Episode #223 ... Religion and the duck-rabbit - Kyoto School pt. 3

hello everyone I'm Steven West this is philosophies this so there's a quote from one of the members of the Kyoto School we're going to be talking about today he said religion without philosophy is blind and philosophy without religion is vacuous see today we're going to be talking about the relationship between philosophy and religion something the Kyoto school was always rethinking as they were doing their work and understand exactly what was meant by this quote I just said just a heads up you're going to need an understanding of the nishitani episodes we've already done episodes 2116 and 2117 you're going to need to know what's meant by shunyata as an experiential framing or the groundless ground and you'll also need nishitani's concept of realization and the double meaning and the way he uses it in his work from here on out this episode is written as though you've listened to those two but you know what all that said I don't even want to start with nishitani or any of the Kyoto school stuff today today I want to start with something simple I want to give some long-deserved attention to a very important cartoon character that's come to be known as the Duck Rabbit who or what is a Duck Rabbit you may ask well you ever seen one of those optical illusion things where half the people see a duck half the people see a rabbit when they look at it there's tons of these things out there it can be a sound can be a video the point is aside from this just being some fun Optical thing on a kids menu at a restaurant these are things that can show us something important about the way we see the world as human beings Vicken Stein used the Duck Rabbit in his work to talk about the meanings of words but the Duck Rabbit as a metaphor can actually be useful for all sorts of situations when we want to get out of seeing things in a classic dualistic theoretical abstract framing of the world like we've been talking about on this show lately and I'd like to take this moment to empathize with a certain kind of person out there listening to this series so far this kind of person may say look I hear you okay where you keep talking about ...