Tag Archives: atheism

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Growing ambitions: Philosophy of ritual/deontics and philosophy of religion

What I today call philosophy of ritual comprises a complex set of philosophical approaches seeking to solve questions and problems arising in connection with ritual. Different philosophers of ritual aim at reconstructing rituals in a highly structured, rigorous manner, curbing religious metaphors to the strict discipline of their linguistic analysis. As a result, they examine religious texts according to exegetical rules to extract all meaning and intelligibility from them. Another set of philosophical questions connected with rituals concerns duty. How are duties conveyed? How can one avoid contradictions within texts prescribing duties? I started using deontic logic, as initially developed by G.H. von Wright, to formalise contrary-to-duty situations and think about commands, especially thanks to the collaboration with the amazing Agata Ciabattoni and her brave team at the Theory and Logic Group of the TU in Vienna. Ciabattoni had not heard of logic apart from the Euro-American mathematical logic. Before meeting her, I had not heard, let alone worked on intuitionistic logic nor on fuzzy logic. By joining forces, we could explore new formalisations to make sense of seemingly puzzling texts (see mimamsa.logic.at).

Working with people outside one’s comfort zone is demanding, since one cannot assume any shared research background and needs to explain each element of one’s research. However, exactly this deconstructive operation means that one needs to rethink each step analytically, often being able to identify for the first time problems and resources one had overlooked.

For instance, our ongoing work on permissions in ritual is going to highlight the advantages of the Mīmāṃsā approach in denying the interdefinability of the operators of permission, prescription and prohibition and thus avoiding the ambiguity of the former (which in common linguistic use as well as in much Euro-American deontic logic can mean “permitted, but discouraged”, “permitted and encouraged” as well as “permitted and neutral” and in Euro-American deontic logic even “permitted and prescribed”). By contrast, permissions in Mīmāṃsā are always “rather-not” permissions, whereas what is encouraged though not prescribed is rather covered by different operators.

Within the next weeks, I plan to put the finishing touches and submit to a publisher a first book dedicated to deontics and philosophy of ritual not in the Euro-American or Chinese worlds. The book, entitled Maṇḍana on Commands, aims at providing both scholars of philosophy and of deontics in general a comprehensive access to the thought and work of a key (but unacknowledged) deontic thinker and his attempt to reduce commands to statements about the instrumental value of actions against the background of its philosophical alternatives. I plan to continue working on deontics and philosophy of ritual with an intercultural perspective and with cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Within Philosophy of Religion, I aim primarily at using an intercultural perspective to rethink the categories of “god” and the connected category ofatheism”. Scholars who have not thought critically about the topic, might think that there is only one concept of “god” that is discussed within philosophy, and that this is the omnipotent and omniscient Lord of rational theology, whose existence is necessary and independent of anything They created. But this is not the case in European philosophy (especially in the parts of it which have been more influenced by Jewish philosophy) and it is certainly not so outside of European philosophy. For instance, Tamil and Bengali philosophers of religion will think about and worship a personal and relational God, one for whom existence is not intrinsically necessary, but dependent on His (Her) relation to His (Her) devotees. Similarly, looking at Buddhist authors allows one to see how atheism can be constructed in a religious context, namely as the negation of one (or multiple) concept(s) ofgod”, typically focusing on the negation of mythological deities and the contradictions they entail. I plan to submit a project on new ways to conceptualise atheism from an intercultural perspective and to continue working on the concept of a relational God, deriving my inspiration especially from Medieval Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta theologians like Veṅkaṭanātha.

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Positive and negative atheism

Michael Martin elaborates on positive atheism vs negative atheism and explains that the former is the positive belief that there are no god(s), whereas the latter is just the absence of belief in any god(s). He then adds:

These categories should not be allowed to mask the complexity and variety of positions that atheists can hold, for a given individual can take different atheistic positions with respect to different concepts of God. Thus, a person might maintain that there is good reason to suppose that anthropomorphic gods such as Zeus do not exist and therefore be a positive atheist with respect to Zeus and similar gods. However, he or she could, for example, be only a negative atheist with respect to Paul Tillich’s God. In addition, people can and often do hold different atheistic positions with respect to different conceptions of a theistic God. For example, someone could be a positive atheist with respect to Aquinas’ God and only a negative atheist with repsect to St. Teresa’s God. (Martin 2007, p. 2)

Martin does not discuss the case of a person convinced that there is, for instance, no Zeus while they believe in the Christian God, possibly because he considers this just a case of inner-antagonism among theists. The phenomenon might be, however, more interesting than that, since it might have rather to do with a belief in a completely different kind of god. This is particularly evident in the case of Indian atheists who might be positive atheists regarding Īśvara or devatās, but then believe in brahman or in a personal god.

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Defending Atheism?

Julian Baggini is certainly right that being an atheist does not necessarily mean being an associate of the holocaust. Still, in order to defend atheism from the accusation of having been the cause of mass murders in the 20th century, Baggini seems to go very far:

[R]eligion is by nature not only divisive, but divisive in a way which elevates some people above others. It is not too fancicul, I think, to see how the centuries of religious tradition in Western society made possible the kind of distinction between the superior Aryans and the inferior others which Nazism required. (Baggini, Atheism, 2003, p. 86)

If Baggini is right, any thought implying distinctions (such as Plato’s utopian Republic) would lead to this kind of effect. And supporters of Christianity could claim that they were the ones who said that we are all children of God… Again, I am led to think that putting the history of atheism in a wider context, e.g., taking India and China into the picture would help enhancing the debate.

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What is the target of Kumārila’s atheist arguments?

Kumārila’s attacks certainly target the belief in supernatural beings who should be able to grant boons to human beings (the devatās), insofar as they show that this belief is inherently self-contradictory. For instance, these deities should be the actual recipients of ritual offerings. However, how could they receive offerings at the same time from different sacrificers in different places?

Kumārila also targets the belief in a Lord akin to the one defended by rational theology, both in Europe and in South Asia, again because this leads to contradictions. Kumārila explains that there is no need of such a Lord in order to explain the creation of the world, since there is no need to adduce further evidence in order to justify the world as it is now (i.e., existing), whereas one would need to adduce a strong external evidence to justify everything contradicting the world as we know it. Therefore, the continuous presence of the world becomes the default status and the theist has the burden of the proof and needs to be able to establish independently of his religious belief that there has been a time when the world did not exist. Similarly, Kumārila shows that the idea of a Lord who is at the same time all-mighty and benevolent is self-contradictory, since if the Lord where really all-might, he would avoid evil, and if he tolerates it, then he is cruel. If one says that evil is due to karman or other causes, Kumārila continues, then this shows that there is no need to add the Lord at all as a further cause and that everything can be explained just on the basis of karman or any other cause.

Are Kumārila’s criticisms also targeted at the idea of an impersonal and non-dual brahman? Kumārila does not explicitly address the issue of the possible distinction between one and the other target. However, a few scant hints may help readers. In a fragment from his lost Bṛhaṭṭīkā preserved in the work of a Buddhist opponent (the Tattvasaṅgraha), Kumārila speaks of deities as being vedadeha, i.e., ‘embodied in the Veda’ (so Yoshimizu 2008, fn. 78). In a verse of the TV, he says that they are ṛgvedādisamūheṣu […] pratiṣṭhitāḥ, i.e., ‘who reside in the Ṛgveda and all other [Vedic scriptures]’ (Yoshimizu 2007b, p. 221). Does this mean that Kumārila was accepting a conception of deities inhabiting the Vedas? I discussed the idea with a colleague who just said that the verses must be interpolated.

What do readers think? Was there local atheism in ancient India?

See also Yoshimizu’s comment to my post on Bhavanātha.

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Bhavanātha and the move towards theistic Mīmāṃsā

The Mīmāṃsā school of Indian philosophy started as an atheist school since its first extant text, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra. At a certain point in its history, however, it reinterpreted its atheist arguments as aiming only at a certain conception of god(s). In other words, it reinterpreted its atheism as being not a global atheism, but a form of local atheism, denying a certain specific form of god(s) and not any form whatsoever.

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Alternative theisms and atheisms (part 1)

One of the main advantages of dealing with worldviews other than the one you grew up in is the fact that you are exposed to doubts and alternatives. One of such cases regards the nebulous category of religion (to which Amod dedicated some illuminating posts on this blog), which in Europe and America is often confused with just “belief in (a) god(s)”. Part of the definition of religion is its being other than philosophy, so much that philosophy is looked upon with suspicion when it is mixed with “religious” purposes, like in the case of soteriology.

However, as soon as one encounters Buddhism, one is faced with the alternative: Either Buddhism is a religion (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of religion) or it is a philososophy (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of philosophy).

A similar case regards categories such as “Atheism”. Atheism as it is common nowadays is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Euro-American world, so much that one risks to postulate that it is a result of the Enlightenment, of Positivism, of the success of Science etc. A glance at South Asia shows that this is not the only way atheism can find its place in the history of philosophy. As shown by Larry McCrea, atheism might have been the rule rather than the exception in South Asian philosophy until the end of the first millennium. This also means that the later shift towards theism has a completely different flavour, insofar as it comes out of a different background.

I am especially intrigued by the moment in which this turn took place, with thinkers composing theistic texts and/or reinterpreting their texts and traditions in a theistic way. A typical example is the adoption and adaptation of Mīmāṃsā (originally an atheist philosophy) within theist Vedānta in the first centuries of the second millennium CE. I have already discussed about the various steps of this incorporation by Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha. What remains fascinating is

  1. how Mīmāṃsā was rebuilt through this encounter, with its atheism reconfigurated as negation of a given form of theos, but not of any form whatsoever.
  2. how Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta was challenged to produce a sustainable version of theism.

To elaborate: Theism in South Asia needed to grow in an environment in which atheist objections where the norm. It had, therefore, to inoculate itself with possible answers to these objections and to rethink an idea of the divine which could resist these attacks.

How could this phenomenon be studied? As usual with South Asian philosophy, many of the fundamental texts have never been edited and remain in manuscript form. Of the ones which have been edited, only a tiny minority has been translated. Of these translations, only a minority can be understood on its own right and independently of the Sanskrit (or Maṇipravāḷa) original. Still less common are works elaborating on the theology entailed in these texts (among the exceptions let me name Carman, Clooney, Mumme and Oberhammer; Ram-Prasad’s Divine Self especially focuses on Rāmānuja’s different concept of God). In short, texts need to be edited, translated, studied, compared with each other and read keeping in sight the goal of understanding the phenomenon of the convergence of theism and atheism.

Why at all should it be studied? The Mīmāṃsā author Kumārila Bhaṭṭa writes that without a purpose, even a foolish does not act, and in fact Sanskrit authors regularly announce at the beginning of their treatises the proximate and remote purpose of their works. In the present case, the proximate cause is the desire to understand the interactions between atheism and theism by looking at them from an unexpected perspective and to throw light on a fundamental chapter in the history of South Asian philosophy.