Chinese Religious Diversities and Philosophy of Religion

Statue of the Buddha triumphing over Mara (c.850-900, India)

 San Francisco Asian Art Museum

Earlier this month, I took part in my first face-to-face conference since 2019--the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. I've given a few papers during the interim, but those conferences have all been virtual. 

The SACP conference took place at the University of San Francisco. As I walked across the campus, I saw a Pro-Palestinian solidarity demonstration being held; I paused and listened to a student's speech, remembering anti-war and anti-Apartheid protests I had taken part in while an undergrad at Occidental College. 

This was, of course, quite different from the milieu of last SACP conference I had attended in 2017 at Beida (北大) in Beijing. Most of the papers at that conference had to do with Chinese philosophy, as one might imagine. (My paper was on Wittgenstein and Xunzi.) In San Francisco, the papers ranged across South and East Asian philosophical traditions, with a significant amount of engagement with Buddhist philosophy in particular; I was especially impressed by a pair of presentations on Buddhist ethics. 

For this conference, I presented a paper titled, "Chinese Religious Diversities and Philosophy of Religion." It's a paper that has long been in development. For the last seven years, I have been teaching at CUHK-Shenzhen, and one of my standard courses is Philosophy of Religion. Given the context, I approach that class in a globally-engaged, critical way. After spending three weeks getting acquainted with some of the central approaches in the history of Western philosophy of religion (especially theistic arguments and arguments concerning the logic of divine attributes), we spend the rest of the semester problematizing that approach and expanding together our understanding of what philosophy of religion could be in a global context. This involves explorations of South and East Asian philosophies and religions and their respective concerns, concepts, and arguments.

Wishing Ribbons at Hongfa Temple (弘法寺) in Shenzhen

Over the years, I have had numerous conversations with students on forms of religious engagement in China, and out of these conversations--and my continual study of Wittgenstein's writings--came the idea for this paper. Essentially, the paper is about challenging expectations about what religiosity in China is (and thus what religiosity may be in many other contexts). A key idea in the paper is that preconceptions about what religion must be and must entail can prevent scholars (and students) from seeing some of the ways in which people in China engage with religious ideas, practices, and institutions. Inspired especially by Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," the paper challenges common assumptions in philosophy of religion by advancing five themes about religions in a Chinese context: 

(1) The relevance of the reception and use of concepts of religion to globally engaged philosophy of religion; 

(2) The plurality of ways that religiosities may be combined; 

(3) The pragmatic ways that people may adopt religious practices, beliefs, values, and institutions; 

(4) The plausible combination of atheism with non-theistic religious ideas and practices; and, 

(5) The forms of state power over social manifestations of religions as well as what even may be classified as a religion. 

I got some good questions on definitions of "religion" and "atheism," but overall my sense was that this is a paper that has an audience. It was challenging to condense the manuscript into a conference draft. (My full draft is already over 8,000 words.) I have some ideas on what to do next with the paper, but first I've got to get through the rest of the semester.

As indicated above, the paper isn't just about China; the phenomena of Chinese religious diversities challenge several assumptions that remain fairly common in philosophy of religion today. First, there is the assumption that there is a single, relatively simple to grasp concept of religion that is capable of capturing what everyone means by the term (usually something to the effect that that religions essentially have to do with belief in supernatural beings). Second, there’s the view that avowed atheism is logically or existentially inconsistent with the holding of religious ideas or performing of religious rituals. Third, there is the prevailing perspective that religious observance/practice/belonging is just one sort of thing and always is mutually exclusive with other forms of religiosity rather than being potentially pluralistic. Fourth, there is the intellectualist presupposition that participation in religious rituals logically implies belief (or should imply belief, if the participation is sincere). Fifth, there’s the autonomy assumption that religions simply are what they are separate from the political or cultural influence and interference. Taking note of Chinese religious diversities reveals in vivid detail the distorting impact of assumptions like these. 

SACP 2023 Conference Program

Philosophical Problems in Diversified Philosophy of Religion

Liu Wei, Liberation No. 1 (2013) at the Rubell Museum in Miami

I've recently been delving into the history of Wittgenstein's reception in philosophy of religion, and this led me to reread D. Z. Phillips's The Concept of Prayer (1965). A paragraph at the very beginning of Chapter One caught my eye:

An interesting thing about this metaphor is that Phillips imagines philosophers of religion continuing to work on the Tower of Babel after, I suppose, God has confused the people's language and scattered them. In this circumstance, any builders remaining would have a difficult time communicating with each other. It's not clear from Genesis, at least, how extensive the linguistic confusion is among the people, but if we read the passage as a polemic against Babylonia, then perhaps the point is not so much that God confuses the languages as that God disperses the univocal Babylonian tower builders. And thus, our world is a world of linguistic differentiation and geographic dispersion of people. Perhaps Phillips's passage and the myth it invokes registers the idea of human beings having diverse projects, languages, and societies (and, of course, worldviews).

Model of Ziggurat at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin

This sort of "dispersed" dynamic is at play in a good many subfields of philosophy. Comparative philosophy operates this way. The reasons why philosophers build connections or emphasize differences across areas or traditions of philosophy can be themselves quite varied. Perhaps the same could be said of history of philosophy. Yet, even if that's the case to some extent with these areas, it is quite strongly characteristic of philosophy of religion, and much more so today than in Phillips's time. 

Recent decades have seen an acceleration of efforts to diversify philosophy of religion from the more or less Christian theistic framework found prominently in analytic and continental approaches through the twentieth century to a more broad set of concerns which is inclusive of a wide diversity of religious and philosophical approaches. What was problematic in such earlier work was the tendency to suppose that what is true of Christianity would also be true of other religions (i.e., that Christianity was prototypical of religion). 

So, just as Phillips thought it prudent to frame his particular vision for what "philosophy can say about religion," it is a good idea to describe for one's audiences what one is going to try to do, what problems one will address, and what ends animate one's philosophical work. In this way, I was pleased to see Phillips quote one of my favorite remarks from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

I like this remark because it indicates that philosophical problems leave one with that sense of being a bit conceptually lost and also that if one finds oneself lost with respect to the use of (otherwise familiar) language, then it may be a philosophical problem that one is facing. Thus philosophy of religion may focus its attention not merely on "standard" or "classic" problems but also on those areas of discourse concerning religiosities that may leave one feeling uncertain or unclear about how to make one's "way about." In this way, philosophy of religion can be adaptive to its many contexts. This Wittgensteinian insight guides me in both teaching and writing about diversified philosophy of religion.