Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism (Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, 37) 9811972486, 9789811972485

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Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 37

Sanjit Chakraborty Anway Mukhopadhyay   Editors

Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism

Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures Volume 37

Editor-in-Chief Purushottama Bilimoria, The University of Melbourne, Australia, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Series Editor Christian Coseru, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA Associate Editor Jay Garfield, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Assistant Editors Sherah Bloor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Amy Rayner, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Peter Yih Jiun Wong, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Member Balbinder Bhogal, Hofstra University, Hempstead, USA Christopher Chapple, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA Vrinda Dalmiya, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA Gavin Flood, Oxford University, Oxford, UK Jessica Frazier, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK Kathleen Higgins, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA Patrick Hutchings, Deakin University, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia Morny Joy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada Carool Kersten, King's College London, London, UK Richard King, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK Arvind-Pal Maindair, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Rekha Nath, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa, USA Parimal Patil, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Laurie Patton, Duke University, Durham, USA Stephen Phillips, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA Joseph Prabhu, California State University, Los Angeles, USA Annupama Rao, Columbia University, New York, USA Anand J. Vaidya, San Jose State University, San Jose, USA

The Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures focuses on the broader aspects of philosophy and traditional intellectual patterns of religion and cultures. The series encompasses global traditions, and critical treatments that draw from cognate disciplines, inclusive of feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial approaches. By global traditions we mean religions and cultures that go from Asia to the Middle East to Africa and the Americas, including indigenous traditions in places such as Oceania. Of course this does not leave out good and suitable work in Western traditions where the analytical or conceptual treatment engages Continental (European) or Cross-cultural traditions in addition to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The book series invites innovative scholarship that takes up newer challenges and makes original contributions to the field of knowledge in areas that have hitherto not received such dedicated treatment. For example, rather than rehearsing the same old Ontological Argument in the conventional way, the series would be interested in innovative ways of conceiving the erstwhile concerns while also bringing new sets of questions and responses, methodologically also from more imaginative and critical sources of thinking. Work going on in the forefront of the frontiers of science and religion beaconing a well-nuanced philosophical response that may even extend its boundaries beyond the confines of this debate in the West – e.g. from the perspective of the ‘Third World’ and the impact of this interface (or clash) on other cultures, their economy, sociality, and ecological challenges facing them – will be highly valued by readers of this series. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peerreviewed before final acceptance.

Sanjit Chakraborty • Anway Mukhopadhyay Editors

Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism

Previously published in Sophia “Special Issue: Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism” Volume 60, issue 3, September 2021

Editors Sanjit Chakraborty Department of Social Sciences and Humanities Vellore Institute of TechnologyAP University Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh, India

Anway Mukhopadhyay Department of Humanities & Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

Spinoff from journal: “Sophia” Volume 60, issue 3, September 2021 ISSN 2211-1107 Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures ISBN 978-981-19-7248-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 Chapters “Religious Conversion and Loss of Faith: Cases of Personal Paradigm Shift?”, and “On Being an Infidel” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

Atheisms: Plural Contexts of Being Godless ........................................................ 1 Sanjit Chakraborty, Anway Mukhopadhyay: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:497–514 (09 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00878-w Correction to: Atheisms: Plural Contexts of Being Godless ............................. 19 Sanjit Chakraborty, Anway Mukhopadhyay: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:515–516 (05 November 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00891-z Defining ‘Religion’ and ‘Atheism’....................................................................... 21 Graham Oppy: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:517–529 (02 July 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00843-7 Has God Been and Gone? .................................................................................... 35 Patrick Hutchings: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:531–549 (02 July 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00850-8 Religious Conversion and Loss of Faith: Cases of Personal Paradigm Shift? ................................................................................................... 55 Robin Le Poidevin: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:551–566 (19 July 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00864-2 On Being an Infidel............................................................................................... 71 Simon Blackburn: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:567–574 (06 July 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00844-6 Confessions of an Agnostic: Apologia Pro Vita Sua .......................................... 79 Michael Ruse: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:575–591 (10 June 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00851-7 The Missing God of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: Too late for God; too Early for the Gods—with a vignette from Indian Philosophy ..................... 97 Purushottama Bilimoria: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:593–606 (15 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00879-9 Atheism is Nothing but an Expression of Buddha-Nature .............................. 111 Gereon Kopf: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:607–6622 (16 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00867-z

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From a Certain Point of View… Jain Theism and Atheism ........................... 127 Jeffery D. Long: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:623–638 (02 June 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00857-1 Zero—a Tangible Representation of Nonexistence: Implications for Modern Science and the Fundamental ....................................................... 143 Sudip Bhattacharyya: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:655–676 (06 September 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00870-4 Can Nāstikas Taste Āstika Poetry? Tagore’s Poetry and the Critique of Secularity ........................................................................... 165 Sudipta Kaviraj: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:677–697 (25 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00869-x ‘And Therefore I Hasten to Return My Ticket’: Anti-theodicy Radicalised .......................................................................................................... 187 N. N. Trakakis: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:699–720 (26 August 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00871-3 Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Secularity, Wilber’s Integral Theory: Living With and Without the Divine .................................................. 209 John Thomas O’Neill: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:721–734 (02 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00884-y Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy .......................................................................................... 223 Jane Dowson: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:735–745 (13 September 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00849-1 Correction to: Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy ................................................................... 235 Jane Dowson: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:747 (12 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00886-w ‘Do You Believe in God, Doctor?’ The Atheism of Fiction and the Fiction of Atheism ................................................................................. 237 Rukmini Bhaya Nair: Sophia 2021, 2021: 60:749–768 (19 October 2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11841-021-00888-8

Sophia (2021) 60:497–514 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00878-w

Atheisms: Plural Contexts of Being Godless Sanjit Chakraborty1 · Anway Mukhopadhyay2 Accepted: 19 July 2021 / Published online: 9 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021, corrected publication 2021

Abstract This special issue of Sophia, titled Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism, deals with  the intricate issue of approaching atheism—methodologically as well as conceptually—from the perspective of cultural pluralism. What does ‘atheism’ mean in different cultural contexts? Can this  term be applied appropriately to different religious discourses which conceptualize God/gods/Goddess/goddesses (and also godlessness) in hugely divergent ways? Or would that rather be a sort of hegemonic homogenization of all possible modalities of living without God, as Jessica  Frazier argues (Frazier 2013, 367)? Is my ‘God’ the same as yours? If not, then how can your atheism be the same as mine? In other words, this issue of Sophia raises the question: Is it not high time that we proposed a comparative study of atheism(s) alongside that of religions, rather than believing that atheism is centered in the ‘Western’ experience? Besides, how can we explore the modalities of atheist  religiosity such as we find in Buddhism and Jainism and also, arguably, in certain forms of Hinduism, as far as the Indic traditions are concerned? How might these (re-)negotiations of atheism across the multicultural spectrum interrogate our tendency to place atheism within the context of the binary opposition of science and religion? Besides, there is a need to focus on the philosophical negotiations between atheism, theism and agnosticism and the discourses that emerge from such dialogues, including that of postsecularity. Keywords  Atheism · Multicultural · Agnosticism · Infidelity · Science · Literature · Postsecularity Chapter 1 was originally published as Chakraborty, S. & Mukhopadhyay, A. Sophia (2021) 60: 497–514. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00878-w.

* Sanjit Chakraborty [email protected] Anway Mukhopadhyay [email protected] 1

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur, West Bengal 741246, India

2

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, West Bengal, India



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Robin Le Poidevin, while presenting atheism as ‘a definite doctrine’, points out the necessity to study atheism side by side with ‘religious ideas’, thereby establishing the methodological connection between the study of the philosophy of religion and that of atheism: An atheist is one who denies the existence of a personal, transcendent creator of the universe, rather than one who simply lives life without reference to such a being. A theist is one who asserts the existence of such a creator. Any discussion of atheism, then, is necessarily a discussion of theism. (Le Poidevin, 1996, xvii) However, if reviewed from a pluralist perspective, the conflation of ‘theism’ and ‘religious ideas’ becomes problematic and makes us wonder whether ‘religion’ is, just like ‘atheism’, a homogenizing signifier that fails to capture the complex nuances of various non-Western religious doctrines which often resist compartmentalizing categorizations. For instance, there are religious traditions like Advaita Vedānta that foreground some ontological centre of the universe, without seeing it as ‘God’. If we accept Robert Neville’s ‘heuristic’ definition of religion as ‘the human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways’ (2018, 3) and ponder over the plurality of the ways in which different religions conceive of or figure forth this ‘ultimacy’ (Neville, 2018, 3–5), we may begin to understand that there is a difference between this ‘ultimacy’ and theos as such. Hence, irreligiosity and atheism cannot be connotationally overlapping concepts or sensibilities, when the ‘ultimate reality’ that may be sought for or celebrated by the ‘religious’ person does not become conflated with God. Further, Neville’s generalization may not be universally applicable, as some religions may celebrate the interconnectivity of the beings and things of the universe rather than reaching for ultimacy. Purushottama Bilimoria raises a legitimate question, ‘Do all religions necessarily have to make reference to one or another conception of ultimate reality in any trans-human, transcendental form’ (2003, 350)? However, the merit of Le Poidevin’s argument warrants acknowledgement. If one has to speak of a-theism, one cannot avoid speaking of theism simultaneously. Hence, the point this issue of Sophia tries to draw home is simply this: without taking into account the plural implications of ‘religion’ and ‘theism’ (and ‘ultimacy’), we cannot embark on a pluralist study of atheism(s). The moment we initiate a dialogue between different models of ‘atheism’ or ideas and sensibilities proximate to it, we are automatically encouraging a dialogic friction between the plural notions of ‘God’, ‘Absolute’ or ‘ultimacy’ prevalent across the planet. To facilitate such a mode of dialogue, this issue presents pluralist negotiations with the notion of atheism and its ethical, epistemological, ontological, literary and scientific corollaries. Noticeably, there is no single secular ideology or behavioural norm that all atheists cherish austerely, except the denial of the existence of God/gods/Great Goddess/goddesses. In Western cultures, atheists are non-religious persons, while in certain Eastern cultures, especially in religious formations such as Buddhism and Jainism, we have religious practitioners who nevertheless do not believe in the existence of supreme God/gods (Nola, 2019, 24). Many of the Western

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scholars, it appears, believe that ‘atheism’ developed in the Western world. While speaking of Diagoras of Melos, supposedly the ‘first’ atheist in ancient Greece (Nola, 2019, 24), Marek Winiarczyk tells us that the Greek word atheos ‘initially did not mean atheist per se, but rather someone who was godless, immoral, heinous or, more rarely, abandoned by the gods’ (2016, 129). ‘It was not until Plato’s Apology’, he continues, that the word atheos ‘actually meant atheist’ (2016, 129–130). Winiarczyk further states: It is worth adding that Jews and Christians were also called atheists, and Christians, in turn, pressed this charge not only against pagans, but also against heretics of their own religion. In my opinion, atheism perceived as ‘the negation of the existence of any kind of deity or supernatural forces’ did not emerge in Greece until around the year 400 BC. (2016, 130) While it is true that ‘atheism’ as a term has a European lineage, but what it connotes was not unknown to ancient India. Some Western scholars have come to appreciate the fact that the oldest form of atheism was articulated by the Cārvāka (sixth–fifth century BC) philosophers in India who believed that ‘… both monistic and dualistic ontologies can be maintained without any commitment to a further ontological category of god’ (Nola, 2019, 24). Thus, when viewed crossculturally, atheism seems to have multilinear genealogies and trajectories. Michael Ruse interestingly attempts to discuss atheism outside the Eurocentric fold. Among other things, this special issue of Sophia sets out to expand and deepen the implications of such non-Eurocentric explorations of atheism. Ruse has widely explored the atheistic or quasi-atheistic sensibilities in different world religions. However, unfortunately, his wonderful multicultural exploration of atheism culminates in the assertion that the ‘problem’ of atheism is primarily a ‘Western Christian phenomenon’ and that it manifests itself most acutely in a non-Western culture when that culture comes in contact with the Western culture (2015, 186). If atheism is defined in such a restrictive way, then a comparative study of atheisms across the globe (outside the binary framework of science versus religion) becomes impossible. However, as Ruse’s own study makes clear (2015, 169–187), a critical engagement with the ‘atheistic’ strains in various religious discourses across cultures may open up new vistas for understanding atheism in a broader way. This sort of broadening of the vista of atheism, naturally, culminates in broadening the domain of comparative philosophy of religion as well. There is a conspicuous disparity between conclusive reasoning (epistemic sense) on the ontological existence of God/gods in philosophy and a testimonial belief in the existence of God/gods in religion. An analysis of atheist arguments from the perspective of the verification theory of language would uphold the merit in such arguments where an atheist reasonably denies the cosmological or ontological denotation of God/gods by underlining the argument that the definition of God/gods itself as a non-referential concept does not involve any external referent. If anyone makes a claim about an invisible dinosaur sitting in the seminar room, no one will take the issue seriously. Similarly, God’s invisibility, His

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non-evidential existence or His omniscience do not prop up a successful ‘communicative action’ (a la Habermas); instead, these discourses hinge on a foundational error of believing in a non-existent thing by delimiting one’s rationality and reasoning. Thus, theological discourse, in the eyes of the atheist, appears to be an anti-realistic one. At the core of the human self, there is a desire to transcend the restrictive domain of the laws of nature and comprehend a sense of freedom. As Kalidas Bhattacharyya insists, religion ‘originates with this sense of freedom…Religion is co-extensive and co-eternal with this sense of freedom’ (Bhattacharyya, 1975, 1). This proposition gets validated in the context of the dialectical interface between the human self and nature on a scaffold of binding natural laws and the subsequent human desire of going beyond it in pursuit of trans-natural spirituality. In many religious traditions, especially in terms of the functional aspect of ‘spirituality’, the seeker, being an inseparable part of the chain of causality involved in natural laws, seeks to step out of nature to get rid of the roots of suffering. The Indic religions provide a variegated panorama of transcendental spirituality, sometimes involving peculiar forms of crossover between theism and atheism. In the twenty-first century, various kinds of quest for ‘ultimacy’ (a la Neville) have marked the multicultural milieu of spiritual seekers who have somehow tried to bypass theism while attempting to reach a transcendent point beyond the domain of existential limitations. The twenty-first century scenario of spiritual seekers is vibrant with several hidden as well as overt dialogues between theism and atheism, and these dialogues are not always bitter debates but rather sometimes follow the logic of ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ (Santos, 1999, 222). Let us, now, revisit the philosophical doctrines of ancient India, as an exemplary non-Western outlook of ideating ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’. It must be remembered that, in the Indic philosophical traditions, the āstika (orthodox)-nāstika1 (heterodox) binary does not wholly correspond to the binary of theist-atheist. The orthodox philosophical systems accept the authority of the Veda, while the heterodox systems refute it (Bilimoria, 1990, 482). The nāstika systems include Cārvāka, Buddhist and Jain philosophies, whereas the āstika systems include Vedānta, Yoga, Sāṁkhya, Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika. The three nāstika schools listed above, however, do not underpin the existence of a transcendent God and hence appear to be atheist as well as heterodox. On the other hand, Sāṁkhya, though it belongs to the āstika school, is atheist (Chattopadhyaya, 1959, 363). The atheistic stance of Sāṁkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy, introduces Prakṛiti as the ultimate subtle material cause of the world that remains uncaused (an unwarranted regressus ad infinitum) and, in its primal condition, is characterized by the equilibrium of the three guṇas (Radhakrishnan, 2006, 260–261). Sāṁkhya moves one step further to underscore the conscious Puruṣa and claim that the unity of Puruṣa and Prakṛiti leads to the creation of the universe, and that the liberation of the empirical self (jīva) is caused by the dissociation of 1   The etymology of nāstika has bearing on  the master Grammarian, Pāṇini, in  Aṣṭādhyāyī defining asti and nāsti, respectively as, ‘one thinks x is (the case)’, ‘one does not think x is (the case)’. Based on this there has been the derivation of āstika as believers in authority of the Vedas, nāstika as disbelievers in  the same (Radhakrishnan,  1960, 20); later in the  tradition as theism gains traction, Vedas or Śruti is replaced by Īśvara.

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these two, thus denying God/gods as the supreme cause of the universe and also denying God’s/gods’ role in the emancipation of the jīva. On the other hand, the theist Yoga philosophy attempts to comprehend infinite God as the efficient cause of the world, although, in this system, too, the material cause of the universe is called Prakṛiti (Radhakrishnan, 2006, 342). Advaita Vedānta is grounded in its quest for the Absolute (Para Brahman) that goes beyond the empirical self of a human being, the phenomenal world and gods or even ‘God’ (Īśvara: a kind of empirical theos). The mode of liberation that Advaita Vedānta advocates consists of the process of realizing an eliminative transcendence, involving the emergence of the subjective knowledge (jnāna) of the absolute identity between the empirical self and the Absolute Brahman (Bhagavan Das, 1936, 170–171). The cognitive account of Advaita Vedānta underpins a solid intellectual system of underlining a trans-empirical spiritual life directed towards the Absolute by negating the reality of the mundane world and plurality of gods. The gesture of denying the plurality of gods and also denying an ultimate or absolute status to Īśvara (who is operational at the level of the manifested universe), in order to experience the supreme truth (Para Brahman), can be seen as neither an atheist stance nor a theist approach. Here, the prerequisite is the trans-empirical cognition of oneness with the pure consciousness that may appear to be similar to a theist psyche’s comprehension of transcendental consciousness beyond the world of phenomena—but a diversion emerges since Advaita Vedānta does not underpin the transcendental essence of God/gods. In this context, it would be interesting to focus on what Swami Vivekananda, the most celebrated Advaita Vedāntin in modern India, had to say on atheism. As Nicholas Gier reminds us, ‘[a]t the World Congress of Religions in 1893, Swami Vivekananda defended the atheism of Buddhism and Jainism...’ (2000, 2). Nemai Sadhan Bose explains: In fact, atheism for Vivekananda is not a problem. An atheist is more welcome than a believer if he only has faith in two other fundamentals. One is faith in himself. The second essential requirement is that of character. One who is dedicated to work - a karma yogin - need not necessarily, have to believe in the existence of God. (1998, 284–285) Of course, it would be problematic to define Advaita Vedānta as an atheist doctrine, as its vision of liberation doesnot depend as much on an Īśvara/God who emancipates the limited human self as on self-help in spiritual askesis, reminding one of the Buddha’s advice to his disciple Ānanda: ‘Ātmadīpa-bhava’ [Be your own lamp to enlighten yourself] (Mishara, 2009, 449). However, in the cases of Jainism and Buddhism, we witness a more unequivocal scenario of atheism than what we come across in Advaita Vedānta. Jainism as an atheist doctrine believes in three tenets: common-sense realism, the relativity of judgments (syādvāda) and pluralism or many-sided realities (anekāntavāda) (Matilal, 1981, 1–3). Jainism had questioned the authority of the Vedas and challenged the divinity of the gods in Hinduism (Dundas, 2002, 233–235). The discursive framework of Jain thought rests upon the apparent conviction that the supremacy of personal gods is superfluous and the transcendental Brahman is not the creator or the first cause of the universe, either. Anne Vallely notes that ‘Jainism vehemently rejects the idea of a creator God, dispenses with the concept of grace, and above all Reprinted from the journal

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else, valorizes self-reliance’ and offers us a fresh perspective for critically revisiting the notions of ‘“God”, “atheism” and “theism”’, by insisting on a ‘devotional structure, which rests upon, not a creator God, but a meaningful cosmos’ (2013, 351). Vallely further explains: ‘Its reasons for doing so evince a dramatically distinct worldview in which an omnipotent grace-bestowing God has no place’ (352). Its atheism, however, paradoxically appears to be ‘God-saturated’, the Jain cosmos offering space for various types of ‘devas’ (Vallely 356–362). Yet, despite the presence of these devas, Jainism’s ‘devotional apparatus thrives in the absence of any transactional relationship with a God’ (Vallely 365). Moving over to Buddhism, we see a relatable situation. As Andrew Skilton notes, while Buddhism apparently accepts the devas (gods) but refutes the existence of Īśvara (God) as a transcendental divine entity and occasionally exhibits ‘quasi-theism’, we must not overlook its strong critique of theism (2013, 340, 343–349). Skilton focuses on Santideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, in the ninth chapter of which ‘Santideva presents his anti-theistic arguments’ (2013, 343). In addition to the philosophical arguments against the existence of God in Buddhism, Skilton explores the ‘non-philosophical critiques of God’ in Buddhism, focusing on those verses in the Jātaka book, ‘attributed to Buddhaghosa (c. fifth century CE)’, which are ‘representative of an established anti-theistic rhetoric that had developed during this period’ (2013, 348). Skilton reminds us that even the ostensibly quasi-theistic entities in Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna cannot really be equated with God (2013, 349). As Ramkrishna Bhattacharya notes, while the believers in the authority of the Vedās saw Buddhism and Jainism as nāstika doctrines, these two systems saw as nāstika those who were materialists in that they did not ‘believe in rebirth and the notion that the meritorious and sinful acts of previous birth would influence the course of future life’ (Bhattacharya, 2011, 229). The Cārvākas, it goes without saying, would fall under this category (Frazier, 2013, 372). The Cārvākas were perceived to be atheist and irreligious (Bhattacharya, 2011, 124). Materialism, thus, seems to have been a problem for Buddhism and Jainism as well as for the theist schools. Interestingly, as Bhattacharya observes, even Sāṁkhya was seen as a materialist doctrine and ‘abused’ like the Cārvāka doctrine (Bhattacharya, 2011, 125). Ramkrishna Bhattacharya insists that there was a pre-Cārvāka school of materialism in India. Besides, by drawing on the Mahābhārata and the Manimekalai, he insists that these ‘two schools seem to have continued to exist side by side’ (Bhattacharya, 2011, 10). Sukumari Bhattacharya notes that the intellectual scenario of India in the seventh century BCE witnessed a lot of non-conformist ideas questioning the existence of gods and the supremacy of the Vedic texts, ideas that included Ājīvika as well as Buddhist and Jain perspectives (2002, 175–177, 181). The proponents of such ideas included, among others, Maskarin Gosāla and Rudraka Ramāputra (2002, 175–176). According to Bhattacharya, the origin of such a stirring lay in doubts and queries regarding the gods, the fire sacrifices and the Vedic texts (2002, 176, 181–182). Moving back into a more distant past, she excavates the traces of such doubts in the Vedic texts themselves and comes to the conclusion that the Vedic texts sometimes give the impression that even those who followed the Vedic teaching were troubled by the question of the ontology of the gods. Sukumari Bhattacharya claims

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that there was an indication, even in the Vedic texts, that the gods were born out of the human imagination and did not belong, really, to a supra-terrestrial realm (2002, 155). Pūrva Mīmāṁsa, an āstika doctrine, can be seen as a rationally justified theory that denied the conception of embodied gods—in Gopinātha Kavirāja’s words— ‘karma devatās’. However, they never negated the concept of ‘ājān devatās’, gods who are not born from the mother’s womb (Kavirāja, 1983, 15–16). These ‘ājān devatās’ are actually invoked in the Vedic hymns. Mīmāṁsa does accept devatās (plurality of gods), but their being is contingent: Purushottama Bilimoria describes it as ‘effervescent mantric-effect’, having even less of beingness (being-in-theworld) than what Heidegger grants to Dasein in its self-authenticating existence. Kierkegaard would have liked (the Christian) God to condescend to just that, and some like the atheist Christians would have liked to see Jesus Christ being depicted as just that, which would make for a new concept of what John Caputo2 called the hermeneuticized repetitious divine. Following Bilimoria, one may be fascinated to say that those religious/philosophical discourses which did not follow the trajectories of the predominant metaphysical ideas in the Indic traditions, grounded in the belief in some form or other of the ‘Absolute’ and widely discussed during and after the colonial period, have often been ‘subaltern’-ized within the field of comparative study of religions (Bilimoria, 2003, 352–354). In this context, it becomes important to focus on Mīmāṃsā, a philosophical system which can be seen as casting doubts on the ‘reality of a supremely divine being’ (Bilimoria, 2003, 353–354; Bilimoria, 1990, 482). Bilimoria thinks that even within predominantly theistic (in the sense broader than monotheistic) traditions there can be strands of atheism (or its variations in a/theism, non-theism), that sit comfortably alongside each other. They could even be in some dependent relation—as in the case of the Mīmāṃsā within the Brāhmaṇical canonical canopy (smoky maṇḍapa). This is so because it is Mīmāṃsā that provides the bedrock argument for the Vedās (preeminent scriptures) being authorless (apauruṣeya, and therefore perennial). This rejection of God is intended to block any attribution of possible authorship of the Vedās to one supreme deity; yet at the same time, the devatās, gods, are needed as functionaries to help bring to fruition expected results from the illocutionary performance of mantras and sacrificial rites.3 Bilimoria says that though it is not possible to conclusively prove that the Mīmāṃsaka was an atheist, it can be insisted that the Mīmāṃsaka was certainly an agnostic, ‘predisposed towards a deconstruction of “onto-theo-logos” of the kind that had emerged from within the broad Indian tradition...’ (1990, 482). To sum up, one can say: Interestingly, if one interprets atheism as rejection of a primary personal creator deity, then an array of atheist schools can be included within the range of

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 John Caputo in ‘Atheism, A/theology, and the Postmodern Condition’ argues that ‘postmodernism turns out to be not a particularly friendly environment for atheism, either, not if atheism is a metaphysical or an otherwise fixed and decisive denial of God.’ (Caputo, 2007, 267). 3   We extend our sincere thanks to Purushottama Bilimoria for bringing these wonderful points to our attention. Reprinted from the journal

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Hindu orthodoxies. . . Reality could be explained in terms of a gnostic duality of matter and spirit (Sāṁkhya), a semantic structure of sound and meaning (Mīmāṃsā), different constituents of consciousness (Yoga), various kinds of atom (Vaiśeṣika), ontological monism (Advaita Vedānta), or other metaphysical models. Theism was by no means central in the earliest texts of most of these schools. (Frazier, 2013, 372–373) Ruse, too, has noted the possibly atheist or quasi-atheist tendencies within the largely theistic spectrum of Hinduism (2015, 185). However, as Bilimoria puts it, ‘Although it is said that the Buddha remained mute on the question of the existence of God and His role in religious discourse, the avowed non-theism of his followers was an issue of some concern to many a Hindu’ (1990, 497). Here, one might be tempted to argue that atheism has been a ‘problem’ (a la Ruse) even in the Indic traditions, and hence, it is fruitful to discuss the problems posed or solved by atheism across cultures before as well as after their contact with Christianity. Keeping in mind Bilimoria’s identification of the Mīmāṃsaka as an agnostic, let us now move to a brief discussion of agnosticism in general and try to comment on its place within the global panorama of non-theism. Agnosticism is generally considered an epistemic position and ‘typically characterized as a view that avoids taking any firm stand in the metaphysical and theological debate between theism and atheism by maintaining that we do not, or cannot, know—or that we do not, or cannot, justifiably believe—anything regarding God’s existence or non-existence’ (Pihlström 2020, 1). But it is not in any way an ontological stance as it does not assert the existence of a godless world. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God/gods could be a faith which induces one to defensively reject the existence of God/gods rather than being agonistic about God’s existence. However, the agnostic4 does not argue that God/gods do exist in another universe; instead, they believe, with indecision, that God/gods may exist. However, can we reasonably appreciate the agonistics’ proclamation (God may exist in another universe), since an opposite statement (i.e. there is no other universe and God cannot exist in another universe) implies a contradiction and an atheist’s challenge too? One may argue that ‘God’ is an irrational idea, like the concept of ‘square circles’ which has no logical consistency or empirical evidence. Nourishing logical impossibilities in promoting the imaginary existence of God/gods inculcates a severe error of self-contradiction. God may be seen as the supernatural unreliable counterpart of square circles, when the agnostic position slants towards atheism strongly in the way Russell’s teapot analogy did or the ‘teapot agnostics’ do today (McGowan, 2013, 24–25). Pihlström, however, presents a new and different kind of agnostic perspective which may lend a new orientation to the debates between theism and atheism: Now, what we wish to suggest here is that we may apply the general and intuitive idea of agnosticism to the debate over the cognitive meaningfulness of

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  The ancient Greek sophist Protagoras in his famous book, On the Gods, writes: ‘Concerning the gods I am unable to discover whether they exist or not, or what they are like in form; for there are many hindrances to knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life’ (Guthrie 1971, 234).

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religious statements. . . the agnostic at the meta-level maintains that we do not, or cannot, know whether religious discourse is cognitively meaningful, purportedly factual, and/or truth-apt. Or at least there is no way we could rationally resolve the matter either way. (Pihlström 2020, 4) From a number of perspectives, Michael Ruse, in his essay in this issue, discusses the significance and utility of the agnostic position and connects it with the centrality of freedom in an authentic human life. An argument from a liberalist atheist or agnostic position may insist on dissociating God from the issue of morality in order to get rid of the irrational practices or religious norms that have restricted human freedom. However, does atheism or agnosticism lead to amorality, in the sense of a mode of freedom unanchored in any ethical framework? In this context, it would be relevant to underscore an observation made by R. Keith Loftin: A common misunderstanding in the debate over the connection, if any, between God and morality stems from the mistaken conflation of two distinct questions: Is God necessary for morality? and, Can a person lead a morally praiseworthy life without believing in God? The former, an inquiry into the metaphysical foundation or grounding of morality, is an important metaethical issue. The latter is an epistemological inquiry, wholly apart from the metaethical question of morality’s foundation. (Loftin, 2012, 8) Living without God, then, is not the same thing as living outside the moral domain. A person’s moral intuition may function independently of the metaethical concerns about the divine or non-divine foundations of morality. A significant number of scientists take either an atheist or an agnostic position: the growth of human knowledge for them does not depend on God’s will but on human will. Logical positivism and scientific realism insist that religious statements are empirically unverifiable and hence pointless. An atheist, generally, does not only ontologically undermine the existence of God/gods, but also distrusts any theological knowledge of God/gods. Scientific discourse places God/gods under the scanner of scientific rationality. Scientific realism holds that, while theism constructs inductive inferences about the existence of God/gods, based on religious language, the whole project in fact centres round an unobservable, causally paralysed, non-scientific entity. However, approaching science in a different, and even a bit idiosyncratic way, one may apparently find hidden parallels between critical questions in mathematics and the vexed issues of the existence/non-existence of God. Let us ask: Could we find, in the context of the number zero, any similarity between zero as a tangible representation of non-existence and the non-existence of God (a question Sudip Bhattacharyya deals with in this issue)? As we know, the definitional part of the number zero stands for a given universal class that corresponds to nothing or an empty set whose predecessor is also zero or emptiness. Logically, existence cannot be the predecessor of non-existence, just as the number 1 (one) cannot be the predecessor of the number 0 (zero). In the context of Advaita Vedānta, we may ponder over the Zero Infinite (Śūnya Brahman, Ananta Śūnya). This Zero Reprinted from the journal

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Infinite operates as the primordial root of the ‘Creator’ as well as his creation of the existent objective world and conscious beings. The original self-expression of the Infinite Zero occurred in primordial times—when the macrocosmic formation was not even manifested within the sphere of the primaeval empty state (i.e. the voidness of all or macrocosmic voidness). Can we, then, see the Infinite Zero (the non-existence of God) as the reality (or ‘ultimacy’, a la Neville) that produces God-as-fiction? When we probe into the practical aspects of atheism and theism in human life, we need to remember that a theistic or an atheistic position is not a perennial one. Human life finds itself inescapably enmeshed in a complex interweaving of the rational and the non-rational, which may occasionally result in extra-rational choices in terms of theism or atheism. Neither an atheist nor a theist point of view should be supposed to remain constant universally or for eternity. A theist may turn into an atheist, disgusted with the excesses of a theocracy; conversely, an atheist may, gradually, turn into a theist, due to circumstances that affect the deepest core of their psychological states. Besides, while rejecting organized religion, one may nevertheless retain or develop a synthetic notion of spirituality that escapes neat epistemic categorizations. In other words, the dialogue between theism and atheism is not just a matter of a tussle between opposing doctrines or epistemic and ideological positions. It, rather, often leads to more intricate, inescapable inner quarrels or even inner synthesis in a believer/non-believer. Hence, while speaking of the psychological dimensions of theism and atheism, we need to continuously underline the contingent nature of these two positions. Being sensitive to such a contingency allows us to appreciate better those sensibilities which are affiliated to neither the conventional epistemologies of theism nor those of atheism. In this context, we need to deal with an issue that is dialogically (and even dialectically) related to atheism in the postmodern world. It is the rise of the ‘postsecular’ as a result of continuous dialogic collision between theism and atheism. The postsecular ‘affirms a mystery that secularism denies’ (Tacey, 2020, 1). As David Tacey points out: First there is mystery, then there is no mystery, then there is. . . The new phase, the postsecular . . . is a cultural and personal reorientation that presupposes disorientation, and loss of the naïve faith of phase one, and the reductive rationality of phase two. It . . . looks to new ways of experiencing the world, self and ultimate reality. (2020, 1) It would be wrong to see this simply as the return of or regression to a religious past. Rather, it is a movement towards a more integrative understanding of the world and the self, where the secular is not dropped but assimilated into a larger vision of the ‘mystery’. As Tacey insists, ‘Today leading philosophers are more interested in the re-emergence of the sacred after atheism’ (2020, 4). He cites the claim of Jean-Luc Marion ‘that the whole polemic about the death of God “is now outdated”.... “We are no longer in an atheist society but a post-atheist one.”...’ (2020, 4). According to Tacey, in philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Kearney, Caputo, Vattimo and Levinas, one can find strains of the postsecular

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sentiment, even though some of these thinkers may ‘choose to remain identified as atheists’ (2020, 4). However, the linear chronology of theist-atheist-post-atheist presented by Tacey may not be required to understand the complex and peculiar emergence of the sacred even within largely atheist epistemologies, if we look at atheism from a non-Western perspective. Such a perspective may sensitize us to the epistemic and ethical potential of ‘atheist’ religiosity. As Michael Martin has observed, ‘... it does not follow from the fact that atheism is not itself a religion that there are no atheistic religions’ (2007, 221). Martin insists that Jainism, Buddhism and Confucianism may be seen as religious systems that can be identified as ‘atheistic’, even though they ‘are not atheistic in the broad sense’, because ‘the way to spiritual salvation and the way of life specified by these religions would not seem to be affected to any major extent by eliminating all gods’ (2007, 229–230). Martin insists that atheism is not necessarily anti-religious, as it may appreciate certain aspects of religion without believing in the agency of God that a religion might insist on (2007, 230). This is an important observation, since New Atheism often gives the impression that atheism is all about a long war waged against God (Bradley & Tate, 2010, 1–2). Martin’s observations make us understand that atheism, when seen cross-culturally, seems to be neither just a war nor just an anti-God movement. As Jessica Frazier insists: Th[e] non-confrontational Hindu axis of atheism reminds us to open up our treatment of these issues beyond the simplifications to which polemic is prone, inviting us to root debates in a more concise hermeneutic of the specific concepts and issues at stake. The debate between theism and atheism need not be hostile, and a range of options can aid reasoning individuals to make sincere and intellectually coherent choices. . . (2013, 378) Bracketing off ‘God’ for the moment, it might be argued that religiosity may be grounded, as Mircea Eliade had observed, in the category of the ‘sacred’ more than in the category of the divine (Eliade, 1959, 8–18). For the Jains, for instance, life is sacred, and their ethical approach to all living beings emanates from this mode of conceptualizing the sacred (Roach, 2019, 13; Vallely, 2013, 365–366; Solomon & Higgins, 1997, 19). The devotional culture in Jainism, as analysed by Vallely, may find a resonance in the domain of the ‘postsecular’. However, its world is different from the one which goes through the three phases of theism, anti-theism and postatheism. As Vallely observes, devotion in the Jain world ‘emerges not from gratitude to a supreme creator, but from the felt sense that one is being called to respond to a world that... invites participation’ (2013, 365–366). This form of religious sensibility, grounded in the principle of empathetic ‘participation’ in the life of the world as deeply as in one’s one life (‘experiencing life in a relational way – as a being-with’ [Vallely, 2013, 364]), may be seen as instantiating what Lata Mani calls the ‘SacredSecular’, a category that weds the sacred to the secular, opening up huge scope for ‘contemplative cultural critique’ (Mani, 2009, 1–4). Raimon Panikkar’s philosophical ideas are also grounded in a notion of sacred-secularity which emerges from a dialogue between atheism and theism that is grounded in the principle of ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ (see the essay of John O’Neill in this issue). This special issue of Sophia raises Reprinted from the journal

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the question: Will we be able to initiate a dialogue with the sacred-secular if we dynamically dialogize comparative religion and multicultural atheisms, with a focus on that mode of ethicality which is independent of God/gods? As Julian Baggini observes, ‘there is nothing to stop atheists believing in morality, a meaning for life, or human goodness’ (2003, 3). We may add that, even after erasing God from her epistemology, an atheist can conveniently pursue the sacred-secular objectives of ‘meaning for life, or human goodness’. In this context, it might be useful to ponder over certain points underlined by Simon Blackburn in his essay ‘Religion and Respect’: Something is regarded as sacred when it is not to be sacrificed to other things, not to be weighed in a cost–benefit analysis, not to be touched. . . . We do not have to be conventionally religious to give these things their absolute importance. If someone tramples on them, it would be quite in order to talk of desecration. (2007, 192) However, Blackburn also reminds us: If too many things are regarded as sacred, we have a life surrounded and hedged by fetishes. If too few things are so regarded, we slide into a world where everything is to be bought and sold, a matter of profit and loss. There is a balance to be struck. . . (2007, 192) If the atheist enjoys those ‘spiritual’ experiences which are not grounded in the other world but rather emanate from this world—the everyday world we inhabit (Blackburn, 2007, 191)—, she will have to strike a ‘balance’ between a fetishistic notion of the sacred and a vicious, exclusionary logic of profit and loss in all spheres of life. Geo-culturally distant and yet attitudinally connectable, can we see the position of Blackburn as comparable to that of Mani who raises the very interesting question: ‘Is a dewdrop sacred, or is it secular?’ (2009, 116–124)? Let us proclaim, once again, that, while speaking of atheism, we do need to think about the issues at stake from a postcolonial and post-Eurocentric perspective. For instance, Raymond Converse’s celebration of the rational faculty of humans, in the context of celebrating atheism as ‘a positive social force’ (2003, 3–9, 159–161), may sound a bit problematic to the postcolonial ears which have been ‘resisting’ listeners (to improvise on Judith Fetterley’s trope of the ‘resisting reader’ [Fetterley, 1978, vii–x]) to the centuries-old imperialist claim that reason defines the human ontology and hence the irrational ‘natives’ should not be granted the full human status. Positioning ourselves within the multicultural matrix, we need to ask ourselves: Do we not need emotive and imaginatively empathetic engagements with the (non-human as well as human) Other(s)— as well as reasoning abilities—if we are to make atheism a genuinely ‘positive social force’? Cannot we learn something from the atheist altruism of Buddhism and Jainism in this respect? The atheism of these religions is grounded in their focus on the exercise of the rational faculty, with a requirement of the necessity for an ethical orientation to the world at large (Vallely, 2013, 364–366; Keown, 2000, 2–3). Therefore, we would like to underline, in this context, the necessity to appreciate Gayatri Spivak’s dismissal of ‘the privileging of reason’ which

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she sees as aligned with the imperialist discourse of the West, while at the same time emphasizing, with Bilimoria, the necessity for ‘a defense of precolonial reason’ (see Bilimoria, 2003, 357–358). In fact, one may be tempted to add that the dynamics of ‘precolonial reason’ was inclusive enough to accommodate and complement the ethical values of empathy and altruism. Here, it also needs to be noted that, while many scholars have argued that, in its broader sense, atheism implies a refutation of the existence of anything supernatural as well as that of God (Converse, 2003, 3), in the ancient Indian ‘Lokāyata’ traditions, and especially in ‘Indian Tantrism’, as Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya observes, belief in the magical often remained intertwined with a potentially this-worldly view of life and with materialist sensibilities that refused to overestimate the other world at the cost of earthly life (1959, xxi–xxiii, 354–358). Hence, when we ponder over the diverse forms of atheism outside the West, or, even outside organized monotheisms, we might find a chaotic assemblage of sensibilities that simultaneously underscore materialist/proto-materialist (or even scientific/proto-scientific [Chattopadhyaya, 1959, 354–358]) rationality and pluralize and diversify the frameworks of ‘rational’ thinking. In other words, what the West understands to be reason may be different from the reason applied by the non-Westerners in different geo-historic contexts. Hence, rationality may have multiple frameworks and functions across cultures. In order to de-universalize atheism, one needs to propose a non-universalist framework of rationality as well. Finally, let us return, once again, to the vexed issue of the co-habitation of atheism and religiosity. Such a co-habitation is not just specific to the non-Western cultural sphere. Even within the Western discourses on atheism, religiosity and atheism often get involved in a complex relationship and thus defy any simplistic conceptualization of a universal agon between them. For instance, taking issue with theological realism and rather championing radical theology, Robin Le Poidevin insists that he would offer an atheist ‘picture’ of the philosophy of religion which is, nevertheless, ‘not an anti-religious one’ (1996, xii, 111–123). Here, Le Poidevin’s frames of reference are not non-Western ones such as are deployed by Martin, namely, Indic and Chinese traditions. He speaks of a non-antagonistic relationship between atheism and religiosity that seems to be very different from the one we come across in the Indic and Chinese traditions underlined by Martin. We do need to underscore the plurality of the discursive forms and frames of atheism—atheisms, in short—even in the West itself. In this context, one may be reminded of Michael Ruse’s critique of the New Atheists. Ruse says, ‘I am an atheist. However, the New Atheists cannot stand me’ (Ruse, 2018). Again, he observes: ‘Ironically, I get on better with many of my Christian interlocutors than I do with many atheists’ (Ruse, 2018). A main objective of this issue of Sophia is to foreground and celebrate the plurality of atheisms within as well as outside the West. We need to highlight the differences, frictions and dialogues between multiple modes of atheism in the West as well as those between Western and non-Western atheisms or ‘irreligious’ and ‘religious’ atheisms. Apart from looking at the multicultural spectrum of atheism, this special issue of Sophia seeks to highlight the affective dimension of atheism. How is atheist thinking intertwined with atheist feeling? How are atheists and atheism represented by literary artists? If God is seen as a fiction (Le Poidevin, 1996, Reprinted from the journal

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111–123), then how does that fiction appear to be meaningful or meaningless in the context of the art of fiction-making, that is, imaginative writing? How does existentialist fiction summon human beings to simultaneously acknowledge the freedom that one obtains in a universe devoid of God and also assume the ethical responsibility that autonomy must entail, a sense of responsibility that,—as Simone de Beauvoir would say—teaches us that the ‘blood of others’ is also our own blood (Cournos 1948–49, 122–126)? In order to explore these issues, this special issue deals with literary as well as philosophical texts. While atheism and theism are seen as oppositional doctrines in the domain of philosophy, in the practical world, theists and atheists do converse, and there are interesting theist responses to atheist ideas/emotions and vice versa. How and why does an atheist enjoy art created within a theist milieu? How, when and why may an atheist find a piece of religious art speaking to her meaningfully? As Blackburn insists: There are two directions in which people look for the meaning of life. One is beyond life itself; this is the transcendent and ontological option. . . But there is another option for meaning, and for our interpretation of religious art, which is to look only within life itself. This is the immanent option. It is content with the everyday. There is sufficient meaning for human beings in the human world—the world of familiar, and even humdrum, doings and experiences. (2007, 189–190) To put the point differently, it is outmoded for the atheist to locate—even as an act of imaginative heurism—the meaning of the world and of human life in the other world for finding something meaningful in ‘religious art’. She may choose the ‘immanent option’ and be ‘content with the everyday’. Blackburn insists that ‘an atheist should not feel guilt about responding to great religious works of art’, as ‘their greatness lies in the domain of emotion rather than that of ontology, and... emotions are reactions to this life, to the here and now’ (2007, 191). He emphatically underscores the essentially human content of great religious art: ‘even Christians are human, and their common humanity is expressed in the greatest Christian art. And the same applies to other religions’ (2007, 191). The basic point is that the atheist’s response to the creative work of a theist or vice versa need not necessarily be confrontational; it can be conversational too. This is an issue which has been taken up by Sudipta Kaviraj in this special issue of Sophia. The emotional and intellectual interactions between theist literature and an atheist’s critical consciousness may open up new vistas of dialogue and negotiation between philosophy and religion, between the theist and the godless, between the votaries of reason and the interpreters of the ‘intelligence of emotions’ (Nussbaum, 2003, 1–3). The re-constellations of, and polylogic frictions between Western and nonWestern atheisms would help us envisage a new horizon of godless territory which is as plurivocal as the domain of endless figurations of the Divine. The global academy has so far mainly dealt with comparative philosophy of religion. It is now time to build up exciting frameworks for the comparative study of atheisms in philosophy, literature and the sciences. The papers in this special issue of

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Sophia, the central arguments of which are briefly presented below, contribute to this enterprise in various ways. Graham Oppy, in his paper, ‘Defining “Religion” and “Atheism”’, raises the issue of the multiplicity involved in the definitions of these terms. He insists that, without focusing on the definitions of these terms and exploring the complexities involved therein, we cannot ask questions or start a meaningful conversation on religion, atheism and their interface. How do we envisage a meaningful dialogue on religion and atheism without knowing whether the participants in such a dialogue mean the same thing when they use these words? Patrick Hutchings, in his paper, ‘Has God Been and Gone?’, addresses the issue of atheism from a global, multicultural perspective. In the context of atheism, he explores the interface between literature, philosophy, politics and religion, underlining how the shadows or remnants of God may be seen even in an apparently godless context. In the course of this broad spectrum analysis of atheism in multicultural contexts, he speaks of the emotional and intellectual aspects of the issue at stake. Robin Le Poidevin, in ‘Religious Conversion and Loss of Faith: Cases of Personal Paradigm Shift?’, tries to understand to what extent Thomas Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm shifts’ can be applied to the cases of religious conversion and loss of faith. Le Poidevin presents the case studies of certain philosophers who have reported significant shifts in their points of view and notices how the reflection of the incommensurability between paradigms may be noted in one’s shift away from the atheist perspective. Simon Blackburn, in ‘On Being an Infidel’, delineates the difference between atheism, agnosticism and infidelity. He insists that the atheists, agnostics and the theists take seriously the issue of the existence of God. On the other hand, the infidel would say that ‘God’ is not a concept she is bothered with at all. Blackburn also explores the cultural and political factors that make an infidel unpopular in the contemporary world. In his essay, ‘Confessions of an Agnostic: Apologia Pro Vita Sua’, Michael Ruse presents a defence of agnosticism, challenging the notion that a strong position of either theism or atheism is better than the wavering position of an agnostic. He says that it can be seen as a position that is as useful and meaningful as faith or faithlessness. Ruse tells us how the agnostic’s stance allows us to have a fresh outlook on human life and the world we inhabit. John O’Neill, in his paper, ‘Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Secularity, Wilber’s Integral Theory: Living With and Without the Divine’, presents a polylogue on theism and atheism, drawing on the works of Raimon Panikkar, Ken Wilber, Jorge Ferrer and Christopher Hareesh Wallis. O’Neill argues that these philosophers do not just offer unique perspectives for studying religion today; rather, their works may offer us a great opportunity to make the exploration of global atheism more nuanced and insightful. Gereon Kopf’s paper ‘Atheism is Nothing but an Expression of Buddha-nature’ explores a/theism from the philosophical perspective of the Japanese Zen master Dogen. Kopf insists that it is useful to read, or rather re-read Nietzsche from the perspective provided by Dogen, and highlights the fact that, for Dogen, all philosophical Reprinted from the journal

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positions are context-specific and hence devoid of absolute truth value. As a result, in this paper there emerges a very useful and significant conversation between theism and atheism, and it indicates the way in which we can make possible a crossperspectival cross-pollination of atheist and theist discourses. Jeffery D. Long, in ‘From a Certain Point of View...: Jain Theism and Atheism’, shows us how the celebration of multiple points of view in Jain epistemology can be seen as a unique methodological key to the discussion of theism and atheism. He argues that, in Jainism, a position may emerge as an atheist one from one point of view, and as a theist one from another point of view. Drawing on this, Long emphasizes the necessity to acknowledge the existence of multiple perspectives while speaking of theism and atheism, especially in a pluralist context. Purushottama Bilimoria, in his paper ‘The Missing God of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: Too late for God; too Early for the Gods—with a Vignette from Indian Philosophy’, takes up the issue of the ‘missing God’ in the thinking, particularly, of two existentialist philosophers: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Bilimoria reads their scholastic approaches to transcendence from the lens of each other (as Jaspers and Heidegger were closely connected), while also drawing on global-critical philosophy of religion for a more contemporary perspective. In the final section, a comparative framework is suggested for discussing deus absconditus between Western and non-Western philosophies, thereby initiating philosophical dialogue between atheism and faith, the human and the posthuman, the divine and the postdivine. In his essay, ‘Can nāstikas taste āstika poetry? Tagore’s poetry and the critique of secularity’, Sudipta Kaviraj critically revisits the notions of secularity and modernity and seeks to explore how and why the atheist reader’s enjoyment of theist poetry may be seen as uncontradictory or non-problematic, with reference to his personal engagement with Rabindranath Tagore’s theist poetry. Kaviraj historicizes the cultural context which gave rise to Tagore’s poetic world and reads or rather re-reads Tagore side by side with Weber, to look at the reason why the religious world of Tagore is still relevant to the ‘secular age’. Kaviraj enunciates that his reading of Indian philosophy—especially Indian aesthetics in a religious context—has altered his understanding of ‘imagination’ and underlines the utility of the imaginative poetic world of a theist poet in the secular world of an atheist. In her essay, ‘Postsecularity and the Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Stevie Smith and Carol Ann Duffy’, Jane Dowson takes up the issue of postsecularity in philosophical and literary contexts and explores how it plays a dynamic role in the poetry of Eliot, Smith and Duffy, in effect problematizing the binary opposition of faith and atheism. She reflects on how poetic discourse, thanks to its capacity for transcending the rational discourses of philosophy, may provide a significant context for exploring the emotive dynamics of postsecularity. Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s paper ‘“Do you believe in God, Doctor?” The Atheism of Fiction and the Fiction of Atheism’ seeks to explore what atheism and fiction may have in common. Nair focuses on Albert Camus’s Plague, a great novel that presents a society plagued by an epidemic and involves debates on theism and atheism. It upholds the connections between atheism and fiction in terms of disbelief and absurdity. Obviously, Nair’s concerns find a notable resonance in the virus-ridden world today where the concepts Camus dealt with need to be revisited and interrogated afresh. Nair

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theorizes the humanism crucial in a godless universe that Camus underlined, through the lens of ordinary language philosophy and by using the tools of sociolinguistics. Nick Trakakis, in his essay, ‘“And therefore I hasten to return my ticket”: Antitheodicy Radicalised’, reads Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov as an antitheodicist whose perspective may radicalize the programme of anti-theodicy. In his reading, the paradoxical nature of Ivan’s gesture of accepting God but rejecting God’s world is not diluted; nor is it assimilated to either a theist or an atheist framework. Trakakis explores the radical dimensions of Ivan’s anti-theodicist position with reference to Albert Camus’s dialectical conception of rebellion and Dostoevsky’s choice of Christ over Truth. In his essay, ‘Zero—a Tangible Representation of Nonexistence: Implications for Modern Science and the Fundamental’, Sudip Bhattacharyya insists that we need to explore the deeper philosophical implications of the mathematical zero and relate it to the capacity of modern science for explaining natural phenomena without grounding those explanations in a supernatural being or God. He argues that, in order to explore the points of convergence between modern science and atheist arguments or sensibilities, we can focus on the philosophical significance of zero which may be seen as a representation of non-existence, especially the non-existence of God in the present context. Acknowledgements We heartily thank Purushottama Bilimoria, Patrick Hutchings, Saranindranath Tagore, Sherah Bloor and the entire Sophia team for their constant support during the preparation of this special issue (Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism) of Sophia. Besides, we would like to thank our distinguished contributors and the peer reviewers for their cooperation in the midst of this worldwide pandemic situation. Finally, we thank our colleagues, students and family members in India and elsewhere.

References Baggini, J. (2003). Atheism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Bhattacharyya, K. (1975). Possibility of different types of religion. The Asiatic Society. Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna. (2011). Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Anthem. Bhattacharya, Sukumari. (2002). Prabandhasangraha. Vol. 2. Gangchil. Bilimoria, P. (1990). Hindu doubts about God: Towards a Mīmāṃsā deconstruction. International Philosophical Quarterly, 30(4), 481–499. Bilimoria, A. Purushottama. (2003). What is the “Subaltern” of the comparative philosophy of religion? Philosophy East and West, 53(3), 340–366. https://​www.​jstor.​org/​stable/​14002​22. Blackburn, S. (2007). Religion and respect. In L. M. Antony (Ed.), Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on atheism and the secular life (pp. 179–193). Oxford University Press. Bose, N. S. (1998). Swami Vivekananda and the challenge to fundamentalism. In W. Radice (Ed.), Swami Vivekananda and the modernization of Hinduism (pp. 281–299). Oxford University Press. Bradley, A., & Tate, A. (2010). The new atheist novel: Fiction, philosophy and polemic after 9/11. Continuum. Caputo, J. (2007). Atheism, A/theology, and the postmodern condition. In M. Martin (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to atheism (pp. 267–282). Cambridge University Press. Chattopadhyaya, D. (1959). Lokāyata: A study in ancient Indian materialism. People’s Publishing House. Converse, R. W. (2003). Atheism as a positive social force. Algora Publishing. Cournos, J. (1948–49). God, existentialism and the novel. The American Scholar, 18(1), 116–127.

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S. Chakraborty, A. Mukhopadhyay Das, B. (1936). Atma-Vidya, or the science of the self. In S. Radhakrishnan & J. H. Muirhead (Eds.), Contemporary Indian philosophy (pp. 139–171). George Allen & Unwin. Dundas, P. (2002). The Jains (2nd ed.). Routledge. Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. Translated into English by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Brace, and World. Fetterley, J. (1978). The resisting reader: A feminist approach to American fiction. Indiana University Press. Frazier, J. (2013). Hinduism. In S. Bullivant & M. Ruse (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of atheism (pp. 367– 379). Oxford University Press. Gier, N. F. (2000). Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western perspectives. State University of New York Press. Guthrie, W. K. C. (1971). The Sophists. Cambridge University Press. Kavirāja, G. (1983). Paramārtha Prasaṅga. Pashyanti Prakashani. Keown, D. (2000). Introduction. In D. Keown (Ed.), Contemporary Buddhist ethics (pp. 1–16). Routledge. Le Poidevin, R. (1996). Arguing for atheism: An introduction to the philosophy of religion. Routledge. Loftin, R. K. (2012). Introduction. In R. Keith Loftin (Ed.), God and morality: Four views (pp. 7–11). IVP Academic. Mani, L. (2009). SacredSecular: Contemplative cultural critique. Routledge. Martin, M. (2007). Atheism and religion. In M. Martin (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to atheism (pp. 217–232). Cambridge University Press. Matilal, B. K. (1981). The central philosophy of Jainism (Anekāntavāda). L. D. Series 79. L. D. Institute of Indology. McGowan, D. (2013). Atheism for dummies. John Wiley and Sons. Mishara, N. (2009). Nītiśāsātra aur Vyavahār. Motilal Banarsidass. Neville, R. (2018). Philosophy of religion and the big questions. Palgrave Communications, 4(126), 1–8. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1057/​s41599-​018-​0182-9 Nola, R. (2019). Definition: Atheism. In J. W. Koterski, S. J., & G. Oppy (Eds.), Theism and atheism: Opposing arguments in philosophy (pp. 19–33). Gale. Nussbaum, M. C. (2003). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge University Press. Pihlstrom, S. (2020). Meaning agnosticism and pragmatism. Religions, 11(302), 1–13. https://​doi.​org/​10.​ 3390/​rel11​060302 Radhakrishnan, S. (1960). The Brahma Sūtra, the philosophy of spiritual life. George Allen & Unwin. Radhakrishnan, S. (2006). Indian philosophy (Vol. 2). Oxford University Press. Roach, S. C. (2019). Decency and difference: Humanity and the global challenge of identity politics. University of Michigan Press. Ruse, M. (2015). Atheism: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press. Ruse, M. (2018, September 25). I’m an atheist. But thank God I’m not a new atheist. Premier Christianity.  Premierchristianity.com. https://​www.​premi​erchr​istia​nity.​com/​Blog/I-​m-​an-​athei​st.-​But-​thank-​ God-I-​m-​not-a-​New-​Athei​st. Accessed 19 Dec 2020. Santos, B. de Sousa. (1999). Towards a multicultural conception of human rights. In M. Featherstone & S. Lash (Eds.), Spaces of culture: City, nation, world (pp. 214–229). Sage. Skilton, A. (2013). Buddhism. In S. Bullivant & M. Ruse (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of atheism (pp. 337–350). Oxford University Press. Solomon, R. C., & Higgins, K. M. (1997). A passion for wisdom: A very brief history of philosophy. Oxford University Press. Tacey, D. (2020). The postsecular sacred: Jung, soul and meaning in an age of change. Routledge. Vallely, A. (2013). Jainism. In S. Bullivant & M. Ruse (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of atheism (pp. 351–366). Oxford University Press. Vasu, S. C. (1898). The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini. Indian Press. Winiarczyk, M. (2016). Diagoras of Melos: A contribution to the history of ancient atheism. Translated into English by Witold Zbirohowski-Koscia. De Gruyter.

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Sophia (2021) 60:515–516 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00891-z CORRECTION

Correction to: Atheisms: Plural Contexts of Being Godless Sanjit Chakraborty1 · Anway Mukhopadhyay2 Published online: 5 November 2021 © Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Correction to: Sophia https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00878-w The original version of this editorial note unfortunately contained some mistakes. The corrections are given in the following list: (1) In the sentence ‘John O’Neill, in his paper, ‘Cosmotheandric, Sacredly Secular and Related Perspectives on Living with and without God.’, presents a polylogue on theism and atheism, drawing on the works of Raimon Panikkar, Ken Wilber, Jorge Ferrer and Christopher Hareesh Wallis.’, the title ‘Cosmotheandric, Sacredly Secular and Related Perspectives on Living with and without God.’ should have read ‘Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Secularity, Wilber’s Integral Theory: Living With and Without the Divine’. (2) In the sentence ‘Purushottama Bilimoria, in his paper ‘The Missing God of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: too late for God too early for the gods’, takes up the issue of the ‘missing God’ in the thinking, particularly, of two existentialist philosophers: Martin Heidegge and Karl Jaspers.’ the title ‘The Missing God of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: too late for God too early for the gods’ should have read ‘The Missing God of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: Too late for God; too Early for the Gods—with a Vignette from Indian Philosophy’. (3) In the sentence ‘In his essay, ‘Zero – A Tangible Representation of Nonexistence, and Modern Science’, Sudip Bhattacharyya insists that we need to explore the deeper philosophical implications of the mathematical zero and relate it to the Chapter 2 was originally published as Chakraborty, S. & Mukhopadhyay, A. Sophia (2021) 60: 515–516. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00891-z.

The original article can be found online at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11841-​021-​00878-w. * Sanjit Chakraborty [email protected] Anway Mukhopadhyay [email protected] 1

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur, West Bengal 741246, India

2

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, West Bengal, India



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capacity of modern science for explaining natural phenomena without grounding those explanations in a supernatural being or God.’, the title ‘Zero – A Tangible Representation of Nonexistence, and Modern Science’ should have read as ‘Zero—a Tangible Representation of Nonexistence: Implications for Modern Science and the Fundamental’. The original article has been corrected.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Sophia (2021) 60:517–529 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00843-7

Defining ‘Religion’ and ‘Atheism’ Graham Oppy1  Accepted: 12 March 2021 / Published online: 2 July 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract There are various background issues that need to be discussed whenever the topic of conversation turns to religion and atheism. In particular, there are questions about how these terms are to be used in the course of the conversation. While it is sometimes the case that all parties to a conversation about religion and atheism have agreed what they mean by ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’, it is often enough the case that such conversations go poorly because the parties mean different things by ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. In this paper, I discuss a range of questions about the meanings of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ that should be taken into account when we are asking global questions about ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. Keywords  Atheism · Dawkins · Definition · Haslanger · Oppression · Religion · Wittgenstein · World Values Survey Defining ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ is a topic with many different dimensions. I begin with a general survey of types of definition. I then turn to philosophically contentious questions about the definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. Next, I make some brief remarks about the contested nature of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. I then consider the prospects for offering ameliorative definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’, in the style of Haslanger (2000). Finally, I apply some of the preceding discussion to questions about ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ in non-Western contexts, with a particular focus on Thomas (2017). I argue that there is a pressing need to revise the survey instruments that are used to collect data about global attitudes to ‘atheism’ and ‘religion’. While the discussion is everywhere brisk, I hope that it draws attention to questions that have often been neglected in academic disputes about the definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. Chapter 3 was originally published as Oppy, G. Sophia (2021) 60: 517–529. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00843-7.

This paper is an invited contribution for the issue guest-edited by Sanjit Chakraborty and Anway Mukhopadhyay. * Graham Oppy [email protected] 1



School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, 20 Chancellor’s Walk, Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia

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Definition There are many different types of definitions. We can distinguish, at least, between the following kinds of definitions: (a) dictionary; (b) ostensive; (c) real; (d) stipulative; (e) explicative; (f) nominal; (g) descriptive; and (h) ameliorative (See Gupta (2015) for discussion of most of these kinds of definitions.). Dictionaries provide information about words for practical purposes. Often, dictionaries provide information about pronunciation, etymology, appropriate use, and rough synonyms (perhaps in languages other than the one to which the term in question belongs). Dictionary definitions rarely prove useful for philosophical purposes. Examples of dictionary definitions: Religion is belief in or acknowledgement of some superhuman power or powers—especially a god or gods—which is typically manifested in obedience, reverence and worship (OED). Atheism is lack of belief or strong disbelief in the existence of a god or gods (Merriam-Webster). Ostension provides definitions by direct demonstration. The use of ostensive definition is limited. If you cannot point—either literally or figuratively—at something, then you cannot provide an ostensive definition of it. Ostensive definition is easiest in the case of singular terms—e.g. proper names. Attempts to define kinds by ostending instances of those kinds have variable degrees of success. Examples of ostensive definitions: Religions are Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the like. Atheists are Richard Dawkins, Rebecca Goldstein, Avijit Roy, Susan Jacoby, Hafid Bouazza, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Agomo Atambire, Maryam Namazie, and the like. (Historically important atheists include, among countless others: Ajita Kesakambali, Wang Chong, Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma’arri, Lārī Mehmed Efendi, Jean Meslier, Paul Henri d’Holbach, George Eliot, Emma Goldman, Jawaharlal Nehru and George Orwell.) In principle, real definitions give an exhaustive list of the essential properties of that which is being defined. That is, in principle, real definitions tell you what properties are necessarily intrinsic to that which is being defined if there is anything that answers to the definition. In practice, it is doubtful whether there is much at all in our universe for which we can give real definitions. Examples of putative real definitions: Religion is belief in spiritual beings (Tylor, 1871:424). Atheism is a lack of belief in gods (American Atheists, 2020). Stipulation provides definitions by fiat. One obvious uses for stipulative definition is in the introduction of new terms. A slightly less obvious use for stipulative definition is in the introduction of a new use for an already existing term. Often, stipulative definitions for already existing terms have limited ambition: they are made for the purposes of a particular argument, or discussion, or the like. Examples of stipulative definitions: Religion is a passionate communal display of costly commitments to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004: 17). Atheism is critique and denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism (Nagel, 1967: 460). Explicative definitions are a species of stipulative definition of already existing terms. In principle, explicative definitions offer refinements on extant imperfect

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definitions. That is, in principle, an explicative definition is a suggestion about what we should mean—or perhaps about what it would be good to mean—by a given expression. Examples of putative explicative definitions: Religion is a relatively bound system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence, in which communion with others and otherness is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment, and knowing (James & Mandaville, 2010). An atheist is a person who does not believe in the existence of God (Smith, 1991: 35). In principle, nominal definitions give ‘the meanings’ of words. Unlike dictionary definitions, nominal definitions do not seek merely to provide sufficient information to generate good enough understanding of that which is being defined. Rather, nominal definitions seek to provide sufficient information to generate fully adequate understanding of that which is being defined. Examples of putative nominal definitions: Religion is the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider godlike (James, 1902: 31). Atheism is the attitude of a person who lives as if God does not exist (Zdybicka, Z. (2005: 20)). Descriptive definitions are nominal definitions of various degrees of strictness. Extensionally adequate definitions are exempt from actual counterexample. Intensionally adequate definitions are exempt from possible counterexample. Analytically adequate definitions are exempt even from hyperintensional counterexamples. In practice, it is doubtful that we have analytically adequate definitions for many philosophically interesting terms. It is a contested matter whether there are purposes for which we need analytically adequate definitions of philosophically interesting terms that belong to non-formal domains, i.e., to domains other than mathematics, logic, formal game theory, and the like. Ameliorative definitions are species of both explicative and descriptive definitions. Like explicative definitions, ameliorative definitions offer suggestions about what we should mean—or about what it would be good to mean—by expressions given our political purposes and aims. But, like descriptive definitions, ameliorative definitions are intended to meet the highest achievable levels of strictness when it comes to the determination of extension, intension and hyperintension. Haslanger (2000) generated an on-going discussion of ameliorative definitions of ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘black’, ‘white’, and so forth.

Wars of ‘Religion’ There are extended academic debates, across a range of disciplines, about ‘the definition of religion’. These debates are mostly concerned with attempts to construct real or descriptive definitions of religion. Some critics—e.g. Smith (1963), Fitzgerald (2000)—say that attempts to give real or descriptive definitions of ‘religion’ import a western or Judaeo-Christian bias into the study of other cultures. Some critics—e.g. Asad (2003), Dubuisson (2007), Josephson (2012)—say that attempts to give real or descriptive definitions of ‘religion’ cannot do justice to the complex history of human culture. Some critics—e.g. Norenzayan (2016)—say that attempts Reprinted from the journal

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to give real or descriptive definitions of ‘religion’ cannot do justice to the complex variations in current human culture. There is no denying that the phenomena that we wish to discuss are very complex. In particular, it is important to remember that there is a distinction between internal (‘participant’) perspectives and external (‘observer’) perspectives. From an internal perspective, our interest is in social structures and practices dedicated to fulfilling ultimate ‘externally imposed’ purposes: satisfying the wishes of ancestors, or the gods, or God, or meeting the requisites for escape from the cycle of death and rebirth, or the like. From an external perspective, our interest is in social structures and practices that enable some measure of mastery of people’s existential anxieties about death, deception, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, loss and so forth, that justify and enable certain kinds of hierarchy and oppression, and that provide clear in-group/out-group marking for members. Practices that are particularly important include rites and rituals concerning purity—food, hygiene, sex, and so forth; relevant social structures are those supporting religious enforcement of social hierarchies of sex, gender, race, class and the like. Given the complexities involved, it is easy to make mistaken identifications of what is globally—as opposed to merely locally—significant. For example, as many have observed, there is an emphasis on orthodoxy in some Christian communities that differs markedly from the emphasis on orthopraxy in some Hindu communtities. This is the important truth in the writings of those who claim that ‘religion’ is a distorting lens: it can be highly distorting to view the other religions of the world through the lens of your own religion. But it is consistent with the acknowledgement of this point that we can distinguish ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ elements in the social structures and practices of non-Western cultures. In particular, much of that which marks social groups within cultures is concerned with geographical, class, gender and racial structures that have no clear relation to either the fulfilment of ultimate purposes or to the management of people’s existential anxieties, the justification of hierarchy and inequality, and in-group/out-group marking at the widest cultural level. To take one clear example, it is clearly not a religious matter whether one supports the Delhi Capitals—rather than, say, the Chennai Super Kings or the Sunrisers Hyderabad—in the Indian Premier League. Obviously, to a very significant extent, support is likely to be determined simply by geography: if you take Delhi to be ‘home’, then you will likely support the Delhi Capitals. This allegiance has nothing to do with whether you identify as Hindi, or Muslim, or Jain, or Christian or whatever. While it is a mistake to suppose that there is an absolute divide between religious considerations and other cultural considerations, it is also a mistake to suppose that we are unable to identify non-religious aspects of non-Western cultures. This is not so say that we should suppose that we can give real or descriptive definitions of ‘religion’. One of the lessons of the twentieth century analytic philosophy seems to be that it is extraordinarily difficult to settle on agreed definitions of any philosophically important terms: ‘knowledge’, ‘causation’, ‘artwork’, ‘property’, ‘belief’ and so forth. Perhaps this is because something like Wittgenstein’s family resemblance view of our concepts is correct; or perhaps it is because, while there are

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precise delineations of the boundaries of our concepts, our use of our concepts does not rely on our making those precise delineations explicit. I do not propose to say more here about the history of philosophical, phenomenological, functional and sociological definitions of ‘religion’. Given the distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspectives—and the related distinction between ‘local’ and ‘global’ perspectives—it is plausible that much of that history is a pointless shouting match in which people trying to define different things confusedly take themselves to be attempting to define the same single thing. (For competing takes on the definition of ‘religion’, see, for example: Bruce (2011), Droogers (2009), Harrison (2006), and Kuruvachira (2011).)

Wars of ‘Atheism’ There is also considerable academic contestation about the definition of ‘atheism’. According to some, ‘atheists’ are all of those who are not ‘theists’. According to some, ‘atheists’ are all of those who are not some particular kind of ‘theist’. According to some, ‘atheists’ are all of those who suppose that there are no gods and that there is no God. According to some, ‘atheists’ are all of those who suppose that there is no God. According to some, ‘atheists’ are all of those who suppose that some particular God does not exist. According to some, ‘atheism’ is a particular species of irreligion. According to some, ‘atheists’ are all of those who hate a particular God. And so on. Given the history of the word ‘atheism’ in English, and given the diversity in current use of the term, it is important that those who make academic employment of the term are prepared to stipulate a precise meaning for it. When I have used the term, I have stipulated meanings for four terms: ‘theism’ is the claim that there are gods or is a God; ‘atheism’ is the claim that there are no gods and there is no God; ‘agnostics’ are those who suspend judgement between ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’; and ‘innocents’ are those who have never considered whether there are gods or whether God exists. This use is patterned on a fourfold distinction that extends to all claims: for any claim that p, either I believe that p, or I believe that not p, or I suspend judgement whether that p, or I am innocent whether that p. On my use of the terms ‘atheist’, there are religious atheists. On my use of the term ‘atheist’, there are nonnaturalist atheists. On my use of the term ‘atheist’, there are spiritual atheists. And so on. I do not say that everyone is obliged to adopt my stipulative usage. (For contrasting ways of using the relevant vocabulary, see, for example, Beaman and Tomlins (2015), Keller et al. (2018), and Martinson (2012).) Moreover, given the history and current use of the term in English, you cannot use my stipulative definition to correctly interpret many texts in which the word ‘atheist’ makes frequent appearances. In the social sciences—particularly, psychology, sociology and political science—over the past 60  years or so, the word ‘atheist’ has regularly been used for non-innocents who fail to be theists or who fail to be theists of a particular kind. Social scientific work which purports to show that theists enjoy social advantages of various kinds relative to atheists are misunderstood if you interpret their results on Reprinted from the journal

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my understanding of ‘atheist’. There is a significant—but far too often neglected— body of work in the social sciences which suggests that, most likely, theists enjoy no social advantages relative to atheists, in my sense of the term, at least in most prosperous democracies. (See, for example, Paul (2005, 2009).) When the term ‘atheist’ was introduced into English from French, more than half a century before the word ‘theist’ came to have currency, it was a generic term of abuse for those who failed to hold orthodox religious views. Well into the eighteenth century, it was almost universally maintained that there could not be ‘theoretical atheists’—serious reflective people who held the considered opinion that there is no God—but rather only ‘practical atheists’—wicked people who knew that God exists but acted as if there were no God, and, in particular, no damnation for the wicked. That flexible category could include heretics, witches, religious reformers, apostates, those largely untouched by religious sentiments and many other types as well. Of course, as freethought gradually gained a more secure foothold in the West, the term ‘atheism’ came to be viewed as a badge of honour by a small, but steadily growing, proportion of the population. In the early twenty-first century, in some countries in the West, there is only minority disapproval of atheism; and, in the early twenty-first century, in most countries in the West, there is a very significant part of the population that does not disapprove of ‘atheism’. While there are remnants of archaic attitudes from earlier centuries in some laws in some jurisdictions and in some patterns of practice, most people in the West have bid regret-free farewell to the seventeenth-century laws in the UK that provided for capital punishment for those who made repeated public profession of ‘atheism’.

Contestation One question that the preceding discussion might be taken to pose is whether there is a common understanding of terms like ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. Some have supposed that there are essentially contested—or essentially contestable—evaluative terms, such as ‘fair’ or ‘artwork’, for which there is no common understanding; some have supposed that ‘religion’ and ‘atheist’ should be included among these terms (See Gallie (1956).). Some have supposed that, while we should not think that there are essentially contested—or essentially contestable—terms, we should insist on a clear distinction between our shared understandings of certain evaluative terms and our divergent theorisations of those evaluative terms (See, for example, Hart (1961) and Rawls (1971).) I think that, regardless of what you maintain about these claims about evaluative terms like ‘fair’ and ‘artwork’, you should be sceptical that there are similar claims to be made about ‘religion’ and ‘atheist’. There may be ‘essential contestation’ about whether, on the whole, religion is good for humanity; but I do not think that it is plausible to suppose that there is an ‘essential contestation’ about whether something is religion that runs parallel to ‘essential contestation’ about whether something is fair or something else is a work of art. Similarly, while we may have diverse theories about the merits of religions, it is not plausible that we have diverse theories

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about what are the central cases of religions. A judgement about whether something is a religion or whether someone is an atheist is not, in itself, an evaluative judgement, even if it is true that, for a given person making such a judgement, there are future evaluative judgments that follow hot on its heels. What I have just said is not in conflict with the further thought that it is possible for people to advance persuasive definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. For example, someone might claim to define an ‘atheist’ as someone who has yet realised that God exists; and someone else might claim to define a ‘theist’ as someone who has not yet realised—and perhaps will never realise—that God does not exist. Of course, such ‘definitions’ are rhetorical cheap shots: they merely hinder, and do not in any way advance, serious discussion of differences of opinion. There may be some who think that my treatment of persuasive definition is cavalier. In particular, some may think that, when it comes to certain kinds of questions about identity, we all take certain views to be ‘unthinkable’, or ‘beyond the pale’, or the like. Moreover, some may think, when it comes to discussion of views that are beyond the pale, the only proper response is ridicule. I think that there are at least two reasons for being sceptical about any view of this kind. The first obvious point is that doxastic distance is a symmetric relation: whatever justification you take yourself to have for supposing that others’ views are beyond the pale, they will take themselves to have analogous justification for supposing that your views are beyond the pale. The second obvious point is that we know, from a range of other contexts, that bullying behaviour typically issues from deep-rooted insecurity: if you are prepared to think that your engaging in bullying behaviour is acceptable in a given context, the most plausible explanation is that you really do not have anything good to offer.

Ameliorative Definition One thought that perhaps deserves some exploration is that we might offer definitions of ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’, and ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ on the model of the ameliorative definitions of gender and race provided by Sally Haslanger. That is, following Haslanger (2000), we might think to frame the following accounts of ‘theists’ and ‘atheists’ for societies—such as those in the UK and Western Europe in the seventeenth century—in which some kind of theism is the dominant ideology: S is a theist iff: (a) S is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain features presumed to be evidence of S’s positive standing in the eyes of God or the gods; (b) That S has these features marks S within the dominant ideology of S’s society as someone who ought to occupy certain kinds of social positions that are in fact dominant and so motivates and justifies S’s occupying such a position; and

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(c) The fact that S satisfies (a) and (b) plays a role in S’s systematic privilege—i.e. along some dimension, S’s social role is privileged and S’s satisfying (a) and (b) plays a role in that dimension of privilege S is an atheist if: (a) S is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain features presumed to be evidence of S’s negative standing in the eyes of God or the gods; (b) That S has these features marks S within the dominant ideology of S’s society as someone who ought to occupy certain kinds of social positions that are in fact subordinate and so motivates and justifies S’s occupying such a position; and (c) The fact that S satisfies (a) and (b) plays a role in S’s systematic subordination— i.e. along some dimension, S’s social role is oppressive and S’s satisfying (a) and (b) plays a role in that dimension of subordination. Moreover, again following Haslanger (2000), we might think to frame the following accounts of the ‘religious’ and the ‘non-religious’ in a society in which a particular religion is the dominant ideology: S is religious iff: (a) S is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain features presumed to be evidence of S’s positive standing on the path to salvation; (b) That S has these features marks S within the dominant ideology of S’s society as someone who ought to occupy certain kinds of social positions that are in fact dominant and so motivates and justifies S’s occupying such a position; and (c) The fact that S satisfies (a) and (b) plays a role in S’s systematic privilege—i.e. along some dimension, S’s social role is privileged and S’s satisfying (a) and (b) plays a role in that dimension of privilege. S is non-religious iff: (a) S is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain features presumed to be evidence of S’s negative standing on the path to salvation; (b) That S has these features marks S within the dominant ideology of S’s society as someone who ought to occupy certain kinds of social positions that are in fact subordinate and so motivates and justifies S’s occupying such a position; and (c) The fact that S satisfies (a) and (b) plays a role in S’s systematic subordination— i.e. along some dimension, S’s social role is oppressive and S’s satisfying (a) and (b) plays a role in that dimension of subordination. These definitions should be thought of as additions to the definitions of ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘upper class’, ‘lower class’ and so forth that are provided by Haslanger and those who have followed her lead (e.g Jenkins  2016). There are many intersecting dimensions of privilege and oppression; the position of a wealthy white male Christian in the seventeenth century in Western Europe was different in

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many ways from the position of a poor, non-white, female atheist in the seventeenth century in Western Europe (While some have denied, and many have doubted, that there were poor, non-white, female atheists in the seventeenth century in Western Europe, I think—following Ryrie (2019)—that we have clear evidence that there were atheists among the ‘common folk’ throughout Christian Europe from the beginning of the second millennium.). I am not suggesting that these ameliorative definitions are appropriate everywhere in the twenty-first century. In particular, for example, I do not think that there are any legitimate purposes that would be served by the adoption of these definitions by atheists and irreligionists in the circles in which I move in Australia in the twenty-first century. While there remain unfortunate historical legacies of times in which there were legitimate purposes that would have been served by the adoption of these definitions by atheists and irreligionists—for example in seventeenth-century England—I think that it is not at all plausible to claim that there is structural oppression of atheists and irreligionists in the circles in which I move in twenty-first century Australia. However, it is at least an open possibility that there are legitimate purposes that would be served by the adoption of these definitions by atheists and irreligionists who move in other circles in other parts of the world in the twenty-first century.

‘Religion’ and ‘Atheism’ in Non‑Western Contexts Discussion of religion and atheism in any context requires careful attention to what we mean by ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. In particular, if we are talking about some context other than our own, we need to be clear about whether we are using the terms ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ as they are typically understood in our context or as they are typically understood in the context under examination. This need for caution ramifies if we are using ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ as translations for terms that belong to a language other than our own. (For contrasting takes on the matters discussed in this section, see, for example, Berger (2014), Dalacoura (2014) and Quack (2011).) One important consideration here is that it may be that we have much deeper knowledge of variability and specificity in our own context than we have of variability and specificity in other contexts. If we are Australian Methodists, we may well have a vivid appreciation, not only merely of the range of differences in the religious beliefs and practices of Australian Methodists, but also—at least given appropriate sensitivity and interest on our part—of the range of differences in the religious beliefs and practices of other kinds of Australian Christians. Perhaps, if we are Australian Methodists, we will have some appreciation of the range of differences in the religious beliefs and practices of Australians who identify with other religions, and of the range of differences in the beliefs and practices of Australians who identify as non-religious. However, if we are Australian Methodists, we may have little or no appreciation of the range of differences in the religious beliefs and practices of people who live on other continents. For most of us, at some point, our representations of the religious (or non-religious) beliefs and practices of others consist of little more than ill-supported stereotypes. Reprinted from the journal

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Consider Thomas (2017), who aims to ‘show the limitations of Western atheism to capture the everyday life of Indian scientists’ (45). According to Thomas, ethnographic data shows that Indian atheistic scientists—unlike Western atheistic scientists—call themselves ‘atheists’ even while accepting that their lifestyle is very much part of tradition and religion: I met many scientists who called themselves ‘atheists’, ‘agnostics’, and ‘materialists’. However … parallels cannot be drawn between their ideas of atheism or non-belief and their Western counterparts. It is problematic to look for a homogeneous category [of atheists]. (47). Thomas conducted extended interviews with a range of self-described ‘hardcore atheists’—Rajiv Kumar, Ashok Baruah, Gracy Gomez, Iqbal Rizwan, Nagendra Rao, Ramesh Iyer, Ramamurthy, Madhava Sastry and Poornima Vasudevan—and ‘liberal non-theists’—Gayatri Iyengar and Narayana Shastry. Thomas observes that, while the ‘hardcore atheists’ all say that there are ‘personally completely non-religious’, they all have: … lives based on religious or cultural ethos. They practised vegetarianism, wore the sacred thread, admired classical songs in praise of Hindu gods, participated in traditional life-cycle and seasonal rituals … gave religious/ traditional names to their children … had arranged marriages from their own religion and caste … visited temples … attended Church services … felt that religion and belief in God provides psychological succour to believers in their hardships so that one should not oppose it … and were critical of the claims made by Western liberal atheists that everything can be explained by science. (59–60). According to Thomas, ‘we should be wary of easy generalisation that draws neat parallels between the contemporary Western atheistic traditions—Dawkins’ position being the dominant one—and other social and cultural sites’ (62/3). The acceptance of [Dawkins’] understanding of atheism or unbelief imposes a closure on the multiple cultural meanings assumed by these categories. Any attempt to universalise or homogenise the experiences of unbelief and atheism against the scale of Western modernity runs the risk of neglecting the enmeshing of these categories within the complex life worlds of Indian scientists. (65). I do not doubt Thomas’ data. Surely there are many ‘hardcore atheists’ in India, not merely among professional scientists, who do some or all of the things that Thomas mentions. (See, for example, the relevant parts of Quack (2011).) However, it seems to me that similar data would vindicate the claim that many ‘Western atheists’ have lives based in religious and cultural ethos. The details differ. For example, there are few remnants of traditions of arranged marriages in ‘the West’. But there are plenty of ‘Western atheists’, including many ‘atheists’ who are scientists, who admire classical Christian music, participate in traditional life-cycle and seasonal rituals (such as Christmas, Easter and Halloween),

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give religious/traditional names (e.g. John, Peter, Mary, Rachel) to their children, visit churches, attend church services, support the maintenance of religion where it bring social goods to others and deny that everything can be explained by science. Somewhat ironically for Thomas, even Richard Dawkins does—or has done—many of these things. We should be wary of easy generalisations that suppose that what Thomas takes to be Dawkins’ understanding of ‘atheism’ and unbelief accurately characterises the cultural meanings assumed by these categories in ‘the West’. If Dawkins really does think that everything can be explained by science, then it is important to point out that there is no reliable evidence that this is a majority position among ‘Western atheists’. The survey instruments used to collect international data about religion—WIN/Gallup, World Values Survey, PEW, national censuses, etc.—contain only very crudely formulated questions about ‘atheists’. For example, the 2017–2020 WVS questionnaire asks people to classify themselves as one of the following: (a) a religious person; (b) not a religious person; (c) an atheist; and (d) don’t know. Since everyone falls into (a), (b), or (d), and since an ‘atheist’ could fall under either (a) or (b), it is not plausible that the WVS questionnaire gives us any reliable global information about ‘atheists’. The kind of criticism that I have made here generalises that there just is no globally administered survey instrument that provides us with reliable data about what Thomas calls ‘hardcore atheists’. Please note that I am not arguing that there are no statistically significant differences between ‘the atheism of Western atheists’ and ‘the atheism of non-Western atheists’. It is surely plausible that there are statistically significant differences between ‘the atheism of Western atheists’ and ‘the atheism of non-Western atheists’. However, there are formidable difficulties that confront those who would like to make an accurate assessment of those differences. On the one hand, there is the elasticity of the term ‘atheism’. And, on the other hand, there is the apparent lack of interest, among the agencies that currently conduct global surveys of religion, in the development of survey tools that would provide accurate data of the kind that is required. I do not think that it is impossibly difficult to devise survey questions that would yield better information than those currently in use. Perhaps something like this. On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 = ‘certainly not’, 5 = ‘no idea’ and 10 = ‘certainly’, rank the following claims: (a) God exists; and (b) there is at least one god. No matter how we define ‘atheism’, we can use the results to this question to inform us about the distribution of ‘atheists’. Moreover, we can include similar survey questions to give us better information about attitudes that correlate with atheism. For example: On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 = ‘certainly not’, 5 = ‘no idea’ and 10 = ‘certainly’, rank the following claim: there are no questions that science cannot answer. If we were to administer a survey that included these kinds of questions, then it seems to me likely that we would discover statistically significant differences between ‘the atheism of Western atheists’ and ‘the atheism of non-Western atheists’. No doubt

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there are subtleties in the art of designing surveys that would need to be accommodated. No doubt, too, there is something lost when established survey instruments are significantly revised. In particular, there is value attached to historical continuity in the asking of questions. But—at least as I see it—there is no value in continuing to ask questions when it is clear that answers to those questions are evidently not delivering useful, high-quality information.

Concluding Remarks We have skated over a lot of ground very quickly. Not everything that I have said pulls in the same direction. On the one hand, for local political purposes, there may be good reason to insist on ameliorative definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. On the other hand, given the vagaries of language, for certain kinds of academic purposes, the best course may well be either (1) to make stipulative definitions of ‘atheism’ and ‘religion’ that give precise content to the use of those terms, or else (2) to avoid use of the terms ‘atheism’ and ‘religion’ altogether. At the very least, it is not helpful to frame global survey questions in terms of ‘atheism’, when we can ask people directly about their attitudes towards the claims that God exists and that there is at least one god. Acknowledgements  I am grateful to two anonymous referees for the journal who provided friendly critical comments on the initial draft of this paper. I am pleased to have been able to improve the work by following their advice.

References American Atheists. (2020). ‘What is atheism?’ https://​www.​athei​sts.​org/​activ​ism/​resou​rces/​about-​athei​ sm/. Accessed 15 July 2020. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity. Stanford University Press. Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 27, 713–730. Beaman, L. and Tomlins, S. (2015). Atheist identities: Spaces and social contexts. Springer. Berger, P. (2014). ‘Is atheism a specifically Western phenomenon?’. The American Interest. https://​www.​ the-​ameri​can-​inter​est.​com/​2014/​11/​26/​is-​athei​sm-a-​speci​fical​ly-​weste​rn-​pheno​menon/.  Accessed 15 July 2020. Bruce, S. (2011). Defining religion: A practical response. International Review of Sociology, 21, 107–120. Dalacoura, K. (2014). ‘The secular in non-Western societies’. The Immanent Frame. https://​tif.​ssrc.​org/​ 2014/​02/​11/​the-​secul​ar-​in-​non-​weste​rn-​socie​ties/. Accessed 15 July 2020 Droogers, A. (2009). ‘Defining religion: A social science approach’ in P. Clarke (ed.). The Oxford handbook of sociology. Oxford University Press, 263–79. Dubuisson, D. (2007). The Western construction of religion. Johns Hopkins University Press. Fitzgerald, T. (2000). The ideology of religious studies. Oxford University Press. Gallie, W. (1956). Art as an essentially contested concept. Philosophical Quarterly, 6, 97–114. Gupta, A. (2015). ‘Definitions’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  https://​plato.​stanf​ord.​edu/​entri​es/​ defin​itions/. Accessed 15 July 2020. Harrison, V. (2006). The pragmatics of defining religion in a multi-cultural world. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 59, 133–152.

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Defining ‘Religion’ and ‘Atheism’ Hart, H. (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford University Press. Haslanger, S. (2000). ‘Gender and race: [What] are they? [What] do we want them to be? Nous, 34, 31–55. James, P. and Mandaville, P. (2010). Globalisation and culture, volume 2: Globalising religions. Sage. James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience. Longmans, Green & Co. Jenkins, K. (2016). Amelioration and inclusion: Gender identity and the concept of woman. Ethics, 126, 394–421. Josephson, J. (2012). The invention of religion in Japan. University of Chicago Press. Keller, J., Bullik, R., & Klein, C. (2018). Profiling atheist world views in different cultural contexts: Developmental trajectories and accounts’. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 10, 229–243. Kuruvachira, J. (2011). The problem of defining religion. Divyadaan, 22, 377–396. Martinson, M. (2012). Atheism as culture and condition: Nietzschean reflections on the contemporary invisibility of profound godlessness. Approaching Religion, 2, 75–86. Nagel, E. (1967). A Defence of Atheism. In P. Edwards & A. Pap (Eds.), A modern introduction to philosophy (revised, pp. 460–473). Collier-Macmillan. Norenzayan, A., et al. (2016). The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 39, 1–19. Paul, G. (2005). Cross-national correlation of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in popular democracies. Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 1–17. Paul, G. (2009). The chronic dependence of popular religiosity upon dysfunctional psychosocial conditions. Evolutionary Psychology, 7, 398–441. Quack, J. (2011). Disenchanting India: Organised rationalism and criticism of religion in India. Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Oxford University Press. Ryrie, A. (2019). Unbelievers: An emotional history of doubt. Harvard University Press. Smith, G. (1991). Atheism, Ayn Rand, and other heresies. Prometheus. Smith, W. (1963). The meaning and end of religion. Macmillan. Thomas, R. (2017). Atheism and unbelief among Indian scientists: Towards an anthropology of atheism(s). Society and culture in South Asia, 3, 45–67. Tylor, E. (1871). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art and custom: volume 1. John Murray. Zdybicka, Z. (2005). ‘Atheism’ in A. Maryniaczyk (ed.) Universal encyclopedia of philosophy. Polish Thomas Aquinas Association. http://​ptta.​pl/​pef/​hasla​en/a/​athei​sm.​pdf. Accessed 15 July 2020.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Sophia (2021) 60:531–549 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00850-8

Has God Been and Gone? Patrick Hutchings1 Accepted: 26 March 2021 / Published online: 2 July 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Could anyone live without God? The pragmatic answer is, ‘Yes’. If we compare the Australian census figures for 2006 and 2016, we find that in 2006, 19% filled in the question ‘what religion’, ‘none’: in 2016, 30% recorded, ‘no religion’. How could this be so? The Jansenist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)1 would have said this sort of thing, ‘By diverting their minds from Godly matters’. Diversion is offered by the national religions of sport and unnecessary consumption. Australia was founded in 1788 as a place of imprisonment, the American thirteen colonies having in 1776 revolted against England and George III, the fledging USA was no longer open as a dumping ground for English criminals. So, under the poisonous fiction that Terra Australis was Terra Nullius—nobody’s place—the Continent was open as a prison, and a place in which to practice European agriculture, ‘Land of Drought and Flood’2 notwithstanding. The treatment of the Aboriginal owners of the land has been shameful, and shameless: the usual Colonialist pattern. As a country in 2020, we are multicultural: good. But we are a petty bourgeois society, with the usual gratin3 of undeserving rich. The Commonwealth exports iron, coal, and natural gas. Our third greatest export is University Degrees. Before COVID-19, Australia attracted Chinese, Indian, and other foreign students: this inward educational traffic may well not continue. Our corporatized university ‘industry’ may go bust, and help from a philistine and ‘economic rationalist’ federal Chapter 4 was originally published as Hutchings, P. Sophia (2021) 60: 531–549. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00850-8. 1

  Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) a semi-Jansenist thinker one of whose Pensées is quoted later on in this paper. He was a great mathematician. He had a religious experience. It is recognized by some as genuine, and put down by others to his fontanelles continuing to grow too long after infancy. He suffered greatly from headaches. 2   My Country by Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1958) ‘I love a sunburnt country/Land of drought and flood…’. It is a good poem, but tarnished by climate change deniers as a ‘proof’ that the recent—2019— unprecedented bushfires and floods are just more of the same. There is a now disused Prime Minister who said ‘Climate change is crap’, and forbade civil servants’ using the words ‘climate change’. At present, he has a job in the UK where one would like him to stay. 3   Gratin, French for ‘the top crust’, i.e. the very well off. Literally, ‘gratin’ is the top layer of a dish of thinly sliced potatoes dressed in butter and olive oil, baked in the oven—pommes Anna. The gratin is made of two kinds of hard cheese grated and mixed with a few breadcrumbs. The gratin is the tastiest part of the dish—everyone wants more than their fair share of it. * Patrick Hutchings [email protected] 1



University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

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government is not to be expected, this even although the virus has forced it into Keynesian policies. Indeed, financial cuts to higher education are in the offing: Many MPs got their degrees when universities were offering instruction gratis. University staff—tutors and so on—are largely casual and so do not get the ‘Economic Support Payment’, Keynesian, money that other workers do. How then can junior academics carry on research and publication? How can they evolve into future professors? Living without God here is a cakewalk: Mammon, if not worshipped, is still highly thought of.

The Human Predicament How Might We Cope—God Absent? The American novelist Saul Bellow’s Herzog4 has the slightly deranged Herzog writing letters—which he never sends—to Heidegger… ‘Dear Herr Doctor Professor you write of “the fall into the quotidian”, where were you when it happened?’ The only possible answer is, ‘Directly beside it, and I got sucked in.’ The cosmologist Brian Cox sets us the question, ‘How can we live meaningful lives in an essentially meaningless universe?’5 The answer is, ‘With difficulty!’ We must remember Sartre on ‘projects’: Since each of us carries meaning, as a function of our rationality with us, we need to find a rational ethic, and a rational politic. The first seems reachable. The second, in 2020, may well be beyond our grasp. First then to an ethic. To a ‘Western’ philosopher, there is an obvious/ ‘obvious’ pair: (1) Utilitarianism, ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’, and (2) Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Unfortunately, one collapses into the other in a disquieting way. Kant’s, ‘Act only on that principle/maxim that you could will to become an universal law’, turns out to be no more than a way of ruling out non-Utilitarian maxims.6 The Categorical Imperative, Kant intended to be neatly—and purely—logical. His best example was, making false promises. If everybody failed to keep their promise, reneged on their contracts, etc., then the institution of promising would fall apart. The Categorical Imperative ceases to work in other cases. From being—nearly—purely logical, the Categorical Imperative eventually came to depend on the fairly contingent: what people would put up with. Certain migrant communities in Australia have a custom of female circumcision. Here, it is a criminal offence—as it ought to be—everywhere. And, of course, Utilitarianism7 comes 4

  Herzog, by Saul Bellow, London, Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1964: [USA ed. 1961] p. 49.   The New Yorker for June 1, 2020, p. 25 has a cartoon by L. Fink, ‘The Eighth Day’, of God sitting quite alone on His cloud-supported throne, and with a very glum look on his face, a voice comes up from below, ‘But what does it all mean?’ If you have a copy of the journal, see also James Wood’s, ‘In from the cold: a Hungarian essayist struggles against Enlightenment’, pp. 64–67. God and Hegel appear in this piece. 6   See my Kant on Absolute Value, London, Allen and Unwin, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1972, pp. 234ff. 7   The New Zealand of my youth—I went up to University in the late 1940s—was a virtually homogenous social democracy: Though the Māori had not yet all that the Treaty of Waitangi had promised. My late Father who rose to a distinguished rank in the Health Department had one and one only philosophy book, J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, slim and bound in buckram. He read Marx, ‘Splendid Economist, but where does the spooky stuff come from?’ ‘Hegel’, ‘Did he write much?’, ‘Shelves full’, ‘Oh’. 5

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full of examples of consequences, which some people would not put up with. The ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ might lead governments to treat minorities unjustly; unless nuanced, the principle can lead to bad consequences. So the Categorical Imperative has to find what is—positively—congenial and useful, and what is not. We need to try to fill out a ‘western’ ethic with ideas from Gandhi, Confucius, and Zoroaster: indeed, most Prophets. Should we, even then, end up in a logical cramp, the ‘fall into the quotidian’ may prove as unresolvable as is the Fall of Adam and Eve. Of that, more later on. However whether we believe in God or not, we all live in a broken world. Now the second thing we need: Good Politics.

The Great Republic and Its Constitution: Trumped! The Decline of Politics? Kellyanne Conway has a place in the future History of The Decline of the West. When Trump boasted, falsely, ‘There were more people at my Inauguration than Obama’s’, aerial photos showed rows and rows of empty seats at Trump’s swearing in. Conway defended The Donald, ‘He was offering an alternative fact’. The expression ‘alternative fact’ makes no sense. It does to postmodernists, it seems. In her The Death of Truth8 Michiko Kakutani argues—convincingly—for PoMo’s dovetailing neatly into a former reality show’s presenter getting elected to the Presidency of the USA. Trump’s base won’t have heard of PoMo: their real grievances, loss of jobs, etc. had them voting for a zany, a demagogue with a small vocabulary and strangulated syntax. What PoMo can do is give a gloss of respectability to the endless inarticulate tweets, which now rank as Presidential policy statements (p. 100), despite their contradicting other tweets (p. 95). And being full of personal insults and blah blah they are nevertheless taken as serious and important. The base just loves the superhot-air twaddle. Umberto Eco writes, ‘Mussolini had no ideas, just rhetoric’ (p. 102). It got him a long way—for a while. Kakutani cites a notorious alt-right troll and conspiracy theorist who said in a profile-piece in The New Yorker (Oct. 31, 2116), ‘Look, I read postmodern theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative … I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?’ (p. 46). Everything is not a narrative. The atomic table is not.9 Of course we may need ‘alternatives to the dominant narrative’: But conspiracy theories don’t cut the mustard. Kakutani’s nicest point is, perhaps this: Putin’s quackspeak man is, ‘a foremost postmodernist theatre director who has been described as “Putin’s Rasputin” and the Kremlin’s propaganda puppet master’. (p. 136). Trump seems to know already how to direct his own theatre! Much of it theatre of the absurd. But: It woiks. The base and the Party of Lincoln are infatuated. 8

  The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani, London, William Collins, 2018. USA ed. Random House/ Penguin (etc.). Ms Kakutani is a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic and former chief book critic of the New York Times. 9   One recalls being told by an otherwise sober philosopher, ‘If the Chinese had discovered the atomic table the numbers would be different.’ The Chinese calculate to base-10. Different names but the same numbers: Au ≡ Confucium? Possibly. Reprinted from the journal

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The alt-right adores him. ‘God put Trump in [the] White House: The US ambassador to Israel believes Trump was sent by God…’.10 The last King of England who ruled by ‘Divine Right’, Charles I, lost his head—to an axe. By chance I heard a Trumpism on Australian TV, ‘If a second term scares the Democrats, what would twelve terms do with them?’ In PoMo, this is an double irony: If twelve terms are impossible, the remark can be laughed off as a joke. However, it may be a serious one: ‘If I could get away with it I’m up for it? Double ironies or the ironization of an irony is a PoMo move. An Australian journalist, Chris Uhlmann, wrote,11 ‘It is not written that Trump will win again, what he may do on the way out is the real horror. Could his last act of his vandalism of American institutions be to burn down the village as he leaves?’ He might? As for the twelve terms, Mitch McConnell the poker-faced Republican Senate Leader has had to reassure Americans that if Biden wins, Trump will go. The monstrous storming of the Capitol12 put this in doubt. McConnell blames Trump for the attacks, but voted against the second Impeachment! As of December 18, 2020—Joe Biden having been elected President—Trump skulks in the White House refusing to concede. When he goes as go he must in the end, what? As of 24 November, the election of Biden has been officially confirmed. However, Trumpism may well live on.13 Trump still has an enormous fascination for his base. Trump is not an ideologue, the Idol is Trump. However, he may finance a ‘news’ outlet on TV worse than Murdoch’s poisonous Fox News. A real ideologue may take up where Trump left off— if Trump don’t run again—and the USA may be threatened by what the Founding Fathers feared most—a ‘mob’.14

10

 Alex Woodward, Independent, New York, Thursday, January 30, 2020, 20:54 (online:www.​indep​ endent.​co.​uk). On PoMo’s contempt for science, see The Death of Truth pp. 20, 36–37, 38–39, 43, 75, etc. The present Australian Prime Minister uses the words ‘Climate Change’ only when he can’t avoid them. He favours as a fill-in before solar power, gas. It produces methane, more damaging even than CO2. There is plenty of sunlight here. Solar panels, please! 11   The Uhlmann quotes are from his initial piece, The Age, 22 September 2020, and from one by Orietta Guerra in the same newspaper, September 13, 2020, pp. 20, 36, etc. 12   For a firsthand account see Luke Mogelson, ‘The Storm’ in The New Yorker, January 25, 2021, pp. 34–53. My memory of hearing Trump on ‘twelve terms’ is semi-confirmed, p. 43, ­colb. If you live in a republic, Mogelson is required reading. The report begins, ‘By the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American Democracy...’ The cover of the The New Yorker has the American Eagle carrying off Trump: If only! The second Impeachment voted down, The Donald could still run for public office. The Union could still lose the Second Civil War! 13   The most incisive essay on Trumpism is by Finton O’Toole, in The New York Review, February 25, 2021, ‘The Trump Inheritance’, pp. 4–8. His analysis is, ‘...Trump lied prodigiously... his construction of “alternative facts” has deliberately and successfully obliterated fro his supporters the distinction between the fake and the genuine. But pure falsehood alone would not have created the bond between Trump and his base. What he managed to do was simultaneously to erase the distinction between the valid and the bogus and to remake it.’ (p.6, c­ old) By such a dodge a scoundrel might subvert the American Republic. Of America’s future, O’Toole writes, ominously: ‘The Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc.’ (February 8, 2020 in the Irish Times) 14  See The Federalist Papers, authored by Alexander Hamilton (c1755–1804), John Madison (1751– 1836), and John Jay (1745–1829), Introduction by Charles R Kessler, Edited by Clinton Rossiter, Signet Classics, Reprint Edition, 2003.

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But don’t blame Trump for America, blame America for Trump. In 2012, Peter Turchin—a University of Connecticut ecologist, evolutionary biologist, and mathematician—made a prediction that the USA was heading for a chaotic and violent 2020. He says: The fundamental problems are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.15 The Decline of the West is not just about the USA, although my private joke, ‘The USA is the World’s richest failed state’ is already a journalists’ commonplace. I did not spread it, it ‘just growed’. Uhlmann has rated world leaders according to their success in dealing with COVID-19: ‘Watching the world’s political class respond to the coronavirus and guide the trajectory of major powers proves the planet is run by imbeciles who really mean it, and worse [by] the truly malevolent.’ This would include the UK, and much of the EU. Australia tries hard to cope: New Zealand scores even better. The title of an essay in Michiko’s Kakutani’s bibliography fascinates me: Pluckrose, Helen ‘How French Intellectuals Ruined the West’, Areo, Mar. 27, 2017. Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida have much to answer for. French intellectuals aside, I leave the last word with Uhlmann. China is Australia’s biggest trading partner, the USA our military protector. An anonymous respondent to Uhlmann’s article is reported, (in Orietta Guerrera’s piece) ‘Australia is caught between a pathological narcissist despot wannabe, and a true despot’. Ms Kakutani could not have foreseen that the 2020 US Presidential Election would result in a victory for a Democratic Party candidate such as Joe Biden. Only a comic dramatist—or a South American Magic Realist novelist—could have imagined the present reality: Voted out, Trump is still refusing to accept the fact. This probably does not surprise Ms Kakutani. The leaders of the Free World have congratulated President-Elect Biden, as has former President George W Bush, and latterly H.H. Pope Francis, the Chinese government, and President Putin. Trump as of now seems—as do some of his entourage and his numerous base—to remember only the 2002 remark by a then a senior adviser to President George W Bush, ‘…we create our own reality…’.16 That President simply went graciously when his time was up. Reality is not ‘Reality’ TV. ‘Reality’ TV is not reality. President-Elect Joe Biden and his Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris both used in their victory speeches the words ‘truth’ and ‘science’, and ‘empathy’. Their plan is to collect a team of scientists to advise on how to cope with COVID-19 which has killed over 300,000 Americans (as at mid-December 2020). Trump ignored the virus—even after he had had it—‘It will go away’. So will he—eventually. But: 15

  Graeme Wood, ‘The Historian Who Sees the Future’, The Atlantic, December 2020 Issue. First published online on November 12, 2020, under the heading ‘The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse’. 16   Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’, The New York Times magazine, October 17, 2004. Reprinted from the journal

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‘Despite all the misleading statements Donald Trump has made, he has never fallen much below 40 percent approval,’ Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the United States, told me. ‘That’s pretty solid. What does that tell you? That we’re living in a post-truth world. Politicians around the world will be looking at this and saying, ‘You can get away with it.’ It’s a shift in the landscape that may be irreversible.’17 A post-truth world will be no Utopia, and that’s the truth of it. As for Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil—and some other countries—authoritarian tendencies grow. Even the UK—‘The Mother of Parliaments’—seems unsatisfactory. All authoritarian governments fear and suppress truth. We might make do without God, but without truth? The Jews were lucky that God occasionally manifested His wrath to them: Heaven came down to earth, with a bump. In the Middle Ages, Theology was ‘the queen of sciences, because it studied the Highest Being’. Now ‘science’ means the natural sciences. Nature is a closer object of study than is God. Ergo climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc., are less rational than are people who believe in God. Science is rationality distilled, and its errors are open to correction. Theology, even to believers, has an inherent opacity. I am a dunce in cosmology, viral-research, etc., but believe in the scientific method: Its logical structure is clear. Scientific experiments are perspicuous only to those with appropriate training. And that’s a fact. Unfortunately. Politicians without a smidgen of science in their heads can run—if they choose—with the least educated of their constituents. Some do. The anti-COVID facemask so becomes a marker of political opinion: As in the USA. Against the political fall into the quotidian there are no bombproof shelters, and no Noah’s Ark in the great Flood of mendacity. Swim!

I a Stranger and Afraid: In a World I Never Made. A.E. Housman18 The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in hisThe Beast in the Nursery,19 ‘Why … hasn’t the death of God been the death of our preoccupation with ourselves as lacking? Making a fetish of absence is the last move of a worn-out theology.’ If for Hindus nastika amounts to not believing in the Vedas, the death of God may entail the ‘West’s’ rejecting of both the Old and the New Testaments. The people of the sub-continent may have other theologies to fall back on. We have not; not respectable ones. Sceptical-believers in the ‘West’ told, ‘God is dead’, may save their belief by borrowing the elegant Indian neti neti and then try the strategy of modern theology—mostly German—of redefining God. ‘God is dead!’

17

  Peter Nicholas, ‘What to Expect Next From Donald Trump’, The Atlantic, online, November 8, 2020.  Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) English poet, classical scholar, and atheist. Quotation from Last Poems, London, Grant and Richards, 1922; USA/New York, Henry Holt, 1922. 19   The Beast in the Nursery by Adam Phillips, London, Faber and Faber 1998, p. 20. (See p. 102 and pp. 113–114.). 18

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occasions the remark, ‘The old descriptions are dead, but not God’.20As for feeling that we are lacking, who does not? Even if we do not know quite what it is that we lack, we know we lack it. ‘It’ remains a ‘?’. Adam and Eve, Genesis III, were driven out of Eden. There is no way back. Other religions register The Fall in other stories. But what Genesis III marks, other religions must deal with. We—none of us—are ‘Happy Campers’. The Australian idiom must have its versions all-over. The Vedas are older even than the Old Testament: this makes them more venerable. Or so remote in time that the propositions in them may seem to come from a ‘form of life’—see Wittgenstein—so remote as to be, or seem to be, now only doubtfully intelligible? The Jewish Old Testament, although younger than the Vedas, seems to belong to a time before Mythos zum Logos. The first moment in Christianity is The Fall: The eating by Eve and Adam of the apple plucked from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The primal couple were specifically forbidden by God to eat from it. The Puritan poet John Milton (1608–1674) in his Paradise Lost—in which he hopes ‘to justify God’s ways to Man’—begins: Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse…21 The greater Man is Christ who was crucified in Atonement for the primal disobedience—a sin—rose from the dead and He regained ‘the blissful seat’. But we are left: left ‘preoccupied with ourselves as lacking’. Pace Adam Phillips we do not, ‘make a fetish of absence’. If God is dead, we should—perhaps—abandon the once-neat phrases about, ‘There is a God shaped hole in the modern mind/worldview’, etc. With or without God, The Fall, the Atonement, the Resurrection, we still feel ourselves unprovided for. Sartre’s ‘Man is a useless passion’22 matches one’s own feelings. We have the sense of being in want: often in want of something indeterminate.

20

  There is a considerable literature on (re)-defining God. A useful book on this is Theology After Liberalism: A Reader, ed. John Webster and George P. Schner, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. There is a continuous set of ‘Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology’. 21   ‘Malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man.’ A.E. Housman, Last Poems. Malt is of course an essential ingredient in beer and whisky: neither fills up our ‘lack’ for us. In The New Mistress Housman wrote: ‘We for a certainty are not the first / Have sat in taverns when the tempest hurled / Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed / Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.’ 22   ‘Man is a useless passion’, L’ Être et le Néant, (Paris 1943) Part 4, Ch. 2, III, Hazel E. Barnes, first English trans., New York, Philosophical Library 1956. There is also, London, Routledge edition, 1956. Reprinted from the journal

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Worrying about The Fall: Nastika? Chapter III of Genesis gives us the account of The Fall. It is not easy to read it as a literal narrative. Indeed, his present Holiness Pope Francis writes: The story of Adam and Eve, the rebellion against God described in the Book of Genesis, uses richly imaginative language to explain something that actually happened at the origins of mankind.23 The Pope concedes that the story is told—as myths usually are—in ‘richly imaginative language’. But he insists that the language is wrapped around ‘something that actually happened’. A sceptical believer—they pop up in Sophia from time to time—may look at the myth bit with hermeneutic suspicion. With Nastika? The Genesis Chapter opens with, ‘Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree in the garden.’ And he goes on, agent provocateur that he is, to tempt Eve to eat of the very tree that she knows to be forbidden. Who was responsible for hiring a talking snake? Surely not God: almost certainly the imaginative myth writer. And, with due respect to His Holiness, does this whole story explain anything? ‘God moves in mysterious ways…’ and explanations always fall short. And the nakedness element which follows the primal disobedience seems not to follow directly from the eating of the forbidden fruit. The standard Christian answer to: ‘Why, suddenly, fig-leaves?’, is that a result of the primal transgression that Adam and Eve lost their primal innocence, and acquired concupiscence, that desire which we all have for things which are as forbidden as the fatal apple: Or, as in the Ten Commandments, ‘our neighbour’s wife.’ See the endless commentary on erotic desire, from innumerable moralists, and—sometimes discordant—psychologists. Read Freud, and indeed Adam Phillips who is quoted in the present essay. God displeasure at any person’s breaking of any of His Commandments can be illustrated pragmatically: I quote the ‘Act of Contrition’ which I learned as a boy: ‘Oh my God I am heartedly sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest my sins above every other evil, because they displease Thee who for Thy Infinite Goodness, art so deserving of all my love, and by Thy Holy Grace resolve never more to offend Thee, and amended my life. Amen.’ The phrases which I have put in Italic open up big questions in Theology and Philosophy of Religion. Is sin somehow worse than every other evil? If so, how? (St John Henry Newman thought it was so.) If God’s displeasure defines sin in ill-conduct does this, or does it not, entail a command theory of value? (The Adam and Eve story seems to.) And is God’s Infinite Goodness so perspicuous that we have a sense of it when we do X—known by us to be bad? Each of those questions: (i) can be gone into, (ii) no doubt have already gone into by some Theological writers or some Philosophers, (iii) God’s infinite goodness grows from his Necessary Being: if the bad is a mere 23

  The Name of God is Mercy. A conversation with Andrea Tornielli, trans. Oonagh Stranski, London, Bluebird Books for Life/Pan Macmillan, 2016, p. 42. Italic on ‘explain’ added. The book is marvellous, clearing away a lot of pre-Vatican II lumber.

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absence of x, God as Infinite and Necessary lacks nothing, has no absences. This is the view of St Thomas Aquinas, it is too complex to be dealt with here: But see Summa Theologica, Ia, iv.2. Crucially here does God’s Infinite Goodness trump his not sending or arriving-as the Messiah of popular expectation? Are critical points of dissatisfaction with God’s world satisfactorily dealt with, Or: does ‘Infinite Goodness’ quash in advance all of anyone’s doubts?

Types of Atheism There are at least two sorts of atheism. The first looks at the world as it is—as it usually is—and says, ‘If there is a God why does SHE not deal with all this mess?’ Atheists of this kind take the acknowledged ‘Silence of God’ as grounds enough to deny that God exists. This is a reasonable position to take. The inference may be contestable: I shall not contest it here. It is more interesting for our present purposes to look at Wallace Stevens’—quasi—Atheism in our next section. Meanwhile, it is amusing to note that even the Jansenist Pascal would not argue against ‘popular atheism’, he thought contestation useless. He wrote: Pensée 542, The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote from the reasoning of men, and so complicated, that they make little impression; and if they should be of service to some, it would be only during the moment that they see such demonstration; but an hour afterwards they fear they have been mistaken.24

Wallace Stevens’ Quasi‑Atheism: The Christian Worldview: Some Candid Remarks about Its Difficulties Western Christianity often takes a cheerful, almost Leibnizian view of God’s Creation. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and his numerous novels run counter to happy accounts of the human condition. Existentialists are not often in favour of existence itself. The Jews who met ‘our’ God before we did would have understood Beckett’s deep misgivings. David Benatar in his extraordinary book Better Not to Have Been Born25 tells us that, ‘The Talmud … briefly records the subject of a fascinating debate between two famous rabbinic schools – the House of Hillel and the House of Shammi. We are told that they debated the question whether or not it was better for humans to have been created. The House of Hillel, known for lenient and humane views, maintained that it was indeed better that humans were created. The 24

  Pensées by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) trans. W.F. Trotter, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, Oxford, Benediction Classics, 2011, (printed in Australia), p. 172. 25   Better Not to Have Been Born: The Harm of Coming into Existence by David Benatar, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006. Benatar reminds us of Sophocles’, ‘Never to have been born is best…’ Oedipus at Colonus, Lines 1224–1231. He reminds us also of Job Ch. 3:24. For the quotations from The Talmud, see Benatar pp. 222–223. Reprinted from the journal

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House of Shammi maintained, by contrast that it would have been better had humans not been created.’ To this Benatar adds, ‘… here [in my work] we have a decision in favour of Shammi, (pp. 222–223)’. The American poet Wallace Stevens might well have favoured Shammi. I cite this from his Esthétique du Mal: It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human There were roses in the cool café. His book Made sure of the most correct catastrophe Except for us, Vesuvius might consume In solid fire the utmost earth and know No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up To die.) This is part of the sublime From which we shrink. And yet, except for us, The total past felt nothing when destroyed. Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 277: Collected Poems, p. 314 (Library of America edition) (Knopf NY/UK, Faber and Faber)26 Without human consciousness there would be no human pain. Humankind is a mistake. The Lord Buddha teaches us to rid ourselves of passions and attachments. If we had not been, there would have been none of these of which to rid ourselves. Stevens’ Esthétique du Mal has an ironic title; aesthetics is concerned with the sublime and the beautiful—Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant—not with pain.27 The irony intensifies, since Stevens’ life-project was to replace God28 with a Supreme Fiction which—he thought—would deaden all the twinges of existence. Existential pain would have an aesthetic palliative. So, in the crucial part of the poem, Stevens—raised a decent Lutheran—writes this of God and Christ, in section III of the poem: Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord, Who has gone before us in experience. If only he would not pity us so much

26

  The poem beings ‘He was at Naples writing letters home…’ qv. The ‘he’ is Pliny the Younger (61c. 113 CE) who wrote ‘Epistles concerning the eruption of Mount Vesuvius’. This engulfed Pompeii in 79CE. The Collected Poetry and Prose is the Library of America one, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, 1977. Stevens’ Collected Poems were first published in 1954 by Knopf of New York, NY; there are editions, including paperback ones, published in London, by Faber and Faber. The book which Pliny is—perhaps—reading is Longinus’ On the Sublime (c. 213–273 CE) so the lines, ‘This is part of the sublime / From which we shrink.’. You can see from the dates that Pliny’s reading Longinus would be poetic licence. So, ‘His book’ is the account of the eruption of Vesuvius which Pliny wrote after it which, ‘Made sure of the most correct catastrophe’; that is, recorded it for future generations. 27   Psychiatrists may agree, or disagree. I write as a layperson. 28   Stevens, writing to nun, denies that he was an out and out atheist: ‘I am not an atheist although I do not believe today in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy.’ Letter 808, to Sister Benetta Quinn in Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens, University of California Press, Berkley, 1996.

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Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great And small, a constant fellow of destiny, A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin An uncourageous genesis … It seems As if the health of the world might be enough. CPP p. 278; CP p. 315 Stevens’ ‘self-pity’s kin’ is written in an extreme of bitterness. Among humans, self-pity is not esteemed. Was the Atonement gone through with by the Son of God because God was, infinitely, miffed by the sin of Eve and Adam? Should SHE not have just shrugged it off? Was God ‘testing humankind to destruction’, as the manufacturers of good motorcars do? Perhaps not. Or, are only Saints ‘the new and improved model’? There is the nice French saying: ‘To understand – fully – is fully to forgive.’ An Infinite God—sulking? Just like one of us: ‘A too too human God.’ Furthermore: were God liable to ethical judgement by us, might we not regard God (The Father) as needlessly cruel to the Son. If the Atonement was necessary, how much insight may we have to this necessity? Again: might not God-theomniscient have come up with a different and less cruel solution to the problem? In Oxford, I put—some of this—to Anthony Kenny, then still a Catholic priest; his answer was—virtually—‘It had to be done as it was done’. There is a considerable literature on the subjection of Son to the Father. I have not read it: Fr Kenny probably had. In the Australian liturgy of the Mass, when Christ’s death is mentioned, there is an addition, ‘To which he freely consented.’ Stevens’ ‘If only he would not pity us so much’, is about God: ‘God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten son…’29 to be crucified, ‘… a over-human god / Who by sympathy has made himself a man…’ is Christ, the Son of God. St Paul writes about Christ crucified: ‘Here are the Jews asking for signs and wonders, here are the Greeks intent on their philosophy; but what we preach is Christ crucified: to the Jews a discouragement, to the gentiles mere folly…’ (I Corinthians I, Knox trans.). The earlier translations have ‘folly to the Greeks’. The readers of Sophia will probably have a little of the Greek in them, and a fair dose of philosophy. Sophia is read by people who would understand why Paul was not keen to discuss ‘Christ Crucified’ in a Socratic Dialogue with the Greeks, ‘intent on their philosophy.’ Paul was on a mission—for him, no seminars! The existential crux is that there were in Christ’s time two different ideas about the Messiah: (1) The optimistic one, that he would come, and with his angels conquer the Romans and establish a Kingdom—one in which there would be universal peace and justice, ‘the health of the world’, and more.

29

  John 3:16. The full text reads: Gospel of John 16ff, ‘God so loved the world that he gave is only begotten Son, so that those who believe in him may not perish, but have eternal life (17). When God sent his Son into the world, it was not to reject the world, but so that the world might find salvation through him. (18) For the man who believes in him, there is no rejection… (Knox trans.). Reprinted from the journal

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(2) Then there was the paradoxical one about the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53.30 Christ was not to be the Saviour of the Jews, driving the Romans out by force: He was not to save us from, ‘the poverty of the world’—one of Stevens’ recurrent themes—but from sin. The Original, the Primal, Sin, not atoned for would leave us in our own sins and unfit to go into Paradise. Of course, the ‘optimistic’ Messiah promise would have suited us better. But we were not asked ‘1 or 2?’

The Holy Trinity: Problems of Reference in Stevens’ Esthétique du Mal Born into a Christian family—Roman Catholic—I do not wish to attack the doctrine of the Atonement. However, en philosophe, I see ways in which it might strike someone of a quite different religion, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist as, (a) difficult to make sense of, (b) so paradoxical31 as to be regarded as a mystery—as it already is for Christians, anyhow. About (a): Why should the Son of God have to atone for the primal sin committed by two—mere—creatures? About (b): What is meant about by the expression ‘Son of God’? The doctrine of the Trinity is (α) a dogma, (β) ‘above but not against reason’. This is a formula puzzling in itself is used to justify intellectual assent by the reasonable to whom what is asserted is above and beyond their reason. A rather circular way of putting a point. What is meant by ‘Son of God’. A diagram may help: The triangle is the Godhead: F = Father; S = Son; HG = the Holy Ghost.

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  Isaiah 53 reads: … to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? (2) for he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. (3): He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not (4). Surely, he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet, we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted (5). But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our transgression; he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (AV). 31  See, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth-Century Theology, by Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008), London, Watts 1958 and 1966. He ran the Philosophy Department at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s when I was study leave replacement for Professor W.H. Walsh. Hepburn was keen on a disputed-reading in Timaeus which is about a fall not man’s fault. See my ‘The Sublime and Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas: Excess the Nexus?’ An Excess of Excess’s Even? Need the idea of God be only an Aesthetic Idea? Or Not Even That?’ in Literature & Aesthetics, 29 (1) 2109; pp. 499–140. https://​ openj​ourna​ls.​libra​ry.​sydney.​edu.​au/​index.​php/​LA/​artic​le/​view/​13415   In my long footnote 12, pp. 123–124 the, contested, reading of Timaeus ­30a ­53b goes thus, ‘the Receptacle was recalcitrant’. When the Demiurge tried to order it by dropping into it the five regular solids— which the Greeks understood—the Receptacle resisted the attempt by the Demiurge to produce a World, rational through and through, failed. This was a fall, if not a moral one. Hepburn had intended to take Holy Orders in the Presbyterian Church, but did not. I suspected a fall not caused by humankind—our Fall—had for him an aesthetic or moral attraction. I felt that this was the case, but I refrained from putting the question. I now wish I had.

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F

HG

S

If S is to be crucified to Atone for the primal sin—by becoming Himself man— then is this a blood offering to F and HG? Or is it to Δ, in which case is S sacrificing Himself to Himself ?—even’tho he was crucified as man—who had emptied himself of God-being. The early Church, Fathers of the Church, Councils of the Church, and ordinary believers puzzled and argued about the puzzle Δ32 and the puzzle within a puzzle, i.e., was S in Δ when crucified? Did God sacrifice Himself to Himself? I have neither the space nor the theological learning to write about the various official unpuzzlings of the puzzle or the puzzle within the puzzle. The reason I bring all this up is not just so that Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists can out-argue missionaries—though en philosophe I lend them any part of this that they feel that they need—but because it shows how the problems of specific reference in the crucial section of Esthétique du Mal arise rather from the subject matter of Stevens’ poem—at this point—and not just from his usual use of obscure language and tropes. Stevens was a Lutheran, and Lutherans are good at theology, so Stevens’ obscurity is understandable. Appropriate, even. That he converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, ‘Amazing Grace’. Once it might have been seen as blasphemous to raise the question, ‘Was the Father cruel to the Son?’ During the revelations to a Royal Commission into paedophilia in the Catholic—and other—Churches, The Age (Melbourne) ran a cartoon: Beside an over life size crucifix stands a—Roman—prelate, and a scruffy little boy. Throwing the Bible behind him, the Bishop says, ‘Let’s us not dwell too much on who did what to whose son.’ (The Age, 4 March 2019, p. 23). There was no public outcry. One marvellous Parish Priest—now retired—made the cartoonist’s point more seriously, more properly. At Christmas, he bought a new sapling, and decorated it. On Good Friday, there was a Scots piper playing a lament, and a layman entered with a chainsaw and cut the tree to make of it a cross. To the Crucifixion of Christ, as to the two possible Messiahs, there are two possible attitudes, the high-toned orthodox one, and the vulgar, popular one. The vulgar one is a heterodox, but anyone can see why the very simple-minded might take it.

32

  For a classic and readable account of, (1) Mystery, (2) The definition of the Trinity see: Belief in the Trinity, by Dom Mark Pontifex, Monk of Downside, London, Longmans Green, 1954. Reprinted from the journal

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Simple-mindedness might even have a momentary appeal to the—weary—orthodox. The high-toned attitude was taken by St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) who wrote: Oh happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer. O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem.33 The vulgar attitude I heard as an Easter carol in an Anglican Cathedral: ‘Twas all for an apple, an apple that they took As clerkēs finden Written in a Bōōke! ‘Why’, the Vulgar ask; ‘Did God find it such an important fault?’ ‘A mere apple!’ (I have always objected, ‘Adam and Eve had no remit from me!’). Why this damned inheritance? And how? St Augustine answers the second question, ‘Through the sexual intercourse of your parents.’ He would. See his Confessions. Augustine’s Confessions are generally reckoned the first autobiography of the—late—Classical period: They describe his ascent from energetic sinner to— severe—saint. The technical term ‘Original Sin’ is ascribed to him. Of the rankness of its consequences for us, Stevens writes: That evil, that evil in the self, from which In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault Falls out on everything: the genius of The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong, The genius of the body, which is our world, Spent in the false engagements of the mind. Esthétique Du Mal, IV, CPP, p. 729; CP pp. 316–317 Bad Karma is the universal inheritance of humankind. The opacity of much that the Christian religion’s doctrine—its ‘resolving’ into Mystery—reminds me of a passage in the Metaphysical Poet Henry Vaughan (1621–1695): The Night.34 There is in God (some say) 33  Augustine, St (Bishop of Hippo), Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, Introduction by Thomas S. Hibbs, Gateway Editions, Reprint Edition, 1996. See also St Augustine Enchiridion—viii—and St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica III 1 3 ad 3. 34   Henry Vaughan: The Night may be found in Vaughan’s Sacred Poems, ed. The Rev. H.F. Lyte, London, George Bell and Sons, 1883, p. 211. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, Sir Herbert Grierson and G. Bullough Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1934 (often reprinted) pp.785–787. The Night is not in Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1921. Eight Metaphysical Poets, ed. Jack Dalglish, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1961 (often reprinted) pp. 86–87. For readers not well versed in Metaphysical Poetry, this edition has an excellent Introduction and notes. Vaughan wrote in The World perhaps the most stunning line in seventeenth century poetry, ‘I saw Eternity the other night…’ op. cit. pp. 81–82. There is also a Penguin edition, 1995.

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A deep but dazzling darkness; As men here Say it is late and dusty, because they See not all clear; O for that night! where I in him Might live invisible and dim. Metaphysical poetry, written by believers, is shot through with various doubts— . . . because they see not all clear while acknowledging ‘a deep but dazzling darkness’. The two words dazzling and darkness are in tension, if not, quite, in contradiction. God seen would be dazzling—and the poet would have regarded this as a commonplace. Unseen, God leaves the writer in deep darkness, because He does not appear, even to this believer. The notion of the darkness of God is trivalent: (i) Because I cannot see or understand, I doubt that there is a God. (ii) God keeps us in the dark about so much, I am, though I believe, unhappy to find God less forthcoming than I would like. (iii) I am a mystic: but my experiences are not Illuminations. What I find is the darkness of God. So (iii) cancels (i); has affinities—of a sort—with (ii) but itself not quite what I had expected or hoped for. The darkness of God sometimes affects even mystics, in a negative way as the kernel of an-expectedly-positive-experience.35 The Night is referenced John III 2 which gives an account of Nicodemus—a member of the Jewish establishment—visiting Jesus by night. So ‘O for that night! where I in Him might live invisible and dim’. Close to Christ, Vaughan would be dim in the—positive—dazzle of the Risen Lord. Nicodemus met Christ before the Crucifixion, and provided Him a tomb.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Kernel of Religion In an entry in Coleridge’s Table Talk36 for October 15, 1833, he gives us the kernel of the Christian religion: The Trinity is the idea: The incarnation, which implies the Fall, is the fact: the Redemption is the mesothesis of the two – that is – the religion (p. 278). Coleridge’s ‘implies’ here in the twenty-first century English reads oddly. The Fall is the necessary and sufficient condition of both the Incarnation and the Redemption. The Fall is the crucial event in the Christian story: It made a mess of ‘the fall into the quotidian’, and it swirls like a vortex still, despite the Redemption. There is no hope whatever of returning to a Prelapsarian Eden. 35

  The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism by Denys Turner, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pb edn. 1998. 36   Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H[entry] N[elson] C[oleridge] second edition London, John Murray, Albermarle Street MDCCCXXXVI (1836) P.275. ‘Mesothesis’ = mediating agency or principle’. Reprinted from the journal

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Furthermore, because of The Fall, we all got born with some bad Karma. For Coleridge, the Fall was both a past event and a personal matter. In his extensive Prolegomena to Coleridge’s Opus Maximum, 37 Professor McFarland notes Coleridge’s sense of sin. We inherit ‘Original Sin’ and so we are prone to sin, ourselves which leads to S.T.C’s fatal flaw: ‘Coleridge’s inability to work at self-assigned tasks was devastating and his opium addiction filled him with self-loathing.’ Opium was freely available in Coleridge’s day; he began taking it to relieve, according to many accounts, facial neuralgia. He got hooked. So he repented—but could not reverse—his own—personal—fall. 38 There are two passages in the Opus Maximum 39 which help us see what the sometime Unitarian40 made of the religious orthodoxy of the Anglican Church: ‘I profess a deep conviction that Man was and is a fallen Creature, not by accidents of bodily constitution, or any other cause, which human Wisdom in a course of ages might be supposed to be capable of removing; but diseased in his Will.’41 And on the same page, there is this: ‘My Faith is simply this – that there is an original corruption in our nature, from which and from the consequences we may be redeemed by Christ … and this I believe – not because I understand it, but because I feel, that it is not only suitable to, but needful for my nature’. Here, ‘feel’ has something of the Romantic sentiment to it. Coleridge, although he aimed to construct a full metaphysical system,42 was not a Roman Catholic who—like St Thomas Aquinas (whom he had read)—and who wished to rationalize, Aristotelianize, Revelation: Coleridge was a Protestant to whom the inner feeling of God-with-me, needed no totally external justification. There is for any Christian one crucial fact, and this—of course—Coleridge acknowledged: St Paul: ‘If the dead, I say, do not rise, Christ has not risen either; and if Christ is not risen, all your faith is a delusion…’ (I Corinthians, 15: 16–17, Knox trans.) If the Christian religion was the consequence of a—dateless—Fall recounted in rather mythological language, it depends on a fact which occurred during the Roman occupation of Palestine: The Crucifixion of Christ and the Resurrection of Christ. Was the Resurrection a fact? One of Jesus’ disciples, Doubting Thomas, doubted. St John’s Gospel records: ‘Jesus came and stood there in their midst; Peace be upon

37

  Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland, Vol. 15 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Princeton University Press, 2002. 38   Op. cit. XV Problem and Motive pp. cxii–cxiii. 39   Opus Maximum, Index; xciii; xcivi–ii, 234 n7, 347. S.T.C. read the Upanishads, see pp. 282n, 202. McFarland was assisted by Nicholas Halmi in connection with these passages. There is much in OM which might interest Indian scholars. S.T.C. refers even to Tibetan theology. 40   Unitarians did not believe in The Trinity; they tried to read the New Testament in purely monotheistic terms. 41   OM, loc. cit., cxiii. What ‘Will’ means in Western metaphysics we cannot go into here; it is a function both of humankind and of an Absolute on Ultimate being. 42   Coleridge never quite gave up on the Idea of his time that Philosophy and the Natural Sciences could be boxed up together. ‘The Fall of Man [can] be shown to be a Necessary Postulate of Science…’ OM, XIII, Transformations, p. cii qv. This despite his having a keen interest in the Science of his day. See, ‘Coleridge: A Bridge Between Science and Poetry’, by Kathleen Coburn in Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies, ed. John Beer, London, Macmillan, 1974, pp. 81–100.

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you he said. Then he said to Thomas, Let me have thy finger; put it into my side. Cease thy doubting and believe. Thomas answered, thou art my lord and my God. And Jesus said to him, Thou hast learned to believe, Thomas, because thou hast seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have learned to believe’. (John 20: 27–30, Knox trans.). Thomas was an empiricist. The Resurrection was a one-off event. So: Faith must replace our modern scientific method: Thomas’ experiment cannot be replicated. If you do not wish to take part in the human predicament, to enjoy/endure eternal life, or cycles of rebirth, do not get born in the first place. David Benatar’s The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions43 is not a self-help book; it contains no practical hints on how to un-be, by never having been.

Is God After You, Like It or Not? The philosopher and poet Jean Wahl elegantly suggests it: L’ athée est bien plus étroitment uni à Dieu par son refus où Dieu s’affirme lui même Que le croyant par sa croyance. The atheist is even more united to God By his refusal in which God, affirms himself Than the believer through his belief. Poems, 194544 This is beautifully put, but is it true?

The Prosperity Gospel In many parts of the world, including in Australia, there are mega churches,45 which began in the USA, and which encourage their flocks to pray for worldly goods and money. It is difficult to find any Gospel sayings which would authorize this. Christ memorably said, in Matthew 6:19: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, …’(AV) xxx

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  Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 2017.   Human Existence and Transcendence, by Jean Wahl, trans. and ed. William C. Hackett with Jeffry Hanson. Foreword by Kevin Hart, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, p. xxxii. 45   See Jia Tolentino, ‘Ecstasy: Losing Religion and Doing Drugs in Houston’, The New Yorker, May 27, 2019, pp. 38–42. Note p. 38, Col.b and p. 42, Col.b. See also ‘The After Party’, by Nicholas Lemann, ‘Nearly twenty years ago, [Trump] formed a public relationship with Paula White, a popular televangelist who preaches the “prosperity Gospel,” and who has said that she guided Trump towards active Christianity,’ in The New Yorker, November 2, 2020, p. 60, Col.a. 44

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As an undergraduate, I used to pray to St Jude who aids hopeless cases: writing this paper, I paid my respects to an image of Ganesh. In Japan, Shinto shrines sell small wooden tablets on which people ask for a blessing—a child, to pass an exam, to find a partner. And so on. We might be living without God, but such practices are probably universal. Pious superstition and folk-belief bear witness to lacks that God might make good: or if there is no God, these are hallowed reminiscences of HIR.

References Aquinas, S. T. (1911). The “Summa Theologica”, Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., Ia, iv, 2. Augustine, St. (1996). (Bishop of Hippo), Enchiridion on faith, hope and love, Introduction by Thomas S. Hibbs, Gateway Editions, Reprint Edition. Bellow, S. (1964). Herzog. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, [USA ed. 1961]. Benatar, D. (2006). Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence. Clarendon. Benatar, D. (2017). The human predicament: A candid guide to life’s biggest questions. Clarendon. Coleridge, S. T. (2002). Thomas McFarland ed, The collected works, Volume 15: Opus Maximum, Princeton University Press. Coleridge, S. T. (n.d.). Table talk, any edition. Danner, M. (2020). ‘The Con He Rode In On’, The New York Review, pp. 35–37. Ferrante, E. (2019) Incidental Inventions, ‘The End’, trans. Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, pp.19-20. Fink, L. (2020). Cartoon of God, The New Yorker, p. 25. Francis. (2016). His Holiness The Pope, The name of God is mercy. Guerra, O. (2020). The age, p. 36. Hamilton, A. (c1755–1804), Madison, J. (1751–1836), and Jay, J. (1745–1829). (2003). The federalist papers, Introduction by Charles R Kessler, Edited by Clinton Rossiter, Signet Classics, Reprint Edition. Hepburn, R. (1958). Christianity and paradox: Critical studies in twentieth-century theology, 1966. Housman, A. E. (1922). Last poems. Grant and Richards. Henry Holt. Hutchings, P. Æ. (1972). Kant on absolute value. Allen and Unwin. Isaiah. (1928). Book of The Holy Bible, (AV). Collins. John. (1945). St Gospel of The Holy Bible, (AV): Knox, Ronald, trans. The New Testament. Burns Oates and Washbourne. Kakutani, M. (2018). The death of truth. Random House. Kant, I. (n.d.). The groundwork of the metaphysic of morals, any edition. Lemann, N. (2020). ‘The after-party’, The New Yorker, p.60, Col.a. Mackellar, D. (1885–1968), The poems of Dorothea Mackeller. Rigby, 1971. Mill, J. S. (1806–1873). Utilitariansim, any edition. Milton, J. (1608–1674). Paradise lost, any edition. Mogelson, L. (2021, January 25). The storm. The New Yorker, pp. 5–12. Nicholas, P. (2020). ‘What to expect from Donald Trump’, The Atlantic, online. O’Toole, F. (2021, February 25). The Trump inheritance. The New York Review, pp. 4–8. Pascal, B. (1623–1662). Pensées: No.542. Any edition. Paul. (1945). St Gospels, trans. Mgr. Ronald Knox. Burns Oates and Washbourne, often reprinted. Phillips, A. (1998). The beast in the nursery. Faber and Faber. Pontifex, D. M. (1954). Belief in the trinity. Longmans and Green. Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Philosophical Library. Stevens, W. (1954). Collected poems, Knopf. Faber & Faber, 1955. (Numerous reprints). Stevens, W. (1879–1955), Collected poetry and prose, Library of America Edition, ed. Kermode and Richardson, 1997. Stevens, W. (1996). Letters, ed. Holly Stevens, University of California Press. Suskind, R. (2004). ‘Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush’, The New York Times Magazine.

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Has God Been and Gone? The Holy Bible. (1928). Authorized Version, Glasgow. Etc. Tolentino, J. (2019). ‘ECSTASY: Losing religion and doing drugs in Houston’, The New Yorker, pp. 38–45. Turner, D. (1995). The darkness of God: Negativity in Christian mysticism, Cambridge University Press. Uhlmann, C. (2020). The age. Vaughn, H. (1627–1695), The complete poems, ed. Alan Rudrum, Penguin Books Ltd, 1995. Wahl, J. (2016). trans. W. C. Hackett, Human existence and transcendence, University of Notre Dame Press. Webster, J., and Schner, G. P. (eds.). Theology after liberalism: A reader. Blackwell. Wood, G. (2020). ‘The historian who sees the future’, The Atlantic, Print Edition. Woodward, A. (2020). Independent, Thursday, 20:54 (online: www.​indep​endent.​co.​uk).

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Sophia (2021) 60:551–566 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00864-2

Religious Conversion and Loss of Faith: Cases of Personal Paradigm Shift? Robin Le Poidevin1  Accepted: 29 May 2021 / Published online: 19 July 2021 © The Author(s) 2021

Abstract Is Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions in terms of paradigm shifts appropriately applied to cases of radical changes in religious outlook, and in particular conversion to faith, or loss of faith? Since this question cannot be addressed in purely a priori terms, three case studies of philosophers who have described significant changes in their own perspectives are examined. Part of the justification for such an approach is to see how changes in view seem from the first-person perspective. Although what is offered here is a very limited group of studies, each of them perforce brief, a key theme emerges: that the incommensurability between paradigms which is part of the Kuhnian model is mirrored by the shift away from atheist or humanistic perspectives, though not necessarily by loss of faith. Keywords  Kuhn · Paradigm shifts · Religious conversion · Loss of faith · Atheism · Humanism · Incommensurability

Introduction In his celebrated account of revolutionary scientific theory change in terms of paradigm shifts, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the first edition of which appeared in 1962, Thomas Kuhn suggests that the decision to embrace a new paradigm in place of the old, on the assumption that the new paradigm can succeed in solving the problems which confront it, ‘can only be made on faith’ (Kuhn (2012: 157)). In the 1969 Postscript to the original edition of the book, he describes the state of mind involved in fully embracing the new paradigm as a ‘conversion experience’ (ibid.: 203). The idea appears again in a later essay: ‘an individual’s transfer of allegiance from theory to theory is often better described as conversion than as choice’ (Kuhn, 1973: 338). The words ‘faith’ and ‘conversion’, of course, have strongly religious overtones to our ears, though Kuhn does not make explicit a Chapter 5 was originally published as Le Poidevin, R. Sophia (2021) 60: 551–566. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00864-2.

* Robin Le Poidevin [email protected] 1



School of Philosophy, Religion & History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

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specifically religious parallel. Alan Chalmers, however, in his introduction to Kuhn’s views, does make this explicit: the change in outlook occasioned by a shift from one paradigm to another (such as the move from pre-relativistic to relativistic physics) is analogous to religious conversion (Chalmers (1982: 96)). Analogous, note, not identical: there is no suggestion that scientific paradigm change is itself a religious change, but rather one which parallels religious conversion in certain respects. The comparison is intended to underline the radical nature of scientific theory change. A paradigm shift is not simply a matter of solving a theoretical problem, but rather coming to see the world in a completely different light. In another parallel, Kuhn talks of a paradigm change as a ‘gestalt switch’ (Kuhn (2012: 118)). To model scientific change on religious change, however, is to suppose that we have enough of a grasp of religious conversion for the analogy to be illuminating. And in 1962, this would no doubt have been a sensible strategy. But now the concept of paradigm shifts is no longer novel, but instead relatively familiar in the history and philosophy of science, we might consider running the analogy the other way. Rather, that is, than employing an unanalysed notion of religious conversion to explain the change from one way of doing science to another, we might try employing the latter ─ perhaps, even, an extreme and controversial construal of the latter ─ to try to illuminate the undoubtedly puzzling nature of religious shifts, from unbelief to faith, or from faith to loss of faith, or from agnosticism to atheism. This paper is intended as a small contribution to that project. The extreme and controversial construal of paradigm shifts I have in mind is one which employs the notion of incommensurability. Can different paradigms be compared, to the extent that the shift from one to the other can objectively be counted as scientific progress, or is the appeal to criteria of evaluation only an available move within a paradigm? Relatedly, can we even establish common meanings of terms which would allow us to see the paradigms as disagreeing about the nature of x (for some relevant x: a type of entity, property, relation, or set of laws)? The incommensurability of paradigms is one of the most controversial themes of Kuhn’s work, though it finds perhaps a more extreme expression in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975). I should say at the outset, however, that I am not primarily concerned with exegetical issues, but rather with the potential for a concept in philosophy of science to cast light on a religious phenomenon. I claim no originality in proposing that we run the analogy in the science to religion direction. Tomas Sundnes Drønen, for example, has offered a careful analysis of the extent to which Kuhn’s model can be applied to the case of religious conversion (including the shift from one religion to another), making use of sociological studies of religious shifts, and reaching a conditional conclusion: that although there are clear parallels, we should not uncritically carry over the notion of incommensurability to the religious case, particularly in view of the criticism of this very feature in Kuhn’s analysis of scientific theory change (Drønen, 2006). One potential disanalogy between scientific and theory change we can usefully pinpoint before embarking on the project. In scientific theorising and practice, the language is impersonal. The question is what the world is like, not how you or I

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experience or relate to the world. Theories are shared, and attempts are made to replicate other scientists’ experimental results. But in religious contexts, though there may be an impersonal language in which religious doctrines and community practices are articulated, nevertheless the first-personal perspective cannot be eliminated. The religious viewpoint offers to transform my life. Equally, the loss of faith may occasion a personal crisis. Both the search for faith, and the abandonment of it, is a personal journey. Scientific paradigm shifts happen to scientific communities, even if it is also true to say that this may sometimes be driven by the scientific work and theorising of individuals. And when we ask whether different scientific paradigms are commensurable, we will most likely think of these in abstract terms, rather than as the belief states of individuals. In contrast, religious conversion or loss of faith is primarily something that happens to individuals, even if this may sometimes spill over into the communities of which these individuals are part (think of the charismatic preacher, or the influential sceptic). So when we ask whether different religious viewpoints are commensurable or not, we can pose this in impersonal terms, as a question about religious propositions (theism versus atheism, for instance). Or we can pose it in personal terms, as a question about the individual thinker: can the person who has gained, or lost, a faith, make an objective comparison between the state they are in now and the state they were in before? We might find we want to answer the impersonal question one way, and the personal question a different way. At least, that is a possibility worth considering. In this paper, I will focus almost exclusively on the first-personal perspective, the perspective of the individual who gains or loses faith. I hope this approach will complement Drønen’s study of religious change in communities. A full investigation of religious change would require attention both to the individual and to the social level, and, moreover, to the interaction between them. So what is offered here is only the beginnings of an investigation into part of the picture. But one of the key points I want to make is the value of the anecdotal. It is difficult, and perhaps not appropriate, to legislate on the proper way to negotiate religious transitions in the case of individuals. An empirical approach seems to be called for. So we will look at three figures who have described their own shift of outlook: Anthony Kenny, representing loss of faith; Janet Martin Soskice, representing conversion; and David Cooper, who describes his shift from a humanisticexistential outlook to one which makes room for mystery. This third case is not necessarily to be identified with a religious conversion. Cooper himself does not present his own case as such, but he does acknowledge that the sense of mystery he identifies may be part of an explicitly religious outlook. My reason for choosing these individuals is that they are philosophers discussing their own change in perspective and so, naturally, are particularly sensitive to the philosophical dimension of that change. The question I shall ask in each case is whether we can model the change on Kuhnian paradigm shifts, a change which so transforms the subject’s outlook as to make internal dialogue between old and new viewpoints almost beyond reach. To provide more detail to the comparison I am trying to draw, let us begin by rehearsing Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions. Reprinted from the journal

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The Nature of Scientific Paradigm Shifts In brief, Kuhn envisages three kinds of phase in the development of science. The first phase is one of pre-science, or pre-paradigm period, where there are no overarching or guiding principles, or criteria by which theoretical adequacy is to be assessed, but rather a haphazard assemblage of competing ideas (Kuhn (2012: 48, 61)). This is replaced by the emergence of a paradigm, which, at least in one of the senses in which Kuhn uses the term, can be characterised as a combination of theory, a set of explanatory aims, a set of problems to be solved, and a methodology which defines proper investigative practices, including, perhaps, specific pieces of apparatus. The period in which a given paradigm is dominant is described as ‘normal science’ (ibid.: 23f). Perhaps one of the more surprising features of Kuhn’s analysis (and one which distinguishes it from other models) is that the testing of the dominant theory is not part of normal science (ibid.: 144). Experiments are not designed to verify or falsify the theory so much as to apply it. The justification for one theory’s being adopted in place of another will be defined within the paradigm, and the new theory will typically share explanatory aims with the old theory: they may both be trying to explain the same phenomenon, for example. This second phase in which a single paradigm dominates continues until it faces anomalies: phenomena it cannot explain, or internal tensions. The pressure of these anomalies builds up and leads to a (sometimes extended) period of crisis until a new paradigm emerges. The transition from one paradigm to another constitutes the third kind of phase, a phase of ‘extraordinary science’ involving the further exploration of anomaly, new kinds of experiment, and new speculative theories (ibid.: 87). Scientific communities may be divided at this point, some clinging to the old paradigm, some abandoning it in favour of the new. With the new paradigm come not only new theories, but also a new agenda, a new set of problems, a new way of assessing theoretical advance. There may be a change in some of the fundamental concepts with which scientists operate, or a new piece of apparatus whose function would have been unintelligible under the old paradigm. Let us illustrate this abstract description with three chemical examples. Consider medieval alchemy (not, in fact, one of Kuhn’s examples). It is natural, perhaps, to dub this a period of pre-science. The most casual survey reveals an eclectic mix of images, symbols, concepts, and descriptions of phenomena. Yet there is some method here. There are specific aims: the construction, or discovery, of the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir of life, the route to the perfection of the soul. And there is, perhaps as a corollary, the transformation of base metals such as lead into gold. The route to these goals is a series of operations on substances, including which we would recognise as distillation, condensation, and sublimation, bringing about changes in physical state, as well as those involving chemical changes, such as calcination. All of these are described, and pictured, in metaphorical language and imagery, linking substances to the heavenly bodies (the seven alchemical metals sharing signs with the seven planets of medieval cosmology), and to the progress of the soul. In medieval alchemy, it seems, the animate

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and inanimate worlds are profoundly connected at every level of their activities. We can identify, then, a set of goals, a set of procedures for attaining these goals, and a language to describe them (see, e.g. Read (1995)). The very fact that we can give these the single label of ‘alchemy’ strongly suggests that we have here a paradigm. It may not be scientific in our sense, but it is a science in the most general sense. It is an attempt, that is, to understand and manipulate the natural world. This paradigm (or period of pre-science, if you prefer) failed to produce the concrete goals it set itself, though in other ways, aesthetic, literary, and technical ─ consider the development of alchemical apparatus ─ it might be judged a success. It was succeeded by early modern chemistry, ushered in by such texts as Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist. Whereas the language and symbolism of alchemy were thoroughly metaphorical, or analogical (such as the links between metals and the heavenly bodies, for example: gold: Sun; silver: Moon; iron: Mars; and lead: Saturn), that of early modern chemistry aimed at literal description. For the alchemists, base metals were in principle transmutable. For the early modern chemists, in contrast, the elements are immutable, except insofar as they participate in chemical reactions. But such reactions never involve the transformation of one element into another. The aims of the alchemists are replaced by a different set of aims, to do with an understanding of how the elements combine (in what proportions) in chemical reactions. There is a focus on quantity and measurement. And in due course, the list of agents of chemical change came to include a power of which the alchemists could not have dreamed: electricity. In the early twentieth century, there is another paradigm shift in chemistry, a more focused one, with the advent of the electronic theory. This makes conceptually possible a thorough reduction of chemical phenomena to changes in electronic configuration. It also provides the theoretical basis for a phenomenon discovered in the late nineteenth century: radioactivity. The transmutation of the elements is back on the table, but this time it is linked to the radioactive decay of the transuranic elements and to the production of artificial elements by nuclear bombardment. Now take a case much discussed by Kuhn: the transformation in the way combustion and calcination were understood (Kuhn (2012: 53f)). For Joseph Priestley, a proponent of the phlogiston theory, the action of heat on red calx of mercury in an enclosed container is the absorption by the calx of phlogiston in the air, leaving ‘dephlogisticated air’ and metallic mercury. But from the point of view of the oxygen theory of combustion, championed by Lavoisier, this gets things exactly the wrong way around. Rather than combining with a component of the air, the heated calx (that is, mercuric oxide) releases the oxygen with which it was combined. Phlogiston is a myth. For Kuhn, the transition from the phlogiston theory to the oxygen theory is a clear example of a paradigm change. Yet the case is very different from the transition from alchemy to chemistry. The phlogiston and oxygen theories are both trying to do exactly the same thing, which is to explain what is going on in the processes of combustion and calcination. ‘Dephlogisticated air’ is functionally equivalent (at least in this context) to oxygen. The two theories are, in a sense, mirror images of each other. And they are answerable to the same set of data: the fact that the calx loses rather than gains weight during combustion, for example (a point Reprinted from the journal

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in favour of the oxygen theory). Still, the transition is a central part of what became known as the Chemical Revolution. Kuhn notes four features of scientific revolutions: (i) They involve choices between competing paradigms. A paradigm is not abandoned without being replaced by a new one (ibid.: 78). (ii) Competing paradigms are, at least to an extent, incommensurable. To put it dramatically, but perhaps metaphorically, adherents to different paradigms live in different worlds (ibid.: 117–118, 134). (iii) Scientific progress is not a matter of accretion, with older views somehow incorporated in new ones (ibid.: 98–103). (iv) Scientific progress through revolutions need not, and perhaps should not, be seen as driven by the need to converge on the truth (ibid.: 169–72). Since (iii) and (iv) follow from (ii), let us explore (ii) further. (i) We will come back to in section IV; (iv) we shall leave until the end.

First‑Personal and Impersonal Incommensurability A period of normal science, suggests Kuhn, is characterised by puzzle-solving rather than testing of the paradigm (ibid.: 36–42). There is substantial agreement over the data to which different solutions are answerable. But where competing paradigms are concerned, comparison is more difficult. Each paradigm may define its own criteria of success. To take again a non-Kuhnian example, we unhesitatingly judge modern chemistry to be ‘better’ than medieval alchemy – but this judgement is made from the perspective of modern chemistry. From that perspective, a relatively transparent language is preferable to a mystical or metaphorical one. Similarly, we value the power of a theory to provide precise predictions of phenomena; experiments must be precisely repeatable, and so on. Moreover, the data to which the theories of modern chemistry are answerable are themselves described in the language of modern chemistry (the notorious ‘theory-dependence of observation’: see Hanson (1958)). But what if we expect our chemical outlook to make room for the divine, for the ensoulment of matter, to connect the properties of substances with cosmology? What if we look to see in the stages of chemical transformation a pattern akin to a pilgrim’s progress of the soul? We will find little comfort or enlightenment in the prosaic, if complex, landscape of modern chemistry. Far more emotionally satisfying will be the mystery and richness of alchemy. Then there are issues of translation. During a period of normal science, competing solutions will substantially share a vocabulary. There may be disagreement (as, at one time, there was) over whether chlorine is a compound or an element, or whether ammonia is a hydroxide of an element (‘ammonium’) or not, but the concept of ‘element’ and ‘compound’ will be the same in both cases. But when we are dealing with different paradigms, even what appear to be the same terms may have completely different meanings. The words ‘sulphur’ and ‘mercury’ occur in both alchemy and in modern chemistry, but do they mean the same thing in both

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contexts? Does ‘sublimation’? Does ‘putrefaction’? And some ideas in one paradigm may have no counterpart in the other, like ‘conjunction’, or ‘stereoisomer’. Before we rush to apply this schema to changes in religious outlook, we should note that the danger (though not everyone will see it as such) of appealing to incommensurability is that it may naturally lead to truth-relativism: we cannot judge a given proposition to be absolutely true but only true relative to a paradigm. But we can temper this by pointing out that the incommensurability in question is, in part, an epistemological one. It is not that there is no one truth at which scientific theories aim, but rather that we cannot adopt a sufficiently neutral perspective from which to judge what that one truth is. There is also a semantic aspect: apparently, the same terms are given different meanings in each paradigm, and some terms defined within a paradigm may have no application outside that paradigm. But this semantic incommensurability only takes as far as what William Newton-Smith calls ‘trivial semantic relativism’: the same form of words may express a truth relative to one context and a falsehood in another, but only because they express different propositions in those contexts (Newton-Smith (1980)). With that cautionary note sounded, let us now consider whether the model of paradigm shifts in science can appropriately be applied to radical changes in religious outlook: conversion to a faith, or loss of faith. As noted above, although a shift in perspective can happen to individuals as well as communities, the distinction between impersonal, community-level perspective change, and individual, first-personal perspective change is more significant in the religious case precisely because of the personal nature of religion, its demands on the individual. In the case of science, incommensurability, where there is no neutral standpoint by which to judge competing paradigms, is something which either occurs at both the personal and community levels, or neither. There does not seem to be a reason for thinking that incommensurability of competing scientific paradigms could arise for the individual but not for the community, or vice versa. Is the same true of religion, given the significance of the first-person perspective? It is worth at least asking whether problems of incommensurability in religion might arise in certain cases just at the personal level. Analytic philosophy of religion is largely composed of attempts to compare competing theories: theism versus atheism, divine command versus natural law theory, timeless versus temporal conceptions of deity, accounts of omnipotence, or realist versus non-realist conceptions of religious language, theistic versus non-theistic conceptions of the spiritual life, and so on. For debates of this kind to be possible, the competing theories must be regarded as commensurable. We can consider the rivals from a neutral standpoint and hope to be able to judge which better meets our (it is to be hoped) neutral criteria of success (e.g. internal consistency, explanatory power, ontological or theoretical parsimony, and compatibility with other independently justified beliefs). Granting all this, we may nevertheless want to make room for the idea that, when it comes to a shift in outlook within the first-person perspective, such comparisons are difficult. The individual undergoing such a transformation may, indeed, feel that they are in a better place, intellectually, morally, spiritually, or emotionally but also admit that they cannot articulate reasons for the shift which they would expect to have any force to anyone with a contrary viewpoint. Any attempt at such justification would appear Reprinted from the journal

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circular. Moreover, they may feel that they cannot communicate their new outlook to anyone who does not share it. They may even have difficulty attempting to recover the content of their earlier beliefs. The obstacles to commensurability may arise just at the first-person level. If this distinction between impersonal and first-personal incommensurability seems rather dubious, consider an analogy. The following state of affairs is one we can readily suppose is instantiated: p is true and x does not believe that p. ‘x’ stands for any impersonal way of picking out an individual. But now replace x by the first-person pronoun: p is true and I do not believe that p. This is not a thought that we can entertain without contradicting ourselves. Or consider a Cartesian insight: I can think ‘x does not exist’ but cannot sustain the thought that I do not exist. So it appears that there some states of affairs which can be contemplated, and accepted, from an impersonal or third-personal perspective, but not from the first-person perspective. In the case of incommensurability, the relevant difference is between ‘x’s belief that p is objectively more rational than y’s belief that not-p’ and ‘My current belief that p is objectively more rational than my former belief that not-p’. It is now time to consider some first-personal accounts of shifts of religious belief state and ask whether these are appropriately described as a shift in paradigm.

Anthony Kenny In his autobiographical A Path From Rome, Anthony Kenny provides a detailed, highly reflective, and engrossing account of his intense religious education, his training for the Catholic priesthood, and the thinking which led to his gradual realisation that he should return to the lay state, which he did in 1963. What prompted this realisation was a combination of considerations, some concerning the emphasis accorded to church hierarchy, but in very large part to do with the intellectual basis for Catholic doctrine, and indeed for theistic belief in general. This could certainly be described as loss of faith, as in the final interview with his archbishop he confessed that he no longer had faith in God, and could only pray as an agnostic might, in the hope that someone might be listening. These doubts were in turn prompted by careful philosophical reflection on the nature of religious language and thought, a topic he explored both in his licentiate dissertation at the Gregorian University of Rome, and in his doctoral thesis, for which he worked in Oxford, coming into contact with contemporary methods of linguistic analysis, and some of their most prominent exponents. The dissertation for the licentiate was particularly concerned with the threat that logical positivism appeared to pose for theological language. According to the principle of verifiability, meaningful assertoric sentences are either analytic

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truths (that is, true by virtue of their logical form, or the meanings of their components) or empirically verifiable. But theological statements are not analytic (unless one is prepared, as Kenny was not, to endorse the soundness of the ontological argument). Nor, on the other hand, do they seem to be empirically confirmable or discomfirmable, as theological statements appear to be compatible with any observation statement. One conclusion, drawn in Richard Braithwaite’s essay ‘An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief’ (1955), is that theological statements are not propositionally assertoric, but rather expressions of commitment to a certain way of life. What differentiates religions which largely share their moral outlook are the stories by which the moral messages are conveyed. Though sympathetic to Braithwaite’s treatment, Kenny suggested that genuinely assertoric theological statements could be given content, and justification, through mystical experience. By the time he came to write his doctoral thesis, however, this struck him as inadequate. As he explains: ...my initiation into the philosophy of Wittgenstein at Oxford, while it removed the bogey of positivism, equally took away my confidence in religious experience as providing justification for the assertions of natural theology. I began to think – as I do to this day – that belief in God can be rationally justified only if the traditional proofs of the existence of God are valid. Faith will not do instead of proof, for faith is believing something on the word of God, and one cannot take God’s word for it that He exists. Belief in God’s existence must be logically prior to belief in revelation. (Kenny, 1985: 147) The path from faith to agnosticism which Kenny describes does not seem to fit the model of paradigm shift. There is, to be sure, the awareness of anomaly. From the later perspective, the earlier attempt to defend the meaningfulness and rationality of theological beliefs is found wanting. Speaking of his dissertation, he says: I find it painful to re-read after twenty-five years: not only am I embarrassed at the philosophical naivety of much of its philosophical content, but I am astonished at the thinness of the intellectual underpinning of a lifetime commitment to the service of the Church. Emotionally...I was at this period totally committed to the priestly life; as devoted to the Church as the most adoring lover to his mistress. But the emotional investment provided no more adequate a basis for a life of fidelity to the priestly ideal than infatuation does for a lasting marriage. The intellectual rationalization which the dissertation provides for the religious emotion looks, from this distance, merely a licence to wallow in make-believe. (Ibid.: 111) This may be a harsh judgement, but it indicates that Kenny finds no conceptual difficulty in recovering that earlier perspective. There is, then, no hint of incommensurability. And, while the specific reasons for finding it inadequate may not have clearly presented themselves at that earlier stage in his life, they do at least appeal to the kind of considerations of rationality which exercised him then. Interestingly, the issue of incommensurability does appear in the licentiate dissertation, when he suggests that faith may actually provide content to religious

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propositions, so that what the theist come to accept is not necessarily what the atheist denies. Kenny quotes a paragraph which begins ‘There must be a sense in which dogmatic propositions “mean something different” to the believer and unbeliever.’ (Ibid.: 104) Again, however, the later judgement is unforgiving: This paragraph is full of muddles. What a proposition means must be independent of its truth-value; one cannot take it to mean one thing if one believes it and another thing if one disbelieves it. Belief and disbelief are contrasting attitudes towards one and the same proposition, and two sentences cannot express the same proposition if they have different meanings. (Ibid.: 105) It is undoubtedly true that the content of a proposition does not vary according to whether the proposition is true or false. It is also true that, in cases of genuine disagreement, one and the same proposition is the object of assent or denial. But there may be cases of apparent disagreement – assent or dissent to a certain form of words – where the truth-value of a single proposition is not at issue. And we cannot rule out a priori individual cases where a change in religious perspective cannot be reduced to a change of attitude to a single proposition. But in any event, Kenny’s own change of perspective, as reported by him, does not invoke, or suggest, any issue of commensurability between earlier and later perspectives. Recall Kuhn’s thesis that scientific paradigms are not abandoned without there being an alternative paradigm to move to: ‘The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another’ (Kuhn (2012: 78)). The word ‘simultaneously’ here does not rule out an extended period of crisis where normal science is replaced by a period of extraordinary science, although that period does not go on indefinitely. But does Kenny’s case provide a religious counterpart to this? It would seem not. The move from faith to agnosticism signals, not so much the abandonment of a paradigm, as a shift in epistemological attitude to it. But there is more than one model for loss of faith. One might imagine a religious paradigm being abandoned without a succeeding paradigm being adopted, a different way of making sense of morality and human purpose. Seeing loss of faith in these terms provides a ready explanation of its potentially shattering nature. Alternatively, there may emerge from this crisis a different religious paradigm, not so much a different religion, but a different interpretation of religious discourse and practice, such as is instanced by the non-realist approach (or approaches) of Don Cupitt (1980, 1984, 2012).

Janet Martin Soskice Our second case study represents a religious transformation in the reverse direction: towards faith, though this is not a precise mirror-image of Kenny’s transition. Janet Martin Soskice began adult life as an atheist (in Antony Flew’s wide sense of one who is not a theist: Flew (1972)): I can remember being an atheist, or perhaps an agnostic, for in those days I did not think much about God one way or another. I knew at that time

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there were Christians – and I suppose adherents to other faiths whose adherence I judged ‘ethnic’ and thus not applicable in my own instance. As for Christians, I assumed they came in two sorts – those who went along for a sense of belonging or a sense of nostalgia, rather like attending a bridge club or square dancing; and evangelicals, who were clearly under-educated and over-excited. I can remember, from my lofty 21-year-old height of wisdom, thinking that it must be soothing to be one of the latter, all of whose problems in life could be seen to be answered. In my assumed clarity about religion I, in fact, knew nothing at all, in my own case it was only dramatic conversion which turned me round and put my feet on a steadier, more modest path whose depths are fathomless. (Soskice, 2009: 77) Immediately, we see a clear contrast with the causes of religious change in the case we discussed in the previous section. For Kenny, it was the accumulating weight of reasons, acquired over years, which eventually tipped the scales. For Soskice, it was sudden, datable, and essentially experiential: In my own case...faith came from a dramatic religious experience. It was not theatrically dramatic – I was not rescued from shipwreck by passing dolphins, or saved from falling to my death off a cliff-face by a gracefully placed liana; nevertheless it was dramatic to me. I was in the shower, on an ordinary day, and found myself to be surrounded by the presence of love, a love so real and so personal that I could not doubt it. (Ibid.: 77) This account is immediately preceded by a suggestion, perhaps more than a suggestion, of a paradigm shift between old and new viewpoints: Can I even say to those who, it seems to me, stand where I once stood (the cultured despisers of religion, as Schleiermacher might have said) what I now feel I know, and don’t know, about God? It would be hard. Because it is not just that faith gives new answers to old questions – it gives new questions, a new world where even the most educated come as babes, born again. (Ibid.: 77) As described, the transition seems to satisfy a key criterion for thinking of a perspective change as a paradigm shift: the old and new viewpoints are not wholly answerable to the same set of desiderata, demands for explanation, or data. Rather, with the shift of viewpoint comes a new set of desiderata – and certainly a new set of data ─ which might not even be recognised by the old viewpoint as legitimate. Indeed, the old viewpoint would dismiss the ‘data’ the new viewpoint attempts to capture as illusion. And we can discern another obstacle to communication between the viewpoints. For the new viewpoint apparently makes available something which was not available before, a way of thinking about God. The shift is not just, as Kenny might see it, from denial to acceptance of a being, but also a shift from the thirdpersonal to the second-personal in relation to that being: Above all, I felt myself to have been addressed, not with any words or for any particular reason and certainly not from any merit – it was in that sense gratuitous – but by One to whom I could speak. (Ibid.: 78)

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Second-person thinking is, arguably, of a different kind, not only from impersonal thinking, but also from first- and third-person thinking, and cannot be reduced to the latter (See Salje (2017) for a defence of this thesis). In contemplating the possibility of God’s existence, as an agnostic might, one views the object of thought third-personally. To view it second-personally requires the complete absence of doubt concerning its existence. This way of thinking is not available outside of the theistic paradigm, though that it is not to say that the idea of it is conceptually unavailable outside that paradigm. Is it appropriate, however, to talk of the period before the conversion as one which is governed by a paradigm? I think it is, in this case. Soskice reports her earlier attitude towards religion in a way which makes it clear that she had an interpretation of religious attitudes, even if that interpretation is later dismissed as jejune. And we may plausibly suppose that, being highly reflective, she would have had views on the nature of morality, at the least that it had no theistic basis. So it seems quite appropriate to class this change in orientation, at least, as a genuine paradigm shift.

David Cooper We now turn to our third, and perhaps most complex case. In ‘Mystery, World and Religion’, David Cooper describes the process by which he came to the view that reality, as it is independently of any human perspective, is mysterious, in the sense of being incapable of articulation or even conceptualisation (not ‘discursable’, is how Cooper puts it). Unlike Soskice, the transition was not primarily occasioned by an extraordinary experience. As he explains: Many people ─ those we call ‘mystics’, but not just those ─ have come to a sense of the mystery of reality through special experiences which they have had or claim to have had. My own life has not, I hope, been entirely devoid of Tintern Abbey moments ─ ones of a kind which, if people are forced to speak of them, have them calling on poetic vocabulary of ‘mysterious presence’, of ‘something ‘deep’ that ‘rolls through all things’, and so on. Though, in my own case, it has tended to be littler and more humbler things than great ruined abbeys which have had me groping for the appropriate terms ─ things like the frog-plopping, bird-cheeping and bamboo-rustling that have been the occasions for Zen priests to communicate their sense of the mystery of things. But it is not these experience or moments which have fashioned my path to mystery. This has been a more intellectual, a more philosophical path. Though ─ who knows? ─ maybe this philosophizing would have struck me as too dry, too abstract, and would have failed to go deep with me, except in conjunction with experiences that I am tempted to construe as intimations of mystery. (Cooper (2009: 51–52)) Cooper outlines three contrasting views concerning the nature of reality:

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(1) Absolutism: there is a discursable way the world is in itself, independently of a human perspective. (2) Humanism (of a rather extreme kind): there is just the human world, the world as it is from our perspective. (3) Mystery: there is a way the world is in itself, independently of a human perspective, but it is not discursable. Influenced by writers such as Sartre, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, Cooper was initially drawn to humanism, and away from absolutism. Science appears to warrant absolutism, but the claims of science to provide the perspective-independent view of reality as it is are, he explains, ‘bogus’: The scientific account of the world owes too much to an all-too-human ‘ground-plan’, and to the privileging (driven by discernibly practical, technological interests) of a certain kind of explanation (causal, roughly), to be viewed as offering an objective, absolute account of the world and as having succeeded, therefore, in weeding out the human contribution. (Ibid.: 53) Humanism, of the ‘raw’ kind presented here, he nevertheless came to see as ‘hubristic’, in the sense that it attributed to us a capacity to live with the idea that nothing we do has any value beyond ourselves. Our beliefs and values are answerable to no higher standard, and so, in the end, are baseless. To confront this would, in fact, be intolerable (we might compare this state to that of someone who has lost their faith without yet finding anything to replace it). And so, Cooper found himself embracing the third option: there is something beyond the world as we construct it, but not something we can articulate. This is not the place to assess such a view, but it is worth noting how Cooper responds to the objection that, if we cannot articulate, or conceive, the nature of mind-independent reality, it cannot guide us. The champion of Mystery (the capital ‘M’ here signalling the name of an outlook) is in a position little better than that of the humanist. That, at any rate, is the inevitable conclusion if Mystery is no more than the bald statement that the world as it is in itself is not discursable. What more is needed, suggests Cooper, is a means of somehow attuning oneself to the mysterious, in such a way that one’s life can be informed by it. This is the natural opening for religion, for are religions not precisely ways of attuning oneself to mystery? Cooper lists a number of religions that are explicit about this, including Daoism, Mahayana Buddhism, and medieval Christian and Islamic mysticism. And he has no objection to the sense of mystery, combined with a confidence in great thinkers who are receptive to mystery and define the pattern of a life in response to it, as ‘religious’. What he resists, however, is the suggestion that the mysterious simply be identified with God, for God appears in theistic religions as an eminently discursable being, even in the writings of negative theologians whose professed principle is that such discourse is impossible. Can we describe the transition Cooper describes from humanism to Mystery, a transition which is, at least potentially, a kind of religious conversion, as a paradigm shift? It certainly seems to chime with Kuhn’s description of the proponents

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of competing paradigms as living in different worlds, or ─ less metaphorically and more prosaically ─ inhabiting radically different representations. Whether or not there is a reality which is not discursable is a significant issue intellectually (and emotionally), and on it depends the choice between significantly different kinds of life. The project of attunement to a mysterious reality is not one that makes any sense on the humanist picture (nor indeed on the absolutist picture). It is not immediately obvious, however, that there is an irresolvable incommensurability here. Cooper’s own reasons for Mystery appear to be that the alternative positions are internally unstable, not that they fail to match a standard which makes sense only once one has acknowledged mystery. It nevertheless remains the case that what gets represented by these three very different outlooks does not seem to be one and the same world, or the same mind which is doing the representing. We can approach this point through Cooper’s warning against a dualistic, or disjunctive, picture of mysterious reality on the one hand, and on the other, the phenomenal world, the world as it appears, which is somehow causally produced by the world as it is in itself. He thinks this dualism is ultimately incoherent (Cooper (2009: 55–56). Presumably, he would not dispute that there is some distinction here, for it boils down to the distinction between the discursable and the non-discursable, without which Mystery cannot even be articulated. The problem rather seems to be that any attempt to give an account of the way in which the phenomenal world is produced, through interaction between mind and world, is doomed to failure. For ‘mind’, as part of reality as it is in itself, is thereby part of the mysterious. So we cannot say where mind ends and the rest of reality begins, nor what kind of interaction could generate the world as it appears. Contrast absolutism, for whom both mind and the rest of the world, and the interaction between them, are discursable. Here clear limits are set to what ‘mind’ could refer to. There are no similar limits to what ‘mind’ could refer to within Mystery. It makes no sense, then, to say that Mystery and absolutism are different representations of mind and world and their relations, despite the fact that in our initial presentation of these positions, that is exactly what those theories looked like. A similar problem emerges when we compare humanism and Mystery. In humanism, mind, world, and mind-world interactions are just so many representations (by what or whom, one wonders). Here too, then, the spectre of semantic incommensurability raises its head. In consequence, conversion from humanism to Mystery, absolutism to Mystery, absolutism to humanism, or any other permutation, looks very much like a paradigm shift.

Conclusion Our central question was whether Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts could be applied to cases of religious conversion or loss of faith (or a shift from agnosticism to atheism). Rather than examine such changes at the level of communities, however, we have tried to look at things through the perspective of the individual. This seems appropriate, as conversion and loss of faith is something that happens primarily at the individual level,

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and sometimes quite independently of events in society at large. In pursuing this question, we have looked, though rather briefly, at three first-person accounts of a significant shift in outlook: respectively, from faith to agnosticism, from atheism to faith, and from humanism to Mystery. The first two are explicitly religious, the third at least potentially so. In two of these cases (Soskice and Cooper), we found significant parallels with the Kuhnian model. In particular, the incommensurability of competing scientific paradigms has echoes in the extent to which, in these two cases, one outlook robs competitors of intelligibility for the person concerned. And we can describe in terms of paradigms the gulf between, on the one hand, the reflective and untroubled absence of faith preceding religious conversion, and, on the other, the void following the loss of faith, both of which might merit the name of ‘atheism’. One is governed by a paradigm, the other not. That is one indication of the fact that ‘atheism’ is not a single category of outlook, and of the appropriateness of the increasingly used plural label ‘atheisms’. Three case studies hardly constitute a systematic study. But using case studies in the first place simply follows Kuhn’s own method, although his interpretation of those case studies amounts to a retelling of the history of science. In contrast, the preceding narrative is, if revisionary, only modestly so. And, unlike Kuhn for most if not all the cases he discusses, I have had the luxury of the protagonists’ first-hand accounts. As Kuhn himself notes, only at the very end of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions does the discussion explicitly concern itself with the notion of truth. But when he finally turns his attention to this, the results are explosive. He compares the progress of science to biological progress, as viewed by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Pre-Darwin, biological progress was thought to be goal-driven, to be teleological in nature. Pre-Kuhn, scientific progress tended to be viewed as similarly goal-driven, the goal being truth. But, just as Darwin replaced that teleological account with one in terms of the survival of the fittest, so Kuhn proposes that we see scientific progress, not as goal-driven (where the goal is conceived as truth), but rather the result of selection of theories by their fitness to preserve scientific activity (Kuhn (2012: 169–172). Can we draw similar conclusions concerning religious change? Here, the distinction between communities and individuals, impersonal versus first-personal religious change, is particularly pertinent. Viewed from the outside, shifts in religious perspectives in communities may seem not so much a matter of convergence on the truth, but rather driven by social forces, prompting a move from one experiment in living to a more viable one. But for the individual ─ at least if these case studies are at all representative ─ whether the shift is a result of a religious experience, philosophical reflection, or a shattering loss of faith, the goal is nothing less than the truth. Acknowledgements  I am very grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal, for their comments on a previous version of this paper, and to the members of the Centre for Philosophy of Religion at Leeds, for stimulating discussion.

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References Braithwaite, R. (1955). An empiricist’s view of the nature of religious belief. Ninth Arthur Stanley Eddington Lecture. Cambridge University Press (Reprinted in Basil Mitchell, ed., Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 72-9). Chalmers, A. F. (1982). What is this thing called science? (2nd ed.). Open University Press. Cooper, D. E. (2009). Mystery, world and religion. In J. Cornwell & M. McGhee (Eds.), Philosophers and God (pp. 51–62). Continuum. Cupitt, D. (1980). Taking leave of God. SCM Press. Cupitt, D. (1984). The sea of faith. BBC. Cupitt, D. (2012). The last testament. SCM Press. Drønen, T. S. (2006). Scientific revolution and religious conversion: A closer look at Thomas Kuhn’s Theory of Paradigm Shift. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 18(3), 232–253. Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. NLB. Flew, A. (1972). The presumption of atheism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2(1), 29–46. Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of discovery. Cambridge University Press. Kenny, A. (1985). A path from Rome. Oxford University Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1973). Objectivity, value judgement and theory choice. In L. Kruger (Ed.), Thomas Kuhn, the essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change (pp. 320–389). University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions, 50th (Anniversary). University of Chicago Press. Newton-Smith, W. H. (1980). The rationality of science. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Read, J. (1995). From alchemy to chemistry. Dover Publications. Salje, L. (2017). Thinking about you. Mind, 126(503), 817–840. Soskice, J. M. (2009). Love and reason. In J. Cornwell & M. McGhee (Eds.), Philosophers and god (pp. 77–85). Continuum.

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Sophia (2021) 60:567–574 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00844-6

On Being an Infidel Simon Blackburn1 Accepted: 12 March 2021 / Published online: 6 July 2021 © The Author(s) 2021

Abstract The paper describes the difference between being an infidel and being either an atheist or an agnostic. Keywords  Infidel · Atheism · Agnosticism · Religion · Expressive views of religion · Lokayata · Apophatic traditions · Ritual · Durkheim

I Infidelity in this context is a lack of faith in something (not, as in other contexts, a breach of trust). There are various things in which one may lack faith. I lack faith in homoeopathy, the pantheon of Greek or Norse Gods, my cat’s ability to read my mind, and so on, as do all sensible people. But in the context of this collection, we are talking about lack of faith in some established religious doctrine, and in addition, I shall suggest, lack of faith in the virtues of established religious practices. In the usage which I prefer, being an infidel is different from being an atheist. According to infidels, atheists share too much with theists, and so do people who sit on the fence, calling themselves agnostics. All three of those take seriously one key question: Does God exist? The theist answers in the affirmative. The atheist denies it. And the agnostic admits to not knowing the answer. However, the three of them share a presupposition: That we have here a definite question. For this to be so we must have some conception of what is being talked about. But infidels deny that we have any such conception. We think that when people try to put into words what they have in mind, they end up in contradiction or mystery, and where there is nothing but contradiction and mystery, there is nothing to give content to the question of existence. As the late Richard Rorty would have put it, we infidels do not say God exists, or might exist, or does not or might not. We just say that ‘God’ is not one of our words. It marks out no path that we wish to tread. Chapter 6 was originally published as Blackburn, S. Sophia (2021) 60: 567–574. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00844-6.

* Simon Blackburn [email protected] 1



University of Cambridge Trinity College, Cambridge, UK

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There are actually traditions in some major religions, including Hinduism and Christianity, which appear to accept this critique, or even to celebrate it. The great economist Amartya Sen recalls being nervous on wanting to confess his loss of faith to his grandfather, a pious Hindu. He was pleasantly surprised when the old man beamed and said that that was very good—it meant that he had joined the Lokayata tradition of Hinduism. And Christianity also has a tradition of ‘negative theology’, sometimes called the apophatic tradition, according to which nothing whatsoever can be said about God and his (or her, or their) properties. We poor finite humans cannot put words to it. It might even be blasphemy to suppose we can. It would be imagining God to be in some way something like ourselves as if, as Voltaire put it: ‘God created man in his own image, and man returned the compliment’. It is pleasant to find so much agreement. But the Lokayata tradition was also associated with Charvaka, a ‘sceptical’ or ‘materialist’ philosophy. An infidel may or may not like that association. It is one thing to say that religious terminology is imprecise and incapable of being given serious use, and a different thing to tie oneself to a general scepticism, or any general metaphysic such as the term materialism suggests. The doubt whether anything worth calling religious belief can be salvaged once it is admitted that nothing whatsoever can be said about the nature of the deity is more local and more precisely aimed than these general positions. There is an important logical tradition that protects infidels. This says that any proposition affirming existence has to supply a predicate, a determination of what kind of thing is being said to exist. Affirming the existence of a deity about which nothing can be said transgresses against this principle. It is a fake existential claim, for, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said’. It is as if someone approaches us and asks whether a jubjub exists. We have to ask what is meant by the term, and if there is no definite answer, there is no definite question to discuss. If all we are told is that the jubjub is everywhere and nowhere, out of time but changeable, a bit like a human being yet a lot unlike a human being, then we would be wasting our time pursuing the question of its existence. We have been given nothing to get hold of. We cannot mount a search for it since nothing could be a signal of success or failure, any more than the hunting of the Snark, in Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, was a real hunt. If it were just scepticism or materialism that attacks the possibility of cognition of God, it might be dismissed as itself just a piece of ideology. This is why it is important to sidestep any such sweeping and wide-ranging claims. The more focussed reason for infidelity is the difficulty internal to many religions, of making any real sense of the being supposedly talked about in religious discourse. The masterpiece of this approach is David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Hume, 1824). Here there is one religious sceptic, Philo, who represents Hume’s own voice. However there are two religious apologists. One, called Cleanthes, represents God as the divine architect, and argues that just as we can rationally interpret an artefact, such as a cathedral or a windmill or a watch, as the upshot of human design, so we can interpret the entire cosmos as an artefact of divine design. The other, Demea, has a rather different, more abstract conception of the deity. His God is beyond space and time, beyond change and contingency, independent and untouchable, in theological terminology a ‘necessary existence’ on which all contingent beings depend.

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One might think that it is easy to fuse these two conceptions of the deity, having the best of both worlds, as it were. But as the detail unfolds, it becomes apparent that there is no such reconciliation or fusion to be had. Indeed, long before the Dialogues finish, these two apparent allies are vigorously contemptuous of each other’s position. Taking Cleanthes’s comparison of the deity to a human architect or designer first, what does this give us? We can only get a sense of what an architect likes doing by seeing his or her own productions—the buildings they have produced. In the case of the world, we have the one creation to go on. This is the world we have to cope with, and about which we know a great deal. But it affords no sign that the architect has also created very different worlds, such as heaven or hell might be. As far as we can tell, the architect is happy with very grey worlds in which there is a mixture of happiness and misery, in which good deeds are not always rewarded, and in which peace is fragile, disease is rife, bad people often rise to the top, and death awaits every living thing. There is no sign that the architect ever intended anything different. If we pursue the analogy with human design, we run into other problems. Really good human designs are not the product of one mind. They are evolutions in which hundreds of people have cooperated. Materials had to be invented, engineering problems solved, more primitive designs improved upon, and mistakes rectified, all by a long evolutionary process of trial-and-error. Are we to think that the same is true of the cosmos? It might be that our world is. ‘very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force, which it received from him’. (Hume, 1824: 46) In the Dialogues, the other theist, Demea, urges these objections to the anthropocentric analogy or model of the deity as an architect. But when it comes to Demea’s own conception of the deity, the ‘necessary existence’ it turns out that we have no conception of a property or power that could give rise to such a thing. Since that is so, we might even suppose that this power, whatever it might be, belongs to the cosmos as a whole, so that although it evolves through countless endless changes, it ‘must’ go on existing. In that case, there is no need for a higher-order, theological layer of being—no need for a God. If we hanker after something necessary underlying the contingencies of the world, the continued existence of the cosmos we know and which we inhabit will do as well as anything else, anything ‘outside’ space and time. Hume was not alone in doubting the possibility of anything worth calling religious thought. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) thought that manifestations of piety, such as prayer, or hymns of adoration were in order, but nevertheless made a nice comparison:

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But they that venture to reason of his Nature, from these Attributes of Honour, losing their understanding in the very first attempt, fall from one Inconvenience into another, without end, and without number; in the same manner, as when a man ignorant of the Ceremonies of Court, coming into the presence of a greater Person than he is used to speak to, and stumbling at his entrance, to save himself from falling, lets slip his Cloak; to recover his Cloak, lets fall his Hat; and with one disorder after another, discovers his astonishment and rusticity. (Hobbes, 1839: 677-678) Hobbes seems not to have taken seriously the thought that if you have no idea what you are talking about, attitudes such as ‘adoration’ or ‘worship’ also fly out of the window. Hume was made of firmer stuff. So much for theology. But I have sympathy with the view that it is mistaken, or perhaps it would be better to say, unimaginative or off-key, to think of religious frames of mind primarily in terms of belief. And it would be similarly misdirected to think that the belief component primarily concerns the existence of anything. I read both these insights into Hume’s celebrated works on the philosophy of religion, but their lesson seems never to have been properly absorbed. Even Wittgenstein, I think, although he came close and certainly flirted with more adequate views, failed to take their measure properly, although I will be unable to substantiate that opinion here. To make both my claims plausible, we can contrast a religious frame of mind with a simple case of mistaken ontology. Bertrand Russell’s comparison with the empirically absurd belief that there exists a teapot flying in its own extraterrestrial orbit around the sun is a convenient example. The first obvious point is that nobody would think of belief in such a thing as itself religious. It has none of the hallmarks. It has nothing to do with the conduct of life, with ethics, with the formation of congregations, with ritual, with the sense of anything as sacred, and with consolation, hope, despair, or the many other emotional and social clothings of religion. It is simply a daft secular belief. But now suppose some of those clothings arrive. The teapot is important to people. The texts describing it are sacred. Out of its spout issue instructions for living. There are proper ways to show respect for it, cemented into services and rituals. There are sacred sites, and taboos associated with it, and priests who interpret its sayings, or who alone are authorized to lift its hidden lid. It is forbidden, perhaps a capital offence, to mock it, or them. Many people assert that without the belief in the teapot, their lives would be meaningless. And so on and so on. The teapot has now become an object of veneration—a religious object. Now my two claims can come further into focus. The first is that the religious clothing that arrived was not primarily a matter of belief. It was a matter of practical dispositions or stances towards things. It was partly like having a favourite poem in your head, or a preference for one kind of music or another. It was partly as well a commitment to some practices and some permissions and prohibitions: an immersion in a ‘way of life’. The second implication is that ontology has actually dropped out of the picture. It simply does not matter anymore whether there is such a teapot or not. A mythical teapot can perform the religious function of being a focus for emotions, attitudes,

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and social practices just as well as an actual teapot—better, in fact, since mythical teapots are not the objects of science. It will be no part of any religious practice to ask whether the teapot is pink or blue, how much it weighs, how wide it is, any more than we ask the same kinds of question about Odysseus or Krishna (Wittgenstein remarked that people who talk of God’s all-seeing eye do not talk about his eyebrows). Teapot theologians would, rightly, be horrified at the idea of sending a spaceship to intercept the teapot: It is no part of the way of life that empirical confirmation or disconfirmation of that kind is to be had, nor that it would be remotely appropriate. Hume said that religionists are in a ‘somewhat unaccountable’ state of mind, somewhere between belief and disbelief. We can now see what he may have meant. The story about the teapot has become serious—as serious as birth, death, marriage, or any of the other aspects of living that the texts and rituals and ordained forms regulate and symbolize. It will not do to mock these things. On the other hand, it is empirically disengaged, or if we like, empirically frivolous, for nothing empirical is relevant to its function as an intentional object, a focus for all the emotions and practices which the religious service of the teapot entails. Just as a child can be afraid of the Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, without really having any conception of it (‘it seems to fill my head with ideas’, said Alice, ‘but I do not know what they are’), so the religionist can pursue the object of veneration without any conception of it beyond a vague and changing kaleidoscope of imaginings. I shall return to this interpretation of religious practices later. Meanwhile, we should note that by failing to share those imaginings, we infidels are free from bondage to the sacred texts that embody them. This does not mean that we mock those who put them in their lives, any more than we mock a particular taste in music or art. It just means that they are not ours. We do not go around, as some militant atheists have done, saying that religionists are deceived or stupid, although no doubt some are. But when they are, it is because of particular further aberrations. It is not stupid to like the music of, say, Elvis Presley, but it would be stupid to suppose that he is still alive, or to follow his teachings, if he had any, on climate science or the cure for a pandemic. It is not stupid to go to church on Sundays, but it would be stupid to accept the Biblical chronology according to which the earth is roughly 6000 years old. Lack of faith is not just another kind of faith, although, again, it can go with particular secular faiths, and some of those might be equally subject to criticism. In the European Enlightenment, it went along with an optimistic faith in the power of reason to change things for the better. To some extent that faith has been justified: Science unlocked the industrial revolution, and more people today are far richer, and have far more opportunities and far better educations because of it. Nobody in their right mind would want to revert to pre-industrial medicine, or a world in which all the work has to be performed by human or animal muscle. But of course all too often visions of improvement have failed to materialize: Human moralities and politics show few signs of progress, and all too often the circles of light that we enjoy are surrounded by an enveloping and sometimes threatening gloom. But infidels about established religions need not have particular views about progress. We may be as pessimistic as anyone can be about the permanence of a better Reprinted from the journal

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world—indeed, given what the science of cosmology tells us, our own world of a stable solar system is not going to be permanent as in about five or so billion years the sun will run out of nuclear fuel, become a red giant, engulf the nearest planets, and kill all life on earth, before ending up as a smaller, but intensely dense red dwarf. People can take various attitudes to this, from discounting it as entirely insignificant to any of our own lives (my own attitude), to finding it intensely tragic and depressing. Wherever we stand on this, there is still plenty for us, living here and now, to get right or wrong as we try to steer towards a better future.

II Suppose we accept Hobbes’s and Hume’s critique of attempts to say what the deity is, but also take note of the non-cognitive, emotional nature of religious practice. Does this give that practice a kind of blank cheque, no more subject to scepticism than music or dancing? I do not think so. For whatever Hobbes may have thought, the confidence that their deities are describable is far more central to most religionists’ conception of things, than this implies. Gods are described as having issued commandments, as having spoken directly to particular prophets and favourite peoples. They are described as having desired sacrifices or directed events. In many believers’ minds, it is because they have manifested themselves that particular prescriptions that they are supposed to have communicated have their force and command our allegiance. And infidels do need to be sceptical about these beliefs and the associated attitudes. There is much we need to debate about politics and morality, but supposing that one side or another has the stamp of divine approval cannot change the debate one jot. You cannot put God’s will into the scales on one side or the other, for we cannot measure the weight of Gods who cannot be comprehended. Perhaps after all, they just do not care. I said at the beginning that it was possible to be an infidel not only when it comes to religious doctrine, but also when it comes to religious practice, but this needs heavy qualification. I do not, of course, deny that many people sincerely perform religious rites, sing religious songs and chants, and have their heads full of religious words. These things happen. Nor do I deny that people find that these rites, songs, and words give them consolation and hope, and change their orientations to the world in important ways. If a child is taught to take consolation in the fact that Jesus is looking after our paths in life, it has an effect, for as the philosopher the late Roger Scruton put it, the consolation of an imaginary friend is not an imaginary consolation. The hope that Santa Claus will visit tonight is a real enough hope, and the excitement it generates a real enough excitement. Most, but not all, philosophers of the emotions agree that at the cinema, our fear that the villain will harm the heroine is real fear, even when at the same time we know that both are fictions. I think it is very difficult to draw up a cost–benefit account of the value of these mental states. Living in a fool’s paradise can be more pleasant than living in the real world. William James even thought that this was a sufficient defence of religious belief itself, not on the grounds of its truth, but on the grounds of its pleasant effects.

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It is only when we take into account the larger-scale effects, either in the religionist’s own life or in the society in which the habit of succumbing to illusions are embedded that the dark side really emerges. The habit of succumbing to wishful thinking and illusion, as W. K. Clifford famously saw when he wrote his brilliant riposte to James, has us ignoring a duty to reason: He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it; he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action. (Clifford, 1879:181) Clifford talks here of beliefs, and even if we try to sideline the place of belief in religious practice, the practices have similar expressions in behaviour. The rites and songs and words enter our hearts, colouring some doings with emotions, not only consolation, fear, and hope, but also emotions of identity and self-righteousness. Religionists think that without the religious atmosphere in which they clothe their world, things would be different, and very likely much worse, as if meaning would have been drained out of the universe. What believers take to be the independent wishes of the gods are in fact bubbles in their own brains, installed by tradition, magnified by repetition, and then projected upon the universe, as if it is its very own voice that is speaking. Such fantasies and fixed ideas may be harmless. They may not harm those who indulge them, and may even be beneficial to them insofar as they bring about positive attitudes, such as hope or consolation. But at least as often, they are invitations to mistrust or hatred of those who do not share the particular bubble that the person of faith inhabits. One of the moral peculiarities of the contemporary world is the hair-trigger propensity to take offence. When people meet others who do not share their views, they are quick to form suspicions and resentments. They put on the cloak of victimhood, and accuse those who fail to agree with them of disrespect and offensiveness. It is as if by failing to fall into their bubble we, the outsiders, are automatically diminishing them, perhaps even denying their humanity and their rights. It is possible to think that distinguishing infidelity from atheism can also do something to assist this process. For atheists, as we have seen, deny something that the faithful assert. But infidels do not. Their attitude is more like one of hearing a foreign language, sayings using words that are not their own, and of which they can make almost nothing. It need be no sign of disrespect to feel like this. But I fear that this is only one side of the coin. When we do not join in a conversation in a foreign language, because their words are not our words, we do not thereby suppose that the others are failing to make sense. This lack of communication is our Reprinted from the journal

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fault, rather than theirs. But when we hear theologians arguing over the nature of God and God’s will, we do suppose that they are deceived. They think they have an intelligible topic, but they have none. And this implies an attitude which if not itself disrespectful, is certainly close to it. It is going to be like coming upon someone who spends energy on completely worthless pursuits, like counting the blades of grass in the lawn. The great sociologist and anthropologist Emile Durkheim, who studied religions across the world, concluded that their real function was just this of not only binding people into cohesive units, cementing the authority and identity of the tribe, but also insisting on the difference from other tribes. Being true to infidelity means being suspicious of all that, and perhaps being in despair at its prevalence in the contemporary world. The hair-trigger propensity to take offence makes it more dangerous now than it used to be, not only in theocratic countries like Iran or Bangladesh, but even in the once-liberal West. Difference is becoming identified with contempt, and contempt with hatred, which is in turn becoming illegal. It should be part of any good education to wean people away from these childish sentiments. An education in philosophy can certainly help that by teaching that there are two sides to many questions, that one’s first thoughts may not be one’s best, and that we live in the midst of uncertainty and debate. But until such an education takes root, infidels, like sceptics, will not be to everyone’s taste. Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://​creat​iveco​mmons.​org/​licen​ ses/​by/4.​0/.

References Clifford, W. K (1879). Lectures and essays, Vol. 2. Eds. Leslie Stephen & Fredrick Pollock. Macmillan and Co. Hobbes, T (1839). The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. 3. Ed. William Molesworth. John Bohn. Hume, D. (1824). Dialogues concerning natural religion, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, G. Fenton.

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Sophia (2021) 60:575–591 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00851-7

Confessions of an Agnostic: Apologia Pro Vita Sua Michael Ruse1  Accepted: 6 April 2021 / Published online: 10 June 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract Francis Collins, the director of the NEH and well-known Christian, has said that  agnosticism is a bit of a cop-out. Either be a Christian or be an atheism, but have the guts to make up your mind. I shall argue in a positive way for agnosticism, showing  that it can be as vibrant a position as belief or non-belief. It gives you a renewed appreciation of life and the world in which we live. Keywords  Agnosticism · Atheism · Theism · Faith · Reason · Existentialism To be well defended, agnosticism should be arrived at only after full consideration of all of the evidence for and against the existence of God. It is a rare agnostic who has made the effort to do so. (Some who have, and a rather distinguished list it is, have expectedly converted themselves to belief in God.) Furthermore, while agnosticism is a comfortable default pattern for many, from an intellectual perspective it conveys a certain tinniness. Would we admire someone who insisted the age of the universe was unknowable, and hadn’t taken the time to look at the evidence? (Collins, 2007, pp. 168–169) Thus, Francis S Collins, longtime head of the Human Genome Project, now Director of the National Institutes of Health, and ardent (Protestant) Christian. The agnostic seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place. Either you do not take the issues seriously, in which case your position has a certain ‘tinniness,’ or you do take it seriously, in which case you stand in danger of becoming a theist. I am an agnostic and, having recently turned 80 years old, I much doubt I am going to change at this stage of my life. Hence, in the light of Collins’s rather condescending put down, I take a leaf from the book of John Henry Newman (1864) when he was attacked as insincere by Charles Kingsley (of Water Babies fame). This is my Apologia Pro Vita Sua—a spiritual autobiography to defend my long-held position. Chapter 7 was originally published as Ruse, M. Sophia (2021) 60: 575–591. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00851-7.

* Michael Ruse [email protected] 1



Florida State University, 651 East Sixth Avenue, Tallahassee, FL 32303, USA

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Definitions As I set out, let me show my philosophical training by offering one or two definitions and distinctions. I take it we are talking here about belief in God, and for the purposes of this essay I will assume that we are talking about the Christian God. Three in One; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or Spirit. I take it that a Christian or believer or (as such a person is known) a theist believes in the existence of this God and all that follows from it. God is Creator, He is all-loving, all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent). Significantly and importantly, humans have a special position in the story. We are ‘made in the image of God.’ I take it that that means we have a moral capacity and intellectual ability. At the other end of the scale is the atheist. Such a person does not believe in God, or any substitute. Such a person may be indifferent to God, but often there is hostility verging over into outright hatred. Richard Dawkins (2006) is eloquent: ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully’ (1). Note an interesting point (Ruse, 2015). For both the believer and the non-believer, the position is epistemological—a matter of knowledge. Does God exist or not? For both the believer and the non-believer, the position is ethical—a matter of morality. Ought I believe in God? Ought I not believe in God? Over the centuries, believers have persecuted non-believers. Equally, Dawkins’s outburst shows that for him God-belief is morally wrong. In the middle between believer and non-believer, we have the agnostic. Charles Darwin’s ‘bulldog,’ grandfather of the novelist Aldous Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley, wrote: When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion ... So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic”. It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. ... To my great satisfaction the term took. (Huxley, 1894, pp. 237–239)

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Distinctions So much for definitions. Now a vital distinction: faith versus reason. Faith, I take it, is something given to you by God. He wants you to know Him and worship Him, so he tells you directly that He exists. John Calvin spoke of this Skyping line to God as the sensus divinatus. That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity [sensus divinitatis], we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead…. …this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget. (Calvin, 1960) Faith is something thrust upon you, whether you want it or not. Most famously, there is St Paul, known then as Saul, on the road to Damascus, where he intends to ramp up the persecution of Christians. The story is told in Acts 9. 3 As he was approaching Damascus on this mission [to persecute Christians], a light from heaven suddenly shone down around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul! Saul! Why are you persecuting me?” 5 “Who are you, lord?” Saul asked. And the voice replied, “I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting! 6 Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” From then on, there was no greater promoter of the Christ-story than this formerly hostile non-believer. (Saul was not then a Christian. He was never an atheist.) A recent example of coming to faith is told by the philosopher John Hick. He wrote of his conversion to Christianity as a late teenager. He was resisting the call. Then it happened. ‘An experience of this kind which I cannot forget, even though it happened forty-two years ago [1942], occurred—of all places—on the top deck of a bus in the middle of the city of Hull.... As everyone will be very conscious who can themselves remember such a moment, all descriptions are inadequate. But it was as though the skies opened up and light poured down and filled me with a sense of overflowing joy, in response to an immense transcendent goodness and love’ (Hick, 2005, p. 205). Sometimes it is a painful process, long resisted. C. S. Lewis, conservative Anglican and now the idol of the evangelicals: You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. (Lewis, 1955, p. 115) As opposed to faith, we have reason. This is the attempt to get to God through our intellects and senses. What evidence is there of God? Most famously, there are the

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proofs for the existence of God. St Thomas Aquinas gives the classic version of the ‘argument from design.’ The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. (Aquinas, 1952, 11, Man, 1a. 2,3.) Standard Christian theology is that both faith and reason lead to God, although, when push comes to shove, faith trumps reason. Aquinas not only endorsed faith, but put it ahead of reason. How else would the ignorant or lazy find out about God? ‘For certain things that are true about God wholly surpass the capability of human reason, for instance that God is three and one: while there are certain things to which even natural reason can attain, for instance that God is, that God is one, and others like these’ (Aquinas, 1259–1265, p. 5). Reason—where we could be mistaken—is limited, and, in the end, faith—where we cannot be mistaken—is top dog. ‘The truth of the intelligible things of God is twofold, one to which the inquiry of reason can attain, the other which surpasses the whole range of human reason’ (7). One should note, however, that there is a Protestant tradition that claims that faith is all, and that appeals to reason in some sense undermine faith. Most famous voice for this position is the nineteenth century Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard. He spoke of a leap of faith, meaning that religious commitment had to go beyond reason and evidence into the unjustified, the absurd. If it did not, then in some sense faith is downgraded. You do not really need faith if reason is there, backing you up. ‘When someone is to leap he must certainly do it alone and also be alone in properly understanding that it is an impossibility. .. the leap is the decision’ (Kierkegaard, 1992, pp. 11–12, 102). And: ‘Faith is the objective uncertainty with the repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the relation of inwardness intensified to its highest’ (610). Karl Barth in the twentieth century followed in this tradition, as have many others. Where does the non-believer, the atheist, stand on all of this? Obviously, they deny the power of faith. Chicago biologist, Jerry Coyne, laments that the problem is not with religion as such but in ‘its reliance on and glorification of faith – belief, or if you will, “trust” or “confidence” – without supporting evidence.’ Faith is dangerous both to science and to society. ‘The danger to science is how faith warps the public understanding of science: by arguing, for instance, that science is based just as strongly on faith as is religion; by claiming that revelation or the guidance of ancient books is just as reliable a guide to the truth about our universe, as are the tools of science; by thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than what stands the test of empirical study’ (Coyne, 2015, pp. 225–226). Of course, you might respond that absence of evidence does not prove evidence of absence. The fact that faith does not work does not mean that God does not exist.

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We can still get at him through reason. It is here that the argument from evil will kick in. The evil in the world—moral evil like Heinrich Himmler and natural evil like the Lisbon earthquake—is incompatible with the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful God. Fyodor Dostoevsky makes the point, brutally, in The Brothers Karamazov. Two brothers, Ivan the older and Alyosha the younger, are talking. Ivan puts a question to Alyosha: “Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.” “No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly. (Dostoevsky, 2003) An all-loving, all-powerful God, would not have let Anne Frank die in Bergen-Belsen. With this background, I turn autobiographical (Ruse, 2017c, d, e). I was born in the English Midlands in 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War. My parents were members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and it was within that religion I was raised. In my teens, I even went to a Quaker boarding school—private, although misleading the English call them ‘public schools.’ Quakers have no dogmas or creeds. When I was young, they were firmly Christian—God as Creator and Jesus Christ his son, who died on the Cross for our sake. The Holy Spirit was very important—the ‘inner light’ or ‘that of God in every person.’ A lion may be dangerous, it is not evil. What made Himmler evil was that, of his own free will, he turned from the spark of divinity that showed him the difference between good and evil. Although, in my early years, I was hardly thinking in a very sophisticated theological way, even then I was working within the framework of faith and reason. Faith leads to what is known as ‘revealed religion.’ I accepted God, His existence and His nature, on faith. It was true, not to be questioned or indeed in need of question. Reason leads to what is known as ‘natural religion.’ It too was important. Quakers are pacifists, and we children were taught that pacifism is the Christian way because Jesus told us so. Quakers are not literalists about the Genesis story and that sort of thing. They are hard-liner literalists when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount. 38

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also;” continuing 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5) These truths are to be taken on faith. But, because they have no creeds and dogmas, Quakers make much effort to justify their positions through reason, and

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pass this on to their children. Unlike the First World War, which was fought for no good reasons at all, the Second World War was a ‘good war.’ Hitler and his fellow Nazis had to be stopped. As often as not, Sunday School teaching was given over to thinking about why violence—war—might not be justified (Ruse, 2018). Although I did not then know the terminology, much time was spent on the principles of ‘Just War Theory,’ the thinking going back before Christianity to Cicero, trying to spell out when war is justified and how it must be waged. Obliteration bombing, for instance, could never be justified.

Growing up I Corinthians 13: 11. ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’1 At about the age of 20, now at university, two major things happened having major consequences for my spiritual life. On the one hand, I started to study philosophy. The first book of the first class was Descartes’ Meditations. Within 15  min, I realized that philosophy was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. You mean there really are others who wonder about whether they are awake or asleep, of if their parents still exist when they have said ‘goodnight,’ put out the light, and left the room? I have always had a strong suspicion that my Quaker childhood had prepared me for this. I had long been used to having to argue about and for my commitments. No better training for a professional philosopher. Had I been raised as an evangelical, I much doubt that philosophy would have had that immediate, overwhelming appeal. On the other hand, I lost my faith. I did not have a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience in reverse. It just faded away. As with the baker in Lewis Carroll’s poem: ‘The snark was a boojum you see.’ You might think that taking up philosophy had something to do with it. I doubt it. The whole point of my Quaker childhood experience was that it was faith in the background and reason in the foreground. They do not compete or threaten the existence of the other. I think the loss of faith was all simply the realization that, for me, there was nothing. Prayers asking for things might be answered; they might as easily go unanswered. Difficult times seemed not to be helped by God belief. I do joke, because away at school I so disliked my headmaster, having had one headmaster in this life, I was damned if I wanted another headmaster in the next. I am not entirely sure it was a joke. I will say that I thought it was one thing to be a non-believer at 20. By the time I was 70, I predicted, I would be back on board with God-belief. As things draw to an end, you cannot be too careful about preparing for the future. I will also say that, somewhat to my surprise, at 70 it never happened. God did not reenter my life, nor has He done so—or shown any sign of doing so—now that I have turned 80. 1

  Quakers are not enthusiasts for sola scriptura. They come from the radical end of the Reformation. The Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding, Bible reading is not a major part of worship or general practice. It is the inner light that guides you. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and, for me, Paul’s paeon to love, I Corinthians 13, is just such an exception. While, elsewhere in this essay, I quote the New Revised Standard Version, I would violate all I hold sacred if here I were to quote other than the King James Version.

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Moving along, at 22 (1962), I emigrated to Canada. This was not really a planned decision. Out of the blue, I got the offer of a graduate fellowship. In those days (when so many were going to the European-settled countries of the Commonwealth), it was easier to get the Canadian equivalent of a green card than a student visa, and I went and stayed. Canada was and is a wonderful country—moving there was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I left and moved South to the USA, in 2000, only because I had married for a second time, had a young family, and needed to go on working and to avoid compulsory retirement at 65. I taught for 20  years, retiring only on reaching 80. (Retiring from teaching. Not from compulsive writing!) My memories of my religious beliefs in my twenties and indeed into my thirties are not vivid. I had other things to think about. I was establishing myself as a teacher and scholar, getting married for the first time, and starting my first family. For all that, my background was up front in many respects, and so it was a natural that I taught undergraduate classes in the philosophy of religion. I think I was certainly an atheist. I do remember that one of my colleagues was a Jesuit, and he queried whether it was appropriate that I teach philosophy of religion. To which, to his credit, my chair responded that if it was appropriate that he, a Christian, teach philosophy of religion, it was no less appropriate that I, a non-Christian, also teach philosophy of religion. (I should note that Canadian universities are secular. Had I been at a Christian institution like Notre Dame, things might have been different. But I doubt I would have been at such an institution in the first place.) One thing of note, however, did happen. Towards the end of the 1960s, when I was moving towards 30, I started to become very interested in Charles Darwin and the revolution in his name sparked by the publication of his book (in 1859) The Origin of Species, where he argued that all organisms, living and dead, are the product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution, powered by the mechanism of natural selection. Darwin noted how powerful is the effect of selection by animal and plant breeders in producing new forms—shaggier sheep, beefier cows. He noted also that population pressure put a constant strain on resources, food and space, and that, in the consequent ‘struggle for existence,’ only a few organisms will parent the next generation. Which leads to the following surmise: HOW will the struggle for existence, discussed too briefly in the last chapter, act in regard to variation? Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and closefitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, Reprinted from the journal

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can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. (80–81) Darwin’s theory plunges you straight into the debate about science and religion (Ruse, 2001), also (Ruse, 2016). If Darwin is true, Genesis taken literally is untrue. Which wins? Science or religion? You might think that taking up this topic showed that my basic interest in religion was still in play. Not at all! Interested in the philosophy of science (my undergraduate degree had been jointly in philosophy and mathematics), I had been writing my doctoral dissertation (thesis) on philosophical issues in biology—a topic chosen, not for my intrinsic interest in biology, but because there was only a limited amount of literature on it, and that mainly bad. An ideal theme for a dissertation! However, at that time, the major force in my field, the philosophy of science, was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Few of us bought into Kuhn’s idealism— ‘paradigms’ which structure actual reality— but many of us bought into Kuhn’s dictum that, to do good philosophy of science, you have to do good history of science. I took this advice—command—so seriously, that in 1972–1973, I spent my first sabbatical in Cambridge, England, working daily in the manuscript room of the University Library, studying the unpublished papers of Charles Darwin. At the beginning of the decade, I published an overview of the philosophical aspects of my area of study—The Philosophy of Biology (1973) — and, at the end of the decade, I published an overview of the historical aspects of my study—The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979a).

And So to Arkansas Little did I know that, all this time, my non-existent God had been working behind the scenes, preparing for the next significant move in my life. It had nothing to do with me. In 1957, the Russians had put a space module, Sputnik, into orbit around the Earth. Appalled at being behind, the Americans built modules of their own. Also, they invigorated the teaching of high-school science, subsidizing the writing and publishing of good-quality textbooks. Naturally, the biology textbooks took Darwin’s theory of evolution as a given, something that appalled America’s many evangelical evolution-deniers. These ‘Creationists,’ as they came to be called, took up arms. A ‘bible’ was hastily written and published—Genesis Flood (1961) —by biblical scholar John Whitcomb and hydraulic engineer Henry M. Morris. Miraculous creation, 6 days, humans last, kicked out of Eden, worldwide flood. By the 1970s, the Creationists were on a roll, culminating in 1981 with the State of Arkansas passing a law demanding that in publicly funded schools, if evolution were taught in biology classes, Creationism had to be given ‘balanced treatment.’ This law was clearly in violation of the First Amendment separation of Church and State, and so the American Civil Liberties Association (ACLU), an organization

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dedicated to defending the constitution, sprang into action to get the law declared invalid. They looked for expert witnesses—theologian, scientists, educators—to make the case for evolution and against Creationism. This is where I came in—a basically unknown professor of philosophy who did not even live in America. I was still teaching in Canada. The lawyers for the ACLU realized that the crux of the case was in fact philosophical. Could one show that Darwinian evolutionary theory is genuine science? Could one show that Creationism—biblical literalism—is religion? These are not really theological questions. They are not scientific questions. They are philosophical questions. I was chosen for two reasons. First, I was good on my feet. Fifteen years of undergraduate teaching had taught me how to appear and argue in public. I realized that a good joke is often worth ten arguments. Second, my work on Darwin had prepared me for all the questions and answers. Darwin and his contemporaries had encountered and answered all the points the Creationists made. In respects, I was better equipped than leading scientists, for instance the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould who was also, alongside me, an expert witness for the ACLU. We won and my testimony (said he immodestly but truthfully) was crucial. The judge wrote that the characteristics of genuine science are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

It is guided by natural law; It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; It is testable against the empirical world; Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and It is falsifiable.

In making these points, explicitly the judge referenced me. ‘Ruse and other science witnesses.’ Darwinism is genuine science. Creationism is not. It is religion. The law was overturned (Ruse, 1988).

And the World Said? Now, all of this makes me look good, but I do not really tell the tale for that reason. It was the aftermath that really counted, and I admit (with thanks) that I was spurred by one of the leading Creationists: Duane T Gish (1973), author of Evolution: The Fossils say No! (Over 150,000 copies sold!) We got to know each other well and outside the courtroom struck up an unexpected friendship. (He was a very bright man and, before his conversion to evangelical Christianity, had published high-quality, regular scientific papers.) He made two telling points. First, I was a coward. As he pointed out, his position had all sorts of moral and epistemological consequences, about the nature of things and about how we should behave. He was open about them. I denied that my position had any such consequences. I had actually recently written a book on the evolutionary biology of social behavior—Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (1979b) —where, explicitly, I drew the traditional (Humean) distinction between matters of fact and matters of obligation, agreeing that truths about the Reprinted from the journal

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former have no implications for claims about the latter. Gish argued that either this meant my position was hardly worth holding or I was being dishonest. Why go to all the effort of arguing for ‘sociobiology’ —and I should say that around 1980 this was a highly career-perilous thing to do because the Marxist biologists were excoriating sociobiologists—if it was all a thought exercise (Segerstrale, 1986). Determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If my position was worth arguing for, it was worth showing that it was morally and socially important. As you can imagine, when Gish first made this charge, I was not pleased. But then I thought: ‘He’s right!’ As I said at the beginning, these positions always have moral implications. I saw that, as a Darwinian, I had to draw out the implications of my evolutionary position for epistemology (theory of knowledge) and ethics (theory of morality). I did this, in my Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (1986), arguing for a kind of neo-Pragmatism. Arguing also what had not been done explicitly before, that the non-directedness of Darwinian evolution means that morality is relative to its past, and hence cannot have an objective referent. This argument for moral non-realism has come to be known as the ‘debunking theory’—debunking claims for moral realism, such as that moral truths are embedded in the eternal Platonic Forms (Ruse & Richards, 2017). My book was not well received by my fellow philosophers who, virtually to a person, think that the fact that we are modified monkeys rather than modified mud (as Thomas Henry Huxley quipped) is irrelevant to philosophy. In the words of the great Ludwig Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science’ (Wittgenstein, 1922, 4.1122). I am glad to say that in the years since I published there has been something of a sea change in thinking about the relevance of Darwinism for philosophy. I joke that I am now being refuted in posh journals that would never accept anything by me! I do take credit for proselytizing for my position for over 30 years (1986, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2017a, 2019, 2021; Maienschein and Ruse, 1998).2 The second telling point made by Duane Gish is that a major reason why the Creationists so dislike Darwinism is that its supporters use it as a vehicle for a kind of religious naturalism. Darwinism versus Christianity sort of thing. As you can imagine, this comment also went down with me like a lead balloon. But, again, I started to see the justice in what Gish claimed. We Darwinians do tend to use our theory to push moral prescriptions and views on sexuality and sin and much more. Think back to the passage I quoted from Richard Dawkins. He sounds just like one of the Old Testament Minor Prophets. Be this as it may, Gish’s insight sent me on a several-decades quest, that has not yet finished. I set out to show that, although Darwin’s theory of evolution—both the theory of the Origin and the modern updated version of the theory—are genuine science, there has grown up a kind of evolutionary humanism—I will call it Darwinism to distinguish it from Darwin’s (scientific) theory—that uses Darwin’s insights as the basis of a kind of secular religion. In 2005, I published a kind of clarion call—The Evolution/Creation Struggle—where I argued that whereas Creationists have as their fundamental metaphysical foundation 2

  These are just the books!

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God’s Providential nature—we are sinners who can do nothing save through the grace of God—Darwinists have as their fundamental metaphysical foundation the hope of Progress—that we humans, unaided, through our powers of reason and the use of our senses, can make things better for all down here on Earth. Rival religions, spiritual and secular. I have followed up this book, more recently, with Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution (2017b) and The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and their Battle to Understand Human Conflict (2018). In the former, using literature—fiction and poetry—as my database, I run through a gamut of topics—God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sex, sin and redemption, the future—and show that Christianity and Darwinism match each other item for item in looking at the topics and giving answers, spiritual or secular. Take for instance the status of humans. Christians say we are top dogs because we are made in the image of God. Darwinists say we are top dogs because we are the apotheosis of a progressive evolutionary process. In the latter, on war, I continued my argument. Take the question of sin. Christians say we are sinners because Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they ate the forbidden fruit, and hence all humans are tainted by that deed, we are cursed with original sin, the tendency to do wrong. Darwinists argue that we are killer apes—the kind of violent primates shown at the beginning of the movie 2001. Spiritual versus secular. I point out that, as a kind of codicil, the fact that now so many Darwinists celebrate Darwin Day—Darwin’s birthday on February 12—is the icing on the cake. Who is the other person whose birthday we celebrate? Jesus Christ on December 25! If that does not tell you something, then I do not know what would. I should add, said he proudly, that this argument about Darwinists being adherents to a kind of secular religion, evolutionary humanism, made me no more popular than did my debunking position about the nature of morality. People like Richard Dawkins (1997), whom I would identify as one of the worst offenders, go incandescent at my thesis. An official denial can be found on the webpage of American Atheists. ‘While there are some religions that are atheistic (certain sects of Buddhism, for example), that does not mean that atheism is a religion. To put it in a more humorous way: If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby.’3 But, putting my psychology on one side—the fact that Michael Ruse enjoyed being the object of vitriolic criticism tells us no more about the truth value of his claims than the fact that former-president Donald Trump shares a liking for being the object of vitriolic criticism tells us anything about the truth value of his claims—what does this all have to do with agnosticism? More particularly, what does it have to do with my having turned from both Christianity, theism, and atheism towards a position between them, agnosticism?

3

  What is Atheism? | American Atheists

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So to Agnosticism First, let me say that today I am no more inclined than before to embrace Christianity. None of this has anything to do with my differences with the Creationists. As a former Quaker, that was never my kind of Christianity. It is just that I do not have faith. If I convinced myself I do have faith, it would be for the wrong reasons—fear of death and that sort of thing— and I continue to think that the natural theological objections—the problem of evil particularly—are insurmountable. Perhaps paradoxically, I have come to feel that the position of people like Kierkegaard and Barth would be the one I would embrace if I were a Christian. If I believed, then the problem of evil would be a mystery, not a barrier. I do not have faith and so I have never had to decide—Aquinas or Kierkegaard. For all their interest in natural theological arguments, I suspect many Quakers feel the same way. There has long been a tug to mysticism. What of the other end of the scale? There are two things that turn me against atheism. First, the social/moral aspects. The realization that often—too often—Darwinian theory is used as a kind of foundation for evolutionary humanism puts me right off that whole approach. I joke that having given up a spiritual religion, I am not about to embrace a secular religion. I began to see that people like Dawkins are just as much in the faith business as people like John Paul II. There are unjustified commitments. Unjustified commitments with moral underpinnings. You ought morally to believe in God. You ought morally not to believe in God. For me, as a philosopher, that is exactly what you should not be doing. Going back to my little book, Taking Darwin Seriously, my whole philosophy behind writing it was that I must not hand over a piece of candy to Duane T. Gish. And this has continued. Remember one of the central topics of the war book. Christians believe in original sin through faith. God who is perfect made us perfect; but, made as we are in the image of God, we have free will and misused it. God in His love forgives us and sends his Son to die in agony on the Cross as a sacrifice. Substitutionary atonement. Darwinists like Robert Ardrey (1961) and Konrad Lorenz (1966) believe we are killer apes and that is why sin—warfare and the like—is a defining feature of human beings. What I have tried to do is prick the pretensions of both sides, showing that, according to the best science today, humans are social animals and that our warlike nature is a late comer, not engrained in our genes. It is a cultural response to new and unexpected conditions, namely the population growth brought on 10 K years ago by agriculture (Fry, 2014). Before that, for literally hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Rather than violence, hurting others where we in turn might be hurt, we simply moved away out of harm’s reach. I, and the others on whom I rely, might be wrong, but our thinking is not faith-based. It is based on evidence and reason. Little surprise that, at the emotional/social/moral level, killer apes make me shudder. Especially when I find enthusiasts quoting religious sentiments in support. Crucially important for Ardrey was an article, ‘The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man’ (1953), by Raymond Dart, a South African paleoanthropologist and rightly celebrated as the first to identify Australopithecus. Dart started his article with a quotation from the seventeenth century Puritan divine, Richard Baxter: ‘Of

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all beasts the man-beast is the worst to others and himself the cruellest foe.’ Ardrey himself, sounding like Jean Calvin on a role, referred to us as ‘Cain’s children’ (Sussman, 2013, p. 101). The author of African Genesis (1961), he writes: ‘Civilization is a compensatory consequence of our killing imperative; the one could not exist without the other’ (348). Concluding: ‘Its greyness is appalling. Its walls are cracked and eggshell thin. Its foundations are shallow, its antiquity slight. No bands boom, no flags fly, no glamorous symbols invoke our nostalgic hearts.’ We are stuck with it, so make the best of it. ‘Yet however humiliating the path may be, man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn’ (pp. 352–353). Adding to my distaste for this sort of stuff is the fact that I believe Darwinism, as I am characterizing it, is false to Darwinian theory as science. The key premise of Darwinism, evolutionary humanism, is that humans have come out top. We have won. And that is why our moral obligations are to preserve and encourage humans. The Harvard ant specialist Edward O. Wilson, who uses evolutionary biology as a substitute for the Christianity of his childhood, is good at this sort of thing. Wilson tells us that of all animals: ‘Four groups occupy pinnacles high above the others: the colonial invertebrates, the social insects, the nonhuman mammals, and man’ (Wilson, 1975, p. 379). He continues: ‘Human beings remain essentially vertebrate in their social structure. But they have carried it to a level of complexity so high as to constitute a distinct, fourth pinnacle of social evolution’ (p. 380). He concludes by speaking of humans as having ‘unique qualities of their own.’ It is from all of this that our moral obligations arise. Wilson would not disagree with Jesus that we should love our neighbors. As a professional naturalist, he thinks it even more important that we should love our environment. This is expressed through his ‘biophilia’ hypothesis. ‘To explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents’ (Wilson, 1984, p. 1). In the organicist tradition, he sees all of life as an interconnected whole. Individual organisms, individual species, are part of a larger network, and no one or group can take itself apart in isolation. Morally, therefore, our obligation is to preserve life. Admirable, but not Darwinian. The one thing that characterizes the Darwinian view of life is that it is not progressive. What wins, wins, and what wins in one situation may well not win in another. The paleontologist Jack Sepkoski puts the matter colorfully. ‘I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival’ (Ruse, 1996, 486). So much for ‘four legs good, two legs better.’ Darwinism—evolutionary humanism—fails me ethically. It also fails me epistemologically. I find myself pushed to the middle: agnosticism. Is there anything positive to be said for this, or am I stuck with either tinniness or a slide back to Christianity? I think there is. Increasingly, I have become enamored by a quip of the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane (1927). The world is not only queerer than we think it is; it is queerer than we could think it is. I combine this with a reflection by, of all people, Richard Reprinted from the journal

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Dawkins (1998). Why on earth should we think that adaptations to get us out of the jungle and onto the plains would equip us to peer into the mysteries of existence? Quakers are right. It is beyond our comprehension. And lest you think I am being too cautious or pessimistic, let me ask you about the world within which you live, the existence that you have. Mysteries abound, starting with what Heidegger (1959) called the fundamental question of metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing? At a more technical level, if anyone can explain quantum entanglement, something happening to one molecule instantaneously reflecting in another molecule across the universe, they are more insightful than I—or anyone else. We do not need to peer into the paradoxes of quantum physics to see the mystery of existence. Take that most common of phenomena, consciousness, and try to explain the true relationship between mind and body (Ruse, 2018, 2021). No one really has a clue as to what it might be. We know a lot of things about the mind and the body, for instance which parts of the brain are used in what kinds of thinking. But no one can say why a bunch of molecules can think. Cartesian dualism is attractive, but how does the mind then affect the body? In the Monadology, Leibniz pointed out that the two are forever separate. One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception. (Leibniz, 1714, p. 215) Trendy today is some form of ‘Emergentism.’ You put the molecules together in a certain order and mind emerges. But that is too much like that Sidney Harris cartoon, where the scientist has written a whole pile of symbols on the blackboard, followed by: ‘An then a miracle occurs.’ As his friend remarks, that is not helpful. If anything, with a growing number today, I am drawn to ‘panpsychic monism,’ everything is both mind and body. W. K. Clifford, the nineteenth century mathematician/ philosopher, thought that Darwinism implies this: We cannot suppose that so enormous a jump from one creature to another should have occurred at any point in the process of evolution as the introduction of a fact entirely different and absolutely separate from the physical fact. It is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent where that event can be supposed to have taken place. The only thing that we can come to, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, is that even in the very lowest organism, even in the Amoeba which swims about in our own blood, there is something or other, inconceivably simple to us, which is of the same nature with our own consciousness, although not of the same complexity. (Clifford [1874] 1901, pp. 38–39)

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I do not think this solves the mind–body problem. It does set the parameters. You are not now making mind separate from the machine, Leibniz’s object of attack, but making mind part of the material of the machine. You might think we are still no better off than the emergentist. Perhaps so. But, in a way, that comment speaks directly to my point. We have absolutely no explanation for one of the most familiar things of our universe. I find myself pushed towards a middle position, agnosticism. Belief will not do. Non-belief (of an absolute kind) is no better. I am where I am because I can not find myself anywhere else. Yet, it is not fear of making commitment. In a way, I am making as much a commitment as anyone. To the eternal search without shaky supports from outside. I argue that this entails a moral commitment as much as is claimed by believer and non-believer. The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1994) lost his faith after he read the Origin. He then wrote his great sonnet, ‘Hap.’ If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!” Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan.. . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. It is not that God is some horrible headmaster out to get me. It is rather that, even if He exists, He does not care about me. And, equally, if He does not exist, He does not care about me. This is where my agnosticism leads me. It says: ‘You are on your own. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to run your life. Spending all day sitting in front of the television doing nothing. Or getting out, creating, helping others, having a purpose-filled, worthwhile time?’ While making a rude finger, saying to God: ‘I don’t care. Any species that produced Vermeer’s paintings, Mozart’s operas, Shakespeare’s plays, Tolstoy’s novels, Emily Dickenson’s poetry has won. You lost!’ This spells existentialism as characterized by Jean-Paul Sartre. In his little essay Existentialism and Humanism (1948), he writes: Existentialism is not so much an atheism in the sense that it would exhaust itself attempting to demonstrate the nonexistence of God; rather, it affirms that even if God were to exist, it would make no difference – that is our point of view. It is not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the real problem is not one of his existence; what man needs is to rediscover himself and to comprehend that nothing can save him from himself, not even valid proof of the existence of God. (5) Reprinted from the journal

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He explains what this means for humankind: My atheist existentialism. .. declares that God does not exist, yet there is still a being in whom existence precedes essence, a being which exists before being defined by any concept, and this being is man or, as Heidegger puts it, human reality. That means that man first exists, encounters himself and emerges in the world, to be defined afterwards. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. It is man who conceives himself, who propels himself towards existence. Man becomes nothing other than what is actually done, not what he will want to be. (1) If the glove fits, wear it! Every time Sartre writes of ‘atheism,’ you can substitute ‘agnosticism.’ The sentiment is unchanged. ‘Condemned to freedom.’ That is what agnosticism means to me. I embrace it with joy. It is what it really means to be a human being.

References Aquinas, St. T. (1259–1265)1975. Summa Contra Gentiles. Translator V. J. Bourke. University of Notre Dame Press. Aquinas, S. T. (1952). Summa Theologica, I. Burns, Oates and Washbourne. Ardrey, R. (1961). African genesis: A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man. Atheneum. Calvin, J. (1960). Institutes of the Christian religion. Westminster Press. Clifford, W. K. (1901). Body and mind (from Fortnightly Review). In L. Stephen & F. Pollock (Eds.), Lectures and essays of the late William Kingdom Clifford (Vol. 2, pp. 1–51). Macmillan. Collins, F. S. (2007). Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief. Free Press. Coyne, J. A. (2015). Faith versus fact: Why science and religion are incompatible. Viking. Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. John Murray. Dawkins, R. (1997). Is science a religion? The Humanist 57, no. 1. Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the rainbow: Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder. Houghton Mifflin. Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Dostoevsky, F. (2003). The brothers Karamazov. Penguin. Fry, D. P. (2014). War, peace, and human nature: The challenge of achieving scientific objectivity. In D. P. Fry (Ed.), War, peace, and human nature: The convergence of evolutionary and cultural views (pp. 1–21). Oxford University Press. Gish, D. (1973). Evolution: The fossils say no! Creation-Life. Haldane, J. B. S. (1927). Possible worlds and other essays. Chatto and Windus. Hardy, T. (1994). Collected poems. Wordsworth Poetry Library. Heidegger, M. (1959). An introduction to metaphysics. Yale University Press. Hick, J. (2005). An autobiography. Oneworld Publications. Huxley, T. H. (1894). Science and Christian tradition. Macmillian. Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding unscientific postscript to philosophical fragments, Volume 1 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol 12.1). Translators H. V. Hong, and E. H. Hong. Princeton University Press. Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Leibniz, G. F. W. (1714). Monadology and other philosophical essays. Bobbs-Merrill. Lewis, C. S. (1955). Surprised by joy: The shape of my early life. Geoffrey Bles. Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. Methuen. Maienschein, J., & Ruse, M. (Eds.). (1998). Biology and ethics. Cambridge University Press. Ruse, M. (1973). The philosophy of biology. Hutchinson. Ruse, M. (1979a). The Darwinian revolution: Science red in tooth and claw. University of Chicago Press.

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Confessions of an Agnostic: Apologia Pro Vita Sua Ruse, M. (1979b). Sociobiology: Sense or nonsense? Reidel. Ruse, M. (1986). Taking Darwin seriously: A naturalistic approach to philosophy. Blackwell. Ruse, M. (Ed.). (1988). But is it science? The philosophical question in the creation/evolution controversy. Prometheus. Ruse, M. (1994). Evolutionary naturalism. Routledge. Ruse, M. (1996). Monad to man: The concept of progress in evolutionary biology. Harvard University Press. Ruse, M. (2001). Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The relationship between science and religion. Cambridge University Press. Ruse, M. (2005). The evolution-creation struggle. Harvard University Press. Ruse, M. (2006). Darwinism and its discontents. Cambridge University Press. Ruse, M. (2008). Oxford handbook of the philosophy of biology. Oxford University Press. Ruse, M., editor. (2009). Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and contemporary readings. Princeton University Press. Ruse, M. (2012). The philosophy of human evolution. Cambridge University Press. Ruse, M. (2015). Atheism: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press. Ruse, M. (2016). Evolution and religion: A dialogue (2nd ed.). Rowman and Littlefield. Ruse, M. (2017a). On purpose. Princeton University Press. Ruse, M. (2017b). Darwinism as religion: What literature tells us about evolution. Oxford University Press. Ruse, M. (2017c). A Darwinian pilgrim’s early progress. Journal of Cognitive Historiography 4, no. 151–164. Ruse, M. (2017d). A Darwin’s pilgrim’s middle progress. Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 2019. 4, no. 165–179. Ruse, M. (2017e). A Darwinian pilgrim’s late progress. Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 4, 180–198. Ruse, M. (2018). The problem of war: Darwinism, Christianity, and their battle to understand human conflict. Oxford University Press. Ruse, M. (2019). A meaning to life. Oxford University Press. Ruse, M. (2021). A philosopher looks at human beings. Cambridge University Press. Ruse, M., & Richards, R. J., Editors. (2017). The Cambridge handbook of evolutionary ethics. Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J. P. (1948). Existentialism and humanism. Haskell House Publishers Ltd.. Segerstrale, U. (1986). Colleagues in conflict: An in vitro analysis of the sociobiology debate. Biology and Philosophy, 1, 53–88. Sussman, R. W. (2013). Why the legend of the killer ape never dies. In D. P. Fry (Ed.), War, peace, and human nature: The convergence of evolutionary and cultural views (pp. 97–111). Oxford University Press. Whitcomb, J. C., & Morris, H. M. (1961). The genesis flood: The biblical record and its scientific implications. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Sophia (2021) 60:593–606 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00879-9

The Missing God of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: Too late for God; too Early for the Gods—with a vignette from Indian Philosophy Purushottama Bilimoria1,2,3 Accepted: 11 August 2021 / Published online: 15 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract The essay explores how God is conceived—if only just—in the works of two existentialist philosophers: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, one considers the mutual convergence and disarming divergence of their respective positions. In 1919, Martin Heidegger announced his distancing of himself from the Catholic faith, apparently liberating himself to pursue philosophical research unfettered by theological allegiances. Thereafter, the last of the Western metaphysicians (in the classical genre) takes his hammer to the ‘destruktion of onto-theology’—the piety of Greek philosophy and of Hellenized Judaeo-Christianity. The essay argues that Heidegger provided both the platform and challenges reins for his long-time friend Karl Jaspers’ thinking on the question of the absconditus—‘absconded into hiding; hence lost, or better, the missing condition’—of the transcendent. One might avail one’s critical perspective by considering ideas from Indian philosophy (and mildly postcolonial doubt) to balance the respective positions of the two humanist-Germanic protagonists. We proceed so with a view to reconfiguring the predominant monotheistically conceived conception of the deity, the place and limits of belief and philosophical faith, and the future of postdivinism in the global axis. Keywords  Heidegger · Jaspers · Nothing · God · Gods · Devatās · Theism · Nontheism · Agnosticism · Philosophical faith · Indian philosophy Chapter 8 was originally published as Bilimoria, P. Sophia (2021) 60: 593–606. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00879-9.

Made possible with support of Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN), Moscow, and Ministry of the Russian Federation (Reference No. 075–15-2021–603). Paper presented at the Karl Jaspers Society of North America (KJSNA) Session at the World Congress of Philosophy in Athens, Greece, 2013; the unedited text was printed in the Brazilian Portuguese journal pragMATIZES – Revista Latino Americana de Estudos em Cultura, 2017, vol 7 no 3 http://www.pragmatizes.uff.br/index.php/ojs/article/view/175. The subreptive play on Heidegger’s adage is explained at the end of essay. * Purushottama Bilimoria [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article Reprinted from the journal

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Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot. Estragon: (despairingly) Ah! Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful! Vladimir: Let’s wait and see what he says. Estragon: Who? Vladimir: Godot. Estragon: Good idea. Vladimir: Let’s wait till we know exactly how we stand. Estragon: On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes. (‘Waiting for Godot’, Samuel Beckett)

Martin Heidegger: Too Late for God Heidegger worried whether transcendence is comprehensible without any specific reference to God. What might be meant by ‘transcendence’ is the unfettered pursuit of the question of being and the quest for freedom and authenticity of being. This directive is consistent with the existentialist critique of Kantian and Cartesian metaphysics. Karl Jaspers’ pronouncement that at the root of existential philosophy—Existenzphilosophie—is an inscrutable mystery of Being, the ‘Missing God,’ that runs deeper than our conventional categories of theism, atheism, or agnosticism and may present itself as an alternative to the same quest that Heidegger underscored, but with significant difference in details and consequences.1 Heidegger is both inspiring and at the same time disturbing. After the ‘Death of God’ (the Nietzschean and Hegelian tropes), what remains? Is there room for theological existentialism of any sort? Heidegger here will be the hovering ghost; and for the perspective of Karl Jaspers, I shall be drawing from his 1951 lectures (which were broadcast) that include a section on ‘The Idea of God.’2 Here, I offer two contrary observations: (1) Heidegger, the last of the great metaphysicians, poses a radical and controversial challenge to philosophers by calling them to do without God in an unfettered pursuit of the question of being (through his ‘destruktion of onto-theology’ and his espousal of the metaphysic of non-being) and, (2) this exclusion nevertheless leaves room for a form of philosophical reflection on the religious, and the ensuing discourse concerning—not the God of philosophers as such, but rather—a notion of divinity in the experience of beings as beings, i.e., in a phenomenological mode (exemplified most clearly in Heidegger’s 1920/1921 lectures on the phenomenology of religious life).3 This is congruent with Existentialism’s attempt to find this ground from within the human form as the contextual whole through which a world appears. 1

  Nichol 2012; the specific cipher ‘Missing God’ arose in response to David Nichol in the seminar of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America (KJSNA) at the APA (American Philosophical Association) Pacific Division conference in Seattle (2012), as a more fitting rendering of deus absconditus in place of ‘the unknown God’ or even ‘divine hiddenness.’ See P. Bilimoria 2012. 2   Published as ‘Karl Jaspers, The Way of Wisdom (1951)’. 3   Issued as ‘Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life (2010)’.

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At the outset, I would like to simply state (as the argument has already been rehearsed in detail in a prior study)4 that I believe that the notion of Nothingness is more important to Heidegger than the ancient or classical grand narrative of transcendence which he castigates as the Western (Judeo-Christian) mistake of what he calls onto-theo-logos. What he means is that all of Western metaphysics, and Christianity and Judaism—and we might add Islam—has a doctrine of Being qua presence, in contrast to a pre-Socratic understanding of Being qua absence and its concealment. What starts as Being fully present in Plato ends up as God in the Hellenized Testaments as fully present personal Being.5 Heidegger traces the initial (by no mentions historically first)6 motivations in Plato’s move to settle for an enduring transcendent form (eidos) that makes possible the making of things, that which is ‘to be,’ hence possessing beingness. Aristotle’s science of ‘on hēi on’ sets out to investigate ‘being as being,’ its nature and qualities, etc., in an aporetic ontology of categories (Heidegger, 1929, 1993, 2–3). Neo-platonism seeks to transcendent being and non-being in the metaphysics of the One (to hen). In the next step, the distinction hedged between essence and existence in ancient thought is integrated in Thomas Aquinas’ analogia entis suggesting a simulacrum of the divine in the creaturely beings and correlatively of finite entities with the divine ‘subsistent being’ (esse subsistens) (Heidegger, 1996, 4). In other words, as Heidegger notes: ‘In medieval times, God became identified with the Being of entities and was depicted…as an all-powerful causal agent who planned, calculated, and produced ‘the relatively stable and independent presence’ of entities’ (ibid). The larger the looming threat of non-being—even of the transient or contingent nature of beings—the more the effort to posit a substantive der Grund (groundholding) of permanence. With Eckhart, Wolff, and Descartes, being takes an epistemological turn and becomes that which is indubitably cognizable as mind and Spirit-Being over the mechanical world. Though this tight hold is somewhat loosened with Kant—vide the non-presentification of the thing-in-itself—the focus shifts to conditions for the possibility of knowing Being in all its appearances and manifestations. Now think of the short step also from Husserl’s phenomenology of transcendence to Heidegger’s ideal of Dasein (humanly be-ing there) making its own authentic existence as a supplement (complementum) out of the remnant possibilitatis suggested in Greek philosophy and after. Here, being—‘to be’—recalls, retrospectively, and portends, prospectively, its own noneist statis in the thrownness-unto-death, the great leveler of all actualizations. So ‘what is there (“to be”)?’ for Heidegger becomes: ‘What would its absence (nonabiding presence) be like (“to be not”)?’.

4

  I discuss this in my recent paper ‘Why is there Nothing rather than Something? An Essay in the Comparative Metaphysic of Non-Being,’ for the Max Charlesworth Festschrift in Sophia, 51(4), 2012, 509– 30; slightly revised version in Bilimoria, (2019) 5  Perhaps Heidegger overlooked the impact of Zoroastrianism in the Middle East that followed the expanding Persian Empire, with its still somewhat crude form of monotheism with dualistic elements (eschewing polytheism which was the dominant trend in certain parts of the pre-axial world and continuing in India). 6  The Upaniṣads in India surely preceded Plato in the similar quest for the One (hence Brahman). Reprinted from the journal

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Around 1919, Martin Heidegger writes to Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and family friend, distancing himself from the Catholic faith of his youth. He no longer wished to be thought of as a Catholic philosopher but simply as a philosopher, free to pursue his philosophical research unfettered by extra-philosophical allegiances. However, the lectures on St. Paul, and on St. Augustine especially, show that in the early 1920s, Heidegger had not yet lost sight of the philosophical potency of the standpoint of faith. By the time of writing Being and Time, however, his judgment had hardened, and the matter had been settled. While he clearly maintained his regard for theology and even entertained hopes for its revival as a discipline, he had reached the decisive verdict: Genuine philosophy cannot take root in the soil of faith. And yet he was opposed to its polar opposite in humanism or the humanist project of the kind that the French existentialists, especially Sartre, took up. The question then arises: Is transcendence—that is characteristic of being-in-theworld—comprehensible without reference to God? Could it even be that the most profound questioning of Heidegger’s own thinking is sustained by a disavowed relation to the deus absconditus, a divine interlocutor for whom the ‘impossible possibility’ of death was only ever a weak substitution? And might that not remain a radical philosophical potentiality within the standpoint of what philosophers of religion today call ‘propositional faith’ (as distinct from belief) despite Heidegger’s disapprobation of faith—or was it abstract belief—as the mortal enemy of philosophical thought? But faith, and transcendence on which it is pivoted, do not escape the chaos and snares of contingency: How could it if its non-finiteness is not affirmed? It causes disruption, dislocation, and disfiguring; the Buddhist Chandrakīrti (ninth century CE) confessed to this. Heidegger’s thinking on non-being—the Nothing—is nowhere more saliently and forcefully presented than in his inaugural lectures of 1929 when he succeeds his teacher Edmund Husserl in Freiburg University (delivered to the faculty in the grand auditorium), entitled Was ist Metaphysik? (just two years later than Being & Time, 1927). He complains that science only examines beings, and nothing further; it rejects ‘nothing’ read as ‘not-ing’ and ‘nullity’ (das Nicht), as a ‘phantasm’ (1993, 95–96). And thus he pleads (to the chagrin of Carnap who elsewhere comments on this passage): What should be examined are beings only, and besides that—nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings, and beyond that—nothing. What about this nothing?…Is the nothing given only because the ‘not’, i.e., negation, is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the ‘not’ given only because the nothing is given?…We assert that the nothing is more original than the ‘not’ and negation… Where shall we seek the nothing? Where will we find the nothing?…[W]e do know the nothing…Anxiety reveals the nothing…that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was ‘really’—nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself— as such—was there… How is it with the nothing?…The nothing itself nihilates. (Heidegger, 1929, 1993, 95–6). So mired with God as Being rather than the sum-total of all being/s, Christian dogma, he proceeds to tells us, denies the truth of the proposition ex nihilo nihil fit

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and gives a twist to the meaning of Nothing, so that it now comes to mean the absolute absence of all ‘being’ outside of God’s existence: ex nihilo fit—ens creatum—the created being is made out of nothing. ‘Nothing’ is now the conceptual opposite of what truly and authentically ‘is’; it becomes the summum ens, God as enin-creatum. Here, too, the interpretation of Nothing points to the fundamental concept of whatis. In both cases, the questions concerning Being (Sein) and Nothing as such remain unasked. Hence, we need not be worried by the difficulty that if God creates ‘out of nothing,’ he above all must be able to relate himself to Nothing. But if God is God, he cannot know Nothing, assuming that the ‘Absolute’ excludes itself from all nullity. Not wishing to lose sight of the work of Being, Heidegger reformulates the old proposition ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ so that it runs thus: ‘ex nihilo omne ens qua. ens fit: every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of nothing, Only in the Nothingness of Da-Sein can what-is-in totality…come to itself.’ (This is the motif that perhaps inspired Sartre, who some say stole the wind from Heidegger’s sails, and dubbed his own magnum opus, ‘Being and Nothingness’: what else could there be if Being is erased?) Contrary to general perception, Heidegger’s ontology is not one of Nothingness as such; he is not a nihilist, far from it (he distances himself from a ‘Philosophy of Nothing’ in the Postscript); rather, Being as Da-Sein remains very much the subject and project of metaphysics, and of theology too if you will. This latter emphasis takes us to Karl Jaspers, who was both Heidegger’s friend and his bête noire.7 To conclude this section of the discussion, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s adage ‘God is Dead’ brings to philosophical awareness a profound event that has occurred and is occurring in the history of the West; and his interpretation of this famous adage of Nietzsche becomes, from the mid-1930s, a persistent reference point for his discussion of the contemporary age as well as his discussion of the task of thinking (Heidegger, 1977). It points the way to the properly philosophical mode of being and thinking. Yet, for all this—and in contradistinction to Nietzsche—Heidegger steadfastly refuses to tell us whether or not to continue with belief in God. As the philosopher, Heidegger (somewhat reminiscent of the Buddha in the Indic-Brāhmaṇic ambience) steadfastly abstains from pronouncing on the question of God; and this means abstaining from any kind of doxastic stance, whether it be positive (God exists), negative (God does not exist), or undecided (I do not know whether God exists). Heidegger’s philosophy, therefore, cannot be properly described as theistic, atheistic, or for that matter agnostic (as Jaspers poignantly pointed out); it suspends all doxastic attitudes. Its atheism is methodological. This theological epoché might even be central enough to Heidegger’s view of philosophy for us to regard it as the decisive component of his philosophical method. In any case, the main point here is to appreciate that for Heidegger, from at least as early as 1921, such an abstention is understood to be a condition for the possibility of philosophical inquiry or thinking in his strict sense of the term.

7

  See David Farrell Krell (1978).

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Jaspers: the Idea of God Karl Jaspers, with whom Heidegger maintained a close relation as a friend and colleague (until the latter’s dubious and politically catastrophic involvement with National Socialism), explains in his 1951 broadcast on ‘The Idea of God’, that while Western theology and philosophy have reflected on Who or what is God? [M]ost philosophers of our times seem to evade the question of whether God exists. Among those who confront it, some philosophers offer logical proofs for the existence of God, while others argue that if all proofs of the existence of God can be refuted, then there is no God. Jaspers rejects both of these positions, and argues that the existence of God can neither be proved nor can it be disproved in logic or language. The supposed proofs and disproofs of God’s existence treat God as an object and are therefore invalid. These proofs and disproofs are only attempts to achieve subjective certainty through the use of fallacious modes of reasoning.8 Is God dead then? Well, not quite. According to Jaspers, we cannot make God an object of our knowledge. Still, even if we admit that we cannot know God, it doesn’t follow that we cease to philosophize or throw up our arms with the disclaimer: It is best not to talk of what we do not know, as we do not know which things we do not know.9 Hence, he takes up the oldest form of inferential proof for the existence of God: the cosmological argument. Rather than refuting the argument, Jaspers looks upon it to derive a metaphorical epigram; and this is what he curiously adduces: … [T]his notion takes on a new meaning when it is no longer regarded as a proof. Then metaphorically, in the form of an inference, it expresses awareness of the mystery inherent in the existence of the world and of ourselves in it. If we venture the thought that there might be nothing, and ask with Schelling: Why is there something and not nothing? we find that our certainty of existence is such that though we cannot determine the reason for it we are led by it to the Comprehensive, which by this very essence is and cannot not be, and through which everything else is. (Ibid, 43).

8

  In published version 1954, 42–43. Reproduced in commentary form Alex Scott (2002). https://​www.​ angel​fire.​com/​md2/​timew​arp/​jaspe​rs.​html 9   Although in modern times, something close to this double disavowal is attributed to Donald Rumsfeld, a former Congressman and US Defense Secretary (in the quaint form: ‘But there are also unknown unknowns  – the ones we don’t know we don’t know’), it could be argued that Indian theory of avidyā (nescience, ignorance) had come to a similar conclusion in that in our supposed oblivion or amnesic state that we suffer from within the contingent, repetitive, existence, we are blissfully ignorant of things we don’t even know that we do not know, i.e., we don’t know what are the right questions to ask. To give a contemporary instance, while there are many things about the COVID-19 condition and the virus that causes this infection in rapid mutations that we don’t know, and we know that we don’t know; indeed, it may well be the deniers—of COVID19 as well as of climate change and science—don’t know that they don’t know (and will probably never bring themselves to know, because they have removed themselves two-fold from the truth of the matter).

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Jaspers next ponders if our reflection on the world of things, which doubtless is beautiful, can lead us to an inference such as of the invisible hand of a grand designer. To this, he makes the following response: But if from all this abounding mystery we infer that God, the benevolent creator, exists, we must call to mind all that is ugly, disordered, base in the world. And this gives rise to fundamental attitudes for which the world is alien, frightening, terrible, and it seems as plausible to infer the existence of the devil as of God. The mystery of transcendence is not thereby solved but merely grows deeper. But what clinches the matter is the imperfectibility of the world. The world is not finished, but in continuous change; our knowledge of the world cannot be completed, the world cannot be apprehended through itself. Far from proving the existence of God, these so-called proofs mislead us into placing God within the real world, or second cosmos, which is as it were ascertained at the limits of the cosmos. Thus they obscure the idea of God. (Ibid, 44). Jaspers echoes here a return to Heidegger’s Nothingness and, despite medieval theologians, dilates on the starkly imperfect nature of the world: But they move us deeply when, leading through the concrete phenomena of the cosmos, they confront Nothingness and imperfectibility. For then they seem to admonish us not to content ourselves with the world as the sole meaning of our life in the world. (loc cit). So yes, it is true, Jaspers argues, we cannot know God; God is incomprehensible; but we can have a modicum of belief in God. We can have or entertain belief as distinct from knowledge; however, belief in God may well call for faith.10 What though warrants this call to faith, what is the source of faith, and what kind of epistemé is this? Does it have its loci in reason, cognition, clear light of mind, or the intellect, or is its radiance to be found elsewhere? Well, Jaspers asserts at this point, which might be disappointing to a deeply thinking philosopher, that ‘Freedom’ (etymologically, free from judgment or fate, dom)11 is the source of faith, and our freedom comes from God. True awareness of freedom produces certainty of the existence of God. 10

  Scott, op cit.   Passing, rather obscure, reference to the optimal freedom in the states of nirvāṇa and mokṣa is made. One might also be reminded of the soul-blues lyrics by Eric Bibb –   Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down…   Remember we walking up to heaven.   Don’t let nobody turn you ’round. (1950).   or the counterfactual:   Freedom, freedom.   Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.   Sometime I feel like I’m almost gone.   A long way from my home.   Richie Havens (1969).   (Blues by the Bay, www.kpfa.com).   ‘There is no freedom without justice and peace,’ Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr., 1958, 2017. 11

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Indeed, faith in God is not the same as knowledge of God, but we may gain a clarity of insight through philosophy which may enable us to have a comprehensive consciousness of God. Jaspers goes onto to argue that in ‘boundary situations,’ we may perceive either Being or Nothingness. And he further argues that the concept of human freedom without God, in which the will to make free choices is perceived as if it were independent of God, exemplifies the angst/anguish (using a term from Kierkegaard) of the facticity of Nothingness. If we acknowledge that we depend on God for our being, and if we accept responsibility for making our own free choices, then our awareness of our own freedom becomes an awareness of God.12 However, one wonders how can Jaspers be so certain that in perceiving or introspecting the phenomenology of our own freedom, we can arrive at a certitude about the being of God? Heidegger chided Jaspers precisely on this sort of claim as smacking of extreme subjectivism, a veritable misinterpretation of phenomenology, even as one stoops to the lure of grandiose transcendentalism. Let us press on with the discussion on faith, with a question. Is this the same faith as that of the religious, sectarian, and evangelical adepts? That is, does Jaspers mean to collapse the conditions for the possibility of philosophical awareness of the divine with religious and theological faith? Faith in Jaspers’ philosophical thinking is a category that stands squarely within the pure conceptual-metaphysical schema and only just touches the borders of the spiritual, albeit via Nothingness, which it must overcome in ontology not in as it were the heart as such. Let me go on with this and develop a critical background from contemporary philosophy of religion and some cross-cultural refractions that will help unpack Jaspers’ thinking on this matter. First up, there is an epistemological question of how much more weight can we give to ‘faith’ vis-à-vis belief. By a twist of faith, Jaspers collapses the two. Surely, we reduce whole junks of knowledge claims to beliefs and represent these in propositions and sentences and then begin to interrogate or connect them logically with other sets of beliefs for their coherence, correspondence with reality, and so on. In the old-style philosophical theology, ‘faith’ belonged to matters religious, a religious way of life, commitment to ultimate values and some ultimate inexplicable and ineffable reality. Faith in that sense would be personal, even a matter of feeling, emotions, evocation, and subjective disposition, and it has the most tangential connection with the proposition and thought in which it might be articulated and expressed, but not necessarily so. ‘Belief’ just might be tagged onto it as we assign labels to certain select messages in our overflowing inbox. In other words, we may do this in deference to ersatz folk psychology but not in strict philosophical thinking, unless we are prepared to subject the contents of the belief which is a disposition to form thought or concepts to rational scrutiny and the criteria of justified true belief or unjustified false belief, where faith as portending some kind of possibility might just linger. God is not what we may see with our eyes, not as factual elements of a deity, but as symbolic ciphers of human possibility, or symbols of transcendence, as the 12

 Ibid.

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human existential possibility of inner change, reversal, and transformation. Wherever this cipher is hypostatically defined as mere positive fact of belief, he concluded, however, that the freedom of transcendence obtained through the sympathetic interpretation and recuperation of this cipher is obstructed. Jaspers beholds the same transcendental thrust in world philosophies across the axial civilizations13 as well, which he articulates in volume I of the tome The Great Philosophers, entitled, ‘Socrates, Buddha, Confucius Jesus,’ and to that metaphysical galaxy, he adds Lao-tse, Mencius, Chuang-tse, Ashoka, and Nāgārjuna. These great individuals and thinkers, he avers, connect us to the depth of the transcendence, to moral resolve, to seeing substance in the world, and to clarity of knowledge, but also to the tragic in the lebenswelt.14

Indian Philosophical Response: Too early for the Gods Many cultures have struggled with the same questions and hit upon the sense of the tragic, radical tragedy if you will. We note in passing the empathic ruminations on the carnage wrought by the great war in the Indian epic The Mahābhārata; one might cite Gautama the Buddha who was profoundly overcome by the pervasiveness of suffering (duḥkha) in the world. Indeed, there were Confucius, the Taoists, and going back further in the Indian tradition, the Ṛgvedic bards in their unsettling angst attempting to ascertain whether the gods had not cursed humanity to bear pain and depravation for all eternity. But why and how is it that almost none eschewed or skipped the possibility of transcendental access, even if theism (i.e., the belief in the grace and benevolence of a personal Omni-God) was not available or not accepted (e.g., by Confucius, the Buddha, Nāgārjuna, the Jainas, and the Mīmāṃsā and Sāṃkhya, two prominent atheistic schools within Hinduism)? Will a time come for a civilization when tragic knowledge no longer suffices as the ultimate expression of deliverance (Bilimoria, 2012, 43)? This explains why world saviours such as Jesus, Mahāvīra, or the Buddha, Mohammad [pbu], and Guru Nanak offer messages of universal liberation for humanity. Theism is not a universal project or narrative, and it need not to be the kingpin for the wheel of saṃsāra either; hence, for that reason alone, theism need not to be the bugbear of religious existentialism. I think Jaspers comes close to this global sensibility; his insights here, not far from Heidegger’s, come closer in kind if not in intent to that which we might discern from a broader historical archaeology of human existential experiences, the tragic and the aesthetic. A Jasperian might argue that strictly within the historical perspective, the radical atheistic solution is but a small drop in the ocean, a slice within the history 13

  The Axial Period is the span of 600  years from 800-200BCE when there is a historical shift in the world towards the teleological or spiritual evolution of the human species, and this is demonstrated in the rise of the Buddha, Zarathustra, Confucius, Pythagoras, and Jesus following a number of Hebrew prophets (Karl Jaspers, 1953). We should mention here the ancient Kojiki sect in pre-Tokagawa Japan, mitigated later by Neo-Confucian influence, in their concept of tama-musuhi (musubi no mi-tama) with its worship of ancestral deities; See Bilimoria (2013). 14   See special issue of Existenz, Introduction to The Great Philosophers Karl Jaspers 1883—1969, 12 (1) Spring 2017, 2, 9, 43; https://​exist​enz.​us/​volum​es/​Vol.​12-1 Reprinted from the journal

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of human evolution (not in biological terms but in terms of the development of consciousness and the political). Or as Charles Taylor (2007) has shown in his monumental work, modernity (including early stages of post-modernity) and secularism—the Age of the Secular—has a great deal to do with this; the pressure of the scientific age, the suspicious marginalization of the sacred because of the excesses of the church and Christendom, forced the post-enlightened sensibilities (in the plural) to take cover under anything but the sacred heretofore. It is a particularly Western response in the coming age of technology, the culture of techno-science as Heidegger also asked. Taylor, by the way, thinks that a society would be deemed secular qua secularity or not, ‘in virtue of the conditions of experience and search for the spiritual’ (ibid, 20); and as David Nichols (2012, 37) points out rightly in my reading, ‘whether existentialists fall into “theistic” or “atheistic” [or “agnostic”] camps, they share this much in common, [namely,] a rejection of the God of Western metaphysics.’15 Neither God nor religion is the specific preserve of the West. Conventional philosophy of religion and religious studies as practiced mostly in Western academies are centered on the notion that the phenomenon called ‘religion’ has been constitutive of the philosophical and cultural frame of the West; religions in the rest of the world are of interest, as Kant also believed, for an anthropological and ethnographic perspective on the ‘other.’ A truly global-critical philosophy of religion would seek to undo this bias, perhaps even overturn the assumptions on their head. And indeed, as the editors of this special issue note in their Introduction citing Michael Martin, certain forms of atheism can have strands of the religious or spiritual within them; the existentialist philosopher, Robert C. Solomon (2002), had argued for a kind of spirituality for the skeptic (whom he took to be largely atheistic, if not at least non-theistic). Besides, it is difficult to place pantheism and panentheism, even henotheism or a theistic-monism (as in the Hindu Bhavagadgītā), squarely within the fold of theism as these do not ‘progress or evolve’ (in R. C Zaehner’s sense) towards monotheism, which is really the target of the atheists— and not the ‘softer’ forms of theism—as we have shown Jaspers to be at pains to point out. Even within predominantly theistic (again, in the sense broader than monotheistic) traditions, there can be strands of atheism (or its variations in a/theism, non-theism) that sit comfortably alongside each other. They could even be in some dependent relation—as in the case of the Mīmāṃsā within the Brāhmaṇical smoky maṇḍapa (canonical canopy). This is so because it is the Mīmāṃsā that provides the bedrock argument for the Vedas (preeminent scriptures) being authorless (apauruṣeya, and therefore perennial). This rejection of God by the Mīmāṃsā scholastics is intended to block any attribution of  possible authorship of the Vedas to one supreme deity (Bilimoria, 1989, 2001); yet at the same time, the devatās, gods, are needed as functionaries, or remote agencies, to help bring to fruition expected

15

  See also Raphael Lataster, The Case Against Theism Why the Evidence Disproves God’s Existence, Dordrecht: Springer, 2017.

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results from the illocutionary performance of mantras and obligatory sacrificial rites, albeit with a deontic disposition. The  Mīmāṃsā  would object to being categorized as atheistic in the same sense in which secular atheism (especially postenlightenment) may be described, because the Mīmāṃsā still has belief in—albeit effervescent, hence devatā—reality of the kindred of Greek gods whom Heidegger did not completely abandon either (Bilimoria, 2021a). Elements of reverential veneration tantamount to personal worship are present in both Jaina and Buddhist religions as well; if they were so fully atheistic, why have they been considered part or pillars of World Religions, and only lately of World Philosophies?16 Worship may also include forms of supplication generally called prayer; but the question arises whether atheists (in the modern Western framing) should excuse themselves and never engage in prayer or participate with full intent in prayers (other than a collegial or family-friendly gesture of tolerantly sitting through them—as for example at a religious funerary rite such as Jewish Shiva or the wedding ceremony of a devout couple— but without undergoing the requisite preparations, such as fasting and refraining from alcohol consumption for certain days prior to the event). It would be interesting to ask: Do the agnostic, non-theist, and even atheist have an obligation to pray? John Caputo (1997), John Lemos (1998), and Travis Dumsday (2012) believe they do, answering for each. The case gets stronger as COVID-19 and an increase in death by cancer, hunger, homelessness, and climate change are being witnessed all around the world (the otherwise privileged ‘First World’ included). God might have ‘been and gone,’ as my good friend and colleague Patrick Hutchings puts it in his elegant article in this special issue of the journal; but we say the need for empathic supplication and prayer may not have gone away with the absconding or absent Almighty. That is precisely why the subtitle ‘Too Late for God, Too Early for the Gods’ of this discussion is a subreptive play (in the sense of reversal) on Heidegger’s adage: ‘Too late for the gods; too early for God.’17

Conclusion Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (1946) invites us to reconsider the divine in the light of an ontological difference between Being and beings. Both Jaspers and Heidegger take their theological cues from the standpoint of the ‘missing God,’ where God necessarily remains hidden, a self-concealing source for all appearances. For this, an ecstatic quest for the concept of ‘God’ in the description of human existence, and more generally in our experience of presence and absence,

16

 See Ninian Smart, 1999; http://​www.​jainp​edia.​org/​resou​rces/​search.​html?​tx_​solr%​5Bq%​5D=​worsh​ ip&​id=​813&L=0. 17   See also study of Heidegger’s interest in and overlaps with Indian thought, plus conversations with his Indian philosopher friend, J L Mehta, and Wilhelm Halbass on both: Bilimoria (2021a, b; 2001) and Jackson (1993).

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is argued for. And this is a veritable contrast to the approach that pivots human experience on tragedy, absurdity, meaningless, and Angst; although we might add, the quest may begin here but need not end thus. ‘The poet or mythmaker supplies us with the earliest responses to wonder by describing the essences as deities’ (Ibid). Textual history of a few non-Western traditions might underscore that better (e.g., Bilimoria, 2013, 2021a). Jaspers kept a book of critical notes on Heidegger, and he routinely described Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in a tone of moral-humanistic disapprobation; yet a common sentiment shared by Heidegger and Jaspers is that transcendence can intrude (that is, be something of an intrusion) in human consciousness, albeit as an experience of the absolute insufficiency of this consciousness for the task of interpreting its own originary or metaphysical character. Historically speaking, we are at the apotheosis of a crisis in transcendence, i.e., a crisis of the metaphysics of consciousness. Jaspers’ own metaphysics is always a ‘post-Kantian metaphysic’: It is a negative metaphysics. As such, it resists all the proposition that human reason might afford itself an account of metaphysical essences. That is turn would define the realm of human meaning formed by its difference against positive metaphysical knowledge, but which nonetheless sees reason, in the Kierkegaardian manner, as driven by a despairing desire for metaphysical transcendence. In this respect, I venture to suggest that Jaspers, on the coattails of Heidegger who himself is haunted by Hölderlin, anticipates the kinds of move we have seen arise toward the end of the twentieth century in critical philosophy of religion, such as ‘reasonable unbelief’ (not to be confused with ‘rational disbelief’) wherein seekers have exhausted all possible arguments that might provide them with any convincing ground for believing.18 And as to faith, I have argued that since the Enlightenment, the Disenchantment, and the Secular Age, there has always been a question about the promises and future of faith, albeit until then understood mostly as a religious prerogative or theological proclivity, a spiritual, even transcendental, or metaphysical alignment, and not as such as a proper philosophical disposition. In a sense, as I have shown, Jaspers is fully aware of the near impossibility of the return of an unrequited faith any more than a fully embraced return of religion unlike that of the pre-Enlightenment era. Nonetheless, I believe that Jaspers is well placed just on the edge of Enlightenment, in which space faith, even if just a modicum of it, has not vanished from humanity’s quest for transcendence. While there is still a seeking to be anchored in the challenging realities of existence and Nothingness, one has to recognize this as being at once a clever and a cunning move. And to be sure, there are saints and martyrs of philosophical faith to the east of Athens and Rome—as Jaspers demonstrate in his recurrent extensive references to the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-Tzu, among others, as exemplary philosophers of faith (or if I may risk a parody: All Souls of the Faithful Unbelievers). Even the irenic Socrates, the social Jesus, the reformist

18

  See J.L. Schellenberg (2015) and Roberto Di Ceglie, ‘No-Fault Unbelief,’ Sophia, forthcoming 2022.

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Mohammad, and a resistant Gandhi were each engaged in communicative solidarity and philosophical faith of sort.19 It is perhaps not humanism, nor posthumanism, or postmodernism (interlooped to postcolonialism), but in the expectant postdivinism, with its onward march backwards from the future, to which we might look and upon which we await in effable silence. Acknowledgements  I wish to express gratitude to participants at the Karl Jaspers Society of North America (KJSNA) Session in World Congress of Philosophy in Athens, Greece (2013), for their critical comments and to an anonymous reviewer for Sophia,  and also Colette Walker for earnest editorial help.  I dedicate this work to Prof. J. N.  Mohanty who taught me Phenomenology and Heidegger, and to Patrick Hutchings who taught me to doubt, and entertain reasonable unbelief, with a modicum of philosophical mischief.

References Bilimoria, P. (1989). The idea of Authorless Revelation (Apauruṣeya). In R. W. Perrett (Ed.), Indian Philosophy of Religion (pp. 143–166). Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bilimoria, P. (2001). Hindu doubts about God: Towards a Mīmāṃsā deconstruction. In R. W. Perret (Ed.), Philosophy of Religion (pp. 87–106). Garland Publishing Inc. Bilimoria, P. (2012). Comments on David Nichols: ‘The God of the existentialist philosophers’. Existenz, 7(2), 52–56. Bilimoria, P. (2013). Tomoko Iwasawa’s Tama in Japanese Myth. Existenz an International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics and the Arts, 7(2), 15–20. Bilimoria, P. (2019). ‘Why is there Nothing rather than Something?’ An Essay in the Comparative Metaphysics of Non-Being. In P. Wong, S. Bloor, P. Hutchings, & P. Bilimoria (Eds.), Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth (pp. 79–197). Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions (Series). Springer. Bilimoria, P. (2021a). Māntric effect, effervescent devatā-s, noetic supplications, and apūrva in the Mīmāṃsā. In R. D. Sherma & P. Bilimoria (Eds.), Contemplative Studies and Hinduism Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship (pp. 178–194). Routledge. Bilimoria, P. (2021b). After Comparative Philosophy: Discussion of “Wilhelm Halbfass and the Purposes of Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” by Dimitry Shevchenko’. Philosophy East & West, 7(3), 815–829. Caputo, J. (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without religion. Indiana University Press. Di Ceglie, R. (2022). ‘No-fault unbelief’, Sophia, forthcoming. Dumsday, T. (2012). Why (most) atheists have a duty to pray. Sophia, 51(1), 59–70. Heidegger, M. (1929). Was ist Metaphysik? F. Cohen Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1993). What is metaphysics? In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic Writings (pp. 89–110). HarperCollins. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), Joan Stambaugh trans. SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. (1946, 1978). Letter on Humanism. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic Writings: Nine Key Essays, plus the Introduction to Being and Time, trans (p. 208). Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’. In W. Lovitt (Ed.), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans (pp. 53–112) Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (2010). The phenomenology of religious life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Indiana University Press. Jackson, W. (1993). J L Mehta on Heidegger, Hermeneutics and the Indian Tradition.  E J Brill.

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 From author’s seminar essay ‘Philosophical Humanity and the Future of Faith,’ being a response to the book, H. Wautischer et  al. (eds) (2012), Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity, at the  Karl  Jaspers  Society of  North  America (KJSNA) Session, APA (American Philosophical Association), Pacific Division, San Francisco, April 2013. Reprinted from the journal

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P. Bilimoria Jaspers, K. (1951). ‘The idea of God’ Broadcast Lectures. q.v. Jaspers, 1954; Scott, 2002. Jaspers, K. (1953). The axial period. The Origin and Goal of History (pp. 1–21). Yale University Press. Jaspers, K. (1954). Way to Wisdom: An introduction to philosophy, translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. (reprints 1960, 1964, 2003). Jaspers, K. (2010). Way to wisdom: An introduction to philosophy, http://​www.​archi​ve.​org/​stream/​wayto​ wisdo​mintr​o00ja​sp/​wayto​wisdo​mintr​o00ja​sp_​djvu.​txt. Accessed 11 Sept 2021. King Jr. Martin Luther. (1958, 2017). My pilgrimage to nonviolence on Gandhi’s legacy (based on Stride Toward Freedom) (Edited with Introduction by Clay Carlson). Beacon Press. Krell, D. F. (1978). The Heidegger-Jaspers relationship. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 9(2), 126–129. Lemos, J. (1998). An agnostic defence of obligatory prayer. Sophia, 37(2), 70–87. Nichols, D. P. (2012). The God of the existentialist philosophers: Fate, freedom, and the mystery. Existenz, 7(2), 36–44. Schellenberg, J. L. (2015). The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy’s new challenge to belief in God. Oxford University Press. Scott, A. (2002). Karl Jaspers’s Way to Wisdom. https://​www.​angel​fire.​com/​md2/​timew​arp/​jaspe​rs.​html. Accessed 1 Sept 2021. Smart, N. (1999). Dimensions of the sacred: An anatomy of the world’s beliefs. University of California Press. Solomon, R. C. (2002). Spirituality for the skeptic. Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Wautischer, H., Olson, A. M., Walters, G. J. (2012). Philosophical faith and the future of humanity. Springer.

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Authors and Affiliations Purushottama Bilimoria1,2,3 1

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

2

Indian Philosophy, RUDN University, Moscow, Russia

3

San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA



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Sophia (2021) 60:607–622 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00867-z

Atheism is Nothing but an Expression of Buddha‑Nature Gereon Kopf1,2,3 Accepted: 3 June 2021 / Published online: 16 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract The theism-atheism debate is foreign to many Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers such as the Japanese Zen Master Dōgen (1200–1253). Nevertheless, his philosophy of ‘expression’ (dōtoku) is able to shine a new light on the various incarnations of this debate throughout history. This paper will explore a/theism from Dōgen’s philosophical standpoint. Dōgen introduces the notion of ‘expression’ to describe the concomitant vertical and horizontal relationships of the religious project, namely the relationship between the individual and the divine as well as the relationship among a multiplicity of individuals, each of which Dōgen conceives of as an expression of the divine and/ or the oneness of the cosmos. Dōgen’s philosophy presupposes the ‘way of emptiness’ (śūnyatāvāda) and Chengguan’s (738–839) ‘four dharma worlds’ (sifajie). To Dōgen, the former indicates the conventional nature of predication and signification, while the latter denotes the existential interwovenness of numerous individuals and the divine oneness of the cosmos. Such a philosophy implies that all truth claims and philosophical positions are mere intellectual and discursive constructions that are formulated against a perceived other. Therefore, Dōgen observes laconically that ‘when one side is expressed, the other is obscured’ or, as Dōgen says elsewhere, ‘when expression is expressed, nonexpression is not expressed.’ Dōgen’s philosophical framework provides some interesting insights about one or more discourses on atheism: Again, the basic assumption is that all philosophical paradigms, systems, and positions are devoid of an absolute truth value, framed in a specific cultural and historical context which they express, and formulated vis-à-vis a perceived other. In this paper, I will look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) atheism from the perspective of Dōgen’s philosophical standpoint. Concretely, I will present Nietzsche’s position on his own terms, translate his philosophy into Dōgen’s terminology, interpret his philosophy from the standpoint of Dōgen’s philosophical approach, and assess the utility of such an exercise. I believe that such a project enables us to read theism through the eyes of atheism, atheism through the eyes of theism, both through the eyes of Dōgen, and Dōgen through the eyes of the a/ theism debate. In this last section, I will introduce the language of Nishida Kitarō Chapter 9 was originally published as Kopf, G. Sophia (2021) 60: 607–622. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00867-z.

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(1870–1945) who attempted a similar project in his The Logic of Basho and the Religious Worldview. The goal of this project is to determine what atheism denies, what atheism contributes, and why a multi-faceted and multi-cultural engagement of atheism is important today. Keywords  Friedrich Nietzsche · Linji Yixuan · Nishida Kitarō · Mark C. Taylor · Dōgen · Atheism · God is dead · See the Buddha – kill the Buddha · Chan · Zen · Buddhism · Postmodern a/theology · Philosophy of expression · Non-essentialism

Introduction1 In the middle of the previous century, many prominent promoters and scholars of Buddhism in the Anglophone world, among them D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), suggested that Buddhism is either atheistic or non-theistic. Both claims are quite difficult to uphold since not only many Buddhist venerate gods (Skrt.: devās), but there are also quite a few devotional forms of Buddhism that worship a personified absolute such as Amitābha Buddha (Jap.: Amida nyorai), Mahāvairocana Buddha (Jap.: Dainichi nyorai), and/or various savior figures such as Avalokiteśvara (Chin.: Guanyin, Jap: Kannon) Bodhisattva. While the forms of Buddhism are diverse and could be described as polytheistic, monotheistic, henotheistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, and atheistic, respectively, it is probably more appropriate to contend that the focus on the number and kind of the deities that populate the temples of Buddhist institutions and the pantheons of Buddhist mythologies is, at best, secondary to the various Buddhist projects. To be precise, the theism-atheism debate is not only foreign but also irrelevant to many if not all pre-modern Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers. But this does not mean that Mahāyāna Buddhism has nothing to contribute to this debate. To the contrary, I believe that a perspective that is not invested in either side of this debate can shine a new and perhaps even illuminating light on the philosophical positions of theism and atheism. In this paper, I will examine Nietzsche’s atheism from the perspective of the Japanese Zen Master Dōgen (1200–1253). I believe that his philosophy of ‘expression’ (Jap.: dōtoku) not only elucidates the atheistic project but also reveals new insights about the rhetoric of a/theism. Concretely, I will look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) outrageous or outlandish claim that ‘God is dead,’ contrast it with Linji Yixuan’s (d. 866) in/famous dictum ‘when you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha,’ and introduce the ‘a/theologies’ of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and Mark C. Taylor, who coined the phrase ‘postmodern a/theology,’ in order to understand the philosophical significance of rejecting the God-hypothesis that is at the center of the a/theism debate. Finally, I will introduce Dōgen’s philosophy of expression as a heuristic device to reveal the assumptions, commitments, and agendas behind the two extreme positions of

1

  I would like to thank the providers of the online resources The SAT Daizōkyō Text Database (http://​ 21dzk.l.​utokyo.​ac.​jp/) and the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (http://​www.​acmul​ler.​net) for their invaluable service. I also would like to thank Qianran Yang for checking my translation of the Chinese texts.

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monotheism and atheism. I believe that such a project enables us to read theism through the eyes of atheism, atheism through the eyes of theism, both through the eyes of Dōgen, and Dōgen through the eyes of the a/theism debate. The goal of this project is to determine what atheism denies, what atheism contributes, and why a multi-faceted and multi-cultural engagement of atheism is important today. Especially, in the USA, the a/theism debate is seen to divide the populace into religious and areligious people. Dōgen’s method will disclose the motivations behind these positions and illustrate that it is possible to be a religious atheist and an areligious theist.

God is dead Friedrich Nietzsche’s ranting ‘madman’ (Ger. tolle Mensch) in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft and his vision of the Übermensch in Also Sprach Zarathustra shook the Christian world, especially Christianity in the United States, so deeply that one of his main interpreters, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980), referred to him even 50 years after Nietzsche’s death as the ‘antichrist.’ To get a taste for the weight of Nietzsche’s proclamation, I would like to quote it here. The madmen jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him––you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns Are we not plunging continually? Backward, Sideward, forward in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? … God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him …. What was the holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe the blood of us?’ (Nietzsche as qtd. in Kaufmann, 1974, 97; Nietzsche, 1887, 153–154)2 Kaufmann, from whose commentary this translation is taken, suggests that this passage paints the scenario of what happens when faith in God is being disposed of. He suggests that ‘[w]e have destroyed our faith in God. There remains only void. Our dignity is gone. Our values are lost’ (Kaufmann, 1974, 97). To Kaufmann, Nietzsche ‘felt that the death of God threatened human life with a complete loss of all significance’ (Kaufmann, 1974, 101). Another possible reading is to understand the death of God as synonymous with the liberation of humanity.3 2

  In this case, I adopted Kaufmann’s translation.   Kaufmann is rather critical or this reading and suggests that Nietzsche’s account of the “death of God” is descriptive rather than normative. He argues that madness is the necessary consequence of the death of God. However, whether Nietzsche’s “god is dead” is understood descriptively or normatively, Nietzsche does relate the “death of God” to human freedom and responsibility. 3

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This interpretation seems to be endorsed by Nietzsche’s vision of the Übermensch in Also Sprach Zarathustra. The madness, then, is either reflective of the theistic vision of humanity after the death of God or, as Carl Gustav Jung and Douglas Adams4 suggested in albeit radically different ways, characteristic of human beings unable to face the freedom of life without the illusion of a God bound by what Nietzsche refers to with the problematic phrase ‘slave morality.’5 In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche envisions the Übermensch who determines himor herself and proposes that ‘“[a]ll gods are dead: Now we desire that the Übermensch lives.”—This was our final ambition at the decisive noon––Thus spoke Zarathustra’ (Nietzsche,  1893, 111; Common,  1999, 79)6 and ‘[g]et over it, he is gone. And even though it does you honor that you speak well of those who passed, you know as well as I do who he was and that he was peculiar in many ways’ (Nietzsche, 1893, 374; Common,  1999, 230). Nietzsche cleverly subverts the Christian adage that Jesus died for the sins of the world and argues that the death of God is indeed the liberation of humanity: ‘Recently I overheard following statements: “God is dead: God died because he suffered with all human beings”’ (Nietzsche, 1893, 126; Common, 1999, 87, 211). Slavoj Žižek takes this sentiment a step further when he proclaims that ‘God died on the cross, the holy spirit is proletarian revolution’ (Žižek, 2009).7 However, it is not my intent in this paper to review and negotiate various interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous slogan, but I would like to contrast it with Linji’s famous ‘when you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’

‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha’ The phrase ‘When you meet the Buddha––kill the Buddha, when you meet the ancestors––kill the ancestors’ appears about thirteen times in the Chinese Buddhist canon. However, it is closely associated with the teaching of the Chan master Linji. For example, The Supplemental Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (Chin. Xu chuangdeng lu) explicitly attributes these words to Linji as well (T 2077.51.651). In some sense, Linji combined the attributes for which Nietzsche and the figures of his writing, the madman of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft and the voice of Also Sprach Zarathustra are known for. Did the protagonists of Nietzsche’s writings proclaim that ‘God is dead’ and that ‘we killed him,’ Linji exhorts his audience to ‘kill the 4

 In his Psychology of Religion (Collected Works Volume 11, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Jung suggests that rituals are necessary since they mediate the force of an encounter with God or, in his mind, the collective unconscious. Similarly, in the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), Douglas Adams suggests that humans inevitably have psychotic episodes when they realize their own personal insignificance in the history of the universe. 5   This terminology is rather unfortunate since slaves have no say in or influence on their legal status while Nietzsche implies that people can chose their moral comportment. Therefore, I believe that the phrases such as “herd morality” or “morality of submission” is more appropriate in this context. 6   The translations of Also Sprach Zarathustra are mine. 7   This was the tagline of Slavoj Žižek’s keynote speech “The Death of God” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montréal November 8, 2009. Last Accessed April 1, 2021. http://​ zizek​podca​st.​com/​2017/​04/​15/​ziz168-​whith​er-​the-​death-​of-​god-a-​conti​nuing-​curre​ncy-​08-​11-​2009/

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Buddha.’ Linji’s equally famous and blasphemous line can be found in The Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Linji Huizhao of Zhenzhou (Zhenzhou linji huizhao chanshi yulu) (T 1985.47). In particular, the text suggests that You want to obtain the understanding just like the Dharma. But do not be confused by people. Whether you turn inward or outward, kill whatever you encounter. When you meet the Buddha, kill Buddha; when you meet an ancestor, kill the ancestor; when you meet an arhat (disciple of Buddha who has attained nirvāṇa), kill the arhat; when you meet your parents, kill your parents; when you meet your relatives, kill your relatives. Then, for the first time, you will attain liberation, you will not be restrained by objects. (T 1985.47.498b; Watson, 1993, 52)8 While this passage might echo the image of crazy Zen masters perpetuated by pop culture, we need to remember two important points. First, to the Buddhist reader in the Song dynasty (960–1279), during which the The Sayings of Linji were published, and today, these lines are not less blasphemous than the Nietzschean claim that ‘God is dead’ was and still is to many Christians. I cited the above passage in toto because Linji asks his audience to violate the most central Buddhist precept and to commit the ‘five severe violations’ (Chin. wuni) or ‘five accursed karmic actions’ (Skrt. pañcânantaryāṇi karmāṇi, Chin. wu wujian ye), the Buddhist version of the seven deadly sins. These violations are ‘injuring the body of Buddha,’ ‘killing of an arhat,’ matricide, patricide, and ‘harm to the saṅgha,’ the Buddhist community. The Chinese term for these karmic actions already implies rebirth in the Avīci Hell (Chin. wujian diyu).9 The Amitāba Sūtra further proposes that these five violations make birth in the Pure Land impossible. Linji suggests to his audience not only to commit those despicable actions but also that this conduct does reflect the Dharma, i.e., the teaching of the Buddha. Second, like Nietzsche’s protagonists, Linji had the reputation of being an imbecile. But, contrary to what the portrayal of Chan teachers in some movies and works of literature might suggest, this ‘madness,’ which in the Buddhist traditions is referred to as ‘crazy Chan’ (Chin. kuangchan) (T 2035.49.129b) is, if it is tolerated at all, the exception rather than the norm. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) monk Miyun Yuanwu (1566–1642) caused a crisis in the Linji School when he insisted on adopting Linji’s rather idiosyncratic pedagogical style that included beating and screaming at disciples. In The Sayings of Linji, however, this kind of shocking rhetoric is almost programmatic. Linji also famously said ‘the Buddha dharma is neither useful nor does it accomplish anything; it constitutes nothing but the everyday and the ordinary; so have a shit take a piss; put on your clothes, eat and drink, retire when tired’ (T 1985.47.498a; Watson, 1993, 31). Finally, not unlike Nietzsche, Chan master Linji associates this ‘Götzendämmerung’ (‘twilight of the idols’) with the

8

  The translations of the Chinese canon are mine. I identify, whenever possible, available English translations for readers who want to access an English version of the text. 9   See the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism by Charles Muller. Last Accessed April 1, 2021. http://​buddh​ ism-​dict.​net/​ddb/​index.​html. See particularly the entries on “五逆” and “五無間業.”. Reprinted from the journal

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unrestrained liberation of humankind from the bondage of any kind of authority, including religious ones. Linji’s ‘true person of no rank’ (Chin. wuwei zhenren) (T 1985.47.496c & 676c; Watson,  1993, 13) seems to provide the Chan Buddhist equivalent to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. In this context, it is important to note that Linji does not reject Buddha but the deification and idolization of an external Buddha as well as the deification of an internal ‘buddha-nature’ (Chin. foxing). The ‘true person of no rank’ constitutes the ‘everyday mind’ (T 1985.47.499c; Watson, 1993, 45) in ‘this red lump of flesh’ (T 1985.47.496c; Watson, 1993, 13). The ‘true person’ does not need idols or authority. Linji explains that ‘when you meet a buddha, teach the buddha, when you meet an ancestor, teach the ancestor, when you meet an arhat, teach the arhat, when you see a hungry ghost, teach the hungry ghost’ (T 1985.47.498b; Watson,  1993, 33). And, ‘when people seek the Buddha, they will lose the Buddha, when people seek the way, they will lose the way, when people seek the ancestors, they will lose the ancestors’ (T 1985.47.502c; Watson, 1993, 76). Despite the overwhelming similarities between Nietzsche and Linji, destruction of the idols, a vision of sagehood, and the inversion of values and principles, there is an important difference between the two thinkers. Nietzsche proposes a position that can be best summarized in the format used in classical Chinese as ‘rejectingDivinity-affirming-the-self’ (Chin. paitian kenji). As it is also attested by his proposed shift from the ‘will to truth’ (Ger. Der Wille zur Wahrheit) to the ‘will to power’ (Ger. Der Wille zur Macht) in the ‘First Main Part’ (Ger. Erstes Hauptstück) of his epochal Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), Nietzsche clearly attempts to erase any traces of transcendence to focus human endeavor on the immanence, a strategy that is reflected in the motto of a ‘Buddhism devoid of transcendence’ (fei tianhua de)10 coined by Yinshun (1906–2005), a Taiwanese monk in the Linji lineage who is usually associated with ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ (Chin. renjian fojiao). Despite his rhetoric of ‘killing the Buddha,’ Linji does not reject transcendence in order to affirm immanence but rather abandons, as the line ‘[w] hether you turn inward or outward, kill whatever you encounter’ indicates, the distinction between transcendence and immanence all together. He follows his dharma grandfather Mazu Daoyi (709–788) and claims that ‘the everyday mind is the way’ (Chin. pingchangxin shidao) (T 1985.47.499c; Watson,  1993, 45) thus collapsing the dichotomy between transcendence and immanence. His position, then, could be paraphrased as ‘rejecting-Divinity-forgetting-the-self’ (Chin. paitian fouji). This is a significant difference, which explains why it is difficult to accuse Linji of atheism or nihilism like Nietzsche even though both use comparable forms of rhetoric. Thus, Linji, like many Buddhist philosophers, suggests that the distinction between externality and internality is not essential but rather provisional and, thus, came to anticipate what Mark Taylor would end up calling a ‘postmodern a/theology.’

10

  Marcus Bingenheimer translates this phrase as ‘Buddhism that was not inhabited by gods.’ In Der Mönchsgelehrte Yinshun (*1906) und seine Bedeutung für den Chinesisch-Taiwanischen Buddhismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Würzburger Sinologischen Schriften, 2004), 210 & 78.

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Nishida’s ‘a/theology’ One of the creators of such an ‘a/theology’ is the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō. Now, it goes without saying that Nishida hardly qualifies as a postmodern philosopher but rather as an outspoken critic of German idealism. However, his work reveals remarkable similarities with deconstruction as well as Taylor’s ‘postmodern a/theology’ as I have argued elsewhere (Kopf, 2010a). Most of all, Nishida developed a conception of ‘god,’ i.e. a theology, that defies the categories of theism and atheism. Three of his central writings are dedicated to the conception of ‘god’ and/or religion: His Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū, 1911) introduces a conception of ‘god’ that defies both theism and pantheism, his I and Thou (Watakushi to nanji, 1932) develops a dialogical philosophy not unlike Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) work by the same title, and his The Logic of Basho and the Religious Worldview (Basho no ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan, 1945) advances a nonessentialist conception of ‘god.’11 In this writing, he proposes conceptions such as ‘the depth of the everyday’ (byōjōtei) (NKZ 9: 303, 333; NKZ 10: 122; NKZ 11: 446–452), the ‘inverse correlation’ (gyakutaiō) (NKZ 11: 425–450), and that which is ‘immanent-and-yet-transcendent, transcendent and-yet-immanent’ (NKZ 11:417). He coins these phrases to describe a world without essences and thus without essential differences, that is a world where the transcendent and the immanent are not essentially different. He illustrates his conception of the “immanent-and-yet-transcendent” with the above cited comment by Linji that ‘[t]he Buddha dharma is not useful nor does it accomplish anything; it constitutes nothing but the everyday and the ordinary; have a shit take a piss; put on your clothes, eat and drink, retire when tired’ (T 47.1985.498a; NKZ 9: 333, NKZ 11: 424, 446). Nishida clearly interprets Linji’s position as a rejection of essentialism and dualism. While Nishida did not comment on Linji’s phrase ‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha,’ it seems that he would read such a claim as a rejection of the notion of a ‘Buddha-who-is-separate-from-the-self,’ however provocative such aclaim may be. Linji’s introduction to this phrase, ‘[w]hether you turn inward or outward, kill whatever you encounter,’ seems to support such a reading. But regardless of what the message and tone of the Sayings of Linji are, to Nishida, the problem does not lie in the notion of the ‘buddha’ itself but in the conception of the ‘Buddha’ as essentially different from the self. By the same token, he would read Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ as a challenge to a dualism that essentializes and reifies the transcendent as the ‘absolute other.’ To Nishida, the problem of traditional Christian theology and all forms of monotheism is that they personalizes and essentialize the ‘absolute’ as a transcendent God. To Nishida, the notion of an absolute God that is opposed to and encountered by an immanent creation is non-sensical and illogical. Nishida explains that

11

 The translations from the Japanese original are mine. For an English translation of Nishida’s The Logic of Basho see David A. Dilworth’s Nishida Kitarō––Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993) or Michiko Yuasa’s ‘The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview’ (Eastern Buddhist 1986 19/2 and 20/1). Reprinted from the journal

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[w]hen the absolute opposes nothing, it is truly absolute. Opposing absolute nothing, it is absolute. There is nothing, which opposes the self objectively from the outside. To say that the self opposes absolute nothing means that it opposes itself as its own self-contradiction. It constitutes a contradictory selfidentity. (NKZ 11: 397) From this perspective, God, not unlike the cosmic Sun-Buddha (Skrt. Mahāvairocana Buddha; Jap. Dainichi nyorai) of Shingon Buddhism, is the personified totality of existence that is not separate from but includes creation. Unlike Nietzsche, Nishida rejects the notion of a separate, transcendent God on logical grounds. Interestingly enough, the conception of humanity in Nishida’s a/theology reverberates Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Linji’s ‘true person with no rank.’ In Nishida’s philosophy, the self is not a contingent creation dependent on and opposed by an absolute God, but a particular and thus limited self-expression of God. To present Nishida’s a/theology and the role of god and self in it, I would like to quote a central passage from his The Logic of Bash and the Religious Worldview: The true absolute contains absolute self-negation. This is absolute being as the absolute affirmation-and-yet-negation. For this reason, it is the true absolute. God includes the absolute self-negation of itself within itself. …The god that simply fights evil, even if we say that he defeats evil in some sense, is a relative god. A simply transcendent, highest god is merely abstract. The absolute god is the god who contains absolute self-negation inside; god descends into ultimate evil. The god that saves the evil doers is truly absolute. The highest form forms the lowest matter. Absolute agape extends to absolutely evil people. God hides even in the heart of the absolutely evil in the form of inverse correlation. A god that simply judges is not a god. In this sense, good and evil are not undifferentiated. … As I said before, the absolute god constitutes the self-identity of absolute contradictories. As the point in which the absolute reflects itself, the self truly constitutes the self-identity of the contradictories good and evil. In the case of Dimitri Karamazov, beauty is concealed in the middle of Sodom … Therefore, this world is, to some degree, abound with the demonic. Our selves as the individual many of the world, are equally evil and divine. A theology of the logic of basho is neither theistic nor deistic; it is neither spiritual nor natural; it is historical. (NKZ 11: 404–6) In this passage, Nishida explicitly critiques and negates the notion of the monotheistic God. A God who is the other or possesses an absolute other is not the absolute but a reified abstract symbol. In his vision of an a/theology, Nishida envisions a space, basho in Japanese, were the polarities of our existence, God and self, affirmation and negation, good and evil, spiritual and natural collide. It is because he envisions such a basho wherein opposites intermingle that he uses paradoxical language such as ‘affirmation-and-yet-negation and transcendenceand-yet-immanence.’ However, these paradoxes employed to map out the basho are only contradictory if one reifies the extreme polarities as essentialized opposites. Such a world of essences is inherently static. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) had already indicated, a dynamic world of becoming cannot

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be described by reified and solidified concepts. A dynamic world, in which this12 becomes that and non-being being, defies any form of essentialism. Nishida resists the essentialization of the opposites as well as the dissolution of their ambiguity. As a matter of fact, the main reason why Nishida insists on notoriously difficult concepts such as his ‘self-identity of the absolute contradictory’ (Jap. zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu) is that he balances the two opposite standpoints of, in this case, a theism that locates the divine in the transcendent realm and a deism, which emphasizes the here-and-now. As I have argued, throughout his career, Nishida labored to develop a threefold taxonomy to analyze and assess various worldviews or, in this case, theologies: externalism emphasizing the reality of the transcendent, internalism and its focus on the immanent, and non-dualism negotiating the former two positions to construct a middle-way philosophy. In his later work, ‘he expands the moments of externality, internality, and their non-duality into a system of three worlds, which I will refer to here as the worlds of objectivism, subjectivism, and history’ (Kopf, 2010b, 215). In a little-known passage in his Lectures on Religious Studies (Shūkyōgaku) (NKZ 15: 221–383), Nishida illustrates his threefold taxonomy with the help of an analogy: [W]e can compare our existence in the world with a play. In this play, we, human beings, not only constitute the audience, but also participate in the play as performers. If we observe the drama of this world from the standpoint of the audience, only the intellectual and aesthetic feelings arise. On the contrary, if we simply participate in the performance, we are completely absorbed in it and any place for reflection upon the performance itself is eliminated. This means that only the feeling of morality arises. However, because we simultaneously perform in and observe the play, the question of whether or not the object of our passions and desire, that is, our ideal, prevails in the contest to decide the dominant paradigm in this world stirs our emotion; this we call religious emotion. (NKZ 15: 291; Kopf, 2003, 230) Nishida compares objectivism or theism to the audience of a play that is detached from the action and positions that rejects the notion of a transcendent God in favor of Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) ‘care for the self’ with the actors in a play. It is interesting that Nishida includes theism and materialism into the same category of objectivism/externalism since both constitute differing forms of positivism and suggest that the ‘real’ is external to the epistemic subject. To Nishida, the opposite of theism, or theological realism, is not materialist atheism but rather various first-person ontologies that locate agency in the subjectivity of the self. Reality, he suggests, requires a third position, a middle-way philosophy, that is able to reconcile the knowledge of a third-person perspective with the introspection of a first-person approach. True religiosity can be found in the liminality between God and self, in the ‘inverse correlation,’ in Taylor’s ‘divine milieu.’ 12

  This wording was inspired by section 5 in chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi. For a bilingual version of the text see the Chinese Text Project at https://​ctext.​org/​zhuan​gzi/​adjus​tment-​of-​contr​overs​ies. Reprinted from the journal

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Taylor’s ‘postmodern a/theology’ The ‘divine milieu’ is one of the center pieces of Taylor’s ‘postmodern a/theology.’ Taylor commences his deconstruction of classical theology with the ‘death of god’ which is followed by the ‘disappearance of the self.’ Since the essentialized notions of ‘God’ and ‘self’ imply each other, the rejection of one results, as Linji anticipated and Nishida articulated, in the demise of the other. Taylor traces the death of God from scholasticism via Martin Luther’s (1483–1564) pro nobis theology, which claims that God ‘died for us,’ to ‘Descartes’ decisive turn to the subject’ (Taylor, 1984, 21): ‘By negating the transcendent causa sui, the narcissistic subject hopes to become causa sui’ (Taylor, 1984, 22). However, Taylor concludes, the modernistic project to replace the creator God with the Transcendental Subject fails miserably because ‘[i]n the effort to secure its identity and establish its presence, the self discovers its unavoidable difference and irrepressible absence …. Once again self-affirmation and self-negation prove to be indivisibly bound. Apparent “selving” is actual “unselving”’ (Taylor, 1984, 50–51). Taylor articulates the position common to Chan (Jap. Zen) and Nishida’s philosophy, that the divine and the self are, in Nishida’s terms, ‘mutually determined’ (Jap. sōgo gentei) as the postmodern insight that the ‘death of God’ implies the ‘disappearance of the subject’ and highlights the difference between Nietzsche and Linji: While the modern form of the death of God comes to expression in humanistic atheism, the postmodern form points toward a posthumanistic a/theology. By denying God in the name of man (sic), humanistic atheism inverts the Creator/ creature relationship and transforms theology into anthropology. Posthumanistic a/theology, by contrast, maintains that this inversion, though necessary, does not go far enough. The atheistic humanist fails to realize that the death of God is at the same time the death of the self. (Taylor, 1984, 20) Here, Taylor implies a paradigmatic history of European philosophy wherein premodern theism identifies God and modern humanistic atheism with the Transcendental Subject as the center of the universe and as the foundational concept of philosophy. In this history, postmodernism exposes the ‘mutual determination’ of ‘creator’ and ‘creature’ and envisions a world without essences and center. The postmodern insight that Taylor proclaims has been a central tenet of Buddhism from its inception. It is best expressed in the philosophy of the founder of Shingon Buddhism Kūkai (774–835). In his Treatise on the Ten Mindsets in the Secret Mandala (Himitsu manadala jūjūshin ron),13 Kūkai maps out ten stages from the ‘ram-like mind of common people’ to the ‘mind of secret adornment.’ What interests us here are stage three, ‘the abstinent mind of the foolish child,’ and stage four, ‘the mind of aggregates only and no-self.’ The third stage refers to pre-Buddhist

13   All translations of Kūkai’s text are Rolf W. Giebel’s as published in James Heisig’s Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 64–74.

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belief in a transcendent power as exemplified by Hinduism and Daoism14 while the fourth stage represents the early Buddhist rejection of such a transcendent power and the notion of a self (Kūkai, 2011, 64–74). Stages three and four of Kūkai’s Ten Mindsets illustrate Taylor’s claim that ‘death of God is at the same time the death of the self.’ Both Nishida and Taylor agree in the vision of a word-view in which God and self, ‘self-affirmation and self-negation prove to be indivisibly bound.’ Taylor calls the space/basho where God and self mutually determine each other in the dialectics of ‘affirmation-and-yet-negation,’ the ‘divine milieu.’ Taylor introduces the notion of the divine milieu in his Erring: A Postmodern A/ theology. To highlight its flavor, I cite the key passage in its totality: If die Mitte ist überall, die Mitte is not so much the center as it is the milieu. Moreover, this milieu is not restricted to a particular spatial or temporal point. It is everywhere and everytime. The universality of the medium implies that what is intermediate is not transitory and that what is interstitial is ‘permanent.’ Though always betwixt ‘n’ between, the ‘eternal’ time of the middle neither begins nor ends. This universal and eternal milieu marks the (para)site where the word plays freely. Along this boundless boundary, the word appears divine. Scripture is the divine milieu, and the divine milieu is writing. The milieu embodied in word and inscribed in/by writing is divine insofar as it is the creative/destructive medium of everything that is and all that is not. Writing, as I have emphasized, is the ‘structured and differing origin of differences.’ This play of differences or differential web of interrelation is universally constitutive. When understood as scripture, the divine milieu is ‘what at the same time renders possible and impossible, probable and improbable oppositions such as’ eternity/time, infinitude/finitude, being/becoming, good/ evil, etc.Writing is ‘originary’ (though not original) inasmuch as it ‘grounds’ or ‘founds’ the differences that form and deform identity. Though the divine milieu is never simply present or absent, it is the medium of all presence and absence. In this complex mean, opposites, that do not remain themselves, cross over into each other and thus dissolve all original identity. (Taylor, 1984, 116) Taylor describes the divine milieu, one of the key concepts of his postmodern a/ theology, in terms reminiscent of Nishida’s. This does not mean that their philosophies pursue the same goals; they do not. Taylor fashions a deconstructive theology that focuses on the traces of writ while Nishida attempts to unearth the foundational paradigm of an inclusive philosophical system and thus very much stands in the tradition of modernism. However, not only do both criticize the essentialism and dualism pervasive in modernistic philosophy, they both envision a space, a milieu in Taylor and a basho in Nishida, where the opposites of transcendence/immanence, affirmation/negation, eternity/time, being/becoming, presence/absence, good/evil playfully combine into a sacred dance. Taylor interprets this to be the act of writing, Nishida the moment of creativity in history as well as in art. Both, however, 14

  It goes without saying that this is Kūkai’s ‘history of religion’ and not a scholarly assessment of either Hinduism or Daoism. Reprinted from the journal

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affirm the ambiguity of this milieu/basho and implicitly criticize the philosophical approaches Taylor identifies as pre-modern and modern for attempting to dissolve the ambiguity between opposites and for postulating a counterfactual alternative that juxtaposes transcendence versus immanence, God versus Subject. Taylor and Nishida reject, albeit for quite different reasons, such a dissolution and affirm ambiguity as the key to religion and spirituality. In Taylor’s words, ‘[i]t neither is nor is not; it is insofar as it is not and is not insofar it is. It is not totally positive or completely negative but it affirms in negating and negates in affirming’ (Taylor, 1984, 117). Ironically, Taylor proposes, and here he reverberates Nishida’s position, that it is not theism but a postmodern a/theology after the death of God that provides the foundation for the religious project.

Dōgen’s philosophy of expression In the last section of this essay, I would like to return to our original question: How is it possible to understand atheism and religion without God from one Buddhist perspective? Both Taylor and Nishida have suggested appealing alternatives to the theism/atheism debate. The former offers a postmodern reading of Nietzsche’s death of God, the latter was inspired by Linji’s iconoclastic desecration of Buddha and the Dharma. In their respective discussions, both suggest a threefold taxonomy of theologies respectively that roughly map onto each other: Taylor’s premodern theistic theology corresponds to Nishida’s externalism, Taylor’s modern ‘humanistic atheism’ to Nishida’s internalism, and Taylor’s postmodern a/theology to Nishida’s nondualism. But how are we supposed to understand and assess these various positions? To provide a new approach to the theism/atheism debate, I propose to interpret the threefold taxonomies of Taylor and Nishida by employing Dōgen’s philosophy of expression. In his fascicle Shōbōgenzō dōtoku,15 Dōgen introduces a blueprint of what I have come to call ‘philosophy of expression.’ The fascicle is dedicated to re-interpret a sinograph that appears in the Chinese Buddhist canon over 200 times. The sinograph ‘道得,’ read ‘dōtoku’ in Japanese, literally means ‘attaining the way.’ It is usually translated ‘expression’ since, in the Chan (Jap. Zen) Buddhist canon this sinograph is used to indicate that practitioners embody their level of attainment when they encounter each other. Dōgen explains as follows. All Buddhas and all ancestors constitute expression. For this reason, when ancestors select ancestors, they ask whether or not they can express themselves. They ask this question with their heart/mind, they ask this question with their body; they ask this question with the walking staff, they ask this question with the pillar and stone lantern. (DZZ 1: 302)

15

  The translations from the Japanese canon are mine. One English translation of this fascicle and the whole Shōbōgenzō can be accessed at thezensite (http://​www.​theze​nsite.​com/​ZenTe​achin​gs/​Dogen_​ Teach​ings/​Shobo​genzo/​038do​toku.​pdf).

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The Sitz im Leben (life setting) of this phrase is obviously the master-student encounter or any encounter between two practitioners. In these encounters, practitioners express and actualize their understanding of Buddha’s teaching verbally or non-verbally. In other words, the actions and words of a Buddha express buddhanature. So far, Dōgen’s presentation follows the usage of this term in the Chinese canon. However, further reading of this fascicle reveals that Dōgen’s understanding of ‘expression’ is rather idiosyncratic. [w]hen we express expression we do not express non-expression. Even when we recognize expression in expression, if we do not verify the depth of nonexpression as the depth of non-expression, we are neither in the face of the buddha-and-ancestors nor in the bones and marrow of the buddha-and-ancestors. (DZZ 1: 303) Expressions are reflective of ‘all-buddhas-and-ancestor’ and thus of the divinity inside of us. Nevertheless, since all human expression occurs in the realm of particularity, our expressions are always limited and incomplete. We express our innate buddha-nature fully but not completely. Elsewhere Dōgen pushes this insight even further when he comments that ‘when one side is confirmed, another side is obscured’ (DZZ 1:7). To articulate and elucidate this predicament, Dōgen coins the phrase ‘expression-and-non-expression’ (Jap. dōtoku fudōtoku). In some sense, Dōgen’s notion of ‘expression-and-non-expression’ anticipates Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) observation that concepts simultaneously ‘disclose’ and ‘obscure.’ Therefore, I suggest writing the concept ‘expression-and-non-expression’ following Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) example ‘under erasure’ as expression. Finally, Dōgen addresses the context of these expression: Now, I and the other engage in liberative practices and enter into a teacher-student dialogue; he and an other engage in liberative practices and enter into a teacher-student dialogue. In me, there is expression and non-expression. In him, there is expression and non-expression. At the bottom of the way, there is self and other; at the bottom of the non-way, there is self and other. (DZZ 1: 304) Dōgen introduces the notion of ‘expression’ to describe the concomitant vertical and horizontal relationships of the religious project, namely the relationship between the individual and the divine as well as the relationship among a multiplicity of individuals, each of which constitutes by itself an expression of the divine or the totality of the cosmos. In short, Dōgen’s framework suggests that all philosophical paradigms, systems, and positions are devoid, empty, of absolute truth value,16 are framed in specific cultural and historical contexts which they express,17 and are formulated vis-à-vis a perceived other.

16

  Here, Dōgen follows the overall direction of the Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy referred to as ‘way of emptiness’ (Skrt. śūnyatāvāda). 17   Obviously, like other thirteenth century thinkers, Dōgen does not talk about cultural and historical contexts, he does, however, imply that the content of these expressions of buddha-nature is neither limited to a particular person nor exhaustive of ‘all buddhas and ancestors.’ Reprinted from the journal

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Conclusion This brings us to back to the question of how we can interpret the theism-atheism debate in a new way. The reading of theism and atheism suggested in this paper challenges us to take these positions out of the commonly accepted framework that interprets these philosophical positions exclusively as two mutually exclusive truth claims and challenges us to explore and engage the underlying concerns that motivate their advocates. From the standpoint of a philosophy of expression, both positions, theism and atheism, are framed in relation to each other. They express conflicting aspects of human experience. Theism focuses on the limitation of the self and the need for external guidance. Nishida cites as a prototype of the religious person the founder of Shin Buddhism Shinran (1173–1263). Shinran famously deferred to the guidance of an ‘other power’ (Jap. tariki) and referred to himself as the ‘fool Shinran’ (Jap. gutoku shinran). Theism also indicates the mystery of the universe and reminds us that there are aspects about reality that are beyond our cognitive abilities. Atheism, or as Taylor framed it, ‘humanistic atheism,’ on the other hand, emphasizes the need to focus on this world, as Yinshun proposed, to take responsibility for one’s life, as Nietzsche advocated, and to validate the knowledge and rules one lives by and for oneself, as Linji suggested. The tropes of ‘murder’ and ‘killing,’ while shocking in their presentation, express resistance to accepted and superimposed norms of a heteronomous18 morality and uncritical adherence to traditional beliefs, metaphysical and moral. Both philosophical positions highlight different and exclusive concerns. Theism is designed to ward off arrogance and self-importance, while atheism resists mental laziness and refusal to be accountable. Both ideologies, however, present only abstract glimpses of the reality of the religious self, who negotiates the ambiguity of ‘eternity/time, infinitude/finitude, being/becoming, good/evil.’ This is the divine milieu where buddhas and ancestors express themselves, where you ‘teach a buddha when you meet a buddha.’ where the theist and atheist interact. Dōgen’s philosophy of expression manages to shift the focus away from the ‘will to truth’ and the ‘will to power’ towards an understanding of what each of our ideologies and positions expresses. Of course, a rereading of atheism warrants a more detailed exposition. But this brief analysis of atheism in the light of a philosophy of expression has revealed three important insights: (1) There are multiple reverberations between Nietzsche and Linji as well as between Nishida and Taylor across traditions and time periods. These echoes warrant a closer analysis because they challenge the preconceived difference between Christianity and Buddhism, ‘West’ and ‘East.’ (2) At the same time, reading Nietzsche through the lens of Chan/Zen Buddhist discourses brings forth a new appreciation of both theism and atheism, their historical contexts, and the motivations that drive their proponents. It also discloses new and surprising bedfellows, theological positivism and materialism, who share the assumption that reality is external and the self, the epistemic subject, constitutes nothing but a witness to this external reality. While the suggestion of this commonality is likely to 18

 I borrow the idea of ‘heteronomous ethics’ (Jap. taritsuteki rinrigakusetsu) from Nishida (NKZ 1: 121).

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provoke resistance on both sides, it does highlight a characteristic of the ideological landscape that is often overlooked. (3) This may be the most confounding one for the reader steeped in any tradition where the debate between theism and atheism has raged: Atheism, at least Nietzsche’s brand, is not about metaphysical truth claims––he explicitly rejects the ‘will to truth’––it is about moral autonomy and accountability. By the same token, theism, in its religious or practiced version, is not primarily about cosmology but, and I believe closer investigations will confirm this, about the confrontation of human fallibility and, as Gordon Kaufman suggested in his God the Problem (1972), human limitations. This is how a philosophy of expression reads the atheism debate. Acknowledgements  I thank the guest editors via the journal Editors for inviting me to contribute to this very special issue and Megah Carron for her editorial comments on the text.

References

Abbreviations DZZ Dōgenzenji zenshū『道元禅師全集』[Complete Works of Zen Master Dōgen]. 2 vols. Ed. Dōshū Ōkubo 城大久保道舟. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1969–1970). NKC Nishitani keiji chosakushū 『西谷啓治著作集』 [Collected Works of Keiji Nishitani]. 26 vols. (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1986–1995). NKZ Nishida kitarō zenshū『西田幾多郎全集新版』 [Complete Works of Kitarō Nishida]. 20 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988). T Taishō daizōkyō『 大正大藏經』[Buddhist Canon - The Taishō Version], ed. by Junjirō Takakusu and Kaigyoku Watanabe (Tokyo: Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō Kankōkai. 1961). THZ Tanabe hajime zenshū 『田邊元全集』 [The Complete Works Hajime Tanabe]. 15 volumes (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1963–4).

Other works Abe, M. (1985). Zen and western thought. In W. LaFleur (Ed.). University of Hawaii Press. Common, T. (1999). Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication. Pennsylvania State University. Davis, B. (2011). “The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless perspectivism.” In W. Edelglass & J. L. Garfield (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (pp. 348–372). Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1992). How to avoid speaking: Denials. In H. Coward & D. Foshay (Eds.), Derrida and negative theology (pp. 104). State University of New York Press. Hakamaya, N. 袴谷憲昭. (1990). Hihan bukkyō『批判仏教』[Critical Buddhism]. Daizō Shuppan. Heidegger, M. (1949). Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Klostermann. Heine, S. (2012). What is on the other side? Delusion and realization in Dōgen’s Genjōkōan. In S. Heine (Ed.), Dōgen: Textual and historical studies (pp. 42–74). Oxford University Press. Heisig, J. W., Kasulis, T. P., & Maraldo, J. C. (Eds.). (2011). Japanese Philosophy: A sourcebook. University of Hawaii Press. Kalupahana, D. J. (1986). Nāgārjuna - The Philosophy of the Middle Way. SUNY Press. Kaufman, G. (1971). God the Problem. Harvard University Press. Kaufmann, W. (1974). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist. Princeton University Press. Kasulis, T. P. (1981). Zen Action/Zen Person. University of Hawaii Press.

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G. Kopf Kasulis, T. (2011). Esoteric words. In J. W. Heisig, T. P. Kasulis & J. C. Maraldo (Eds.), Japanese philosophy: A sourcebook (pp. 160–161). University of Hawaii Press. Kim, H.-J. (2007). Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on is View of Zen. SUNY Press. Kopf, G. (2003). Neither Dogma, nor Institution: Nishida on the role of religion (translation). Eastern Buddhist, 35(1 & 2), 219–240. Kopf, G. (2010a). Language games, selflessness, and the death of God; A/Theology in contemporary Zen philosophy and deconstruction. In B. Davis, B. Schroeder & J. Wirth (Eds.), Continental and Japanese philosophy: Comparative approaches to the Kyōto School (pp. 160–178). Indiana University Press. Kopf, G. (2010b). The self-identity of the absolute contradictory what?––Reflections on how to teach the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō. In D. Jones & E. Klein (Eds.), Teaching texts and contexts: The art of infusing asian philosophies and religions (pp. 129–148). SUNY Press. Kopf, G. (2017). Nishida, Tanabe, and Mahāyāna Buddhism: A blueprint for a critical philosophy. In C. Ching-yuen & L. Wing-keung (Eds.), Globalizing Japanese philosophy as an academic discipline. Global East Asia Series (pp. 241–267). V&R Unipress and National Taiwan University Press. Kūkai. (2011). The ten mindsets (R. W. Giebel, Transl.). In J. W. Heisig, T. P. Kasulis & J. C. Maraldo (Eds.), Japanese philosophy: A sourcebook (pp. 64–74). University of Hawaii Press. Maraldo, J. (1995). Tradition, textuality, and trans-lation: The case of Japan. In C. Fu & S. Heine (Eds.), Japan in traditional and postmodern perspectives (pp. 225–244). SUNY Press. Maraldo, J. (2003). Rethinking God: Heidegger in the light of absolute nothing, Nishida in the shadow of onto-theology. In  J. Bloechl (Ed.),  Religious experience and the end of metaphysics. Indiana University Press Maraldo, J. (2004). Defining philosophy in the making. In J. W. Heisig (Ed.),  Japanese philosophy abroad (pp. 220–245). Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Müller, R. (2013). Dōgen’s Sprachdenken. Verlag Karl Alber Nietzsche, F. (1887). Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Verlag von E. W. Fritsch. Nietzsche, F. (1893). Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. Druck und Verlag von C. G. Naumann. Park, J. Y. (2006).  Naming the unnameable: Dependent co-arising and différance. In J. Y. Park (Ed.), Buddhisms and deconstructions. Rowman & Littlefield. Srajek, M. (1998). In the Margins of Deconstruction. Kluwer. Taylor, M. C. (1984). Erring – A postmodern a/theology. University of Chicago Press. Watson, B. (1993). The Zen teachings of Master Lin-chi: A translation of the Lin-chi Lu. Shambhala. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Transl.). Blackwell. Žižek, S. (2009). “The Death of God.” Keynote speech at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montréal November 8, 2009. http://​zizek​podca​st.​com/​2017/​04/​15/​ziz168-​whith​er-​ the-​death-​of-​god-a-​conti​nuing-​curre​ncy-​08-​11-​2009/. Accessed 1 Apr 2021.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Authors and Affiliations Gereon Kopf1,2,3 * Gereon Kopf [email protected] 1

Luther College, Decorah, IA, USA

2

University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

3

Tōyō University, Tokyo, Japan



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Sophia (2021) 60:623–638 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00857-1

From a Certain Point of View… Jain Theism and Atheism Jeffery D. Long1  Accepted: 27 April 2021 / Published online: 2 June 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Keywords  Jainism · Jain philosophy · Jaina philosophy · Atheism · Theism · Indian philosophy

The Jain Tradition: Theistic or Atheistic? The Jain tradition is widely held to be atheistic, due to its denial of the existence of a divine creator of the cosmos. Much like Buddhism, to which it is related historically, the Jain tradition teaches that something has always existed.1 The cosmos has been forever undergoing a cycle, with no beginning and no end, that consists of alternating phases of advancement (utsarpiṇī) and decline (avasarpiṇī). This process occurs naturally and is not held to be due to the creative or coordinating activity of any divine being. There is no creatio ex nihilo in Jain thought, because there was never a time, according to this tradition, in which nothing whatsoever existed. Again, there has always been something. Being itself therefore did not stand in need of being created, and the particular cosmos we are now experiencing is just one in an infinite succession of such realms, or lokas. Jain philosophy, however, should certainly not be confused with atheism as this position is understood in the contemporary Western world. Contemporary Western atheism typically makes up part of a larger worldview that philosopher David Ray Griffin characterizes as ‘naturalismsam,’ in which the subscript sam stands for ‘sensationist-atheistic-materialistic.’2 Sensationism refers to the epistemological doctrine that all our knowledge is ultimately derived from the physical senses, while materialism is the doctrine that everything which exists is finally made up of bits Chapter 10 was originally published as Long, J. D. Sophia (2021) 60: 623–638. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00857-1. 1

  The Jain and Buddhist traditions are both part of the śramaṇa movement which opposed Vedic sacrificial ritual and Brahmin privilege during the first millennium before the Common Era. Richard Gombrich has speculated that the Jain tradition played a significant role in the formation of Buddhism as a source of concepts and practices which the Buddha to some extent critiqued and to some extent retained in his own teachings. See Richard Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 45–59. 2   David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 22. * Jeffery D. Long [email protected] 1



Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, USA

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of insensate matter. The Jain tradition is not materialistic; for it strongly affirms the reality of jīvas, or souls, as well as a process of karma and rebirth. The ultimate goal of Jain practice, like that of Hindu and Buddhist practice, is mokṣa, or freedom from the cycle of rebirth. This freedom is achieved through the attainment of kevala jñāna, or absolute knowledge: a state of consciousness popularly referred to as enlightenment. Jainism is also not sensationist; for it affirms that knowledge is inherent in all jīvas, as part of their fundamental nature. Absolute knowledge and phenomena like telepathy arise from direct awareness on the part of the soul and are not mediated by the senses.3 Theism, as it is conventionally defined in the Western world—or at least classical theism, for there are modifications of this position that have been proposed by various thinkers who have found aspects of classical theism problematic4—is the affirmation of the existence of God, who is typically conceived as a conscious, willing being who is omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, and who is also the creator of all that exists. God is also seen as supremely worthy of worship and as the ultimate object of properly religious adoration. Although the Jain tradition is atheistic in the sense that it denies the existence of a creator deity of the kind affirmed in classical theism, there is another sense in which it is theistic, inasmuch as enlightenment can be seen as the actualization of a divine potential that is present in all living beings, and inasmuch as those who have attained this state are seen as worthy of worship. In other words, the Jain universe, much like the Buddhist universe, even if it is not theistic in a conventional sense, is not a desacralized universe of the kind affirmed in contemporary Western atheism. The Jain tradition thus provides an excellent example of the limitations of categories such as theism and atheism for grouping and evaluating belief systems. An analysis of the senses in which Jain thought is both theistic and atheistic reveals the inadequacy of the widespread tendency in the Western world to identify theism with religious faith and atheism with scientific rationalism. It also reveals that theism and atheism are relative terms. One is an atheist or not depending upon how one defines God or gods. If, by God, one is referring to an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator of the universe, then Jains are atheists. If, by God, one is referring to something that is supremely sacred and of ultimate importance, then Jains are theists. If the claim that Jain thought is both theistic and atheistic appears to be self-contradictory, it might be helpful to draw our attention to a distinctive feature of this philosophy which may help to make sense of this claim: its doctrine of conditional predication, or syādvāda. According to this doctrine, the fundamental claims of any given philosophical view or school of thought bear seven possible truth values. The truth value of a claim, according to this doctrine, is dependent upon the perspective from which it is made. This connects syādvāda with Jain epistemology, and its 3

 Umāsvāti, Tattvārtha Sūtra (2007) 1:9–12.   Such as the ‘neoclassical’ theism proposed by thinkers in the process tradition, such as Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others. See Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics (Whitefish, Montana: Literary Licensing, 2011). 4

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doctrine of perspectives, or nayavāda, according to which any given entity or topic can be perceived from many valid points of view. This perspectival epistemology is itself rooted in the Jain ontological doctrine of many-sidedness, or anekāntavāda, according to which any given entity has many facets or aspects. For each of the many facets that an entity possesses, it can be viewed in correspondingly many valid ways, and whatever is said about this entity can be true, if one takes into account the particular facet or aspect of the entity that is under consideration. It is therefore the case that an entity can be said, for example, to be permanent to the extent that it has certain features that persist through time, and that it can also be said to be impermanent to the extent that it has other features which are in constant flux. Both of these seemingly contrary claims can be true, just so long as one specifies which features of the entity in question one is claiming to be permanent or impermanent. Is the cosmos permanent or impermanent? It is both, according to Jain thought. If, by cosmos, one refers to the totality of existence, then such a totality has always existed and will always exist and is therefore permanent. If, by cosmos, one is referring to a particular state of affairs at a given time, then it is impermanent, because the cosmic state of existence undergoes constant change. If we apply syādvāda to the question of the existence of God, what results is the conclusion that God, in one sense or from one point of view, does exist; and that God, from another point of view, does not exist. Jain teaching about the existence of God does, indeed, reflect this conclusion. As John Cort has pointed out in his work on Jainism in Gujarat, there is a sense in which Jainism is theistic. The existence of God as a creator is certainly denied in Jain thought, as well as the idea of God as somehow coordinating or directing what occurs in the cosmos. The Jain tradition is not lacking, however, in an object of worship viewed as being of ultimate importance and value. God, in the Jain tradition (Dev or Bhagavān) does not refer to a singular creator of the universe. It is a collective term used to refer to the sum total of enlightened beings, or Jinas (for whom the tradition is named).5 We can say, then, that depending on how one defines divinity, God both does and does not exist, according to Jain philosophy.

Jain Ontology: What Does Exist? What does exist, according to the Jain tradition? First, it should be noted, before delving any further into Jain thought, what, precisely is meant by ‘the Jain tradition’ and ‘the Jain worldview.’ Jains, of course, like adherents of any other religious tradition, can be greatly varied in terms of the beliefs and observances of specific individuals. Any talk of ‘the’ Jain anything is therefore, by necessity, a generalization. That being said, in regard to the topics under discussion here, when one looks across the texts of all the various Jain sects, one finds a remarkable uniformity. The two main divisions in Jainism are the Śvetāmbara, or ‘white-clad’ and Digambara, or ‘sky-clad’ communities. These terms refer to the clothing worn by mendicant 5

  John E. Cort, Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 91–93. Reprinted from the journal

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adherents of these two communities (or not worn, in the case male mendicants of the latter group). There are some further divisions within each of these. However, by and large, the distinctions among all of these groups are related to issues of practice and not of belief: issues such as whether male mendicants should wear clothing, whether image worship is a legitimate Jain practice, whether mendicants should dwell in monasteries, and so on. On topics such as ontology or epistemology, there is widespread agreement. This is likely due to the role played in all Jain communities by the Tattvārtha Sūtra, a text which was likely composed around the second or third century of the Common Era by a Jain scholar-monk named Umāsvāti, possibly before the distinction between the Śvetāmbara and Digambara Jains had crystallized. Umāsvāti’s summary of Jain philosophy is accepted as authoritative by both of these communities, thus leading to the uniformity that one can observe in philosophical matters across Jain traditions.6 According to Jain thought, the cosmos is composed of six types of entity, or astikāya. These are called dharma, adharma, ākāśa, pudgala, kāla, and jīva. The first five are material in nature, while the sixth is not. Jain thought is therefore not materialistic. All six, however, are viewed as eternal and uncreated. Jain thought is, therefore, atheistic in this particular sense. The six fundamental entities were not created by any deity. Dharma, in Jain philosophy, does not refer to the fundamental order of the cosmos and the ways in which this order translates into human moral duties, as it does in Vedic thought (though Jains did eventually adopt this usage as well). Adharma, similarly, does not refer to chaos or evil. Dharma, in Jainism, refers to the principle of motion: that which makes motion possible in the universe. It could, perhaps, be translated as dynamism. Adharma, correspondingly, refers to inertia, the countervailing force opposed to dynamism. They are basically physical principles, though it is possible that these Jain principles could also be interpreted in the more ethical sense of dharma and adharma as these are found in Vedic texts, if motion is interpreted in a moral sense, as ethical and spiritual advancement, and inertia as a kind of moral or spiritual sluggishness.7 Ākāśa is space. It is divided into the lokākāśa and the alokākāśa: cosmic space and what might be called a-cosmic, or extra-cosmic, space–space that falls outside of the boundaries of the cosmos. The cosmos, according to Jainism, is bounded. While vast, it has a definite shape and size. The shape of the Jain cosmos, interestingly, has the appearance of the outline, roughly, of a human body, with the legs extended outward and the arms stretched upward and then inward, with the fingertips of the hands touching above the head (much like the posture in which one stands while passing through airport security scanners). It is even called the lokapuruṣa, 6

  Padmanabh S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 81–82. 7  Christopher Key Chapple, personal communication. A similar moral or spiritual shading given to ostensibly physical concepts of dynamism and inertia can be found in the Sāṃkhya tradition—which seems to be a close cousin of Jainism in many respects—in the form of its teaching of the three guṇas, or qualities which make up phenomenal existence. In Sāṃkhya thought, rajas and tamas, respectively, are principles of activity and inertia; but these qualities also possess moral connotations, with rajas being superior to tamas, and the sattva guṇa being superior to both.

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or cosmic man, in Jain texts. It is often depicted in Jain art as a giant human being who contains the cosmos. Jain teaching does not, however, suggest, in contrast with the Vedic puruṣa, whose body becomes the cosmos, that the lokapuruṣa is a deity, or even a conscious being at all. It is simply the shape that the world happens to possess. The Vedic and Jain concepts, however, of the cosmos as the body of a single humanoid being do suggest some historical or cultural kinship. The Vedic version of this concept, though, is theistic. The puruṣa is a deity who essentially offers his life in a sacrifice to create the world, as recounted in the Puruṣa Sūkta of the Ṛg Veda.8 The Jain version is atheistic; for the shape of the lokapuruṣa is, again, just the way the cosmos looks. The lokapuruṣa does not have agency, like a deity, and is not worshiped as one.9 Interestingly, however, the Jain vision of the cosmos is theistic in another sense. Among the countless beings inhabiting the cosmos are deities, or devas. In another similarity to Buddhism, the Jain tradition affirms the existence of beings who are not God in a monotheistic sense, but who are very powerful and capable of intervening in positive ways in human affairs. They are not seen as being at the same exalted level as liberated, enlightened beings. They are ritually honored and invoked, however, for the good that they can do in helping with this-worldly affairs. They include deities which are worshiped prominently in Hindu traditions, like Gaṇeśa, Sarasvatī, and Lakṣmī: the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, the goddess of wisdom, and the goddess of prosperity, respectively. Deities are seen in Jain thought as beings with very good karma who have achieved great power and longevity through the positive works they have done. Their relative ranking in the spiritual order of being is reflected by where they are located within the lokapuruṣa. Deities reside, for the most part, in the heavens, above the middle realm where human beings reside. The liberated souls of those who have become enlightened, however, reside at the very top of the cosmos, beyond even the heavens, in the Siddhaloka, or realm of the perfected ones. Returning to the six types of entity, pudgala is matter—the basic stuff of which physical reality consists—and kāla is time. Again, all the types of entity described thus far are of a material nature. They are unconscious and uncreated, being simply fundamental features of existence. The sixth type of entity is the jīva, which literally means life and can perhaps be translated as the life force, or soul. Jīvas are many in number, there being as many jīvas as there are living beings in the cosmos. Living beings are not infinite in number, but are virtually infinite in number: or, as Jain texts say, ‘innumerable.’10 In terms of ontology, Jain thought is pluralistic. It affirms the reality of many fundamental entities, none of which is reducible to the others. Dharma, or dynamism, is not reducible to inertia, space, matter, the life forces, or time. Inertia is also not reducible to dynamism, space, matter, life force, or time. And so on. Each of the six basic entities is just that: basic. None is reducible to the others. Similarly, individual 8

  Ṛg Veda 10.90.   Jaini, pp. 127–130. 10   Vincent Sekhar, Dharma in Early Brahmanic, Buddhist, and Jain Traditions (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 2003), p. 12. 9

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instances of these six basic types of entity are truly distinct from one another. They are not aspects of some more fundamental reality. Jain ontology is also realist. It affirms that the fundamental entities really do exist and are not mere appearances or epiphenomena of some deeper reality. This differentiates Jain ontology from the ontology of traditions like Advaita Vedānta, which affirm that the realm of time, space, and causation does not reflect the ultimate nature of reality. Jain philosophy does not speak of the cosmos being an effect of māyā, which is a prominent Hindu doctrine. Māyā, in Advaita Vedānta, is an effect of our ignorance of the true nature of reality. In theistic Hindu systems, it is the divine creative power. Neither of these concepts of māyā plays a role in Jain philosophy. Jain thought, however, also departs from most contemporary Western forms of atheism to the extent that these systems of thought also typically affirm materialism. The realist ontology of the Jain tradition affirms that the experiences of matter and consciousness are both truly reflective of the plural nature of the cosmos as consisting of both material and spiritual—that is, conscious—entities, and not one to the exclusion of the other. In other words, just as Jain thought does not see the material universe as epiphenomenal to a spiritual reality, such as the Vedāntic Brahman, it also does not see consciousness as epiphenomenal to a fundamentally material universe, along the lines of the dominant thread of atheistic thought in contemporary philosophical discourse in the West. Jain thought rejects both absolute idealism and absolute materialism and affirms an integral view in which both matter and consciousness are real. In a similar vein, Jainism affirms the reality of the phenomenon of time as one of the basic entities making up existence. What does it mean to exist? According to the Tattvārtha Sūtra, to exist is to be ‘characterized by emergence, passing away, and endurance.’11 These are real aspects of existence, and not illusory, according to Jainism. Change—and thus time—is real. This is distinct from those schools of Indian philosophy that either deny the reality of change or see it as an effect or function of consciousness. The Jain tradition takes a definitive step away from anthropocentrism—that is, a philosophy centered on human beings as the chief location and source of value in the universe—with its doctrine of the universality of the jīvas. Jainism affirms that the life forces, like the principles of dynamism and inertia, space, and matter, pervade the cosmos. The jīva fundamentally is the living being. Any given living creature, whether it be a human being, an animal, or a plant, is on one level composed of matter (pudgala). This matter is, in and of itself, non-living, or ajīva. It is part of a living being only inasmuch as it constitutes a body informed by the jīva, or life force. If the life force leaves the physical form, death occurs, and the matter making up the body of the once-living being is now no different from any other non-living matter, subject to the forces of decay. The jīva, however, continues its existence and is reborn in a new physical form, the specific type of which is determined by its karma. The new form could be a human body, but it could also be the body of an animal, or even a plant. A human 11

 Umāsvāti, Tattvārtha Sūtra (2007) 5:9. Translation mine.

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being, therefore, is a jīva temporarily inhabiting a human form. The same jīva has inhabited many other kinds of form in the past, stretching back through infinite cosmic time, and is likely to inhabit other forms until becoming liberated from the cycle of rebirth by following the Jain path of spiritual purification. The jīva is our true identity. Each jīva possesses four characteristics, each to an infinite degree. They are thus called the four infinitudes (ananta catuṣṭaya). These are infinite knowledge (jñāna), infinite perception (darśana), infinite happiness (sukha), and infinite power (vīrya). While jīva essentially means the life force of a living being, the fact that it is also the center of awareness—of knowledge, perception, and happiness—means it would not be inappropriate to translate jīva as soul: a convention which has become common among both Jain and non-Jain scholars writing about Jainism in English. The fact that knowledge and perception are inherent to the nature of the soul and are not effects which are mediated by the physical senses illustrates, again, that Jain philosophy is both non-materialistic and non-sensationistic, and is thus distinct from the mainstream of contemporary Western atheism, which is also materialistic and sensationistic. As living beings, most of us must wonder, on being told of these four infinite characteristics of the soul—and that the soul is what we really are—why it is that what we actually experience in our lives is merely limited knowledge, limited perception, limited happiness, and limited power. We are ignorant of many things. We suffer and die. Why is this? Why are we not experiencing our unlimited potential, if this is something we truly possess, as our true essence? The Jain response to this question is that the soul, for most beings, does not exist in its pure and unobstructed state. It has been tainted by association with non-living (ajīva) matter. There is, according to Jain thought, a specific type of matter that adheres to the soul, thus causing distortions in its intrinsically pure nature. This bondage of the soul to matter did not begin at a particular time. It has simply always been the case that each soul has been existing forever in a state of bondage to matter. The soul did not ‘fall’ into this state of bondage through some primordial transgression. It is, though, trying to rise from it. The fact that this bondage had no beginning does not mean that it can have no end. There is a way to free the soul from this bondage. This is the Jain path. Interestingly, the specific type of matter that is bound to the soul is called, in Jain thought, karma. In Hindu thought, karma is the principle that actions are followed by reactions of a similar kind from the cosmos. Jainism, one could say, develops a systematic model—almost a physics—of karma by which this principle of action and reaction is explained. Karmas are seen, in Jainism, as particles of subtle matter (or, one could also say, bundles of energy) that adhere to the soul, being attracted to it by distortions or warps in the soul’s pure nature. These distortions are caused by the kaṣāyas, or passions. The passions are reactions to experiences. The intrinsic, pure state of the soul is one of perfect equanimity, or sāmāyika. The Jain path aims to cultivate this state of equanimity, which is essential to becoming free from the cycle of rebirth. According to the Tattvārtha Sūtra (an early Jain text composed by a monk named Umāsvāti and regarded as an authoritative guide to reality by all of the various Jain Reprinted from the journal

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sub-traditions), there are seven basic principles (tattvas) that make up the Jain path to liberation. These are jīva (the soul), ajīva (matter), āsrava (the influx of karmic matter into the soul), bandha (the bondage of the soul to karma and its effects), saṃvara (the cessation of the influx of the karmic matter into the soul), nirjarā (the expulsion of karmic matter from the soul), and finally, mokṣa (liberation of the soul from all karmic matter). This list of principles outlines the stages of the process by which a soul becomes bound to and liberated from karma, and saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth.12 Karma leads to rebirth by requiring the soul to experience the results of all its past actions, which takes many lives. First, there are the soul and matter, the main elements with which the path of purification is concerned. Matter flows into the soul and becomes bound to it. The process of this karmic influx must be brought to an end and the matter already bound to the soul removed for the soul’s infinite potential to be realized and freedom to occur. Karmic matter is compared, in some Jain texts, to a seed (bīja). Like seeds, there are many kinds of karma, which are exhaustively listed in Jain texts. Some seeds bring pleasant experiences. These are good karmas. Some seeds bring painful or otherwise unpleasant experiences and would of course be seen as bad karmas. Other seeds yield experiences that are neither pleasant nor painful, but neutral. All of these experiences, though—good, bad, and neutral—keep the soul bound to the rebirth cycle, for they must occur, even if a given lifetime has come to an end. The kind of seed that will be attracted to a soul depends on the passion within the soul that attracts it. Again, the passions are distortions in the soul which exert a kind of magnetic pull upon karmic matter, drawing it to the soul. The passions themselves are the soul’s emotional responses to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral experiences produced by earlier karmas. Pleasant experiences tend to create attraction. One wants more of this kind of experience. This craving attracts karma to the soul. Unpleasant experiences create negative craving, or aversion: a desire not to have certain experiences. Neutral experiences create the passion of indifference: the sense that one has not been either pleased or pained by the experience, so is neither drawn to nor averse to it. All the passions, depending on their intensity, attract different types of karmic particles. These particles flow into the soul, where they become embedded. After a period of time whose length depends on both the type of karmic particle and the general environment of the soul—the kinds and intensities of the passions pervading it—the karmic seed will ‘sprout,’ producing an experience of a pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral kind. In response to this experience, the soul will feel a passion, which will attract more karmic particles, and the process will begin again. The karmic seed that produced the original experience leaves the soul upon having its effect of creating a happy, unhappy, or neutral effect. It will then continue to float through the cosmos as a potential for future experiences until it is again drawn into a soul undergoing the type and intensity of passion that attracts it. These particles, although indestructible, can have their effects negated by ascetic practice. Ascetic practice, or tapas, is said 12

 Umāsvāti, Tattvārtha Sūtra (2007) 1:4.

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to have the effect of ‘cooking’ the karmic seeds, thus preventing them from ever bearing fruit in the form of an experience. In this way, a Jain practitioner is able to accelerate the process of getting rid of unwanted karmas, thereby moving closer to liberation. This is the cyclical process by which karmic matter becomes bound to souls. Karmic matter that is already present in a soul, having been previously attracted to that soul by specific passions which that soul was undergoing, produces experiences. These experiences evoke further passions, which attract more karmas, which also eventually produce experiential effects, and so on. The path to liberation involves a twofold process of stopping the influx of further karmic matter into the soul and expelling the karmic matter already present before it is able to give rise to further experiences. One should note the mechanistic and impersonal nature of this process. It does not involve a deity. Good and bad karma are not divine rewards or punishments. Again, it is not that simply engaging in action attracts karmic matter (and the karmic effects to which this matter gives rise). It is the passions that attract karma to the soul. If, therefore, one cultivates a state of equanimity and does not respond to experiences with the passions of attraction, aversion, or indifference, one will cease to attract karma into one’s soul. The cultivation of equanimity is brought about with a combination of ethical and meditative practices. According to Jainism, except in the cases of persons who have developed an exceptional degree of self-control through ascetic practice, most of our actions are accompanied by passions. This is true even on an unconscious or barely conscious level. Some actions involve specific passions to such an inevitable degree that committing these actions almost automatically involves passion and the attracting of karma to the soul. Thus, even though it is really the passion and not the action which attracts karma, for all intents and purposes, one may speak in shorthand of certain actions always involving bad karma and certain actions always involving good karma. The worst actions, in terms of being accompanied by passions which attract bad karma, are those involved in harming or destroying living beings: those involved in violence in thought, word, or deed. This is why the central Jain ethical principle is ahiṃsā, or nonviolence: the absence of even the desire to inflict harm on another being. The oldest of the Jain meditative practices is samāyika (also a name for equanimity itself). It involves the recitation of certain Jain texts which recollect the serene state of the liberated beings and serve as affirmations of one’s own aspiration to achieve that same state. Many Jain laypersons observe this practice daily for a period of roughly 48 min.13 There is also prekṣa-dhyāna, which was developed by the twentieth-century Jain master Ācārya Tulsi. It is a recovery or reconstruction of ancient Jain meditation practices long-ago forgotten and seems to draw upon the wider meditation practices shared across many Indian traditions. It is important to note that the state of equanimity cultivated in Jain meditation is not to be confused with indifference (which, one may already have noted with some puzzlement, is one of the passions). The state of samāyika is sometimes characterized as being ‘alike in joy and sorrow.’ One who is in this state of equanimity 13

  Cort, p. 123.

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experiences happiness and unhappiness, joy and sorrow, but does not allow these ephemeral experiences to disrupt one’s inner peace. One identifies, mentally, with the serenity which is the true and constant nature of the jīva, rather than with one’s changing external circumstances. One thus gradually begins to identify with one’s true nature. Like Vedānta and Buddhism, the Jain tradition teaches that seeking happiness in external objects and conditions leads only, at best, to temporary happiness. Infinite joy is to be found in the jīva, which possesses this joy as one of its four essential traits. Identifying with the serenity of the inner self—the soul—is quite different from the state of indifference. Indifference is based in the ego and external circumstances. One is indifferent to phenomena that do not bring one either pain or pleasure. Indifference is thus based on whether a particular thing or condition is making me happy or unhappy. I am indifferent, for example, to an airplane flying in the distance outside my window. I might barely be aware of it. If I know this airplane is bringing someone that I love to visit me, it will become a source of happiness for me. If it crashes into my house, it will become a source of unhappiness. In each case, it is the external circumstance that gives rise to my inner state. Equanimity, on the other hand, as a fundamental trait of the soul, is constant throughout all external conditions: happy, unhappy, and neutral. Once one has cultivated the state of equanimity, identifying with the true nature of the soul rather than with one’s temporary, constantly changing circumstances, one ceases to attract karma. One’s soul no longer exerts the magnet-like pull upon karmic particles that it exerts when subject to the passions. From a Jain perspective, though, cultivating equanimity and ceasing to attract karma to the soul is only half of the twofold process of liberation. The other half involves expelling the karma already present in one’s soul. This pre-existing karma, as noted earlier, is much like a collection of seeds. Each is waiting to ripen and bear fruit: to give rise to an experience. The particular type of experience to which it gives rise depends on the type of karma it is. The length of time it takes to do so depends both on its type and the conditions of the soul to which it is bound. It is much like the way the ripening of a seed is affected by the conditions of the soil in which it is planted. Is the soil rocky or fertile? Does it have abundant water and sunlight? The condition of the soul, by analogy, is a function of the degree of control one exerts over the passions. If the passions run free—if one does not control, but is controlled by, these passions—then the karmas will ripen in their own time. As long as these karmic seeds are in one’s soul, in an un-ripened state, one is not yet free. If, however, one is able to master the passions—cultivating equanimity, as discussed above, but also imposing a measure of discomfort upon oneself, through ascetic practice, without allowing this discomfort to disturb one’s inner state, this is said to end the process of the slow ripening of one’s karmas. Again, ascetic practice negates karmas. This is compared in Jain texts to ‘cooking’ a seed in the ‘fires’ of asceticism. A cooked seed cannot ripen. Similarly, karmic seeds bound to the soul of one who practices asceticism find that soul to be a hostile environment to their ripening and flee from it. They are thus expelled from the soul, much as they eventually would have been in any case, upon having their effect;

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but under the effects of ascetic practice, these karmas leave the soul more quickly, without producing any binding, passion-evoking experiences. The idea behind the Jain path of ascetic purification is that, by ending the influx of karma to the soul through cultivating equanimity and expelling the already present karma through ascetic practice, the soul eventually becomes karma free. Its full potentials of infinite knowledge and bliss then manifest. One thus attains kevala jñāna—omniscience, or absolute knowledge.

Jain Morality: an Atheistic Ethos The centrality of ethical practice to Jainism follows logically from the Jain understanding that freeing oneself from the passions is essential to attaining liberation, and that avoiding certain actions—violent actions—which invariably give rise to destructive passions is vital to this process. In this sense, one can say that Jain practice begins and ends with ahiṃsā. Violent actions (and words and thoughts) are not, however, the only actions likely to bring bad karma into the soul. The Jain moral code is enshrined in a set of five moral rules called vratas, or vows. Though not all Jains formally take these vows, they nonetheless define the basic rules of behavior expected of observant Jains. They are practiced with greater strictness by the ascetic community, though they inform lay Jain life as well. As observed by ascetics, these rules are known as the mahāvratas, or great vows. They consist of the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Ahiṃsā: absolute nonviolence, observed to the strictest degree humanly possible. Satya: always telling the truth, avoiding all falsehood. Asteya: not stealing, not taking anything that is not explicitly given to one. Brahmacarya: celibacy, observing strict control over sensual desires of any kind. Aparigraha: non-attachment, owning no personal property whatsoever.

As observed by householders, these rules are known as the anuvratas, or small vows. These are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ahiṃsā: avoiding deliberate harm to macroscopic (that is, visible) living beings. Satya: abstaining from falsehood, maintaining honesty in business dealings. Asteya: not stealing. Brahmacarya: marital fidelity, maintaining restraint with regard to sensual desires. 5. Aparigraha: non-attachment, avoiding greed or obsessive preoccupation with belongings.

A common criticism of atheism is that a worldview in which there is no supreme God who is presiding over existence would inevitably lead to a breakdown of

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society, as there would be no motivation for people to behave morally. ‘New Atheist’ thinker Sam Harris responds sharply to this criticism by invoking Jainism as a source of morals superior to that of Biblical traditions: ‘If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures…[W]e need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.’14 Jains once again, however, are not atheists in the contemporary sense, which also involves materialism and sensationism. The impersonal process of karma, rather than a divine agent, plays the role that such an agent plays in Western theistic traditions. Indeed, from a Jain perspective, the karmic process obviates the need for a supreme deity, as explained by Padmanabh Jaini: ‘Jaina arguments against the theory of a world-creating God are basically twofold. (1) Creation is not possible without a desire to create, and this implies imperfection on the part of the alleged creator. (2) If karma is relevant in the destinies of human beings, then God is irrelevant; if he rules regardless of the karma of beings, then he is cruel and capricious.’15

Implications of Jain Ethics for Jain Epistemology and Ontology: the Anekānta Doctrine The overriding concern of Jain ascetics to avoid harming living beings has a major impact on Jain philosophy. Questions arose among early Jain ascetics as they pursued their practice of nonviolence. How can I tell if something is alive or not? If there are tiny life forms everywhere, how can I cause the least destruction to them? What is the difference between a living being and a non-living being? Are there beings that are, in one sense, living, and in another sense, non-living?16 This set of reflections also involved reflection on the nature of the jīva, or soul: that which makes, by its presence or absence, an entity a living thing or not. It was noted that the soul has some characteristics—the four infinitudes—that are stable and enduring, and some—like incarnation in a particular form and the emotional and karmic states experienced in that form from moment to moment—that undergo constant change. From these reflections, a set of doctrines arose that are quite remarkable and distinctive to the Jain tradition, and that seem to have been poorly understood by 14

  Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 22–23.   Jaini, p. 89. 16   Piotr Balcerowicz, Early Asceticism in Jainism: Ājivikism and Jainism (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 326. 15

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adherents of other systems of Indian philosophy who sought to critique the Jain perspective. These are the Jain doctrines of the complex nature of reality and the relativity of ordinary knowledge (prior to the attainment of kevala jñāna), as well as the Jain doctrine that a statement is only fully valid when the conditions under which it may be true are specified.17 In terms of ontology, anekānta-vāda states that reality is complex. No phenomenon can be reduced to a single truth. Recall that the basic ontology of Jainism is pluralistic and realist. It rejects the idea that all things can be reduced to modifications of a unified field of consciousness (such as the Vedāntic Brahman) or to a set of modifications to unconscious, non-living matter (the view of materialists). Reality has many dimensions. It is complex and many-sided (anekānta) and so defies simplistic, reductionist characterizations. This follows from the nature of the soul, as including both stable, unchanging characteristics and states of being that change from moment to moment. Each entity, like the soul, has many aspects, is both living and non-living, and so on. Related to this conception of being as complex is a corresponding doctrine of knowledge, or epistemology. Naya-vāda, the doctrine of perspectives, states that, for every aspect of an entity, there is a perspective from which it can be viewed. From the perspective of its intrinsic traits, the soul is unchanging. From the perspective of its changing states, the soul is ephemeral, and so on. Each perspective captures a real aspect of the complex nature of the entity. This epistemology of perspectives gives rise to a distinctive Jain doctrine regarding how one should formulate philosophical propositions. Rather than stating absolutely either that the soul is eternal and unchanging or that it is ephemeral and varied from moment to moment, it is necessary to specify the perspective from which such assertions are made. In the Jain scriptures, the enlightened teacher Mahāvīra is depicted as taking this approach to questions widely regarded as avyākata, or unanswerable, like whether the universe and the soul are eternal or non-eternal. In a discourse with one of his monks, named Jamāli, Mahāvīra explains that there is a sense in which the universe and soul are eternal and a sense in which they are not: ‘[T]he Venerable Mahāvīra told the Bhikkhu Jamāli thus:…[T]he world is, Jamāli, eternal. It did not cease to exist at any time. It was, it is and it will be. It is constant, permanent, eternal, imperishable, indestructible, [and] always existent. The world is, Jamāli, non-eternal. For it becomes progressive (in time-cycle) after being regressive. And it becomes regressive after becoming progressive. The soul is, Jamāli, eternal. For it did not cease to exist at any time. The soul is, Jamāli, non-eternal. For it becomes animal after being a hellish creature, becomes a man after becoming an animal and it becomes a god after being a man.’18 Mahāvīra is here explaining that those who claim the cosmos is eternal and those who claim it is non-eternal are both correct, from their points of view. According 17

  Ibid, pp. 174–185; 220–226.   Bhagavatī Sūtra 9:386. Translation by Matilal. Cited in Bimal Krishna Matilal, Anekāntavāda: The Central Philosophy of Jainism (Allahabad, L.D. Institute of Indology, 1981), p. 19. 18

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to the Jain worldview, there has always been a cosmos. It is, in this sense, eternal. But it is not static. It undergoes constant change, its character being vastly different during the various phases of a cosmic cycle, known as progressive (or utsarpiṇi) and regressive (or avasarpiṇi). It is, in this sense, not literally the same universe from era to era. In a similar vein, the individual soul, or jīva, is also eternal. It has always existed and will always exist. But it inhabits many forms over the course of its journey to freedom. The same soul can be, in one lifetime, a human being, in another an animal, and so on. These forms are not eternal. They perish and pass away, to be replaced by another, and another, until liberation. Answers to questions like, ‘Is the cosmos eternal or non-eternal?’ and ‘Is the living being eternal or noneternal?’ depend on whether the questioner has in mind the totality of the cosmos or its current state of affairs, or the jīva as such or the body it currently inhabits. In this way, seemingly incompatible answers to these questions can both be seen to be true. There is that in all of us which is eternal, and that in all of us which will pass away forever. The two are not mutually exclusive. This approach to seemingly contrary answers to the same question became, in the hands of Jain intellectuals over the course of two and a half millennia, a complex system of logic according to which the views of rival systems of thought could be reconciled into an integral synthesis.19 In its fully developed form, syādvāda, the Jain doctrine of conditional predication, states that a proposition is only true syāt—that is, from a certain perspective, or in a certain sense. From another perspective, the same claim is false. From yet another perspective, the same claim is both true and false. And from another perspective yet again, the truth or falsehood of the claim cannot be determined. It is indeterminate or ‘indescribable.’ If one adds the non-redundant combinations of these four possibilities, one comes up with a total of seven possible truth values for a given truth claim. This teaching is therefore also known as the saptabhaṅgi-naya: the sevenfold (or literally, ‘seven-limbed’) perspective. According to this teaching: From one perspective, or in one sense, claim X is true. From another perspective, or in another sense, claim X is false. From another perspective, or in another sense, claim X is both true and false. From another perspective, or in another sense, the truth of claim X is indeterminate. 5. From another perspective, or in another sense, the truth of claim X is both true and indeterminate. 6. From another perspective, or in another sense, the truth of claim X is both false and indeterminate. 7. From another perspective, or in another sense, the truth of claim X is true, false, and indeterminate. 1. 2. 3. 4.

19

  The approach attributed to Mahāvīra in the Jain Āgamas to the ‘unanswerable’ questions can be profitably compared to that attributed to the Buddha, particularly as understood in the Madhyamaka system, developed by Nāgārjuna (c. second–third century CE). Matilal describes the Buddhist approach as ‘exclusive’ middle path, in that the Buddha rejects all pairs of alternatives as finally inadequate to the description of truth, whereas the Jain approach is an ‘inclusive’ middle path, showing that each perspective has some validity, even if none can serve as a comprehensive picture of reality. See Matilal, p. 18.

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Using this method, one can integrate multiple perspectives regarding the nature of a thing into one, more comprehensive perspective. The most comprehensive perspective is that of an omniscient Jina, who has attained absolute knowledge. What is an example of syādvāda in action? What, precisely, do the Jains mean in talking about a claim having different truth values? Let us take the example of a clay pot. We can say that a clay pot exists inasmuch as it is actualizing the characteristics that we associate with a clay pot at a given time. It is made of clay. It has a particular shape. It can hold water. And so on. But there are also senses in which the clay pot does not exist. It does not exist absolutely, that is, at all times and in all places. It came into being at a particular time, will endure for a while, and will eventually cease to exist as a clay pot (such as if it is broken, in which case it will no longer actualize the characteristics of a clay pot, but of a collection of clay shards). It fills a certain quantity of space in a particular location. It also does not exist as certain other things. It is not a pen: that is, it is not actualizing the characteristics of a pen. One cannot write with it, for example, or carry it in one’s pocket. There is a sense in which the clay pot both does and does not exist. It is embodying certain characteristics at a certain time and place and is not embodying these at others. It is embodying these characteristics and is not embodying other characteristics. And there is a sense in which the nature of the clay pot’s existence cannot be captured in words or concepts. There is that which is in the clay pot that makes it an actual entity and not simply a collection of ideas: what we might call its inexpressible thatness. Although these doctrines affirm that simple metaphysical claims should not be made in an absolute fashion and that the truth of a claim is dependent upon—that is, relative to—the perspective from which it is made, these Jain doctrines should not be taken to constitute a form of relativism, if by that one means the view often found in contemporary discourse according to which there is either no such thing as ultimate truth or no way of knowing what that truth might be. These are not, in other words, skeptical doctrines. On the contrary, they reflect the conviction that, when we properly disambiguate our claims by specifying the perspective from which they are made, we are able to capture the truth better than otherwise.

Conclusion If we take seriously the Jain approach to truth, with its claims of the infinite complexity of existence, the corresponding variety of perspectives from which a topic may be approached, and the ability of claims to have several differing truth values depending upon the perspectives from which they are asserted, then the idea of a worldview that is, in one sense, atheistic, and in another sense, theistic, makes perfect sense. It also stands as a challenge to the somewhat simplistic way in which debates between theists and atheists tend to be carried out in the Western world today. It is typically the case that the deity whose existence or non-existence is being debated is one very specific deity among the many possible sacred beings that might

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be acknowledged and worshiped in a spiritual tradition. We have seen that there is nothing in the Jain tradition that corresponds to this specific deity. This tradition is therefore typically labeled atheistic. But there are at least two senses in which it is not atheistic at all. The collective of enlightened beings residing in the realm of the perfected ones is called, by many Jains, Dev, Bhagavān, or, as English has become a widely spoken language among Jains today, God. There are also gods in the plural, the devas, such as the goddesses of wisdom and prosperity, whom Jains commonly worship. This is not the behavior of atheists in the contemporary Western sense, where atheism is typically identified with not being religious at all. We have also seen that Jain atheism—or, more specifically, Jain denial of the reality of a creator deity—co-exists with a non-materialist ontology and a non-sensationist epistemology, which again makes it quite different from contemporary Western atheism, which is typically both materialist and sensationist. The question of Jain theism or atheism thus stands as a challenge to the ethnocentric notion that there is only one way to slice up the pie of reality; for a vast array of possible philosophical positions exists. One can be theistic in one sense and atheistic in another, and simultaneously hold a range of views about reality and knowledge.

References Balcerowicz, P. (2016). Early asceticism in Jainism: Ājivikism and Jainism. Routledge. Cort, J. E. (2001). Jains in the world: Religious values and ideology in India. Oxford University Press. Gombrich, R. (2009). What the Buddha thought. Oxford University Press. Griffin, D. R. (2001). Reenchantment without supernaturalism: A process philosophy of religion. Cornell University Press. Harris, S. (2006). Letter to a Christian nation. Random House. Hartshorne, C. (2011). The logic of perfection and other essays in neoclassical metaphysics. Literary Licensing. Jaini, P. S. (1979). The Jaina path of purification. University of California Press. Matilal, B. K. (1981). Anekāntavāda: The central philosophy of Jainism. Allahabad, L.D. Institute of Indology. Sekhar, V. (2003). Dharma in early Brahmanic, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. Sri Satguru Publications. Umāsvāti. (2007). Tattvārtha Sūtra. Manu Doshi, trans. JAINA–Federation of Jain Associations in North America.

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Sophia (2021) 60:655–676 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00870-4

Zero—a Tangible Representation of Nonexistence: Implications for Modern Science and the Fundamental Sudip Bhattacharyya1 Accepted: 1 July 2021 / Published online: 6 September 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract A defining characteristic of modern science is its ability to make immensely successful predictions of natural phenomena without invoking a putative god or a supernatural being. Here, we argue that this intellectual discipline would not acquire such an ability without the mathematical zero. We insist that zero and its basic operations were likely conceived in India based on a philosophy of nothing, and classify nothing into four categories—balance, absence, emptiness and nonexistence. We argue that zero is a tangible representation of nonexistence and constitutes all nonzero numbers, which together represent existence. It appears that zero’s journey out of India somewhat separated its mathematical and philosophical aspects, with the former being more valued by some cultures and the latter by others. The European culture, in which modern science grew, largely ignores a philosophy of nothing due to a deep-rooted Greek philosophical base, although this science relies on the notion of nonexistence through zero. Consequently, zero is a mere number of convenience without its foundational philosophy in science, and techniques to circumvent zero are developed. We insist that, while such techniques contribute to the progress of science and mathematics within the current framework, a tendency to avoid zero and its philosophy leads to approximations and may hinder a deeper understanding. Finally, we argue that nonexistence may notionally constitute existence, and hence may be the fundamental. This implies that, if a supernatural being exists, it is not the fundamental. The independence of modern science from a supernatural being is consistent with this. Keywords Fundamental · History · Mathematics · Nothing · Philosophy · Science · Zero Chapter 11 was originally published as Bhattacharyya, S. Sophia (2021) 60: 655–676. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11841-021-00870-4.  Sudip Bhattacharyya

[email protected] 1

TIFR, Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400005, India

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Introduction Modern science, which provides means of finding the patterns of nature, methods to predict natural phenomena with precision and without invoking a supernatural being (e.g., a god), and hence ways for technological progress, deals with the existent world. This is not surprising, because we ourselves are existents, at least to us, and we can access only existents. But, nevertheless, we have a notion of nonexistence. The notion itself is an existent, but it points towards what is beyond existents and existence. The notion could perhaps be ignored as impractical, but for the fact that this notion gave rise to the mathematical zero (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’), which not only built an essential foundation of modern science, but also happens to be inseparable from the fabric of science (see ‘Zero: a Seed of Modern Science’). This likely points to the premise of modern science, which is beyond existence and more fundamental than the realm of science. A glimpse of this premise could probably be had by studies considering exactly zero, instead of by merely approaching it, as one does in mathematics, for example, by taking limits. Such a glimpse may also have implications for the fundamental. In this paper, we expand upon these points. We speculate how zero could have been conceived (‘Conceptualization of Zero’), examine the philosophical foundation of zero and its operations (‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’), and discuss the eventual separation of the philosophical and mathematical aspects of zero (‘Journey of Zero’). The indispensable contribution of zero to modern science is outlined in ‘Zero: a Seed of Modern Science’, and the implication of avoiding studies considering exactly zero is mentioned in ‘Zero: a Number of Convenience’. We discuss implications of the philosophy of zero for the fundamental in ‘Implications for the Fundamental’. Finally, we argue why this philosophy is not similar to many other philosophies of mathematics (‘The Philosophy of Zero and Other Philosophies of Mathematics: a Difference’), and include summary and conclusions in ‘Summary and Conclusions’.

Conceptualization of Zero Nothing Zero implies nothing. Before addressing the conceptualization of zero, first we need to briefly mention what nothing could be. Philosophically, we can identify four kinds of nothings—balance-nothing, absence-nothing, emptiness-nothing and nonexistence-nothing. Here, we briefly explain these distinct ideas with examples. An example of balance-nothing is two equal and opposing forces balancing each other, so that there is no motion or no acceleration. k − k is another example of balance-nothing, where k and −k are balancing each other. In the ancient ˙ Indian philosophy of S¯amkhya (see Radhakrishnan 2008, vol. 2, pp. 226–307), the unmanifested Prakr.ti, the fundamental substance, is an example of balancenothing, which, when disturbed and not in equilibrium, can cause creation (see

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‘Invention of Zero’). Similarly, the so-called vacuum, as considered in science, may be another example of balance-nothing, because it can fluctuate and give rise to shortlived particles (Seife 2000, p. 172; Hawking & Mlodinow 2011, p. 145). Note that not only are the two or multiple opposing agents generating a balance-nothing existents, but also a balance-nothing, which is a secondary, is itself an existent. An absence-nothing points to the absence of a thing. That thing is an existent, and is the primary in this context. The absence-nothing is defined with respect to this primary existent, and hence should be an existent itself. An emptiness-nothing is somewhat similar to an absence-nothing, and is defined with respect to a container, which is an existent, and the primary here. For example, while an empty space has been considered to be synonymous with nothing in multiple cultures throughout the history, it is an emptiness-nothing with the space as the container for the emptiness of space. A mathematical empty set is also an emptiness-nothing with the set as the container. Among the four kinds of nothings, the nonexistence-nothing appears to be the most fundamental. But how much nonexistent is a nonexistence-nothing? A balancenothing is not a nonexistence-nothing at all, because here existents combine to become a nothing. An absence-nothing is not a nonexistence-nothing either, because this nothing refers to (the absence of) a specific thing, an existent. An emptinessnothing, however, is somewhat nonexistent, because, while it requires a container, it does not refer to a specific existent for itself. A more nonexistent nonexistencenothing, while it somehow exists, lacks any property or essence. An example of this could be the so-called Nirguna Brahman of an ancient Indian philosophy (see ‘Invention of Zero’; Radhakrishnan 2008, vol. 1, pp. 132–133). The absolute nonexistence-nothing is not widely considered, but the nothing or Non-being (Wu), the unnamable (Yu-Lan 1976, pp. 94–95), of Chinese Taoism is perhaps conceptually closer to this (see ‘Invention of Zero’). Note that, in this paper, we use positive be verbs with nonexistence and nothing for the sake of clarity. However, a true nonexistence cannot be thought of or spoken of, because what is thought of or spoken of is an existent. What is zero then? Zero can be seen as a tangible representation of a nothing, which was conceived to understand and use the inaccessible nothing. It is our intellectually invented practical tool to deal with nothing. Let us now discuss how humans could invent zero. Much Ado About a Placeholder Zero is used as a number. One of the greatest intellectual inventions by humans is numbers for counting. This happened in the prehistoric era (Seife 2000, pp. 6–9), and required a level of abstraction, because objects as different as three trees and three tigers would be referred to by the same word and the same symbol representing three. The abstraction increased, when an apparently continuous entity, such as a land, was measured using numbers in terms of a unit, and this probably gave the idea of fractional numbers with respect to the same unit. Sumerians, who dominated

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Mesopotamia1 since before 3000 BCE to about 2000 BCE, are credited with many fundamental inventions, including the place-value number system (Kramer 1969, p. 124; Kaplan 1999, pp. 10–11; Kriwaczek 2012, pp. 192–195). In such a system, the value of a digit is determined by its position in a number, and this is the bestknown way to express numbers, which we currently use. However, the Mesopotamian number system was a sexagesimal or base 60 system, which had 59 digits instead of 1 − 9 of our decimal or base 10 system. In the decimal system, for two side-byside digits, the weight of the left digit is 10 times more than that of the right digit, while in the sexagesimal system, this weight is 60 times more. For example, ‘14’ is 1×10+4 in the decimal, but implies 1×60+4, i.e., 64 in the sexagesimal. However, the Mesopotamian number system did not have a zero. This would not be a problem, when a number like ‘102’ in sexagesimal (which is 3602 in decimal) would be verbally mentioned or written in words. This would not be a problem either, when calculations involving this number would be done using an abacus, which Mesopotamians were so deft with. But, since there was no numeral for our ‘0’, ‘102’, if written using numerals, would easily be confused with ‘12’ (which is 62 in decimal). Even if they had tried to put a gap between ‘1’ and ‘2’ for ‘102’, such a gap would not usually be clear. This is why, finally around 600 − 300 BCE, Mesopotamians started using a slant double-wedge symbol as a placeholder to occupy this gap (e.g., to separate ‘1’ and ‘2’ for ‘102’; Kaplan 1999, p. 12; Seife 2000, p. 15). Since this placeholder would appear at a position where we use the numeral ‘0’ today, the placeholder is often highlighted as the first appearance or invention of ‘zero’ (Seife 2000, p. 15). However, the placeholder was neither a mathematical zero nor a philosophical nothing, for the following reasons. (1)

(2) (3)

(4)

1 Iraq

The Mesopotamian placeholder was used as a punctuation mark or separator between two digits, so that different numbers could be identified without a confusion, as explained above. A punctuation mark does not give rise to the thought of zero. This placeholder was never used as a number, and its mathematical operations were not conceived. As far as we know, the placeholder was not connected to any philosophical idea, such as that of nothing. For example, it is unlikely that Mesopotamians used the placeholder to represent the emptiness-nothing (see ‘Nothing’), such as an empty column of an abacus or an empty position of a number. This is because, had Mesopotamians done so, they would have used the placeholder also to mark the empty position at the end of a number, like 60. But, it seems that they never did that (Kaplan 1999, p. 12). They continued to express both 1 and 60 by the same numeral. A placeholder is required in the place-value number system, but is not needed in many other number systems, such as Greek and Roman. It is not essential even for the place-value number system, and Mesopotamians used this system

and around.

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without a placeholder for about two millennia. Therefore, it is not likely that a concept as fundamental as that of zero would originate from a nonessential punctuation mark. So we conclude that the Mesopotamian placeholder cannot be considered as an initial form of zero, and it is unlikely that this placeholder gave the idea of zero. This possibly implies that a place-value number system was not important to invent zero, and the notion of zero does not depend on whether all numbers are written in a highly systematic and compact way using only a few symbols, or if all numbers have different symbols. Invention of Zero How was zero invented then, and where? Here, we do not consider the Mayan2 number system, which had a numeral for zero (Kaplan 1999, p. 80; Seife 2000, pp. 16–18), because it is not likely that this system influenced our current mathematics and zero. The Indian Indus valley civilization, which was contemporary to Sumerians, also had an advanced mathematical knowledge like Sumerians. This is evident from the astonishing precision and standardization of their weights and measurements of various things, like bricks, buildings and cities (Joseph 2011, pp. 317–321; Raha et al. 2014, pp. 139–144). But it is perhaps not known if they had the zero in their number system. The equally ancient Egyptian civilization, although advanced in geometry, had neither a place-value number system nor the zero (Seife 2000, pp. 10–12). Among the later civilizations, those of ancient Greeks and Romans are wellknown. They did not conceive the zero. Greek scholarly activities generally opposed the idea of nothing. This Greek prejudice influenced later Islamic and Christian cultures throughout millennia, and shaped the way zero is treated in modern science. Hence, we will briefly mention certain aspects of mathematics and philosophy of ancient Greeks. Greeks started significant scholarly activities towards the end of the first half of the first millennium BCE. This happened mostly in the cities along the Aegean coast of Anatolia,3 founded by Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian Greeks (Freely 2010, pp. 5– 8). The centre of such activities was shifted to Athens, when the Persian power rose, and later gradually to Alexandria, when Romans started building an empire. Initially, Greeks learned mathematics perhaps primarily from Egyptians (Seife 2000, pp. 10–12), but may be also from others, such as Mesopotamians and Phoenicians. Consequently, like Egyptians, Greeks were skilled in geometry (Seife 2000, pp. 11, 34), and made a notable progress in this branch of mathematics. But the Egyptian influence also ensured that they did not have a place-value number system. The Greek and the somewhat similar Roman number systems were quite inefficient in expressing bigger numbers and in mathematical operations, and did not have the capacity to

2 The

Mayan civilization flourished in Mexico and Central America during around 300 BCE–900 CE. part of Turkey.

3 Western

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support the mathematical and scientific development leading to the current stage of human civilization. While Greeks did not have a place-value number system, Greek astronomers learned and used the Mesopotamian place-value system for their calculations (Seife 2000, p. 19). They would translate the results of these calculations back into the Greek system, and did not realize the need to adopt the superior place-value system for a general use. Greek astronomers naturally used the Mesopotamian placeholder, the Greek symbol of which was a hollow circle, either decorated or undecorated4 (Kaplan 1999, p. 19). Although the Mesopotamian placeholder was not zero (see ‘Much Ado About a Placeholder’), this circular symbol is sometimes speculated to be the first appearance of zero. But the knowledge of circle has been very common in many cultures, and what is important is not a specific symbol but the notion. The ancient Greek culture is not known to have the notion of a mathematical zero. We believe that ancient Greeks could not have invented a mathematical zero (Seife 2000, p. 12) for two main reasons: (1) they had less inclination towards abstraction of numbers, and (2) they did not have a philosophical source for zero. Regarding the first point, Greeks could not view numbers in an abstract way, and sometimes would visualize them using geometric shapes. This gave rise to categories such as triangular numbers (e.g., 3, 6, 10) and square numbers (e.g., 4, 9, 16) (Seife 2000, pp. 27–28). But a notion of zero using geometric shapes was not possible, because, no geometric shape would correspond to the idea of zero (Seife 2000, p. 34). Regarding the second point, while the philosophical source of a mathematical zero is nothing, the ancient Greek culture rejected nothing, following the views of scholars, such as Parmenides and Aristotle (e.g., Hospers 1997, p. 50; Kaplan 1999, p. 63; Seife 2000, pp. 46–48; Close 2009, p. 9). However, a philosophical idea of nothing was not rejected in China, when in the later half of the first millennium BCE, Taoism proposed that the Being (Yu) comes from nothing or Non-being (Wu), and beings come out of the Being (Yu-Lan 1976, p. 96). But a mathematical zero was not conceived in China (Kaplan 1999, 91), and a vacancy between numerals in numbers, like that in Mesopotamia (see ‘Much Ado About a Placeholder’), was not zero. Perhaps Indian travellers, mostly Buddhist missionaries, or Arabs, who learned ‘zero’ from Indians, brought zero to China (e.g., Kaplan 1999, p. 91; Liangkang 2007). It is widely accepted that the mathematical zero was invented in India (e.g., Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, pp. 75–88; Basham 2004, p. 497). As indicated above, such an invention required an abstraction and a philosophical source. We note that, among all the abstract concepts, the concept of nothing, and hence zero, perhaps requires the abstraction of the highest degree. This is because, unlike other abstractions, which are built on perceived and/or known entities, the abstraction for nothing and zero does not have a empirical foundation to be built on. It is clear that the level of abstraction in India was significant, and favourable for the invention of zero, in the first millennia BCE and CE. For example, in India, numbers were stripped of their descriptive purposes, and were considered as abstract objects themselves (Kaplan 1999, p. 75; 4 For example, in the astronomical treatise Almagest, written by the notable Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy in the second century CE.

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Seife 2000, p. 70). This is why general solutions of algebraic equations, irrespective of specific practical problems, such as the solution of the general quadratic equation ax 2 + bx = c by Sridhara or Sridharacharya, could be formulated in India in the first millennium CE (Datta & Singh 1962, Part II, p. 65). A philosophical environment, useful to support zero, was also present in India, and here are some examples. Nothing was mentioned in the ‘Hymn of Creation’5 in the ancient Indian text R.g-Veda. This hymn, which is perhaps the oldest record of philosophic doubt in the world history, and could have been composed before 1000 BCE, started with (Basham 2004, p. 249) ‘Then even nothingness was not, nor existence’. The hymn also mentioned (Basham 2004, p. 250) ‘That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing’, which may have been grounded in a concept quite similar to Chinese Taoism (Yu-Lan 1976, p. 96), i.e., a concept of existence originating from nonexistence, but it was articulated in India centuries before Taoism. This is opposite to the dictum—nothing comes from nothing—prevalent in the ancient Greek culture (Seife 2000, pp. 25–61). The idea of nothing was subsequently developed in multiple Indian philosophical sects.6 Nirguna Brahman, or the Absolute without qualities, of the Upanis.ads7 may ˙ be an example of this. Another example may be found in the S¯amkhya system of the first millennium BCE (Radhakrishnan 2008, vol. 2, pp. 226–307), according to which creation or manifestation happens due to a disturbance of the equilibrium in the fundamental substance Prakr.ti, which, in the unmanifested condition, is nothing. Since all things are based on Prakr.ti, which is a union of opposites, its unmanifested condition could be considered a balance-nothing (see ‘Nothing’). Besides, the Indian ´ unyav¯ada, insisted that all is void or empty (Radhakrishnan Buddhist school, the S¯ 2008, vol. 1, p. 508). N¯ag¯arjuna,8 a Buddhist philosopher of the second and third century CE, supposedly proposed9 that all expressible things are empty of their own being, because a thing is caused by, and hence dependent on, other things. It was argued that a dependent thing lacks its own being, and cannot exist (Lindtner 1987, pp. 35, 67). But when was the mathematical zero invented? Zero gained the status of a number, when some of its basic mathematical operations were established (Kaplan 1999, p. 140). The first clear record of the currently used rules of addition, subtraction and multiplication involving not only zero, but also negative numbers, is found in the book Br¯ahmasphut.asiddh¯anta written by the Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta in 628 CE (Datta and Singh 1962, Part I, pp. 238–244; Datta & Singh 1962, Part II, pp. 20–24; Kaplan 1999, pp. 71–72). It is, however, expected that, after the first conception of an idea as radical and ‘unnecessary’ (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’) as the mathematical zero, centuries might have

5 Rg-Veda:

10:129. Bilimoria (2012) for a discussion on nothing, also in the Indian context. 7 Indian philosophical texts. Some of them could have been composed in the first half of the first millennium BCE (Radhakrishnan 2008, vol. 1, pp. 106–220). 8 See Bilimoria (2017) for a brief and systematic discussion on N¯ ag¯arjuna’s philosophy. 9 S¯ ´ unyat¯asaptati: verses 2 and 71. .

6 See

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passed before the invention of its basic operations and its wide acceptance in mathematics (e.g., Kaplan 1999, p. 71). In fact, there are many not-so-direct and indirect indications, based on epigraphic and palaeographic evidence, word-numerals, Indian and non-Indian texts, etc., that both the decimal place-value system and zero perhaps existed in India centuries before Br¯ahmasphut.asiddh¯anta was written (Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, pp. 75–104; Basham 2004, p. 497). It is not entirely clear why a direct evidence of zero before Br¯ahmasphut.asiddh¯anta does not exist, but there could be several reasons, including the fact that most of the mathematical calculations used to be done using dust spread on the ground or on a board, and not on preservable substances or objects (Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, pp. 123–124; Kaplan 1999, p. 49). In fact, this is why mathematical calculations used to be known as dhuli-karma or dust-work in India (Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, pp. 123–124; Kaplan 1999, p. 49). The division of a number by zero was discussed in the book Lilavati written by Bh¯askara II or Bh¯askaracharya in twelfth century CE. He remarked that a/0 (a = 0) is something that does not alter by addition and subtraction (Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, p. 243). This is what we call the infinity. Note that infinity in nature was largely rejected by the ancient Greek culture, at least starting from Aristotle (Seife 2000, pp. 46–47), and this has a deep influence on modern science. On the other hand, infinity was quite accepted in India since long before Bh¯askara II. For example, the Ch¯andogya Upanis.ad (Verse 7.23.1), an Indian philosophical text of the first half of the first millennium BCE, declared that joy is in infinity, no joy is in finity. And not only infinity, but also its multiple levels were mathematically conceptualized and studied by the Jaina sect in India perhaps in the first millennium BCE (Joseph 2011, pp. 349–350). It is worth noting that different levels of infinity were first accepted in Europe in the late nineteenth century CE, after Georg Cantor studied this topic (Seife 2000, pp. 148–156).

The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations Could the mathematical zero be conceived without a background philosophy of nothing? Here, we discuss how much this philosophy may have contributed to the notion and operations of zero. First, we note that ancient civilizations, like those of Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, etc., built cities and large-scale trade networks, and spectacularly progressed in science, technology, literature and many other aspects throughout the millennia without knowing the mathematical zero. Therefore, clearly, neither these activities required zero, nor could they give rise to the notion of zero. This means zero was conceived purely intellectually, without any practical need. Was zero required in mathematics? Numbers could be expressed and mathematical calculations for practical purposes could be done without zero in antiquity. However, zero could have been conceived as a reference point. This is because each number is a point on the number line and hence cannot be distinguished from other numbers. The unique meaning of a number on this line is given by its separation from zero. Zero could have also been conceived as a boundary of decreasing values of pure fractions on the number line. But, had one of these concepts given the notion of zero, perhaps 150

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zero would have been invented by many cultures. Moreover, zero is commonly used to mean no.10 This suggests that no, or the idea of nothing, and not a mathematical need, gave rise to zero. Zero is sometimes defined as k − k (k is any nonzero number). This is improper, because without defining zero as a nothing, one cannot meaningfully conclude k − k = 0. Hence, the philosophical idea of zero is the primary, and k − k = 0 is a secondary. Furthermore, just as the idea of 2 does not come from 5 − 3 and 63 − 61, and in general from k − (k − 2) in a non-unique manner, the idea of zero should not come from k − k. If the mathematical zero represents a nothing, then what kind of nothing could it be (see ‘Nothing’ for categories)? Does zero represent either a balance-nothing or an absence-nothing? If yes, then it has to be either a balance of existents, particularly numbers (e.g, k − k for any nonzero k, as mentioned above), or an absence of every existent, particularly every number. This would mean, there would be a zero corresponding to every number and various sets of numbers, and zero would be non-uniquely defined based on all numbers, and not by its own right. Could zero represent an emptiness-nothing? Emptiness does not refer to a specific existent.11 But it requires a container, which has to be empty. The nonzero numbers do not need a container, and hence zero should not need it, either. We also note that balance, absence and emptiness must have been known from experience in all cultures throughout history, but most cultures did not invent the mathematical zero. So the idea of zero probably came from the remaining category, i.e., nonexistence-nothing. Since the rules of basic mathematical operations, viz., addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, gave zero the status of a number (see ‘Invention of Zero’), it is important to examine if such rules could be independent of an idea of nothing. Let us first discuss if such rules for zero could come from the notion of mathematical operations of other numbers. Note that addition increases and subtraction decreases. In fact, the notion of increase comes before the mathematical operation of addition, and must have existed since time immemorial.12 We cannot have a doubt that even many non-human animals can recognize increase in their own ways. This notion led to the invention of the mathematical operation of addition only recently, i.e., a few thousand years ago. The same can be said for decrease and subtraction. So increase and decrease are primary, and addition and subtraction are secondary. But one can add and subtract zero without increasing and decreasing. Here, unlike other numbers, addition and subtraction are primary. Similarly, there is no other number, which, like zero, collapses any number to itself by multiplication. The result of division by any other number is also not similar to the result of division by zero. Therefore, clearly, the rules of zero’s operations did not come from the mathematical operations of other numbers. It may also be noted that the operations of zero, which we use today, were conceived and established long before modern advanced mathematics was developed. So, this mathematics was developed on the basis of, and hence is secondary to, zero’s 10 E.g.,

I have zero money instead of I have no money. absence, which refers to the absence of a specific thing (see ‘Nothing’). 12 Note that a child can distinguish between increase and decrease, before he/she learns mathematical operations. 11 Unlike

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operations, and cannot be used to understand such operations. Therefore, we have the only remaining option, i.e., the very idea of zero based on the philosophy of nothing must have been used to define the rules of zero’s operations. Thus such rules were not proved. The nonzero numbers and their basic mathematical operations, which provide a premise in mathematics, were also not proved. They were defined based on experience, particularly from the requirement of counting objects. A large part of the mathematical structure, along with the corresponding so-called rigorous proofs, stand on, and hence are secondary to, this premise, which was decided in the prehistoric era and in the early stages of civilization. However, zero and its operations were defined using a higher level of abstraction, and were not much aided by experience. It appears that a specific notion of nonexistence-nothing, viz., nonexistent cannot change the amount of anything (existent or nonexistent), gives the rules of addition and subtraction of zero (‘Invention of Zero’). Next we consider the multiplication of a number with zero. It is a common practice to ‘prove’ 0 × b = 0 with the steps 0 × b = (k − k) × b = k × b − k × b = 0. But, as mentioned above, this is improper because k − k does not define zero, and is secondary to zero. Rather, zero means no. So, just as 2×b means two bs, 0×b means no b. Therefore, if there is no b, and no other existent is mentioned, then there is nothing, which means there is 0. This is the philosophical premise for multiplication with zero. Here, two notable aspects are these: (1) unlike other numbers, zero collapses all numbers to itself, or nothing, by multiplication, and (2) hence all existents or numbers have the same standing for zero. Regarding the first aspect, multiplication with zero notionally disintegrates a number, and we will comment on this after discussing the division with zero. The second aspect suggests that zero is fundamentally different from nonzero numbers, which is consistent with the notion that zero represents nonexistence, while all other numbers together represent existence. This is why the conceptualization of zero is at least as important as the conceptualization of all other numbers together. Let us now consider the division with zero. What is division, e.g., a/b? Here, without losing any generality, we can assume a and b to be pure numbers, because units, if any, can be separated and combined, and the answer will have the same combined unit. a/b could be interpreted in the following two ways. It implies that b number of exactly equal entities (numbers) are made, at least notionally, using the entire a only, and a/b is the size of each such resulting entity. a/b also implies how many bs are contained in a. A mathematical way to find it is to calculate how many times b has to be subtracted from a to get zero. For pure numbers, these two interpretations are equivalent. With these, let us now consider 0/0, which implies the number of nonexistencenothing contained in nonexistence-nothing. A philosophical notion of nonexistence suggests that this could be any number. We can check this mathematically using the subtraction rule of zero (which also uses the notion of nonexistence-nothing), as 0/0 means how many times 0 has to be subtracted from 0 to get 0. The answer is any number of times, and hence 0/0 is any number, including 0. Similarly, a/0 (a is a nonzero number) means how many times 0 has to be subtracted from a to get 0. A finite number of subtractions will not achieve this, and hence the notion of 152

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endless or infinite subtractions is introduced. This gives a/0 ≡ ∞, with some rules of operations for ∞ defined (see ‘Invention of Zero’). Therefore, the idea of division with zero is also based on the philosophy of nothing. Basic mathematical operations of zero are typically considered somewhat anomalous (e.g., Seife 2000, pp. 20–23), when they are naively compared with those of other numbers. But, as explained above, these operations are not anomalous, if the origin of the notion of zero from the philosophy of nothing is considered. For example, another way to understand 0 × b = 0 is that multiplication with zero notionally disintegrates a number (as mentioned above) out of existence. This is because such a multiplication is equivalent to endless or infinite divisions (since 1/0 ≡ ∞ implies 1/∞ ≡ 0), which notionally breaks the essence of a number. This suggests that nonexistence constitutes a number, i.e., an existent. This is fully consistent with 0/0 being any number, including 0, which means all numbers can be generated from zero. This is why we believe, while 0/0 is considered perhaps the most anomalous entity in mathematics, and is summarily avoided whenever it appears, it is the most interesting and important mathematical entity. For nonzero numbers, a multiplication with a number k can be reversed by the division with the same number k, i.e., the original number can be recovered. This is because k/k = 1, and 1 is the multiplicative identity. But, this is not generally true for a zero multiplier, since 0/0 is any number. This is typically considered to be an anomaly (e.g., Seife 2000, pp. 22–23). But the reversal does happen even for zero, if we consider, as mentioned above, that zero represents nonexistence and all other numbers together represent existence. This is because, notionally, a multiplication with zero unbuilds existence, making it zero mathematically, and a division of zero with zero builds existence. In this section, we have discussed the premise regarding zero and not any proof. Note that, while a formal proof is usually required to support a further progress, every proof depends on a premise, and hence the premise is the primary and a proof is a secondary.

Journey of Zero In this section, we briefly discuss the spreading of the idea of zero into other countries from India. As mentioned above, zero has two aspects—philosophical and mathematical, with the latter depending on the former. The journey of zero out of India somewhat separated these two aspects, with the former being more valued by some cultures and the latter by others. In the first millennium CE, both aspects likely spread in Southeast Asia and East Asia, where Indians either established colonies or at least exerted a significant cultural influence. For example, an indication of the mathematical aspect of zero comes from the inscription of a year in seventh century CE on a stone tablet found near Sambor in Cambodia (Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, p. 44). On the other hand, an Indian philosophy of nothing gave birth to the Ch’an13 school of

13 The

word Ch’an came from the Indian word dhyana, which means ‘meditation’.

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philosophy in China, which spread in other parts of East Asia and became known as the Zen philosophy in Japan (Yu-Lan 1976, p. 255). But, while the mathematical aspect of zero did not give rise to modern science in this part of the world, its philosophical aspect is still valued there by sects of the Mahayana Buddhism. However, the mathematical aspect of zero and the Indian decimal place-value system were accepted, used and popularized in the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate established in 749 CE. The first few generations of these Arab caliphs patronized an aggressive acquirement of knowledge, primarily by inviting scholars and translation of books, mainly from three sources—Indian, Greek and Persian (e.g., Fakhry 2009, pp. 7–12; Sachau 2002, pp. xxx–xliii). There cannot be any doubt that the Indian decimal number system, arithmetic and algebra became known in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, by early ninth century CE. This is because around that time Al-Khwarizmi, a scholar under the service of the caliph al-Ma’mun, could write a book on the computation with Indian numerals and another book on algebra, a subject which was developed with abstraction and general rules by a number of Indian mathematicians before Al-Khwarizmi. But the philosophy of the Islamic world was greatly influenced by that of Greeks (Fakhry 2009, pp. 3–4), including the rejection of nothing by Aristotle. Thus zero came into conflict with Aristotle’s doctrine (Seife 2000, pp. 47–48), and consequently was treated as a mere number, separated from its foundational philosophy of nonexistence. Similar conflicts were repeated in the Christian world in Europe after a few centuries (Seife 2000, pp. 77–78), when Leonardo from Italy learned the Indian numerals and techniques of calculations from the Islamic world in North Africa, and introduced this new knowledge in Europe in thirteenth century CE (Freely 2010, pp. 132–133). A main attraction of Aristotle’s doctrine in multiple theologies was its spatially finite cosmological model, which provided a ‘proof’ of God in the form of the prime mover (Seife 2000, pp. 46–47). But, when even after many debates and multiple bans, the immense power, utility and potential of the Indian decimal system including zero, and the arithmetic and algebra developed based on it, could not be ignored or suppressed, theologians and early natural scientists in Europe, such as Blaise Pascal, started looking for an alternative proof of God14 (Seife 2000, pp. 101–104). The rejection of Aristotle’s doctrine and the acceptance of the mathematics including zero developed in India, and later in the Islamic world, marked the rise of modern science in Europe (e.g., Seife 2000, p. 83).

Zero: a Seed of Modern Science By modern science, here we primarily mean the ways to connect the observed patterns or phenomena of nature by key statements or propositions, which give the power to ‘know’ about the unobserved patterns or phenomena by linking all of them by assumed similarities and a supposed evolution. Such propositions are called ‘laws’,

14 The

divine wager of Pascal, based on a probabilistic calculation, was an example.

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which replace the ‘whims’ of a supernatural being (e.g., a god) and the randomness of natural phenomena, thus providing us a much valued predictive power. There are other defining aspects of modern science, such as the requirement of objectivity15 and specific methods. But what distinguishes science from many other intellectual institutions is its independence from a supernatural being. This was possible, as gradually we gained enough confidence that our known patterns, theories and ‘universal’ laws work successfully to describe and predict many natural phenomena. The foundation of this confidence was built through multiple cultures and millennia, and science took its current form mainly in Europe in the last few centuries. This form of science came into being as the theological roots of science significantly weakened, and no professional scientific work would mention a god or a miracle. But, due to various reasons, including cultural influence, personal belief, lack of confidence in the fundamentality of a law, etc., even well-known modern scientists sometimes mention a god in relation to understanding nature. For example, Albert Einstein, a twentieth century scientist, allegedly commented that God does not play dice... Another modern scientist, Stephen Hawking, after having a discussion on a plausible complete theory of everything, mentioned God in his book: ‘then we would know the mind of God’ (Hawking 2009, p. 124). Richard Feynman, yet another twentieth century scientist, apparently aired his doubt about the existence of a so-called ultimate law, that explains everything (Krauss 2013, p. 177). Here, we note that a major problem of having an ultimate law is that such a law, being an existent, may require a sustenance, and anything that sustains it would be more fundamental or ultimate than it16 . The following hymn (Conference 1888, p. 18) could be seen as an endeavour to make a compromise between the laws and God, by accepting the power of laws, yet considering them secondary to God: Praise the Lord, for he hath spoken; Worlds his mighty voice obeyed; Laws which never shall be broken, For their guidance he hath made. But the God, if an existent, may also require a sustenance. However, despite the above points, modern science with ‘universal’ theories and laws is certainly one of the most godless intellectual institutions in human history. In order to understand the crucial contribution of zero to modern science, one needs to study how and to what extent zero is explicitly and implicitly used in science. A more useful exercise would be to simulate what kind of science might have appeared without any conception of zero due to an evolution since the first half of the first millennium CE. But both of these are beyond the scope of this paper, and here we will briefly mention a few points on the role of zero in the development of modern science with its laws, focussing on calculus, a mathematical discipline.

15 Note that a degree of subjectivity was mentioned in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory (Heisenberg 2000, pp. 19–25). 16 Implausibility of self-sustenance is briefly mentioned in ‘Implications for the Fundamental’.

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A precise law of nature, expressed mathematically, can be an indeterminate algebraic equation, i.e., an equation with more than one unknown. The unknowns in the equation are measurable parameters characterizing some aspects of nature. An early example of this is Boyle’s law for gas (published in 1662), which is P V = k, where, P and V are the pressure and the volume of the gas respectively, and k is a constant, which could be estimated from one set of measured P and V values. Here, P and V are two unknowns, and one of them can be known for a given value of the other using the law. The degree of universality of a law depends on the extent of the realm of its application. For example, Boyle’s law is applicable for an ideal gas with a given temperature and amount in a closed system. Zero is present, explicitly or implicitly, in every algebraic equation. For example, a cubic equation is essentially (x −a)(x −b)(x −c) = 0, and the roots (a, b, c) of this equation are found in the rule of multiplication with zero, which requires that at least one of (x − a), (x − b) and (x − c) be zero. Moreover, while Mesopotamians, Greeks and others studied algebra in antiquity, explicit and general laws (rules or algorithms) to solve algebraic equations considering the unknown entity as an abstract object without assigning its nature were established in India in the first millennium CE by a series of mathematicians (Datta & Singh 1962, Part II, pp. 1–307; Kaplan 1999, p. 75). These mathematical laws were the predecessor of and set the arena for the laws of modern science. Therefore, the series of mathematical studies in India, including the decimal number system with zero, abstraction and explicit arithmetical and algebraic laws (Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, pp. 130–244; Datta & Singh 1962, Part II, pp. 1–307), made algebra sufficiently advanced to become a language of the laws of nature. The next step was to combine algebra with geometry to make a coordinate system, which was started perhaps in the Islamic world, and was formalized in Europe in seventeenth century CE by Ren´e Descartes, who put the origin at 0 (Seife 2000, pp. 94–95). Eventually, the axis was extended to the negative side. This required an unreserved acceptance of negative numbers, which was made √ possible by zero. Later, another axis made of the so-called imaginary numbers (k −1; k is a real number) was added. Note that imaginary numbers essentially came out of the rule described by Brahmagupta, that negative multiplied with negative is positive (Datta & Singh 1962, Part II, p. 22), and hence the square of no (real) number can be negative. This rule, however, was not proved, but came from a definition or premise that negative generally implies opposite, and hence the product of two minuses makes a plus. We note that a coordinate system, made of positive and negative, real and imaginary numbers and zero, which combined algebra with geometry, was the key to formulate, understand, analyse and use ‘precise’ laws of nature. And such a coordinate system could not be conceived without zero. But an indeterminate algebraic equation, such as P V = k, does not capture the change of a parameter, and hence cannot predict how a natural system would evolve through a specific process. Note that it is such predictions which actually made modern science independent of a supernatural being, and such a prediction requires the rate of change of a parameter with respect to another parameter (e.g., time), the rate of change of that rate of change, and so on in an algebraic equation. A special equation

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like this is called a differential equation, and this new field of mathematics came to be known as calculus, which was developed in seventeenth century CE in Europe.17 An indeterminate algebraic equation without a rate term could give a static law or an expression of a parameter of nature, e.g., the gravitational force. Such an expression, when included in a differential equation, e.g., the one expressing Newton’s second law of motion, could predict the evolution of a parameter, such as the evolution of the location of an object influenced by the gravitational force. In fact, this specific example, which showed that the motions of both celestial objects and terrestrial objects could be predicted by the same law of nature, expressed using a differential equation, was particularly useful to make science independent of a supernatural being. The rate of change of a parameter y with respect to another parameter x is written as dy/dx, which is the limit of [y(x + h) − y(x)]/ h for h tending to 0 (Das & Mukherjee 1992, p. 69). Without the concept of zero, the mathematics involving such an infinitesimal change, viz., calculus, and hence modern science, might not have been developed.

Zero: a Number of Convenience While the foundation of calculus is zero, it inherently avoids zero. Calculus is a study of change, which is required to track the evolution of a system (here, the dependent parameter y; see ‘Zero: a Seed of Modern Science’) continuously, i.e., with zero gap (i.e., dx = h = 0 in dy/dx). This is why calculus is founded on zero. But a zero gap implies that the change is to be measured at one point, which is not possible. A change in x implies a length, not a point. This is an inherent inconsistency of calculus, which, we believe, occurs because we do not know how to handle some aspects of 0, particularly 0/0. Calculus is notionally a study of 0/0. This is because dy/dx of differential calculus points to 0/0, and the integration of integral calculus indicates a sum of infinite zeros, i.e., 0 × ∞ ≡ 0/0. The standard way to avoid a zero in the denominator is to replace it by h, and making h as close to 0 as possible (i.e., h → 0). This is how the limit of a function of h is taken, and this function is [y(x + h) − y(x)]/ h for dy/dx (see ‘Zero: a Seed of Modern Science’; Das & Mukherjee 1992, p. 69). But h → 0 does not include h = 0 by definition for a limit (Das & Mukherjee 1992, pp. 23–24). Limit is a mathematical trick, invented in eighteenth century in Europe (Seife 2000, pp. 127–130), to avoid or get around zero, where zero is too important to be ignored. For taking a limit, as indicated above, the independent parameter x is made to approach a, i.e., the gap x − a is made to approach 0. Taking a limit could be useful, if a function of x cannot be determined or is not handleable at x = a. This may happen if 0 appears at the denominator of the function at x = a. The underlying idea of limit is that 0 is the number with the smallest magnitude, and hence can

17 Although, the basics of calculus were developed within trigonometry in fifteenth century CE in India by the Kerala School of mathematics (Webb, 2014).

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be accessed or probed by indefinitely decreasing the values of pure fractions. But a nonzero number, no matter how small it is, has mathematical operations different from those of 0 (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’). Hence, while a nonzero number 5 can be accessed by approaching it from 6, 0 cannot be accessed by approaching it from 1. This is not surprising, because zero represents nonexistence and all other numbers together represent existence (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’), and nonexistence cannot be probed by shifting from one existent to another existent. Rather an existent is to be notionally unbuilt to access nonexistence (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’). Another mathematical technique to get around zero (particularly, 0/0) is L’Hospital’s rule, invented by Johann Bernoulli in seventeenth century CE (Das & Mukherjee 1992, p. 205; Seife 2000, pp. 124–125). According to this rule, concerned functions are to be replaced with their derivatives or rates of change. But a change cannot be defined within a point, as mentioned above. Therefore, L’Hospital’s rule implies the approximation of a point or zero with a line/length or nonzero. This is, however, not viable without a fundamental change of characteristics, because a nonzero amount of deviation from zero implies a complete avoidance of zero, as this means that ‘nonexistence without essence’ is replaced with ‘existence with essence’. While zero is a key ingredient of modern mathematics and science, attempts to circumvent zero, particularly quantities with zero at the denominator, are quite common in both disciplines. This is because of our inability to handle such quantities satisfactorily in a direct manner. Perhaps a reason for such inability is that, after zero’s basic operations were formulated on the basis of the philosophy of nothing in India (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’), probably no significant attempt, based on this philosophy, was made to develop such operations further. It appears that the primary effort was employed in circumventing a problem related to the handling of zero, for example exhibiting the already mentioned propensity for approach and avoidance. Such a circumvention, unlike the initial development of zero and its operations, uses nonzero numbers, which represent existence, as the primary. This happens because modern science grew in a culture, which, despite being forced to accept zero and reject Aristotle’s doctrine, still largely considers the principle that only nothing comes from nothing (see ‘Invention of Zero’). This tends to introduce a self-contradiction in this science, and this is why the foundational philosophy of zero is mostly ignored, zero is treated as a mere number of convenience and only a mathematical tool, and its basic operations are still considered anomalous. Nevertheless, the techniques of avoiding zero (e.g., calculus, limit) work satisfactorily to describe and predict the patterns of nature. This is because, we, being finite existents, can access only finite existents. Nonexistence and infinity are only notions for us. Since the techniques of avoiding zero appear to work for practical purposes, can we not define zero by its basic operations, without considering its philosophy? We note that in such a case one has to give up any understanding of not only zero but also everything which is based on the concept of zero. Moreover, no further development of zero’s basic operations will be possible. Besides, since the techniques of avoiding zero involve approximations, a more fundamental understanding of nature could be

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missing,18 if the idea and operations of zero are not further developed on the basis of the philosophy of nothing. Finally, it is likely that, when this philosophy gave rise to the mathematical zero, which was apparently a radical, impractical and unnecessary entity, it was not realized how it would fundamentally affect the course of the human civilization. This suggests that the current rejection of the philosophy of nothing may hinder an unforeseeable deeper understanding.

Implications for the Fundamental A deeper understanding, which the notion of nonexistence may provide, can extend beyond the realm of science and mathematics. In ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’, we argue that zero constitutes numbers. While this is true for the realm of numbers, if we extrapolate this argument considering that zero represents nonexistence and all other numbers together represent existence (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’), we get the general philosophical notion: ‘nonexistence can notionally constitute existence’. Note that, although we have used verbs like generate, disintegrate, build and unbuild in previous sections for the sake of clarity, in this paper we actually mean a perpetual constitution of existence by nonexistence. This is because constitution at a certain point of time introduces an additional parameter, time, which itself is an existent and needs to be constituted. Consequently, the above notion, i.e., ‘nonexistence can notionally constitute existence’ (the notion A) is different from the ancient notion of ‘existence originating from nonexistence’ (the notion B).19 These two notions could be further differentiated, if the notion B implies that existence comes out of nonexistence as a separate entity. This is because, by the notion A, we mean that an existent contains nonexistence as its ‘building block’, and therefore the existent is not a separate entity. Hence, according to our notion A, at the level of existence, nonexistence cannot be accessed, because that would require a complete notional ‘dismantling’ of existence. Note that existence cannot dismantle itself, because it does not remain existence then, and hence the notion of dismantling itself is self-contradictory. Therefore, there is no nonexistence at the level of existence. On the other hand, at the level of nonexistence, existence is not constituted, and hence there is no existence. Which of these two is the higher level, the level of existence or the level of nonexistence? According to our notion A, nonexistence constitutes existence, and hence existence depends on nonexistence for its sustenance. This is why we consider the level of nonexistence to be the higher level, and nonexistence as the

18 Note that an approximation hinders a further deeper understanding. As a crude example, suppose 23.473 centimeter is the measured length of a rod, and we approximate it to be 23.5 centimeter. Once we accept this approximation, neither will it be meaningful nor will we be motivated to measure the length of the rod more precisely, and to find out, for example, if it is 23.4727 centimeter or 23.4732 centimeter. 19 This notion is mentioned in ‘Invention of Zero’.

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fundamental.20 We emphasize that this nonexistence is fundamentally different from balance-nothing, absence-nothing and emptiness-nothing, which are essentially existents (see ‘Nothing’). For example, nonexistence is not the so-called vacuum, which could be a balance-nothing (see ‘Nothing’). This tends to address the traditional question—why is there something or anything rather than nothing?21 —because we propose that there is no something or existence at the highest level, which is the level of nonexistence. Something is only at a lower level, and therefore fundamentally there is no existence and the above question is not correct. Another implication of nonexistence being the fundamental is that, if a putative god or supernatural being exists, it is not the fundamental. An important aspect of our argument is that what contains is less fundamental and what constitutes is more fundamental. Consequently, even an infinite god, which may contain everything, is not the fundamental. Let us now ask if we can arrive at the notion that—nonexistence is the fundamental—independently of the idea of constitution of nonzero numbers by zero, and if a self-consistent philosophical structure including all philosophical aspects can be built considering such a notion. A thorough analysis involving such aspects would be required to address this, which is out of the scope of this short paper, and we will undertake this in a future work. However, we note the following. An existent or an object, not necessarily a material object or one with a spatial extension, can be broken endlessly, at least notionally. If any remaining existent component is further broken without an exception, notionally nonexistence-nothing should be arrived at. Since we do not have a notion of ‘beyond nonexistence’ in the opposite direction of existence, nonexistence cannot be notionally broken further. Therefore, nonexistence should be the ultimate constituent and hence the fundamental. We emphasize that this notion of the fundamental may be the most satisfactory. This is because, for any existent, we can ask ‘what sustains it?’, and hence we need to look for its fundamental. So no existent can be the fundamental. But nonexistence, by definition, does not require a sustenance, because only what exists requires a sustenance. Therefore, nonexistence can satisfactorily be the fundamental. Here we note that the question: ‘what sustains it?’ can refer only to the internal substance of the ‘it’ mentioned in this question, and need not presuppose any external existent. Therefore the what question should be more appropriate than a why question, which presupposes a purpose, and a how question, which presupposes a process, because both purpose and process are external existents, which require additional sustenance. But can an existent be notionally broken endlessly, as mentioned above? The ancient Greek scholar Democritus assumed that the existent would be indivisible at a certain stage of breaking (Aristotle 1984, A2, 316a). Somewhat similar quanta of

20 Here

is an example. Consider a pure iron bar made of iron atoms. Which is more fundamental, an iron atom or the iron bar? The bar cannot exist without atoms, but an atom can exist without the bar. So, while the bar contains all atoms, an atom is more fundamental. However, this is a simplistic example, because an iron atom is fundamentally different from nonexistence. 21 For example, considered by Martin Heidegger in twentieth century CE (see, for example, Robinson & Groves 2012, p. 121).

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objects were also assumed in the Indian philosophical school of Vai´ses.ika (Radhakrishnan 2008, vol. 2, pp. 157–225). Such an assumption could imply that an indivisible existent, and not nonexistence, can be the fundamental. But this assumption gives rise to the question—what sustains this indivisibility? This question takes away a plausible fundamentality from that existent, and also argues against the self-sustenance of an existent. However, we, being existents, cannot access nonexistence, and patterns of nature are also existents. Hence, it is natural to consider nonzero amounts or quanta of objects in modern science. Finally, as argued above, while critical inquiries about the fundamental naturally lead to nonexistence, this is still a premise. We cannot ‘prove’ it, because a proof requires a premise to stand on, and we may not have a more fundamental premise to support such a proof.

The Philosophy of Zero and Other Philosophies of Mathematics: a Difference Philosophies based on numbers are not uncommon. A prominent example of such a philosophy was popularized by Pythagoras, a well-known Greco-Phoenician mathematician of sixth century BCE. Pythagoras apparently travelled widely, and enriched and gavanized the Greek mathematics partly by what he had learnt perhaps from Mesopotamia, Egypt and other places22 (Freely 2010, pp. 13–14). He eventually established an influential cult based on a number-based mysticism in Croton in southern Italy (Seife 2000, pp. 26–38; Freely 2010, pp. 13–14). Such a cult is not acceptable in modern science and mathematics, because a reason for the success of these disciplines is that they are believed to be independent of subjectivity, mysticism and supernaturality. Another example of such a philosophy was popularized by Plato, who suggested that mathematical concepts exist timelessly and irrespective of mathematicians. This view is sincerely discussed, and even supported, by some modern scientists (e.g., Penrose 1989, pp. 123–127). We emphasize that there is a fundamental difference between such philosophies based on numbers or other mathematical concepts, and the philosophy of zero mentioned in ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’. For the former, the numbers or the mathematical concepts are the primary, and the philosophy is built on them, and hence is secondary. Therefore, such a philosophy is not essential for numbers or mathematical concepts. But for the latter, the philosophy of nothing is the primary, and the mathematical zero and its operations would not have likely been conceived without such a philosophy. This is why, unlike other philosophies of mathematics, the philosophy of zero is indispensable for modern mathematics and science, because these disciplines are largely built on the mathematical zero. We, however, caution that the philosophy of zero mentioned in ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’ should not be confused with some other ideas with similar names. 22 E.g., ‘Pythagorean triples’ (e.g., {3, 4, 5}, since 32 + 42 = 52 ) were known in Mesopotamia (Kramer ´ 1969, p. 125) and India (e.g., Sulba Sutras; Datta & Singh 1962, Part I, p. 134; Datta & Singh 1962, Part II, p. 207), perhaps centuries before Pythagoras (Seife 2000, p. 29).

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For example, a ‘zeroism’ (Raju, 2014), which projects approximation as an essential aspect, is entirely different from the philosophy of zero discussed in this paper.

Summary and Conclusions In this paper, we classify nothing into four categories (see ‘Nothing’), and argue that the basis of the mathematical zero, which was conceived in India, is the philosophy of nonexistence-nothing (see ‘Invention of Zero’ and ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’). Since zero is a key contributor to modern science (see ‘Zero: a Seed of Modern Science’), this philosophy should be fundamentally important for this science as well. It is, therefore, important to further develop the concept and operations of the mathematical zero based on this philosophy, in addition to inventing techniques to avoid zero (see ‘Zero: a Number of Convenience’). We note that, since zero is a tangible representation of nonexistence, building more mathematical structures and patterns based on mathematical objects including nonzero numbers may not be useful for probing zero or for a deeper understanding beyond the current framework. Rather, perhaps the omission of some such structures and a focus on structures related to exactly zero may hold the key. We argue in ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’ that zero can constitute nonzero numbers. As discussed in ‘Implications for the Fundamental’, this points to existence being notionally and perpetually constituted by nonexistence, and hence nonexistence being the primary or fundamental. We also argue that, if nonexistence is the fundamental, the endless series of the ‘what sustains it?’ question is satisfactorily terminated, because no sustenance is required for nonexistence. This notion of the fundamental implies that there is no existence at the highest level. On the other hand, at the level of existence, which is our level, nonexistence cannot be accessed (see ‘Implications for the Fundamental’). As indicated in ‘Implications for the Fundamental’, this notion of the fundamental is a premise, albeit a reasonable one. Using the discussion in ‘Implications for the Fundamental’, here we present the following argument in favour of nonexistence being the fundamental. Suppose, we reasonably assume that we are at the level of finite existents, which is not the level of the fundamental. Now in order to notionally identify the level of the fundamental, we need to explore all levels. Hence, starting from our level, we need to explore in two directions, i.e., we should keep on breaking finite existents and we should also keep on combining them, both notionally. The former should lead to nonexistence (see ‘Implications for the Fundamental’) and the latter should lead to infinity. Therefore, either nonexistence or infinity should be the fundamental. This is because an intermediate existence level should not be the level of the fundamental, as the ‘what sustains it?’ question would not be terminated at an intermediate stage (see ‘Implications for the Fundamental’). Infinity, however, depends on infinite number of components for its sustenance, and hence cannot be the fundamental. Hence, nonexistence should be the fundamental. We also note that infinity, having infinite number of diverse components, is the most impure entity, which is typically ignored when a god is proposed to be infinite. Nonexistence, on the other hand, is purer than any existent, by definition. 162

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Let us now briefly address a natural question—in what way can nonexistence constitute or give rise to existence? Apparently, the inability to answer a specific version of this question motivated the ancient Greek scholar Democritus to develop or support a theory of indivisible existents (see ‘Implications for the Fundamental’), as reported by Aristotle (1984, A2, 316a). But this question has already been addressed mathematically, as zero constitutes nonzero numbers (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’). However, if this question refers to a ‘process’, which may be typical in science, then the question leads to a self-contradiction, and hence is not meaningful. This is because, if a ‘process’ would exist, it would itself be constituted by nonexistence, and hence could not be the ‘process’ of existence being constituted by nonexistence. Notionally, however, we can address the question in the following way. As nonexistence should be arrived at by the notional endless breaking of existence (see ‘Implications for the Fundamental’), there is no reason for the reverse to be forbidden. Finally, we note that modern science relies on the mathematical zero (see ‘Zero: a Seed of Modern Science’), and zero is based on the philosophy of nonexistence (see ‘The Philosophical Base of Zero and Its Operations’). We, therefore, ask if ‘nonexistence being the fundamental’ is consistent with modern science. This cannot be tested, because science deals with the existent world (see ‘Introduction’). However, note that, if nonexistence is the fundamental, then an existent putative god or supernatural being, even if it is infinite, is not the fundamental (see ‘Implications for the Fundamental’). This is consistent with the ability of modern science to successfully predict natural phenomena without invoking a supernatural being, an ability which it would not acquire without the use of the mathematical zero. Acknowledgements We thank Navin Sridhar for critically reading this paper.

Declarations Conflict of Interest The author declares no competing interests.

References Aristotle (1984). On generation and decay. In J. Barnes (Ed.) The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Basham, A. L. (2004). The wonder that was India. London: Picador. Bilimoria, P. (2012). Why is there nothing rather than something? an essay in the comparative metaphysic of nonbeing. Sophia, 51, 509–530. Bilimoria, P. (2017). Thinking negation in early hinduism and classical Indian philosophy. Logica Universalis, 11, 13–33. Close, F. (2009). Nothing: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conference. (1888). The seventh-day adventist hymn and tune book for use in divine worship battle creek. Mich. Review & Herald Publishing House. Das, B. C., & Mukherjee, B. N. (1992). Differential calculus. Calcutta: U. N. Dhur & Sons Private Limited. Datta, B., & Singh, A. N. (1962). History of Hindu mathematics: A source book. India: Asia Publishing House. Fakhry, M. (2009). Islamic philosophy. London: Oneworld Publications.

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S. Bhattacharyya Freely, J. (2010). Aladdin’s lamp: how greek science came to europe through the islamic world. United States: Vintage Books. Hawking, S. (2009). The theory of everything. Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House. Hawking, S., & Mlodinow, L. (2011). The grand design. London: Bantam Books. Heisenberg, W. (2000). Physics and philosophy. England: Penguin Books Ltd. Hospers, J. (1997). An introduction to philosophical analysis. New York: Routledge. Joseph, G. G. (2011). The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of mathematics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaplan, R. (1999). The nothing that is: a natural history of zero. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramer, S. N. (1969). Cradle of civilization. United States: Time Inc. Krauss, L. M. (2013). A universe from nothing. New York: Atria Paperback. Kriwaczek, P. (2012). Babylon: mesopotamia and the birth of civilization. London: Atlantic Books. Liangkang, N. (2007). Zero and metaphysics: Thoughts about being and nothingness from mathematics, Buddhism, Daoism to phenomenology. Frontier of Philosophy in China, 2, 547–556. Lindtner, C. (1987). Nagarjuniana: Studies in the writings and philosophy of Nagarjuna. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Penrose, R. (1989). The emperor’s new mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radhakrishnan, S. (2008). Indian philosophy. India: Oxford University Press. Raha, S., Sinha, B., Sinha, D. K., & Mukherjee, S.P. (2014). Physics, mathematics & statistics. In A. K. Sharma, M. G. K. Menon, M. S. Valiathan, H. Y. Mohanram, I. B. Chatterjee, & S. Ghose (Eds.) History of science in India. Kolkata: The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. Raju, C. K. (2014). Zeroism. In H. Selin (Ed.) Encyclopaedia of the history of science, technology and medicine in non-western cultures. Dordrecht: Springer. Robinson, D., & Groves, J. (2012). Introducing philosophy. UK & USA: Icon Books Ltd. Sachau, E. C. (2002). Alberuni’s India. New Delhi: Rupa & Co. Seife, C. (2000). Zero: The biography of a dangerous idea. London: Souvenir Press. Webb, P. (2014). The development of calculus in the Kerala school. The Mathematics Enthusiast, 11, 493–512. Yu-Lan, F. (1976). A short history of chinese philosophy. United States of America: The Free Press.

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Sophia (2021) 60:677–697 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00869-x

Can Nāstikas Taste Āstika Poetry? Tagore’s Poetry and the Critique of Secularity Sudipta Kaviraj1 Accepted: 4 July 2021 / Published online: 25 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract This paper asks the following question: can an atheist reader fully taste the aesthetic meaning of poetry written by a theist author? This question is discussed with specific reference to the devotional poetry of Tagore. The paper discusses forms of pre-modern religious thinking which influenced Tagore’s conceptions of God, his relation to Nature, human society, and the human self. But it stresses that Tagore’s time was different from those of pre-modern believers. Tagore, as a modern thinker, had to fashion a response to the ‘problem’ of disenchantment. He constructed a philosophic vision that embraced modern science, but argued that it did not dispel the sense of living in an enchanted universe. Consequently, it is argued that a nastika can enjoy his poetry. This requires the nastika to view the idea of God not as a failure of cognition, but as a triumph of the imagination. I can continue to enjoy Tagore’s poetry without unease. This paper will try to think through a problem that is both personal and general. I admire Tagore’s musical and poetic art and consider some devotional songs to be its best achievements. Is this a defensible and uncontradictory position? Clearly, this is also a much wider general historical problem. The general problem is: can a nāstika admire āstika art — irrespective of the historical period?1 If we live in a ‘secular age’ — in which there is something disreputable about believing in God — to many Chapter 12 was originally published as Kaviraj, S. Sophia (2021) 60: 677–697. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00869-x. 1

  I must make it clear that my use of the two terms āstika and nāstika is taken from the modern Bengali use in which nāstika is a translation-term for the English word atheist. These two terms are, of course, of ancient provenance in Indian philosophy. In pre-modern philosophy, āstika means those who believe in the authority of the Vedas, and nāstika those who do not (See Editorial Introduction to this issue on discussion of the distinctions and permutations.) Philosophic traditions like the Cārvākas or the Buddhists would fall under that technical description. My use here does not either refer to or draw from that premodern tradition of debate. I simply mean that Tagore’s philosophical position should be characterized as āstika, because he is convinced of God’s existence, and my position is skeptical — answering the modern description of a nāstika (See Editorial Introduction to this special issue on distinctions and permutations.)

* Sudipta Kaviraj [email protected] 1



Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

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secular spirits, it is a sign of backwardness, does that accentuate the problem for secular people like me?2 What is interesting here is the fact that the nāstika position is a negation rather than a free-standing one, somewhat like ahiṃsā  (non-violence). And a lot depends on to what kind of God the atheist denies existence. This paper will serially examine several forms of argumentation that a nāstika can present to defend his enjoyment — without inconsistency — of āstika art. For the āstika artist, his art depends entirely on the conviction that God exists, and He has a particular nature. Can we really enjoy artistic writing while considering the fundamental belief on which it is constructed erroneous? God, it is rumored, created the world in verse. This thought is hard to understand, given the state of our world. It seems that, even if he had, his human creatures found a way of escaping the ethical restraints he put on them by making them in his own image and, using his fatal error of conferring free will on them, found their own way to degrade it beyond recognition. Little trace of that original verse seems to be left. But the idea of creation as versification is unmistakably available in major religions, and major modern thinkers have sought to think through that idea in their own reflections on the world of advancing modernity. This idea can be found in nearly identical phrasing in many different religious traditions. Ancient Kashmiri theorists of the pratyabhijñā school thought of Śiva, the creator or the world, as a poet, and his creation as inextricably linked to poetry. Ibn Arabi said directly, God created the world in verse.3 Medieval Vaiṣṇava extended this idea by asserting that, if we cultivate our listening, we can hear Kṛṣṇa’s flute sounding in the universe. Rabindranath Tagore, the main object of reading in this paper, drew deliberately from these earlier traditions and developed them to produce a coping strategy with the disconents of modernity. The argument I shall offer is simple, but can be elucidated by using the verse metaphor. If we were thinking about a poet, not God, and the artifact was not the whole of creation, but a poem — let us say an infinitely long poem — we can split this ‘poetic quality’ into three component elements. The first is an empirical question: is this poem a creation of Kālidāsa or Amaru — regarding the empirical question of authorship. A second question can be about whether this text is indeed in what we generally acknowledge as verse, for instance, in the meter mandākrāntā.4 Critics can then engage in the further question of aesthetic judgment: is this verse of excellent quality or mediocre? To return to thinking about the world, my argument will be that on the first question — whether it is created by God or not — the vast gap between the nāstika and āstika positions is unlikely to be reduced. But that is not entirely 2

  I owe another point of clarification here. I do not think it is obligatory for irreligious people to necessarily believe in the rationalist thesis of disenchantment. German scholars point out that the term ‘disenchantment’ — though conventionalized through Weber’s use — has come to carry a much wider meaning in the Anglo-American literature. 3   ‘God Almighty made existence like a verse of poetry in its structure and its order… All of the world is endowed with rhythm, fastened by rhyme, on the Straight Path.’.   Denis E. McAuley, Ibn `Arabi’s Mystical Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44–45.   In the Arabic: Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futuḥāt al-makkiyah, ed. Aḥmad Shamsaddīn, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyyah, 2006), 414. I thank Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed for this quote. 4   A meter used by Kalidasa in his Meghaduta and widely used in Sanskrit verse-making.

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determinant of our judgment about the second and the third questions — on both of which a nāstika reader can, without being inconsistent to his ontological commitments, allow himself to be persuaded by the āstika artist. Without believing that the world is created by God, a nāstika can think it has a discernible arrangement that can be regarded as ‘poetic’ and that it offers us sufficient material to use imaginatively against the usual disappointments and afflictions of ordinary human life. The world has, as the Kashmiri thinkers say, an artistic character: and using our imagination (kalpanā), we can do with the real world what we know we can do with works of art. So, a nāstika can establish the similarity between the world and art — not by the thinking that God has created the world like art-objects, but that human beings can use the world the way they use art-objects. There can be a large degree of overlap between these two āstika and nāstika conceptions of the world — without obliterating their profound distinction on the first question. I conclude that I can, without feeling logical guilt, enjoy Tagore’s poetry — even on the theme of pūjā (worship).5 I shall present first the setting of Tagore’s poetic art, followed by a genealogy of his aesthetic thought, and finally, what I take to be the structure of his thinking about the crucial relations between God, nature, human beings, and the self. After presenting more fully what he has to say about each of these subjects, I shall show why it is possible for a nāstika reader to assent to a large part of these statements and the unanxious enjoyment of this world-picture in words, in addition, to feel particular gratitude to him, because I doubt if someone else — without his religious ontological commitments — could convey these ideas with such refinement and clarity. I derive a double advantage from this process. I get a richer picture of the world to live with than my own ontological commitments can deliver; and at the same time, I do not have to assent to an idea to which I am not unprepared to make a commitment.

Reading Historically: Setting the Historical Context Correctly The opposition between theist and atheist philosophic positions is very old and exists in both pre-modern and modern historical periods, but the position of atheism is very different in these two cultural milieux. My concern is with ideas of a modern theist poet. So this entire discussion is about whether a modern nāstika can enjoy modern āstika poetry. The modernity of the context is highly significant, because we generally accept the idea that the advent of modernity alters the relation between theism and atheism radically. According to standard sociological theory, in modernity, atheism or secularism6 becomes the default position of culture. Belief and unbelief exchange places. While in pre-modern cultures unbelief had to give special reasons for its existence, now the default position is not to take the existence of God

5

  Tagore divided his songs into four/five cycles — pūjā (worship), prem (love), prakṛti (nature), svadeś (native land), and vicitra (assorted/many-colored). For him, pūjā is the first. Rabindranath Tagore, Gītabitān. 6   In fact, this equation is misleading. Atheism is a philosophic position; secularization is a process of transformation of whole societies. In another sense, secularism is a state principle. Reprinted from the journal

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for granted.7(Taylor, 2007) But the temporal question in our discussion is somewhat more complicated. Our poet, Rabindranath Tagore, in my reading, absorbs into his artistic conception of the world some influential pre-modern notions on God, nature, and human beings. Is there a difference between the West or Latin Christendom and the Indian cultural world about the ‘age’ in which we live? Does it make sense to say that, if we live in the West, we would be in an indubitably secular age; but in India, we do not? Is the ‘age’ itself different in different parts of the world? Can we say there is no sufficiently singular historical world, so that we can confidently assert a singular characterization of time? Is time itself spatially fragmented, and we live in its separate incommensurable corners?8

The Context of Secularity: Our Context Neither the writers of the Upaniṣads, nor the Pratyabhijñā philosophers, nor the Vaiṣṇava theologians and poets had to contend with a culture which assumes the non-existence of God. As they wrote in a world where God’s presence was an accepted background assumption, debates were only about his qualities. Philosophers did not have to inaugurate their thinking with a critique of secularity. But should we take for granted this way of positing the historical context? Taylor’s work is stimulating precisely because on one fundamental point he rejects the standard Weberian narrative of secularization. First Taylor offers a careful, detailed chronological account of the process of intellectual secularization, driven by the emergence of the modern scientific revolution. Development of science systematically divests natural processes of mysteries, of unintelligible complexity. Techniques of science do not reduce the rational registration of complexity of the natural universe but slowly craft analytical methods of sufficient answering complexity to make the universe intelligible. At the end of this long intellectual development, Taylor places the doctrines of Providential Deism that not merely accept the picture of the universe shaped by modern science but, more profoundly, admit that it is the province of scientific thinking to unravel these complexities in nature’s existence. Deism retains its deep belief that this design is fashioned by God — an appropriate creator of the homo faber — who established these qualities and rules and made them function eternally without further help from him. God exists as the artificer of this universe — but in hiding. On Taylor’s account of this intellectual history, both proto-secularists and religious thinkers concur in this view — that, to function, the universe or nature does not require a constantly attendant engineer. But the two sides then draw totally divergent conclusions. For some the absence of a constant minder of the universe makes the need and the presence of this artificer fade, resulting in disbelief. Secular people do not need a God as a source of either the natural universe or, after Kant, of ethical rules. They can now not merely believe in a Godless, totally secularized universe, but, as they have to give an account to themselves of the known 7

  Charles Taylor defines ‘a secular age’ by that feature.   This leads to a very important question about historical thinking: is historical time one or many? But we cannot pursue this problem here. 8

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history of religion, they can see the rise of their own form of thinking as a narrative of ‘subtraction’ — ‘rise’ of the human mind to higher levels in which unnecessary and erroneous beliefs are rescinded (Taylor, Chapters 6, 7, 15). Another line of thinking out of this intellectual conjuncture regarded the evidence of a constantly expanding complexity of the natural universe as the signal of God’s omnipotence. Omnipotence is now reconceived — not seen as caprice taken to an infinite degree, but as the power that must be required to create such an infinite system. The most startling suggestion in Taylor’s analysis is that it is entirely possible for rational individuals to accept the scientific picture of the world — what he calls the ‘immanent frame’ — and still continue to believe in God (Taylor, Chapter 15). Empirical evidence would support Taylor’s view that despite sociological secularization many in the Western world would believe both in the immanent frame and in God’s existence in some form. Taylor’s analysis can be read to produce a paradox: that we undoubtedly live in ‘a secular world,’ but in this world, unlike what Weber assumed, the radically secular are in a minority. If this is a plausible reading of Taylor’s analysis, further questions naturally arise — how can the ideas of a minority dominate the culture of the majority? Reading Taylor’s work in this way obliges us to think more closely about the chronotopic variations in the idea of ‘a secular age.’9 Do all human beings who are inhabitants of this time — partakers of this age? Or is this ‘age’ topically heterogeneous? This is a question that has been sharpened by very recent discussions about decolonial thinking in history.10 But this is a necessary discussion regarding the historicity of thinking. Did Tagore live and respond to ‘a secular age’; and if he did not, do we? This is a crucial analysis because this will determine how we accurately understand Tagore’s theoretical context, his pūrvapakṣas. All modern Indian thinkers had to contend with two types of pūrvapakṣas — pre-modern Indian and modern Western thought — to both of which Tagore responded with an attitude of discerning disagreement.

Tagore’s Context What was Tagore’s context like? In late nineteenth century Bengal, he certainly did not face a general intellectual consensus in favor of ‘the immanent frame.’ In fact, he was one of the few who embraced this novel idea. But he certainly lived inside a culture marked by genuine anxiety arising from the possibility that the new scientific-atheist view will sweep everything before it. Probably, his contemporaries exaggerated the power of Western secular thought and feared an imminent extinction of their religious world of inhabitance. At the same time, Tagore, whose primary thinking language was Bengali, worked inside a language almost entirely untouched by a deep, taken-for-granted, secularity. On the contrary, every secular

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  Taylor leaves this question open and insists that his history is a narrative of intellectual changes in Latin Christendom. 10   See Nigam’s discussion about Ernst Bloch, Aditya Nigam, 2020. Reprinted from the journal

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idea had to be inserted into the Bengali words selected to convey them through a semantic struggle: a pre-modern meaningfulness had to be deliberately erased and the term invested with a new modern semantic denotative content.11 Thus Tagore was situated strategically at a critical historical moment. Though Tagore (1861–1941) and Weber (1864–1920) were almost exact contemporaries, their historical worlds were not commensurable.12 Simply saying that this reveals the ‘synchronicity of the asynchronous’ is true but trivial: it simply asserts that what is isotemporal is not isomorphic. In 1922, when Weber is writing the two essays on Protestant Ethic — taking for his object of analysis the ‘already-happened’ historical process of the rise of capitalist modernity — Tagore is living in a surrounding sea of religiosity. There is also an immense distance between two natural languages inside which the two do their thinking. Weber is thinking through and trying to stretch the semantic and analytical capacities of a new historicist language of secularized social science in German. Tagore’s linguistic inhabitance is inside Bengali which had gone through little semantic secularization. It is important to remember that a ‘picture of the world’ is already implicit in each language. We can then turn to the question: what attitude should atheistic readers today adopt towards Tagore’s poetic ontology?

Constituents of Tagore’s Poetic World Tagore’s poetic world is composed of four components: God, nature, the human being, and his13 individual and interior self.14 All these elements are held together in a world that is illimitable yet intimate — an infinite structure of the greatest intricacy and refinement. I think Tagore constructed each of these elements using a language from the deep past15; but at the same time, that language had already learnt, in his mind, to contend with the unaccustomed difficulties generated by a looming modernity threatening to colonize this world. To Tagore, the language of the past came from three different religious sources: the Upaniṣads from Vedic antiquity, Kashmiri Saivism from the tenth century, but above all from Vaiṣṇava theology and 11

  I have tried to show this in case of a most mundane but essential word: freedom — how the older meaning of the term mukti was initially overwritten with the new precisely secular meaning of a politically inflected freedom and how, after social change worked in its favor, the word came to bear the second meaning with stability, and the former meaning forgotten. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The ideas of freedom in India,’ in Robert Taylor (ed), The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. 12   I explore this contrast between Weber and Tagore in greater detail in terms of sociological theory in a forthcoming paper, ‘Is disenchantment inevitable?’, University of Leipzig. Also in a Bengali essay, Kaviraj 2021 13   In both sense of this term: the poet’s own, and of the abstract human being evoked by the first person pronoun — ami. Some aspects of this pronoun are examined in my ‘The poetry of interiority,’ in Sudipta Kaviraj, The Invention of Private Life, Chapter, Columbia University Press, 2014. 14   Use of the term self or I/me in poetic enunciation is a fascinating problem which cannot be analyzed here. How something as non-transferable as the self can be used generally is an interesting question. 15   The idea of the self in his work is clearly suffused with associations from the Upaniṣads reflected in typical phrases like ‘e āmir ābaran’ (the cover of this self) noticed by Sankha Ghosh, E Āmir Ābaran, Papyrus, Kolkata, 1991. 

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poetics of the sixteenth century — which was already a part of Tagore’s own immediate literary culture. I shall specify what I think Tagore drew from each corpus.

Upaniṣadic Wonder Tagore came from a family of Brahmo reformers, intensely active in reconstituting Hindu religiosity. Absorbing rationalist philosophic thinking, and witnessing Protestant religiosity, early Brahmos accepted a form of Providential Deism.16 But, as they did not intend to convert to Christianity, they faced a problem of selecting elements from the vast Hindu corpus of religious texts which gave expression to their Deist conception of God. Human Being’s appropriate comportment to this God, who is both hidden and revealed, is philosophic wonder. Paradoxically, the best communicative vehicle for this emotion was not the cognitive language of philosophy, but the artistic language of poetry. These background beliefs in the nature of God, and his presence in the universe made them seek appropriate liturgical expression mainly from the Upaniṣads, and a few Vedic sūktas which they edited to their taste. Tagore’s writings — both his musical poetry and his philosophic prose — are full of direct references to the Upaniṣadic hymns. The Upaniṣads contained many other strands — of ritualistic instructions, religious lore, examination of forms of religious knowledge, instructions on intellectual practice; but Brahmos selected only hymns expressing philosophic wonder at the universe and seeking knowledge of God, this ‘being the color of the sun, beyond darkness’.17 That, the Upaniṣads said, ‘is the only way by which humans can go beyond death: there is no other way.’18 We must be clear on one particular point in this reading. God’s creation is celebrated by a seer who is primarily a seeker of knowledge. The wonder at the unknown, mysterious universe is praised in a language that is poetic. Strictly speaking, the Upaniṣads do not characterize God as a poet.

Reading the Poetry of the World: Kashmiri Saivism One intriguing feature of understanding Tagore’s ‘language’ is the frequency of the idea that God is a poet, that he created the universe in a rhythm/meter (chanda), yet the absence of direct references to the great religious tradition which made this idea central to its theological reflections — ‘pratyabhijñā’ (self-recognition) philosophy of Kashmiri Saivism. Arising in the eighth century, partly in response to Buddhist critiques of Vedic doctrine, Kashmiri thought fashioned an entirely new form of philosophic reflection which was imbricated with a philosophical aesthetics of amazing subtlety and complexity. The theory of artistic pleasure (rasa theory) 16

 Christian missionaries active in nineteenth century Bengal were mainly Protestants, and education curricula exposed them to British protestant theology. 17  ‘Ādityavarṇam tamasaḥ parastāt’. This particular chant: ‘śṛṇvantu visve amṛtasya putrāḥ…’ was also used by Vivekananda for his reading of Hinduism. 18   Śvetaśvatara Upaniṣad, Chapter 2, verse 5. ‘ati mṛtyum eti, nānyaḥ panthā vidyate ayanāya’. Reprinted from the journal

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that Kashmiri philosophers constructed in the tenth century has remained the central corpus of Indian aesthetic reflection and practice ever after.19 Major philosophers of this tradition often invoke Siva in their invocation verses as a poetic creator of the universe: directly viewing creation as poetry. Despite their extraordinary achievements in aesthetic philosophical analysis, their eventual conclusion regarding religious life remained other-worldly: ordinary human life was incapable of transcendence. Moments of savoring great art — in an actual theater where people watch drama or in the mind’s inner theater where the savoring of poetry occurs — constitute the only possibility of transcendence. The transiently overwhelming and transporting taste of art20 was, for them, equal to the taste of God21 (Viśvanātha, 1923) — but necessarily temporary. A whole human life cannot be passed inside a theater. Untheatrical, unartistic mundane life remained unsatisfactory — worthy of vairagya, non-attachment. The highest task of religious cultivation through a process they called pratyabhijñā (recognition of God in oneself) was to renounce this world and achieve unity or merger with God — which left human life as ultimately incapable of rising from degradation.

Listening to the Music of the World: Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Vaiṣṇava thinkers in the sixteenth century worked a fundamental transformation of this ideal of religious life. Paradoxically, the new theorists of Vaisnavism totally absorbed the complex theoretical apparatus of Kashmiri aesthetics into their own doctrines, but put it to a complete new theoretical purpose. Nearly all Kashmiri technical concepts regarding rasa are re-used in the elaboration of Vaiṣṇava doctrines of premabhakti, but under the sign of a total determinative re-theorization. Each singular concept is present, but doing some entirely different philosophical work.22 For example, the rasa theorists elaborated a doctrine of nine fundamental mental states of human subjects which come into play in the process of aesthetic rapture (rasaniṣpatti). To eight states mentioned in the original text — the Nāṭyaśāstra — the erotic, comic, compassionate, enthusiastic, heroic, wonderment, revulsion, and terror, the Kashmiri commentators famously added the tranquil (śānta). In Kashmiri aesthetics, these are applied as categories defining diegetic moments or dramatic personae. All these categories are now subsumed under the axial category of bhakti (emotive devotion to God). But the main conceptual-philosophic transformation Bhakti doctrines introduced is the idea that if we believe that transcendence of ordinary human life — which is a life of irreparable degradation and unfulfillment — can occur only inside the experience of great art, eventually, very little of an ordinary life span is transformed. Human existence is conceived as irredeemably 19

  For excellent accounts of the relevant parts of their thinking, McCrea, 2008, Reich, 2021, Chakrabarti, 2000a. 20   Which turns subjects into vedyāntarasparśaśūnya — untouched by other perceptions. Viśvanātha, 20. 21   brahmasvādasahodara — sibling to the taste of God. Ibid. 22  This is particularly evident in the philosophic arrangement or architecture of a text like the Ujjavalanīlamaṇi. All the nine rasas are deployed, along with the technical terminology of vibhāva, anubhāva, vyabhicārī bhava, the distinction between rasa, rasābhāsa.

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degraded; and for fulfillment, human beings have to wait for death and subsequent merger into God’s own beatific existence. Bhakti theologians present two distinct objections to this theory of transcendence. First, this quarantines ultimate joy only inside the experience of art. Second, even the picture of beatitude is not particularly attractive: it an endless expanse of eventless serenity. Vaiṣṇava theorists propose daring emendations to both these ideas. They propose taking the experience of art from inside the theater and the reading of texts into a more mundane, more repetitive, more everyday scene of religious worship — where intense religious emotion is given wings by poetry and music. But the more significant and startling suggestion is that the object of Vaisnava religious life should not be viewed as eventual ascent to vaikuṇṭha and equality with God’s existence, which must be other-worldly. The task of human life is inhabitance in Vṛndāvana — a half-real, half-imagined space in this world — in which, with imaginative, ethical and artistic cultivation (sādhana) human beings can actually live. And this transcendence of ordinariness is open not only to the sādhakas  or religious adepts, but to all human beings. In a deep and highly interesting sense, it is the opposite of askesis. Vaisnavas should desire — not a quick end to human life, but an endless extension of the life in Vṛndávana. This Vṛndāvana (Vṛindāvana), when seen correctly, is real — because it is this human existence, but imagined because it is untainted by suffering. Further, it is imagined not in the sense that it is does not exist; rather, we persuade us to believe that it does — that is, a fantasy. It is imagined in the sense that although it does not exist immediately, this can be conceived, worked for as a potential state of being. If our aesthetic capacities and our ethical self-fashioning can be properly coordinated and directed attentively towards these ends, that state of affairs can be realized, made real — objectified. Ironically, followers of Indian philosophers and Marx should not find it hard to understand this process. Initially a potter has only a conception of an object that is non-existent. If he has access to earth and water to make pliable clay, and the laboring skill to fashion a pot, this entirely non-existent ‘non-thing’ will be thingified — turned by labor into a thing — objectified. Vaiṣṇava doctrine was thus centered on a simple, elemental, and utterly transformational message regarding the nature of religious experience. The task of God — the reason for God’s existence — was to show us, fallen creatures, who were fallen not because of innate sinfulness, but because we did not recognize the paradise within our grasp, how to lead a human life and aim, failingly, at perfection. No other religious group had the daring to humanize divinity — God himself — so radically. Clearly, this vision was nothing short of revolutionary. With their uncanny intelligence, ordinary people were quick to grasp the newness of this message and responded through a real explosion of artistic creativity. Kṛṣṇabhakti in the ordinary form — not in its arcane theological intricacy — occupied the imaginative language of India. It won’t be an exaggeration to claim that we have still not invented any other language for the expression of our innermost emotions.23

23

  I think the language of expression of love in the vastly popular Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s speaks this language — almost exclusively. Reprinted from the journal

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Kṛṣṇa was the first God to summon the courage to show that the real tasks of godliness were not winning terrifying battles or giving subtle counsel to kings or ruling with imperturbable calm and justice, but to accomplish far more urgent human tasks — being a charming toddler to his mother, an incomparable lover to his sweetheart, an entirely dependable friend to his companions, and charming the world with the music of his flute. God, in this profound transformation in the Indian religious world, was moving in the exact opposite direction from Western Deism. In the West, God was becoming more omnipotent, abstract and hidden; in India, He was becoming more concrete, human, and manifest. In the Western transformation, God ascended ever higher into the infinite to be completely hidden, in the Indian, he descended to the earth, and came to touch humanity, assuming their everyday form. Thus, the profound philosophical move towards abstraction which set off the chain of intellectual events that produced ‘disenchantment’ did not occur in India. Rather, here the process was a turn towards this-worldliness, humanization, a de-supernaturalization, or de-transcendence. If we want to call it secularization, we can, at the cost of utterly transforming the meaning of the term. With this re-imagination of religion in its totality, the Vaisnavas set up a picture of an interconnected universe connecting God, as a creator, but also a presence that is always seeking contact with his creatures, Nature as the immense, and infinite system of all inanimate and sentient existence, and human beings whose task of worship is now transformed into realization of their own possibilities of perfection and divinity through forms of love-relations that are always abundantly strewn around them — in the relation with parents, friends, and lovers. Nature is involved in this arrangement, not as an inert ecology of things, and beings, but as a crucial participant. Because it is nature which reminds human beings of the possibility and responsibility of love through periodic phases of self-decoration — in spring, monsoon, and in the endlessly repeated occasions of the full moon. When their religious life settled down into its fully developed form, Vaiṣṇava elaborated a system of daily worship which, unlike other Hindu sects demanding elaborate rituals, urged devotees to do periodic personal prayers, chanting whenever inclined, carrying on with the workaday quotidian life. After sundown, Vaiṣṇava would gather in a temple for artistic remembrance of God in his form as Kṛṣṇa and recount his deeply moving human exchanges in Vṛndāvana — with his mother Yaśodā, with gopī women, with his playmates, other cowherds and the cattle which are part of their circle of intimate life, and finally, with Rādhā, his lover whom theological interpretations read as his own self alienated into a loving ‘other’ through whose eyes he can finally see himself. Rādhā, and her deeply gendered feminine affection, transparently, represents humanity. And this relationship of need is seen not as one-sided — only the humans’ requirement for succor — but as reciprocal, signifying God’s real need for love. Descension to earth, to the imperfect world of humanity, is divested of all associations of loss, but marked instead as fulfillment of God’s own godliness. Kṛṣṇastu bhagavān svayam24: it is only as Kṛṣṇa that God finds his fullness.

24

  Krishna is God himself.

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Religion is thus seen to be in constant change in the Indian historical world. But, if we pay attention to the intellectual and conceptual content of this specific religious form in late medieval times, it shows a direction or character that is totally different from the universal trajectory presented in Weber. Unlike the Weberian narrative of the West, where the scientific revolution intensifies the process of rationalization and encourages philosophers to move towards the God of Providential Deism, Indian religiosity also undergoes a deep turn that, according to Weber’s analytics, could be termed this-worldly, but which does not oblige God to hide more deeply behind a created universe of infallible natural laws which, paradoxically, show his omnipotence but erase his presence. Vaisnava religion emphasizes the aesthetic presentation of nature and God’s vivid readable presence in the worlds of nature and man.

God’s Presence Tagore’s agamas were discontinuous and complex — as all traditions always are. At the center of Upaniṣadic reflection are two ideas which must exist in deep tension — that God not merely created the world, but in everything created he has left some cryptic intimation of his presence; and, still, it is hard to grasp his presence, and his nature. I think what Tagore particularly liked was the idea — distinctly implied in the Upaniṣadic hymns — that the wonder felt by the human mind at the mystery and majesty of creation gives rise to an emotion which humans can seek to capture in two distinct languages: the language of philosophy and the language of poetry. The language of poetry, because its objective is not precision or exhaustiveness, is more expressively apt, because it acknowledges that the emotion is ineffable, beyond human language. The only language that can express that something is beyond language but capture it in the same act is the language of poetry. Poetry alone is able to indicate the limits of language in language.25 Poetry is an expression of the experience of residence on earth (to steal Neruda’s expression). Tagore’s sense of this inhabitance deploys elements from mainly the Upaniṣadic and Vaiṣṇava languages of the Indian tradition, but melds into them elements from modern Western Protestant thought and sensibility to construct a highly specific system of images. God is both the creator and central presence in this universe. But what is crucially significant in Tagore’s thought is the unique manner he approaches one of the central problems of modern religious consciousness. God has three main manifestations in Tagore’s artistic metaphysics. Some of his songs, collected in the section he himself named Pūjā (worship), straightforwardly direct their words of worship to God, the creator of this universe. Two songs, worn into meaninglessness by constant repetition on radio and television, evoke this sense: In a star-filled sky, an earth filled with life,

25

  Hans Joas’s recent study (Joas, 2021) has an interesting discussion about the role of the expressive in religious thought. Reprinted from the journal

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I find myself: in surprise a song rises in me. The world swings in the ebb and flow of time’s endless tides, The blood in my veins feels its pull. That surprise fills me with song. I tread on grass in the forest paths, I am startled by flowers’ scent, And discovered the gifts, strewn around, of joy. My song is born in that surprise. (Tagore, 1970, 430). God’s creative majesty is seen in the endless universe — where He reigns as the king (mahārāja). What is remarkable and unique here is the mode of seeing. God’s majesty is revealed in the infiniteness and the intricacy of his creation. Note that both these qualities — infiniteness and intricacy — obstruct knowledge and reduce the possibility of knowing an object. But it is not the scale and limitlessness — which stresses the unencompassability of the universe by human cognition — that is stressed. Inherent in this revelation — placing the universe before our eyes — there is an expressive quality — which desires embodiment and invites a grasp by humanity (very similar in some ways to Hegel’s understanding of Geist)26 (Taylor, 1975, Chapter 3) which is here its primary defining feature. The shift from the cognitive to the aesthetic orientation towards the world is critical. God’s creation is not constantly tending to exceed human cognition and therefore escaping a gathering into knowledge, but tending instead towards connection and thus inviting a gathering into human aesthetic perception and emotion. Although the entire world swings to time’s rhythm, it also throbs in the rhythm of my blood.27 It is present as unforgettable gifts of joy in small things: the feel of grass on the forest path and the sudden fragrance of flowers in the wafting air (Tagore, 1970, 577). Surprisingly, there is a constant desire on God’s part to communicate with his creation, particularly with humans. What is miraculous — what we truly cannot understand, only marvel at with gratitude — is how something on an infinite scale can contrive to present itself in something so small, obviously as an intimation. Tagore’s songs celebrate not just the infiniteness, not just the always available joy, but this arrangement of presences. A second song adds a crucial element: palaka nāhi nayane, heri nā kichu bhuvane, nirakhi śudhu antare sundara virāje28 (Tagore, 1970, 206). My eyes do not blink (but with this unblinking eye); I do not see anything in the world. Because this act of seeing has matured, or because the eyes have finally learnt to see, they only notice the

26

 Vivakṣā - which pervades all creation - is remarkably similar to the ideas about geist in Hegel.    Asīmkāler je hillole joyār-bhaāṅṭāy  bhuvan dole, nāḍīte mor raktadhārāy legeche tār tān. Gītabitān, 430. 28   Mahārāja e ki sāje ele hṛdaya pura mājhe, caraṇatale koti śaśī sürya mare lāje/Garba saba tutiyā mūrcchi pade lutiyā, sakala mama deha mana vīṇāsama bāje/ E ki pulaka vedanā bahiche madhubāye, kānane jata puṣpa chila milila taba pāye. Palaka nāhi nayane, heri nā kichu bhuvane, nirakhi śudhu antare sundara virāje. Gītabitān, 206. 27

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beauty that resides inside my mind.29 Even in these two brief songs, the arrangement of this universe is represented with precision. It is a characteristic architecture of God as a creator of the universe, with a nature that has an inherent quality of the beauteous expressivity. What is crucial in this beauty is not just the picturesqueness, or the pleasing quality of the things: beauty contains equally a ‘desire’ to be seen on its part — expressiveness or an ‘offer’ of itself.

God’s Presence as Nature Already, this representation of nature suggests a second form of God’s manifestation in the world — now reaching increasingly towards the human — like the finger of God touching Adam’s in the Sistine Chapel. If creation contains a divine intentionality, if the infinity of the universe is too overwhelming for ordinary human minds, that intentionality to communicate must be lodged in some other quality — more easily accessible to ordinary faculties of the human mind. Faculties can be trained: an athlete who likes jumping can, after 10 years of intensive training, seek to challenge Beamon’s world-transforming leap. These intimations of divinity must be sufficiently mundane to be able to touch an untrained sense and lure it towards its higher treasures. To accomplish that task, God has a second form — sāj30 or rūpa31: that works through His expression in and through nature. In Tagore’s thought, nature in this second form is a distinct living presence. In Indic languages derived from Sanskrit, there is an easily intelligible word with resonant associations to express this idea — prakṛti. Prakṛti means nature, but it also means woman. This creates a slight awkwardness for grasping Tagore’s visualization of prakṛti. He uses the term with high seriousness: a section of his song cycles is called prakṛti  (nature) containing his seasonal songs (Tagore, 1970). Yet the image of God as nature is not feminine in any definitive sense. Only in a few songs and poems, there is a clear use of distinctively feminine attributes or verbs. Ordinarily, this figure — because it is definitely a figure — is either masculine or asexual. In Bengali writing, I have designated this figure as prakṛti -puruṣa (Kaviraj, 2021) because puruṣa can mean a being or a subject without a strong gendered connotation. Ascription of playful acts registered in grammatical use of verbs (especially khelā) describes this figure as intrinsically playful. But play introduces a second quality in nature’s presence. Play cannot exist if something remains in an imperturbably steady state. It requires, by definition, changes of states. Nature, accordingly, exists in two states. Of course, 29

  This surprising claim — that when the eyes learn to see the world, they see a beauty that resides ‘inside’ — is uncannily similar to an ancient Kashmiri description of meditation: अन्तर्लक्षं बहिर्दृष्टि निमेषोन्मेष -वर्जिता एषा हि शाम्भवी मुद्र सर्वशास्त्रेषु : antarlakṣaṃ bahirdṛṣṭi nimeṣonmeṣa-varjitā eṣā hi śāmbhavī mudra sarvaśāstreṣu gopitā : ‘The attention is directed inwards, the unblinking look outwards: this posture (mudrā) indeed, called Śāmbhavī, is implicit in all scriptures.’ 30   Sāj can mean any aspect, or decoration, dressing up. 31   Because rūpa in both Bengali and Sanskrit can mean two related but distinct ideas: a form and form that has beauty. Any physical body has rūpa, form. But when he writes, Āmi rūpe tomāy bholābo nā, bhālobasāy bholābo [I shall capture your heart not with my beauty, but with my love.] rūpa carries the second meaning (Tagore, 1970, 307). Reprinted from the journal

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there is a constant, always available condition of nature that is of itself quite beautiful — waiting to be seen by human eyes. In a song describing ‘descent’ — a vastly important concept for Indian religious thought of all kinds (Gandhi, 2014) — he says using his poetic pronoun ‘I’ the representative of humanity: ‘flaming torches fill the night sky; there, in some bygone era I had an invitation—to live in the great expanse of paradise always drunk with light.’32 ‘But my mind did not love it. That is why I made a long journey across the sea of time, to this earth, under the sleepless sky. Here there is the gentle sweet whispering between water and land, in the verdant earth; here the grass is painted with many-colored flowers; light and dark embrace each other in the forest path. My mind fell in love: that is why I spend my time on this green earth immersed in play and pretense.’33 What is to be noted, to prepare for our next distinction, is that the beauty of the sky with its flaming lights and of the earth with its forests, grass, and flowers is constant — its habitual, ordinary, non-transformative state. This is the first presence of nature. Nature, however, exists in a second way: where it is full of play — transformations. Periodic spectacles of color, light, and flowers signal special times of festival — occasions that medieval Vaiṣṇava learnt to single out and celebrate. Evenings shrouded the exhaustion of tumultuous work by darkness — a time for collective singing and retelling of Kṛṣṇa stories, transforming the edge of the day with a brief transcendence before the night’s rest. Sprouting flowers of spring and clouds of the first monsoon rain after the long summer scorching of the earth signal these periods of delight. Nights of the full moon set a scene making nature expectant for human happiness. A combination of all these, the autumn full moon in a flowering forest in Vṛndāvana, is the scene of the rasalīlā — the circling dance of lovers — the greatest festival of the Vaiṣṇava. Here God, who has alienated himself into Rādhā to savor himself,34 rides in a swing with her — signaling the swing of life.35 The nature-figure — the prakṛti -puruṣa — is depicted as playful: he places his footprint on every bloom to say he has been there, yet his time for play vanishes as quickly.36 The transience of this period of designated delight must be seized by humans and enjoyed in every possible way — through the most intense living of the human relationships of love, enjoying the beauty of nature, the Yamnuā in full tide, the light of the full moon, and the blooming forest. Even the inevitable ensuing period of viraha (of separation) is transformed from the sadness of loss to the anticipation of joy — through the taste of vipralambha śṛṅgāra — because even separation/longing can be beautiful in the beauty of the night.37

32

  Āj tārāy tārāy dīptaśikhār agni jvale, nidrābihīn gagantale. 577.   I am putting this in quotes, though this is paraphrase, a loose transfer into English. 34   Her incarnation is interpreted in the classic Vaisnava work, the Caitanyacaritamrta: 35   Tagore has a spectacular poem with the title, jhulan (the swing) (Tagore, 1972,). 36   Kusume kusume caraṇacihna diye jāo, pare dāo muche; ohe cancala, belā nā jete khelā keno taba jāy ghuce, Gītabitān, 428. 37   Viraha madhura hala āji madhurāte/ gabhīra rāginī uthe bāji vedanāte. (Tagore, 1970, 376). Kashmiri aesthetic theorists make a distinction between two forms of śṛṅgāra (erotic feeling) – of union and separation (vipralambha). 33

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God’s Presence in Human Life Eventually, we come to the end of this line of thought, and the final part of the arrangement. All this decoration of nature, her śṛṅgāra38 — self-ornamentation — is to induce human beings to attend to love (premā), the central purpose of their existence. It is here that Tagore’s drawing from the Vaiṣṇava tradition is the clearest. Vaiṣṇava theology gradually developed an ethics of seeing. It conceived of God as the creator of an infinite universe invested with a quality of beauty that interpellates human beings not by exciting their ambition to know, but alluring their aesthetic faculty of tasting beauty. Both knowledge and beauty are objects of seeking. Beauty is offered in two forms that are interlinked — the beauty of nature and things and the beauty of human relations. The full moon night in autumn is thus a reminder of the obligation to celebrate relationships of affection. The aesthetic faculty in human beings is also enlisted in the service of this orchestra of āsvāda by bringing in singing and dancing. Vaiṣṇava religious thought mobilized two distinct forms of writing to press this essentially philosophic argument — first, in the form of arcane theology, and second in the form of some of the greatest vernacular poetry of medieval India. Texts like the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and the Ujjvalanīlamaṇi  advance rigorous philosophic ideas. Here too there is an orderly sequence of presentation of philosophic thinking: the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu is mainly concerned with the definition and elaboration of the unfamiliar new axial concept of bhakti; its primary philosophical operation consists in carefully disassembling the theoretical apparatus of prior rasa aesthetics and then re-employing its internal concepts in a newly constructed philosophic structure which deploys — for entirely different purposes — each single concept of rasa theory.39 But the center of this restructuring is a redirection of human effort in ethics and aesthetics. First of all, this philosophy strives to connect ethical and aesthetic aspects of human living by an inseverable bond, by training our minds to see good acts as beautiful. Secondly, it urges human beings to seek to live in Vṛndāvana, this world — but in an altered state from which all taint of suffering has been subtracted — which is a perpetual struggle, because the social structures within which individuals have to live are intractable. Censorious mothersin-law are always exercising surveillance on young brides. The world is filled with sisters-in-law poisoned with suspicion. Vṛndávana is not easy to create, and consequently, it can be present only interruptively. To the Vaisnavas, however, the consolation lies in the fact that memory of times of union, sometimes the darker memory of loss through separation or death are also beautiful, though tinged at times with grief. Rasa theorists had paved the way for complex desires and consolations of this kind through maintaining that any sthāyī — stable emotion — can be crossed by a saṅcārī (crossing) emotion of a very different character. In this aesthetic world, there 38

  Which can mean both erotics and decoration.  All the nine rasas are redeployed, just as all its secondary concepts — like vibhāva, anubhāva, vyabhicārī, or sthāyī and sañcārī rasas. This general conceptual structure of prior rasa theory extends from early texts like the Abhinavabhāratī, to the Daśarupaka with the commentary by Dhanika, the Kāvyaprakāśa, down to Sahityadarpaṇa, the last text just about a century before Sri Rupa Goswami’s texts on Bhaktirasāmṛta Sindhu. 39

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is no contradiction in crossing the emotion of srngara — erotic joy — with a tinge of grief, or wistfulness. In Indian classical music, a composition in a single raga can easily flow from a mood of joy in union, to fear of separation and loss, and an overcoming of that fear in the different pleasure of anticipation of future union. Kṛṣṇa, God himself, perpetually wanders the world seeking Rādhā, the sign for humanity. He too enjoys most His own descent into this complex imperfect world. Vaiṣṇava theology accomplished a startling inversion — turning the imperfection of the human earth more pleasurable than the static perfection of prior religious heaven. The Vaiṣṇava, however, lived and thought in a world utterly different from Tagore’s. In the fifteenth century, theologians had to contend with the nominal existence of a few negligible schools of nāstika philosophic doctrine. Vaiṣṇava theorists effected a fundamental transformation of religious thought by re-directing its creative resources to focus on ethical and aesthetic possibilities in the human world. At least superficially, this seems similar to the redirection of thought during the Italian renaissance in respect of art: the immense efflorescence of painting and sculpture was simultaneously an exuberant expression of religious emotion and a celebration of human inhabitance on earth. In the odd language to which we have become habituated in Indian academic discourse (Kaviraj, 2018), this can be seen as a form of ‘secularization’ — but that is true only in the sense of redirection of philosophic and artistic attention towards the human world, not in the sense of any depletion of God’s presence. Presence of God in the world is felt with greater intensity. This cannot be seen in any sense as a weakening of religious culture. In this sense, there was a profound divergence in the historical paths of religious evolution between Europe and India. Hindu religious thought took a sharp ‘this-worldly’ (aihika) turn in the fifteenth century but this was very different from the European turn towards the secular, through the scientific revolution leading to the rise of Deism. Rather, the new religion turned God powerfully towards a descent to the human world and made one of his selves a deep participant in human life. But in some ways, this also serves to subtract the element of the supernatural from religious ideas. This can be seen in the contrast between the themes pursued in Vaiṣṇava poetry and those in the other powerful popular literature in medieval Bengal — the mangalkāvyas. In the Chandimangal and Manasamangal, the reigning deities take recourse to the supernatural at every turn. By contrast, the theme explored in the Vaiṣṇava Padāvalī is the infinite transformation of states in human affection and erotics under the thin pretext of the story of Rādhā and Krishna. In some ways, therefore, despite its undeniable this worldliness, the Vaiṣṇava turn could be seen as going in an opposite direction to the European. Tagore deploys this revolutionary turn to entirely obviate the profound Weberian problem.40 Weber’s cryptic conclusion from reading the history of Western religion was that the general process of rationalization, which was always at work inside religious thinking, intensified, as in many other fields of social and intellectual life, under conditions of modernity. Deism already constructed a universe with a hidden God from which a step towards complete disenchantment simply followed logically. 40

  For a detailed exploration of Weber, see Joas 2021.

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In modernity, ordinary people accepted the ‘immanent frame’ and the resultant disenchantment of the world. Theorists who pursued the implications of this line of thinking after Weber41 have suggested therefore that in modern conditions human beings seek to ‘re-enchant’ their world through spirituality and art (Taylor, 2007, chapters 16, 19, 20). A critical step in Tagore’s thinking is his avoidance of the belief that there is an obligatory historical movement towards disenchantment. This general move — because Tagore does not deal with the problem of disenchantment frontally — can be supported by serious historicist arguments. Any step taken by influential thinkers in the modern West are not, except in an abstract sense, an event in the thinking of all societies. It is true that because of the intrinsic rational power of arguments, or colonial epistemic dominance of Western thought over the rest of world cultures, such ideas can become hegemonic. But it is essential to have a clear conception/theory of ideational eventuation — the real event of an idea appearing in the world. Deism and the consequent ideas about mandatory secularization of cultures undoubtedly sent ripples across Indian cultural discourse. Some of Tagore’s Brahmo forbears made sense of their own historical situation in distinctly Deist language.42 More significantly, academic discourse of Indian social science usually assumes a strongly universal logic of secularization as mandatory — something that is bound to occur sometime in future. But ordinary Indian consciousness and behavior show hardly any signs of comprehensive secularization. The actual discursive world around Tagore was deeply religious — without any semblance of disenchantment. Tagore, consequently, does not think through the category of a secularization or disenchantment process. His world is still intensely religious, though not averse to using new ideas from the West. Clearly, like his Brahmo colleagues, Tagore does not believe in the Hindu theory of karma or metempsychosis. That does not lead him to a secular world view, shorn of all religious beliefs. In fact, he continues to use many conventional Hindu concepts — but after taking them through a process of connotational thinning, so that these become metaphors or images without true conceptual content. His poetry about the pleasure of earthly inhabitance occasionally states, ‘If You want me, I shall come back to the shore of this sea with its undulating waves of sorrow and joy’ (Tagore, 1970, 232). Or his remembrance of a woman who must have been his first love in a prior birth.43 But the sheer poeticism of these invocations reveals the literary, not metaphysical nature of such statements. These are artistic devices to express a thought or emotion, not content of deeply held religious beliefs. True historicization obliges us to measure the historical distance between Tagore’s time and ours — in which the ‘world’ has become allegedly more secular. But in the real Indian context, this probably merely means a small statistical increase

41

  Anglo-American sociology widened the meaning of disenchantment at critical points. In a sense, it is this conception of ‘secularization’ rather than Weber’s narrower notion of disenchantment that has become a default position in modern social science. 42   Though they certainly desisted from taking the step towards accepting the immanent frame. 43   Tomārei jena bhālobāsiyachi śatayuge śatabār, janame janame yuge yuge anibār (Tagore 1972, 96). Reprinted from the journal

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in the number of academics who are drilled by their formal education to believe that they must start from a premise of unbelief in making an academically serious argument. The surrounding society’s belief in God still appears overwhelmingly evident. Human life is conceived in intrinsically anti-individualistic anti-monadic ways. We are what we have become through our most profound formative experiences. These are experiences of affection: which demonstrates that we could not become what we most intrinsically are by ourselves, entirely on our own, unmediated by the presence of others. That alone allows us to touch the depths of our own possibilities — shows how much we can care, how much we can love, and how much we can feel the loss of other selves. Love is a self’s recognition of the existence of others as selves. Even separation from someone met long ago does not make us forget: we come to the realization ‘that her unseen fingers cause in my dreams the ripples in the lake of tears’ (Tagore, 1972, 598).44 Memory — one among many functions of the imagination — can compensate for the lack of presence (Tagore, 1970, 330).45 Poetic imagination fortifies human beings for all exigencies of love and loss. At the end of a human life, the overwhelming emotion is gratitude for this journey on earth, and an assertion that ‘I loved, I loved this earth’46 — this paradise fallen on this earth. But this life of fleeting and fragile moments of perfection also drives human beings to explore their own selves. The first sun on the first day of existence, asked ‘Who are you?’. It did not get an answer. The last sun of the last day on earth, asked the last question: ‘Who are you?.’ It did not get an answer. (Tagore, 1972, 833.)

The World of History Around the World of Art Tagore’s art, clearly, offers a defiant negative response to the question of desacralization of the world and disenchantment as inescapable destiny of all societies. Even if we shift from Weber’s language of disenchantment and substitute it by Durkheim’s distinction between sacred and profane, we discover that for Tagore, extricating the world from an older sacral language does not mean an inevitable profanation of everything. It leads to sacralization by other means. The world remains meaningful and beautiful — though the presence of God and the conception of God himself are altered beyond recognition. Historicizing our own reading, we have to ask the question that historicists must always ask themselves: has the world and the act of reading itself changed significantly between the time Tagore’s text were written and my time of reading them? In late nineteenth century, Tagore’s thought world was marked by colonial modernity

44

  Dekhi tāri adṛśa aṅguli svapne aśru sarovare kṣaṇe kṣaṇe dey dheu tuli   In an extraordinary song on memory, Tagore describes its many modes: ‘if I go far away, if this love is covered over by new love, if I stay so close that it is hard to know if I am there or not, like a shadow’. ‘Tabu mane rekho’. 46   Bhālabesechinu ei dharaṇīre bhalabesechinu. Gītabitān, 563. 45

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— a modernity propelled by political-economic maneuvers of imperial power. The presence of colonial power — against which Indians felt themselves politically helpless — and its potential alliance with modern forms of philosophic and social thought loomed as a future threat, a threat that was not already a presence, but a real possibility in future. Thinkers like Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Gandhi, and Tagore — with their different but equally delicate perceptiveness — warned about the peculiarity and transiency of this historical moment in time, that it was not going to last. Thinking people in India, they warned, must make a choice — whether they wanted to embrace this change and all its consequences or seek to obviate this as historical fate. But this required an accurate understanding of the nature of that historical moment — and its implications. Indians should not accept as fate their incarceration in a ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarti, 2000b). They should view this as a beginning of a different path into futurity. This more open, more possibilistic perception of their moment in historical time is reflected in Tagore’s artistic world, and its tripartite arrangement of God, nature, and humans — a world that is at ease with itself, un-disenchanted. In his darker writings, for example, his play Rakta Karabī (Red Oleander) (Tagore, 1925, 2002), the power of modernity is represented by the king of the dark chamber whose power is irresistible, but his own sense of his ugliness does not allow him to come out into the light. It is not surprising that he has a deeply contradictory relationship of asking for deliverance/transcendence from Nandinī — the feminine principle of joy. Nandinī is eternally irresistible, but fragile and elusive — in this modern world. She is not threatened, in Tagore’s artistic world, by extinction. She can be forgotten — i.e., people might not know that she exists, she is certainly elusive, but she is an ineradicable presence in a human world. Thus, in Tagore’s thought, the danger of modernity exists as a threat, a potential wave of thinking that might overwhelm present Indian thought and sensibility, but it is not dominant in his present. Following him, we might consider if we have been persistently misled about our own historical present. If dominance in a culture is reckoned in terms of what ordinary people think, and what is implied in the way they behave, significant changes have occurred in Indian culture and sensibility; but still, it cannot be plausibly claimed that the default position of an ordinary Indian is that God does not exist. Hard atheists are still a small minority. Ordinary Indians are not — in a precise historicist sense — inhabitants of ‘a secular age.’ It is inside the academia that the fear and anxiety about ‘backwardness’ of religiosity is intensely felt. Academics in social sciences, therefore, start with a background assumption that the whole world — without exception — lives, along with Latin Christendom, in ‘a secular age,’ and consequently, the abundance of everyday religiosity seen around is an historically illegitimate abomination — i.e., ordinary people continue to be religious (an empirical truth) defying some fundamental law of history ( a conceptual truth). Ordinary people appear oblivious of the existence of that law. My own adherence to an atheistic position is not, I hope, a reflex of this academic background assumption, but based on the idea that it is economical not to assent to the presence of a being for whose existence there is no certain evidence. But a reasonable attitude towards the idea of God cannot be, in our age, simply focused on the narrow philosophical, ontological question of existence. Since ideas — irrespective of whether their objects are real or not — are real Reprinted from the journal

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and cause real effects, historical realism enjoins us to take into serious account consequences of belief in the idea of God. The aesthetic arrangement of ideas in Tagore’s art — of God, his created world and nature, and his relation with humans — offers a picture that can be not only attractive to ontological atheists, but offer them ways of expressing their own sense of wonder at the world in a language which, because of their unbelief, they cannot generate on their own. In my case, I think, a reading of ancient philosophy altered my own understanding of this problem: by turning the meaning of the crucial term ‘imaginary.’ Earlier, the primary sense of the idea that God was a creation of imagination meant that it was an unreal thing taken for real. Reading Indian aesthetic philosophy changed my understanding of what imagination meant. Kalpanā — the Indic concept of imagination — is a primary faculty of the human mind contrasted with the other primary faculty of reason.47 The function of imagination is not taking the unreal as real — which would imply that acts based on this idea would be inefficacious. Imagination here means the capacity to posit an idea with the knowledge that it is unreal, but, if taken as real, it would produce effects on the real world, and some of them might be of a character which may make what was unreal earlier real after a time. If we reconceptualize the imaginary — the creations of kalpanā — in this manner, it becomes clear that a great number of things are brought into being (bhāvana) in this way. Such objects include mundane things like the potter’s making of the pot (ghaṭa) — a mere image in his mind initially, turned by acts into an object sufficiently objectified as to be separated from him entirely without any diminution of its reality. Other objects of a different kind of significance also fall into this category — Kant’s view of ‘practical reason,’ constitutions in liberal political theory, the stock market in the capitalist economy, and finally, God himself — the longest lasting of these objects of kalpanā. Ontological commitment to atheism is not compromised by admiration and real enjoyment of āstika poetry. In fact, I can get two worlds for the price of one (after all, we live in a capitalist world where such offers are irresistible): I can have my nāstika world, but I can also have an āstika world right next to it, with a door through which we can communicate constantly — particularly when we face grief or need a language for the ineffable.

References Chakrabarti, A. (2000a). ‘From Vimarsha to vishrama: you, I and the tranquil taste of freedom’, Evam: Forum on Indian representations, Vol 4, No 1 and 2. Chakrabarti, D. (2000b). Provincializing Europe. Princeton University Press. Gandhi, L. (2014). Common cause: Postcolonial ethics and the practice of democracy 1900–1955. Chicago University Press. Joas, H. (2021). The power of the sacred. Oxford University Press.

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  For Weber, an idea — if it is not rational, is irrational. In Indian thought, an idea, if not rational, can be imaginative. Or in Shulman’s phrase, ‘more than real’ (Shulman, 2007).

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Can Nāstikas Taste Āstika Poetry? Tagore’s Poetry and the… Kaviraj, S. (2018). ‘Languages of secularity’. In Sarkar, T., & Iqtedar, H. (eds), Tolerance, secularization and democratic politics in South Asia. Kaviraj, S. (2021). ‘Marxbād o svarger sandhān’, Summer, Anuṣtup, Kolkata. McCrea, L. (2008). Teleology of poetics in medieval Kashmir. Harvard University Press. Nigam, A. (2020). Decolonizing theory. Bloomsbury. Reich, J. (2021). To savor the meaning. Oxford University Press. Shulman, D. (2007). More than real. Harvard University Press. Tagore, R. (1925). Red Oleanders (English translation of Rakta Karabi), 2002 Rupa, Kolkata. Tagore, R. (Thakur, Rabindranath) (1970). Gitabitan. Visvabharati. Tagore, R. (Thakur, Rabindranath) (1972). Sancayita. Visvabharati. Taylor, C. (1975). Hegel. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard University Press. Viśvanātha, K. (1923). Sāhityadarpaṇam. Nirnayasagar Press.

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Sophia (2021) 60:699–720 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00871-3

‘And Therefore I Hasten to Return My Ticket’: Anti-theodicy Radicalised N. N. Trakakis1  Accepted: 4 July 2021 / Published online: 26 August 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Keywords  Anti-theodicy · Problem of evil · Fyodor Dostoevsky · Albert Camus Da steh ich schon auf deiner finstern Brücke Furchtbare Ewigkeit. Empfange meinen Vollmachtbrief zum Glücke! Ich bring ihn unerbrochen dir zurücke, Ich weiß nichts von Glückseligkeit.1 1. This third stanza from Schiller’s poem, ‘Resignation’ (composed 1784), was to inspire Dostoevsky to place in the mouth of his character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) words of such force that, as one commentator remarked, ‘changed the face of theology’, for ‘henceforward, no justification of evil, by its outcome or its context, has been possible’.2 In translation, Schiller’s stanza reads: Already at your darkened bridge I tarry Terrible eternity. Receive my letter, my contract for happiness! Unopened, I return it you,      Of happiness I know naught.3 Sprung from Schiller’s intense but troubled affair with the (unhappily) married Charlotte von Kalb, the poem expresses resignation but also renunciation towards the order of things, which is disclosed as in fact lacking order and justice, at least in Chapter 13 was originally published as Trakakis, N. N. Sophia (2021) 60: 699–720. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11841-021-00871-3. 1

  Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3 (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1970), pp.112–13.   Alexander Boyce Gibson, The Religion of Dostoevsky (London: SCM Press, 1973), p.176. 3   Translation mine. 2

* N. N. Trakakis [email protected] 1



School of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne campus, 115 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy, Victoria 3065, Australia

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any transcendent or ultimate sense: ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’,4 Schiller famously wrote in the penultimate stanza. Hegel, infamously, saw in this confirmation of his optimistic philosophy of history. But as Schiller’s narrator protests, in this world virtue is not always correlated with happiness, and ‘what is rejected in the moment / won’t be waiting in eternity’. The disconnection between our longing for harmony and happiness, for clarity and comprehension, and a seemingly irrational world which spurns such desires is experienced as a rupture in the ‘covenant’, as a betrayal of our ‘rights’ (‘Vollmachtbrief zum Glücke’).5 Reality, having thus defaulted, Schiller’s narrator returns his letter (his ‘contract for happiness’) unopened, and Dostoevsky’s Ivan does the same.6 Herein lies a response to the problem of evil quite removed from those standardly offered in philosophy and theology. Even the kind of ‘anti-theodicy’ that has witnessed a surge in interest over the last decade bears only a family resemblance to Ivan’s rebellious gesture, which seeks — as I hope to show — to radicalise the rejection of theodicy by surmounting the traditional atheism-theism divide and suggesting a new way of thinking about God and evil. 2. It might help, to begin with, to look at the meaning of, and motivation behind, anti-theodicy, where this has been developed along religious lines. The idea is a somewhat straightforward one and could be expressed as follows: no reconciliation between God and evil is possible. Different anti-theodicists will spell this out in their own ways, but Zachary Braiterman’s formulation in his 1998 study, (God) After Auschwitz, is gradually taking on a canonical status. Anti-theodicy, states Braiterman, is ‘any religious response to the problem of evil whose proponents refuse to justify, explain, or accept as somehow meaningful the relationship between God and suffering’.7 On this view, of course, the project of theodicy is rejected outright — the project, that is, of identifying’s God’s (possible or actual) reasons for permitting evil. The rejection of theodicy, in turn, rules out the currently fashionable position of ‘skeptical theism’, the view that God’s reasons for permitting evil are not within our ken. What this indicates is that, for the anti-theodicist, the problem with theodicy does not lie in the hubris of claiming to understand the ways of God, but in something much deeper having to do (e.g.) with our very understanding of the concepts of ‘God’ and ‘evil’.

4

  This can be rendered as ‘The world’s history is the world’s judgement’, or less literally and more in keeping with popular hymns: ‘The history of the world is the Last Judgement’. 5   This is not to deny that Schiller’s poem is also seeking to critique self-interested conceptions of morality. The poem, as John Simons notes, ‘questions the value of a deed performed only because the person wants to make a deposit in a celestial savings account to be collected in the Hereafter, with interest’. (Friedrich Schiller, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981, p.46) 6   Dostoevsky knew of Schiller’s poem from V.A. Zhukovsky’s Russian translation, which reproduces lines 3–4 of the third stanza somewhat freely as: ‘The entrance letter to an earthly paradise / I return to Thee unopened’. See Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p.16. 7   Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p.31.

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2.1 A theodicist, for example, might postulate human freedom (Augustine), or the diversity and plenitude introduced by ‘the great chain of being’ (neoplatonism, in Lovejoy’s reading), or ‘soul-making’ (Hick) as the reason-why (or part of the overall reason-why) God has created a world like ours, riddled as it is by all manner of ‘minuses’, from the trifling to the horrific. An atheist, observing and contemplating these very same phenomena, infers instead that there is no (perfect) God. But no such step is taken by the (religious) anti-theodicist, who remains committed to a theistic worldview but without building into it any telelogical scheme whereby all evils exist for the sake of greater goods. Again, different anti-theodicists will develop this idea in their own distinct ways, but each will do so while holding fast to (i) a religious perspective, or at least a certain way of understanding religious beliefs and practices (without, in either case, resorting to the rejection of religion), wherein (ii) the very notion of ‘God permitting evil for the sake of a greater good’ is in some sense illegitimate or unintelligible. To develop these ideas, anti-theodicists have often attended to the phenomenology of evil and suffering, and to the language and conceptual lineaments of morality. The experience of Auschwitz, for example, and the impossibility of adequately capturing this experience may seem to point to an intuition or insight that is, arguably, widely shared, at least outside of theologically biased contexts: the meaninglessness of much suffering, particularly brutal and dehumanising suffering. To assume, as theodicists like Hick and Swinburne do, that all suffering, no matter how extreme, must serve some God-ordained purpose (irrespective of whether we are able to recognise such a purpose), is to run afoul not only of lived experience (which might, admittedly, be deceptive or mistaken), but (more importantly) of fundamental principles and presuppositions of morality. Arguments here sometimes take a Kantian, ‘transcendental’ turn, in seeking to show how moral principles and practices we hold dear (e.g. never treat others merely as a means to your own ends), or moral emotions and reactions (such as sympathy and sacrificial service) would be undermined if we believed, say, that all suffering serves a beneficial purpose. It is not hard to see how, in light of these criticisms, theodicy can be charged with moral blindness, or even distortion and dishonesty, as Beverley Clack has pointed out, where the reality and extent of evil are ‘remodelled’ so as to be made to cohere with one’s preconceived (Panglossian) judgements as to how the world ought to be.8 2.2  Another route to anti-theodicy takes its cues not so much from the nature of morality, but from the nature of divinity (though the two are not entirely separate).

8

  See Beverley Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, in Hendrik M. Vroom (ed.), Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp.197–215. This tendency to distort was captured well in some recent remarks by German artist, Anselm Kiefer: ‘These [ancient belief-systems such as Kabbalah and Gnosticism] are such fantastic systems of thought because there is so much hard work put into proving that there is a big meaning to everything. But, of course, the reason that there is so much hard work is because there is no meaning’. Quoted in Sean O’Hagan, ‘Anselm Kiefer: “When I make a truly great painting, then I feel real”,’  The Guardian, 25 November 2019. Reprinted from the journal

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The argument here is often expressed as a critique of anthropomorphism or supernaturalism in theodicy. The criticism might, for example, target the hermeneutically naïve ways in which theodicists make use of anthropomorphic images of the divinity found in biblical texts. Alternatively, it has been argued that theodicists continue to be influenced by a Newtonian or Enlightenment paradigm that pictures the world as a relatively autonomous system operating according to its own laws, so that any deity must be conceived in distant and deistic terms as a first cause and grand designer who occasionally intervenes ‘supernaturally’, acting from outside the natural order to miraculously modify the ordinary course of events. By contrast, anti-theodicists have advanced conceptions of God, or ultimate divine reality, that avoid these pitfalls. Brian Davies, for example, draws upon the difficult doctrine of ‘divine simplicity’ to argue against ‘theistic personalism’, the assumption (prevalent in perfect-being theology) that ‘God is something very familiar. He is a person. And he has properties in common with other persons’.9 Others have sought to develop a purely immanent and naturalistic, non-personal and non-theistic way of understanding divinity, whether it be by way of the ‘Absolute’ as found in German and British idealism (e.g. Hegel, Bradley), or the analogous notion of ‘Brahman’ in the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, or the pantheist identification of God with the world or all-there-is (e.g. Stoicism, Spinoza). Whether one follows Davies’ Thomist strategy, or the path of naturalising the divine, the upshot for the anti-theodicist is essentially the same: the very idea of a God who has desires and purposes, duties and obligations, and who governs the world in such a way as to fulfil these desires and duties, is incoherent. 3. Whatever the merits of these kinds of considerations, they remain — I have come to see — too theodical and theistic in character. That is to say, the criticisms levelled against theodicy are done so from a standpoint that continues to accept certain significant planks or presuppositions of both the theodicist’s and the theist’s worldview. To see this, let’s return to the way in which the theodicist thinks about reality. For the theodicist, reality is essentially rational, in the sense that whatever evil there exists in the world is counterbalanced, if not outweighed — or perhaps even ‘defeated’ in the Chisholmian sense — by some good. When all is said and done, there will be no ‘surd’ remainder. The rational structure of reality means that the possibility of reconciliation and redemption is never foreclosed, not necessarily in the sense that every person will be saved in the end (unless one is a universalist about salvation) but in the sense that there will always be good reason to believe or hope that all evil can be overcome and redeemed by God, thus removing any potential obstacles there might be to entering into a relationship of trust and love with God. This is a fundamentally optimistic vision of reality and a deeply life-affirming one too. And there is an important sense in which the (religious) anti-theodicist shares in this vision. For, even if (as the anti-theodicy view holds) we cannot think of God as having (morally sufficient) reasons for permitting humans to suffer, it is entirely compatible with this position to say that God has an overall plan for the 9

  Davies, ‘Letter from America’, New Blackfriars 84 (2003): 377.

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world and, in particular, for human beings — where this plan or purpose could be specified (as it normally is in Christian theology) in terms of ‘union with God’, or ‘eternal loving communion with God’. It is just that this grand plan cannot be taken as the reason-why God allows suffering.10 But for the (religious) anti-theodicist, as much as for the theodicist, God is always victorious in the end — because he, and only he, has the resources to defeat despair, to overcome the pessimistic Schopenhauerian view that, in light of our knowledge of evil, ‘we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be’.11 There is nonetheless an interesting, albeit overlooked, way of sundering this connection between rationality and reconciliation, between a rationally ordered and providentially governed universe on the one hand, and on the other the seemingly instinctive desire to affirm and accept this scheme to the extent of existentially committing oneself to it as a source of consolation and meaning. There is, in other words, a certain way of relating to God that aligns well with the anti-theodicy impulse, but which is neither theistic nor atheistic in any standard respect. One of the most powerful illustrations of this comes from Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, in the figure of Ivan. 4. Ivan, however, is a widely misunderstood and much maligned figure. It is not difficult, after a first reading of the novel, to regard him as a religious skeptic, atheist and even nihilist: after all, to his father’s repeated questioning, ‘tell me: is there a God or not?’ he answers: ‘No’.12 And in light of his rejection of God and immortality, he notoriously proclaims that ‘everything is permitted’ (69) — a pivotal proclamation, as it influences his (rumoured) half-brother to commit the murder of his father. It is not difficult, then, to see Ivan as the antithesis of the saintly Zosima: while the elder advocates solidarity with all of God’s creation, Ivan appears lonely and haughty, even misanthropic (‘I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors’, he admits, 236). He is articulate and intelligent, but his sincerity is questionable (Zosima, for example, questions whether he means what he says in his theologically nuanced article on ecclesiology13) and the rationalist bent of his despairing ‘Euclidean’ mind drives him in the end to insanity. This characterisation of Ivan goes wrong at many points, but here I want to concentrate on his alleged atheism. What has regularly been overlooked is that Ivan is no atheist at all, at least in the usual sense of atheism as the belief that there is no God. Ivan’s attitude and outlook, I think, can be better captured by what I am calling ‘anti-theodicy’, but a kind of anti-theodicy that dispenses with the division between theism and atheism. This somewhat unusual form of anti-theodicy, different in significant ways from

10

 The anti-theodicist might hold that God’s plan comes to fruition despite, and even through, evil, but not because or in virtue of evil, where ‘because’ and ‘in virtue of’ denote a necessary connection between evil and God’s purposes. 11   Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p.576. 12   Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p.134. All subsequent in-text citations are from this translation. 13   Ivan’s article is summarised at p.62, and Zosima’s response is given on p.70. Reprinted from the journal

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the anti-theodicy outlined in §2, offers a perceptive and challenging way of thinking about the problem of evil and, more broadly, about the nature of the religious life. 4.1 Let’s begin with ‘The Brothers Get Acquainted’, the third chapter in the famous Pro and Contra (Book Five) section of the novel. Ivan is briefly visiting his home town and, before leaving, has decided to meet with his estranged younger brother Alyosha in a local tavern, because (he says to Alyosha), ‘I want to get acquainted with you once and for all, and I want you to get acquainted with me’. (229) The conversation soon turns to ‘the eternal questions’ (233) which have gripped all of Russia’s youth: Is there a God? Is there life after death? Or, for those who don’t believe in God, how can justice on earth be brought about? The discussion gets underway with a surprising admission from Ivan: ‘Imagine’, he laughingly says to his brother, ‘that perhaps I, too, accept God’. (234) Alyosha, in disbelief, replies that Ivan must be joking. But it’s not clear what exactly Ivan is up to. He goes on to quote Voltaire’s famous dictum, ‘If God didn’t exist, he would have to be invented’, and he seems to side with the French philosophe when stating that ‘man has, indeed, invented God’. (234) But he quickly qualifies this by saying that, ‘I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man’. (235) He then returns to his initial declaration: ‘I accept God pure and simple’. (235)14 Again, what Ivan is up to is not clear — not just yet anyway. Ivan proceeds to distinguish two distinct conceptions of divinity: a God who creates the world in accordance with Euclidean geometry, and so is amenable to rational understanding; and a God who embodies instead the newly formulated paradoxical principles of non-Euclidean geometry (developed by Dostoevsky’s contemporary, N.I. Lobachevsky), in which case the divine nature is incomprehensible. Ivan states that if there is a God, that God must be of the first, Euclidean, variety. But he adds that if God is of the latter, non-Euclidean, kind, then there would be no hope of resolving the eternal questions: ‘All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions’. (235) In the context of this apophatic conception of God (common in the Orthodox tradition), Ivan returns, for a third time, to his initial ‘acceptance’ of God, clarifying it by saying: ‘And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us’. (235) This is clarified further still by a kind of credo, of the sort that is professed during the ordination of a bishop in the Orthodox Church, when the bishop-elect is asked: ‘And how believest thou, if thou believest anything at all?’ It is this very question, according to Ivan, that Alyosha has been eagerly waiting for months to pose to him (233). And now Ivan meets his brother’s demand in a most startling way, by declaring: I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is

14

 Or, in Victor Terras’ translation: ‘I accept God outright and simply’. (A Karamazov Companion, p.219, note 106)

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yearning, and who himself was “with God”, who himself is God, and so on, and so on and so forth, to infinity. (235) It is not without significance that this christological credo ends without an ending: the et cetera expresses a restlessness with the tediousness of dogmatic formulae, thus hinting at an ironic and cynical attitude towards professions of faith. This complicates Ivan’s confession, making it even more difficult to know how seriously to take him. But read more literally, Ivan’s et cetera can also be understood as an invitation to place there whatever dogma takes one’s fancy: it is a placeholder for any religious worldview whatever. Then comes Ivan’s denouement: ‘And now imagine that in the final outcome I do not accept this world of God’s, I do not admit it at all,15 though I know it exists’. (235) He goes on to explain: It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. (235) He qualifies this with ‘one reservation’: he has a ‘childlike conviction’, he admits, that in the end, ‘in the moment of eternal harmony’, all the evils and wrongs of the world will be remedied and transfigured in such a way as ‘not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men’. (236) Let’s add this teleological tale to our et cetera, Ivan seems to be saying, and let’s take it not as a tale but as the truth, the eschatological truth about human history. ‘Let this, let all of this come true and be revealed’, Ivan concedes, ‘but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it!’ (236) Reverting to the image of non-Euclidean geometry, he adds: ‘Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it’. (236) This confession, which Ivan insists on ‘in all seriousness’ and as defining his ‘essence’, as what he ‘lives by’ (236), constitutes the foundation of what I’m calling his ‘anti-theodicy’. 4.2 A brief interlude on a real-life parallel to Ivan might be instructive at this point. The parallel comes by way of Alexander Voevodin, a young writer obsessed with suicide and frequently on the brink of ending his life. He would collect newspaper articles of suicides and keep track of suicide statistics. He died in 1903 at the age of 46, and although it is not known how he died, it has been suggested that it was by his own hand.16 What’s important for our purposes, however, is a letter he wrote to Dostoevsky on March 16, 1878, boldly stating: 15

  Or as David McDuff’s translation has it, ‘I don’t admit its validity in any way’. (The Brothers Karamazov, London: Penguin, 1993), p.270. 16   See Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 175, 251 n24.

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I would like to talk to you about suicide. I uphold that: (1) Every person has a right to suicide. (2) In certain circumstances, every person must commit suicide. (3)  A person may commit suicide while professing faith in God and life after death.17 Dostoevsky in fact responded to Voevodin. The two men entered into a brief correspondence, which included an exchange of letters as well as notebooks, and it appears that they even met in person.18 But let’s look at Voevodin’s three propositions, which are likely to be seen as progressively implausible: (1) seems relatively innocuous, particularly from a libertarian standpoint predicated upon the right to self-determination; (2) makes a shift, harder to defend, from suicide as permissible to suicide as (in some, perhaps extraordinary, circumstances) obligatory; and in (3) something even more counterintuitive is asserted: even if there is a God (in which case life has a, divinely bestowed, purpose), I am permitted to commit suicide (thereby avowing that my life is not worth living). Note the ‘even-if’ structure of (3). Note also that, the suicide in (3) begins, like Ivan, from a position of belief; their starting-point is not atheistic, as might be presumed. Irina Paperno, in Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, correctly identifies the error here, one that Voevodin’s father did not avoid: According to Voevodin, his pious father saw his son’s suicidal inclinations as a product of nihilism and atheism. But, much like Dostoevsky, the elder Voevodin missed the point. A member of the young generation who held progressive views, the younger Voevodin insisted that the right to suicide was compatible with belief. It was not God but life that he refused to accept: “I do not accept life as it is. I cannot tolerate many things about it, many things about it make me nauseous. Spite, indignation, and hate are suffocating me…”19 As Paperno points out, ‘This confession of “faith” (Voevodin’s word) resembled Ivan Karamazov’s famous argument: it is not God but his world that I refuse to accept’.20 Dostoevsky was fascinated by figures like Voevodin, as is evident in his article ‘Two Suicides’ for the October 1876 issue of A Writer’s Diary: About a month ago, all the Petersburg newspapers ran a few short lines in small print about a Petersburg suicide: a poor, young girl, a seamstress, had thrown herself out of a fourth-floor window – “because she was absolutely unable to find enough work to support herself.” It was noted as well that she jumped and fell to the ground, holding an icon in her hands. This holding an icon is a strange and unprecedented detail in suicides!21 17

  Quoted in Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, p.174.   See Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, pp.175, 178. 19  Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, p.176. 20  Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, p.176. Indeed, one may wonder whether the character of Ivan was in any way based upon Voevodin. 21   Quoted in Ronald Meyer, ‘Introduction’ to Dostoyevsky, ‘The Gambler’ and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2010), p.xxvii, emphasis in original. 18

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Dostoevsky goes on to describe this as a ‘meek, humble suicide’, involving no protest or reproach against God, but an acknowledgement that ‘it had merely become impossible to live’, and so, after saying her prayers, the young girl (Maria Borisova) lept to her death. Doestoevsky, in his article, takes this suicide as illustrating the oft-repeated dictum that truth is stranger than fiction: ‘reality…exceeds everything your own observation and imagination was able to create!’22 This realisation, Dostoevsky notes, might well erode a writer’s self-confidence, but it did not prevent Dostoevsky from creating one of his most popular short stories, ‘The Meek One’ (1876). The female protagonist of this story is modelled on the meek Petersburg seamstress. Dostoevsky invents a backstory to make sense of her demise (she is tormented by her stern, domineering husband), but her end is the same as her factual prototype: after praying to an icon of the Mother of God, she throws herself out the window, while clutching the icon to her breast.23 The Meek One, like Voevodin, follows Ivan in accepting God but rejecting the world and the life God has offered. This paradoxical form of reasoning stands in need of further analysis and elucidation, but the cases discussed here illustrate that what is involved is no simple affirmation of atheism, or theism for that matter. To obtain more clues as to what is involved, let’s return to Ivan. 4.3 In the chapter aptly entitled ‘Rebellion’, Ivan provides one of the most potent and influential arguments ever made against theodicy and, more broadly, optimistic teleological narratives of human progress and redemption. His argument, as is well known, revolves mainly around harrowing stories of the abuse of children, some of which were based upon real-life accounts Dostoevsky had culled from newspapers, periodicals and other sources24 and adapted here, exhibiting in the process his infamous ‘cruel talent’. After recounting these stories of innocent suffering, Ivan turns to the question of how such suffering can be redeemed (244–45). Ivan desires retribution, though he is well aware that revenge cannot provide redemption. He introduces once more the theodical narrative that ‘the universe will tremble when all in heaven and under the earth merge in one voice of praise, and all that lives and has lived cries out: “Just art thou, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed”.’ (244) But this higher eternal harmony also fails to provide redemption, for ‘it is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child’. (245) Importantly, Ivan is not doubting the existence of God, nor is he challenging the belief in a providential order where God ushers in an eternal harmony that will justify and defeat all temporal evil. Ivan accepts God and God’s providence. As he puts

22

 F.M. Dostoievsky, The Diary of a Writer, vol. 1, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), p.468. Note the response that Dostoevsky made to this in a private notebook: ‘But it is the poet who sees the real life, while others see nothing’. (Quoted in Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, p.183) 23

  Dostoevsky, ‘The Meek One’, in ‘The Gambler’ and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Meyer, p.332.   One of Ivan’s stories, about a retired general who unleashes a pack of borzoi hounds on a little boy, was taken from the literary journal, The Russian Herald, the very place where The Brothers Karamazov originally appeared in serial form in 1879–1880. 24

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it, ‘I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer’. (244) These are not the words of a straightforward atheist. At the same time, however, Ivan rejects God. More precisely, he rebels against all theodical schemes that seek to make sense of the undeserved suffering of children. On the one hand, he does not doubt God’s providential plan for the world, but on the other he exclaims, ‘I absolutely renounce all higher harmony… I don’t want harmony, for the love of mankind I don’t want it’. (245) It is at this point that Ivan introduces his poignant Schillerian motif: Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket… It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket. (245)25 The crucial moment in anti-theodicy, then, is not to be found in disputing the existence or goodness of God, or in questioning God’s purposes and the means employed to realise them, but in ‘returning the entry ticket’. Alyosha calls this ‘rebellion’, and even if Ivan does not agree (contending that ‘one cannot live by rebellion’, 245), Ivan’s stance discloses something of the nature of what might be described as antitheodicy radicalised. 5. To get a better sense of what anti-theodicy in this radical guise amounts to, it might help to consider some of the even-if clauses that inform Ivan’s thinking. Consider a commonplace clause of that form: (1) Even if you leave right now, you still won’t catch the train. It would be a mistake to think that (1) could be translated into a conditional statement, like: (2) If you leave right now, you won’t catch the train. Here the antecedent implies, and is therefore a sufficient condition for the truth of, the consequent. This, of course, is an instance of ‘material implication’, as understood in propositional logic. (1), however, is not a conditional, but rather translates simply as p. In saying p even if q, one is asserting p whether or not q, and this is equivalent to asserting p on its own. But this analysis, correct as it is, misses an important conversational implicature in even-if statements. These statements are uttered against the background of a presumed connection between two states of affairs (e.g. departing now — catching the train) and seek to sunder this connection. It’s not merely the truth of p that is being asserted, but its truth in relation to q. 25

  Interestingly, Vissarion Belinsky used similar language in repudiating Hegelian optimism. See his letter to V.P. Botkin, dated 1 March 1841, quoted in Alexandra H. Lyngstad, Dostoevskij and Schiller (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp.89-90.

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With this in mind, let’s turn to what Camus has called ‘Ivan’s most profound utterance’,26 the following perplexing even-if declaration: I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. (245, emphasis in original) Wrong about what? The context indicates that Ivan is referring to what he calls ‘the higher harmony’, a theodical narrative of the eschatological transfiguration of the fallen creation, where all suffering is healed and redeemed and God’s love and justice are vindicated. Ivan even goes so far as to postulate that this will include the illumination of God’s ways (‘then of course the crown of knowledge will have come and everything will be explained’, 244) and the realisation of reconciliation through forgiveness (‘the mother embracing her child’s tormentor’, 245). To what extent Ivan remains here within the limits of traditional Christian teaching can be debated, but it is clear that he is drawing upon biblical imagery (e.g. Isaiah 11:6, 65:25, Psalm 119:137, Rev 15:3–4, 16:7, 19:1–2) as well as patristic Orthodox themes, especially ‘deification’ and the cosmic vision of the human being as joining in Christ’s work of bridging the created and uncreated orders, thus healing the divisions in the cosmos. In any case, we might recall (from §4.1) Ivan’s earlier christological confession and its et cetera conclusion in order to note that Ivan is more than prepared to endorse whatever grand narrative of redemption his interlocutor seeks to defend. It would not be inaccurate, therefore, to express Ivan’s even-if statement more prosaically as follows: (3) Even if I am wrong about Christianity, I don’t accept eternal harmony. Assuming, as Ivan seems to, that the eschatology of eternal harmony is an essential ingredient of Christian theology (at least of the Orthodox variety), and not a dispensable addendum, (3) is tantamount to: (4) Even if I am wrong about Christianity, I don’t accept Christianity. And (4), more succinctly put, comes to the following paradoxical statement: (5) Even if Christianity is true, I don’t accept Christianity. Again, this is not the utterance of any ordinary atheist. One might reply that the paradox is easily removed by deferring to the distinction between belief and acceptance, or the analogous distinction found in religious contexts between ‘belief that’ and ‘belief in’. Roughly, to believe something is to assert or assent to it (where ‘it’ might be something like a proposition), to take it to be true

26

 Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (London: Penguin, 2000), p.51.

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or an accurate description of reality. But acceptance involves more than cognitive assent; it requires voluntary decision and practical commitment. It’s not unusual to believe something without accepting it, just as a religious believer could pay lipservice to the teachings of their religion but exhibit a lack of faith and commitment (a failure to ‘accept’ or ‘believe in’) by not ‘living out’ these teachings. Is this what is happening in Ivan’s case? No, it isn’t. In the Gospel of Matthew (14:22–33), the disciples witness Jesus walking on water, and when Jesus invites Peter to leave his boat and walk over the waves to him, Peter does so but the stormy conditions frighten him and he begins to falter and sink. Jesus rescues him but chides him: ‘O you of little faith’. (14:31, NKJV) What Peter lacks is not ‘belief-that’ but ‘belief-in’, unwavering trust in Jesus as lord over the forces of nature. When conditions subsided and Peter was safely back in the boat, Matthew writes that ‘those who were in the boat came and worshipped Him [Jesus], saying, “Truly You are the Son of God”.’ (14:33, NKJV) The attitude of the disciples is one of profound awe and reverence, and we can surmise that in Peter there would also have been feelings of regret and repentance. By contrast, Ivan’s failure to accept Christianity does not provoke any such contrition but is rather taken by him as a sign of success. In refusing to accept Christianity, he presumes to be taking a correct (if not the only morally justified) course of action. As this indicates, there is a certain perversity in his lack of acceptance. In religious contexts, like the miracle story in Matthew, the lack of faith and acceptance is deemed sinful or at least something to be regretted. But there is no remorse in Ivan; there is obviously much inner torment that comes with his refusal, but this is because it’s a refusal driven by compassion with suffering humanity, and so in his eyes anything other than refusal would be a betrayal of the sufferers. For this reason, it’s not plausible to interpret Ivan as simply having, like Peter, little faith, belief-that but not belief-in. There is something much more intriguing going on in Ivan, which can be brought to the surface by considering some more of Dostoevsky’s even-if statements, this time from outside The Brothers Karamazov. 6. When one looks to Dostoevsky’s other writings, including his other fiction and his correspondence, it becomes clear that Ivan’s ‘even if I am wrong’ was no isolated pronouncement but a recurring theme in Dostoevsky’s thought. In a letter written in 1854, and now as widely discussed as Ivan’s rebellious musings, Dostoevsky had this to say soon after his release from prison in western Siberia: As for myself, I confess that I am a child of my age, a child of unbelief and doubt up to this very moment and (I am certain of it) to the grave. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and continues to cost me, burning more strongly in my soul the more contrary arguments there are. Nevertheless God sometimes sends me moments of complete tranquillity. In such moments I love and find that I am loved by others, and in such moments I have nurtured in myself a symbol of truth, in which everything is clear and holy for me. This symbol is very simple: it is the belief that there is nothing finer, profounder, more attractive, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that

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there cannot be. Even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.27 This striking statement, which I have italicised, is quite different from Ivan’s insistence that, even if an eternal harmony should be realised in the eschaton, he would not accept it; or, as I paraphrased it, even if Christianity were true, he would not accept it. Dostoevsky’s ‘even-if’ is in fact the converse of Ivan’s: even if Christianity is not true, he would accept it. But the underlying structure is the same in both cases: the disconnection between truth (or knowledge of truth) and acceptance. If Ivan’s atheism is perverse, flying in the face of the divine disclosure of ultimate justice, Dostoevsky’s allegiance to Christ is equally perverse, floating free of the truth-value of Christianity. The 1854 formula is repeated in the novel, Demons (1871–1872), where Shatov (a former revolutionary turned fervent Christian, who ends up murdered) reminds the nihilistic Stavrogin of the ideas the latter formerly upheld: But wasn’t it you who told me that if it were to be mathematically proven to you that the truth existed apart from Christ, then you would rather remain with Christ than with the truth?28 In other places, truth gets detached from acceptance in other ways. In Notes from Underground (1864), for example, the solitary and scornful narrator lashes out against the liberal, progressive principles of the ‘men of the 60s’, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky. According to the Underground Man, even if the utopian ideals of these revolutionaries were to be actualised, and a just and rational social order established, people would still want to assert their individuality and autonomy, even to the point of (knowingly) acting contrary to reason and self-interest: Shower him with all earthly blessings, plunge him so deep into happiness that nothing is visible but the bubbles rising to the surface of his happiness, as if it were water; give him such economic prosperity that he will have nothing left to do but sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the continuance of world history 27   The letter was written in January–February 1854, and was addressed to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina, wife of another Siberian exile; she visited Dostoevsky in a transit prison in Tobolsk in 1850 and gave him the only book he was permitted to possess: the New Testament. The above is Malcolm Jones’ translation, in ‘Dostoevskii and Religion’, in W.J. Leatherbarrow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.155–56, emphasis mine. In David Lowe’s and Ronald Meyer’s edition of Dostoevsky’s Complete Letters, vol. 1: 1832–1859 (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1988), the italicised sentence is rendered as:

  Moreover, if someone proved to me that Christ were outside the truth, and it really were that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth. (p.195, emphasis in original) 28

 Dostoyevsky, Demons, trans. Robert A. Maguire (London: Penguin, 2008), p.276. Dostoevsky expressed the idea again in a notebook written during the final month of his life: ‘Christ made mistakes – it has been proven!... It is better for me to stay with a mistake, with Christ, rather than with you’. The ‘you’ here refers to Dostoevsky’s opponent, K.D. Kavelin, a liberal Westerniser and university professor. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.712, who notes that the ‘mistakes’ ironically attributed by Dostoevsky to Christ ‘remain unspecified, but we may assume they correspond to the charges made in Ivan’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’.

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– and he, I mean man, even then, out of mere ingratitude, our of sheer devilment, will commit some abomination.29 Just as Ivan chooses to remain with his unassuaged indignation than accept eternal harmony, and Dostoevsky chooses to remain with Christ than accept truth, so the Underground Man prefers to follow his own will over the dictates of reason and common sense, for as he puts it, ‘one’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness – that is the one best and greatest good’.30 And so, even if placed in a crystal palace or the best of all possible worlds, we would not rest content until we had, inconsistently, self-destructively, brought it crashing it to the ground. 7. Although similar even-if statements occur elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s work,31 what has been set out here should be sufficient to better understand Ivan’s repudiation of harmony. A recurring danger, however, is that of watering down Ivan’s mutiny, as though he were targeting only something that is clearly (and perhaps even recognised at some level by him as) a misrepresentation of what his opponents believe. This is the trap that many otherwise insightful commentaries on Ivan have fallen into. A case in point is Stewart Sutherland’s Atheism and the Rejection of God, an extended and perceptive discussion of the variety of forms atheism may exhibit, taking its cues from The Brothers Karamazov.32 Although published in 1977, the book’s opening statement that, ‘Philosophers of religion could profitably spend much more time than they do examining the tissue, bone, and muscle of atheism’,33 continues, 29

 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, in ‘Notes from Underground’ and ‘The Double’, trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.37–38. The narrator goes on to say that, even if it were scientifically proven that free will is an illusion, this would make no difference and would, if anything, impel one to behave even more capriciously and destructively merely so as ‘to convince himself that he was a man and not a piano-key!’ (p.38) 30  Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, pp.33–34. 31   See, for example, Dostoevsky’s 1877 short story, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (in Dostoevsky, ‘The Gambler’ and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Meyer), where the narrator has a vivid dream of being transported to an earthly paradise populated by morally pure people living in complete peace and harmony. Gradually, however, the narrator corrupts these people, introducing vice and sorrow into their lives. Upon waking from this dream, the narrator immediately gives up his previous desire to commit suicide and decides instead to take up a new way of life centred around preaching the ‘truth’ he believes was revealed to him in the dream (this truth being that, by following Christ’s directive to love others as yourself, ‘people can be beautiful and happy, without losing the ability to live on this earth’, p.357). In response to the objection that his dream was nothing more than ‘ravings, hallucinations’, and so should not be taken seriously, he replies: ‘I’ll even go so far as to say: even if this never comes to pass and there is no paradise (you see, that I do understand!) – well, I will preach nevertheless’. (p.358, emphasis mine) In other words, even if the dream was just that, a dream, and the truth it disclosed merely an illusion, that is to be preferred over reality.   A similar choice in favour of subjective desire over objective reality is expressed by Ivan during his discussion with Alyosha: ‘If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment – still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I’ve drunk it all!... I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic’. (Brothers Karamazov, p.230, emphasis mine) 32   Stewart R. Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977). 33  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.3.

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sadly, to be true. The general assumption in philosophy of religion, then and now, is that atheism consists in the cognitive attitude of denial or disbelief towards the proposition God exists, and so a philosophical investigation of atheism should be primarily concerned with the truth or falsity of this denial, where this in turn is to be settled by assessing the arguments and evidence in support of the atheist hypothesis.34 Sutherland seeks to show, however, that Ivan may afford an understanding of atheism along very different, more emotional and experiential, lines. There is much to commend in Sutherland’s account, but I don’t think he has got Ivan entirely right. Sutherland describes Ivan as an atheist but an odd kind of atheist: one who accepts God.35 Although Sutherland goes on to say that, in portraying Ivan in this way, ‘Dostoevsky was neither naively mistaken nor philosophically confused’,36 I think it’s a question-begging move on Sutherland’s part to presume from the outset that Ivan is an atheist. There is, to be sure, an atheistic dimension to Ivan’s thinking, but this is insufficient for holding that he must therefore be an atheist, even a quite unorthodox one. An at least equally plausible reading would take Ivan as seeking to subvert the very distinction between theism and atheism. More of that anon. For now, let’s return to Sutherland’s analysis. Sutherland points out that Ivan’s unusual form of atheism consists in accepting God while also rejecting God’s world; and that his atheism has three dimensions. Firstly, it involves a moral response to God’s creation, specifically to the suffering of children.37 This is atheism as rebellion, ‘returning the ticket’. It is the rejection of theodicy as a distortion of the facts, but also the rejection of any attempt to use suffering as evidence for the non-existence of God: ‘Speculative atheism is no better than speculative theism’.38 Secondly, Ivan’s rebellious atheism has, as a consequence, the trivialisation of religious faith, the ‘profoundly and intentionally blasphemous’ reduction of God to a finite, anthropomorphic caricature.39 The third aspect of Ivan’s atheism consists in his ‘even-if’ utterances, which are explicated by Sutherland in terms of Ivan’s insistence that there is no alternative to his view of God and religion, that the alternatives proposed by Alyosha and Zosima are meaningless.40 The second of these dimensions demands scrutiny. According to Sutherland, ‘the God whom he [Ivan] accepts is a false God, the God of the Russian boys, a God whom man has invented’.41 This is a purely speculative God, indulged in by those (called by Ivan ‘the Russian boys’, or bourgeois liberal students and their professors42) who spend their free time in taverns debating the eternal questions. But these discussions are ‘academic’ and frivolous, and religious belief, even if accepted, has no application to daily life. The God Ivan accepts, then, is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but a trivialisation, ‘a puppet-god’43 that mimics but mocks the 34

 Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, pp.4–7, 11.  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.25. 36  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.26. 37  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, pp.28–30. 38  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.30. 39  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, pp.30–34. 40  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, pp.34–36. 41  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.31. 42   See Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.234. 43  Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.31. 35

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God of the Bible. Ivan’s God belongs to the idle chatter of the pub or the detached disputations of the seminar room, not to the life of worship in church and of self-sacrifice in society. Highlighting the internal relations between emotion and religious belief, Sutherland notes that Ivan’s affirmation ‘I accept God’ ‘has detached that locution from the emotions of reverence, love and humility’.44 Ivan’s utterance is instead infused with dark humour and cynical irony, and forms the basis of a ‘blasphemous’ rejection of God born of anger and outrage, especially in the face of innocent suffering. As a result, Ivan’s affirmation is a veiled rejection, for ‘to use the utterance “I accept God” in this way is to misuse it: to misuse it thus deliberately is to reject belief in God’.45 Interpretations of The Brothers Karamazov are, of course, legion, which is precisely what the ‘polyphonous’ nature of Dostoevsky’s fiction invites. But it’s debatable that Ivan is adopting the kind of speculative or dissimulating stance imputed to him by Sutherland. In his discussion with Alyosha, Ivan explicitly distances himself from the Russian boys, whose disinterested attitude towards God is contrasted with the passion, even torment, displayed by Ivan. Alyosha, like Sutherland, suspects that Ivan is just ‘joking again’,46 but Ivan’s response (what I called earlier his ‘christological credo’), tinged as it might be with irony and resentment, is impressive in its force and conviction: he commits himself to the central tenets of Christianity, even if he then proceeds to rebel against them. Sutherland’s reaction is that rebellion can only be a mark of rejection, in the sense of a lack of genuine faith and piety. But this conveniently emasculates Ivan’s atheism, given that Ivan is now merely contending with a paper-god. Perhaps we could instead see Ivan, like Job, as wrestling with the ‘real’ God, not the false, theodical God of Job’s friends, even if, unlike Job, Ivan refuses to forgive and be reconciled with God.47 This may well be contested as an interpretation of Ivan, but there is conceptual space here for a more ‘troubling’ possibility than the one envisaged by Sutherland, one that sees Ivan as intimating a way of thinking about God and evil that transcends the theism-atheism dichotomy. This would involve both acceptance and rejection of God, and both with complete sincerity. In order to elucidate the ‘logic’ of this response, if it has one, it might help to briefly look at some other attempts at domesticating Ivan. 8. In a penetrating analysis of Dostoevsky’s paradoxical ‘Christ against the Truth’ statement from 1854, Rowan Williams arrives at an understanding of Ivan that is not far removed from that advanced by Sutherland.48 Williams rightly rejects from

44 45

 Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, p.41.

 Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God, pp.55–56, emphases in original.  Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.234. 47   Nehama Verbin, by contrast, pictures Job as forgiving God and thereby overcoming his resentment toward God. Nonetheless, Verbin’s Job, as a ‘knight of protest’, does not retract the content of his accusations, nor is he willing to be reconciled with his assailant, God. See Verbin, Divinely Abused: A Philosophical Perspective on Job and his Kin (London: Continuum, 2010). 48   Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008), ch. 1. 46

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the outset readings of the Christ-Truth axiom that picture Dostoevsky either as an irrationalist who knows where the truth lies but obstinately insists on his freedom to believe otherwise; or as a proto-existentialist who follows Kierkegaard’s account of faith as risky and passionate, where truth is not an object of disinterested knowledge but an existential task, ‘something created by human freedom’.49 Williams then turns to Dostoevsky’s later novels in search of clues for a more plausible reading. But what Williams ends up with is no better than the two proposals he rejected at the beginning, in that his strategy is the same one of facilely removing the paradox by rejecting, or radically reinterpreting, one of its terms. Williams’ view, in short, is that ‘the Truth’ opposed by Dostoevsky consists of ‘facts’, the set of rationally and empirically demonstrable truths about the world, expressed in third-person terms that make no reference to human desire and experience, and therefore provide no moral or practical guidance. And Christ stands outside truth (in the foregoing sense) by disclosing possibilities of awareness and reconciliation that cannot be found within the world of facts alone. As Williams explains, …if I recognize faith as generated from outside, by events in which the world appears unpredictably as grace and above all by the phenomenon of Jesus, what I do in the light of this irruption becomes a witness to the authenticity and independence of the source of faith – and thus to a reality that is not an item within “the truth” about the world but is the context within which this “truth” is fully illuminated.50 But here, as with Sutherland, we have the relaxation, if not obliteration, of the tension at play in Dostoevsky’s Christ-Truth axiom. If ‘the truth’ outside Christ involves the distortion or elimination of human subjectivity, if it requires, as Williams says in reference to Ivan’s Inquisitor, ‘lying about the human condition’,51 then what Dostoevsky would be opposing is only a diluted form of truth, in much the same way as Sutherland’s Ivan revolts only against the false god of the Russian boys. But if the rebellion is to be meaningful, it must be targeted at a worthier opponent. 9. Albert Camus, by contrast, displays greater sensitivity towards the strength and significance of Ivan’s rebellion, calling Ivan’s ‘even-if’ his ‘most profound utterance, the one which opens the deepest chasms beneath the rebel’s feet’.52 But even Camus’ reading falls short, in parallel ways to the readings of Sutherland and Williams. In The Rebel, Camus construes ‘metaphysical rebellion’ as ‘the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation’.53 It is a protest specifically against the finality of death and the ‘absurdity’ of the universe, or what Camus had earlier in The Myth of Sisyphus described as the radical discrepancy between aspiration and reality, between our desire for (e.g.) clarity and justice, and the silent (if not mocking) response of the universe. But rebellion against absurdity and mortality is not necessarily atheism: 49

 Williams, Dostoevsky, p.16, emphasis in original.  Williams, Dostoevsky, p.38. 51  Williams, Dostoevsky, p.30. 52  Camus, The Rebel, p.51, cf. p.74. 53  Camus, The Rebel, p.29. 50

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If a mass death sentence defines man’s condition, then rebellion, in one sense, is its contemporary. When he refuses to recognize his mortality, the rebel simultaneously refuses to recognize the power that makes him live in this condition. The metaphysical rebel is, therefore, not an atheist, as one might think him, but inevitably he is a blasphemer. He simply blasphemes, primarily in the name of order, by denouncing God as the origin of death and as the supreme disillusionment.54 One such metaphysical rebel, according to Camus, is Ivan: ‘He does not absolutely deny the existence of God. He refutes Him in the name of a moral value’.55 That value is justice: ‘If evil is essential to divine creation, then creation is unacceptable. Ivan will no longer have recourse to this mysterious God, but to a higher principle, namely justice’.56 In a creation rife with death, destruction and suffering, Ivan (in the child abuse cases at least) sides with the victim and insists on their innocence. In the process, ‘Ivan rejects the profound relationship, introduced by Christianity, between suffering and truth’,57 so that (as Ivan puts it) even if the Christian salvation-story turns out true, he will refuse it. Camus asks whether such rebellion is sustainable as a way of life, and defends Dostoevsky’s depiction of Ivan as caught up in a nihilistic vortex where ‘all is permitted’, including the murder of his father, with madness the inevitable result.58 Dostoevsky’s unsympathetic portrait of Ivan notwithstanding, it is questionable whether metaphysical rebellion, particularly given its avowal of the value of life as against the absurdity of death, necessarily leads down the destructive path of madness and murder. A further weakness in Camus’ account concerns his view of Ivan as ‘replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice’.59 Camus pictures Ivan as putting God on trial, where, in a show of solidarity with sufferers, Ivan makes a case for the inviolability of justice, ‘which he ranks above divinity’.60 But as indicated in §4.3, a closer reading of Ivan’s conversation with his brother will reveal that Ivan has no intention at all of disputing divine justice. On the contrary, he is prepared, he says, to sing along with everyone else at the end of time, ‘Just art though, O Lord’. To assume that Ivan is merely rebelling against (what he takes to be) a capricious, or perhaps evil, deity is to fail to appreciate the full force of Ivan’s challenge, which (as Sutherland and Williams also failed to see) is made in outright admission of the existence of God and the justice of his ways.61 10. In the alternative he proposes to metaphysical rebellion, Camus inadvertently offers a more interesting and plausible way of thinking about Ivan and, by extension, anti-theodicy. After discussing the advent of metaphysical rebellion with the 54

 Camus, The Rebel, p.30.  Camus, The Rebel, p.50. 56  Camus, The Rebel, p.50. 57  Camus, The Rebel, p.51. 58  Camus, The Rebel, pp.52–56. 59  Camus, The Rebel, p.50. 60  Camus, The Rebel, p.50. 61   It is for this reason that Ivan cannot be classified as a ‘misotheist’, a God-hater who rejects divine benevolence. See Bernard Schweizer, Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 55

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Marquis de Sade, and its subsequent development in the Romantic tradition and in Dostoevsky’s Ivan, Camus shows how their rebellious ideas were incarnated in the more recent inhuman excesses of historical revolution, especially the Russian communist revolution. Camus’ alternative is to return to the origins of rebellion as constituted by ‘the affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty common to all men’.62 In place of the totalising and destructive tendencies of revolution, rebellion establishes ‘a philosophy of limits, of calculated ignorance, and of risk’.63 Connecting this to his Algerian background, Camus describes his philosophy of limits as ‘Mediterranean’, representing proportion and moderation, and finding inspiration in the classical world of Greece (where these values were symbolised in the goddess Nemesis, the avenger of human hubris) and in nature and sensuous experience, for the Mediterranean is ‘where intelligence is intimately related to the blinding light of the sun’.64 But the rebel’s passion for unity and order is not a betrayal of the consciousness of absurdity, as some critics have thought.65 It is better seen, rather, as a facet of Camus’ dialectical conception of rebellion. According to James Caraway, the dialectic employed by Camus in The Rebel is not Socratic (the question-and-answer method of the elenchus), nor Hegelian (the process of Aufheben, the sublation of antitheses), but is more akin to the tradition of ‘dialectical theology’ led by Tillich and Barth where, instead of the resolution of contradiction, there is only the restless tension between polarities.66 Similarly, in Camus’ dialectic, Caraway notes, ‘two seemingly contradictory assertions are affirmed simultaneously, with neither being allowed to take precedence over the other. There is no synthesis; each pole of the dipolar group is maintained equally’.67 In line with such a dialectic, Camus defines the rebel at the very outset of his book as ‘a man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself’.68 Camus explains towards the close of his book that this

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 Camus, The Rebel, p.217.  Camus, The Rebel, p.253. 64  Camus, The Rebel, p.263. 65   For example, Colin Davis, ‘Violence and Ethics in Camus’, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.110–11. 66  James E. Caraway, ‘Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion’, Mediterranean Studies 3 (1992), p.130. I am not so sure, however, that this is an accurate representation of dialectical theology, at least of the Barthian variety, for the oppositional tension in such theology is eventually resolved, albeit in God only, while in Camus there is no resolution or repose. ‘Rest is in God alone’, writes Karl Barth (‘The Christian’s Place in Society’, in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton, New York: Harper & Row, 1957, p.311) In his Church Dogmatics, Barth speaks of the doctrine of predestination as the summation of the Gospel, and states that this doctrine ‘is not a mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation. Originally and finally it is not dialectical but non-dialectical… The Yes cannot be heard unless the No is also heard. But the No is said for the sake of the Yes and not for its own sake. In substance, therefore, the first and last word is Yes and not No’. (Church Dogmatics, II/2, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley et al., Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957, p.13) 67   Caraway, ‘Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion’, p.130. 68  Camus, The Rebel, p.19. 63

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movement between the two poles, ‘in order to be authentic, must never abandon any of the terms of the contradiction which sustains it. It must be faithful to the yes that it contains as well as to the no which nihilistic interpretations isolate in rebellion’.69 Caraway identifies a number of dialectical dimensions in Camus’ thinking on rebellion,70 but what matters most for present purposes is the way in which Camus’ dialectics can help to illumine Ivan’s rebellion. When Ivan says that he accepts God but rejects God’s world, returning his ticket to God; or when he says that, even if everything the Church teaches about salvation turned out to be the final truth, he would still return his ticket, at least one possible way of understanding Ivan is along the dialectical lines of Camus’ rebel. Like rebellion in Camus, Ivan’s mutiny (and, we might add, Dostoevsky’s choice of Christ against Truth) harbours no eventual or simplistic resolutions: there is no attempt to dissolve, harmonise or explain away the contradictions for the sake of coherence, as happens with the readings proposed by Sutherland and Williams. Instead of ultimate synthesis, there is perpetual antagonism.71

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 Camus, The Rebel, p.249. Note also Camus’ statement that rebellion ‘is not, originally, the total negation of all existence [as is revolution]. Quite the contrary, it says yes and no simultaneously’. (pp.216–17) Likewise, rebellion ‘starts from a negative supported by an affirmative’, as opposed to revolution’s starting-point of absolute negation. (p.217) 70   Caraway (‘Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion’, pp.131–34) schematises Camus’ dialectic as comprised of the following polarities:   No Yes   Absurdity Rebellion  I We   Freedom Violence   Violence Nonviolence   Absurdity Meaning Earlier, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus had rejected the capitulation to absurdity (in the manner, for example, of suicide or the leap of faith), advocating instead conscious revolt: staying with the absurd, while never reconciling oneself to it. Continuing along these lines, in his introduction to The Rebel, Camus states that revolt against death and absurdity presupposes the recognition of ‘human life as the single necessary good’. (p.14) And so, Absurdity-Rebellion generate the parallel pair of No-Yes. But the values by which the rebel acts are recognised as common values, thus interlinking rebellion and solidarity: ‘I rebel – therefore we exist’, I-We (The Rebel, pp.21–23, 27–28). The rebel is also committed to freedom and justice, acknowledging their interdependence without absolutising them: ‘the two sides must find their limits in each other’. (p.255, cf. p.248) The rebel renounces violence on principle; but so as not to collude with oppression he will fight injustice, and this will make the use of violence unavoidable in some circumstances (pp.249–51, 255–56). The final pair, Absurdity-Meaning, indicates that, although rebellion does not annul absurdity, it can be help to provide this-worldly (not transcendent) meaning through the affirmation of life and its limits. 71

  This is what Aaron Edwards, in a helpful conceptual analysis of dialectic in theology, classifies as ‘antagonistic dialectic’: In an antagonistic dialectic, the polarities are ontologically distinct and yet inseparable. They remain their individual selves but are perpetually connected and affective upon one another’s movement in the ongoing antagonism… The dialectical tension may lean one way or the other in a dynamic which partially inflates and partially suppresses each polarity, never to rest in resolution, perpetually wrestling back and forth. (‘The Paradox of Dialectic: Clarifying the Use and Scope of Dialectic in Theology’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 77 (2016): 296)

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Dostoevsky’s characters routinely exhibit tormenting dualities, the classic example occurring in his early novella, The Double (1846). Ivan is similarly conflicted with what William Leatherbarrow has called ‘a duality of perception’, where Ivan ‘is instinctively drawn by the beauty of God’s world, as condensed in the image of the “sticky little leaves in spring”, and this contradicts his intellectual disgust over God’s ordering of creation’.72 Importantly, the contradictions splitting Ivan’s psyche are not merely apparent, in the sense of a paradox of seeming opposites which we, with our finite understanding, cannot reconcile; nor are they merely rhetorical, unearthing by a startling turn of phrase some neglected truth or moral. Insofar as the dialectic tension is maintained, the contradictions are ontological, representing how things stand in reality. When Ivan, faced with child suffering, returns his ticket; or when Dostoevsky, after encountering Christ, walks away from Truth, the negation in each case does not correct or cancel the prior affirmation as one would expect from the perspective of classical logic and its principle of non-contradiction. The dialectic (or ‘dialethic’) logic of ‘both-and’ is deviant in clearing ontological space for the truth of (at least some) contradictions.73 Ivan’s Yes-and-No, therefore, is not necessarily irrational or a recourse to the extreme fideism of credo quia absurdum. Properly speaking, Ivan does not make any faith-commitment: his ‘credo’ is taken up only on an ‘even-if’, hypothetical, basis. His point nonetheless remains that even if Christianity were true, he would reject it as false and unjust; even if God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, and Ivan knew this to be the case, he would opt out of any such reconciliation, rebelliously defying the will and wisdom of God.74 Ivan’s rebellion, then, can be regarded as an expression of the ‘anti-theodicy’ view of evil as useless and meaningless, as something that cannot be justified or explained by way of a providential master-plan without diminishing or denying its brute reality and tragic nature. But this is anti-theodicy radicalised, for it is not predicated on or in the service of theism or atheism (or agnosticism, for that matter). Rather, the theist/atheist divide is made redundant, as it makes no difference whether or not there is a God who graciously offers us the prospect of eternal felicity, or whether or not

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  William J. Leatherbarrow, Fedor Dostoevsky (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), p.153. The reference to the ‘sticky little leaves in spring’ is one that Ivan makes, quoting from Pushkin’s poem, ‘Chill Winds Still Blow’ (1828). See The Brothers Karamazov, p.230. 73   Cf. Edwards’ notion of ‘ontological paradox’, which he distinguishes from dialetheism: ‘The Paradox of Dialectic’, p.287. 74   William Hamilton, one of the principal figures of the ‘death of God’ movement, has similarly emphasised this duality of belief and rebellion in Ivan, as well as in Dostoevsky. Hamilton approvingly quotes Stefan Zweig’s comment that, ‘His [Dostoevsky’s] faith oscillates between Yea and Nay, the two poles of the universe. In the very presence of God, Dostoevsky remains banished from the land of unity’. (Hamilton, ‘Banished from the Land of Unity: Dostoevsky’s Religious Vision Through the Eyes of Dmitry, Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov’, in Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966, p.84) Reprinted from the journal

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God assumed flesh, suffered and died so that the whole creation might be reconciled to him. All this is, as it were, too late, if not too little. For after ‘Auschwitz’, after the horrors recounted by Ivan and replayed countlessly on history’s slaughter-bench, theodicy is not so much insufficient or falsified, but nauseating and obscene, to the point of being beyond belief even if true, especially if true.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Sophia (2021) 60:721–734 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00884-y

Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Secularity, Wilber’s Integral Theory: Living With and Without the Divine John Thomas O’Neill1  Accepted: 5 September 2021 / Published online: 2 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract Central to Raimon Panikkar’s work is the acclaimed Cosmotheandric epigram, according to which reality has three interrelated and irreducible dimensions, the human, the cosmos, and the divine. The paper examines this thesis and examines related concepts, such as ‘sacred secularity’ in Panikkar’s thinking. The overall pluralistic thesis allows for dialogue, communication and conversations across cultures. Panikkar considers that a new mythos may be emerging that places value on actions in this world and on temporality. Related to the above is Ken Wilber’s ‘Integral Theory’ that underscores the stages of development of consciousness and worldviews, especially with regard to spirituality. Different perspectives on the divine and atheism are said to arise at each level of development. Wilber’s principal thesis is that religions and spiritualities have continuing and future potentials as ‘conveyor-belts’ of human development in three movements of the Spirit (Geist): art, religion and science. A brief discussion will follow on ‘participative spirituality’ and Nondual Śaiva Tantra, and their relation to contemporary atheism. The paper argues that rich space and forum for dialogue are opened between the discourses explored here with global a/theism. Keywords  Raimon Panikkar · Cosmotheandric · Non-dualism · Ken Wilber · Jorge Ferrer · Christopher Hareesh Wallis · Śaiva Tantra

Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Mythos Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010), the Catalonian-Keralan intercultural philosopher, who was profoundly Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist and Secular at different stages of his life, had an understanding of divinity that allows for fruitful engagement with atheism in as much as the secular is more often than not aligned with atheism (if not Chapter 14 was originally published as O’Neill, J. T. Sophia (2021) 60: 721–734. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00884-y.

* John Thomas O’Neill [email protected] 1



Pelaw Main, Australia

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radical forms of non-theism). Panikkar arguably is one of the preeminent philosophers of religion to have lived and worked in contemporary times. Panikkar writes up the triple horizons of divinity: the cosmological (with ‘Creator’), the anthropological (‘human heart’) and the ontological (‘silence’); these are not mutually exclusive. Numerous thinkers in many traditions have attempted to approach the mystery of divinity through three levels, as ways of answering various philosophical and theoretical problems. Through these three highways, across its history, humankind has recognized the existence of a ‘mystery’ that is ineffable and is yet present within humankind (Panikkar 2003, hereafter EOG, p. 35). Panikkar discusses privileged places for the experience of the divine. These include love, joy, suffering, evil, transgression, forgiveness, crucial moments, silence. I will concentrate on the last of these. He writes that silence is an indispensable condition for experiencing the divine, which is an untranslatable symbol. It points towards the beyond, the infinite (EOG, p. 55). Panikkar says that the experience of the divine is possible only when we have arrived at the triple silence of mind, will and action. It is an experience that shows that our thought, like our desire and our action, never exhausts its purpose. The selfawareness that we are without beginning or end is precisely the experience of divinity. There are a variety of personal, psychological and religious paths that lead to this experience. The divine transcends language and human faculties, and is manifest in experiences of the void, emptiness and silence. Panikkar considers that the experience of the divine is the ‘ultimate and universal experience incarnated in the concrete and particular’, such as conversations with friends, sharing a meal, the love that we experience, the ideas which we defend, the pain which we endure. It shows us the value within the deepest and most real of our human acts. It is an experience of the third dimension beyond the physical and mental, which can show its effects in the profound ways of conducting human activities. The interpretation of the experience depends on our cultural milieux. It coincides with the fact of seeing the divine in ‘all things’ and all things ‘in the divine’, if that is the name which we want to give to the divine. It consists in touching the totality of Being with the totality of our own being: to feel in our body, our intellect and our spirit the whole of reality both within us and outside us (EOG, pp. 138–141). Panikkar, in The Rhythm of Being (hereafter ROB; Panikkar, 2010), drawn from his 1989 Gifford lectures, ‘wanted to rescue the divine from being considered a separate entity, a supreme Being above the rest of reality at the top of a pyramid’. He sees the divine as dwelling within all things and yet beyond all things, and as irreducible to any concept or entity (ROB, p. 319). He sees the divine as a constitutive dimension of reality. His view is that ‘a cosmotheandric experience purifies spirituality and religion, rather than destroying them, by rediscovering the infinite dignity of human beings and the cosmos’. This makes possible a religious and spiritual life for people disillusioned by the shortcomings of most forms of religion, by bringing them back to their real home, which is reality. This ‘re-links’ humanity with the divine and the cosmos. He sees this as the function of religion, in a nondualistic way. He sees this as an unfinished experience, open to the dimension of ineffability, infinity, numinosity and freedom inherent in everything. He acknowledges that philosophers like Feuerbach, Marx,

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Nietzsche, Freud, Russell and Sartre were right in criticizing traditional religions for causing alienation and pathologies (ROB, p. 321).

The Silence of the Divine Panikkar considers that the divine cannot be experienced in words, thinking or doing but only through silence, the absence of sound, because Being is silence, which he posits is a recurring theme among thinkers representing most human traditions (e.g. Pythagoras, Lao-Tzu, Plotinus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, many mystics and philosophers, up to Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and others). As the Psalmist said: ‘Be still and know that I am the divine’ (Psalm 46.10). He thinks that if we are to perceive the silent dimension of beings and all things, we could become aware of the divine, ‘not because the divine is hidden in Silence but because the divine is Silence’. He sees silence as a central metaphysical principle. It is not NonBeing, the negation of Being; rather it is the absence of everything, including Being, and is prior to Being; hence the preeminent question; ‘Where is there Nothing rather than Something?’ (Bilimoria, 2019). To become aware of the silence of being is getting close to discovering and experiencing the divine dimension. For him, the traditional religious exercise of the presence of the divine is a discovery of the divine dimension in the act in which we are engaged, the transcendent in the immanent (ROB, p. 323). Panikkar characterizes the divine as having three features: emptiness, freedom and infinitude. He sees three approaches to the divine: the nihilistic, the dialectical and the Advaitic (non-dual). ‘Nihilism argues that it is all nonsense, hallucinations, projections, illusions, which purifies the idea of the divine from anthropomorphic images’. In the dialectical approach, we come to the idea of the Absolute by negating all affirmations about Him/It, as did John of the Cross. Panikkar associates the Advaitic approach quaintly with emptiness, spaciousness, a Divine, ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’. (Acts 27.28). This aspect of the divine belongs to the whole of reality, to be found in the face of everything (ROB, p. 312). For Panikkar, freedom is the freedom of being, the absence of external constraint, the way in which Being manifests itself, grows, expands, lives, without any prior or predetermined prescription. It is the flow of beings when they are in flux, interacting spontaneously. Only a person who knows oneself (which means knowing the divine) can be really free. This reveals the divine dimension of reality. He also sees the divine as infinite, unlimited, irreducible to our knowledge. ‘Everything, including the universe, is unfinished, nonfinite, open, dynamic, capable of change’. (ROB, p. 315). Everything has this infinite dimension, part of the nature of reality. Infinity is a symbol for the divine, as every being is unlimited, without limits. Panikkar’s ‘Rhythm of Being’ is a rhythmic dance between the three dimensions of reality. In The Invisible Harmony, he suggests enjoying the beauty of the symphony, a harmonious interplay of ‘the music (divine), the musicians (the human) and their instruments (the cosmos)’. (ROB, p. 180). This requires a cosmic confidence or fundamental trust in Reality. Reprinted from the journal

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In The Silence of God (hereafter SG; Panikkar, 1989), Panikkar considers several possible reasons why the Buddha chose to remain silent about ultimate reality, including cynicism, agnosticism, nihilism and pragmatism. He concludes that the Buddha’s apophaticism was not just epistemological, in that ultimate reality is ineffable to human intelligence and understanding. Rather, it was an ontological apophaticism, in that ultimate reality for him was even denied the character of being. The Buddha took this so seriously that he had no interest in communicating or talking about the supreme experience. He chose to show the path without talking about the goal. Panikkar remarks that, whereas most people are afraid of silence and drown out this fear by noise and crowds of various kinds, the Buddha taught that there was nothing to fear from silence. He acknowledges that the Buddha has shown us that where silence is concerned, one cannot speak, similar to Wittgenstein’s pithy statement ‘whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent’. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, prop. 7). Panikkar nonetheless sought to transmit through words, from his own silent, meditative experience (SG, pp. 167–168). He asserts that the Buddha’s message is that humanity has no ultimate support or foundation on which to lean, ‘no ultimate Subject which could bestow value on all things’. There is only the provisional support of the three gems—Buddha, saṅgha (community), dharma (moral order), which are, respectively, a symbol, a community, and a behaviour (SG, p. 170). The silence which the Buddha wishes for his disciples ‘is not a philosophical one but an interior mystical experience’. (SG, p. 171). He only allowed philosophical discussion on the impermanence of everything. The only thing that mattered for the Buddha is to help us reach our own silence as a way to deliver us from suffering. This means not only renouncing the search for The divine, but also The divine as well, as support for the journey. That comes close to the conclusion of many atheists, e.g. Albert Camus. Panikkar admits that ‘the Buddha did not speak about God, not even to say that God is the silent abyss of nothingness. Rather, the Buddha spoke of humanity’. (SG, p. 173). It is Panikkar who speaks of the divine as silence, the absence of Being, prior to Being. What mattered for the Buddha was not God but liberation from human suffering, through orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy: that is the divine in action! The Buddha neither affirmed nor denied God in that literal sense, but wanted his followers to liberate themselves through silence from interior and exterior noise, into peace and serenity. In that sense, the end-goal is divine, as Pannikar sees it at least. Panikkar thought that this message, with its sociological, political and environmental ramifications, as well as the religious, spiritual and mystical ones, still has relevance to the current secular era, which is borne out in the vast and growing popularity of Buddhism.

Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Epigram In his book The Cosmotheandric Experience (CE; Panikkar, 1993), Panikkar discusses his most important and central insight. This is that the human, the comos, and the divine are the three irreducible constitutive dimensions of the whole of reality (CE, p. 60).

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Every being has an infinitely inexhaustible depth dimension, which he calls ‘Divine’, both transcendent and immanent, its mystery, also known as emptiness (CE, p. 61). Every being exists ‘within the range of human consciousness and awareness, in that it is thinkable’. Humanity’s being enters into relation with the whole of reality. Consciousness manifests through humanity. We could not know a being if it was not somehow related to consciousness and so this relation is constitutive of its being (CE, p. 63). This is where secularity comes in. ‘Everything in human consciousness is in relation with the world. Anything that exists has a constitutive relation with matter/energy and with space/ time, even angels, devas, apsaras, etc., if they exist’. (CE, p. 64). There are no disembodied beings or disincarnated divines. Similarly, there is no spacio-temporal world without divine and conscious dimensions. This also means the divine is not without matter, space, time, bodies, which all belong to the divine. He presents his ‘cosmotheandric principle, with a minimum of philosophical assumptions’. (CE, p. 71). This means that reality has a physical element, matter and energy, the cosmos. It also has a noetic, self-reflective dimension. Thirdly, there is the infinite inexhaustibility of all things, the divine. And so we have the cosmic, the human and the divine. He is neither an idealist nor a materialist. He does not accept the metaphysical assumption that ultimately all is matter or all is spirit. His argument relies on ‘the constitutive interrelatedness of everything’, his intuition of the insight gleamed from seeing that the knower, known and knowledge are united in some one reality. Thus, the great sage does not see ‘the world as a habitat, or an external part of the whole or even of myself’. It is more intimate than that. ‘My relationship with the world is intimately no different from my relationship with myself’. (CE, p. 74). We are not separate realities. We share each other’s life, existence, history and destiny, as we share the entire cosmos. So Panikkar does not see the divine as the Absolute Other, nor as the same as us. He sees the divine as the ultimate and unique ‘I’, that we are the divine’s ‘thou-s’ and that we have a personal and nondualistic relationship. A human being experiences the depth of her own being, her inexhaustible possibilities for relationship, her infinite character, her unlimited potential for growth and development (CE, p. 74). There is an innate ‘more’ in our own being which goes beyond our private being, more than meets the eye, finds the mind or touches the heart. This ‘more’ is the divine dimension; a human being is more than an individual. She is a person, a knot in the net of relationships. In Panikkar’s view, humanity is at the crossroads, the crossing of the three dimensions of the divine, the human and the cosmic (CE, p. 75), a cosmotheandric vision he sees as a holistic, integral insight into the nature of reality. The three dimensions are interwoven: at the root of the ecological sensibility and concern there is a mystical impulse, at the bottom of human self-understanding there is a need for the infinite and what is beyond understanding, and within the divine there is an urge for space, time and humanity. By Kosmology, Panikkar understands the science about the holistic sense of the kosmos, the logos on and about the kosmos, the ‘word of the cosmos’ (ROB, p. 369). Kosmology, for him, attempts to understand and interpret whatever comes into our consciousness Reprinted from the journal

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whereas cosmology admits what has arisen within the scientific, analytical cognition.

Sacred Secularity Sacred secularity is one of the epithets that Panikkar advances for a new emerging mythos. It undergirds the insight that ‘everything is related to everything else but without monist identity and dualistic separation’. (ROB, p. 404). Panikkar’s idea of secularity carries the sense that Being and time are irreducibly and inextricably linked. Time is a constitutive dimension of reality. ‘Sacred secularity is an expression meaning that secularity is inserted in a reality which is not exhausted by its temporality’. (CE, p. 121). He coined the term ‘tempiternity’ to express this unityeternity within the present moment, reminiscent of Heidegger’s conjunct of Being and Time. ‘If we take eternal life to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present’. Panikkar sees this world as well as the time span of this world (saeculum), as sacred, and therefore posits that even our secular actions have transcendental ramifications. In Myth and Hermeneutics (Panikkar, 2020; hereafter MH), Panikkar acknowledges that secularity is an important part of the life of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, that will continue to accompany the growth of human consciousness. He links sacred secularity to worship, defining worship as the ultimate expression of a belief, an act of faith. For him, it is ‘every human act that symbolizes a belief, as every human act resulting from a particular belief’. In this context, not unlike the Canadian philosopher, Charles M. Taylor (with his thesis of ‘secularity’ or the ‘secular age’), Panikkar was already suggesting that what has been emerging today is the sacred dimension within secularity. The temporal is regarded as positive and, in a certain sense, sacred. He considers this to be a new development in human history. A secular human is not necessarily anti-religious or profane just because he upholds the positive, sacred value of time and temporal reality. He notices a new attitude emerging, which considers time as both positive and definitive, not as a means to be manipulated or a phase to be overcome but as a worthy end in itself. He mentions that mystics often embrace the secular, as are able to experience the tempiternal nature of reality. He suggests that ‘the lived experience of tempiternal awareness is not that of an existence faced with an atemporal or post-temporal eternity but rather the experience of those tempiternal moments of this existence in time and space’ (Mysticism and Spirituality, Panikkar, 2014, 170). Next, Panikkar thinks that the history of humanity and of the development of individual and collective consciousness could be understood by way of the three concepts: heteronomy, autonomy and ontonomy (MH, p. 259). These concepts represent three periods in human history and the development of human consciousness, each with their own institutions, as well as three basic religious and human attitudes corresponding to three anthropological degrees of consciousness. Panikkar considers the modern phenomenon of secularization in relation to each of these three perspectives.

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Here, Panikkar moves to suggest building a bridge to connect the sacred and the secular through venerable worship. He recommends that worship should be integrated into everyday life. It must give full meaning to human life by exalting the importance of human acts, such as growing up, getting married, making love, working, eating, drinking, dancing and dying (MH, p. 273). Integrating life into worship means discovering values that are universally recognized or accepted. He considers that it is imperative to discover symbols and forms of worship which have a nonsectarian universality at a deep level. There needs to be a balance between concreteness rooted in the past and universality projected towards the future. It would need to include rubrics such as spontaneity, universality, concreteness, sincerity, continuity and orthopraxis (right action). He sees the need for including these basic acts of worship: devotion (bhakti), knowledge (jñāna) and action (karman). Other elements of worship include beauty, truth and goodness. Worship needs to integrate these elements in order to fully satisfy human needs and fulfill the meaning of human life. So Panikkar suggests that we need to recognize that in every human action there is always something greater and more profoundly involved. Each act of worship must represent a deepening of our feelings, a realization of the enormous importance of all things Worship also has intellectual, scientific and contemplative aspects. It also includes other activities such as work, service, sports, artistic and cultural endeavors, collaborating with others to “build, to discover, to accelerate the process or coming of the kingdom, to help the world fulfill its destiny, allowing time to run its course, thanks to human efforts.” (MH, p. 288) Secular humanity’s worship should emphasize serving the world, as the ninenteenth century Hinud savant, swami Vivekananda and following him Mahatma Gandhi has insisted. A common ground may be charted with secularists, atheists and humanists in suggesting that authentic worship can preserve its meaning in rich and creative ways that express the glory and splendor of the cosmos its mysteries. Thus, [H]uman and cosmotheandric act for which faith, hope and love are required; this is the act that, by acceptance of our human condition, sets us on the road to redemption, through the transfiguration that sustains and illuminates the immense experience of perceiving oneself as a cosmotheandric being. (MH, p. 290)

Intercultural Dialogue Elsewhere, he discusses a secular, intercultural, dialogical approach to some of the most important questions of our times, e.g. the environmental mega-crisis, the dehumanizing, domineering effects of technology, the global arms races, social justice, the liberation of the poor from oppression. He sees that Indian philosophy, because of its pluralistic history of grappling with some of the deeper questions which the human spirit faces when it approaches the mystery of reality, has much to offer to Reprinted from the journal

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our contemporary globalized world (Panikkar, 2017; Bilimoria, 2019; Bilimoria & Antony, 2019). In regard to dialogue between philosophies and cultures, (Cultures and Religions in Dialogue, Panikkar, 2018a, b) his concept of homeomorphic equivalences is a useful one. By this, he means the functional equivalences or deep correspondences between words, concepts or symbols in different cultures and systems of thought. The word ‘Divine’, for example, may have functional equivalences in non-theistic or naturalistic systems, such as infinity, emptiness, or deep silence. This allows for the integrity of the systems to be respected while finding communicative bridges between them. Another useful concept is Panikkar’s ‘imparative philosophy’ (from Latin, imparare, to immerse oneself), which is entails participating and learning from the different experiences of philosophies, religions and cultures of people of other worlds, allowing oneself to be nourished and fertilized by the views and visions of one’ others, the strangers. Panikkar also introduces the conception of ‘diatopic hermeneutics,’ by which he means that in order to understand others in different cultures, one needs to have some understanding of the topoi, or different cultural places and locations within their cultural traditions, without trying to understand them through the tools of understanding only from one’s own cultural system or tradition. This engagement seeks for the truth in and from different positions in order to arrive at enhanced mutual understanding. This naturally leads into a more dialogical philosophy and approach towards engaging with others (Bilimoria and Anthony, Ibid).

Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy: Integral Theory Ken Wilber is a contemporary thinker (albeit, not as such in the academic philosophical tradition) whose project has been to bring together the wisdom that the world’s religions, cultures and contemporary disciplines may enlighten us on in respect of human potentials: socially, psychologically, culturally, spiritually. He does this primarily by developing a comprehensive cartography that brings these together by distilling their major components into five essential factors. I propose that the ensuing map goes some way towards bringing together religions, spiritualities, science, and contemporary atheism in ways that make room for their mutual dialogue. His prominent work is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality  (Wilber,  2000, hereafter SES), which was intended to be the first volume of his Kosmos Trilogy. Volumes 2 and 3 have yet to be completed (although some 600 pages of excerpts from Volume 2 have been published online).

Wilber’s AQAL Model I refer here to The Religion of Tomorrow (2017, hereafter TROT), perhaps his most comprehensive work after SES. The ‘Integral Theory’ is embellished with a AQAL model: ‘all quadrants, all levels’, now expanded it to include all states, all lines and

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all types. Another key concept is ‘holon’ that refers to a whole which is a part of a larger whole, be that an occasion, an object or an event. The quadrants within AQAL represent four basic and irreducible perspectives: in the interior of the individual, or the ‘I’ space; the interior of the collective, or the ‘we’ space; the exterior of the individual, or the objective ‘it’ space; and the exterior of the collective, or the systems ‘its’ space. All four perspectives make for a holistic perspective commended for any discipline, such medicine, law, economics, and spirituality. Each quadrant has different but equally important truth, validity claim, methodology, objects and events (TROT, p. 129). Wilber posits that quadrants can be looked at ‘from the viewpoints’ of ‘zones’— that is, a holon in each quadrant can be looked at from ‘without,’ or ‘from the outside,’ in an objective/universal/ rational stance, or looked at from ‘within,’ or ‘from the inside,’ in a subjective/cognitive/local/enacted/stance—that gives us eight zones: four within and four without, each with their own methodologies, and each disclosing or enacting different aspects of reality. His view is that ‘disciplines in each quadrant break down into these two major approaches, a realist (objectivist) and an idealist (cognitive) approach’. The world will then look to be fundamentally realist or idealist, depending on the zone from which one observes the world. Integral Theory draws together both the ‘true but partial truths’—realist and idealist, into a larger ‘truer but partial view’. (TROT, pp. 681–682). The second major element comprises essentially states of consciousness (TROT, p. 83). As first-person, direct immediate experiences, states of consciousness are open to introspection, immediate experiences, meditation and other direct experiential modes. So Wilber opines: The great contemplative traditions generally list four or five major natural states of consciousness available to all humans from birth onwards. The four major states, found explicitly in Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Kashmiri Shaivism and in several Western Neoplatonic schools, and implicitly in nearly every mystical school East and West are: gross, subtle, causal and nondual states. (TROT, p. 85) Wilber asserts that this allows us to connect what was previously viewed as ‘other-worldly’ or ‘metaphysical’ or ‘supernatural’ with this world, the natural and material world, as being the interior and exterior of the same Wholeness of the Real and not rented apart into two antagonistic, distinct and disjointed realities (e.g. transcendent and immanent). By seeing that neither can be dispensed with nor reduced to the other, we prevent the reduction of spiritual (interior) realities to the material (exterior) phenomena and we likewise realize the importance of the material plane as the vehicle through which higher, interior, mental and spiritual realities are able to manifest and communicate themselves. According to Integral Theory, ‘consciousness is not a thing, process, event or system but the opening or clearing in which these appear or arise. Consciousness, in its ultimate sense, is the empty clearing or opening in which manifestation arises’. (TROT, p. 192). It always has exterior, physical and energetic correlates in the righthand quadrants.

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Wilber considers that the modern and postmodern world will only accept realities emerging from world-centric and higher levels of development (Fig. 1, TROT, 121). It rejects all forms of ethnocentric religious fundamentalism, East or West. For him, the only way to grant spirituality an honoured place in the modern and postmodern world is to train its teachers and students to progress not only through the states of consciousness, from ignorance to Enlightenment, but also through structures of consciousness, from immaturity to full maturity. The path to is by Growing Up (through the stages of development) and Waking Up (through the various states of consciousness) (TROT, p. 192).

Integral Post‑Metaphysics Wilber claims, in Integral Spirituality (hereafter IS; Wilber, 2006a, 46, 2006b) with his Integral Post-Metaphysics, that ‘the profound truths of the premodern traditions can be salvaged by realizing that what they are saying and showing applies basically to the Upper Left Quadrant, stripping them of their ideological baggage, so they need not be held responsible for not knowing about the other three quadrants and thus their own truths can be included and honored’. Likewise, Modernity was dealing largely with the right-hand quadrants, and Postmodernity with the lower left, all of which can be included and embraced in an Integral Approach (ibid).

Fig. 1  The Wilber-Combs lattice

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The Three Faces of Spirit Wilber claims that Spirit can be viewed through the four quadrants or three major perspectives—first, second and third persons. Spirit in first person is one’s own Awareness, as one’s True Self, looking out through the eyes of every sentient being, expressed in the sense of ‘I AMness’, which is found only in the timeless, and is the Self and Spirit of the entire Kosmos. Spirit in second person is thought of as a ‘Great Thou’ or Great Intelligence, the universe as a living, breathing Reality with which one can have living relationship (TROT, p. 570). This is witnessed in many theistic traditions. It is also a reminder that ultimate Reality will always be, in some ways, a Great Mystery, a Great Other, a Great Openness; which comes through in Martin Buber’s notion of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship. Spirit in third person is looked at objectively as in the ‘Great Web or Life’. This vista connects with ecological and cosmological views of reality. It is partially true because it represents the objective dimension of Spirit, reminding us that ‘Spirit is not just an interior realization or personal awareness but a concretely existing total manifest world that embraces us and all beings in a vast, mutually interdependent, mutually evolving and dynamic network’ (TROT, p. 570). This can evoke senses of grandeur or (in Otto’s terms) the numinous, wonder and awe, such as when one looks up at the Milky Way in the night sky, or the Uluru in Australia, or the Grand Canyon. or the galaxies and Black Holes in images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Integral Methodological Pluralism Wilber next enunciates three principles of Integral Methodological Pluralism in The Kosmos Trilogy, which have some resonances with [in] the composite theses of syādvaāda and anekāntavāda in Jaina Philosophy (Bilimoria, 2019). The first is non-exclusion: ‘everyone is right’. This means that one can accept the valid truth claims (i.e. the truth claims that pass the validity claims for their own paradigms within their own fields, e.g. hermeneutics, spirituality, science) insofar as they make statements about the existence of their own disclosed and enacted phenomena, but not when they make statements about the existence of phenomena disclosed by other paradigms. The second principle is that of unfoldment, which summarizes the holistic pattern of flowing existence: ‘transcend and include’. This heuristic principle suggests that all paradigms are in themselves true and adequate; but some paradigms can be more encompassing, holistic, and inclusive than others. This does not render the other paradigms wrong, inaccurate, or deficient. The third principle is enactment. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity bring forth or enact a phenomenological world in the activity of knowing that world. Subjects do not perceive worlds but enact them (hence, the divine is a verb). This means that the phenomena brought forth by various types of human inquiry will be different

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depending on the quadrants, levels and types of the subjects bringing them forth. A subject at one wavelength or level of consciousness will not enact and bring forth the same worldspace as a subject at another. Wilber invokes physicists and meditation adepts to illustrate the applications of the three principles. On the one side is the orthodox physics paradigm that presupposes that the fundamental reals of the universe are ultimately physical in nature, e.g. electrons, photos, quarks, energy, plasmas and bosons. On the other side are meditational and spiritual traditions claiming that the fundamental fabric of reality is a construct of the mind or the stream of consciousness. It is a daunting task to reconcile these incommensurable paradigms. However, if we recognize that the phenomena explained in each paradigm are actually brought forth and enacted by different practices, injunctions and theories relative to their context (historical and cultural), then we can accept each side as being true, albeit partially so. Wilber claims that his AQAL Integral Theory makes ample room for each side. The physicist may be coming from a third-person objective approach, while the meditator may be coming from a first-person subjective singular dimension of being in the world; but the twin shall meet in the Archimedean point. Some subjects may embrace both the phenomena of physics and of meditation. If so, they may agree that both quarks and emptiness are real, although the latter would be able to enfold the former. Both require ‘communities of the adequate,’ e.g. scientific and meditative communities, to validate the respective findings. Newberg and Waldman (2016) and Goleman and Davidson (2018) deduce new vistas from recent scientific research uncovering connections between meditation experiences and deeper neurological activities and processes. Finally, for Wilber, what is actually flourishing and moving through the levels of development are the specific lines of development. He is interested in multiple lines of intelligence, e.g. cognitive, self, values, morals, interpersonal, spiritual, needs, and the kinesthetic, considering the spiritual line as bespeaking the ultimate concerns (TROT, p. 577). Hence, ‘The traditions have a general notion of this important fact in that they usually distinguish different types of paths, yogas, schools, etc., which emphasize different lines, while still usually recognizing the general spectrum of development’. (TROT, p. 579). He observes that each spiritual system has its own mix of elements of the AQAL Matrix. It is important that the spiritual path is matched to the AQAL characteristics of the student or practitioner.

Jorge Ferrer’s Participatory Spirituality Ferrer in his major work, Participation and the Mystery (2017, p. 38), observes that ‘participatory spirituality’ can be ‘understood as a spiritual orientation, towards embodiment, integration, relationality and creative inquiry, [to be] found in many spiritual and religious communities, traditional, contemporary and emerging’. Here, there is a recommendation for an ‘open naturalism which is not committed a priori to any worldview such as scientific naturalism or any particular religious cosmology. In the context of his participatory, enactive spirituality, an open naturalism can be open to both the ontological integrity of spiritual referents and the

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plausibility of subtle dimensions of reality’. (p. 247). He uses the term ‘subtle’ to refer to any possible world of being shaped by the interaction of consciousness and energy, including coexisting and enacted spiritual realms. Ferrer suggests that ‘the physical, material and subtle worlds are ultimately united, possibly interacting in the context of a seamless multiverse’ (PM, p. 249) in co-creative, participatory, and enactive ways, such as sustained practices of various kinds, collective experiences, individual inquiries and inherited wisdom traditions. So the idea is, to envision religious manifestations as the outcome of human co-creative communion with an undetermined mystery – or creative power of life or reality – [that] allows affirming a plurality of ontologically rich religious and secular worlds without falling into any of today’s reductionisms. (PM, p. 240)

Christopher Hareesh Wallis: Nondual Śaiva Tantra Wallis is a scholar-practitioner of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, and comments on classical writings, such by Abhinavagupta, and Kṣemarāja (The Stanzas on Pulsation and the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra). In his Tantra Illuminated (Wallis, 2013), and The Recognition Sutras  (Wallis, 2017),  Hareesh offers a rather impressive example of what Wilber has suggested is needed for the future of religions and spirituality. The expectation is that the inquirer remains well-acquainted with latest communications technologies, grounded in spiritual teachings, scriptures and practices, while being open to research in psychology, consciousness studies, neurosciences, physics, and cosmology. He asserts: Note, however, that this philosophy is not asserting simplistically that there was no universe before we were here to see it—rather, what is being said is that ‘the universe’ denotes the collection of perceivable objects as they exist within our perceptions. What we call ‘the universe’ is only the coming together of perceivers and things perceived, a coming together exclusively mediated by the means of perception (including mind and consciousness) possessed by those perceivers. We cannot know anything apart from this. One of the most widespread modern myths, produced by a superficial understanding of physics, is the notion of an unconscious universe that exists independently of conscious beings, vast and uncaring, against the backdrop of which our appearance is a meaningless and accidental blip. The fact is, such a universe exists only as a figment of our imagination. All that we have direct evidence of, all that can be properly called real, are the phenomena that arise from the union of perceivers and perceived. So it is literally true to say that the universe appears when awareness is flowing. Scientists and philosophers can all accept the main point being made here (provided they understand it)—but Kṣema takes it further, making a point that not all will accept without meditative investigation: that awareness is not only necessary for the appearance of reality, it is the cause of its appearance, its apparent consistency, and its disappearance too. (The Recognition Sutras, pp. 50–51)

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Conclusion One could argue that Panikkar, Wilber, Ferrer, Wallis and atheists could all agree and find common ground in the unfathomable mystery of reality and the associated experiences of awe, wonder, gratitude and love towards the ‘secular sacredness’ of this reality, beyond definitive conceptualizations, languages and formulations. All religions, spiritualities, sciences and philosophies are humanity’s limited attempts to understand and express this magnum, inexorably inadequate but always growing and developing. These discourses open up inviting spaces for dialogue, communication, learning and enhanced mutual understandings, even as veritable strangers in each other’s camp or tightly knit paradigm. Acknowledgements  I wish express to Colette Walker for help with editing an earlier draft, and to Purushottama Bilimoria for his suggestions toward revising the intertwined discussion.

References Bilimoria, P. (2019). ‘Why is there Nothing rather than Something?’ [An essay in the comparative metaphysics of non-being. In P. Wong, S. Bloor, P. Hutchings, & P. Bilimoria (Eds.), Considering religions, rights and bioethics: For Max Charlesworth (pp. 79–197). Springer. Bilimoria, P., & Antony, D. M. (2019). Raimon Panikkar: A peripatetic Hindu Hermes. e-Research European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(3), 2–29. Ferrer, J. N. (2017). Participation and the Mystery. State University of New York Press. Goleman, D., & Davidson, R. (2018). The Science of Meditation. Penguin. Newberg, A., & Waldman, M. (2016). How Enlightenment Changes your Brain. Hay House. Panikkar, R. (1989). The Silence of the Divine. Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. (1993). The Cosmotheandric Experience. Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. (2010). The Rhythm of Being. Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. (2014). Mysticism and Spirituality. Part Two: Spirituality, the Way of Life. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. (2017). Hinduism. Part Two: The Dharma of India. Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. (2018a). Cultures and Religions in Dialogue. Part One: Pluralism and Interculturality. Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. (2018b). Cultures and Religions in Dialogue. Part Two: Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue. Panikkar, R. (2020). Mystery and Hermeneutics. Orbis Books. Wallis, C. D. (2013). Tantra Illuminated. Mattamayūra Press. Wallis, C. (2017). The Recognition Sutras. Mattamayūra Press. Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Shambhala. Wilber, K. (2006a). Integral Spirituality. Integral Books. Wilber, K. (2006b). Excerpt B. The Many Ways We Touch. https://​www.​kenwi​lber.​org. Accessed 15 Jan 2021 Wilber, K. (2017). The Religion of Tomorrow. Shambhala.

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Sophia (2021) 60:735–745 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00849-1

Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy Jane Dowson1  Accepted: 26 March 2021 / Published online: 13 September 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021, corrected publication 2021

Abstract This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic postsecularity in western nations that encroach across the globe. Postsecularity accounts for the resurgence of a religious consciousness in the face of challenges to secularity in the forms of accommodating minority religions; the yearning for spiritual expression as an antidote to capitalist materialism; and posthuman concerns about the engineering of biological human identities, artificial intelligence, and anthropogenic climate crises. Poetry, with its non-verbal cues, can both animate and also reach beyond the purely rational discourses of philosophy. Accordingly, poems by T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy span a century of thought and literary evocations of the interstices and crossovers of theocentric belief and unbelief. They illuminate the postsecular elements of partial faith, spiritual plurality, and resacralization. These elements disrupt binary polarizations of atheism and faith. Keywords  Secularity · Postsecularity · Literature · Philosophy · Posthumanism · Habermas · T.S. Eliot · Stevie Smith · Carol Ann Duffy

Introduction: a Crisis of Faith in Twenty‑First Century Secularism This paper considers a putative crisis in secularity that is manifested in the rise of new spiritual networks, concerns around posthumanist technologies, and religious tribalism. The resurgence of religious fundamentalism at a personal level and conflicts at public and international levels are particularly critical for both those who would live without a god and those who would not. The concept of postsecularity eschews a binary opposition between belief and unbelief; instead, it accommodates Chapter 15 was originally published as Dowson, J. Sophia (2021) 60: 735–745. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00849-1.

* Jane Dowson [email protected] 1



De Montfort University, Leicester, England, UK

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and also interrogates evidence for the crosscurrents of spiritual pluralism, postreligion, and a resacralized secularity in democratic societies. Literary representations can register and animate philosophical theories away from any ready polarizations of atheism and faith. Thus, with reference to extracts by T.S Eliot (1888–1965), Stevie Smith (1902–1971), and Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955–), I will show how poetry can ventilate the divergent and overlapping impulses of the sacred and secular in human psychology and social behaviour. Postsecularity is the complex cultural condition that both continues and shifts away from the postreligious: ‘a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity’ (McClure, 2007). This conceptual third space can pertain to a chronology, a set of ideas, prominent thinkers, and the application to different disciplines. Historically, the term became a currency during the first decade of the twenty-first century, largely forged by the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. Habermas acknowledges that a postsecular consciousness largely exists in the Western world, but, as Nathan Gardels (2008) illustrates, postsecularity is increasingly the condition, or at least portentous of that condition, elsewhere. As with other movements with a non-hyphenated ‘post’ prefix – postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism, posthumanism – postsecularism consists in the continuation of what it also succeeds: in this case, the possibility of a secular nation state. In ‘Secularism’s Crisis of Faith’, Habermas (2008) attributes the waning of religious influence in secular states to three phenomena: scientific developments that are hard to reconcile with a theocentric world view; the functionality of law, politics, public welfare, and education over which religious organizations have lost any control and apparent relevance; and the widespread shift from rural to urban living, along with the intense industrialization of agriculture, that reduce dependence upon forces beyond human control. A secular society is readily synonymized with a democratic one, in neither imposing nor preferring any system of belief. France is perhaps the country most proud of its democracy and is also proudly secular. To this end, it is controversial in banning home education and all religious externals in schools – whether crucifix, hijab, or skullcap. However, this ideal of secularity is disrupted by some of the same factors and principles that underpin it. Advances in technology, medicine, and anthropogenic climate change, which formerly contributed towards secularism, now demand public policies and personal decisions that are ethical, frequently metaphysical, in nature. For example, the movement to permit euthanasia pits the ideals of liberalism and individual choice against the fear of its abuses due to the economic drain of an ageing population. The French writer and philosopher, Régis Debray (2008), delivered a talk in New Delhi about the issue of religious momentum in a world supposedly gone secular. He views this resurgence as a reaction against advances in science, materialistic capitalism, and globalized communications that all unsettle any consensus about human values and identities: ‘But at the very moment that economic life has become planetary, cracks are appearing in the political planet. There are surprising crosscurrents: an obsessional neurosis concerning territory confronts the increasingly free flow of commerce; the freer flow of information begets cultural self-assertion.’

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Another shift towards postsecularity, then, is a ‘neurosis concerning territory’. Arguably this neurosis is aggravated when immigrant groups bring a religious vigour that clashes with a predominantly non-religious host culture. Habermas (2008) faces this clash with the urgent question: ‘The resurgence of political Islam and the endurance of broad religious belief in the most modern of societies – America – has created a crisis of faith among secularists. If modernity no longer implies a secular outlook, and secularism, by definition, cannot generate any values beyond an indifferent tolerance of all belief, what role will religion play in the ­21st century?’ He concludes: ‘In a democracy, the secular mentality must be open to the religious influence of believing citizens.’ Several cultural commentators correspondingly call for a discourse that dissolves the binary polarization of religious and secular vocabularies and ideologies. For Michael Kaufmann (2009), ‘locating the postsecular’ includes ‘Deepening our awareness of the ideological, cultural, and historical valences of those terms [“religious” and “secular”] … and … complicating our understanding of the relationships between the religious and the secular.’ In his article, ‘The Challenges of Non-Western and Postsecular Modernity’, Gardels (2008) surveys the apparent gulf between secular and religious political systems to commend an intercultural discourse that guarantees equal rights for all voices. He cites Zhang Xianglong of Beijing University’s philosophy department: ‘“Only then can there be real discourse, and not Universalist coercion under various elaborate names – democracy, science, enlightenment”. … Here, we begin to see the terms of the new discourse, as non-Western modernity and postsecularism settle across the globe.’ Thus, postsecularity as a discursive space can address the threats to and failures of a democratic secularity that is rife not only in European societies, but ‘across the globe.’ I will focus on the interstices and intersections between spirituality and secularity through poetic evocations of such postsecular concepts as partial faith, spiritual pluralism, postreligious nostalgia, and resacralization. The poetry spans 100 years through which a discernible sacred-secular imagination ebbs and flows.

Postsecularity in Philosophy and Poetry As indicated above, such philosophers as Habermas, Zhang Xianglong, and Debray, writing from and across diverse national contexts hypothesize about recent histories and situations, whereby democracies rely upon a secularity that is tolerant of ‘all faiths and none’, a contemporary mantra of alleged diversity and inclusivity. Literature, however, can scrutinize the unconscious and irrational elements of psychology and emotional intelligence behind what is often lip service to this secular creed. Whereas the mantra can enforce a conceptual opposition between faith and no faith, literary representations can entertain their coexistence. In Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Postsecular Imagination, Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate (2010) examine a continuum of sacred and secular orientations in contemporary novels: ‘Literature, like religion, has always implied a challenge to strict boundaries – between fantasy and fact, transcendence and immanence, the spiritual and the material. The secular history of Reprinted from the journal

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literature in the West – a narrative caught up with the materialist revolutions of technology – is shadowed by a persistent encounter with a less tangible reality.’ When John McClure (1995) produced his article, ‘Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality’, he was perhaps the first scholar to register the trend in literature and theory. For him, postsecular characteristics and characterizations include the concepts of partial faith, spiritual pluralism, and resacralization. He defined resacralization as a movement away from secularism and towards a context in which the religious is part of the discussion. Over a decade later, McClure (2007) published Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, the first full-length book devoted to the subject. He explains how literature opens up the interrelationship between epistemologies in psychology, philosophy, and sociology: Postsecularism, a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity, is being studied and theorized in North America by thinkers such as Harold Bloom, William Connolly, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor. In Europe the project of inventing and understanding postsecularism is identified with philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Hadot, and Gianni Vattimo. But novelists such as Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko are also vigorously exploring postsecularism and postsecularist modes of being. These novelists, whom critics often relegate to separate domains within contemporary fiction, are all thinking in the narrative mode about postsecular movements and possibilities that the theorists and sociologists treat more abstractly. All of them tell stories about new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being. And in each case, the forms of faith they invent, study, and affirm are dramatically partial and open-ended. (ix). As McLure claims here, writers make abstract theories palpable through narrative. However, the non-narrative features in poetry are especially conducive to blending the rational and irrational elements of metaphysical sensibilities. Nonverbal and audio-visual imagery, rhythm, and typography, for example, evoke the sensed realities that elude the confining syntax of prose. In A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Richard Eldridge (2010) impresses how poetry has a specifically ontological purpose: ‘Unlike theoretical representations that present phenomena that exist “on their own”, such as the melting point of lead or the composition of the atmosphere of Jupiter, poetic imitations present scenes, incidents, actions, and thoughts and feelings about them all, in relation to how they matter to and for human life. In poetry, scene (as object of attention and reflection), incident, action, thought and feeling all exist for a responding intelligence.’ (386). Thus, poetry can awaken a ‘responding intelligence’ to what Habermas posits as a ‘crisis’ in secularity that is both cause and effect of ignoring human spirituality, whether religious, open-ended, or humanist, that pushes to influence public mores and policies.

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‘A Heap of Broken Images’: T.S. Eliot and Partial Faith In lay terms, both philosophy and literature are concerned with what it means to be human, with ‘meaning’ as the centre around which both hypothetical and empirical narratives revolve. As McClure outlines, the preoccupation with ‘new forms of religiously inflected modes of being and seeing’ in postmodern narratives reverberates with works by modernists earlier in the twentieth century. As T. S. Eliot (1963) put it poetically, ‘We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / in a different form’ (Four Quartets 208). Debray (2008) reflects philosophically on the same sensed aporia. He argues that a blind eye to the personal and collective desire for meaning accounts for the acceleration of religious extremism: ‘We must see that it is precisely due to the lack of freely granted civic religion, the lack of an agnostic spirituality, the lack of credible political and social ethics that, once again, clerical fanaticisms are prospering. … Today, the greatest ally of obscurantism is the spiritually empty economism of our prosperous liberal societies. If our cynics up there at the apex of power were less concerned with the Dow Jones Index there would undoubtedly be fewer devotees, down here, in the mosques and basilicas.’ In similar vein, the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney (2020), delivers the prestigious BBC ‘Reith Lectures’ on the question: ‘Why have financial values come to be considered more important than human ones?’ Lecture 1 is tellingly titled, ‘From-moral-to-market-sentiments’. Underlying the perceived quest for meaning in a morally bankrupt society is the deficit of spiritual resources in a non-religious culture. Looking back at poetry in the twentieth century, Edna Longley (2000) views the inattention to human spirituality as one defining feature, often identifiable as a ‘postreligious sense of loss’. In ‘Poetry in a Postsecular Age’, Michael Symonns Roberts (2008) likewise pinpoints ‘a language drained of religious significance but a yearning for the metaphysical and religious’. Chronologically, the rejection of, or indifference towards, metaphysics emanates from what Cleanth Brooks (1971) termed a ‘post-Christian’ era in which, for example, T.S. Eliot’s religious references were dismissed: ‘Eliot has been continually in the poem [The Waste Land] linking up the Christian doctrine with the beliefs of as many peoples as he can. … Eliot’s theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now discredited.’ However, the so-called ‘spiritual turn’ in Modernist Studies engendered a flourishing of theoretical and critical readings that rehabilitated the pluralistic sacred-secular intertextuality in Eliot and others. Their evocations of metaphysics resonate with their neo-Romantic tendencies towards individual transcendence. The modernists’ preoccupation with aestheticism has thus been refigured as both discarding the trappings of metaphysics and also longing nostalgically for those trappings. As Martin Bell (1999) records in ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’: ‘The pervasive concern with the construction of meaning helps explain the emphasis in all the modernist arts on the nature of their own medium; and in the case of literature this means, as well as literary genres and forms, language itself.’ Nowhere is the ‘concern with the construction of meaning’ and its contingency on language more evident than in the poetry of T.S. Eliot (1963).1 This interdependence 1

  All poetry quotations are from Eliot 1963.

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of language and meaning is constructed and deconstructed in his iconic modernist poems, The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1935–1942). The five-part antiepic The Waste Land reconstructs the dissolution of an individual psyche in a culture that has been overwhelmed and overtaken by materialism and mechanization: the brown gods are, ‘Unhonoured, unpropitiated / By worshippers of the machine’ (‘The Dry Salvages’). The dehumanized robotic routine of the typist in ‘The Fire Sermon’ is a chilling symptom of spiritual dysphoria: ‘At the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting’ (ll. 215–6). Eliot’s depictions of a postreligious stasis are interwoven with shafts of light from both Eastern and Western sacred traditions. Advocates of the spiritual turn in cultural studies embrace such intermingling of Eastern and Western thought for countermanding vestiges of linguistic and philosophical colonialism. For example, in his article, ‘The Influence of Eastern Philosophy on Selected Poetry of T. S. Eliot’, Sayan Mukherjee (2019) refers to Four Quartets as arguably ‘the most philosophical poem of the [twentieth] century’. He aptly transmogrifies the ‘tumid apathy’ of Eliot’s sick souls as the ‘trishna’, the spiritual craving, in Buddhist tenets: ‘[Eliot] recognizes the root cause of all misery is nothing but the trishna that Buddhism has tried to explore in many ways.’ Eliot attributed much of the ‘Eastern borrowings’ to his encounters with Mulk Raj Anand (1981), who became popular with the Bloomsbury writers in London. Eliot told him: ‘One thing that your book The Hindu View of Art did for me was to send me to the Vedic hymns – also the Thirteen Principal Upanishads’. The echoes of the Upanishads in The Waste Land, ‘Datta, dayadhvan, damyata’, and the final ‘Shantih shantih shantih’, are heralded for their post-Christian spiritual pluralism that waters the waste lands of materialist secularity. Following the dominance of a universal yet pluralistic ‘trishna’ in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men (1925), in Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930), the psychic condition is most akin to the ‘partial faith’ outlined by McLure (2007) in Postsecular Fictions: ‘They [the novelists] do not provide, or even aspire to provide, any full “mapping” of the reenchanted cosmos. They do not promise anything like full redemption. And they are partial in another sense as well in that they are selectively dedicated to progressive ideals of social transformation and wellbeing. In all these respects, of course, postsecularism is at odds with resurgent fundamentalisms.’ The opening lines to Part VI of Ash Wednesday condense multifarious treatises about faith and unbelief: ‘Wavering between the profit and the loss / in this brief transit where the dreams cross / The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying’. With his famed ‘negative capability’, Eliot mediates how poetry reaches beyond the mind’s censoring apparatus to revive a soul that is atrophied by its agnosticism: And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices. In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices. And the weak spirit quickens to rebel (104). Following his own religious conversion, in Four Quartets, Eliot positions himself both within and outside of the spiritual dysphoria of non-believers: ‘Only a flicker / Over the

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strained time-ridden faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction / Filled with fancies and empty of meaning’ (‘Burnt Norton’). In other places, he eloquently reconstructs an unutterable flailing between ‘āstika’ and ‘nāstika’: There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable. Prayer of the one Annunciation. (‘The Dry Salvages’). Philosophical abstractions around the ‘partial faith’ of postsecular citizens are contained in the intensely rhythmic phrase of ‘barely prayable / Prayer’. Along with the potent rhythmic shifts, the alliteration, rhyme, and assonance enliven a reader’s jostling of faith and doubt that evades rational articulation.

‘Each One Upon Each Other Glared’: Stevie Smith and Spiritual Pluralism ‘I do not know much about gods’ states Eliot (1963) with perhaps false modesty but apparent harmlessness (‘The Dry Salvages’). When the choices of several gods, agnosticism, atheism, or humanism are purely personal, secularity assumes an amenable coexistence of beliefs: ‘The sea has many voices, / Many gods and many voices’ (ibid. 206). However, when these seemingly contradictory multiple ideologies infuse the public sphere, they can become embattled. For Slavoj Zizek (2000), postsecularity is an unwelcome aspect of the seemingly benign reality of spiritual pluralism: ‘One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era and its so called “thought” is the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises.’ During the postmodern era of the late twentieth century, multiculturalism became the ideal of a tolerant inclusive democratic society. However, a rude awakening from a sleepy secularity occurs when an increasing number of immigrants, often fleeing religious terrorism, claim the human right to bring their religious cultures into the public sphere: to build places of worship; to observe religious festivals; and to obey religious rules before the laws of the land. This kind of multiculturalism is not at all the same as secularity. The rights of ever burgeoning religious minorities offend the rights of the humanist or atheist to live free of any religious iconography, interference or influence. These clashes of rights arouse a consciousness about religion that would otherwise remain dormant. When the sacrosanctity of free speech, crucial to a democracy, conflicts with the allegedly democratic right to revere a sacred icon or text, we see such murders as the shooting of staff who worked at the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine (January 2015) or the beheading of a teacher for discussing satirical cartoons (Paty, 2020). Its secularity means that France has no blasphemy laws, but these violent acts awaken every citizen to the competing allegiances of national citizenship and religious orthodoxy. Whilst philosophical rhetoric must ruminate this clash of freedoms, literature can dramatize unfathomable human impulses and dilemmas for the reader’s ‘responding Reprinted from the journal

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intelligence’ (Eldridge, 2010). The quixotic poetry of Stevie Smith (1975)2 typically condenses the psychological complexities around bringing religion into the conversation that philosophers of postsecularity call for. ‘Was He Married’ illustrates Smith’s acute sense that human behaviour directly correlates to its concept of a god: ‘A god is Man’s doll, you ass, / He makes him up like this on purpose.’ The dialectic conclusion is that a noncombative humanism is preferable: ‘A larger one [god] will be when men / Love ‘love’ and hate ‘hate’ but do not deify them?’ (390–1). It is one of many poems that are relevant to contemporary accounts of postreligious culture and its adjunct, postsecularism. Smith’s poetic sketches, ‘1. An Agnostic (of his religious friend)’ and ‘2. A Religious Man (of his agnostic friend) (347), are both sceptical and affirming of each stance. The polarized positions regarding a theocentric universe are bridged through their shared quality of graciousness. Here, thorny philosophical abstractions over accommodating the dual demands of church (or mosque or temple or synagogue) and state are dissolved through the greater good of a consensus around civilized behaviour. The atrocities committed when stances concerning faith are oppositional are dramatized more vehemently in Smith’s multivocal ‘Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood’ (265). This first line simultaneously evokes the Nietzschean ‘God is Dead’, a childlike lament over the death of a dog, the philosophical conundrum over whether God can be good if humans suffer, and that any talk of god is merely nonsense. The faux-naïve voices of children destabilize any centre of truth or authority, implicitly satirizing all religious factions and fanaticism. The linguistically playful treatment of hermeneutics in ‘Our Bog is Dood’ forces the reader to question its importance. At the same time, the tangle of contradictory theocentric philosophies has consequences that are deadly serious: ‘Each one upon each other glared / In pride and misery / For what was dood, and what their Bog / They never could agree.’ The impossibility of a rational debate leads to hostility that leads to vocal warring that finally leads to brutal savagery. Thus, harnessing the anti-poetic patterns of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse with Gertrude Stein’s exaggerated repetitions and obscure signifiers, Smith marks a seemingly unbridgeable gap between tribes, whether grown-ups and children, different fundamentalist religious groups, and finally sects within each group. Significantly, in Smith’s poem, it is the linguistic impotency that leads to violence: ‘But when I asked them to explain / They grew a little wild.’ This linguistic impotency is congruent with the fantastical and irrational nature of their belief: ‘We know because we wish it so / That is enough, they cried’. Translated into the context of postsecular societies, a sensed disenfranchisement produces the impulse to create a community around some god, regardless of concrete grounds for belief. Whereas Smith might wish her poem to be an impetus to reject all deifications in favour of a benevolent humanism, the reality is that religious minorities step into the spiritual vacuum of secular states, resulting in ‘fundamentalist radicalization’ (Habermas, 2008). The poem horribly realizes the human fallibilities that obstruct dialogue between communities. Smith’s religious groups lack any vocabulary for a reasonable discourse and become more extreme without it.

2

  All poetry quotations are from Smith 1975.

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‘Some are Brought to their Knees’: Carol Ann Duffy and Postreligious Resacralization Although framing zeitgeists is psychologically pleasing for its historicizing neatness, it tends to render too much linearity to phenomena that overlap and revolve. With this caveat, we can situate spiritual pluralism as a precursor to an agnostic secularity that evolves into a phase of postreligious spirituality. Unlike the humanist secular mind, that is hostile to all spiritual expression, the postreligious consciousness might entertain partial faith and a metaphysical dimension that rejects, or occurs outside of, religious institutions and orthodoxies. That metaphysical awareness is frequently manifested in the ache, the ‘trishna’, for faith. In ‘Missing God’, Daniel O’Driscoll (2002) recounts a litany of occasions, from the sublime to the mundane, when this absence of any spiritual language is felt: ‘Miss Him when the TV scientist / explains the cosmos through equations, / leaving our planet to revolve on its axis / aimlessly, a wheel skidding in snow’. Similarly, Carol Ann Duffy’s (2015)3 ‘Space, Space’ delineates how: ‘The brain says No to the Universe. Prove it. / but the heart is susceptible, pining for a look, a kind word.’ Here, religious practice is both enviable and maligned: ‘Some are brought to their knees, // pleading in dead language at a deaf ear.’ Again, this crisis of secularism is contingent on the absence of a meaningful language for spiritual exploration and expression. This late twentieth-century zeitgeist of postreligious sensibilities hovers over Duffy’s vexed relation to formal religion. She variously depicts the satire of mature rejection, the hurt of disillusion, and a yearning for the consolations that that religion promised but failed to deliver. The emptiness of non-belief is frequently evoked: ‘But we will be dead as we know / beyond all light’ (‘Mean Time’). The first line of ‘And Then What’ – ‘Then with their hands they would break bread’ – takes its imagery from Holy Communion or Mass, but what follows outlines the brevity and bleakness of the human life cycle. Hands are the cohering signifier of the inexorable progress from youth to work to love to death. ‘An Old Atheist places his last Bet’ personifies the angst of viewing life as a mere game of cards with no dealer: Poker is the card game and the look on his face while images of nothingness signal the vacant space left by religious faith. Duffy’s anti-religious stance that reaches for some kind of secular spirituality certainly hit a spot. In 1995, her sonnet ‘Prayer’ was voted the most popular poem in the English language. It is one of her most frequently anthologized and considered one of the best poems in her entire oeuvre. Its opening line, ‘Some days we cannot pray, but a prayer / utters itself’, resonates with Eliot’s earlier ‘barely prayable / Prayer’ and with readers ‘of all beliefs and none’. It thus endorses a secularity that is freed from the strict boundaries of buildings or doctrines. The strikingly domestic image, ‘So, a woman will lift / her head from the sieve of her hands and stare / at the minim sung by a tree, a sudden gift’, depicts despair and weariness but also a moment’s epiphany. The next stanza centres a man remembering the Latin chants of his youth: ‘Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth / enters our hearts, that small familiar pain’. Sounds – ‘utters, sung, chanting’ – put him in contact with 3

  All poetry quotations are from Duffy 2015.

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the ‘familiar pain’ of nostalgia, regret, guilt, loneliness, or loss, yet also console that loss. ‘Pray for us now’, a fragment from ‘Hail Mary’, is a dreg of the Roman Catholic mass he no longer attends. Duffy’s final couplet on the ‘radio’s prayer’, the shipping forecast, is contrastingly prosaic yet suggests how the human antennae for ‘otherwhere’ is attached to the most mundane of rituals. Duffy (O’Brien, 2002) increasingly asserts that poetry ‘is a secular prayer’, for ‘when faced with extinction rather than life the poet’s powers prove themselves indispensable. For after religion, what else is there?’. The search for spirituality in a secular culture is most often expressed as pertaining to an individual, to the private sphere, but when it applies to social policies, to ethics, and morality, it shifts private dysphoria to the destabilization of secularity as a viable society. In Duffy’s ‘Free Will’, atheism is resoundingly preferable to dogmatic religiosity but is void of opportunities to console a conscience or determine ethical dilemmas. The poet’s voice is scathing about religious doctrines that burden the individual with a sense of sin concerning personal morality; in this context, the ‘sin’ of abortion that is prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church. Campaigns to change abortion laws in Ireland, the USA, and currently Poland, for example, put centre stage the conflict between democratic human rights and religious dogmas. In a piece on contemporary poets’ eschewal of God, Kathryn Simmonds (2014) notes a handful who do meld the secular and spiritual, and asserts, ‘the poem, with its big white space is the natural place to confront mystery, the natural place to question, praise or meditate.’ Accordingly, Duffy proves how poetry can articulate and evaluate the parallel and convergent streams of postreligion and postsecularism. In her later poems, she takes the symbol of bowing the knee in worship to secular places where human heroism and sacrifice warrant collective reverence, such as the bravery of parents whose sons were victims of senseless racial murders (‘Birmingham’). ‘Telling the Bees’ stitches a seam between the sacred and secular as Duffy refreshes the iconography of prayer by applying it to global concerns about endangered species. The terrible consequences of bees dying off, their dead bodies strewn on the ground, are likened to beads lying around from a broken rosary. ‘A Rare Bee’ wholly appropriates the language of religion to the art of poetry. The poet visits a hermit and seeks the honey of poetic inspiration from a rare specimen of bees. Duffy’s pilgrimage is a sacred-secular combination of East with West: ‘So I came to kneel at the hermit’s hive – a little church, a tiny mosque – in a mute glade / where the loner mouthed and prayed’. Thus, in the face of anthropogenic climate emergencies, the notion of ‘resacralization’, whereby both religious and secular minds hold that ‘the soil is sacred’ (Debray, 2008), is one visible realm of postsecular discourse. While postsecularity mostly describes Western European societies, the erosion of their fundamentally tolerant principles can be a warning to democratic nations who might currently treasure the ideal of a spiritually plural and secular state in which living with or without a god is blithely coexistent. Furthermore, secularity, whether atheistic, resacralized, or spiritually hybrid, assumes a universalist epistemology that goes back to the Enlightenment. This same universalizing metaphysics and spiritual pluralism might partly account for a return to more territorial religious fundamentalisms. Thus, at a philosophical level, postsecularity is difficult to reconcile with the diversification of subjectivities that are also essential to the ideals of a secular

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pluralism. Here, postsecular discourse might harness theories and narratives about posthumanism. Scrutinizing ways in which cybernetics blurs the boundary between the biological and the engineered, for example, they project about the state of things to come. These stretch from the ways in which machines might rob, genetically modify, or even enhance, human identity, experience, and endeavours. The posthuman discourses involve such metaphysical questions as: How can all presumptive human needs and wants be subordinated to the impersonal soul-destroying operations of the market? What new forms of subjectivity will be offered by the posthuman project? What is the status of spirituality in artificial intelligence?

References Anand, M. R. (1981). Conversations in Bloomsbury. Wildwood House. Bell, M. (1999). The metaphysics of modernism. In M. Levenson (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. (pp. 9–32). Cambridge University Press. Brooks, C. ([1947] 1971). ‘The waste land: An analysis’. In B. Rajan (Ed.), T.S. Eliot: a study of his writings by several hands (pp. 28–35). Dennis Dobson Ltd. Carney, M. (2020). The Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4. https://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​iplay​er/​episo​de/​p0900​t1x/​ the-​reith-​lectu​res-​2020-​mark-​carney-​how-​we-​get-​what-​we-​value-​lectu​re-1-​from-​moral-​to-​market-​ senti​ments. Accessed 10 Dec 2020. Carruthers, Jo., & Tate, A. (Eds.). (2010). Spiritual identities: Literature and the postsecular imagination. Peter Lang. Debray, R. (2008). God and the political planet. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), 33–35. Duffy, C. A. (2015). Collected poems. Picador. Eldridge, R. (2010). Truth in poetry: Particulars and universals. In G. L. Hagberg & W. Jost (Eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. (pp. 385–398). Blackwell. Eliot, T. S. (1963). Collected poems 1909–1962. Faber. Gardels, N. (2008). The challenges of non-western and postsecular modernity. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), 2–5. Habermas, J. (2008). Secularism’s crisis of faith: Notes on postsecular society. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), 17–29. Kaufmann, M. (2009). Locating the postsecular. Religion and Literature, 41(3), 68–73. Longley, E. (Ed.). (2000). The bloodaxe book of 20th century poetry from Britain and Ireland. Bloodaxe. McClure, J. A. (2007). Partial faiths: Postsecular fiction in the age of Pynchon and Morrison. University of Georgia Press. McClure, J. A. (1995). Postmodern/post-secular: Contemporary fiction and spirituality. Modern Fiction Studies, 41(1), 141–163. Mukherjee, S. (2019). “Shantih Shantih Shantih”: Influence of eastern philosophy on selected major poems of Thomas Stearns Eliot – a literary analysis. Journal of the Gujarat Research Society, 21(4), 150–159. O’Brien, S. (2002). ‘Review: Poetry: Feminine gospels by Carol Ann Duffy’. Sunday Times, 29 December. O’Driscoll, D. (2002). Exemplary damages. Anvil. Paty, S. ‘Beheading of teacher deepens divisions over France’s secular identity’. London: BBC News. https://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​world-​europe-​54602​171. Accessed 10 Dec 2020. Roberts, M. S. (2008). Poetry in a postsecular age. Poetry Review, 98(3), 69–75. Simmonds, K. (2014). ‘The God allusion’. Poetry News, (Winter). The Poetry Society. Smith, S. (1975). Collected poems. Allen Lane. Zizek, S. (2000). The fragile absolute – Or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for?. Verso.

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Sophia (2021) 60:747 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00886-w CORRECTION

Correction to: Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy Jane Dowson1  Published online: 12 October 2021 © Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Correction to: Sophia https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00849-1 In this article the title was incorrectly given as ‘Living Without God: Multicultural Spectrums of the Atheist/Nastika: Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy’ but should have been ‘Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy’. The original article has been corrected

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Chapter 16 was originally published as Dowson, J. Sophia (2021) 60: 747. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841021-00886-w.

The original article can be found online at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11841-​021-​00849-1. * Jane Dowson [email protected] 1



De Montfort University, Leicester, England, UK

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Sophia (2021) 60:749–768 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00888-8

‘Do You Believe in God, Doctor?’ The Atheism of Fiction and the Fiction of Atheism Rukmini Bhaya Nair1  Accepted: 4 July 2021 / Published online: 19 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that ‘disbelief’ may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus’ The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key ‘existentialist’ text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of natural, political, economic and psychological distress gone ‘viral’, it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: ‘Do you believe in God, doctor?’. Rieux’s answer is telling: ‘No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.’ It is this human ‘struggle’ to discern the contours of the invisible ‘in the dark’ that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and J.L, Austin and John Searle’s classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran’s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its ‘ordinariness’; yet, it is here that the ‘extraordinariness’ of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of ‘universal’ inquiries into ‘what it means to be human’ that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction. Keywords  Absurdity · Atheism · Camus · Disbelief · Evolution · Fiction · Humanism · Literature · Narrative · Ordinariness · Plague · Religion · Science · Speech acts Chapter 17 was originally published as Nair, R. B. Sophia (2021) 60: 749–768. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11841-021-00888-8.

* Rukmini Bhaya Nair [email protected] 1



Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Main Building, IITD Campus, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, Delhi 110016, India

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Disbelief: ‘Fumbling in the Dark’ What, if anything, do fiction and atheism have in common? This essay suggests that both these concepts pivot on the nature of disbelief. Fiction is a narrative genre that creates beings and contexts that, by definition, do not exist; in Coleridge’s famous words, that is, entering the fictional domain of literature requires of a reader a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. Atheism, likewise, is a position on the ontological status of a being (God) or beings (gods) as well as contexts of creation that also, from the perspective of the atheist, do not exist. We have to willingly ‘suspend disbelief’ in our everyday material world of actors, events and observed causal sequencing when we pray, for example, to some unseen, unknown being to change the course of events in this familiar world; for the atheist, such a position is untenable, even absurd. The question then becomes: how do we derive a meaningful semantics, reasons for intentional actions, ethical stances, and affective dispositions from such absurd worlds in which we can by no means straightforwardly believe? This is the central conundrum at the heart of Albert Camus’ The Plague (1960), a key ‘existentialist’ text, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, that several critics have also termed absurdist (see Rossi, 1958). Not only is The Plague a novel that seems especially relevant to our current coronavirus stricken times of natural, political, economic, and psychological distress gone ‘viral’, it is also one in which a bluntly relevant question is posed to the hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, by another of its main characters: ‘Do you believe in God, doctor?’ Rieux’s answer is telling: ‘No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.’ I will argue in this paper for the straightforward proposition that it is this ‘struggle’ to discern the contours of the invisible ‘in the dark’ that animates the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism, of science as well as of skepticism. It goes without saying of course that the natural kind (see Putnam, 1975; Kripke, 1972) metaphor of what one might call the preponderance of ‘dark matter’ in the universe (see Ade et al., 2013) has been reused continually in varied cultural contexts and times and across disciplines from philosophy and soteriological doctrine to linguistics and physics. Darkness, despite its connotations of undesirability, has in fact always been a haunting presence in the human search for meaning. That harsh glare of unknowing which renders life’s absurdity too painful to bear, it might even be suggested, is in praxis alleviated by the invocation of ‘darkness’ in a phalanx of texts. Such texts range from the short incantation in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (circa 700 BCE) that asks to be led ‘from darkness to light’ to Paul’s meditation in Corinthians-1 (‘For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face’, circa 350 AD) to the idea of pratibhā (a ‘shining forth’) in Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa theory of language (circa 600–700 AD),1 via Milton in his major Enlightenment epic Paradise 1   While the central focus of this essay is not Indian traditions of atheism, they do form part of its crosscultural background. In this connection, it is perhaps worth mentioning that India had many avowedly skeptical schools of philosophy such as the Ājīvika and the Cārvāka who were both atheist and, respectively, radically fatalist and skeptic. These schools were committed to turning conventional wisdom on its head, as in the verse that speaks in the Bhagavad-Gītā 15.1 of ūrdhvamūlaṃ adhaḥ śākham, meaning ‘roots on top and branches below’. Remarkably, the ‘orthodox’ schools of Indian philosophy (darśana) also include the

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Lost speaking of the engulfing flames of hell that give out heat but no light as an oxymoronic ‘darkness visible’ (1667), all the way to the Churchlands’ ingenious thought-experiment (1990) mimicking the ‘darkroom’ of the mind in support of J.R. Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ arguments on understanding linguistic meaning via James Clerk Maxwell’s physicist’s experiments on magnetism and electricity. Noam Chomsky, himself an atheist, uses the metaphor very effectively to explain dilemmas of understanding in the social sciences, thus: If you go back to, say, the Greeks, and look at the range of questions they asked, most of them we are still asking, without very much progress. There are some areas where there’s been extreme progress, in fact in what we call the natural sciences. But that is like a point in a whole sky of darkness that remains as dark as it ever was. We work our way through the murky problems as best we can, but without profound understanding (Chomsky, 1997) Or, just pick any twentieth-century literary text of consequence in any language and it is an almost sure bet that it will contain the word ‘dark’, so critical is this trope to all sorts of sense-making, in fiction as in life (see also footnote 3). This essay will explore some of these semantic moves towards extracting light from darkness through a reading of the single representative work of fiction that I have already mentioned: The Plague.2 We live today in a world that is still coming to terms with a ‘once in a century’ pandemic, a world desperately in need of appropriate fictions that will capture some of the salient features of the sociobiological crises said to be typical of the current

Footnote 1 (continued) atheist Sāṅkhya and Mīmāṃsā. In addition, literary traditions of biting satire from at least the seventh to the seventeenth century (see in this connection the reference to the translation of some of these satirical texts by Somadeva Vasudeva, 2005) dwelt on various social vices, as in the eleventh-century text Kālavilāsa by Kṣemendra that roundly castigates doctors experimenting on their own patients:   The physician becomes a renowned success.   After he has killed a thousand patients with his concoctions,   Swapping around their various constituent drugs.   In an attempt to figure out his own science.   Take away the diatribe against doctors and the remark about “swapping around… various constituent drugs” in pharmacological trials for vaccines would not be all that different today! I’d like to thank Ranjit Nair here for an erudite discussion on the above (see also R. Nair, 2010 below). 2   Such a focus on a ‘single text’ recalls Wimsatt and Beardlsey’s classic 1946 piece on the ‘Intentional Fallacy’. The gist of this essay in ‘New Criticism’ was the idea that a text could be read more or less independently of its historical context and the putative intentions of its author. According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, a text is: ‘not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). [It] belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge.’ While one may not agree with the extreme view that a text can be entirely shorn of its contextual moorings, it is certainly possible, and sometimes even desirable, to read a text with fresh eyes from the vantage point of a specific crisis in reader’s own times—in the present case, the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as to see it as a ‘public’ resource that concerns ‘the human being, an object of public knowledge’ without privileging its historical context overmuch. This, in fact, is what I have tried to do in my ‘close reading’ of Camus’ The Plague here in the dark context of the global pandemic and its aftermath that has placed ‘ordinary’ people everywhere in ‘extraordinary’ circumstances of crisis. Reprinted from the journal

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‘Age of the Anthropocene’ (see Zalasiewicz et  al., 2010). Today, once again as in The Plague, medical doctors and researchers are emergent heroes in an embattled scenario; and a heated debate rages between those who advocate that we should ‘follow the science’ in order to find ways and means to combat climate change, the COVID-19 virus and other ‘plagues’ and those who feel that any scientific advice is part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy, a fiction malevolently designed to mislead the people into giving up their freedoms of speech, movement, and action. Interestingly, both scientists and those who doubt scientific prognoses altogether admit that ‘science’, unlike the all-knowing divine, is fallible. The difference lies in the nature of their disbelief. The stereotype of the scientist is that s/he disbelieves in any results not attested by clinical trials and experimental verification while the science skeptics vociferously disbelieve the ‘so-called results’ produced by the scientists, preferring a politically, and often religiously, inflected narrative that suggests that they are being deliberately hoaxed and ‘kept in the dark’.3 Without going into the merits of these often harshly polarized stances and the social circumstances that have engendered them, what I wish to emphasize are the powerful, hostile strains of disbelief in each other’s positions that these camps share in common. Disbelief is a state of mind that runs the gamut from mild doubt to incredulity to radical skeptical denial.4 Without defining disbelief as the simple converse of ‘belief’, I suggest here that it has at least the three following features. One, disbelief is provoked, in the main, by violating the felicity conditions on just one of the five main speech act classes: namely the representative (‘Algiers is located on the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula’). Given default contextual conditions, tacit background knowledge, etc., when the felicity conditions on this class of speech act are intentionally violated in everyday life, they are likely to arouse the reaction: ‘I don’t believe you!’. It is then up to the speaker to convince the hearer of the truth of these assertions. This is where literary fictions, I argue, play and have always evolutionarily played a crucial role in human cultures. They offer us exploratory pathways to interpretations of the ‘truth’ as it is encoded in the fictional speech act of the representative in particular and, more importantly, in fiction in general. Entering the ‘representational’

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  The pervasive metaphor of ‘darkness’ in literature as well as ordinary discourse obviously raises issue of the ‘direction of fit’ (words-to-world or world-to-words) in speech act theory/ordinary language philosophy. Where is ‘darkness’ actually located—out there or in our minds? According to Searle, ‘direction of fit’ is one of the most important ‘dimensions of difference between illocutionary acts’ (Searle, 1976, 1). Such ‘fit’ may be taken to be in one direction in the case of fictional renditions and in another in the case of non-fictional or factual renditions. In fiction, the ‘direction of fit’ or causal directionality is almost always assumed to be words-to-world. This matter is discussed more fully in Nair (2002, Chapter  2 ‘Force, Fiction, Fit and Felicity: Narrative as a Speech Act—Gurus: Austin, Searle’). Specifically, in the case of darkness, small children may fear the dark in physical terms but Lyons (1985) argues plausibly that ‘fear’ of the dark in adults ‘may not be fear of the absence of light but fear of the absence of knowledge’. It is precisely this fear of ‘unknowing’ that is expressed so often in a words-to-world’ direction of fit in great works of fiction such as The Plague and in several of the other works cited in this essay. 4   Most thesauruses list at least over 20 common close synonyms of the common noun ‘disbelief’ such as distrust, incredulity, incertitude, and misgiving. Yet the concept has been largely under-explored in the philosophical literature so far.

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world of a fictional text allows us to mitigate mental attitudes, to nuance our disbelief in and suspicion of the stances of our ‘others’ (Nair, 2012, 2017a).5 Narrative fiction, an enduring ‘discourse universal’ across cultures from very early on in our species history, is today a latitudinous genre that permits an atheist to try on the mental shoes of a priest for fit, and vice versa. At its best, the genre specializes in creating arenas of imaginative empathy by presenting varying ‘points of view’ among its characters and engendering an appreciation in the reader for the essential humanity of all contending players (Nair, 2011a, 2015, 2018b). ‘Fictionalizing’ the world through a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ even enables imaginative vaults across species barriers through the invention of hybrid mythological such as centaurs, sirens, and elephant-headed gods. These multifarious, multicultural crossovers are evident in the Indian purāṇa and the Greek, Norse, and African myths, not to mention early epics like the Iliad and the Mahābhārata—and they remain observable, as we shall see, in modern novels like The Plague where the transgenic plague bacillus enters the human bloodstream through rats in the French Algerian town of Oran with consequences that infuse ordinary ‘lived’ experience with the ‘extraordinariness’ of an unexpectedly calamitous, ‘once in a lifetime’ event. Two, tellers of stories or writers of fictions draw the hearer into their ‘makebelieve’ world by specifically lifting the restrictions on the pragmatics of everyday interaction and persuading the audience to enter a universe of newly minted beliefs (see Searle, 1975, on ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ in this connection). In such cases, it might be argued that human authors in effect remodel themselves as ‘God’, creating the world anew and leading their audiences towards a promised, if often unpredictable, ending. It is in this sense that—whatever the personal beliefs of the author of a text who may in fact be very devout—fiction as a concept strongly implies an atheistic impulse towards disbelief in divinity. This is because it necessarily involves a human—in effect any human among our seven and a half billion since each is endowed with the gift of narrative production and comprehension—merrily usurping the primary creative role of the divine and thus leaving little daylight between her narrative act and that attributed to God or, in some religions, to multiple gods. On this reading of the speech act of fictional narration, a human speaker mentally rejects or expresses disbelief in the very idea of divinity, by assuming, via her creative fictions, God’s allegedly unique powers of creation. Three, a feature attributed to ‘God’ is that such a being has an absolute grip on space–time. God is an entity who already has all the answers; the ‘truth’ has eternally been at his/her disposal. The darkness of soul that plagues human beings grappling with the difficult problems of human existence and multiple interpretations of a presumed ‘truth’ cannot logically constitute any sort of impediment for an

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  There is of course a long tradition of philosophically evaluating the ‘representational’ world of a fictional text’. Frege, for example (1979), considers two types of proper names in fiction: historical characters like Caesar and fictitious characters like Scylla and opines that: ‘In myth and fiction thoughts occur that are neither true nor false. Logic has nothing to do with these’ (Frege, 1979, 1984). Despite Frege’s dismissal of fiction as inimical to logic, Munton (2017) has recently argued in a persuasive manner, in general consonance with the thesis of this paper, that Frege’s views actually suggest that fiction could have something of the ‘force’ of a speech act. Reprinted from the journal

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all-knowing God. By inference, then, doubt, skepticism, or the pursuit of ‘scientific reason’ would hardly matter to a God of whom neither belief nor disbelief in propositions couched in a human language is required. Fiction, in turn, would be a redundant device for such a being. Likewise, presumably God is neither a theist nor an atheist; he or she simply is. I want therefore to somewhat incautiously argue that fiction always ‘lives without God’. Because it is primarily concerned with the business of decoding the puzzles of human existence, even when fiction has as its overt subject matter ‘Acts of God’ such as plagues, pestilences, and fires (Nair, 1997, 2011b), even when it introduces gods as heavily anthropomorphized players as in the classical epics, the trajectory of these tales invariably follows human trials and follies. The transcendent divine, as it were, remains outside the frame of the human story; it can be intuited but it cannot be narrated.6 I want to argue for the necessary ‘atheism of fiction’ in this respect. Some critics have suggested that atheism is parasitic upon theism in that it needs a God or gods to prove its disbelief in the proposition that these beings exist. My suggestion, on the contrary, is that the ‘fiction of atheism’ is actually a conceptual space that is inimical to divine intervention. When gods (or animals and machines) enter the fictional space of narrative genres such as the novel, they are ‘humanized’, much as the reverse process is set in motion when humans become ‘god-like’ creators as the producers of fiction. In fiction, as in the atheist’s universe, illumination when it does come to a character or a reader derives from a focus on the human rather than the divine. Or, as the narrator in The Plague puts it: ‘In this respect, our townsfolk were… humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences.’ Even when the universe is absurd and meaningless, bereft of any divinely decreed ultimate destiny, that is, Camus thought a ‘blind faith’ in humanism was so core to our species that it inspired people to wage heroic battles against death and to want to survive at whatever cost. Camus’ antidote to an acceptance of the ‘absurdity’ of existing in a universe without meaning, one minus the guiding hand of an all-powerful God overseeing human

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  One of the reviewers for this paper asks an interesting question: Does negation stand for ‘disbelief’ or something more in the fictional world? It seems to me, in a preliminary sort of fashion, that ‘negation’ cannot stand for ‘disbelief’ in ‘the fictional world’ (or perhaps in any other kind of world) because that would imply synonymy between the two terms—which is by no means the case. To negate a proposition is, inter alia, to deny its truth. For example, consider the question and answer pair below: Q. ‘Did you eat the last chocolate in the box?’ A. ‘No’. The question here has the speech act force of a directive (D) and the logical form D(p) where p stands for the proposition, which is in this instance being categorically denied in the answer. In ordinary language philosophy, concerned not so much with ‘truth’ as ‘use’ (Austin, 1962), negation can also be achieved indirectly, e.g., via the defeasibility of the presupposition and/or implicature, for example: A. ‘Which box?’ or ‘There were no chocolates in the box, just biscuits’ or ‘I only ate the second last one’ and so on. Disbelief, on the others hand, can range from mild (the raised eyebrow) to strong (the head shake) forms of skepticism. This is well illustrated in the famous apocryphal Niels Bohr story which goes something like this: Visitor to the physicist Niels Bohr’s home: ‘I thought you did not believe in superstitions but you have a horseshoe nailed above your desk for luck!’ Bohr: ‘Of course I don’t believe in any such superstitious nonsense—but they say the horseshoe works whether you believe in it or not!’ Much the same can be said, I suppose, of narrative fiction. It exists as a discourse genre across cultures whether you believe in its qualities or not! You cannot negate its existence as a linguistic form; at best, you can only express your disbelief (mild to severe) in its propositions, if you so wish.

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action, was first to come to terms with the fact there was no God (see his Notebooks, 1970, 227, on this point where he writes ‘It is our task to create God’, a task presumably undertaken by fiction); second, to enjoy each moment of the quotidian delights of human existence, such as a bath in the sea after a tough day’s work, romantic love, the company of ‘others’, conversation in cafes, and the dappled sunlight during a walk in the woods—for there was nothing beyond this frame of the every day; and third, to cultivate an ethics of ordinary human ‘decency’ towards other human beings because them resolving their predicaments constituted an important justification for one’s own existence. It is the nature of this sort of ‘humanism’, its ‘disbelief in pestilences’ and ‘acts of God’ and the consequent cleaving unto an ‘ethics of decency’ or responsiveness to the ‘causeless’ suffering of fellow humans that the current paper seeks to explore, tracing our need for fiction back to its ancient evolutionary roots. This emphasis on evolution is not only because Camus’ text postulates that the plague bacillus is an intrinsic part of human history but also because, as I see it, the concept of ‘multiculturalism cannot be confined just to contemporary regions and cultures but is exemplified by ‘ways of living’ across evolutionary time (see Nair, 2002, 2011a). In the sections below, I will consider, mainly with reference to the text of The Plague, the three tentative ‘hypotheses’ outlined above, but always bearing in mind Newton’s classical hypothesis non fingo caveat,7 so relevant to the ‘science and religion’ discussion in all historical contexts including the present global crisis we face with respect to the coronavirus pandemic.

Humanism: ‘Some Rare Kind of Fever’ This section concerns the first feature of narrative fiction as a ‘representative speech act’ among humans that could easily and obviously provoke disbelief. Indeed the enigmatic epigraph from Daniel Defoe that prefaces The Plague focuses on this very act of representation. It says: It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not. Camus’ choice of this Defoe quote has been variously interpreted, mainly with a focus on its first part which critics feel could mean that the motifs in The Plague, published soon after World War II, are also emblematic of other nominal-kind disasters such as the war itself, the root cause of which was the virulent racist hatred perpetrated by Hitler’s Nazi rhetoric. The second part of this quote has received less notice but appears directly germane to the subject of my paper, namely fiction. 7

  This is considered Newton’s most famous saying and is from his Principia (1687).   The original English translation of 1729 is by Francis Motte and says: ‘Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power … I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and [so] I frame no hypotheses [hypotheses non fingo]’ Source: https://​philo​sophy​now.​org/​issues/​88/​ Hypot​heses_​Non_​Fingo Reprinted from the journal

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Defoe speaks of ‘represent[ing] anything that really exists by that which exists not’. To my mind, this is a more than sufficient, admirably succinct, description of the crucial representational role performed by the speech act of fiction from very early on in human evolution across cultures (Nair, 2011a, 2019, 2020a, b). The cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has, for instance, argued that human beings tell stories as naturally as beavers build dams and birds build nests. To paraphrase Dennett further, we need language representations and narrative activity to fashion our cognitive environments as much as we need food, security, shelter, and sleep for physical survival (Dennett, 1991). Similarly, J.B. Carroll and the ‘Literary Darwinists’ maintain that the great literary texts of any age go back to certain basic patterns in the formation of early communities. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read novels in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. It’s impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways… the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts. (Max, 2005) Following on from Dennett’s ideas, I suggest in my own work (Nair, 2002, 2011b, 2014) that our stories make us up as much as we make up our stories.8 Thus, in asking what evolutionary value narrative has had as a genre, I conjecture that, although it is by no means the most effective way of conveying information straight up, narrative fiction affords us a relatively cheap epistemic means of learning and intergenerationally transmitting life lessons by producing ‘make-believe’ representations of the world not as we know it—but as we do not know it. In terms of species preservation and the will to live (a philosophical problem that was of deep concern to Camus), narrative fictions, I argue, can prevent us from taking major individual and species risks, i.e., actually confronting a snake or climbing a mountain in order to learn what is dangerous or actually falling in love to learn about its wonderful and/or problematic consequences. Fiction achieves this life-preserving objective via gripping ‘life-like’ representations of crisis situations. In this sense, they are quite a bit like flight simulators, training us without danger in survival skills. As we know, most children have told their first lie and have learnt to evoke ‘contexts of disbelief’ by the age of four (see Talwar & Lee, 2002; R. B. Nair, 1985, 1991, 2010, 2018a; R. Nair, 2010). Fictions, we could argue, are socially sanctioned and pleasurable forms of ‘the lie’ that serve the purpose of guiding us from childhood onwards in the arts of both bodily and cultural survival.

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  Gillian Beer’s (1983) book Darwin’s Plots, which wonderfully connects Darwin’s evolutionary discourse to George Eliot’s novels and other nineteenth-century fictions of the period, is relevant in this respect, as are Michael Ruse’s explorations in Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (2016).

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Think of what happens to us when we listen to an engrossing but ‘false’ story— our pulse rates go up, our eyes fixate, our palms sweat. In fact, we have many of the same reactions that we would have if we were in the real situations that these stories depict. This is a chief reason why fictions (epics, myths, novels) are discourse universals, found in every known human culture and why they remain a chief mode of communicative interaction. Fictional stories, as a genre, are in fact cognitively designed to probe into contexts, present conflicting hypothesis, examine causal evidence, and come to some resolution. In this sense, stories are a species of ‘natural theory’ and embody an instinctive research methodology. Narrative is proto-theory and proto-method. As I have argued elsewhere (see Nair, 2014), the history of cultural evolution has worked by introducing us to ‘primitive’ but foundational versions of biological theory (how the leopard got its spots); political theory (Robin Hood was a revolutionary who challenged the oppressive class structures of a feudal society); moral theory (Cordelia’s ‘sin’ was to plainly tell the ‘truth’ and Lear’s to stubbornly refuse to hear it); aesthetic theory (the mirror on the wall in Snow White proved itself a dispassionate judge of beauty); and so forth. These stories perform, in essence, a function not dissimilar to the cultural ‘work’ done by, say, Darwinian theory for biology or Marxist theory for political science or Christianity for ethics or Platonic theory for aesthetics. Naturally, this process constitutes hard intellectual labor. At the same time, fictions sugarcoat this hard cognitive labor we undertake uncomplainingly each day by constantly appealing to our emotions, thus giving readers and listeners the seductive emotional practice so necessary to cultural survival (Nair, 2002, 2020a, b). I believe that Camus makes precisely this point when he radically reconfigures the Sisyphus myth, usually a metaphor for having to engage in the same repetitive activity of rolling a stone up a hill forever as a punishment for having offended the gods, by asking us to imagine Sisyphus happy even as he endures his punishment. Would this not take away the very point of the ‘suffering’ inflicted on him? I will return to this point about the ethical valence of human suffering and its literary representation in the next and final section of this essay. At this point, I must reiterate that narratives overall, fictional as well as factual, are structures that convert talk into text and raw experience into reusable cognitions of memory and feeling. They offer us a powerful linguistic framework to explain and internalize the ‘problem of others in the world’, teaching empathy and social survival. Children across the world arrive at a foundational knowledge of their cultures, which includes imbibing cultural prejudices, via stories and myths (Nair, 2002, 2015). We shall note again in the next section that it is the death of a child from plague that most closely binds together in an emotional embrace the warring factions of religion and science, represented in Camus’ novel by Dr. Rieux, the doctor, and Father Paneloux, the priest. But for now, to turn briefly to the work of the sociolinguist William Labov (1972) who further suggests in a now classic paper that all narratives, fiction or factual, display in their ‘full form’ a six-part structure that he found among African American youth narratives describing the first person protagonists finding themselves in ‘danger of death’ situations. These consist of the Abstract (that pertains to the theme of the story); the Orientation (that describes Reprinted from the journal

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scene, time, and other contextual details); the Complicating Action (that focuses on the narrative crisis); the Evaluation (that brings out emotional reactions of the characters in the story as well as listeners to the story); the Resolution (that resolves the narrative crisis); and the Coda (that returns the narrative time to the present so that the audience is freed from the grip that the story has on him or her). While this is not the place to go into a detailed explication of Labov’s ‘universal’ narrative schema, it is worth noting three points that he makes: one, that these typical aspects of a story do not come bunched together but are spread throughout the text giving it texture and emotional resonance; two, that while these six features comprise the ‘full form’ of a story, the only ‘essential’ part of narrative among these six is the element of ‘complicating action’ or crisis; and three, that ‘danger of death’ stories are always the most tellable. As he puts it, it is always relevant to say, ‘I saw a man fall off a bridge today’. Labov’s contention is that the idea of death—to my mind, of all species happenings the most inevitable as well as the most unimaginable—does indeed seem essential to the construction of iconic myths in most cultures. My further argument is that thoughts of death are prototype emotion boosters in two basic ways. They arouse in us feelings of both speculative curiosity (prompting questions like: what lies beyond this earthly compass?) and of knee-jerk fear, panic, love, etc. (encouraging the query: what’s most precious—present delights or the promise of an afterlife?). With this theoretical background in mind, a brief reading of The Plague as a representative modern narrative concerning religious belief versus atheistic skepticism during pandemic times seems in order. Next day, by dint of a persistence that many thought ill-advised, Rieux persuaded the authorities to convene a health committee at the Prefect’s office… The Prefect greeted them amiably enough, but one could see his nerves were on edge. “Let’s make a start, gentlemen,” he said. “Need I review the situation?” Richard thought that wasn’t necessary. He and his colleagues were acquainted with the facts. The only question was what measures should be adopted. “The question,” old Castel cut in almost rudely, “is to know whether it’s plague or not.” Two or three of the doctors present protested. The others seemed to hesitate… Rieux, who had said nothing so far, was asked for his opinion. “We are dealing,” he said, “with a fever of a typhoidal nature, accompanied by vomiting and buboes. I have incised these buboes and had the pus analyzed; our laboratory analyst believes he has identified the plague bacillus. But I am bound to add that there are specific modifications that don’t quite tally with the classical description of the plague bacillus.” Richard pointed out that this justified a policy of wait-and-see; anyhow, it would be wise to await the statistical report on the series of analyses that had been going on for several days. “When a microbe,” Rieux said, “after a short intermission can quadruple in three days’ time the volume of the spleen, can swell the mesenteric ganglia to the size of an orange and give them the consistency of gruel, a policy of wait-and-see is, to say the least of it, unwise. The foci of infection are steadily extending. Judging by the rapidity with which the disease is spreading, it may well, unless we can stop it, kill off half the town before two months are out.

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That being so, it has small importance whether you call it plague or some rare kind of fever. The important thing is to prevent its killing off half the population of this town.” Richard said it was a mistake to paint too gloomy a picture, and, moreover, the disease hadn’t been proved to be contagious; indeed, relatives of his patients, living under the same roof, had escaped it. “But others have died,” Rieux observed. “It doesn’t matter to me,” Rieux said, “how you phrase it. My point is that we should not act as if there were no likelihood that half the population would be wiped out; for then it would be.” Followed by scowls and protestations, Rieux left the committee-room. Some minutes later, as he was driving down a back street redolent of fried fish and urine, a woman screaming in agony, her groin dripping blood, stretched out her arms toward him. (1960, 46-49) This passage of less than 450 words contains examples of all five classes of speech act in its very opening: the directive (‘Let’s make a start, gentlemen’); the expressive (‘The Prefect greeted them amiably enough’); the commissive (‘Rieux persuaded them’); and the declarative (‘The question… is to know whether it is the plague or not’)—but it is the representative (‘We are dealing… with a fever of a typhoidal nature, accompanied by vomiting and buboes.’) which dominates  (see Searle, 1969, on speech act classes and Searle et  al.,  1980, on speech act analysis). Indeed, it could be said that this passage—and the novel as a whole—strictly belongs to the representative class of speech act, as it is descriptive fiction (see Austin, 1962, on the use of ‘connecting particles’ in genres such as the novel).9 What is worthy of note, though, are the psychological objectives accomplished by the representations in this passage. We witness here the reinforcement of character types in animated dialogue: Old Castel is irascible and rude; Richard is cautious, a non-committal ‘wait-and-see’ man; the Prefect is uncertain and worried; the doctors as a group hesitant and indecisive. The only person who emerges as a strong-willed, persistent man, one who looks the facts in the face and does not flinch, one not concerned with the form of words but the consequences of actions, is Dr. Rieux. The novel therefore implies that he is the one whom we as readers can trust most when a future course of action is to be charted out. He is the one who, as a man of science and an out-an-out humanist, appears to be really inoculated against the plague since his knowledge of this ‘rare kind of fever’ is deep and empirical. It is in his blood, so to speak. The next section will return to this issue when we discuss the last predictive sentences in The Plague and the evolutionary importance of the ‘seer’ in the discourse of religion, but there is one other feature of this fictional representation that bears mentioning before we move on. This is the manifest affective load the passage carries: nerves are ‘on edge’, death is an ever-present ‘gloomy’ specter and ‘scowls and protestations’ abound.

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Most emotionally disturbing of all is a device Camus uses very effectively throughout the novel: a single qualia-laden representative sentence ‘coda’ at the end of chapters that throws into sharp relief, without comment, the trauma and total horror of the situation being discussed. Here, it is that sudden appearance out of the dark in Rieux’s path of a woman ‘screaming in agony… her groin dripping blood’. This image appears to imaginatively encapsulate both Rieux’s fearful ‘other’ and his intimate ‘self’. Returning now to Dennett, commenting on the interpretative role of the other in fictional texts as he explains his idea of the self as a gravitational center for cognitive activity: A center of gravity is just an abstractum. It’s just a fictional object…. [Similarly] a self is also an abstract object, a theorist’s fiction. The theory is not particle physics but what we might call a branch of people-physics; it is more soberly known as a phenomenology or hermeneutics, or soulscience (Geisteswissenschaft). The physicist does an interpretation, if you like, of a chair and its behavior, and comes up with the theoretical abstraction of a center of gravity, which is then very useful in characterizing the behaviour of the chair in the future, under a wide variety of conditions. The hermeneuticist or phenomenologist—or anthropologist—sees some rather more complicated things moving about in the world—human beings and animals—and is faced with a similar problem of interpretation… The theoretical problem of self-interpretation is at least as difficult and important as the problem of otherinterpretation…. Now how does a self differ from a center of gravity? It is a much more complicated concept. I will try to elucidate it via an analogy with another sort of fictional object: fictional characters in literature. Pick up Moby Dick and open it up to page one. It says, “Call me Ishmael.” Call whom Ishmael? Call Melville Ishmael? No. Call Ishmael Ishmael. Melville has created a fictional character named Ishmael. As you read the book you learn about Ishmael, about his life, about his beliefs and desires, his acts and attitudes. You learn a lot more about Ishmael than Melville ever explicitly tells you. Some of it you can read in by implication. Some of it you can read in by extrapolation. (1992, 12) In this passage, Dennett makes four points that reinforce connections between literary representation and philosophically oriented cognitive research on narrative. The first, by now familiar, reminder he has for us is that there is no special location where the ‘self’ is to be found. The self does not reside exclusively in the brain or in culture, although it certainly is an epiphenomenal creation of brain processes in which millions of chemical transmissions across synapses together contrive to give us a strong illusion of self. This illusion of selfhood is important in humans because it then serves as a focus of interpretation—which brings us to Dennett’s second idea, namely, the juxtaposition of ‘self-interpretation’ with ‘other’ interpretation. Dennett’s third argument is that ‘theories’ about the self help explain the future behavior of selves, that is, they have predictive power—and this remark is obviously related to my own ideas about narratives as ‘proto-theory’, while his fourth and final idea is that fictions are never wholly explicit.

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Literary narratives, including religious and quasi-religious narratives such as those of the modernist Camus or the postmodernist Salman Rushdie, as I see them, strikingly bring together the ‘narcissistic’ desire of an author to reflect on his own life and the ‘altruistic’ urge of a storyteller to gift his readers/listeners pleasure and self-knowledge.10 When Dennett reminds us that literary narratives work by ‘implication and extrapolation’, I interpret this as the suggestion that even the simplest narratives need the gravitational pull of a ‘moral’ to render them acceptable and reusable in other contexts and conversations. A primary task of narrative is to underwrite these shared human premises. Yet, because narratives are intrinsically indeterminate, there is always infinite scope for further interpretation and moral choices. The next and final section considers the second and third features of ‘disbelief’ argued for at the beginning of this essay: that is, the confounding of the powerful ‘fiction of atheism’ with the equally strong ‘atheistic’ impulse of fiction in cultural texts that represent grave ‘danger of death’ situations.

Divinity: ‘Today the Truth Is a Red Spear Pointing Towards Salvation’ A striking feature of The Plague is that it is ‘multicultural’ in a very obvious sense since it is set, not in Paris or other imposing center of western civilization, but in Oran, a real town in the French colonial territory of Algiers. Oran’s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its ‘ordinariness’; yet, it is here that the ‘extraordinariness’ of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the precise sorts of ‘universal’ inquiries into ‘what it means to be human’ that, my paper argues, motivate alike the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction. In one of the most dramatic scenes in The Plague, the priest Paneloux, ‘a man of a passionate fiery temperament’ and widely respected in the community for his scholarly integrity, delivers a sermon on the subject of the pandemic that has mysteriously struck the town of Oran—and although the ordinary folk of Oran might normally have preferred to let ‘sea-bathing compete seriously with churchgoing’ on Sundays, they recognize that they are living through an ‘exceptional’ situation and thus, despite dripping rainy weather, a ‘huge congregation’ flock into church for Father Paneloux’s sermon. And the priest does not disappoint. He had a powerful, rather emotional delivery, which carried to a great distance, and when he launched at the congregation his opening phrase in clear, emphatic tones: “Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it” there was a flutter that extended to the crowd massed in the rain outside the porch. (1960, 90)

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  See Nair (2011a) for an extended analysis of the discourse of religion and literature, with several literary texts such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and David Lodge’s Thinks, analyzed in terms of the narrative of evolutionary biology and the emotive notion of a ‘threat’ from without that is both morally and physically destructive.

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Thus, Paneloux begins by pointing his ecclesiastical finger directly at the town’s people. They are the guilty ones; they bear responsibility for the ghastly ‘calamity’ that had struck their inconspicuous humdrum town and although the atheist Dr. Rieux may feel that the priest’s sermon fails to follow any ‘strict logic’ and depends greatly on oratorical ploys such as detailed references to several sites of sin (the plague of Egypt, Gomorrah, Job, the zeal of the Abyssinian Christians and so on), others like M. Othon, the magistrate, assure Dr. Rieux that the preacher’s arguments are ‘absolutely irrefutable’. And so it is that Paneloux is able to deliver his coup de grace in a ‘calm, almost matter-of-fact voice’: Many of you are wondering, I know, what I am leading up to. I wish to lead you to the truth …Today the truth is a command. It is a red spear sternly pointing to the narrow path, the one way of salvation. (1960, 94) Dr. Rieux remarks that it was ‘hard to say if this sermon had any effect on our townsfolk’; however, it was ‘noteworthy… that this Sunday of the sermon marked the beginning of something like a widespread panic in the town’. He then ends the chapter with his usual device of a striking narrative coda. A few days after the sermon, when Rieux, on his way to one of the outlying districts of the town, was discussing the change with Grand, he collided in the darkness with a man who was standing in the middle of the pavement swaying from side to side without trying to advance. At the same moment the streetlamps, which were being lit later and later in the evening, went on suddenly, and a lamp just behind Rieux and his companion threw its light full on the man’s face. His eyes were shut and he was laughing soundlessly. Big drops of sweat were rolling down the face convulsed with silent merriment. “A lunatic at large,” Grand observed. Rieux took his arm and was shepherding him on when he noticed that Grand was trembling violently. “If things go on as they are going,” Rieux remarked, “the whole town will be a madhouse.” (1947, 97) Madness and truth, light, and darkness: these are concepts most pertinent to the analysis of narrative crisis. Austin, the progenitor of the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of speech acts discussed earlier, contended that, in everyday circumstances: under the heading ‘truth’ what we, in fact, have is not a simple quality nor a relation, not indeed any one thing, but rather a whole dimension of criticism... there is a whole lot of things to be considered and weighed in this dimension alone—the facts, yes, but also the situation of the speaker, his purpose in speaking, his hearer, questions of precision and etc. (1962, 21-22) As even the brief passages from The Plague quoted in this essay show, Austin’s latitudinous description of the truth would greatly suit a writer of literary fiction, enabling him or her to create a detailed experiential world and comfortably ‘live without god’ within the pages of his or her narrative. In short, ‘God’ if s/he appeared at all in a fictional text would likely be a product of imaginative excesses of disbelief while imaginative parsimony of belief would typify the narrative of religion. Religious narratives, that is, just like the narratives of science, would seem to

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prefer a stricter view of ‘the truth’, even when it appears counterintuitive, counterfactual, or ‘mad’. Indeed, those interested in ‘the religious experience’ among evolutionary theorists tend to argue that religious narratives seem to have provided an ancient cultural resource whereby strange, estranging, ideas could be explored as ‘revealed’ truth without fear or debilitating anxiety, since they were told under the protective, homogenizing, umbrella of priestly sanction. Religious stories provided strong community resources that could be used to both protect and/or punish, just as we observed in Father Paneloux’s sermon. Evolutionary theorists Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan, thus argue that: A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally-selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival—such as predators, protectors and prey—but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. (2004, 713) According to this theory, an ‘agency detector’ originally intended to spot predators in the course of hominid survival is also set in motion during a religious experience in which a subject ‘sees’, for example, an angel in the trees or ‘hears’ a thunderous God speaking to him. As I see it, this sort of evolutionary explanation is relevant to our understanding of literary production and its sociological effects in that the seer’s voice, like that of a literary author is quite unique and requires hermeneutical interpretation. In the words of Atran and Norezayan, that is, ‘these…metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions’ to fundamental existential problems. Hence, no social group can afford to weed out the religious experience and the seer—or indeed the literary author—altogether. A seer’s ‘vision’, for instance, may serve to keep the flock together in times of crisis or offer a version of ‘life beyond life’ that is a crucial psychological counter to the near universal fear of death in all human communities. That is why the role of the evolutionary ‘agency detector’ is so crucial; its existence among the human species enables them to build communities that share foundational beliefs without question and visualize a common future for themselves. For the only species on the planet which possesses the linguistic gift of ‘displacement’—that is, the ability to summon up scenarios that do not exist in the here and now—such a device could well prove invaluable to survival in a competitive, often depressing, world. Ronald Pies, by profession a doctor like the fictional Rieux and in real life a clinical professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, analyzing narratives by depressives, writes: The inherent problem in positing a depressive trigger is that we humans are famous for constructing explanatory narratives, even when the facts of the situation are not clear. Indeed, in her book, Narrative Gravity, linguistics professor Rukmini Nair argues that human beings have a genetic drive to fabricate narratives that serve our emotional needs. (2009, 21)

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And it is here that we return to the notion of the religious ‘agency detectors’ propounded by Atran and Norenzayan. My thesis in this essay is that when old motifs such as, for example, ‘Satan’ or ‘Sodom’ enter public discourse anew they do so in circumstances where the humdrum has been rudely disrupted by a destabilizing event like the plague or a virus, disbelief is rampant, and trust is severely eroded— or, in Pies’ words, ‘the facts of the situation are not clear.’ It is in these situations of widespread social anxiety that both seers and skeptics as interpreters of the times are most needed. Just as a seer might once have interpreted ‘voices in wind, faces on clouds’, both religious leaders and radical authors (such as Camus reinterpreting the ancient myth of Sisyphus in the troubled period of the postwar) are the twin interpreters of crisis in periods of grave social turmoil—the one from a religious perspective where God is the sole arbiter of human destiny and the other from an atheist viewpoint where humans are in charge of their own fates. Literary fictions, with their great scope for interpretative expansion, underwrite this great evolutionary debate. Camus, for example, can be regarded as an author committedly creating this ‘wider range of possible interaction’ and in the process generating considerable social perturbation. Insofar as he infuses the received narratives of religious discourse, and their time-worn garb with a new literary energy that speaks directly to the times and engages with contemporary intellectual and social dilemmas (see Spencer, 2014), he may paradoxically be said to contribute, in evolutionary terms, to keeping the religious conversation alive, since it abides everywhere including within the interstices of the basic structures of human institutions such as the family. Thus, Richard Dawkins argues, in his book The God Delusion (2006), that children have a deep-seated psychological tendency to take on their parent’s beliefs within families. Differing from Atran and Norenzayan on the role played by ‘agency detectors’ in religious evolution, Dawkins fixes not on the unique psychology of the seer, but instead on what, according to him, is the universal orientation towards obedience among human children, which makes them highly vulnerable to the ‘mind viruses’ designed to quell any potential rebellion against the prevailing parental/patriarchal order. Society, Dawkins maintains, actually encourages such absolute loyalty by labeling children with the religion of their parents: ‘A child is not [naturally] a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents’ (2006, 382). In an even earlier essay called ‘Viruses of the Mind’ (1993), Dawkins also remarks that ‘a human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people’ and pursuing an epidemiological metaphor in that preliminary paper takes the view that the institutional hotbeds of religion and science in particular offer fertile breeding grounds for ‘mind viruses’ among the impressionable, such as children. These fields, he argued, take in the gullible but also draw in the most profound of thinkers (see also Grayling, 2013). Camus would not disagree with this view. It is not by accident, after all, that he places a child dying of the plague at the dark center of his novel in a situation where both Dr. Rieux and Father Paneloux feel equally helpless—and thus come emotionally closest to each other. Here are Camus’ masterly descriptions of the two men by the dying child’s bedside:

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Now and then Rieux took his pulse, less because this served any purpose than as an escape from his utter helplessness and when he closed his eyes, he seemed to feel its tumult mingling with the fever of his own blood. And then, at one with the tortured child, he struggled to sustain him with all the remaining strength of his own body. But, linked for a few moments, the rhythms of their heartbeats soon fell apart, the child escaped him, and again he knew his impotence. Paneloux gazed down at the small mouth, fouled with the sordes of the plague and pouring out the angry death-cry that has sounded through the ages of mankind. He sank on his knees, and all present found it natural to hear him say in a voice hoarse but clearly audible across that nameless, never ending wail: “My God, spare this child!” (1960, 206) It is such moving textual moments that attest the power of literature as an empathy generator, one that can indeed enable, even if momentarily, the atheistic doctor and the religiously absolutist priest to step into the spaces of each other’s disbelief. If there is a sudden moment of illumination in fiction, that jolt of recognition that Aristotle terms ‘anagnorisis’, it comes after much struggle and is a stark revelation of human inadequacy. In common, then, between the institutional fields of science and religion—but not so much literary fiction—is that both disallow a skeptical disbelief in their basic premises and each offers individuals specialized, doctrinal and yet capacious and social ‘niches’ for a. community member-shipping, and b. pattern-recognition. As a result, emotional, ethical, and aesthetic needs are simultaneously satisfied when any individual hosts mental ‘viruses’ from these areas. Religious and scientific narratives comfortingly repeat familiar semantic motifs that make them shore up our aesthetic intuitions and, at the same time, serve to strengthen our belief in the ethical norms that guide us. In this respect, Camus’ humanism seems broadly similar to what Tagore on the Indian subcontinent called ‘The Religion of Man’ (1931, see also Nair, 2017b and c), in preference to the hypothesis of an unforgiving, monotheistic God. The Tagore-Einstein dialogues of 1930 (see Ray, 1995 below) as well as Einstein’s 1941 wartime aphorism that ‘science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind’ are also pertinent to these debates about science and religion being  related discourses because each seeks an underlying unified explanation of observed phenomena;  Einstein  (1930), for instance, expresses this belief in a most unequivocal fashion when he writes, ‘I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research’. Strikingly, too, Einstein uses exactly that ‘universal’ metaphor mentioned in my opening section of moving from dark to light in his struggle to find the ‘general theory of relativity’: In the light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternation of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into light – only those who have experienced it can understand it. (see Guilini and Straumann below, 2006)

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In his interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus, Camus  (1965), as we know, suggests that in an absurd universe that has no purpose, the only ‘rational’ choice seems to be to commit suicide. But he doggedly resists this dark, defeatist solution, choosing instead to imagine the impossible through a philosophy of fiction—a happy Sisyphus, or ordinary people like the fictional inhabitants of Oran on the treadmill of a ‘pointless’ human existence but nevertheless able to delight in living. It is, he seems to conclude, better to commit philosophical suicide rather than real suicide. This is the bedrock of Camus’ atheistic humanism, to be good to others as well as to oneself despite knowing that a force such as the plague bacillus—or indeed the coronavirus of today—is ultimately undefeatable and perhaps the truest measure both of the immortality of humankind and the mortality of God. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town [because the plague has gone], Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. (1960, 297)

References Ade, P. A. R., Aghanim, N., Armitage-Caplan, C., et al. (2013). Planck 2013 results. I. Overview of products and scientific results – Table 9. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1303, 5062. Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 713–770. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Clarendon Press. Beer, G. (1983). Darwin’s plots: Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-century fiction. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Camus, A. (1965). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays, trans. Justin O’Brien. Hamish Hamilton. Camus, A. (1960). The Plague, trans. Penguin Books. Camus, A. (1970). Selected essays and notebooks. Penguin. Chomsky, N. (1997) The ‘Noise’ interview with Fred Branfman, Hotwired 1997.  http://​www.​choms​ky.​ info/​inter​views/​19970​2-.​htm. Accessed 28 June 2021. Churchland, P. S., & Churchland, P. M. (1990). Could a machine think? Scientific American, 262(1), 32–37. Dawkins, R. (1993). Viruses of the mind. In B. Dahlbom (Ed.), Dennett and his critics: Demystifying mind (pp. 13–27). Blackwell. Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Bantam Press. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Little Brown. Dennett, D. C. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. In F. Kessel, P. Cole, & D. Johnson (Eds.), Self and consciousness: Multiple perspectives (pp. 103–114). Erlbaum. Einstein, A. (1930). Religion and science. New York Times Magazine, 1–4. Frege, G. B. (1979). ‘Logic’ in Frege, 126–151. Frege, G. B. (1984). In McGuinness (Ed.),  Collected papers on mathematics, logic, and philosophy. Blackwell. Giulini, D., & Straumann, N. (2006). Einstein’s impact on the physics of the twentieth century. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 37, 115–173.

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