ABSTRACT
Alan Watts’ philosophy of religion makes a claim for secular competence in religious praxis. The argument appears as paradoxical as a Zen koan: religion is a secular affair, for both the value and actuality of faith are lost when held faithfully, but reborn in the necessity of acting on insecure foundations that life demands. The premise is that believing can either assist a believer in dealing with facts of living, or hide them from the believer’s attention. In the latter the believer is less likely to prosper. I posit that religion, as Watts uses the term, represents the binding of interpretation within and as living being, put to work as a furthering of the coordination of organism and environment. As such, religion is a process of biosemiotic ontology, an entailment of the function of sign use. As persons, religion is that process by which what we believe becomes what we do and thus who we are. Watts warns us not to bind-perception-into-action speciously, that is, not to do religion merely as an arbitrary metaphysical heritage. He also reminds us that religion cannot safely be ignored, and schools us to do it well, i.e., to submit it to skeptical analyses.
Notes on contributor
Gerald Ostdiek is assistant professor in the Hussite Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague, and a researcher at the University of Hradec Králové. He grounds his philosophical efforts within the study of semiotics as biology and culture, and the all too real consequences of reciprocity, radical continuity, and reproduction with variation plus selection.