Decentralizing the Philosophical Inquiry into Religion

What resources may be useful to rethink philosophy of religion? Despite some crossover in the early 20th-century, the field lies outside religious studies’ scholarship. “Theory” remains a novel methodology. Since the turn of the millennium some have contemplated how their scholarship engages with cultural critiques of social power. Anglophone philosophy in general is making this turn. Is an Anglophone philosopher of religion’s roughly ‘etic’ position vis-à-vis religious studies advantageous or irrelevant? This paper suggests that contemporary developments among philosophers of religion challenge the horns of a conservative dilemma: either retain the current scope and methods, or, lose the field's identity at the hands of theory. To avoid these horns, the field might learn how critical scholarship asks philosophers of religion to make their subject position and methods more reflexive. Given recent discussions on “critical religion," it is useful to show how this works in an (un)related field.

Can scholars of religion use historiography and ethnography to reconstruct subaltern philosophies? Or is this an anachronistic imposition? In 1919, in the City Magistrate’s Court in Trinidad, Baboo Khandas Sadoo stood charged with obeah, or “pretended” African magic. Yet, Khandas called himself a Hindu. His name evinced Hindu and also Islamicate elements. Further, during his trial, his defense brought Yusoff Ibrahim, a client of Khandas’, to testify that he knew Khandas to be “very philosophical.” Khandas identified himself as African but also as a Hindu. His ritual work brought together Hindus and Muslims and Christians and of Indian and African descent. Khandas’ case provides an opportunity to analyze the complexities of the modes of racial and religious identification that quilt together the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, modes of life animated by subalterns embodying what we might call, following the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, a transverse philosophy.

Nishitani's 20th century philosophy of religion undermines a common assumption about how we ought to ground the philosophy of religion and offers one alternative. The targeted assumption is that the philosophy of religion can be adequately decentralized while continuing to rely on a purportedly value-neutral conception of humanity. Drawing on marginalia from his library archive, I examine Nishitani’s critical engagement with this assumption as established within Schleiermacher’s and Feuerbach’s, respectively, Christian and post-Christian elisions between "humanity" and "religion.” These elisions, I argue, continue to place minoritized philosophers of religion in a double bind devaluing analyses of religion based in emic concepts and normative aims. Alternatively, Nishitani’s late theorization of an “emptiness-in-affect” (情意における空) critically bridges 19th century attempts to ground religion in human affectivity with 21st century attempts to criticize the oppressive dimensions of that ground within the affective turn.