*The writer is a researcher with background in philosophy and social sciences. He is interested in history of ideas. Email: [email protected]
Abstract
For a clear understanding of religion, it is imperative to explain the nature of religious language and critically analyse different approaches, including theology, within religion to explicate sublime truth. This article attempts to explore the interface between the divine truth and history, and analyse the nature of religious language. – Author)
A unique trait of our society in general and “intellectuals” in particular is the arbitrary use of concepts without exploring their epistemological basis. Hence, our collective failure to explore different facets of life in depth. It also explains our mental lethargy to venture into domains that have remained unthought of in our collective thinking. Though religion is a favourite topic of discussion in our daily life, we essentially remain ignorant about religion, itself.
The prevalent intellectual mindset of both liberal and religious persuasions is stuck within their intellectually debilitating dogmatic enclosure. For a clear understanding of religion, it is imperative to explain the nature of religious language and critically analyse different approaches, including theology, within religion to explicate sublime truth. This article attempts to explore the interface between the divine truth and history, and analyse the nature of religious language. Though religious truth claims to be above time and history, it does manifest itself in diverse ways. Religion manifests and sublimates itself in history through personal psyche, architecture, rituals, philosophical reflection, asceticism, poetry, dance of the Sufi, war, meditation, music and other ways. Thus, we witness the embodiment of religion in materiality of things and multiplicity of religious languages. Through language religion weaves a grand story encompassing everything – spanning from microcosm of self and collective rituals to macrocosm.
Among the varied expressions of religion, language is the primal medium. Language imposes order on our chaotic experiences and impressions. The glorious Quran is called the Word of God. The first verse in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John in the Bible starts with the words “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Through language the human mind transmits ideas, concepts and understanding about the world within us and the outside world. This does not mean that language is uniform. There are varieties of religious languages in the world because of the heterogeneity of religious experiences. The variety of language shows diverse ways through which mankind expresses its ideas about the noumenal and phenomenal world. Religious belief is also presented in a language called religious language.
Like other dimensions and languages of religion, theology and speculative metaphysics are one of the outcomes of religious reasoning to construct a coherent story. However, theology cannot be taken as religion per se. Being oblivious of the genealogy of theological thought, today we take it as a supra-historical thing. In theology we attribute all creations to the ultimate being. Metaphysics is the intellectual theory about god, angels, the life hereafter and entities that lie beyond the senses.
Immanuel Kant’s book ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is directed to destroy metaphysics. He does not reject religion, rather he wants to show us that religion is not metaphysics. Kant looks at the mind and is concerned with the possibility of knowledge. Metaphysics is a natural outcome of a desire of religious reason for definite answers about the things that lie beyond the senses. Like a dove, to borrow a poetic metaphor from Immanuel Kant, which desires to fly in the empty space where it does not have to face the resistance of the air, religious reason is stuck with a desire of attaining pure understanding of the transcendent on the wings of metaphysics in the empty space.
Kant’s criticism was a fatal blow to metaphysical traditions of philosophy, in general, and religion, in particular. He rejected speculative metaphysics as idle vapourings and dogmatic, and favoured critical examination with our own rational apparatus and power. At the same time, his critique has provided a chance for religion to do away with dogmatism which emanates from metaphysics because the essence of religion gets enwrapped and ossified in the layers of metaphysical explanations and theological postulates, respectively. Metaphysics held sway over the religious mind for most of its thinking period. Gradually, it attained a status of religion. Kant’s argument against metaphysics helps us to bring out the intellectual context of religion.
During the last three centuries, scientific reason and its language is expanding the influence of natural science on other fields of knowledge, including religion. In addition, the chasm between natural and human sciences is increasing. Instead of helping, the dominance of natural science has made the study of human being problematic. Logical positivism is the manifestation of this. It is influenced by the rule of verifiability in natural science. Therefore, it rejects every proposition that cannot be verified. A. J Ayer is a representative of this attitude. He declared metaphysical statements meaningless because they are not verifiable. There is no criterion that can verify statements such as ‘houris exist’ and ‘houris do not exist’. His rejection is sweeping, as the criteria of verifiability cannot be used for every statement and field of knowledge.
The problem at an epistemic level arises from the will of different disciplines to solely define and dominate the whole domain of knowledge by their own standards. Human psyche has two components named logos and mythos and the balance in both keeps human minds healthy. Logos is defined as the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enable men and women to function well in the world. Both logos and mythos have their own domains to work but meddling of one in other’s sphere creates personality disorders. Science is a product of logos. We cannot apply criteria developed for natural sciences to measure the validity of religious experience. Mythos works well in the inner world of the psyche and directs attention of people to the eternal and universal.
To understand notions stemming from intuition we need to see them in their own terms. Interpellation of the logical (logos) way of comprehending deprives oneself of the riches offered by the mystical/mythos. In order to comprehend the meaning of poetic truth, it is indispensable, in the words of S. T. Coleridge, to willingly suspend disbelief. He defines ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ as ‘poetic faith’ that can be attained by putting aside our critical faculties/logos to open our self for the meaning hidden in the mystical, mysterious and surreal. Take the example from a non-religious domain to understand how meaning divulges to the reader of the text. For example, if we logically or critically read the famous poem “Yad” of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, we will end up terming it nonsensical, illogical and preposterous. Faiz says:
Dasht-e-tanhayee mein, aye jaan-e-jahan larzan hai
Teri awaaz kay saayay, terey honton kay seraab
Dasht-e-tanhayee mein, doori ke khas-o-khaak talei
Khil rahee hain, tere pehlu kay saman aur gulaab–
Uth rahee hai kahin qurbat sey, teri saans ki aanch
Apni khushboo mein sulaghti huwi, madham, madham…
Door ufaq par chamkati hui, qatra, qatra…
Gir rahee hai teri dildaar nazar ki shabnam–
Iss qadar pyar sey, ay jaan-e-jahaan rakha hai
Dil ke ruḳhsār pe is vaqt, terī yaad ne haat
Yunh ghuman hota hai, garjey hai abhi subh-e-firaaq
Dhal gaya hijr ka din, ah bhi gayi, wasl-ki-raat–
Translation: [In the desert of my solitude/o love of my life, lie quivering, shadows of your whisper/ mirage of your lips;/ In the far away place of loneliness/ in distance between I and thou/ are blooming roses and jasmine;/ Somewhere from close/ rises the warmth of your breath/ gently smouldering in its fragrance;/ On distant horizons, glistens/ drop by drop/ the dew of your beguiling glance;/ With such tenderness/ your remembrance has placed/ Its hand upon my heart’s cheeks; Though the dawn of our separation looks intact/ the day of separation is at dusk/ and night of unison is in the offing.]
To understand the hidden meaning in metaphors like the mirage of lips (honton kay seraab), the shadows of voice (awaaz kay saayay), the dew of beguiling glance (dildar nazar ki shabnam), gently smouldering in its fragrance (khushboo mein sulaghti huwi) and remembrance placing its hands on the cheeks of the heart (dil ke ruḳhsār pe is vaqt terī yaad ne haat), we ought to have a state of credulity. Logically speaking remembrance is intangible. So it cannot put its hand on a heart’s cheeks for neither does remembrance have hands nor does the heart have cheeks. Rationally speaking, belief in the metaphorical idea that a voice has shadows and lips have a mirage is, in itself, believing in a mirage. Nevertheless, poetic images in the poem hint at a deeper psychological process of nostalgia and love. The poetic devices employed by Faiz Ahmed Faiz resonate with the subjective world of the reader.
With the advent of modernity, we see dominance of language and methodological tools of logos over the spheres of mythos. Working under the influence of the doctrines of logical positivism, Ayer committed a mistake trying to relate religious experience with a doctrine that extrapolates outlook of modern natural science as the model for all knowledge. In the case of Islam, religious clergy try to explicate objective facts from religious outlook. They tend to tackle challenges of modernity, which is a product of reason, with incompatible tools of mythos. As a result, we fail to expand the horizon of our mind and explore the variety of religious languages in our social milieu.
Today, Muslim societies are in intellectual disarray because they let myth take over the tasks that are supposed to be fulfilled by logic. Extrapolating tools of a different knowledge to another sphere results in preposterous notions.
Time renders all human endeavours in eternalising their ideas and ideals about religious truth obsolete. It is thinking that enables us to fight against the ossification of ideas and imprisonment of imagination. Owing to this, the inquisitive mind brings about change in comprehending religious experience by liberating our vision from narrow confines of ideology and broadening our intellectual horizons. However, thinking itself operates within an epistemic range, which can be called horizon of mind. The broader the mental horizon, the more inclusive will be the ideas. On the other hand, a narrow horizon produces exclusionary ideas, and thus fails to interpret a phenomenon in accordance with context and time. This article is an attempt to show the role of horizon in formation of religious truth.
The twentieth century was amazing as it witnessed the emergence of a myriad of perspectives in philosophy. Logical positivism was one of the schools of thought in philosophy that appeared as a promising outlook to explain our world because of its methodological rigour. Its successes in the scientific domain compelled human sciences to extrapolate positivist methodology into humanities and social sciences. Though logical positivism broke new grounds in epistemology of science, it did not prove that helpful when applied to explain social phenomena, including arts and religion.
Instead of logical positivism, a philosophical anthropology and phenomenological approach is more helpful in understanding religion. Philosophical anthropology adopts an interdisciplinary approach because it rejects the view that an umbrella or universal method can encompass all the complexity and diversity of phenomena and human condition. Ludwig Wittgenstein provides interesting insights into the phenomenon of sacred and profane in society. Although Wittgenstein started with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, he eventually distanced himself from them. Unlike his peer philosophers in the circle who arrogate a superordinate role to philosophy, Wittgenstein, in the words of Sandra Laugier, “sought to destroy philosophy’s privilege and to bring it back down to the “rough ground” of ordinary life.” His drift from scientism of logical positivism is visible in his remarks on James Frazer’s book “The Golden Bough’. He criticised stagiest concept of history and characterized certain societies and rituals as primitive. Since Wittgenstein was against the totalising tendency of extending the verification method to every realm of life, he rejected Frazer’s ideas because they aimed to reduce other forms of life and associated language games to “category mistakes”. Thereby, he opened new ways of seeing and understanding other forms of life, including religion.
Edmund Husserl is the founder of the philosophical movement called phenomenology. It is a method that reflects on pre-reflective or lived experience. Through the phenomenological method, Husserl wanted to overcome the preconceptions of science and personal opinion to reach a primordial level of experience. He did not want to pin down reality on scientific conceptions, rather he wanted to make space for human sciences without rejecting sciences. His phenomenological method tries to describe experience as it is not embroiled in genealogies, origins and politics formative phase. Martin Heidegger took the idea of being from Husserl. He used the word ‘Dasein’ in place of being. ‘Dasein’ literally means ‘being-there’. By being he does not mean being. Heidegger employs Dasein as a term for the manner in which human individual exists. The kind of existence Dasein lives is different from other entities because existence is an issue to him. For Heidegger, a human being is not a living thing, but a clearing or opening.
The implications of Heidegger’s philosophy are enriching. The idea of an authentic being in Heidegger philosophy is conducive in defining the being of human being as one who has knowledge, which comes from his direct involvement in the world. According to Heidegger, our practice or involvement is more primary than belief. Seen in this light, the theologian mode of knowledge seems to be not superior to other peoples’ knowledge emanating from involvement. Hence, it can be said that theology gives birth to inauthentic involvement with religion.
In the Muslim context we can say that theology and metaphysics came to dominate due to historical circumstances and intellectual bias that happened in history. Realisation of the contingent nature of theology and metaphysics can help to break the dominance of theology on our religious thinking. Because of its treatment as a supra-historical entity and its contribution to the contraction of Muslim mind, theological corpora are declared as “Officially Closed Corpus” by Professor Muhammed Arkoun. Today, Muslims are lost in the labyrinth of metaphysics and theology elaborated and codified by intellectuals centuries ago. Hence, it can be said that theological and metaphysical ideas are a non-primary understanding of God.
Human beings are open to possibilities due to their scope for creativity. On the contrary, the theological and metaphysical reason has become a model of thinking that forecloses the possibilities of emergence of new hermeneutical horizons. The managers of sacred have closed the doors of becoming and possibilities of new hermeneutics by stifling human beings’ involvement with the primary experience of sublime by confining experience and language of the sublime in theology and metaphysics and rejecting other modes of religious experience and cramping the horizons of thinking.
The Phenomenological approach enables us to enter a space of openness to the experience or phenomenon we are trying to understand in its pre-reflective sense. We see the sublime truth of divine only through the openings that our horizons provide. The smaller the horizon, the narrower and more exclusive will be our idea of religion. The broader the horizons, the more encompassing will be our concept of religion. One of the pitfalls of modern scholarship on Islam is that Muslim scholars wanted to make the epistemological posture about Islam scientific. Since science works in formulas and universal laws, the transposition of its methodology to study religion makes it formulaic without the rigour of scientific experimentation and verification. The formulaic approach stifles human reasoning to take an intellectual and imaginative leap of faith to unravel hitherto unexplored meanings.
Theology claims to be a science of religion. Being a science, it provides unquestionable answers and ways of seeing things to questionable questions. To avoid epistemic and intellectual blunders, it would be better not to talk about religion theologically. Theology closes and art opens the being. We experience immensity and sublimity of the divine in art. Listening of the qawali opens our being to sublime ideas and feelings. Such is the power of art that the ghazals of Hafiz Sherazi and rubaa’iyat of Umar Khayam. transforms the meaning of a taboo objects into sublime metaphors
There is a strong likelihood that religion in the future will be defined more by artists and people who are not necessarily religious but involved with sublime truth of religion with broad horizons of mind. In the context of intellectual history of Muslims, the modern liberal mind claims to be an emancipatory project. However, it itself falls into the trap of liberal fallacy of treating religious mind as monolithic. Unlike science, religion thrives on plurality of ideas. This plurality stems from different levels of horizons. The ultimate goal of religion is to expand mental horizons to a cosmic level.
French philosopher Henry Corbin beautifully expounds the relationship of horizons of mind and plurality of envisioning religious experience in his interpretation of the Acts of Peter, a book belonging to “apocryphal” collection. The apostle Peter refers to the scene of the Transfiguration that he had witnessed on Mount Tabor. Sharing his Theophanic vision he states, “Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui (I saw him in such a form as I was able to take in)”. Henry Corbin narrates the Theophanic vision experienced by people in assemblage. Everyone experiences the ineffable event differently. According to Corbin, “some have seen an old man, others a youth, still others a little child who lightly touches their eyes and made them open.” Corbin thinks, “Each one has seen in a different form, appropriate to the capacity of her being; each one may say:” I saw him in such a form as I was able to take in. So, it can be interpreted that everyone saw according to the horizon of their personal experience and subjectivity. Here the event is more to do with polysemy of meaning rather than its facticity.
Moulana Jalal Uddin Rumi also explains this plurality of experience in his exquisite poetry through the metaphor of the beloved. He says:
Har lehza ba shaklay but-e-ayyar baraamad Dil burd-o-nihaan shud
Har dum ba libaas-e-digar aan yaar baraamad Gah peer-o-jawaan shud
Translation (S. R. Faruqi ): [0′ that trickster idol-beloved! Every time he made an appearance, he had a different face- He pulled the people’s hearts, And hid from view. Every time he came out in a different garb- He was sometimes young, And sometimes he was old.]
Love in this sense is a process of getting rid of one’s personality and imbuing oneself in the hues of the beloved. One can easily see that Moulana Rumi does not fix his beloved in his mental horizon, rather he keeps his visionary horizon open to view the ever-mutable facets and forms that his beloved adopts. By doing so he opens the possibility of witnessing reality in the flux of history. Today our idea is exclusive because instead of expanding our intellectual horizons, we have closed ourselves in the cocoon of our certainties. Hence, the increase in the domain of dogma and unthought. By opening and expanding horizons of our thought, we can emancipate our self from the invisible fetters of only thought, but also liberate religion trapped in the dark dungeon of our closed mind in which no rays of light can penetrate.
Art is different from other discursive and theorizing disciplines and modes of knowing because its very survival is based on rebelling from dogma. Unlike art, theology and metaphysics fix sublime truths and visions in their dogmatic enclosures. The religious narrative remains in time. On the other hand, rituals are its manifestation in space. Religious experiences stem from dialectics of engagement timeless mythical narrative within particular space. It can be called a conversation of temporal with timeless and fusion of concordance with discordance. The religious being emerges from the angst of negotiating discordant elements within a timeless narrative.
Coupled with theology and metaphysics, the project of modernity has also played havoc with the being today. With the developed structure and apparatuses at its disposal, the modern state controls the being. Martin Heidegger called man the shepherd of being. However, modernity has led him to become a master of beings and changed those and his own being as resource. In a nutshell, the utilitarian outlook of today views everything, entity, ideas and practice as a resource. Owing to its non-utilitarian nature, the concept of holy has lost its significance in this civilisation of productivity. Today we live in the time of foundering [Untergang]. In the time of foundering, we have lost the ability to explain God.
Because of our engrossment with modern time and episteme, our perception about worldviews of the past appears mythical. Contrary to the modern view of myth as a lie or false story, at the core of myth lies a real event, which over the time assumes mythical status. That is why myth has attracted special attention of modern philosophers and scholars. Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected James Frazer’s characterisation of the primitive societies as essentially stupid as modern myth. In his remarks on Frazer he tried to show that we modern are more primitive than the societies we deemed stupid and unscientific. Religious experience is more primary than the myth. To go to primary we have to go to primary human experience. The idea of holy is more primary. Through religious experience human beings encounter primordial being. The religious experience finds its way into language. The moment it gets entrance into language, we interpret it in the light of the very culture.
Language is a light of the emotions. They remain in dark until they are put into words. We catch the experience at the level where it is no longer experience but not yet philosophy. It is neither experience because it is in language, nor is it philosophy as it is not conceptualised. Art is the language of feeling. It does not function under causal formulas of natural science. Because of this, art expands imagination to bring disparate entities, ineffable thoughts and feelings, insights, surrealistic dimensions, new realities and intuitions within unified sensibility through symbolic language.
Religious language remains at the threshold of proverbial state of ineffability. It is revelation that illuminates the unfathomable and ineffable religious experience in language. The revelatory vision and emotions remain in dark until language illuminates emotions by putting them in words. That is why the first word of revelation in Quran is Iqra –read. Quranic language is poetic. It is replete with symbols, metaphors and similes. These poetic devices of language illuminate experiences and make thought sublime. The act of naming mentioned in the Holy Quran can be seen as illumination and bestowing wisdom to Adam through language. The glorious Quran says:
“And God taught Adam all names,
then set them forth to the angels and said,
“Tell me these names, if you are truthful.”.
After gaining the ability to name, the world revealed itself to Adam. Wisdom is the ability to name the entities in the objective world and our existential experiences. Without language there will be cosmic numbness and stasis. We live our life through the words we chose. Words determine our outlook, not vice versa. The kind of words we internalise to represent ourselves, determines our personality. Today we are stuck within the dogma because we have fed our soul with ossified and decayed words. That is our society – in spiritual malaise.
To understand religious experience, we have to listen to this type of language. This is the point where symbolic language emerges. Symbolic language means we experience in a certain way and articulate in a way that one meaning refers to another. It is an indirect way. It is not the sphere of reason, rather it is the level of meaning where emotions are brought forth. Reason is secondary. The order of language is primary. Both our self and that which we cannot experience, we indicate symbolically. God is unlimited. Those scholars who try to provide evidence of God actually destroy the religion. Taking cue from the efforts of theologians, clergy and philosophers to provide evidence of God, we squander our energy to build an edifice without solid earth. Therefore, by default all the religious authorities who claim to have proof of divine fall outside the pale of religion.
The treatment of language by the above mentioned philosophers opens us to other languages or forms of life. Moreover, the exploration of rich symbolic meanings of myth by anthropology and philosophy is conducive in seeing the role of myth in religion and society in a positive way. Myth tells us a story of an event which happened once upon a time. The myth came under severe criticism at the hands of philosophers who rejected it using the yardstick of science and verification. For Paul Ricouer “myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world – that is, of the other world or the second world – the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence.” Heidegger takes myth as real, because ‘Dasein’ reveals itself through it.
The moments of theophany and revelation can be understood in terms of primary experience of receiving revelation by religious figures. The experience expressed in the divine and sacred books is different from the language of fact. The knowledge of prophets, saints and religious founders stems from their direct involvement with the holy. Before attaining enlightenment, it is imperative for one to be aware of one’s own darkness. It is common among religious figures to withdraw from society in order to avoid being engulfed by the darkness of society. After realising darkness within and without, they embark upon the journey of light. In Islam, pre-Islamic Arabia is termed as the age of jāhilīyah (ignorance). It does not mean that Arabs did not know writing and reading. In fact, Arabs were producing the finest poetry. Jāhilīyah refers to a state of affairs and the ignorance of the darkness within. So, it can be said that before illumination, one’s experience remains in darkness. In the first book of “Paradise Lost”, Milton seeks help of the Holy Spirit in the following words:
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
Like poetry, symbolic language deals with meaning and it should not be taken as propositions of facts. The language of reason cannot comprehend this type of language. Due to the visible triumph of science in modern age, scientists and even scholars of human sciences tried to investigate every sphere of life with a single method of science. As a result, we witness a crisis in understanding the human being in modern age and applications of ideas of natural sciences on human beings and societies. Social Darwinism is an example of this. According to social Darwinism, ‘social forces are of such a kind as to produce evolutionary progress through natural conflicts between social groups. The best-adapted and most successful social groups survive these conflicts, raising the evolutionary level of society generally (‘the survival of the fittest’).’
In order to avoid such epistemic blunders, there is need to open our self to other languages, including mythical language. There is not just one myth, rather there are a multiplicity of myths. That is why we have plurality of traditions. In a myth we speak about the whole. We think it, but we do not know it. We think it symbolically, but we do not know it in any other way. Myth contains possibilities of variety of interpretation, and interpretation is a never-ending process. When we interpret scripture, we put its language aside and let our language speak. We cannot remove primary language. Instead of this, we should be involved in the scripture. Our over reliance on the explanations of so-called religious authorities not only rob us of the feeling of primary experience, but it has also ossified the hermeneutical mind. With detachment from the anchor of symbols, we live our life on explanations elaborated centuries ago. The whole purpose of a myth is motion. Theological interpretation makes us oblivious to primary language where the idea of the sacred is hinted. As a consequence the creativity of a religious tradition stagnates.
While discussing religious language, it is important to understand how language refers to the world? We can say that the only kind of language that refers to the world is the language of facts. Ricoeur explores this reference to symbols. We cannot get out of symbolic language. Whether this language refers to being or not is something that has to be verified. Verification of religious language means acting and living through what symbols tell us. Thus, we verify that symbols refer to this or that. So, our life as lived, based on the assumption of real.
Ricoeur thinks that we act in accordance with what scripture proclaims. It is a wager. Faith is wager not certainty. We should rule out certainty and live in uncertainty. Uncertainty and its anguish propel people to search for certainty and solace. It is too much certainty that emaciates religion intellectually and spiritually. Muslim clergy are doing a disservice to Islam by making its followers certain about everything by feeding them on axioms and dictates emanating from externalities not from lived experiences and subjectivity. So, we can say that today’s Muslim is less determined by inside and more determined by outside structures of thought and society.
Religion survives the onslaught of time by keeping itself untimely by maintaining a narrative that is a nonstarter in temporal. This untimely nature of religion in time and space enables it to keep the enduring aspect of the story intact from the dictates of ideology. That is why religion has survived in the culture of disbelief created by enlightenment. When religion itself becomes ideological, like Islamism of today, its story loses relevance and worldview starts to crack. The failure of political Islam is not failure of religion per se. Ideology operates in the domain of profane rather than mythical story. Ideology creates the prison of unthought. Certain ideologies have tried to demythologised religious narrative by expelling symbolic, mythic, philosophic, cultural, syncretic and anthropological aspects from Islam by imposing political ideology. As a result, instead of saints and religion, monsters emerged from religion.
We fear criticism because it can destroy the comfort zone of our certainties and render us totally crippled without crutches of regurgitated food we take for knowledge. Instead of destroying religion, criticism on theology and metaphysics by modern philosophers has paved the way for the enrichment of religious language. Statements of faith are not statements of fact, but they hint at something. Ludwig Wittgenstein says that to talk about God and religion, we need a language that does not try to explain a mystery but simply refers to it. It is a statement in a language of faith, which makes it possible to act in the world in a certain way. Kant and Wittgenstein did not deny religion. What they deny is that the religious experience can be the foundation for an objective truth. By living according to the symbols we act in the world. So, we can say that religion works as a compass for human beings.
Immanuel Kant did the philosophical equivalent of smashing idols. He did this in order to create room for faith. A philosopher’s vocation is to smash the idols developed with the passage of time. Prophet Mohammad literally destroyed physical idols, on the one hand, and social ideals and idols, on the other. The tragedy with Muslim scholarship, in particular, and religious scholarship, in general, is that they worship idols developed by theological and metaphysical reason centuries ago. It is the duty of the philosopher not to speak like a believer. When she/he does this, he destroys his own vocation. A philosopher does not feel the intention and motivation of believers, rather he listens to their language without surrendering himself.
A lesson that religion can learn from science is that it has to incessantly criticise its own explanations and claims to improve them. Due to the absence of such a tradition within religion it has not been able to convince the modern man – whose ship lost the beacon of religion in the tumultuous life of modernity – of the need of religion in his life. Lastly, it should be receptive to the development in other fields of knowledge and avoid traditional dichotomy of knowledge by modernity into watertight compartments. By doing so religion can secure its place in human society as a dynamic aspect of human beings. And investigation of the varieties of language by Immanuel Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur is beneficial for our understanding of the nature of religion.
