E-020 SEP CTHE - God and Other Ultimates (Thesis 1 Excerpt)

Exact excerpt

### 1.1 Definition of “ultimate”
 
Brahman, the Dao, emptiness, God, the One, Reasonableness—there, in alphabetical order, are names of the central subjects of concern in what are commonly parsed as some of the world’s religions, philosophies and quasi-religious-philosophies. [ 1 ] They are all names for what is ultimate, at least on some uses of the names (for instance, “God” is not always taken to be ultimate, more soon). But what is it to be ultimate, in this sense?
 
To answer in terms of its use, the term “ultimacy”, meaning the state or nature of being ultimate, has Brahman, the Dao, emptiness etc. as instances. To answer semantically, with a meaning, is difficult for at least two reasons. First, though there is abundant precedent in the literature for collecting these subjects as ideas of ultimacy, [ 2 ] doing so presupposes they have some shared characteristic or family resemblance that makes them count as ultimate. But is there a shared core idea of being ultimate? “Particularists” among others argue no: the diverse range of cultural and historical contexts from which these subjects come, coupled with how hard it is to talk across such contexts, makes them all “separate cultural islands” (Hedges 2014: 206; see also Berthrong 2001: 237–239, 255–256). [ 3 ] The second concern is related, and not far from one Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) among others has raised about religion: even if we found a substantive account of ultimacy visible in multiple traditions, such an account necessarily will be borne from a cultural conceptual context. Thus, far from delivering the notions at work in other traditions, such an account actually risks de-forming them.
 
Regarding the first concern, John H. Berthrong, among others, is far more optimistic than the particularists that concepts not only can be shared across cultures but in fact are
 
already comparative, having been generated by the interactions of people, texts, rituals, cultural sensibilities and the vagaries of history and local customs. (2001: 238)
 
Other theorists explore factors that could detail or add to Berthrong’s list—e.g., trade and conquests (Gayatriprana 2020), shared human evolutionary biology (Wildman 2017), and the evolution of moral development (Wright 2010). [ 4 ] Still, most take the second concern about enculturation to stick and thus to temper the optimism: there is both a shared humanity and real cultural difference to own in reaching a global idea of ultimacy. Raimon Panikkar says it well:
 
Brahman is certainly not the one true and living God of the Abrahamic traditions. Nor can it be said that Shang-ti or kami are the same as brahman. And yet they are not totally unrelated. (Panikkar 1987 [2005: 2254])