“So… you’re an atheist and a naturalist… but you call yourself spiritual?”
The short answer is yes. That might seem very odd, and by the end of this you might think I’m not making sense or that I’m abusing vocabulary. I think that’s okay with me.
First, let’s separate this from “Spiritualism,” the religious movement popular around the dawn of the 20th century that purported that the spirits of the dead were all around us. This is what gave rise to the seance, and that’s a whole different thing from what I’m talking about.
So What Are You Talking About?
What I’m talking about when I say “spirituality” will take me a pretty big post to describe… so prepare for a pretty big post.
Spirituality, in general, is probably best defined as the search for meaning or purpose or definition in life, and I consider it a direct response to existential angst. So, uh… what’s existential angst?
Kierkegaard (philosopher, dead Danish dude, you can read about him on the internets) used the word “angst” to describe the fear a human being had because of their responsibility to God. Of course, I don’t believe in God (see second post), but Kierkegaard is one of the first people to realize that the more freedom man gets, the more fear is generated. (This is important, but I’ll have to talk about it another time.)
Heidegger says… well, it would take me three books to explain what Heidegger says. But he defines Angst as apprehension about (for lack of a better term) the immaterial. “Fear” to Heidegger is the apprehension or stress in response to a real, existent thing whereas Angst is the response to a concept or perhaps a situation.
Hooray, Angst…
I could go on at length about the nature of angst, but I won’t… in this post.
The reason to talk about angst and “existential angst” is that it grips everyone at some point in their life. In fact, if you can imagine intelligent alien life forms that are self-aware, they’re likely to experience existential angst as well, as far as I’m concerned.
If you have ever asked, “Why am I here?” or “What does it all mean?” or “Who am I?” you’ve experienced existential angst. As opposed to Kierkegaard, I don’t think it has to do with your responsibility to God. I think existential angst is the natural response of a being that is self-aware to a world that is not. It is the response of a being which strives for structure and purpose to a universe with no structure nor purpose.
It’s Us Against the World
Quite literally, we are in constant conflict with the world. We have evolved in a specific way to solve puzzles and find patterns. You’d think that would help us deal with the world. Well, it does. This evolutionary advantage is significant and it’s how we have developed science and created technology. It turns out that nature is full of discernible patterns!
But there are two problems. First, our pattern-seeking brain is essentially flawed. It has a really big problem with statistics, so we tend to favor personal experience over general evidence. Let me emphasize this – we are really, really bad at statistics.
The second problem is that we expect everything to think like we do. We treat cats, dogs, cars, toasters and video game characters like they were fellow thinking beings. We plead with our car to start in the morning. We ask the dog why it chewed on the furniture. And finally, we ask the universe why it had to be this day that the dog chewed the furniture and the car won’t start.
Very simply, the universe has never provided us with an answer to “Why?”, and it likely never will.
But This One Time, I Yelled at My Car and It Just Started!
We’re really bad at statistics. And we’re really good at picking out the patterns that match what we expect while dismissing those that don’t confirm our suspicions. It takes a very disciplined mind to pick out the truth, but it’s a talent anyone can learn.
But even if an individual person isn’t good at critical analysis, everyone I have ever met has had those moments where they realize the world around them just doesn’t give two shits about them. And that’s existential angst.
To extend a metaphor from Intelligent Design advocates, once upon a time, we were wandering on a beach and we saw a watch. And we decided that there must be a watchmaker because watches don’t just magically appear on beaches.
But eventually, we approached the watch and realized it was just a shiny clamshell in the sand. Our minds had invented the watch because we preferred a valuable watch to a dull clamshell.
Of course, there are all sorts of problems with that metaphor, but setting that aside, I think we’ve all realized that there is a conflict between what we expect the world should be like and how it is. There is a conflict between our obligations and our desires. There is a conflict between fairness and self-interest. And each of these generate their own variety of existential angst.
Why can’t life just be simple? Why can’t it just be the way I want it to be?
The Spiritual Response
Spirituality is an attempt to discover the answer to those strange questions.
How does spirituality shape my own life? Well, that’s a long answer I’ll probably talk about in future posts. To answer briefly, I believe we must find meaning and answers not only individually, but together as a group. We must not only learn lessons from “teachable moments” in our lives, but more importantly, we must learn when to throw our hands up into a shrug and simply smile.
Our minds work on abstraction. Applying what we want to see or what we would create in human society to the universe as a whole is an abstraction. Religion is often an attempt to assign human values to a nature that clearly rejects them, and (much like I would expect) it’s the equivalent of putting a dress on a cat.
Perhaps spirituality, then, should be an attempt to understand what we are, what our expectations are, and how to adjust our minds to deal with an unforgiving, uncaring world.
I know it sounds really depressing when someone talks about the “uncaring world,” but ask yourself – why are you expecting the world to care? Ask a person to care! That’s practically all they do!
We didn’t ask for this life. We certainly weren’t given any instruction books. But only a human being, with its pattern-obsessed mind, would think that you only get what you ask for.
The instruction book – like every instruction book in your house – has to be written by human beings. And it’ll be a much better instruction book if we write it with some semblance of teamwork.
I don’t see how “spiritual” means “believes that essential questions and conflicts of a existential nature exist, and the desire to solve them”, which seems like what you’re saying here.
The meaning behind your message is excellent, I just don’t feel like spirituality is the way to express that, lest you be confused with all the people on OK Cupid who are “not religious but spiritual”. Sure, you can define spiritual that way, but it feels like you’re hijacking the term.
I do really like your observations about pattern recognition and angst; the connection of the essentially abrupt and inhuman reactions of the world to our own feelings of isolation and despair, and the key tangent of anthropomorphizing everything.
@Donald: Yeah, I don’t think this post is clear about why I use the word “spiritual” instead of another word, or why it might apply to me but not other people, and it unfortunately went on so long I didn’t feel like making it longer by talking about that.
A million people can say they are “spiritual” and we have a vague sense of what that means. But it is doubtful that any two of those million can agree on how we should approach the “spiritual.” The same goes for “Christian” or “Liberal” or many other labels.
I think I’m spiritual because I am intensely interested in the essential questions and crises of an existential viewpoint and I spend a lot of time trying to actually answer them.
As a comparison, think about a term like “gamer.” A person will self-identify as a gamer if they feel that their life has a dominant role for games and gaming. Likewise, I self-identify as spiritual because the abstractions of human existence have a dominant role in my life.
I’ll likely go into this in a future post. These first few weeks are going to be a lot of establishment of things so that I can branch off from them and reference them.
I guess my own discomfort with the term arises because of how many people use ‘spiritual’ to mean “wishy washy agnostic” or “willing to believe in whatever sounds kinda cool” or even “believes unexplained phenomena have a supernatural, rather than a scientific, explanation”
I think you should definitely have a “spirituality revisited” post at some point, so you can, more tersely, center in on why *you* choose to use that word.
For myself though, I consider what you’re describing ‘philosophical’. Though maybe, when you’re reading and writing about philosophy a great deal, that seems a bit broad.