Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen 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 216 and 217.

You're going to need to know what's meant by Shunyatta as an experiential framing or the groundless ground.

And you'll also need Nishatani's

concept of realization and the double meaning in 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 kid's menu at a

restaurant, these are things that can show us something important about the way we see the

world as human beings.

Wittgenstein 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

...