Hick's Real Is Not a Monism: A Classical Chinese Reading of Religious Pluralism — Epoche C1
The charge against Hick John Hick held that Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, Brahman and the Dharmakāya of Mahāyāna Buddhism are not competing candidates for a single office, but different ways in which one transcendent reality is humanly experienced. In An Interpretation of Religion (1989) he called that reality the Real , and he divided it in two: the Real as it is in itself, and the Real as encountered within the concepts, practices and histories of a particular tradition. The personal forms he called personae , the non-personal ones impersonae , and the divergence between them he attributed to the traditions rather than to the Real. The standard objection, pressed by Gavin D'Costa among others, is that this is monism wearing pluralist clothes. A monism , in the sense at issue, is the doctrine that behind apparent multiplicity there stands a single reality of which the many are aspects. If the Real is one, and the traditions are its appearances, then the differences between them — over whether the ultimate is personal, whether there is rebirth, whether anyone is saved by faith — are demoted to cultural colouring on a common substance. This essay argues that the charge misidentifies its target, and that classical Chinese and Indian Buddhist philosophy supply the vocabulary in which the misidentification becomes visible. It also concedes, along the way, that an earlier formulation of this argument was itself defective in a manner that the same vocabulary exposes. The Kantian machinery, stated exactly Hick's structure is borrowed and modified, and both halves of that need setting out before the argument can proceed. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787), distinguished things as they appear to us from things as they are in themselves. Appearance is not illusion: it is the product of a real object and the mind's own forms of receiving and organising it — space, time, causality. Because those forms are contributed by the knower, the object as it is apart from them is not available, and Kant held that the categories of the understanding cannot be applied to it. Hick takes over the shape of this and changes one thing, the change being where the pluralism comes from. For Kant the organising apparatus is universal, the same in every rational mind, so appearances are uniform. For Hick the apparatus is cultural and historical: the concepts through which a community receives the Real are those its scriptures, its practices and its language supply, and they differ. The same input, differently formed, yields Allah in one setting and śūnyatā in another. The consequence is the point the monism charge overlooks. If our substantial concepts belong to the receiving apparatus rather than to the Real in itself, then they do not apply to it — and Hick states this in the strongest available form, holding that the Real cannot be said to be personal or impersonal, substance or process, good or evil, or, decisively for the present dispute, one or many. Number is a category too. So the premise that the Real is a single thing behind the many appearances is not a premise Hick grants. The traditions are not aspects of a One, because 'one' is not a predicate available here. To that extent the reading defended in this essay stands: Hick's Real is not a monism, and the title's claim is textual rather than merely charitable. The objection that survives, and a correction owed That disposes of the numerical version of the charge. A harder one takes its place, and it must be faced rather than declared answered. If no substantial concept applies to the Real, on what ground is it asserted to exist, to be one referent of many traditions' worship, and to be that to which their transformations are responses? Each of those is itself a substantial claim, so transcategoriality appears to undercut the very statements the theory needs. D'Costa develops a related charge in 'The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions' (1996) and in The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (2000): the pluralist has not stepped outside the traditions to a neutral vantage point, but has occupied a further position of his own, with its own metaphysics and its own criteria for what counts as authentic religion, and is therefore an exclusivist with a wider circle rather than a genuine pluralist. Here the correction. The earlier version of this argument described Hick's Real as an empty signifier — a term borrowed from political theory for a sign whose content is unfixed, so that different parties can invest it with their own. That description concedes D'Costa's case and misstates Hick's. Hick was an explicit realist about the Real: he held that it exists independently of human belief and that religious experience is a genuine cognitive response to it, and he argued against non-realist accounts of religious language that treat God as a human construction. A placeholder that different traditions merely fill would be exactly such a construction. The distinction the argument needs is not between full and empty signifiers but between two ways of being empty: the Real is empty of predicates, not empty of reference. Nothing we can say characterises it; that is compatible with there being something our saying fails to characterise. Which Chinese reading? A prior question Before the Chinese material can be brought in, two things need correcting, one philological and one philosophical, because the earlier treatment mishandled both. The rhetorical scheme invoked was written 起承転合. The character 転 is the modern Japanese simplification; the Chinese form is 轉, and the Chinese four-part scheme is 起承轉合 ( qǐ chéng zhuǎn hé ) — opening, development, turn, and joining or resolution — while the Japanese counterpart ends in 結 rather than 合. The scheme originated as the structure of the four lines of a jueju quatrain and was later extended to prose composition. It is a way of arranging an argument, not a thesis about reality, and it can arrange a monist