In recent years, new terms and concepts have been created in the field of religion in an attempt to understand the diversification of religious phenomena. On the basis of Amos 8: 11-12, which states, “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find
it, ” the paper will propose a new perspective to understand this flood of words in academic discourse that continues unabated in Japan today.
In particular, the incommunicativity between the prophet Amos and the people, as described in the text, is resulting from the conceptual gap between the desires of the autonomous spirit of the people who search for a satisfaction in the meaning of the words of prophecy, and the claims of the heteronomous spirit of the prophets who want the people to obey the order of God in action. In light of this gap, the longing for new terminology to explain modern religious phenomena in Japan can be understood as a parallel with a hunger for the autonomous spirit of the ancient Israelites as described in Amos 8: 11-12; their hungers should last as long as it lacks a sensitivity to the heteronomous spirit of obeying the word of God.
With the above understanding of the issue, in search for the ways of the autonomous spirit which do not reject the demands of the heteronomous spirit, the paper will explore preliminarily a possibility of the model-based thinking claimed by Adin Steinsaltz on Judaism and the language sense of the Talmud. As an example of the model-based thinking, the paper will focus on the dispute in Talmud related to conversion and circumcision in order to illustrate a contrast of the model-based thinking of Judaism with the definition-based thinking by philosophers in general.
The conclusion of the paper will be that when discussing life, a definition-based thinking ultimately proceeds first from a definition and therefore is not an adequate way for discussing the secrets of nature (the ineffable) such as the marvels of life. What we should be pursuing instead is a reevaluation of the heteronomous spirit of religions which commands an awareness of the issue of life. It will help one to understand the limits of modern ethical debates regarding life and to direct the pursuit of philosophical definitions of “Life” toward the concrete respect of “Life” rather than the sets of highly abstracted concepts which are fundamentally nothing but a formalized oblivion of modern ethical problems.
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