A Thinking Spirituality:
Why Spirituality Needs Philosophy
The sands are shifting under the skies of religion and spirituality these days. When I was growing up, most people were born into a particular faith confession and stayed there, with occasional exceptions for interfaith marriages where one partner switched to the other partner’s church for the sake of familial harmony. Such stability is hard to imagine now.
There is much to be welcomed in the unsettling of the religious terrain. All the great religious traditions have left blots on the pages of history. They have hoarded power, supported injustices, rejected criticism, and resisted the renewal offered by developing knowledge of the universe from almost every other domain. From any number of perspectives, those who walked away from religion may have been justified.
What was more difficult to leave behind was the quest for meaning. Released from the institutions that had claimed primacy in the meaning-of-life game, many discovered that while the answers the church had offered were inadequate, the questions remained. More, the experience remained, the experience of something beyond themselves that poked up out of the crowded carpet of life and evinced something else that lived, paradoxically, both within and beyond it. Many are hesitant to call it God; some refer to it as the intelligence of the universe. They may call themselves “spiritual but not religious” or simply “seekers.” But the growing number of spiritual books, teachers, and organizations offers irrefutable evidence that if the modern world has outgrown the ancient concepts of God, it has nevertheless grown into a new need to understand ultimate reality. And this is a good thing too.
But this new spiritual freedom comes with a caution. All manner of things may blow in through those open windows. Things deep and superficial, things attractive and repugnant, things comforting and things challenging. Things that contradict one another, defying us to accommodate them all even if we had the time and energy to study them. No, we must filter. We do filter, each of us, all the time and with regard to every field of knowledge in our personal universes. And we almost never ask where we got that filter.
We filter through our worldview. And a worldview is, plain and simple, a philosophy. Our philosophy is how we think the world works, how the pieces fit together. It is the map by which we navigate the terrain of life. It shapes our opinions and our actions. It is, in short, our personal truth.
A philosophy is inescapable in this adventure of life. We all have one, whether we call it that or not. Perhaps if we did see it as just that, we would take this worldview as philosophy more seriously. Because the problem is that for almost all of us, our philosophy has been assembled haphazardly and unconsciously. It includes input from parents and all those doting aunts and judgmental uncles, every school teacher and coworker we’ve ever had, every book or blog post or news channel we’ve consumed. And the result is determined by an unexamined weighting of input according to the perceived authority of the contributor as it meets the content of what we really want to believe. Voilà – a philosophy.
Now, if you are just looking for a comfortable way to make your way through life, perhaps that is adequate, at least minimally functional. But if you claim to be a serious seeker after the truth at the heart of life, I very much hope that you would not be satisfied with such an accidental tool to filter the multifarious offerings of “spirituality.”
For you see the risk, of course. Such a filter is likely to let through only the things we like, the things that make us comfortable, things that open the path of least resistance. And it is very likely to filter out the challenge, the things we don’t want to hear but most need to hear. The things that will call something bold and creative and important from us. Things that will be hard.
Throughout history, certain men and women have chosen to devote their life’s work to the close examination of experience in dialogue with the philosophies they inherited, in order to create new and more effective philosophies to move the conversation about life forward. But the truth is that we all “do philosophy” all the time, whether we call it that or not. The difference between us and the “professionals” lies in the degree of attention and commitment they bring to the process. They stake their reputations on the integrity of their thinking; they are meticulous and thorough. They seek to articulate life in a logical and coherent manner. That’s why they can be tough to read – because the reality they seek to penetrate is vast and complex, and they are taking it very seriously indeed.
I’m not enough of an idealist to suggest that we should all start reading the greatphilosophers on a regular basis – though the world would benefit in ways beyond imagining if more of us did just that. For the disciplines of philosophy give us the tools for critical thinking and show them in action. They teach us how to spot and root out faulty assumptions, to note inconsistencies in how we think about and manage different areas of our lives. And perhaps most crucial in our day, they demand that we critique the voices that come at us from all directions to persuade us of their preferred worldviews. Despite what the multiplication of media perspectives implies, the building of an adequate – a life-giving – world view is not like choosing from a buffet. The exercise of philosophy demands that we choose how to build a life based on more than personal preference or adherence to presupplied value systems. Yes, philosophy demands that we do some work.
And nowhere is this more important than in our search for a spiritual path. If spirituality is to be more than the comforting assurance that all is well, if spirituality is to be more than the filling of one of the compartments that we must top up for a good life, then we must pay close attention to the philosophical map that guides our choices.
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The ancients were clear about the role of philosophy in a life well lived. According to Socrates, philosophy is a daily activity. Aristotle added that everybody must do philosophy, because even denying the necessity of philosophy is a philosophical stand. But they stood in an entirely different relationship with spiritual matters than does the contemporary person. In the absence of the grasp of scientific fact as we know it, there was for them no gap between the physical world and the spiritual world. There had to be an unseen world beyond what could be directly observed in order for the observable to make sense. Philosophy was the enterprise of that making of sense. With the tools of imagination and experience, they built maps for living and understanding.
All the major religious traditions were born in this period, and all have struggled to integrate a physical world that has become increasingly quantifiable. When they failed in that task of offering a philosophy, a doctrine, that could hold the universe intact, the science of the material world and the wisdom of spirituality parted company. The choice was to either abandon one of them, or to hold each in a separate compartment. Science and spirituality ceased to speak to each other.
But many are discovering what has been lost, and are seeking to restore spirituality to their lives. That is the first step. Whenever I hear people identify themselves as spiritual but not religious, I want to say, “That’s a great place to start. Now, where is it going to take you?” For if trust in the doctrines of the church has been damaged because of its inability or refusal to open itself to the unfolding knowledge of the sciences, neither may the spiritual seeker freed from those constraints blithely waltz away into an unfettered universe of spiritual options. In order to know where our spirituality might take us – indeed, for a renewed spirituality to take us anywhere at all – we need a philosophy. We need a worldview that brings matters of spirit back to that indivisible reality in which the ancient philosophers were rooted.
If we could make the time to read the philosophies of the masters, they may indeed show us the tools and the categories we need, may suggest a few possible starting points. But the philosophy we need today is one that is created enroute, for we have learned the hard way that one size does not fit forever. Philosophy ever outgrows itself. Each day requires its renewal.
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Because philosophy is first and foremost a conversation. A very big, very broad and very deep conversation. It is a conversation with eyes wide open. Nothing may be excluded, and nothing may be accepted at face value. It remembers history and engages the future. It is a conversation that calls us out of our narcissism and calls us forth into challenge. It is a conversation that drinks in the universe and reflects on it, thinks about it, asks what rings true, what gives life. It invites real conversations with those in our everyday lives who are holding different maps. Even, and perhaps especially, with the religious traditions we thought we had left behind, for it will be careless to omit wisdom that has spoken over centuries.
But if this conversation would claim to be in service of a map that truly honors the whole of reality, it will recognize the spiritual as woven into that reality, not as a separate dimension of it. It will honor the spiritual reality that sits at the heart of our humanity, that cannot be named, that comes as a flash of insight or a deeply intuited wisdom, the reality that history has named God. It must welcome home to the very center that reality that so many are once again finding inescapable. Spirituality is not an add-on to be selected from a menu; spirituality is the ground of reality to be discovered by a close reading of life.
Contrary to the doctrinal way, we are not seeking a philosophy that will shape our spirituality for all time. Contrary to the contemporary way, we are not seeking a spirituality that can be fit into a preferred philosophy. We need a philosophy and a spirituality that participate in each other, that live within each other, that correct each other and inspire each other.
In the opening pages of his own ponderous volume of philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead offered one of the most cogent assessments of the task of philosophy I have encountered. His cautions were clear, and they are linked. Philosophy may claim too much. The life of the world is vast, and philosophy’s aims will always outstrip its success, even were the world to stay still. But it doesn’t. Life evolves, experience becomes more complex, new questions arise, and one hopes that the human desire for understanding will keep pace. But however committed we are, we will always be reaching out toward a world that is always in the process of becoming. The proper test of philosophy, says Whitehead, is not finality, but progress. Our place is in the flow.
“Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away.” Whitehead’s second caution is that philosophy must never lose a sense of the mystery up against which it is bound to run. That mystery holds the opening for truth. If the religious philosophies that became doctrines attempted or claimed too much, we may nevertheless understand their fault, for we have inherited it. We too want the certainty of explanation. But neither a philosophy nor a spirituality may claim to know all; if it claims to do so, beware. But if it be consonant with an honest and expansive examination of experience, then ride it as far as it will take you, and no farther. Then pick up your boat and do the work of portage until you may again launch yourself into the stream.
Whitehead winds up his consideration of philosophy by urging a path that fuses boldness with humility, imagination with common sense. A vision that soars without losing sight of the ground of experience. A spirituality with roots.
And an adventure, no? Said Plato, “The one who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and who is curious to learn and is never satisfied may be justly termed as a philosopher.” Welcome to the club.
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