“Once natural science and its image of the world had been established, the teleological conception of the natural world gave way to a mechanistic one, bringing a fundamental change in the relation between man and nature. It was a process of disengaging the approach to nature from the religious world view that had been its matrix” (Nishitani Keiji – Religion and Nothingness).
Modern science has completely transformed the old view of nature
While reaffirming his belief in God as the creator and architect of the world, French philosopher René Descartes at the same time attempted to establish a “ground of certainty” that would give the emerging science based on mathematics, observation of facts and the experimental method a solid foundation. Using methodical doubt, he came to establish human self-consciousness as such a ground, and therefore human reason as absolute authority. This is what Nishitani refers to as the field of consciousness (or reason), on which things are apprehended by a subject who looks at all things (objects) as separate from him/her. Although this way of looking at the natural world is now familiar to us, this was not how it had been perceived before him throughout human history.
Nishitani writes: “The laws of the natural world used to be regarded as part of the divine order, a visible expression of the providence of God. The order of the natural world and the order of the human world were united in a single great cosmic order. This meant that everything in the universe existed by virtue of being assigned a specific place in the whole. As an order, it was conceived teleologically; and as a cosmic order, it was seen to witness to the existence of God … Augustine, for example, notes in De ordine, VI, 19: ‘If, as we have been taught and as the necessity of order itself persuades us to feel, God is just, then he is just because he renders to each thing what is its just due’. Augustine here sees a ‘great order’, and beyond that, a ‘divine providence’.”
In fact, the idea of a cosmic order goes back much further, “to Pythagoras and Plato, before them to the Upanishads, and still further back to several peoples of the ancient world.” It is still found in contemporary indigenous spiritualities where it has given rise to ways of life based on the need to adapt to the cosmic order and seek to nourish and protect it. In fact, “even in modern times,” Nishitani adds, “such natural scientists as Kepler and Newton regarded their own research and pursuit of the laws of nature as a quest for the secrets of a divine cosmic economy.”
As late as the 18th century, we can see signs that such a view was still prevalent in Europe. The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was one of the events that signalled a turning point in the European view of what we now call “natural” disasters. Nishitani writes: “On the one side, we see the English clergy, for instance, attributing the earthquake to the Catholicism of the city’s inhabitants. On the other, we see the people of Lisbon thinking that they had brought the disaster upon themselves by permitting heretics (Protestants) to reside in their city. But behind these controversies was the profound and extensive shock that the earthquake inflicted on the mind of Europe. The chronicles of the history of philosophy tell us of the ill will the disaster engendered between Voltaire and Rousseau. We know, too, that Kant wrote a treatise on the disaster in the following year, in which he attacked as blasphemous the ‘misguided human teleology’ that would label such a natural phenomenon as divine punishment or presume to detect in it ‘the aims of divine solicitude’.”
holding a fiery sword, personifying divine judgement.
The collapse of teleology can therefore be dated very precisely to the mid-18th century, which, given the massive impact it had on our worldview, our political and economic systems right through to our daily lives, is surprisingly recent.
Nishitani continues: “Then, as is well known, once natural science and its image of the world had been established, the teleological conception of the natural world gave way to a mechanistic one, bringing a fundamental change in the relation between man and nature. It was a process of disengaging the approach to nature from the religious world view that had been its matrix.” But, “as this intellectual process continued, the natural world assumed more and more the features of a world cold and dead, governed by laws of mechanical necessity, completely indifferent to the fact of man … it is a world in which we find ourselves unable to live as man, in which our human mode of being is edged out of the picture or even obliterated. We can neither take this world as it is or leave it … It is a world that leads man to despair.” Nishitani, however, adds: “A religion based merely on the old teleological view of nature is, to say the least, inadequate for our day and age.” So there is no going back, we cannot unlearn what we have learned.
“But,” said Friedrich Holderlin, “where the danger is, also grows the saving power” (Friedrich Holderlin)
To be honest, Nishitani does not mention Holderlin’s famous words quoted by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology. Instead he refers to a similar idea he found in Dostoevski. He writes: “But for Dostoevski the matter did not end there, for from within that very despair there came to birth an awareness of nihility penetrating deep beneath the world of natural laws and inhuman rationality with which science is preoccupied. At this depth the awareness of nihility opens up a horizon that enables a freedom beyond necessity and a life beyond rationality. For Dostoevski it meant reinstating the question of religion together with and over against the question of nihilism.”
So, Nishitani asks: “is it possible for us to regard a natural order so indifferent to our human mode of being as to rub it out, as belonging to a greater divine order? Or is such an indifferent natural order altogether incompatible with the concept of God? Religion has yet to confront science at this fundamental level.”
It is a fact that in the past “religion” has been primarily concerned with human salvation. But, Nishitani remarks, “being concerned with the salvation of man is different from concluding that the enabling ground of salvation lies within the realm of human interests. In short, the problem comes down to this: when the relationship between man and an insensitive world on the one hand, and between this same world and God on the other, are made the ground of religion, what becomes of the relationship between God and man which is religion? So long as the world could be seen from a teleological standpoint, there was no real difficulty. A fundamental harmony was seen between the world and the existence of man in that world. Man was taken to be the supreme representative of all things in the world. He stood at its center. The meaning and telos of human existence formed the criteria for the meaning and telos of the world. As a consequence, the relationship between God and man became like its own axis with the world pushed out on to the periphery. Whether the world was thought of positively as the creation of God or negatively as something to be cast aside made no difference. For once this axis had been set up, it was possible to establish a relationship between God and man based exclusively on human interests, and beyond that made into something exclusively ‘personal’.”
A world that has become indifferent to human interests stands in the way of humankind’s relationship to God because it is no longer possible to see the world as ordered by divine will or divine providence. In Nishitani’s words, “the world cut through the personal relationship between God and man.” To be sure, religion itself was expected to eventually disappear, forced out by the growing authority of science. Although modern science undermined the authority of religion and triggered the birth of various forms of atheism, religion has survived, albeit often in corrupted forms. In fact, the more indifferent the natural world is to the concerns of humans, the more humans faced with a “meaning crisis,” crave for salvation to overcome the particularly virulent nihilism Nishitani had experienced in his own life. Within the short time between the intrusion of US navy in the Bay of Edo and Nishitani’s birth, a mere forty years, Japan’s ancestral culture had been displaced by Western scientific and technological culture. Nishitani could therefore assert that “this turn of events can hardly be without relevance to the question of God as its affects all religions, but in particular as it affects the kind of clearly defined theism we find in Christianity.”
Nishitani gives two examples of what it means, in concrete terms, when Western abstract, scientific and technological terminology displaces age-old experience-based, ways of looking at the world. In the first, he takes the example of a man tossing a crust of bread and a dog leaping up to catch it. From one angle, all “things/beings” – the man, the dog, and the bread – and their movements are subject to physico-chemical laws. But from another, that of the concrete particularities of each of these things – the particular man, the particular dog, and the particular crust of bread – these do “exist in their own proper mode of being and their own proper form … and that as such they maintain a special relationship among themselves” (RN 79). There is, then, two ways of seing the scene, as the manifestation of a natural law, or as the concrete interaction between the three particular “things/beings” actually taking place. In the second, Nishitani says that “whether atomic power is employed to kill off vast numbers of people or applied to peaceful objectives matter not to the natural laws at work. These laws display in both cases the same cold inhumanity, the same indifference to human interests” (RN 50).
Source:
Nishitani Keiji – Religion and Nothingness (serialised from 1961 onwards – English translation 1982)
Please click on https://buddhism-thewayofemptiness.blog.nomagic.uk/the-non-duality-of-life-and-death/ for end of this text