“A Shuddering Awareness of Death and Life Together”: Doing Justice to Ambivalence in the Philosophy of Religion

Ambivalence is a prominent feature of religious traditions, with respect both to the attitudes exhibited in the faith of many religious practitioners and to the qualities embodied in conceptions of the divine. Yet these ambivalences have received little scrutiny from philosophy of religion, especially in its analytic mode. Helping to address this lacuna, the current article comprises critical and constructive components. In a critical vein, it challenges the tendencies of intellectualism and moralism that encourage an overemphasis on intellectual or cognitive dimensions of religion and a privileging of religious forms that accord with the investigator’s moral predilections. Constructively, the article looks to Wittgenstein-inspired philosophy and to aspects of the anthropology and phenomenology of religion for conceptual resources to deploy in relation to ambivalent, awesome, or even terrifying conceptions of divinity. In aid of enlarging the scope of (Western, principally analytic) philosophy of religion beyond the confines of standard Christian-centric or “theistic” strictures, examples of ambivalent deities are drawn from Hindu sources, most notably the Bhagavad Gītā and Śākta (Goddess-revering) traditions. The guiding purpose of the article is to promote a radically pluralist approach that seeks to do conceptual justice to the variety of forms that religion takes without imposing an overintellectualized or moralistic picture on them.