Religion has more in common with philosophy than is often recognized. Some traditions of religion and spirituality can be seen as facets of emancipatory philosophy, when viewed as attempts to deal with the ultimate question of human suffering.
The three fundamental problems our species has grappled with are “what is real”, “how to live together” and “how to deal with suffering”. Together these three questions form the broad categories of
- theoretical philosophy, pertaining to the questions of ontology, epistemology and metaphysics;
- practical philosophy, pertaining to the questions of ethics and justice; and
- emancipatory philosophy, pertaining to the questions of suffering and ultimate identity.
Emancipatory philosophy in its variety has escaped the radar of philosophical classification. It has seldom been counted among philosophy proper, often not seen as philosophy at all, but labeled either “spirituality” or “religion”. This is a problem, since both concepts remain ill defined by scholars[1].
The lack of scholarly consensus on what “religion” refers to, not to mention the variety of competing theories of religion is revealing. [2] Also, religion and spirituality have various forms that are not interested in the problematization of suffering, but are, rather, traditions that attempt to conserve ethics, cultural conventions and institutions for succeeding generations (Shils 1981).
Emancipatory philosophy as a knowledge pursuit interested in the question of suffering[3] is a new way of understanding many of the approaches previously labeled as religion. Emancipatory philosophy has a long history, appearing in the earliest written sources, from the Greek pre-Socratics to Indian Advaita Vedanta (Barnes 2002, Waite 2004). This is intuitive, as the history of human suffering is as old as our species. To question it, and to try to be free from it, is likely as old as any of the ontological, metaphysical and ethical questions our species has posed in its love of wisdom and knowledge (φιλοσοφία).
Emancipatory philosophy, as the name suggests, is concerned with how to emancipate us from the experience of suffering.
If pain is the original experience, and suffering is the response, then all forms of emancipatory philosophy try to answer how the response can be managed. These managed emancipatory responses to the problem of suffering range broadly according to context and culture.
Stoicism predated the Shakespearean advice of “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” by suggesting our thoughts, instead of things, are the cause of our suffering. To manage suffering we need to manage our thoughts. Pre-socratic philosophers searched the answers from separating the changeless and the changeable realities. By identifying with the changless there is a possibility of the changes not touching our identitity.
Other emancipatory approaches also empasize the problems of identity formation. These include Buddhism, where the concept of the void or lack of intrinsic identity (Shunyata) is laden with the possiblity of avoiding suffering. This is also reflected in the philosophers of the the early Indian Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta, where the emphasis is on reality being one, with no distinctions between personal self (Atman) and the ultimate self (Brahman). St. Francis of Assisi suggested that what we are looking for is what we are looking with, pointing towards the transparency of our core identity.
At their root, all philosophies of emancipation deal with the question of “who is it that is suffering?”, or our ultimate identity.
Various strata of emancipatory philosophy answer this question differently. Many of them suggest that in actuality there is no-one suffering; when suffering appears, it is always someone – a person – that is suffering. When the separate person is not identified with, suffering ceases. Emancipatory philosophers David Hume (1739/2019), Huineng (2008), Gautama Buddha (2018), Jesus of Nazareth (2001), Sankara (2016), Nagarjuna (1995), Nisargadatta Maharaj (2014), Greg Goode (2012), Bob Adamson (2004) and Fred Davis (2021) express this in different words that contain a similar pointing towards identity that has no duality, separation or suffering.
The solution to the problem of suffering that each emancipatory philosopher, East and West, has ever offered, from Heracleitos to Epictetos, and from Buddhism to Christianity, remains more or less the same. There is the world of change and world of the changless. Depending on which we identify, they lead to or lead away from the experience of suffering.
For scholars of religion and philosophy, this is a chance to revisit a few core assumptions of scholarly identity and disciplinary boundaries. At the moment there is no academic discipline devoted to studying emancipatory philosophy. A cross-disciplinary effort to study emancipatory philosophy would be a start. It could be carried out by an informed and interested group of scholars from the fields of philosophy, religious studies and theology, offering a novel way to reframe one of the oldest philosophical questions, and the contexts, culture and systems we have built around it.[4]
NOTES:
[1] See, for example, the entry on “Spirituality” in the Oxford Handbook of The Study of Religion (2016), not to mention the fact that an earlier version of the Encyclopedia of Religion (1987) lacks an entry on “spirituality” altogether.
[2] For context, see Contemporary Theories of Religion (2009) and The Oxford Handbook (2016), and notice the fact that almost no theories of religion from the earlier book appear in the latter one.
[3] As contrasted with questions of physical, ecological and systemic pain, which is an unmanaged reaction.
[4] Cf. Wesley Wildman’s Religious Philosophy as Multidisicplinary Comparative Inquiry (2010) for a similar approach.