As the result of a discussion on the UU-Community e-mail list
regarding tensions between "humanists"
and "pagans" (in January 2000)
I stumbled across this Spiritual Paths
Project,
and found myself challenged in trying
to answer the 10 questions.
The following is my preliminary effort
to answer these questions.
(The questions
themselves are included in red.)
I say preliminary because I feel that
I will probably go on
trying to answer these questions for
the rest of my life.
As one progresses through life, one's
ideas are bound to change.
One's beliefs and spiritual experiences
are not a static object
written in concrete.
The following is just a contingent
snapshot
of where I happen to be today.
Upfront I should mention that most of my spiritual beliefs
come out of my experiences of
having got
a PhD in English two years ago.
Some might find my responses overly
abstract or academic,
but this is just because this has been
my immediate frame of reference for
so many years.
I'm deeply skeptical of any approach
to life
that tries to circumscribe experience
within an acceptable realm of the "everyday."
What counts as "real" life is something
to be questioned,
not just blindly accepted.
So for me my spiritual beliefs/experiences
are tied up with
the humanistic tradition in which I'm
deeply interested.
I'm not sure this path is a "spiritual"
one per se,
or an "intellectual" one.
1. How do you
describe your form of spirituality?
Distinguish it
from others.
I would be hard pressed to assign one label to my form of "spirituality."
To begin with I'm not sure I'm even
on one consistent path.
For example, ever since taking a class
on Eastern religions in college
I've been interested in various Chinese
philosophies/religions
--consulting the I-Ching oracle, Taoism,
Confucianism.
What I like about the Chinese worldview
is the lack of a transcendent other
world.
It's just us--here in this world--and
we should learn to live
with each other in more harmonious
ways.
In their book Thinking Through Confucius,
David Hall and Roger Ames (see bibliography
at end)
describe the Chinese worldview as "immanental".
What this means is that rules, principles,
and norms
have their source in the very human
contexts which they serve.
They argue this is opposed
to most influential philosophical positions
in the West
(Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, materialism,
and even existentialism),
although in a later book they do describe
an alternative strain
of Western thought originating with
Heraclitus
that accords with the Chinese perspective.
But since I'm not actually Chinese,
all of this seems somehow "inauthentic."
If forced to describe my spiritual path
I would call it "posthumanist/deconstructive":
related to humanism because it comes
out of
a humanist philosophical position more
than a theist perspective
(ultimately I'm interested in concrete
people more than spiritual matters),
but "post-" because it thoroughly questions
the metaphysical assumptions
about the figure of "the human" in
humanism.
For example, the fifth source of UU
tradition
says that humanist teachings
can warn us against idolotries of the
mind and spirit,
but what if the idea of "the human"
or reason
themselves become idolatries?
The skeptical questioning implicit
in poststructuralist thought
helps prevent this from happening.
The two main philosophers that I find of value
on this spiritual pathway are Jacques
Derrida and Walther Benjamin.
The issues that they grapple with in
their work
are of prime importance to me:
relationship between subjectivity and
language;
disjointed, alternative temporalities;
the importance of the "Other";
immanent form of critique.
How does this relate to spirituality
or religion?
Benjamin is perhaps the most relevant
for his connection to a mystical Jewish
tradition,
but even Derrida discusses a "messianicity
without messianism"
in Specters of Marx.
As John Caputo writes in his book on
Derrida and religion,
in as much as "Deconstruction comes
down to
an affirmation or hope or invocation
which is
a certain faith in the impossible,
in something that pushes us beyond
the sphere of the same"
then it would seem there is a spiritual
side to deconstruction too.
If I were to try to specify three main
lessons
I have learned along my spiritual path,
they might include:
1) Be open to contingency:
"Life is what happens to you while
you're busy making other plans"
sings John Lennon.
Learning to be open to the contingencies
of life events
is something John Buehrens writes about
in A Chosen Faith (136-8).
Life confounds xpectations.
We can learn to find the traces of
God
in the unexpected turns life can take.
Becoming open to and accepting of these
unexpected events
is an important spiritual component
of living, writes Buehrens.
(Walter Benjamin writes of how for
the Jews
"every second of time was the strait
gate
through which the Messiah might enter"
--this means that the experience of
time
is not as a homogeneous or empty time,
but with the potential for drastic,
unexpected turns.)
For example, I recently
started looking for my biological mother.
I learned through an intermediary that
she doesn't want contact.
This was a contingency that I was willing
to risk going into the search.
It's not something I can control--it
is her decision to make.
I just have to learn to live by the
results.
You just never know exactly what will
happen,
and when the results are not those
you had hoped for
you have to move on and keep risking
the impossible . . . .
2) Learning to live fragmentarily/
putting less emphasis on the presumed
unity of one's subjectivity:
this is a point that derives from Nietzsche's
questioning
of the relationship between subjectivity
and language.
As individuals we are largely the effects
of language.
We are willing to believe in ourselves
as independent agents
because this is a convenient grammatical
category
by which to think of ourselves.
Why do we carve up the world into nouns
and verbs?
In an "everyday"
sense be cognizant
of the kind of person we become by
the kind of language we use.
If we're in a position of power at
work by supervising others,
how does this authority get implemented?
What kind of language do supervisors
use
in describing those they supervise?
How might the supervised imagine other
positionings for themselves?
(In Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari
recommend a form of communication that does not bring out the "General"
in one.)
Don't always try
to smooth out the presumed contradictions
of one's self into a unified, totalized
picture.
Allow the contradictory shards of experience
to contend
within one's self without definite
resolution.
3) Discover the "counterfactual possibilities"
implicit in history/Read history against
the grain:
Benjamin writes of the value of "wresting
history away
from a conformism that is about to
overpower it."
There is a "spiritual" component to
maintaining
an intellectual inquiry into the past.
Rather than trying to "archive"
the past into a dead relic,
how might the past be re-lived by us?
I can't say how this might have any
bearing on individual lives
--this is something that we can't legislate.
This kind of inquiry can't be standardized
into a multiple-choice test format.
You just never know what might happen
. . . .
Differences from other spiritual paths:
Not Christian--doesn't accept the divinity
of Christ;
not Buddhist--doesn't see suffering
at the root of all existence;
not necessarily pagan--no drumming
required
(At the same time, there are elements
of paganism that I like, too.
There's something about how it's in
tune
with the rhythm of the earth that's
appealing,
although I'm leery of the "New Age"
side of this strain of spirituality.);
not theist--no gods;
not humanist, strictly speaking,
because it calls into question the
privileging of the idea of the human.
2. What does "spirituality" include and exclude from your point of view?
From my point of view "spirituality" is a vexed term.
To me it seems to address primarily
transcendent, supernatural issues.
But if the "spiritual" is related to
that which eludes humanity's effort
of mastery,
then there's a connection of sorts
to my pathway.
"Spirit of life come unto me . . ."
(see also Shelley's Ode to the West
Wind):
Spirit can be invoked, but it, this
transformative force,
only "comes" of its own accord.
I'm not sure that the model of inclusion/exclusion
applies well to spirituality.
Potentially spirituality can include
everything
--how one goes about living one's life.
But in that we are also fundamentally
material beings
it's completely irrelevant as well.
3. How does a "spiritual" experience differ from an emotional response?
If the "posthumanist/deconstructive" path I'm on
can be described as a spiritual one,
then it would differ from an emotional
response
because whereas an emotional response
comes primarily from "within" one's
self,
the spiritual is that which deals
with the absolutely other or heterogeneous,
coming from "without".
Deconstruction is a remaining open
to the radically other, an affirmation
of it.
4. Does
your form of spirituality
involve a world-view
or metaphysical system?
The philosophical tradition from which my path derives
is skeptical of metaphysics, in general.
Basically the one thing that deconstruction
tries to do consistently
is to question the metaphysics of presence
that haunt the history of western philosophy.
One article I've read that links Derrida to process theology
suggests that a deconstructive way
of thinking about the world
is similar to Whitehead's idea of reality
as "process"
(see Buehrens and Church, A Chosen
Faith, p. 176-7, 16, 21)
as well as John Wheeler's ideas about
physics
and a "participatory universe"
(William Dean, "Derrida and Process
Theology").
5. Does your spirituality
involve any supernatural beings,
entites, forces,
influences, or tendencies?
In general, I would say no--no gods.
But in the notion of différance
(one of Derrida's main "concepts")
there is something of a "force"
--something that happens outside the
control
of what one "wants to say".
Also there's something of a belief
in "ghosts" in deconstruction.
6. What are the benefits of your form of spirituality?
I think there's something to be said toward
that which shatters the horizon of
the same
--being open to that which is "wholly
other".
Unlike the "determinable" faiths of
Jewish, Christian, and Islamic fundamentalisms,
it does not allow one to forget the
necessity
of an open-ended hope in an unforseeable
future.
7. How does your form of spirituality deal with death?
Personally I like that bit about how when one dies
one lives on in others' memories of
you
. . . whatever might happen to
one's "soul."
Death is part of that experience that
cannot be fully mastered.
It creates an absolute boundary with
our physical existence,
but perhaps there are other forms of
existence, too?
8. Does your form
of spirituality involve
any ritual practices
or spiritual exercises?
A certain form of careful reading
becomes a kind of spiritual exericise,
I think.
Almost anything can become a spiritual
exercise
if spirituality is large enough to
encompass one's entire life.
9. What do critics
of your form of spirituality say
--and how do
you answer them?
Three main critics of deconstruction.
1) doesn't allow one to adopt a committed
stance
regarding politics/too wishy-washy.
I think the response here would be
to point out all the evil
that has been committed in the name
of committed decisions.
Deconstruction is interested in that
capacity
that allows us to assume positions
in general.
2) overly intellectual: uses
Derrida's ambiguous statement
il n'y a pas de hors-texte
("there is no outside con-text" or
"there is nothing outside the text")
to claim that Derrida thinks everything
is a book.
This is almost the exact opposite of
what he's saying,
since "book" and "text" have quite
different connotations for him.
What the statement seems to mean
is that there is never a final, transcendental
frame of reference
from which we can judge something.
Although we can't not try to put something
into a context,
no context permits of total saturation,
either.
3) deconstruction is "too" political
in wanting to "destroy"
the western tradition of philosophy
(people like William Bennett say that
deconstruction
is what allowed the evils of multiculturalism
to seep into our schools.)
The response here is to point out that
deconstruction
is not about getting rid of or liquidating
tradition.
Learning to "solicit" tradition in
a deconstructive way
while not exactly respectfully allows
the tradition some breathing room.
Instead of seeing the philosophical/religious/literary
tradition
as sealed off in the past as sacred,
instead it should be understood as
a contemporary "problematic"
or forcefield of interests and on-going
questioning.
The "tradition" can interrupt our self-assured
view of the world
by bearing on the excessive parts of
our experience.
(see Benjamin, "The Destructive Character")
10. If your spiritual
path were mistaken or distorted in some way,
how would you
uncover the errors or recognize the distortions?
This is why the labor of questioning must continue on always.
Keeping a fundamentally interrogative
position on life
disallows a solidifying of one's beliefs
in "errors".
(But then again we also need errors.
In a way one's blindnesses are the
constitutive forces in one's life
--see Wilde, The Decay of Lying
and Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight)
Bibliography for my spiritual path
Heraclitus, Fragments
Montaigne, Essays
Percy Shelley, Defense of Poetry; On
Life; Ode to the West Wind;
Mont Blanc; "Mutability"; Triumph of
Life
(Secondary: Jerold Hogle, Shelley's Process, many other sources)
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Emily Dickinson, selected poems
Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities
Friedrich Nietzsche, selected aphorisms
from The Gay Science,
Beyond Good and Evil, Will to Power
and other works
Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Trauerspiel;
Theses on the Philosophy of History;
"The Destructive Character"; other
works
(Secondary: Caygill, Walter Benjamin--The Colour of Experience; Tom
Cohen, Ideology and Inscription;
Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter
Benjamin;
John McCole, Antinomies of Tradition;
essays by Irving Wohlfarth;
Samuel Weber, "Genealogy of Modernity")
Martin Heidegger, "Hölderlin and
the Essence of Poetry";
"Origin of Work of Art"
(Secondary: William Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism)
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation;
The Step Not Beyond; The Essential
Solitude; Writing the Disaster
(Secondary: Steven Shaviro, Passion and Excess;
Leslie Hill, Blanchot-Extreme Contemporary;
Arkady Plotnisky, Reconfigurations)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand
Plateaus
Jacques Derrida, "Différance";
"Faith and Reason";
Specters of Marx; Given Time; Living
On/Borderlines;
Circumfession; Of Spirit; "Marx and
Sons"; etc.
(Secondary: John Caputo,
The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida;
William Dean, "Derrida and Process
Theology"
in Journal of Religion vol. 64;
Richard Beardworth, Derrida and the
Political;
Herman Rapaport,
Heidegger and Derrida-Reflections on
Time and Language; etc.)
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and
Women
David Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking
Through Confucius
(three other of their books)
I-Ching
Confucius, Analects
Zhuangzi
Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith
(regarding religious imagery in the
popular culture of Gen-Xers)
Mark Taylor, About Religion--Economies
of Faith in Virtual Culture
Star Trek
Buehrens and Church, A Chosen Faith
Raschke, ed. Deconstruction and Theology
John Cobb and David Griffin,
Process Theology: An Introductory
Exposition.
Readers interested in David Bockoven's
spiritual path
are invited to write to him:
<bockoven@efn.org>
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