Joy Brennan & Relgious Studies in the Academy

Joy Brennan teaches Buddhism and East Asian religions at Kenyon College. She is interested in epistemologies of ignorance and how they function in the individual and social spheres. She is currently writing a book on an early Mahāyāna Buddhist theory of human transformation.

She writes in 'Immanent Frame'-

The great struggle of an introductory class in religious studies is to give students confidence in the value of the field while laying the foundations for them to understand three central features of it: 

1) there is no agreement whatsoever on what does and what does not count as religion;

This is not the legal, the historical, the economic, the sociological, or even the philosophical or theological view of any country under the Sun- including the US, where Kenyon College is located. Suppose this were not the case. Then it would be meaningless to speak of 'separation of Church and State'. A Public School could get students to chant all sorts of prayers and participate in all sorts of rituals by claiming they were actually doing Drama.

Everybody agrees that Religion exists and there is overlapping consensus as to, in broad terms, what constitutes a Religion though, no doubt, it is an 'essentially contested' term and, at the margin, there will always be questions as to whether a particular outfit is genuinely religious and not some sort of brain-washing cult.

Mahayana Buddhism had no difficulty recognizing itself as a Religion distinct from other Religions- with whom, historically, it maintained good relations as a matter of 'upaya kausalya'.

It was never an 'epistemology of ignorance'- Avidya- at all, any more than Karl Popper was a proponent of pataphysics.

In Mathematics, the Benacerraff identification problem highlights the difficulty in reducing natural numbers to pure sets. This throws doubt on whether mathematical objects have a 'Platonic' existence as eternal and immutable. As time went by it was discovered that 'anti-Platonic' approaches, too, had problems of their own. Meanwhile, great strides were being made in Pure Mathematics in a manner which had very useful real world applications. Thus, nobody now is losing much sleep over a merely metaphysical difficulty.

Indeed, every useful discipline has had or could have a 'methodenstreit'. From the philosophical point of view, it is relatively easy to show that the discipline is fundamentally flawed. But, since these subjects are useful, whereas philosophy is useless, people lose interest in such debates. Something similar could be said about Religious Studies or Literary Theory or other such 'soft subjects'. The fact is Religion matters. So does Literature. On the other hand, turf wars or concerns over a 'principle of demarcation' don't seem to matter very much.

2) there is no agreement whatsoever about what it means that we can’t agree about what counts as religion;

Nonsense. Sensible people can 'good faith' agree that Religion is an essentially contested concept.  So are many others- e.g. 'Art' as opposed kitsch, 'Dance' as opposed to vulgar display, 'Paideia' as opposed to a Credentialist Ponzi Scheme.

 3) that because of the former two features, we also cannot agree about whether we should or should not police the boundaries of our discipline.

You don't have a discipline. Even if you did, nobody requires you to 'police its boundaries'. You don't see Mathematicians getting their knickers in a twist because there is no agreement as to the nature of some mathematical objects or the licitness of certain axioms. Maths is useful. So it burgeons. Religious studies is very useful if you mean to earn your living as a priest. My ancestors certainly did well by it and even when no longer economically compelled to stick their nose to that particular grindstone, did so anyway for the pleasure of the thing.

Because of these features, basic questions about who should even teach in a religious studies department, what they should teach, and how what they teach connects to the humanities or social sciences, or to how they are situated in a given institution and vis-à-vis other institutions (like churches, the judiciary, public schools, public ethicists, etc.), also cannot be settled.

So what? Basic questions involve Tarskian primitive notions which may be 'essentially contested' but which are in any case undefined. Useful subjects have them just as much as useless ones.

And this is just the beginning. We also cannot agree whether theology should or should not be taught in religious studies departments.

It should. Otherwise you might as well just give out credits for finger painting.

We cannot agree about whether the colonialism that was foundational to the creation of the concept of religion is damning to that concept or not, or what it would even mean to answer that question one way or the other.

Colonialism was not foundational to the creation of the concept of Religion. By contrast, pre-existing Religions may have helped define, or motivate, a particular type of Colonialism.

BTW, concepts don't get 'damned'. Souls- maybe. Not concepts.

In the case of India, we know that Brahmanism predates Buddhism with which it happily co-existed- at least as far as actual Brahmans were concerned. This is not to say some Brahmans aren't Hindus or some Hindus, who may be Brahmans, don't reject Brahmanism- but this presents no great paradox or aporia. Jews for Jesus exist. Indeed, there is a purely Jewish Christian sect in Kerala which probably predates Saul's Damascene conversion. In Kerala, there was no great difficulty in differentiating what we now call Hindus from Jains, Buddhists, Moslems, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians etc- if, that is, it was worthwhile making the distinction (which it generally was because of differences in inheritance laws).

Colonialism is about money and military might. It has nothing to do with Religion.

We cannot agree about whether “religious literacy” (whatever that is) is valuable to teach or actually hinders student understanding of the broader point that “religion” is a constructed category. The list is endless.

Religion is not a 'constructed category'. It corresponds to a Tarskian primitive notion which is undefined precisely because its pragmatics is so utile.

Consider the word 'Cool'. What does it mean? Damned if I know. But I do know I want cool stuff or, at any rate, stuff I think makes me look cool. As a matter of fact, no one has ever called me cool. But that's cool coz it would be so uncool if I were, precisely coz I iz.

Come to think of it, Joy Brennan is cool coz she shows 'upaya kausalya'- a suave economia- simulating a Socratic ignorance which, for Paideia, is linked- by way of the palinode- to the harmonization of all echoing footsteps down every path not taken- such that there is a Jain or T.S Eliot 'what the Thunder said' type divyadhvani to a soundless Tathagatha Gita.

When one is young, one hungers for certainties. It is probably a good thing to have a preceptor who is comfortable with uncertainty- even ignorance.

And yet, I go to class when and where it is scheduled with the syllabus I have drawn up with vexation, and I work my way through with my students.

Joy Brennan understands 'kshanna sampatti'- kairotic 'low hanging fruit'- but this vexes her as it did Vasubandhu. After all, anything kairotic must be complex and what is complex is already a fossil. Shantideva, thank goodness, could do a runner with his washer-woman. Paratman parivartana- swopping selves is swiftest Moksha.

I think it is reassuring that Brennan carefully prepares her syllabus. She vexes herself to a good purpose- viz to make things as simple as possible but not more so.

However, Religious Studies is most useful to those who will earn a living as a priest. It does no great harm to point out that Certainty does exist for the eye of Faith and not all knowledge is 'vexation of spirit'.

I begin every semester by introducing them to how our discipline is not going to talk about a natural feature of the world: religion.

I think this is sad- for her discipline. Religion is a natural feature of our world. Her discipline isn't. It will disappear when no one is willing to pay for it.

I point out that what might be meant by “religion” to people from different religions varies.

The same could be said for any other object of study.

In this way, I take religion as a natural feature of human life through appeal to students’ everyday notion that there are people who “belong” to different religions. But then, relying on that everyday notion, I induce students to see that those people, those ones whom we take to belong to different versions of this category of thing called “religion,” themselves would not agree about the properties of that category of thing.

This does not matter. There is 'overlapping consensus' re. the 'extensional' meaning, or pragmatics, of the term. The thing itself is essentially contested or a Tarskian 'primitive notion' which is undefined. Indeed, that's what makes it useful. It solves a 'coordination problem' though, no doubt, this gives rise to 'hedging' through discoordination games.

In this way, I need the constructed term to function as fixed in order to help students to see how it is constructed. When that happens, when the student has been relying on the fixity of the term and starts to see that it is in fact constructed, then the student stares back at the fixed term as if watching the bridge they’ve just crossed begin to crumble. If that happens, then the students have arrived where I want them to be: in a state of utter perplexity, an extreme non-knowing, an abyss.

Gaslighting or beating and sleep deprivation would militate to a similar end. The point about 'dark nights of the soul' is that they must arise spontaneously after years of relentless striving in burning noon-tide heat. If Mother Theresa experiences 'utter perplexity' and gazes fearfully into the abyss it is because she exerted all her power in the service of Christ. Though she is in torment- perhaps one far worse than a serial killer eating his final meal before mounting the scaffold- it is a refining fire, a necessary evil for the attainment of an eternal Good.

In her recent essay asking “Is Public Philosophy Good?,” Agnes Callard outlines the way in which she perceives the discipline of philosophy to assiduously maintain its boundaries precisely so that it may bring students to the place where they realize that they don’t know even the most basic things.

I'm not sure she is saying that. In France, Philosophy is taught at High School. Phenomenology is popular precisely because it recognizes no boundaries. It would make philosophy even out of an apricot cocktail. America has a different tradition. However, Pierce's approach ties in well with that of Tarski. Because of the Cold War, American Post Grad education tends to be more mathematical- which is why American Econ PhDs are far more employable than British Econ PhDs. It may be that Voevodksy's 'univalent foundations' has 'completed' Philosophy- at least as Russell conceived it. Philosophy may well be over. Thus, for purely selfish reasons, its tenured hacks may well want to 'police boundaries' so as to prevent the incursion of this unwelcome news.

The discipline that polices itself so that its students become non-knowers gives its students a false non-knowing, for that non-knowing rests on a refusal to sit with the profound discomfort of the constructed nature of the very discipline that is promoted as that which can bring them to non-knowing.

This may seem convoluted but Brennan is right about 'false non-knowing'. The British Analytical School turned cretinous because everybody would take their pipe out of their mouth and say with the round eyes of a moon-calf, 'I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean when you say 'get your hand off my butt you big fat perv.'

Thus, Callard’s easy reference to the fixities of the discipline—there is a department, we are the professors, our courses are assigned classrooms, the students come, and, in that space, we read and think and are philosophers together—belies the many acts of exclusion that create the fixed foundation from which philosophers play at non-knowing.

This is as true of the Econ Dept. or the Literature Dept. etc. You don't really learn how to economize by writing a bunch of equations. Nor will you turn into a J.K Rowling by auditing a bunch of lectures.
Economic theory explains that 'information asymmetry' makes it worthwhile for people to acquire 'costly signals' showing they have a particular propensity. Employers may use these 'signals' as a screening device. It doesn't always work. Sometimes a particular Dept. turns to shit. When I was young, Sociology majors were considered unemployable. Yet, 20 years previously, Corporations and Govts. paid a premium to secure their services. I believe something similar has happened to a lot of 'Liberal Arts' programs. This is particularly sad for working class people.

These exclusions are legion. An important one is that “philosophy” is still unselfconsciously taken by most philosophers to be Western philosophy. To point this out to scholars who take philosophy as such is to find oneself an unwilling participant in a shell game, in which philosophy is now defined as precisely involving a certain Western canon, and now taken to be a sort of universally available method of thinking which, alas, is not found outside of that canon. Any non-knowing that emerges within a classroom where thought is contained by this kind of willfully ignorant certainty is, I think, false.

Brennan is probably right in her strictures against Western Philosophy Depts. But, surely, there is also a 'Demand side' problem? Will smart young people sign up for what is seen as a useless discipline? The fact is a lot of prominent Philosophers publish nonsensical articles or compile their worthless Conference papers into misleadingly titled books. This brings the subject into disrepute because, thanks to Google, ordinary people now have access to better information than these so-called savants.

In religious studies, by contrast, our students learn non-knowing not by thinking their way to it, but by actually not knowing, up to and including a profound unknowing about the conditions that make possible our sitting together in a classroom under the auspices of a field we call religious studies.

Does Brennan have her tongue in her cheek? I can't be sure. Perhaps she is simply too honest for her own good. She is saying 'my students are completely ignorant, not for any philosophical reason but because they are genuinely as thick as shit. If you ask them, how come you are here in this class? They will be startled and look around them in bafflement. They don't know why they came to class, or what it is, or how they got there. '

And I believe the best teachers and thinkers in our field, those most honest and alive to the range of positions in our discipline and to the range of incompatible positions they require from us, model it for them.

So the best thinkers in the field are 'models' of a similar ignorance and bafflement.

So when, in my introductory course, we do a section on important recent events figured in an essential way by some notion of religion, I am always uncertain whether I should take a position on the issue in question (e.g., the Masterpiece Cakeshop case), push my students to take a position on the issue, or simply talk about the issue, refraining from any such position. If I do the former, am I performing the policing of moral boundaries that religious studies scholar Robert Orsi calls good religion/bad religion, sorting through religious phenomena for my students to indicate to them which are acceptable and which not? But if I refuse to take a position, perhaps I am simply an intellectual and moral coward. The truth is, I don’t know which position to take and when I pick one or the other—as I must—I don’t know the fullness of what the choice means. But I still go to class and work my way through it with my students and hope that they can see the rich contours of the non-knowing that we are together thrust into.

Should a Cake shop owner be permitted to discriminate against a Gay couple who wanted a Wedding Cake? I suppose Brennan would have put forward the purely religious arguments- presumably Christian ones- which have salience in this matter. She, very wisely, refused to take sides because she is not a Cardinal or other such Religious functionary with the Religious authority to decide the matter. Still, if she said 'As a practicing XYZ, I think such and such', that would be perfectly acceptable unless what she had to say made people of a certain sexual orientation uncomfortable or the subject of attack.

Another example: I am a professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions, with training in the philosophy of religion as a Buddhist philosopher (all very vexed positions, in which the discipline of philosophy haunts everything that I do), but I am also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and founder and teacher of a Zen Buddhist community that is based in the small rural city near my college. My students are invariably interested in my two roles, and seek to understand how what I do with them in the classroom relates to what I do and who I am as a Zen priest, teacher, and leader of a small Buddhist group. In the beginning, when we are just setting out and the bridge is still stable, I make it casual, telling them that these are simply two different roles that I have. At the end, when the bridge has entirely collapsed and we are falling together, I think with them about questions like the one a student asked me yesterday. Her question was prompted by her attendance at the talk of a visiting Zen Buddhist priest and activist, Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, who has recently come into national prominence as a religious voice for change, with a focus on the profound wounds of racialization that are open and bleeding everywhere in our country. The student asked: Should all education be about healing wounds? When I asked her what she thought the answer is, she reflected and, having at one point taken a course in Ancient Philosophy (by which was meant the Greeks), she said: “Well, the Greek philosophers, I mean Aristotle, he aimed for happiness, right? Doesn’t that mean there must have been some wound he sought to heal? So is suffering really the condition of all humans? And if so, shouldn’t education aim at healing it?” We talked it through. What about the kind of education that makes people competent practitioners of some art or science? Is that just training, rather than education? Is healing akin to activism? If so, is healing partisan? If so, is that a problem? Is a college the right institutional space for healing? And if it’s not right now, should it be? What would be lost and gained if it were? And so on.

So Brennan is honest with her students. She isn't trying to convert them by stealth.  She listens to what they have to say. That is admirable. She may believe that her students are 'falling into unknowing' but a Christian observer may feel that she is helping her students overcome the 'scandal' or stumbling block of 'Belief' (many of our Religious Beliefs being out of tune with modern Society) so as to arrive at the firm 'unthought known' of Faith.

I did not then and do not now have answers for her, but she and I sat together genuinely in the space of non-knowing.

We don't know that. The two sat together. One thought 'this is the space of non-knowing'. The other did not. It may be that the girl was African American or concerned about what was happening to African Americans. It may be that she was wondering how a healing 'metanoia'- not a 'non-knowing'- could bring the Nation together.  What would Dr. King have done? What would Christ do?

This space’s condition is not the fixity of the discipline of religious studies. Rather, the condition for her question, in particular, was the fact that I—her teacher—had chosen, as a scholar of the discipline of religious studies, to breach the already unsteady boundary of our discipline. I invited to our college a person who is not a scholar, but who is situated within a religious tradition and practice, thereby signaling that I won’t perform a (for me false) acceptance of the (for me) false scholarly objectification of “religious people” and “religious practices” and “religion” itself.

I think it very sad if a University Dept. frowns upon hearing from actual practitioners rather than armchair pundits.

My student could feel that the visit of this Zen priest and activist was showing to us the constructedness of our religious studies department, our discipline, our methods, our questions.

Constructedness can be either sound or unsound. It seems that Brennan's religious studies department has been constructed of flimsy materials. It may shelter some otherwise unemployable people but the thing should be condemned as unsafe for young people.

And this is how she got to her question. The conditions for that question and of our space of non-knowing were not a false fixity—of discipline, department, textual canon, or room number—but the recognition of the realities of the historical, cultural, political, and moral embeddedness of our very moments of thinking together.

Sadly, young people and their teachers are ill equipped to 'recognize the realities' of what shapes society. If they did they would be employed in much more utile and well remunerated professions.

The point about Religion is that it is relatively easy for a Human being to learn. History and Politics and Economics, however, are very difficult to master. When we read a story about a poor man who was very very good despite being the victim of all sorts of injustices we know how the story will end only if it is a religious story. 

In Callard’s essay, the fixity of the discipline of philosophy is not ostensibly posited in contraposition to other academic disciplines, which is how I have figured it here thus far. Instead, that fixity is positioned in relation to the public.

This is perfectly fair. A discipline has its own 'terms of art' and it is useful to maintain a barrier against popular pragmatics. 'Capital' in Econ means something different to its ordinary language usage. However, 'Capital Theory' in Econ has collapsed because it could not 'pay its way'. Similarly, many legal 'terms of art' fall into desuetude, or- in England- get purged by the Profession.

What Callard said was-

When Aristotle said that the intellectual life is one of serious leisure, I believe he was trying to avoid the Scylla of business and the Charybdis of pleasure. If philosophy offered helpful answers to the questions you were asking anyways, it wouldn’t be leisurely; if it added fun to the life you were living anyways, it wouldn’t be serious. It is hard to overstate how difficult it is for a single activity to be serious, leisurely and radically open-ended in the way that philosophy is. What can look like territorialism is really a valiant effort on the part of academic philosophers to maintain the tension that keeps an almost impossible activity from falling apart— dissolving into unleisurely business and unserious pleasure.

 A better way to say this is that Philosophy is a protocol bound, juristic, discourse autonomous of other disciplines. However, if another discipline makes as breakthrough such that a particular branch of philosophy- such as the search for synthetic a priori judgments, or the nonsense that is the Husserian eidetic object- is shown to be based on a naive ontology, then Philosophy must ruthlessly lop off the rotten branch or consign it to the lumber room of 'history of ideas'. It is because it failed to do so that it sank in prestige.

Philosophy proper, her essay begins, takes place with the fixed position of an intellectual discipline housed within an academic institution, led by a professional philosopher. These are the conditions that produce the non-knowing of which she writes.

Callard says she isn't going to give her students 'answers'. If she did, philosophy would be utile not 'leisurely'.  If Callard said 'I'm going to show you how to come to 'not-knowing'- then she would be giving students an answer. Some philosophers do promise some such thing. But this sort of philosophy is 'vocational' not 'leisurely'. It is like Medicine or Jurisprudence. Well, that is the claim. Sadly, it is false.

Callard is well aware that Philosophy's status has fallen a great deal. There was a time when Physicists, like Einstein, took an interest in Philosophy. So did Mathematicians like Brouwer. Those days are long gone. Thus Callard seeks to inculcate a 'serious' but 'leisured' pursuit. This is perfectly reasonable.

Callard’s question—Is public philosophy good?—is a thinking through of her not knowing about whether her discipline really should be fixed within an academic institution or whether instead it can be practiced in public spaces, like newspaper articles, popular internet forums, or perhaps a seminar at the local public library.

I think, Callard is saying 'public philosophy' is like pop psychology or the History Channel's sexed up version of events. Most of us would go further. It is exhibitionism of an obscene and meretricious type. Everybody knows the Emperor is naked. Nobody wants to see the old fool twerking.

By posing this question, she rightly points to the history, indeed founding, of the very discipline that now represents itself as fixed in a certain way: Socrates engaged continually with non-philosophers.

Because philosophers were thin on the ground. Anyway, Parmenides took down his pants but good.

I commend this question for its spirit of not knowing, but I can answer it right now. So long as the occasion for thinking about philosophy’s relationship to the public is that the fixity of philosophy is the occasion for its unique relationship among academic disciplines to the eruption of not knowing, the answer to her question will be no, public philosophy is not good.

This is not the Mahayana doctrine- or indeed that of any Indic philosophy save some extinct type of Mimamsa. Darshan Gyan has no 'unique relationship among academic disciplines'. Yuddhishtra can learn from a 'Vyadha' as Confucius could learn from Butcher Ding.

Eruption is 'sphota'. Not knowing is Nirvana- extinction as of a candle being extinguished.

It is true that there are 'esoteric' schools in Buddhism and Hinduism. As far as I know, they are all utterly shite. That which is Darshan Gyan, as opposed to fraud, is that which is already in its most publicly accessible form.

To consider what the public is and how philosophy is positioned against it will betray the way that the not knowing Callard writes of is false, precisely because it rests on a certainty—about what the discipline of philosophy is vis-à-vis other academic disciplines—that is false.

The Vimalakirti is good philosophy. Dhyana is itself founded upon the idea of 'suhrit prapti' the seeking of like minded others across all social divisions- including that between Pundits and Proletarians.

Callard is merely saying that Philosophy is protocol bound and has 'terms of art'. She isn't saying that she is certain Philosophy is any good save as a 'serious' form of leisured activity.

In the discipline of religious studies, we have no such certainties, or maybe some of us do, but the field is constituted in good part by our debates with each other about them, and everybody knows that. I wrote above that as a scholar of religious studies I am haunted by philosophy. It is the discipline I would be a part of had I not been repelled by its false certainties and fixities, most importantly its apparently a priori certainty about what counts as philosophy in the first place.

An axiom is merely 'what is thought fitting'. This changes over time. No doubt, back in the Eighteenth Century there were a few pedants who thought they could discover something marvelous- perhaps a mathesis universalis. But history proved them wrong. As Nietzche said 'Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people”

But also, when I say I am haunted by philosophy, I mean more than this. I mean something like what Kathryn Lofton means when she writes that as a historian of religion, she is haunted by the discipline of history. For Lofton, history is a discipline confident in its methods’ ability to capture its object, even when those methods are a topic of intra-mural dispute among historians. By contrast, Lofton writes of religious studies departments: “Our ordering fact is that we do not, ostensibly, share a disciplining method, but rather that we share a relation to a maddeningly problematic, inciting and freighted object: religion.”

I suppose the same may be said about Media Studies and Basket Weaving and Finger Painting other similar courses.

Suppose Religious Studies courses showed students how to qualify as priests, gain large congregations, build and manage mega-churches and so forth, then Religious Studies would be as lucrative as 'Sports Management'.

Callard’s essay betrays a confidence like that Lofton attributes to historians, a confidence in the discipline of philosophy’s capacity to bring its practitioners (among whom Callard counts any student who finds herself in a philosophy course, which is generous while yet a symptom of the problematic confidence I write of) to the heights, or depths, of thinking itself.

Callard knows that Philosophy isn't attracting the best minds. I suppose she herself must have dreamt of being a Fields Medalist or Physics Nobel Prize winner.  But many are called and few are chosen. The vast majority of us will never know the 'heights, and depths of thinking'. This doesn't mean we can't live a productive life. Still, if we are real smart we should stay away from Philosophy. Look at David Lewis's last works. The guy was bright but he went into the wrong field and ended up talking nonsense.

Lofton situates the discipline of history as in a kind of denominational dispute with the sorts of histories produced by and methods practiced by church historians. In parallel fashion, I situate the discipline of philosophy as in a denominational dispute with any intellectual discipline for whom inquiry into the conditions of its own existence is seen as crucial to understanding its very identity and function.

Sadly, in the case of Mathematics or Physics, this is no longer true. Philosophers simply aren't smart enough. As for Econ and other lesser disciplines, it is widely recognized that only shite Economists migrate to Philosophy's La La land. Look at Amartya Sen. His own people now consider him an utter cretin.

This is the inquiry philosophy cannot allow itself to withstand, does not actually have the confidence to withstand. And so, for example, the philosophers’ refusal to travel down the bridge leading to thought by starting with a recognition of their kin from other places and times—like the thinkers who have sustained multi-millennia traditions of inquiry into things like the formation of the moral subject, the conditions that produce knowledge, the study of what kinds of things exist or what existence itself is, or the procedures of reason in South Asia and East Asia (to name the two with which I am most familiar)—is not an accident that will eventually be corrected through increasing familiarity with those foreign philosophies. It is a symptom of the very feature that holds the discipline together: the refusal to look at its own conditions.

Back in the Sixties, some Indians thought people like J.L Mehta or Matilal would 'correct' Eurocentrism. After all, Radhakrishnan had become an international celebrity. Robert Graves writes of the cult of the Indian philosopher in his 'The Long Week-end'.

Then we read Mehta and Matilal for ourselves on the internet and discovered that they had become more ignorant of Indian thought than we could have thought possible. Meanwhile the reputation of Western Philosophers was plummeting. Rawls was considered a great philosopher. The cretin did not get that 'behind the veil of ignorance' people would choose a Social Insurance scheme. Indeed, that's what they did- where it was feasible- anyway! Still, Rawls was a sort of theologian and represented the spirit of the vanished Warren Court.

There are some bright people alive today who are Philosophers- Gibbard, Kripke, Maudlin maybe- but our feeling is they went into the wrong discipline. They wasted their brain power. Any way, what the market wants is 'Grievance Studies'- at least while Student Loans or the Bank of Mum & Dad continue to finance worthless Credentials.

While I am haunted by philosophy because of the certainties and confidences it would afford me if only I were permitted into its ranks as a philosopher of Buddhism (certainties and confidences which, for the sake of thought itself, I am happy to find myself unburdened by), Callard’s inquiry into the potentials—the potential goodness—of public philosophy is haunted by this refusal.

Come to think of it, Nalanda would be delighted to appoint Brennan a professor of philosophy. She may be inspired to produce path breaking work which will lead to Chairs- or hammocks- at Ivy League.

And the specter of the false confidence that accompanies this refusal haunts her essay, beginning as she does with a performance of it, and then setting forth into a question that will ultimately be devoured by it.

Oh dear. A ghost will eat a question. How sad.

I would suggest to Callard then, for the sake of non-knowing, to step back from the question of publics and examine the conditions from which she asks that question. From here, I think, the kinds of inquiries that arise from genuine non-knowing may begin.

The contatus of genuine non-knowing keeps it clear of all 'kinds of inquiries'. That is why it is worth having. An even better strategy than that of 'good soldier Shweik' is to know nothing and be as stupid as shit. Even the immortal Gods battle in vain against Stupidity.

By contrast, Occassionalist philosophy- like that of the Gita- as well as 'kshanikavada' momentariness- permit 'not knowing' to be the condition for more, not less, good and worthwhile actions. This is the warrior code of the Kshatriya or Samurai. The arrow shoots itself. The eye has already picked out its next target. Meanwhile, under the guidance of 'the peasant sage' Ninomiya, the Zen priest has taken up fishing to feed the village.

This does not mean the priest can no longer minister to his flock. On the contrary, he is a better priest for being a better man and enabling others too to rise up.

By contrast, the precision and certainty of 'Akrebia' is a fault. In Judaism there is the concept of halakah vein morin kein- the law which, if known, forbids the very action it otherwise enjoins. The Game Theorist, Robert Aumann has beautifully illumined the Talmud to explain why this must be the case.

It would be unfair to take Brennan's article- a response to one by Callard- to fully reflect her own thought. Still, I have drawn attention to it because it highlights the problem with Religious studies as taught in Universities. In India, the recent controversy over the hiring of a Muslim to teach Hindu priestcraft- of which he was wholly ignorant- has alerted us to this type of mischief. Students deserve to be taught things which are useful to them, not convenient to their otherwise unemployable teachers.