The End of Spirituality — Implications of Richard Rorty’s Post-Philosophy on the Spiritual Seeker
This past Spring, I went to Rishikesh. I went because the city (about 5 hour's drive north of New Delhi) is famous as the place where the Beatles learned to meditate, because I like to meditate, and because a random girl on Bumble (with whom I was late-night hammer texting and who ghosted me the next morning) challenged me to travel solo.
What I was hoping would be a deeper exploration of pre-Hindu meditation practices, ended up being daily solo sessions on the philosophy of Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (founder of the Hare Krishna movement) taught by a well-intentioned couple in their early 30s who had left their tech jobs in New Delhi and come to Rishikesh to pursue a life of spiritual asceticism. My daily philosophy sessions shared eerie similarities with the one-on-one Bible studies I used to conduct as a Jehovah’s Witnesses — cyclical logic, persuasive rhetoric devices, and warmth.
The moment that this honest but enraptured couple lost me was when, while driving back to the resort after a day of shopping and sweet eating in the world’s yoga epicenter, my instructor turned to me and said, “Tom, it seems like you are searching for something.”
It took everything I had to resist the urge to jump out of the car and down the mountain. I was triggered. When we finally reached the resort, I canceled the rest of my yoga sessions and spent the remainder of the trip locked up in my hill-station bungalow watching Gangs of London. I came home, got a second job, and bought a motorcycle.
“You are searching for something”.
When cultists say the above, they are more than eager to provide you with that very something — usually, a trite philosophy explaining the great mysteries of life, an easy-digestible ethical code, and an embracive community that enables your predisposition to codependency — all in exchange for a small slice of your psychic liberty. Alternatively, when the secular or post-religious thinker asks this question, they may add a dash of condescension, as if your existential quest indicates naïveté — as if it were a symptom of an immature developmental phase. How is it that some can give up their quest for answers to universal questions or be so completely unconcerned? Is the spiritual seeker cursed with some sort of neuroticism that manifests in an obsession with unanswerable questions?
The short answer is, Yes. It’s probably genetic. And almost certainly rooted in the type of longing that results in the unpredictability or absence of an attachment figure in childhood — a yearning imprinted in the limbic areas of our brain that only intense intellectualization by the left prefrontal can quell, or else a string of toxic relationships and religio-spiritual obsessions and disillusionments that result at last in a battle-worn submission, not to any deity, but to the banality of life.
The Language of Spirituality
Over time, the word spirituality has come to include a collection of quasi-religious practices such as animism, crystal healing, eastern religions as practiced by non-natives, and astrology. But it points to a deeper social psychology. As the Western world secularized, many who left traditional religious structures used “spirituality” as a catch-all term to include an underlying respect for morality in general, a quest for a deeper purpose and understanding of the mysteries of life, or surrender to an anthropomorphized chaos.
“Spirituality” is one of those words that you are sure you understand, but struggle to define. The term has even entered the scientific domain by way of formalized research into its usefulness in clinical mental health treatment and ongoing research into its neuroscientific roots (see my article on Andrew Newberg’s Neurotheology).
We could define the word anthropologically — for an up-to-date understanding, we would need to analyze its use in general conversation, perhaps a look at its use in the social media realm and its appearance in profile drop-down menus under “Religion”. Or we could define it from a psychological perspective. James Fowler, for example, frames faith as a lifespan development arch that, in its most mature state, culminates in a framework of transcendent values that extend beyond belief-bound religion.
I have settled on the following: when humans reach the limit of their intellect to bring order to an entropic universe and cannot adequately categorize or explain certain phenomena, material or psychological, they lean upon mysteries, absences, voids, and absurdities of such variance that one can only group them under the umbrella of “spiritual”. The ineffable.
Ineffability refers to the inability of language to adequately represent an experience. Neuroscience brings some legitimacy to this felt experience of awe at that which cannot be put into words. Linguistic cognition is a function of the left prefrontal regions of the brain. But a lot is going on in the brain beyond the linguistic areas. It could be then, that the disconnect between linguistic and abstract cognition (seated in the subcortical areas of the brain) corresponds to the experience of awe, the ineffable, the spiritual.
Additionally, perhaps the exhaustion of rational thinking that leads to a surrender to the mystical relates to the hemispheric division of the brain (a disconnect between the linguistic and socially responsive dominance of the left hemisphere and the nonlinear emotional intensity of the right). Indeed the brains of those whom we consider spiritual (or perhaps more creatively profound) are likely more neuronally and synaptically dense and connected across the corpus callosum than other brains. Is this bundle of nerves that connects the left to the right hemisphere the seat of spirituality in its many forms?
My musings above reveal a common denominator — language and awe (or wonder). These two elements of human cognition are addressed by the American post-modern philosopher, Richard Rory in his book Philosophy & the Mirror of Nature. While Rorty’s hermeneutical approach deals mainly with the fields of linguistics and philosophy, I will extend this line of thought to spirituality as defined above. And while Rorty proclaimed the end of philosophy as we know it, I will do so with spirituality.
Before the end of spirituality comes the end of philosophy
With the rebellious badassery of anyone who brings change to an infrastructural or cultural edifice, Rorty went so far as to deconstruct his own discipline, stripping philosophy of its “whigishness”, and releasing it from the burden of determining morality, truth, or knowledge and reducing it to merely one of many ways of having a conversation.
One of Rorty’s main themes in his 1979 Philosophy & the Mirror of Nature is that epistemology (that is philosophy’s preoccupation with checking religion, politics, and science on their claims to truth, or knowledge) has become passe. According to Rorty, the mind cannot be considered an accurate “Mirror of Nature” as was adequately discussed by Decartes and others who emphasized the epistemological gap between what’s going on outside of our minds and what is going on within them. Rorty even takes materialism to task (my beloved neurophilosophy), saying that neuroscientific talk is just a different way of talking about the same stuff and therefore of no more use in bridging this gap than traditional philosophical systems.
It is as if the reality of something is divorced from any discussion of it. For example, we can speak of gravity in Newtonian terms, poetic terms, or otherwise. We could even go so far as to deny its existence. Interlocutors from all various disciplines might end up in a fight about words. But if we throw an apple off a building and watch it plummet to the ground and explode, all sides of the argument would see that what happened to the apple happened to the apple, regardless of what language or lexicon they choose to discuss it. Reality is again divorced from language. Reducing discussions of reality, knowledge, and truth to interpretations of language and text is referred to as hermeneutics.
Rorty turns the thinker’s attention to how commensurate language creates contextualized epistemology, and situation-based shared systems of truth. By reducing philosophy to just one form of commensurate language, Rorty is said to have brought the end of philosophy (a concept sometimes called post-philosophy).
Commensurate language is simply language that makes sense to two or more parties in a discussion. When a word is used in conversation, all parties in the conversation have a similar psychic concept associated with the word. If so, a knowledge, a truth, is established, bound by the context, the parties involved, and the mutually agreed upon lexicon. Commensurate language can also be created, through mutually understood language that connects two or more contextual epistemologies. If this happens, the gap is bridged and a new shared epistemology is created.
Rorty’s approach devalues truth and knowledge, relegating seemingly profound existential concepts to nothing more than a lexicon that is peculiar to Western philosophy due mainly to the path that the discipline has followed over time. By taking this hermeneutic turn (directing philosophy’s attention to the meaning of language rather than meaning at large), Rorty pokes at philosophy’s ego. Although, says Rorty, philosophy ought to continue its epistemological work, it can no longer be viewed as the almighty arbitrator of claims made by religion, politics, and science as it once was.
Now, the end of spirituality
So how does Richard Rorty’s hermeneutic turn that disempowers philosophy lead me to proclaim the end of spirituality?
Spirituality, as reverence for chaos of the universe or an experience of awe at the ineffable, is a reaction to the systems of truth and non-truth, knowledge and non-knowledge of a contextualized epistemology. The spiritual seeker, for whatever psychological and neurobiological reasons, is drawn to explore the gaps in the contextualized epistemology of their social ecology. What cannot be easily expressed linguistically (the ineffable) — what exists in the epistemological gap — is experienced at the organismic level as mystical, spiritual, and profound.
Rorty puts it this way when discussing the human spirit:
“The temptation is to anthropomorphize the nonhuman world, or some part of it, just as soon as it becomes clear that, as with the native of an exotic culture, or the genius whose talk is over our heads, we do not ‘speak the same language’… Spirit is whatever is so unfamiliar and unmanageable that we begin to wonder whether our ‘language’ is ‘adequate’ to it. Our wonder, stripped of mirror imagery, is simply about whether somebody or something may be dealing with the world in terms for which our language contains no ready equivalents.” (Rorty, 352).
From the standpoint of Rorty’s hemeneutics, psychic material (or even perhaps realities) that exist in the epistemological gap of any discourse are not of a different sort than those that do not. It is all too possible that an exotic epistemology held in either another domain or another culture has a lexicon to fill these epistemological gaps (and likely spiritual practices to explore the gaps in their own). In short, the gaps in linguistic commensurability and the contextualized epistemology of a domain or social ecology are home to experiences of spirituality and the birthplace of the practices a person uses to either explore, surrender to, or revere said gaps.
As in the apple analogy above, reality exists unaffected by any linguistic or epistemological gaps. The sense of awe and wonder that the spiritual seeker experiences has nothing to do with discovering realities of another kind than those already mutually agreed upon in a shared system of knowledge.
When the spiritual seeker alights upon the commensurate language necessary to bridge the epistemological gap in their social ecology, the sense of awe and wonder vanishes. This realization marks the end of spirituality.
Provisional Aspirations
According to Rorty, to look for a universal commensurate language for truth is not only unnecessary to the human condition, it could also be considered unnatural. Rorty concludes that “to look for commensuration rather than simply continued conversation — to look for a way of making further redescription unnecessary by finding a way of reducing all possible descriptions to one — is to attempt escape from humanity.” (Rorty, 377)
The search for commensuration is the spiritualist’s quest. From the perspective of Rorty’s hermeneutics, the spiritual seeker’s fixation on closing epistemological and linguistic gaps (exploration of the ineffable) is an attempt to escape their very humanness.
Post-modern perspectives (no doubt Rorty’s included) led to the reaction from American philosopher Robert Kane upon which I base the title of this podcast/blog. Kane, in an attempt to give philosophy back its raison d’être, introduced the “quest in the realm of aspiration” as a response to the endless incommensurate conversation of postmodernism. “You may be right”, says Kane, “but don’t we all have our version of a quest for ultimate truth? Should not this be held as an aspirational value to frame our lives? Should not philosophy’s end be suspended in indefinite abeyance?”
Or did the human spirit just take its last breath?
Is it time to let the magic go?
References:
Rorty, R. (2009). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Vol. 81). Princeton university press.
