I’ve often said that if I ever did a PhD, I would want to do it in Asia. From what (admittedly little) research I’ve done, their universities often seem to combine their departments of philosophy and religion. In fact, I recall reading somewhere (I think in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Feng Youlan?) that the Far East has rarely distinguished between philosophy and religion, which is a western innovation. Nobody doubts that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions. On the other hand, people aren’t so sure about Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and the like: people seem awfully confused about whether they are philosophies or religions! It’s left ambiguous; and you know, this ambiguity is precisely where I feel at home!

I remember once asking myself whether I thought of myself more as a philosopher or a theologian. The answer was pretty obvious to me from the get-go: I was a philosopher—that is, a lover of wisdom—first and foremost. Theology, to me, seemed to revel in circular thinking, proof-texting, and inscrutable “revelation”. I find it interesting, of course, but it feels like a comparatively small pond to play in.

That being said, I had (and still have) a bone to pick with philosophy. I did four years of philosophy in undergrad, and in that time, I had some classes that were meh, some that were fantastic, and others that were absolute nonsense. I don’t mean that they were irrational or anything. I don’t even mean that they were pointless. They certainly had a point to them, though mainly in the way sudoku or a koan has a point to it. But oftentimes I would find myself sitting there, listening people make a big fuss about some abstract metaphysical question, thinking about how people have been debating this for hundreds if not thousands of years, and I would think to myself: who fucking cares?!

Seriously! Who fucking cares? My favourite example of this was when I had to take a metaphysics class in third year, and my professor asked us: does a chair exist, or do the atoms that make up the chair exist? What, in other words, is ultimately real: the material, or the idea? My answer: does it matter if we have somewhere to sit down?

Another class I had was about Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which was about “trying to make metaphysics into a science”. What on earth does that mean? It just seemed overly abstract or like intellectual fluff to me, and what’s the point of that?

On the other hand, I had classes about the ancients, who (while not above idle speculation) seemed concerned with the big questions that made me want to study philosophy to begin with. Questions like “what is a good life?”, “what is the nature of God?”, “how do we know things?”, etc. That’s what I wanted to ask. These were fundamental questions, after all, and it felt like we were whisked past them to the increasingly convoluted eras of medieval, early modern, and modern philosophy.

On the other hand, the religion of those periods had something that appealed to me. It was concerned with the fundamental questions of old, too, but also seemed at odds with many of the rational principles of philosophy (as I had come to understand them). This disjunction became clear to me with slogans like “theology is the queen of the sciences” and “philosophy is the handmaid of theology”, an attitude that seems to persist in some theological circles to this day.

So, there we are: philosophy without religion seemed without a point or end in mind, and religion without philosophy seemed dogmatic and irrational. Neither seemed satisfying without the other. I wanted both. How could I have both? What lessons could we learn from China, as Feng Youlan would describe it, that might enhance our spiritualities with philosophy, and vice versa? In my opinion, not only should we remember that it is possible to integrate the two but also that both are at their best when in conversation with each other.