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On the very idea of spiritual values

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

John Haldane
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Extract

It is unusual for an academic philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to discuss the subject of spirituality. Not so long ago this fact might have been attributed to a general view of philosophy as the practice of conceptual analysis and the theory of logic. However in a period when the discipline has developed to a point where almost every aspect of human life has been made the subject of some department of ‘applied philosophy’ it could hardly be said that the subject of spirituality, in so far as discussion of it may have normative implications, lies outside the sphere of reasonable philosohical enquiry. Yet it is almost entirely neglected.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 47 , September 2000 , pp. 53 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2000

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References

1 A. Flew, ‘What is “Spirituality”?’ in Brown, L., Farr, B. and Hoffmann, R. (ed.), Modern Spiritualities: An Inquiry (New York: Promethius Books, 1997).Google Scholar

2 In this connection see Spiritual and Moral Development — Discussion Paper (London: National Curriculum Council, 1993)Google Scholar and Social and Cultural Development (London: Office of Standards in Teacher Education, 1994)Google Scholar

3 For some discussion of these ideas so far as the issue of mental causation is concerned see Haldane, John, 'A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind, in aOderberg, D. (ed.), Form and Matter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).Google Scholar

4 For further discussion of these matters see Haldane, John, ‘Applied Ethics’ in Bunnin, N. and Tsui-James, E. (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar. For examples of recent contributions from nonphilosophers see various of the papers in Haldane, John (ed.) Philosophy and Public Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Incidentally the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations reports that in the same year, 1854, as Thoreau first published this dictum in Walden, George Sand wrote (in her Histoire de ma vie) of Chopin as being in a state of ‘désespérance tranquille’.

6 ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’ in Wiggins, D., Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Balackwell, 1987), pp. 136–7.Google Scholar

7 Although this type of account of aesthetic attitude and experience is associated with Kant and other Enlightenment and post-enlightenment authors it is anticipated in the middle ages. Aquinas, for example, writes that ‘good means that which simply pleases the appetite, while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend’, Summa Theologiae (London: Washbourne, 1914)Google Scholar Ia, IIae, q.17, al ad 3.

8 I use the analogy of participation in the life of a family rather than that of a parent given that in Christian mystical theology partaking in the life of God involves entering into the mutual Divine life of three persons.

9 Quinton, Anthony, ‘Character and Will’, in From Woodhouse to Wittgenstein (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998) p. 39.Google Scholar

10 ibid., p. 42.

11 See Hadot, P., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (ed. aDavidson, A. I.)(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).Google Scholar

12 The Discourses of Epictetus (ed.) Gill, C. (London: Everyman, 1995) 3, 23, 30.Google Scholar

13 ibid., 4, 4, 33.

14 Hadot, , Philosophy, p. 206.Google Scholar

15 ‘Reflections on the Idea of the “Cultivation of the Self”’ in Hadot, , Philosophy, p.212.Google Scholar

16 See Foucault, M., History of Sexuality, trans. Hurley, R. (New York, 1984) Vol. III.Google Scholar

17 Hadot, , Philosophy, p. 211.Google Scholar

18 de Caussade, Jeanne-Pierre, Abandonment to Divine Providence (trans. Beevers, J.) (New York: Image, Doubleday, 1975).Google Scholar

19 Haldane, John, ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae’, in McGhee, M. (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

20 Caussade, , Abandonment, pp. 24–6Google Scholar