Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
Yearning For Meaning with Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren and Dr. David McPherson (Part 1 of 2)
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Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. This search is at the heart of religions all around the world. Over the past century or so, however, religion, especially in the West, has been in decline, and many commentators have marked the rise of the “nones” and “dones”--those who have no religious affiliation and those who have abandoned religion with no intention to return. What factors are behind these shifts? What does the search for meaning in the absence of religion look like? What is spirituality and what is its relevance in our contemporary context? In this episode, I interview a psychologist and philosopher who are trying to make sense of these trends.
Daryl Van Tongeren, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Hope College and the director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research. A social psychologist, he has published more than 200 scholarly articles and chapters, and four books, on topics such as religion, meaning in life, and virtues. Most recently, his work has focused on the psychological and social processes of leaving religion and undergoing religious change, culminating in his newest book, Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion. His research has been covered by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Hidden Brain, Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR-affiliated radio stations, Scientific American, and Men’s Health. His work has been supported by numerous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, and he has won national and international awards for his research. He is also an associate editor for The Journal of Positive Psychology. He enjoys running, biking, and hiking near where he lives with his wife, Sara, in Holland, MI.
David McPherson is Professor of Philosophy in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida as well as Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. McPherson works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020), as well as the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017). McPherson is currently the project leader for a three-year Templeton-funded grant project on “Spiritual Yearning and the Problem of Spiritual Alienation,” which will result in his third book monograph titled Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God as well as an edited volume titled Spiritual Yearning in an Age of Secularization: Philosophical, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives.
In this first part of our conversation, we talk about:
- The four main reasons people leave religion
- Navigating cognitive dissonance and existential anxiety
- Virtue ethics and the good life
- What is spirituality and do we need it?
- Spiritual alienation
To learn more about Daryl and his work, you can find him at:
Website: http://darylvantongeren.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/darylvantongeren/
X: https://x.com/drvantongeren
Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/done
To learn more about David and his work, you can find him at:
Website: https://davidmcpherson.weebly.com/
X: https://x.com/davidlmcpherson
Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective:
In each of our lives, you might say we begin in a garden of Eden. We begin uh kind of in a state of innocence, simplicity, harmony as young children. But as we grow and develop, we sort of experience alienation. Or, you know, we we don't always do the things we think we should do. We feel shame and guilt in relation to others, and we feel like we're trying to discover our place in the world. I think that's just part of the maturation of each human life. And so that's why I think to really get at like the role of spirituality in human life, you have to like, I think you have to make a case that there's like a spiritual predicament that we're trying to address.
SPEAKER_01I'm Brandon Vagunathan, and this is Beauty at Work, the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. As human beings, we are driven to pursue meaning and fullness in our lives. But is this kind of spiritual yearning human universal? How do we express this deep longing? And what happens when we become alienated from it? And what happens if some people say they don't experience it at all? Can religion guide us towards this kind of fulfillment, or might it also be a source of that very alienation? And once someone leaves religion, how does the spiritual yearning continue? To address these questions, I'm interviewing a psychologist and a philosopher who are working to make sense of these topics from different perspectives. Daryl Ventongren is professor of psychology and the director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College. As a social psychologist, he uses experimental research to investigate meaning in life, religion, and identity, and virtues. His latest book is Dunn: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion. David McPherson is a professor of philosophy in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, an affiliate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida. His most recent book is The Virtues of Limits. Let's get started. All right, Daryl and David, it's so good to see you guys. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Thanks so much for having us. Great to see you, Brandon. Hey, you too. You too. Such a pleasure. All right, so I'm going to start by asking each of you to share a memory of beauty, of profound beauty, that maybe maybe has lingered with you since childhood. David, you want do you want to go first? Yeah, sounds great.
SPEAKER_02I was thinking about this. Um actually the thing that came to mind interestingly was uh my relationship to my grandparents as a young kid. Uh the sort of the, you know, as as a philosopher, I think uh have a sort of keen sense of mortality and sort of this deep connection I had with my grandparents and just the sense of sense of time and the sort of like preciousness of life and sort of through generations. And uh so I think if if you know I mean it's probably you know, m one might think of like natural landscapes or some you know picture, but uh I think people and I especially I think like aging is is beautiful. Uh you know, you think of like Rembrandt's paintings of like the old woman and I know there's something like I don't know, it's I was sort of deeply moving, and I I suppose I've always been sort of an old soul, and uh it's part of maybe what drew me to philosophy is a sense of one's mortality and the preciousness of life. And and so I you know, I I if I think about like what was kind of something that sort of when I think about beauty, I think of something that sort of like draws you out in some way, some good that sort of draws you out of yourself, uh it sort of moves you in a deep way. And I think sort of the the beauty of like one's family, especially one's grandparents, and sort of confronting the fragility of life and uh our mortality, I think has always been sort of deeply moving to me. And so like I I think there's something beautiful in old age and kind of that relationship between the generations. Yeah, I think that's that's sort of what comes to mind if you're asking me, like something in my childhood. It was sort of like the beauty of that sort of relationship with one's grandparents.
SPEAKER_01Is there was there any particular aspect or any any particular memory from that relationship? I mean, like I'm I'm trying to think back. I didn't know my grandparents too well, but I I don't I don't have memories that I would consider beautiful. I mean, I you know I have very, very fleeting memories of seeing them once in a while. Yeah. But yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think, you know, things just like uh going fishing with my grandpa. Like we would we'd go out fishing all day on the boat, and I know it just was like a very important experience for me as a young young kid. And of course, you know, I'd go fishing hunting with my dad too, but this sort of intergenerational relationship that was always this this deep bond, and some of my experiences of beauty also just being out in nature, but also having that be a kind of connection between my dad, my grandpa, you know, and then yeah, just other things. Grandparents were very involved in our lives, and so uh no, it just was always um something as important to me. And I was, you know, I remember like giving a speech at their I think it was their 40th anniversary, maybe 50th anniversary. I just was like choked up and it wasn't clear like why I was choked up giving this speech. But it was something oh, I was probably like 20, and so maybe it was their 50th. I'm trying I'm trying to, it was it was back aways now though. Uh both of them have passed on at this point, but um and those are sort of like deep things, the sort of like bonds you have as you know, young child getting older, and then like kind of confronting confronting aging and mortality, and uh so I don't know, I just had a lot they would come to all of our like baseball games and everything, and so it was very involved in our lives, and it was something deeply moving to me. So I think of beauty as something that's deeply moving and sort of draws you out and uh helps you to find the beauty and goodness of life.
SPEAKER_01So awesome. Daryl, what comes to your mind?
SPEAKER_00For me, I I was born in California and then was raised there until middle school. Then my family and I moved to Colorado. And so for me, it was the first time I saw snow. Uh there was just something deeply moving. I felt like I had a Kierkegaard set of emotions of both awe and dread. Right. So being a Californian, seeing the snow, I was a little nervous, a little afraid. Like, well, what is this? Is this scary? Is this a threat? Um, but also this sense of awe of something that was so unfamiliar, so foreign, but also so beautiful. And so it was this beautiful mixture of fear and excitement and curiosity. And and yeah, and and I I'll never kind of quite forget that first that first snow. It's kind of stuck with me.
SPEAKER_01Huh, yeah. Well, it's that's definitely an experience of the sublime, I imagine. The combination of beauty and fear. Uh how old were you?
SPEAKER_00Do you remember when you uh I I think I was 11 when I first saw snow.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I I was 20 when I first saw snow. I moved from uh from Dubai to Nova Scotia. So wow.
SPEAKER_00It's a shift.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember very vividly the first snowfall, the winter of 99. So um well, I want to ask you, Daryl, maybe to to start. Tell me a little bit about like your own journey into psychology and into the work you do in in you know in the study of religion, and then especially about your recent book, Done. But could you could you briefly trace your trajectory into how you were led to to pursue a career in psychology and then this particular area of research?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I I went away, you know, I'm the first generation college student, and when I entered college, I came with with the parental mandate that I had to choose something very practical. And so I was a business major. Um I realized very quickly, though, I'm not very good at business. And so uh the the class that I really loved though in my first semester of college was intro to psych. And so my second semester, you know, I remained a business major because that's what I needed to do, but I I was secretly taking all of these upper-level psych courses, even though I never switched majors. So eventually switched majors, you know, had the had the difficult conversation with the parents and said, you know, I'm not gonna not go into business, I'm going into psych. And I think I've always been interested in some of the bigger questions around human existence. And so I think psychological science offers a unique window into some of those. And so even just very early on, my my senior undergraduate thesis focused on religion and death anxiety. And so I think I started engaging with psychological research around religion since I was an undergrad, because these big questions, enduring questions, have always just drawn me in more than some of the other things. And so for a long time I studied how religion is a meaning system and some of the social cognitive functions of religion. But then shortly after finding out I'd gotten tenure, I was going on a run with one of my friends, and we were kind of celebrating that I'd gotten tenure. And he said, you know, what's something that you've always wanted to study, but you haven't, but now that you have the security of tenure, you feel like you can you can explore. And I thought, well, people leaving religion. And he's like, well, why on earth, like, why, why now? Why not later? Um, you know, and I'm at a religious institution, and I was a little worried, you know, how would my scholarship be perceived? And also I think that that you know, the idea of leaving religion is a fraught topic. So people on both sides, uh, it's it's very charged. And so he encouraged me to pursue this. So with a with a separate colleague, we wrote a grant and we got some funding from the John Templeton Foundation to conduct cross-cultural research on religious de-identification and what we call the religious duns. So people who are leaving religion. And since then, this has been one of the most rewarding areas of my scholarship, and I'm really grateful for the encouragement of that colleague who you know said that you know now's the time for intellectual curiosity and courage. So so jump after that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It's really a fantastic book, and I think I think it's great to to coin that term and and to distinguish it from the religious nuns, right? So, which is what a lot of I think the research has been focused on is people who are not affiliated with any religion and how that population is growing. Do you see the population of religious duns as as also growing? Or what what is the and I think in your in your book you say about 20% of Americans uh are in this category, but what what is your sense of the rate of change of this category and and its future?
SPEAKER_00I do think that this category is increasing. So there's some statistics that one in three people raised Christian will leave their faith by the time they reach 30. Some estimates are as high as maybe three-quarters of religious nuns are actually duns. They've actually left a faith. And so I do see the proliferation of the duns. I do think that more people are going to be walking away from their faith. And I think there are a few reasons why we might be seeing that. Um so in my book, I call these the four horsemen of religion's apocalypse, so four reasons why religion might be experiencing a decline. So one is because of what I call, and research participants have told us, so we call this cultural stagnation. So they give intellectual reasons. They say, I'm becoming more progressive, but my religious institutions aren't. And there's this gap between the values I espouse and the ones my institution promotes, and I simply can't make sense of those anymore. A second is because of religious and spiritual abuse or trauma. And so either they have experienced this abuse or trauma or they've witnessed it, or they've witnessed religious leaders or clergy perpetuating this trauma, and they can't stand the moral hypocrisy, and so they have to leave. Third reason is because of theologically thin views of suffering. So when adversity strikes, they simply can't make sense of how a loving God or a just world could allow such tragedy to befall them or someone that they love. And then the fourth reason is because religion, and particularly in the US, evangelical, has taken on a social label that many people are not comfortable with. So a recent poll showed that 40% of self-identified evangelicals do not affirm the deity of Jesus, which I'm pretty sure is like the core thing it means to be an evangelical. So what this means is that evangelical probably has a more socio-political term that some people don't want to be a part of. So there's a number of reasons why people are leaving, and I think these numbers these reasons are going to lead to an increase in the religious duns.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I I could identify with a lot of those categories. And I when I was growing up, I grew up Hindu, and I think I I left uh religion for three of those reasons. So everything besides religious trauma I could identify with, and you know, certainly the simplistic views of suffering. My mother became severely mentally ill when I was a child. I just could not find any kind of theological resource that was offered to me by at least the way the tradition was communicated to me, uh, and the practices didn't seem very helpful and so forth. But yeah, then I became Roman Catholic just before the 2002 sex abuse scandal erupted. So just in time. Just in time for religious trauma. Yes. But uh one of the things you talk about is that these these four horsemen are all um forms of cognitive dissonance, right? This sort of mismatch between Yeah, could you say a little bit about cognitive dissonance and then the kind of responses of assimilation and accommodation, I think, that you talk about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Right. So so in my mind, all four of these things, there's a discrepancy between what people have been taught or they've learned or somehow internalized, right? So their expectations or assumptions around the world and their experiences of the world. So there's this gap. So psychologists call this inconsistency cognitive dissonance, it's a negative mental and physiologically arousing state. And we're really motivated to do something to reduce this distance. We don't like it when there's inconsistencies. And so Crystal Park's research on meaning suggests that the bigger the discrepancy between our expectations and reality, the greater the distress. And so for minor inconsistencies, or if people have a worldview that's able to do this, kind of our first uh pass at trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance is to assimilate our experiences into our existing religious structures, beliefs, or frameworks. So basically, we try to make it fit. We try to make sense with the religious beliefs that we have. And if we can effectively assimilate that, the discrepancy goes away, the distress goes away, and we maintain our beliefs. If the dis if the discrepancy is too big and the distress is too big, and you simply can't make sense and you can't fit it into your existing belief structures, you accommodate them. And what that means is you just change them. And we're we're hesitant to change them, especially something as big and important as religion. We don't really want to change these beliefs, but but oftentimes sometimes we have to. And so when we accommodate, that's when we undergo this wholesale belief change or significant belief change. And for a lot of people, that might mean leaving religion altogether.
SPEAKER_01Is there a third option, Daryl? I was wondering whether whether it might be a way of just sort of standing in between that, you know, with with it holding the tension, right? Where you you know, you know, that there's something in the world that you can't quite assimilate into your religious beliefs. At the same time, you don't want to change those beliefs. Is that do do people navigate that middle space?
SPEAKER_00I think I'm secretly an advocate for that middle space. So uh where right, so I think that middle space is rare for a number of reasons. I think that that middle space requires us to tolerate uncertainty, and that's very uncomfortable for many people. And uh we we're drawn to beliefs and worldviews and ideologies that that provide us with certainty and ensure security. I think it also requires intellectual humility to be able to say, I don't know, yeah, the world's a wild place, evil exists, but I also think there's good and there's beauty. I can't make sense of this, even though they pay me as an academic to pontificate on why this might be the case. And so there there takes some humility in order to do that. And so all of this kind of revolves around the idea that in order to stay in that middle space, I think what we need to do is we need to cultivate an existential distress tolerance. So we need to be okay with existential anxiety. We need to become comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing and saying, I'm probably wrong and I just don't know. And that's that's culturally very challenging. Those things are not valued or valorized in our culture. And so you're swimming against cultural currents. But second, it's also personally challenging to be able to withstand that amount of distress. But I don't think it's impossible. I think that would be my encouragement is to the degree that we can cultivate more existential resilience and the distress tolerance are gonna be less likely to act out of trying to manage existential anxiety and respond defensively or foreclose on ideas, and it allows us to remain open. So kind of this, maybe this is a bit of a leap, but in the same way, like when I first saw snow, I was terrified, but I was also drawn to it, right? There was there was dread, but there was also awe. I think when we undergo changes or when we're when we can't exp understand and explain things, and we're sitting in the existential distress tolerance, that is, that is terrifying. There is some dread, but it's also expansive. You're also overwhelmed with seeing the world in a new way. You can appreciate your relative smallness to something bigger than yourself, and there's a sense of awe that really is motivating. And so being able to hold both of those seemingly competing emotions at the same time, I think might be, as you mentioned, a really fruitful way forward.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, um, thank you. That that's that sounds amazing. I I just interviewed this journalist, Maggie Jackson, who wrote a remarkable book called Uncertain, and it's it's she she advocates for uncertainty as a as a sort of psychological superpower. And yeah, and I think certainly it's related to humility, which which we can talk about in a little bit. So maybe David, let me ask you uh about about your your journey into philosophy. You you mentioned being an old soul as a child, but I'd be curious to to know just how you decided to become a professional philosopher. And tell us a little bit about your journey into the study of virtue and and humility and and then now alienation. Yeah, thanks.
SPEAKER_02Um yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I I guess I sort of like indicated maybe some of those, some of those motivations. Um, you know, I think I I grew up religious, and I think probably when I was a teenager, I started having, you know, a bunch of questions, doubts, you know, problem of evil, all these sorts of things. And so I think I I kind of felt impelled to philosophize. Aristotle, famously at the beginning of his metaphysics, says philosophy begins with wonder. And that sounds really nice. It's like you know, it sounds like this nice euphoric experience, but it's really something like being perturbed. He says, like, we philosophize in order to no longer be at a loss in the world. And so I think philosophy, you know, sort of the ancient practice of philosophy as a way of life, is this attempt to sort of discover an orientation in one's life, to discover wisdom. Uh, wisdom as a kind of understood as kind of holistic understanding that sort of aims at living well. And so I think philosophy has um, you know, it's always been part of that human quest. I mean, this I always try to impress this upon my students is that we're we're all natural philosophers. We all ask these questions all the time. And in fact, part of a philosophy course, you know, should be to help you, you know, one of the things that should help you do is have your midlife crisis early so you don't have to go buy the Lamborghini later, which isn't gonna solve your problems. Not that I not that I actually want you to have the crisis, but I want you to address the kinds of questions from which crises arise, and so that which which are just part of the human condition. And so in that sense, I I I think I just felt impelled to do philosophy to sort of um inquire into some of these big questions about meaning in life, how to live well. And so I think, you know, you asked about virtue ethics. So my first two books have been on virtue ethics, one on called Virtue and Meaning, which is kind of virtue ethics and meaning of life, and a second one called The Virtues of Limits. And now I'm a my current book project is more kind of philosophy of the spiritual life, which I the book project's called Spiritual Alienation, The Quest for God. But I I think virtue ethics always seemed to me like it allowed you to reflect upon the good life. Going back to ancient tradition, these big questions were just part of, you know, you look at Aristotle, Plato, the big questions about sort of the nature of the world and our place within it are just so much a part of that. And I think I have tried to push virtue ethics in a kind of more because I mean there's always these pressures and and sort of academia to kind of narrow in, and I think there's this value in that. But uh sometimes we lose like the big picture, the big questions. And so, for instance, in contemporary virtue ethics, they sort of don't talk about Aristotle and contemplation. They don't have much place for the contemplative life. Whereas it seems to me like it's obviously very central to Aristotle, the sort of the place for the contemplative life. And it's he thinks that the best kind of life would be the contemplative life. And there's sort of a question, how do you how do you sort of um square that with also the the the practical life engaged in human community, which I think there's interesting questions around that. But for the most part, a lot of contemporary students have just been kind of concerned with how do we use practical reason to live well, to flourish. But part of flourishing, I mean, like part of the kind of beings we are is that we are, as I as I put it, meaning-seeking animals, that we seek meaning in our lives. And to flourish as a human being is to flourish in the mode of like being a meaning-seeking animal. And so I think a lot of times contemporary virtue virtue ethicists have attempted to try to make their views sort of scientifically respectable. So they'll talk about, uh they'll talk about, you know, like flourishing, like flourishing of like a tomato plant or like a dog or whatever. So like human flourishing is like that. And I think there are analogies, but there's also disanalogies. And one of the disanalogies is that we seek meaning in life. And so Aristotle himself said that non-human animals can are not capable of eudaim eudaimonia, which is you know the Greek term often translated as happiness, but I think it's something more like a meaningful life, a noble life, a worthwhile life, something that's deeply fulfilling. And so um, so I think that we have to get at like what is it to be human? I think a central sort of part of my own research is trying to is what we might call philosophical anthropology, sort of philosophical reflection on the human condition. What is it to be human? And so I think virtue ethics is sort of a way into that to think about well, how do we flourish as human beings? How do we live well? And the virtues are the excellences that help us to live well. Again, part of that's going to be meaning seeking, that part of uh see, you know, the virtues help us to live meaningful lives. That in fact, when we're properly the virtues help us to be properly responsive to the goods all around us, and in being properly responsive to those goods, uh, we find fulfillment or meaning in our lives. And so uh that's sort of the the sort of general picture, and I think sort of why I was drawn into to virtue ethics. I think my work has tried to push it more in a kind of, as I've already indicated, meaning of life direction, but also in the direction of the life of the life. Of spirituality, that um it's not so far from saying we're the meaning-seeking animal to saying we're like fundamentally religious or spiritual, spiritual by nature, homo religiosis as if you want to use a Latin term here. And so, you know, I think the present book probably is trying to grapple with what you might call our our spiritual condition or spiritual predicament from a philosophical vantage point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, that's great. Um, in your book on spirituality, you have defined spirituality as uh a practical life orientation uh shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy, which I thought was a really compelling uh definition of spirituality. And I recently interviewed on the podcast Alan Leitman, who identifies us as spiritual materialist. So he's uh, you know, sort of ontologically, he's you know committed to materialism, doesn't think that we're anything more than atoms and molecules, and yet he's had these profound experiences of transcendence, and he thinks that's that's what spirituality is. It's it's being open to those kinds of experiences. What do you think about like what do you mean here, I suppose, by self-transcendence, which and he wants to use that word transcendence as well, because often we think of transcendent as implying some something beyond the material world. How much of that is needed in your sense of spirituality?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's great. Um, so I mean, just on the first part of that definition, so I I describe it as a practical life orientation. So by practical, I mean it's it's the life of practice, or they might say you have to engage in certain kinds of spiritual practices. It's not enough, in my view. I mean, this is you know, it's a normative definition, like what I think, how we think we should understand spirituality. So people could, of course, use the term in all kinds of different ways. So it could just be you have some wow moments, you know, like there's people who like, you know, like on psychedelics or something, like you could have these wow moments moments, right? This sort of question is like, maybe that could be a route into the spiritual life for someone, but uh this sort of this question of like, or this issue of like spiritual praxis that you have to engage in some way in spiritual practices, in a way trying to orient your life. This is life orientation towards some vision of the good, we might say. And I think that gets into this sort of self-transcending aspect. I think there's some sense that I think the spiritual life, you feel called to something. You feel, uh, I mean, if you think about like Christ beginning his uh ministry, calling people to metanoia, to repentance or conversion, right? There's some sense I think that the spiritual life responds to a call upon our lives to change, to be reborn, however one, if you think of sort of the great spiritual traditions, they they sort of issue a call upon one's life to be changed. And that I think necessarily has to sort of come be experienced as coming to us from without. So sometimes I I'm currently teaching this class on the search for meaning in a secular age. And so we'll get into like what do people mean when they're spiritual but not religious, and then sort of gets into what's religion, what's spirituality. And there are some sort of test cases. I don't know if either you remember uh this example from uh Robert Bell et al. Habits of the Heart, but there's this this woman, Sheila, who had her own religion of Sheilaism, right? And there's sort of this question of like, could that be like a spirituality or religion where it's just like you do you, I'll do me. Like, and there's like there's a sense in which there's like, I mean, there could be, I think, like some sense of an authentic self, who you really ought to be, right? But if it's just kind of like I'm gonna do whatever I desire, no demand, there's sort of no fundamental restructuring of my desires or my orientation. Um, I don't think, I mean, so part we're trying to capture a phenomenon, like what has spirituality been and what can it be sort of going into the future? And I think I think that sense of like a the call upon, that's why I talk about certain normative demands, certain normative demands upon, including a sense of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, right? So we're trying to capture something that seemed very important in the human condition, something that seems, for me, I'm interested in as like a key ingredient in a flourishing human life. So what is what is the kind of spirituality that we that we you know we need in order to flourish as human beings, as sort of meaning-seeking homo-religiosis or maybe by nature spiritual beings. And so that's what that's why I I think I mean my my definition, I think, will sort of like say, well, some of these views they may have elements of like spirituality, but it's not kind of the full package of at least what I think spirituality is at its best.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, that's really helpful to try to delineate those things. And is yeah, it seems to me, and I've met people who are, you know, who at least espouse a kind of Shilaism, right? They they they have this sort of little bricolage mentality in terms of the kind of spirituality they want to construct. I don't think they can escape the demands, even if they say, well, I'm gonna practice some yoga and I'm gonna go to this sort of nudist retreat on this beach with other people. I mean, whatever you engage in, the practices bring with them some kinds of demands and values. You have to, you know, eat certain kinds of food and do certain kinds of exercise and avoid certain kinds of other practices, and you know, so it's it's somehow becomes inescapable. And then even those who are, say, you know, tied to more conventional religious traditions could live those those forms of religiosity in ways that make no real demands of them, right? And so it becomes kind of thorny to navigate what is actually a well-lived out spiritual practice, you know, whether in the domain of religion or outside.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And just to add, I mean, so this is part of the motivation behind the spiritual alienation project. So part of, I mean, I mean, all the great spiritual traditions have some sense that things are not as they should be, things are out of joint in some sense, that there is a spiritual predicament or problem that we're trying to address. In some sense, we're not where we need to be, or to use language from like Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age, that we're we're not yet at the place of spiritual fullness, right? We're in some way we're on the way, maybe, or we feel exiled or alienated from it, but we're not where we need to be. And, you know, I discuss in this current book project three perennial forms of spiritual alienation. The first is self-alienation, which is our our lack of integration with the good or lack of wholeheartedness in relation to it. So you think about like Augustine on the divided will, right? Or like Aristotle on weak uh occursia or like weakness of the will, sometimes it's translated as or lack of self-control. You also think here, um, I mean, St. Paul, why do I do the things I don't want to do or things I hate and so forth, right? So it's a very common experience that like we're not fully aligned, right? Or you think of the Buddhist tradition on selfish craving and so forth. So like there's ways that we're not fully aligned. Then that often leads to alienation from others when we engage in wrongdoing, and so we find ourselves alienated from others. But also that can just be part of the experience of loneliness uh that's just sort of endemic to the human condition. And then lastly, there was what I call alienation from the world, which is sort of that comes you know with that philosophical impulse where we feel at a loss in the world, we feel like we're trying to find that orientation, find our place in the world, trying to grapple with evil and suffering, right? And so all those I think are part of our coming into moral and spiritual self-consciousness. And so I actually, in the book, I begin with a philosophical reading of the Garden of Eden story, which is a long tradition of this, you know, obviously go back to someone like St. Augustine, but Kant, Hegel, so forth. Um, and one thing I think is interesting, it's often referred to as a fall, but it's also a rise into moral and spiritual self-consciousness. The experience, you know, to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they experience shame and like there's this, you know, they're exiled from this place of harmonious living, right? So it has this like deep power to speak to us because of like, I think in each of our lives, you might say, we begin in a garden of Eden. We begin uh kind of in a state of innocence, simplicity, harmony as young children. But as we grow and develop, we sort of experience alienation or you know, we we don't always do the things we think we should do. We feel shame and guilt in relation to others, or we feel like we're trying to discover our place in the world. I think that's just part of the maturation of each human life. And so that's why I think to really get at like the role of spirituality in human life, you have to like, I think you have to make a case that there's like a spiritual predicament that we're trying to address. And so that's that's why I I mean I to just say like every you know, like kind of leave everything as it is, a kind of like quietist sort of approach to like where we're at, like I'm fine as I am, is like not to realize maybe the the depths of the problem. And if I could just invoke someone I know, uh I probably were all fans of uh William James here. He's got this distinction between a religion of healthy-mindedness and and sort of the sick soul, right? And I think a lot of the great, I mean, I think there's actually a place for both. I think maybe healthy-mindedness is an aspiration, but we often begin from like that sick-souled condition that not all is as it should be. Or, you know, Daryl invoked uh Kierkegaard earlier. We might think of like the sickness unto death, right? There's this sense, or Pascal, you know, like knowing your knowing your wretchedness and your greatness. You have to kind of pair those those two things together.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. What how would you articulate the heart of the spiritual predicament? I mean, is it is it that we're we're sort of looking for some kind of belonging that that we don't find in this world? I mean, how does it how would you articulate the heart of that predicament?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's really interesting because I'm trying to so the the book's called Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God. And so in one sense, you know, it's a kind of traditional project of like saying like some way like this leads us on a quest for God, or it could, the spiritual alienation. There's some way that maybe the desire for God or yearning for God could be derived from that experience of spiritual alienation. Of course, other traditions are going to sort of interpret it differently. But one of the things I actually take on is there are a number of people who like criticize theistic religion as sort of causing alienation. So uh, you know, famously Nietzsche sort of criticized theistic religions as being otherworldly, right? So it causes alienation from the world. Or there's certain kind of like autonomy objections towards like theistic ethics, right? That it sort of alienates us from our autonomous self. We have to be obedient to the will of God, right? Or maybe like religion causes social conflict. So a number of areas, like people actually argue that like theistic religions can cause alienation. So I get into some of that, and then maybe in some versions it can, but I think at their best, I actually think there's ways that they sort of help us to address that. So for instance, take take Nietzsche's criticism that like uh theistic religion is otherworldly. Well, if you think about the biblical traditions, you know, there's a sense in creation that like the world is God creates the world and completes it by contemplating it as very good, right? And so we might say the task of the spiritual life is to come to a similar affirmation of the world. And one way a theistic view helps us to do that is it helps us to see the world as gift, right? There's there's a giftedness of the world. Uh so the world in some sense, although there's evil and suffering, there's a kind of hospitality to the world. Well, it may seem in some times hostile, but it allows us to also see it under the vantage point of a kind of hospitality, like where there's like a giftedness of the world, right? Or you think about going going so if we go to self-alienation, uh you think about, you know, this idea of a wholehearted love of God, and then loving your neighbor in some sense is related to that wholehearted love of God as a way of trying to overcome that alienation, self-alienation, right? And likewise with others, you you have all these teachings on forgiveness and repentance, right? And one thing I think, just one last point here, uh, just to kind of uh fill in one last detail. I think loneliness is a really interesting. I mean, you see it, it's there in the garden story, right? The Garden of Eden story, that the the first, the you might say at the beginning of the sort of humanizing process or the coming into like realizing one's humanity is when God says it's not good that the man should be alone. It's like first, you know, thing that sort of begins the process, and then Adam, you know, names the animals and then like distinguishes, you know, sort of says these aren't like the the source that I'm looking for. It's not the source of the longing I'm looking for, and then God creates Eve. And it's only at that point, really, that that Adam, because that's his first instance of speech, uh, is naming the animals, so distinguishing. And it's like then it's like when God creates Eve, it's like at last, bone of my bone, flesh and my flesh, it's this longing, right? This loneliness is like this reaching out for some indefinite uh something not fully defined that we're seeking fulfillment in. And a lot of great spiritual writers, I think you think of like Dorothy Day, the long loneliness, right? Right. I've sort of seen loneliness as having this spiritual implication of like, while you know, human relationships can go a long ways in addressing that loneliness endemic to the human condition, there's a way in which that loneliness seems to like reach out even beyond the best human relationships to something more, right? As we we confront our mortality and the fragility of human existence. And so I think lonely, I mean, if you're kind of like, how does it maybe go in a more like spiritual religious direction? You know, I think loneliness has, you know, it's just one kind of point uh for for how that can occur. And I think it does have a deep, deep spiritual significance potentially.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it seems that, you know, one way I'm seeing this is that the heart of it is there is there's a yearning for connection, right? Whether it's connection to God or higher power or connection to others, connection to oneself, one's true self, or something like that, connection even to nature, right, which we can feel alienated from. And it's it seems that there is this kind of yearning. All right, everyone, that's a good place to stop the first half of our conversation. We're gonna pick up next week where Robert talks about his comprehensive survey of the landscape of consciousness. Make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to our podcast if you haven't already, and please leave us a review. We'd love to hear what you think about the show.