(Part 1 is here)
Introduction
Today we continue sharing material from John Cottingham’s incisive, creative, and compelling (at least by my lights) book, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cottingham (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading and Professorial Research Fellow, Heythrop College, London) is a Catholic (he serves on the Advisory Board of the Von Hügel Institute), and his examples, explanations and reflections often draw upon his faith (as we say) while largely assuming—and I think in most cases correctly—that his arguments and conclusions apply in one fashion or to one extent or another to other traditional religious worldviews (he occasionally draws illustrations and comparisons with material from Buddhism). And while he more or less has specialized in the philosophy of Descartes (e.g., he is the co-editor and translator of the three-volume standard Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes), his work as a philosopher has a far broader compass. Only a handful on contemporary philosophers (Iris Murdoch, Ninian Smart, B.K. Matilal, Jonardon Ganeri come quickest to mind) have written on religion and spirituality in a way that both resonates with and challenges me, and Cottingham is among them. I hope this series speaks to some of your abiding interests and concerns on these topics as well.
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“What does this excursus into Freudian theory have to do with the question of spirituality and its link with mora virtue? [….] What is involved in [both the spiritual quest and the psychoanalytic quest] is a systematic programme of askesis which is linked to an interior journey—the journey to find the true self with which the smug, superior, intellectualizing, rationalizing ego is so easily confused [in brief, there are different conceptions of autonomy, some more spiritually and psychologically cogent and availing than others].
The process of growth and transformation, in order to overcome cognitive and the conative defects to which the moral deliberator is typically subject,1 is a crucial part of what it is to become a developed human agent [that point in a person’s life in which she has fulfilled at least a necessary condition of self-realization through moral psychological individuation]: our moral lives are a journey in a much deeper sense than applies to many parts of our intellectual lives (for example our accumulating knowledge of geography or natural history). Now of course there are many moral philosophers who have acknowledged the importance of learning in the moral sphere; Thomas Aquinas, for example, was well aware of the Aristotelian stress on the importance of training and habituation in ethics [as were several notable philosophers in the Confucian tradition, beginning with Confucius], and he himself spoke of habits of virtue, describing conscience in terms of habits of will, as well as practical reasoning. But the human moral journey described in the works of the great spiritual writers (Augustine is perhaps the paradigm case, though there are many others) is radically different in its outlines—radically different from what one might call the ‘classroom’ model, a model of careful progressive moulding of habits based on innate capacities of practical intellect and will. All such ‘normal’ apparatus no doubt has its place, but, if anything like the religious worldview is correct, there is something more dynamic and more dramatic typically at work in the human spirit. As moral beings, we do not just start from a reliable innate deposit, and then accumulate information and get more skilled in processing it; rather, we gradually, laboriously, stimulated by examples, moved by parables, humbled by error, purged by suffering, begin to change. The faculty enabling us to respond in this way may be innate, and in that sense ‘natural’ (as Aquinas, for example supposed), but it also requires our being open to the possibility of transformation—in Pauline language, to putting off the old nature and taking on the new, or in the language of the Fourth Gospel, to the possibility of rebirth [religious and philosophical worldviews of Asian provenance would of course choose, in most cases, a different metaphor for this process!].
Such rebirth, for any who are sympathetic to the psychoanalytic model, will involve a guided programme of self-discovery, a struggle towards greater self-awareness and clearer resolution, whereby we are progressively freed from the shadows and projections inherited from the past, Not all religious thinkers will want to take on board all the Freudian or Jungian apparatus (though it will be very hard for anyone seriously interested in human moral and spiritual development not to acknowledge the need for at least some of it—for example the lessons to be learned concerning the battle against rationalization and self-deception, the need to recognize the shadow or darker side of the human psyche, in order to understand and transcend it). But however we work out the detail, and the structure of the required programme of askesis, the central point remains: that the healthy growth of the human spirit requires a therapeutic phase, a way of coming to terms with the obstacles to a balanced and harmonious and integrated life.
So far it may seem as if our argument simply presents the need for what could broadly be called a psychotherapeutic phase in human moral development. That itself would be a fairly ambitious result, taking us beyond what most of the leading philosophical accounts of the good life (for example those of Aristotle, Spinoza, Bentham, Mill, and even Kant) have been remotely prepared to acknowledge. But even if we grant a need for such a phase, we need to focus on one particular aspect to provide a rich understanding of what is added by a specifically spiritual dimension in the programme of askesis, and why the full flowering of the moral self may be thought to require it.
Consider for the sake of argument someone who has successfully completed a programme of psychotherapeutic analysis (the imagined case is perhaps rather artificial since it is probably a misunderstanding to envisage a final state of ‘cure’ after which everything is plain sailing, but let that pass for the present). The supposition is of someone who has begun to learn to integrate the disparate and split-off parts of the psyche, who has started to bring to the surface the buried fears and anxieties stemming from early experience, who has begun to master the techniques of self-examination and self-awareness, who has learned something of the dangerous and ever-present propensity to rationalize—the fussy attempts of the controlling intellect to manage life’s problems by neatly parceling them up and thereby concealing all that is most salient to their true meaning. How do we envisage such a person proceeding? After this imaginary ‘graduation day,’ when our subject gets up off the couch and resumes ordinary life, can the askesis of spirituality hence forth be ignored? Can our ‘cured’ patient stride forward into the clear daylight of the moral life, henceforth exercising the sober and self-confident virtue of Aristotle’s phronimos, the man of ‘practical wisdom,’ liberated from any psychological distortions that might previously have got in the way.
That is certainly one model of the good life. And indeed nothing in the present argument implies any denigration of practical wisdom and its virtues. Without the careful evaluation of evidence, accurate means-ends reasoning, calm consideration of alternatives, reasoned debate and discussion, it would be impossible for human beings to pursue the good in any systematic way. But for all that, to uphold the life of practical reason as, so to speak, the last word on the good life for humankind seems in the end both a naively optimistic position, and at the same time, an ultimately pessimistic one. It risks being naïve in so far as it places reliance on the balanced deliberation of the healthy subject to provide a sufficient basis for a fulfilled existence. Freud was more grimly realistic: you have learned to cope with neurotic misery, he said to his patients; now that your treatment is finished, learn to cope with ordinary misery. The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to love, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence, as the Buddhists have it.2 And unless the moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [e.g., a daily regimen of spiritual exercises that includes, among other things, readings, contemplation, prayer, meditation, self-examination, the technique of prosoche, and a ‘therapy of desire’] that enables us to come to terms with it.” — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 143-146.
Given Cottingham’s Catholic lifeworld (a’ lifeworld’ being the personal individuation of a worldview, religious or not), it is not surprising that he is more intimately familiar with, and argues specifically in favor of a Catholic (Christian) program and strategy of spiritual, moral and personal discipline and exercises for confronting, and embracing, existential vulnerability “as ultimately redemptive.” While mentioning Buddhism in particular, Cottingham appears to appreciate the fact that there are similar when not identical forms of askesis in other religious traditions (cf. Sufi ṭarīqah in Islam), including those of Asian provenance (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, for instance), and these are not solely the prerogative of monastic orders or would-be mystics (arguably, the modern or post-modern age seems to be blurring the boundaries a bit between the spiritual praxis of monasticism and the religious life of the laity, most notably in Buddhism and Christianity, with Sufism providing arguably the best model of this insofar as celibacy is not institutionalized and Sufi orders seem to vary more among themselves than is the case with Christian monasticism). Moreover, the specific form of the spiritual exercises and disciplinary practices may differ, as does the metaphysical, philosophical, and in some measure, psychological presuppositions and assumptions that motivate the respective spiritual programs.
We should also note that Cottingham grants there are non-religious responses (unsatisfying or insufficient to the extent that they are ‘naturalistic,’ but he concedes that we can nonetheless speak of a—perhaps attenuated—‘spirituality’ here as well) to human vulnerability in the aforementioned sense: the Aristotelian approach, the “heroic” strategy of the Nietzschean, the “absurdist” existentialism of Camus, or the “romantic realist” (Iris Murdoch) version of Sartre’s existentialism, or the phenomenologically rich feminist existentialism of Beauvoir (Cottingham here cites only Camus).
In our third and final post in this series, the need for and role of spiritual, moral and personal discipline and exercises (which assume the possibility of transcending the natural world or the existence of non- or supra-natural metaphysical properties) will be explored further on its own terms with respect to religious pluralism as well as in relation to philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Notes
- In a footnote stressing the significance of the distinction between cognitive (perceptual) defects and conative (volitional) defects, Cottingham states his belief that it’s “insufficiently appreciated that the aim of psychotherapeutic programmes of self-discovery is to produce a kind of self-awareness and integration in which the formerly split-off part of the psyche no longer appear as alien forces to be subdued by a ‘superior’ act of will, but instead are perceived in their true colours. The result is that our ‘cognitive’ and ‘conative’ incapacities are found to be intimately related….”
- Cottingham is here referencing duhkha (P. dukkha), “suffering” or existential “unsatisfactoriness,” being “ill-at-ease” as fundamental ontological or metaphysical condition. It is the first of the “four truths (known by the spiritually) noble” ones (catvāry āryasatyāni, mistranslated but commonly known as the ‘four noble truths’), being a spiritually motivated symptomatic diagnosis of what ails us, as human beings (and a mark of all sentient existence). The second truth identifies different types or forms of such suffering and two principal causes (inordinate craving or desire and ignorance). The third truth is said to demonstrate, as the Buddha himself did, that it is possible, while embodied, to bring an end to duhkha. The fourth and final truth involves the therapeutic regimen of spiritual praxis needed to bring an end (nirodha) to duhkha, the path (marga) being of an eightfold nature (āryastāngamārga), with three principal sections having to do with, generally speaking, (i) morality, (ii) concentration, and (iii) wisdom. Duhkha is also one of the “three marks” (trilaksana) of all conditioned phenomena in samsāra (existence or the natural world), the other two being impermanence (anitya) and nonself (anātman).
(A list of recommended readings and relevant bibliographies is appended to the first post, and while there are no such readings this time round, additional readings will be appended to the third and last post in this series.)
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