Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Sixteen: A Secular Spirituality?

s i x t e e n a secular spirituality? James, Dennett, and Dawkins Ciarán Benson I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing. —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Who says “hypothesis” renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience We live in a time of energetic argument for which, in the united states, the phrase “the culture wars” has for some time now been current. For some in these wars the conception of an argument is evidentially supported reason, for others it means assertions supported by intuitions or by the authoritative interpretation of texts. it is a time when words that seem to have most to say about the best of human being are undergoing anxious reassessment, revaluation, and realignment. i say “anxiously” to indicate that these words matter to us all. they engage 388 a secular spirituality? 389 us at profound levels of identity and self-understanding. i have in mind words such as artistic, spiritual, religious, conscious, moral, true, sacred, interior, and so on. in what follows i want to reflect on some aspects of these fraught contemporary debates, and i want to do so in the spirit of interdisciplinarity . the focus of my reflection is the question: Can those who think of themselves as agnostics, atheists, or simply nonbelievers still lay claim to being spiritual? if they can, how might we situate that wish within a modern intellectual tradition? my suggestion is that it is reasonable to argue for the notion of a secular spirituality, despite the repugnance that writers like richard Dawkins might feel about secular attempts to reclaim this particular category. i return to William James’ magisterial The Varieties of Religious Experience to make my case, supported by the reflections of modern poets. Bright lights in Dark Places This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience Human beings recognize themselves only in history, not through introspection. Basically, we all search for the human being in history; but more broadly, we look to history for what makes us human and religious, etc. We want to know what “the human” is. If there were a science of the human being, it would be anthropology, which aims at understanding the totality of lived experiences according to their structural nexus. The individual never realizes more than a possibility of his or her development, which could always have taken a different direction from what was decided upon. The human being is there for us only under the condition of realized possibilities. —Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences Coming, as i do, from a philosophical tradition in psychology where words and symbols are the constituents of the phenomena that 390 Ciarán Benson interest me—phenomena that rely upon, and emerge from, the uses to which symbolizations are put, individually and collectively—i stumbled somewhat when i first read of a new use for an old word. my hesitancy became the more particular when i realized that the word was meant to apply to the likes of me. it is a word that nominates a disparate group as one, some of whose eligible members want this new use of the old word to be a battle standard around which they can assemble and engage with what they take to be the forces of obscurantism . this self-applied label is bright, but it is now to be used as a noun rather than adjectivally. it is analogous to the changed use of the word gay. some of us, it seems, are “Brights.”1 Why should i cavil at my inclusion in such a select and happily self-regarding club? trying to answer that question for myself is the motivational source of this paper. We have in ireland a saying, now a cliché, that the first item on the agenda of any new movement is “the split.” in what follows i want to outline grounds for the emergence of the self-Denying Brights. the source of this dissent goes wider...