Abstract
This section contains a description of the outline of the book, the background for it, my personal motivation to write it, an account of my personal preconceptions and presuppositions, and my qualifications.
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Notes
- 1.
I use that term in the same sense as Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) used it in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment. If the rationality of enlightenment is pursued to the very end, it turns into its opposite. Horkheimer and Adorno have argued that Nazism in Germany is such a dialectical consequence of an “enlightened” rationality gone over the top. I would like to extend it: if we refuse to integrate spirituality into our collective rationality, this very rationality will become irrational.
- 2.
While Buddhism is currently popular among academics, probably because it is inquisitive and akin to science in its methodological outlook, but certainly also because of the championship of the Dalai Lama and scientists associated with him, nothing points towards the direction that Christian or Jewish mythical imagery or theological doctrine receives reinterpretation by scientific thought or is being adapted towards scientific insights. A good example of Buddhist thinking in academia is Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community. (Docket et al. 2003). A criticism of the implicit Buddhist leanings of psychology in general and transpersonal psychology in particular can be found in Xenophilia as a cultural trap: Bridging the gap between transpersonal psychology and religious/spiritual traditions and Is Buddhism a psychology? Commentary on romanticism in “Mindfulness in Psychology” (Friedman 2009, 2010). Other attempts at bridging the gap using different types of background theory can be found in Brian Lancaster’s (2000, 2004, 2011) writing.
- 3.
See Walach 2007 (Mind-Body-Spirituality) and Van Lommel 2011 (Endless consciousness: A concept based on scientific studies of near-death-experiences). A challenging set of data are presented by Eben Alexander (2012) in his book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Although near-death-experiences are conventionally explained as experiences of an awakening brain, (see Marsh’s (2010) Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality? for a thorough analysis and argument to that effect), both van Lommel and Alexander make it quite plausible that such disoriented and disjointed experiences of awakening from a state of coma are phenomenologically quite different from the lucid and noetically different states. Apart from this, there are a variety of other spiritual experiences and their phenomenological signatures place some challenge to the mainstream paradigm. I have discussed some of this in my 2007 article quoted above. For other examples see Spirituality: The legacy of parapsychology (Walach et al. 2009).
- 4.
I will go into greater detail below. Although Bohr’s original notion is no longer used as more formally satisfying notions are available, technically speaking, complementarity or the handling of incompatible observables is still at the core of the quantum physical theorizing, as Kim and Mahler (2000) have shown.
- 5.
With a pinch of salt and under the viewpoint of eternity.
- 6.
Wilber is a different matter. He certainly has provided very useful compilations of thoughts, mainly from a modernised Vedanta point of view, which in essence is idealist, making spirit the primary entity (some of his works which I find useful include The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (1998) and Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (2000). This “perennialism” that is based on the assumption of a universal truth that runs through cultures and history is on the one hand appealing, on the other hand rather ahistoric, neglecting the conceptual, historical and cultural problems associated with that view. It does not take into account the relativity of the post-modern situation; see below. Wilber adapts his thought rather quickly to new criticisms that are being raised, and adds a new piece of thought to his system. This reminds me of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely who has marked a special position in the history of art, whereby he put all sorts of things together creating playful objects such as “world harmony” that can be viewed in a museum specifically dedicated to his work in Bale, Switzerland (see www.tinguely.ch). However, Wilber never really seems to grasp the conundrum of a postmodern position and the difficulty of a revival of idealist thinking. The main difficulty, as I shall point out later, is the mind-body problem that cannot be solved this way. His work seems to sit mainly outside the scientific mainstream discourse for this very reason, and my guess is that it is the lack of historical awareness that creates the basic problem. Solid criticisms, like those by Ferrer (1998, 2000, 2002) seem to be glossed over without noticeable impact.
- 7.
This postmodern position can be, briefly, described as follows: Around 1930 several thinkers and researchers have, quite independently, discovered that it is not possible to construct any language system that is completely plausible and convincing out of its own foundations. For mathematics, Gödel has shown that any axiomatic theory, such as an algebra or a formal type of logic, needs to recur to another system to give sense to its own final foundational sentences (Devlin 2002). This is the so called “Unabschliessbarkeitstheorem”, the “incompleteness theorem”. In parallel, the philosopher Collingwood (1998, orig. 1940) pointed out that there is no such thing as a philosophical system that can make its own foundations plausible. It will always have to take refuge in presuppositions, Collingwood calls them implicit presuppositions, necessary to make the system work. Most of the time these presuppositions go unnoticed and uncriticized. Other philosophers pointed out that it is impossible to give final reasons and arguments for a system, because these reasons will always have to rely on a certain understanding of language. Finally, even the attempt by Carnap and colleagues to construct a purely formal scientific language that was devoid of opaque notions was doomed to failure, precisely because of this structure: it is always necessary to translate such a language into the normal one, and then the same problems apply (see Hoche (2008) for some very basic arguments and Smith (1994) for a good historical analysis). Wittgenstein (1958, orig. 1953) has shown that we can never step out of the boundaries of our language structures in philosophical argument. Although this principal situation was beginning to become clear by the end of the 1930s, the term “post-modern” was coined by Lyotard (1979) who made clear it meant the end of any “final” philosophical system. Hence, a return to such a system cannot be the remedy for this post-modern situation, even though many might wish it, as this would get rid of the insecurity this situation is coming with. In fact, a lot of our problems such as the many fundamentalisms and other “…isms” are probably due to this very situation.
- 8.
“dogma” is Greek and means “teaching”. It has further developed into a technical term within Catholic theology meaning the official teaching of the Church. This used to be a consensus agreement of all bishops and cardinals, representing the collective wisdom of all the church members. Only very recently, in 1870, did the First Vatican Council decree that the Pope himself can add to this dogma on his own, a stance which was opposed by the German bishops. I use the term here in this meaning, but also to mean that every experience has to be expressed in language eventually, and will thus take on a “dogmatic”, i.e. interpretative and thus fixed nature. This is not only true for the Christian dogma, but for any teaching, even though it may be “New Age” and thus purportedly anti-dogmatic. For there is no such thing as experience without interpretation. My emphasis on “non-dogmatic”, secular spirituality means that we need to bring the experience itself into focus. The discussion of how to interpret it, is quite another matter.
- 9.
See footnote above; the doctrine of papal inerrancy is a rather young one and was proclaimed only in 1870. Previously the joint teaching of the Church and the teachers of the tradition was that only a joint group of bishops together with the bishop of Rome as their principal, congregated in meditation and prayer to solve a difficult issue would be inerrant. The interpretation of the ancient teaching of Mary’s virgin birth as a sexual-physiological fact is also a rather recent event. Spiritually, it signifies the openness of Mary to the “will of God”, meaning the willingness to be of service. Spiritually speaking, virginity is neither a physiological nor a sexual attribute at all, but a spiritual one.
- 10.
The scientific meta-theory which I find most convincing is the one put forward by Bruno Latour in his socio-historical analyses (Latour 1999; Latour and Bastide 1986). Apart from that, I think that the cognitive-evolutionary argument of my theory of science teacher Erhard Oeser of Vienna still holds true (Oeser 1987, 1988). However, I do not think that these texts are available in English. I learned a lot from him and subscribe to this evolutionary-biological approach of human knowledge and science in general.
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Walach, H. (2015). Introduction. In: Secular Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09345-1_1
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