chapter 11 Critical Perspectives and Re-Inventions of Spirituality
Roderick Nicholls and Heather Salazar
The Enlightenment critique of religion gave rise to an array of revisionary views. To some degree, they accepted major criticisms expressed by the likes of Voltaire and David Hume but did so with the expressed goal of saving reli- gion. In the process, spiritual experience became more prominent. For exam- ple, philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher dissociated religion from both propositional beliefs and moral action, identifying it with an inborn spiritual sensibility. The emerging bourgeois culture, he alleges, undermined this sensibility from an early age, preventing an education of the whole self (self-formation or Bildung). This upbringing, argues Schleiermacher, cuts off our intuitive access to “the infinite;” and it encourages a “suicide of the spirit” that silences the “holy music” which ought to surround and elevate our feelings and emotions.1 In the twentieth-first century, we are well-positioned to cultivate the fer- tile philosophical ground inherited from over two centuries of valuable work performed by numerous post-Enlightenment figures. They were effectively disentangling life-enhancing spiritual potential from traditional religions and institutional structures. Often it was not “religion” but “spirituality” being rein- vented. The result is that we can now explore spiritualities with characteristics which no longer seem conceptually alien or contradictory, including: eroti- cism and embodiment by philosophical naturalists; existentialist and psycho- therapeutic responses to the meaning of life genealogically linked to Stoic, Epi- curean, or other pagan spiritualities; a deep involvement with the natural world and art that expands the aesthetic qualities of spirituality; scientific views (of cognitive scientists, physicists, and others) that re-enchant the world and reaf- firm the mystery of the universe.2
1 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66. Schleiermacher, of course, later reasserted his Protestant heritage but this classic work of early German romanticism (Fruhromantik) was a key source for later attempts to do justice to the felt, emotional, or intuitive character of religious spirituality, for example, Otto’s seminal work: Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). 2 John Brockman, Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). This is one of the first attempts to thematically organize many such trends under © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004376311_013
The collection of essays in Part Three represents some of the reinventions of spirituality created from philosophical perspectives that have been very criti- cal of traditional religious spiritualities. They are far from consistent with each other, but their thematic concerns will resonate with the aspirations of many reflective people in this age of resurgent spirituality. In “Care of Self and Amor Fati as a Spiritual Ideal,” Roderick Nicholls ex- amines how Friedrich Nietzsche’s harsh criticisms of Christian spirituality and his critical, but more sympathetic view of Eastern varieties, depend upon positive revaluations of notions such as ‘selfishness’ and ‘body.’ They are an integral part of Nietzsche’s distinctive spiritual Bildungsroman which is care- fully designed to compete with related narratives within religious traditions and to provide a context for understanding his philosophical account of spiri- tual self-overcoming. Reflecting atheism, naturalism, and determinism, this story culminates in the achievement of amor fati, an ideal antithetical to both the religious spirituality of a John Cottingham or Charles Taylor and the self- creationism of Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty (philosophers with whom Nietzsche is often associated). Bertrand Russell is best known for foundational work in analytic philosophy but the popular polemic, Why I am Not a Christian, fixed his public reputa- tion as an irreligious intellectual. In “Bertrand Russell’s Religion Without God,” Nikolay Milkov emphasizes that Russell’s atheism belied a life-long and deeply personal interest in the possibility of spiritual consolation. He experienced the emotional longings to which religions have always responded and the pain of cosmic abandonment articulated by his existentialist antipodes in philosophy. Russell developed his ideas, resonating with the spirit of Stoicism, in various writings. Yet these efforts were tentative and truncated largely due to criticisms by Wittgenstein who strongly believed that on such matters one should ulti- mately remain silent (despite yearning for an ecstatic union with a transcen- dent God which Russell could never believe in). Kerem Eksen, in “Truth in Practice: Foucault’s Procedural Approach to Spirituality,” directly addresses the possibility of establishing an independent philosophy of spirituality and uses a well-chosen contrast to consider the shape this field might take. Over the past two decades, an informal group of philosophers have taken up the study of spirituality after the earlier, pioneering work of Pierre Hadot. Eksen identifies a line of thought, exemplified by John Haldane, which postulates the existence of a specific spiritual dimension of the world. This “substantivist” approach is very different from the “procedural” one followed by Michel Foucault. For Foucault treats spirituality as primarily
the ‘third culture’ rubric, including those that react against the common image of spirit- deadening, scientific reductionism.