154 cosmos
simple ignorance when the early Russian astronaut said God was not to be
found in space. It was a remark clearly out of touch with the true nature of
science and religion.
The domain of experience is difficult to agree upon. If we draw on a re-
lational metaphysics of experience, we come to the conclusion that experience
is relating. It is not the experience of an experiencer. The experiencer qua
experience does not precede the experiencing. Nor does what-is-experienced
precede the experiencing. The reality is the action, the acting, relating. The
terms of the relationship are derivatives, useful abstractions, but we must not
make them fundamental.
It is this metaphysical perspective that makes some aspects of quantum
theory so interesting. When Heisenberg maintained that the reality of the par-
ticle comes into existence when we observe it, some realists thought that he
had introduced the “ghost of the observer” into quantum mechanics. I should
argue that it is a metaphysically responsible position, in that in the words of
David Bohm, the observer and the world represent an indivisible system. Un-
der this rubric he elaborates upon the nature of the world:^35
the world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead it
must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts ap-
pear as valid approximations only in the classical limit.One thing I have insisted upon in my relational position is that we need
only one metaphysics for the whole of experience. In the previous state of
affairs people had several: one metaphysics for science at the macroscopic level,
another for the quantum level, another for the social level, and still another for
religious matters. The relational schema I am proposing has in its favor ex-
treme economy. We may say that the observer—the observing—and the ob-
served reduce to the observing. The observer and the observed are co-derivative
abstractions. In the social world, the self—the relating—and other reduce
fundamentally to the relating. The self and the other are co-derivatives. In
religious discourse, the worshiper—the worshiping—and the Worshiped re-
duce to the worshiping. The Worshiped is not demeaned by this formulation,
for it is worship that gives us God, as I shall argue later. In this connection
Whitehead’s words are worth remembering: “The power of God is the worship
He inspires.”^36
In the West where there is almost an idolizing of the “subject”—as witness
the long entrenchment of the philosophy of idealism—some may feel that this
relational system demeans the subject, namely the individual. This objection
I should counter with the insight of the Kyo ̄to philosopher, Nishida Kitaro ̄—
somewhat influenced by William James—who argued: “It is not that there is
experience because there is an individual, but that there is an individual be-
cause there is experience.”^37 It is only along this line of reasoning that we can
say that experiencing is all there is. One of his colleagues, Keiji Nishitani,