Rethinking Philosophy of Religion with Wittgenstein -- on the metaphor of landscapes

My new book, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion with Wittgenstein, is coming out shortly, so over the next few weeks, I will be posting here a little bit about the book. 

Today, I want to write about a metaphor I use in the book, juxtaposing religious landscapes in order to see deeply what is there and to shift one's perspective so as to see what otherwise may be missed. I draw the metaphor from a remark Wittgenstein makes in the preface to Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein writes of the impossibility of putting the various remarks that are collected in the book into some sort of unified structure:

After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination. -- And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. -- The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys. (PI, Preface - trans. by Ancombe, Hacker, and Schulte)

"The very nature of the investigation" is related to why it proved impossible for Wittgenstein to put the remarks into some sort of "single track." His prefatory remarks suggest that a linear presentation of the ideas of the Investigations would somehow misrepresent or give only a partial representation of those philosophical insights. 

View of the landscape around the village of Xizhou (Yunnan Province, China)

When one approaches philosophy of religion with an eye to religious diversities, this metaphor of philosophical investigation as sketching and juxtaposing landscapes directs one's attention, first, to the background contexts of the things people say or do in connection with religions. The sorts of phenomena that one might try to contextualize within a landscape could include not just claims expressing belief in some sort of ultimacy or ethical value (and arguments used to advance such beliefs or values) but also varied aspects of religious practice or identification. For example, Wittgenstein is often keen to point out that religious beliefs and practices should be interpreted in a way that recognizes how they are interconnected with a whole way of life rather than as discrete aspects of a person's thinking or acting.

A second way of thinking about landscapes of religiosity includes contexts in which various people may label something as being or not being a religion. A key example in the book is when Confucianism is classified as/as-not a religion, but ascription of religion-status happens frequently in polemical discourse in connection with political views and actions. If one's commitment to a political party or goal is labeled as religious, this is frequently a way of saying that that commitment is beyond reasoning. This is not to say that religious and political commitments do not overlap. Clearly, they do in some cases (e.g., Christian nationalism), but classifying an opponent's view as "religious" can be also an indirect way of saying the view is irrational or unworthy of rational consideration. Classifications of Confucianism as a religion have served a number of different purposes. (On this, Anna Sun's book, Confucianism as a World Religion, is indispensable.)

View of Shanghai Confucian Temple

A third way in which the metaphor may be helpful is in drawing one's attention to ways in which religions are made manifest in contexts of power  (e.g., ideologies or institutions of state atheism, secularism, or white supremacism). These landscape features can circumscribe possible expressions of religions in their contexts. Sometimes, this is because a governmental system has an operating conception of religion, which then sets boundaries prescriptively for what religions may be (e.g., in China, we might consider the divide between private and public, the construction of religious sites, the training of religious clergy, the viability of religious practices in public, the permissible forms of religious education, and so on). In the case of the ideology of white supremacism, Christians have overtly supported the ideology through, for example, Biblical arguments for racism, segregation, or enslavement. Even white Christians who may not support white supremacism overtly may be reluctant to challenge it openly lest they lose privileges that come with compliance (consider, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s calling out white Protestant ministers in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail").

It's important to keep in mind that landscapes function not at three discrete levels but that they interact with each other. Contexts of ascription of religion-status as well as contexts of power can influence what sorts of phenomena relating to religion might be the object of one's investigations. For example, the book explores two points of focus--the very idea of philosophy of religion in China and the intertwining of religion and racism in the United States; out of this juxtaposition, new insights about one focus may arise from examination of the other. In my next post, I'll elaborate on how Wittgenstein's philosophy is helpful for noticing easily overlooked aspects of these two points of focus.

Floral wreath presented at the Martin Luther King Memorial, Washington, DC 

(60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)