Spirituality and Philosophy

Being fascinated is one of the most profound psychological states I have come across. In fact, there are few things that fascinate me as much as fascination itself. I can’t help but wonder what gives rise to fascination? What is it about things that makes them fascinating?           

With a nod to Kant, what seems to fascinate us is the sublime—things with a certain property of greatness. The sublime may present itself to us as spiritual, aesthetic, artistic, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, and so forth. But ultimately, there seem to be two sources of the sublime: one deep within us and the other entirely outside the world of sense experience. I think that if this is right, then spirituality seems to have a central place and role to play in philosophy. Let me show how and why.     

Let's go back to the two sources of the sublime. On the one hand, we have the depths of the human mind—most prominently our faculty of reason and the responsibilities that may come with this capacity. On the other hand, we have the transcendental realm—that which transcends or is beyond the world of sense experience. While the first is concerned with questions of ethics, psychology, and cognitive science, the latter is concerned with questions of astrophysics, cosmology, and ultimately any questions concerning the laws governing nature, which would seem to include the natural sciences. 

So why does this mean spirituality has a place in philosophy? I came to think this by reflecting on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich W. J. Schelling. Kant’s approach to philosophy was roughly to inquire what the mind must be like for the world to appear to us in the way that it does. Schelling, on the other hand, thought it should be the other way around: we should be asking what nature must be like for the human mind to be the way that it is. Kant gave us his transcendental idealism and Schelling gave us his Naturphilosophie—a philosophy of nature. I think that each got at least one thing right: there is a profound connection between nature (including that which is beyond the physical realm) and the human mind. However, I think the idea of the relationship being a one-way street—where one comes before the other, or where one explains the other, is mistaken. Rather, it seems that the human mind and nature are in some profound way two sides of the same coin. There seems to be a deeply rooted connection between the two—a bilateral relation. I think we can say that they are in some way cut from the same cloth. This makes sense, considering reflecting on the sources of fascination led us to the sublime and the sublime led us to ask questions about whether there is some connection between the different kinds of sublime. If this is so, then it seems there may very well be something outside the reach of the human mind and its faculty of reason to make sense of that in some sense “holds everything together”. And because of this, I think that philosophy, at least conceived of in the way Kant and Schelling (among many others of course) did, may have a place for spirituality.