Synopsis
SPIRITUALITY FOR THE SKEPTIC
THE THOUGHTFUL LOVE OF LIFE
By Robert C. Solomon
Acknowledgements (IX)
3 presumptions he works from:-
- Spiritually has a lot to do with thoughtfulness
- Spiritually is not at odds with but rather in cahoots with science.
- Spiritually is by no means limited to religion, much less sectarian, authoritarian religion.
These in turn lead to his affirmation of what he calls naturalized spirituality and his summary, Hallmark card phrase, “spirituality as the thoughtful love of life.
Preface (XI). For most of his life he conflated spirituality and the worst of religion. Raised as a (nominally) Jewish secular humanist, he found religion a source of suspicion and sometime outright hatred and spirituality to be platitudinous nonsense fueled by pretention and dominated by hypocrisy.
In retrospect he realizes that he was missing out on something important; that spirituality can be severed from vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banality both. Spirituality, he has come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life and is not connected with the belief in any sort of god. Many of the “Devout’ are as devoid of spirituality as an empty styrofoam cup (which is not to say that he rejects god but he is skeptical). Spirituality is of course, at home in organized religion but is also at home elsewhere. His search is for a non institutional, non exclusive sense of spirituality which is not based on belief, is not anti science, is not otherworldly, is not uncritical and is not cultist or kinky it is a Naturalized Spirituality.
He is frustrated at the extent that the notion of spirituality has been hijacked by organized, New Age eccentrics, organized religion and divisive sectarians. He notes that modern religion is mindlessly ahistorical in its focus on eternal truths and oblivious of its history of intolerance, persecution and massacres. The Inquisition and the Holocaust must never became “mere history”.
He has also become disillusioned with philosophy as it is defined and taught. What was conceived as the love of wisdom has became a tedious technical enterprise which utterly ignores the emotional side of being human. He has, therefore studied philosophies from around the world including Taoism, Buddhism and tribal religions and concluded that philosophy could not be severed from questions about spirituality and that the “philosophy of religion” cannot long survive in the rarified air of abstract proofs of propositions. Worldly religion came to mean two things; the many religions of the world (Religions pluralism) and also religion that really matters, not just an intellectual execize but as a concrete way of coming to grips with life and the world. The philosophical emphasis of on critical thinking has taken a devastating toll on the emotional engagement and commitment that lies at the heart of every religion and in the heart of every beginning philosophy student.
Spirituality embraces both emotion and rationality, both religion and philosophy. Religion seems overly parochial and exclusive; spirituality is truly non-sectarian. That is what philosophy, the love of wisdom is all about.
What is a Naturalized Spirituality? (XV)
A good place to start is the experience of spirituality that most of us have in music that, as we say, sweeps us away. Music takes us out of ourselves and allows us to escape from our worries and desires. It transports us to a larger world and forges a community with our fellow listeners.
Other examples of naturalized spirituality can be found if you look for them. There is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountains and deserts to the exquisite design of ordinary mosquitos. This is not to forget the staggering force of earthquake and hurricane. Like music, science transports one into a larger universe and forges a global community of fellows. This larger universe is this universe, this world, this nature. The place to look for spirituality is right here in our lives and in our world, not elsewhere.
Spirituality is also found in our grandest passions, love above all, and in our sense of humanity and camaraderie, our sense of family.
There is awe and spirituality in the sense that we are not in complete control of our lives and there are forces that determine our course that we don’t understand that nevertheless seem to have some purpose. He would not evoke monotheism by calling it “God” or even “Spirit” or “Fate”. He will stick to “Spirituality”
Introduction – In the Spirit of Hegel. (3)
Hegel took great pains to downplay the importance of the individual and to stress the primacy of the social and his all embracing comprehension of the world as spirit. In contrast to the existential emphasis on angst and taking control of our lives, Hegel talked about “destiny” and “fate” and pointed out the futility of individual decision making in the face of the overwhelming force of the Zeitgeist. He embraces the passions but viewed them as suprapersonal, hardly individual at all. They are the passions of being caught up in life and “swept away”, the very opposite of the “take charge” resolutions of modern existentialism. The Hegelian picture is brutally portrayed by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, where even Napoleon is the pawn of forces he cannot control.
The confrontation between Hegelianism and existentialism is the dominant philosophical problem of our times. That which remains intractable is our personal and collective need to get straight about our place in the world. How can we live and cope with the overwhelming difficulties and tragedies of life? How should we think about and deal with death. These are universal questions that they face us all.
In our time the world is being unified in human consciousness, in the way we think of ourselves and our place in the world: how can we both respect ourselves and adopt the kind of humility that puts us in our proper place in the world? How can we relate to others in terms of shared spirit and compassion as approves to acquisitive individualism? How can we come to terms with the awesome forces in the world without reducing them to simplicities? How can we cultivate the grand passions and minimize the petty ones? How can we maintain a sense of the big picture when we are so caught up in our hopes, fears, aspiration and the tempers and fashions of the times. These are the questions that lead us to spirituality.
Spirituality, like philosophy, is coming to grips with the big picture and with it our need for a larger sense of our lives. Professor Solomon, as an existentialist, has always been concerned with the action oriented questions: what should I do? How should I live my life? What should I make of myself? Accordingly, he felt obliged to remain wholly secular. Even his interpretations of Hegel were light on spirit which he construed in terms of social membership and shared values. He was captivated by Nietzsche and Sartre, both atheists who harshly denounced religion. He has lately come to see another side of Nietzsche who never rejected spirituality but rather, like Hegel, attempted to naturalize it to get & away from “otherworldly” religions and to re appreciate or “ Reenchant” everyday life. The idea is to recombine spirituality with science and nature rather than play them off against one another. Spirituality means thoughtfulness (but not thought without feeling) about these aspects of our lives that involve questions that have no ultimate answers despite the efforts of religion and philosophy to provide them. Death and tragedy provoke questions in even the most thoughtless amongst us that even the most thoughtful cannot answer. Even if we share a dogma with millions, the questions remain and the answer are to each her own.
Spirituality has everything to do with passion the passion of life. The fear of death, grief and despair are not themselves spiritual emotions but these often serve as preconditions for spirituality and can became spiritual as we ponder on them as do joy, love and certain kinds of trust and gratitude. Needless to say, dumb feelings, however exhilarating, do not, without thought are not spiritual. Spirituality means the grand and thoughtful passions of life and a life lived in accordance with those grand thoughts and passions. To summarize: - Spirituality is the thoughtful love of life.
Spirituality, he argues, is ultimately social and global, a sense of ourselves identified with others and the world which must be also understood in terms of the transformation of the self. How we think and feel about ourselves has an impact on who we actually are (and became). The grand thoughts and passions of spirituality change us and make us different kinds of people. Spirituality is the process of transforming the self not a conclusion or a philosophy to try on like a new pair of pants.
Spirituality is the expansion of the self, not its abandonment (Buddhism). It does not focus on the soul as a fixed metaphysical nugget at our core but rather something as fluid as our lives
Ch 1 From Philosophy to spirit on spirituality (8)
In this chapter Solomon distinguishes spirituality from religion and naturalizes it to natural science and philosophy. Nonetheless, spirituality is opposed to the merely technical, the perfunctory, and nit picking argumentation that refuses to accept anything as a living whole and insists on dissecting the lifeless pieces. Even though spirituality escapes narrow analytical categories and is not amenable to “proof” like a limited empirical hypothesis or a mathematical proposition is no reason is say that it is irrational or indescribable. It is philosophical poetry or possible poetic philosophy.
There is spirituality in nature, in art, in the bonds of fellow feeling that hold community together and in the reverence for life and other things that transcend our petty self interest. It is that passionate sense of self awareness in which the very distinction between selfishness and selflessness disappears.
Spirituality, Religion & Science (12)
The conflation of religion and spirituality is false insofar as it turns on the idea that both consist primarily of beliefs. Neither consists primarily of belief. Religion is primarily belonging. Most religionists do not even understand their own beliefs or theology. Some have argued that the beliefs of most religions are unintelligible may be indistinguishable by a neutral observer (hence the essential irrelevance of theology). Spirituality is a way (a great many ways) of experiencing the world, of living and of interacting with other people and the world.
Ecumenism (always welcome) emphasizes the similarities between the different faiths. Thus belonging is expanded from sect and faith to humanity.
The reason of deemphasizing the role of belief in spirituality and religion is to undermine the false battle between science and religion. Science is all about belief backed up by the evidence of the senses. It religion is defined by belief there is an inevitable clash between religion and science. (How did the immune system and eyeball come about? What are the origins of the world?) Most scientist and the theologians are willing to call a truce. Few scientists deny there are always open, unanswerable questions; very few (well publicized) religionist insist that the hard evidence of science be ignored.
Solomon firmly excludes recourse to anything transcending this life; views of the beyond are stumbling metaphors and musical experiences are rare and ineffable unavailable and unhelpful. “In place of the dubious purpose of transcending life, let us defend the ideal of transcending ourselves in life”.(24)
Naturalized spirituality is not science but there is no conflict, only synergy between them. Philosophy as “an attempt” to come to grips with the perennial, personal and human problems of meaning, (26), was once kin to spirituality but now it seems like a distant relation. But philosophy can reclaim its rightful inheritance by embracing myth, passion and fate.”Philosophy, as Plato clearly saw, is a spiritual practice”. (27)
CH 2 Spirituality as Passion (28)
# In Solomon’s view, passion is not necessarily irrational; indeed, some passions, particularly erotic love, reverence and trust, are “definitive of rationality”. (28) In the Symposium Plato makes it evident that philosophy is a kind of love, even a kind of lust (Eros). A passionate life is “defined by emotions, by impassioned engagements and guests, by embracing affections”. (29) Certain emotions are ruled out: envy resentment, war hysteria, racism- even fanaticism for Texas football(31) yet Nietzsche had it right when he conceived of “the overflowing spirituality of a passionate life”(43). When Nietzsche insists “ I am dynamite “he is summarizing a new, existing conception of spirituality, the overflowing spirituality of a passionate life.
CH 3 Spirituality as Cosmic Trust (44)
Cosmic trust is characterized as “a determined stance towards the world. (44) And a way of being in the world”. It is “authentic trust’. an acceptance born of experience, refined by reflection, and intentionally chosen. Once again envy and resentment emerge as the evil opposite (53), but beyond them lie contentment and forgiveness-indeed, “forgiving the world for the misfortunes it (inevitably) inflicts upon us (57). Thus spirituality is also called wisdom. Forgiving is not forgetting. If you forget, what’s to forgive? Forgiving but not forgetting keeps the betrayal alive should future breaches of trust require its use. (57)
Ch 4 Spirituality as Rationality. (58)
He’s not talking about dry, abstracted thought, but engaged passionate thoughtfulness. Reason is not the enemy of the passions, but their friend. Indeed, says Solomon,” I want to suggest that reason and the passions are not only complementary, they are ultimately one and the same”. Reason thus understood is contingent on our human natures, and on our particular cultures as well; emotions constitute our ultimate ends in life, the things we really do and should care about, and reason helps us it achieve those ends and thereby enriches our lives(61). It is only at our peril that we so divorce rationality from our emotional lives and relegate emotions to the realm of the irrational. Rationality is not limited to instrumental reasoning or abstract ratiocination. Nor is it the pursuit of self interest narrowly construed. Instead, rationality is having the right emotions or caring about the right sorts of things. (70)
Emotions and rationality together constitute spirituality and make us capable of an awareness of a larger human and global context in which all our fates are engaged and our mutual interests are involved. There is nothing particularly human about emotion as such – A dog can be angry or sad but there are distinctively human emotions – romantic love, passions that constitute moral indignation, religious passion, scientific curiosity and those passions that constitute spirituality that are precisely those that are typically designated as proof of our species rationality. (73)
Ch 5 Facing up to Tragedy. (74)
Solomon wants philosophy to help us face up to tragedy by giving meaning to suffering. He rejects causal stories that allow us to affix blame for tragedy. We are not entitled to a good life. In the big picture none of us is entitled to anything. The language of justice loses is place in the larger questions of tragedy, and tragedy, not justice, is the ultimate upshot of life.(80) and cannot be explained.(81) yet we insist on explanation and someone to blame. As Nietzsche said, a universe that is explained ever with bad reasons is better than one with no explanation at all. But in the face of tragedy, even the most ambitious explanation turns out to be no more then denial, a refusal to face the hard facts of life. It has always been obvious that bad things happen to good people. We personify the universe and ask “Why me” (81) and some how expect fair play of it whether we believe in god or not. Of course our question when good things happen to bad people is “Why not me?”
In response to these two troubling facts many heavens and hells have been invented most of them dedicated to the proposition that in the end there will be justice.
The Buddha taught “Life is Suffering” and his followers try to swear off the cravings and expectations that result in suffering. But we insist on satisfying every one of them and, when we are frustrated, ask “Why?” But, if the Buddha was wrong, and life isn’t suffering, then suffering demands any external explanation. In the Judeo Christian traditions that explanation is God and that leads to the “Problem of Evil”. If he’s all powerful, all knowing and good, why does he allow evil in his realm? Belief in heaven etc. is sweet and understandable but not all versions of these beliefs are sweet.
To challenge the “Problem of Evil” we need not question religious beliefs but rather remind ourselves of the contingency of our good fortune and the inevitability of misfortune. The problem of evil exists only for those who expect the world to be good. (84)
There are answers that do justice to life and tragedy together. It does not deny suffering nor wallow in it. Gratitude is one of them. A good sense of humor is another. Spirituality is a combination of gratitude and humor, a dash of that mock-heroic. Camusian confrontation with the Absurd and a passionate engagement with the details and the people in our lives. We must embrace tragedy as an essential part of the life we love and for which we showed be grateful.(88) Adopting such a perspective, suffering has meaning because life has meaning. That’s all we can ask of the world.