I am tempted to describe Richard White’s Spiritual Philosophers: From Schopenhauer to Irigaray using the language he himself uses to characterize an essay by James Hillman: “despite appearances to the contrary, [this] is not an exercise in scholarship. It is rather an attempt to unsettle us by undermining some very fixed ideas that we may have about the nature of spirituality and the forms of spiritual life” (120).
White did not mean for his description of Hillman to be an insult, and neither do I. In its best moments, White’s book powerfully demonstrates what it might look like if “philosophy becomes a form of spiritual practice,” and many of the individual chapters are quite moving (2). However, White’s concessions to traditional analytic philosophy and attempts to defend the spiritual practice of philosophy from a skeptical—or even hostile—audience are less compelling. The introductory essay is something like an attempt to provide logical reasons for the value of what is beyond reason, and the results are sometimes awkward.
Joining an ever-growing body of literature expressing a sort of disenchantment with disenchantment and a desire to move constructively beyond critique, the book expresses White’s dissatisfaction with the answers provided by traditional religion as well as secular modernity (which he—too hastily in my opinion—equates with reductive materialism). Following Pierre Hadot, White notes that philosophy has historically been a way of life and offered far more than disinterested reasoning and logic. He argues that the humanities classroom ought to be a place where students can ask ultimately irresolvable questions about how we should live, and sees value in engaging with “audacious” and “provocative” thinkers, such as the artist Wassily Kandinsky or psychoanalyst Carl Jung, even (or especially) when it comes to matters which cannot be proven or resolved once and for all (108, 109). As White explains, he wants us to think about spiritual themes, “for even if they are ‘invisible’ and they cannot be measured in any straightforward way, they are real, and we may neglect the deepest part of ourselves if we choose to ignore them” (15).
The book is composed of nine chapters, each focusing on an individual philosopher and their engagement with a spiritual virtue, spiritual practice, or spiritual point of focus. Along the way, White takes care to rebut many prevalent critiques of spirituality, such as the idea that it is inherently selfish, fundamentally incompatible with political engagement, or inevitably co-opted by capitalism. The chapter focusing on the post-Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman is particularly strong, and it offers a model of spirituality which looks more like soulful engagement in the world than a lofty withdrawal from it. It also entails an affirmation of the sort of melancholy, suffering, and despair that—as White observes—shallow forms of New Age spirituality attempt to eradicate.
The chapters on Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are also noteworthy. White takes these two philosophers, whose names come up frequently in debates about the excesses and deficiencies of critique, and uses their work to craft constructive—and beautiful—discussions about how we might live lives of meaning and perhaps even joy. Foucault is famous for revealing the many ways modern structures of power and knowledge have formed us into docile subjects, yet White utilizes Foucault’s often-overlooked later work on the care of the self to show us that there is more to his project. Foucault also urged us to “challenge the identities that are fixed upon us and reinvent ourselves”—a task that White reminds us entails continual self-fashioning rather than the uncovering of some authentic self (140). White turns to Derrida to reflect upon how we might mourn in a way that is neither entirely self-oriented (as in the Freudian model) nor completely focused on the other (as in Barthes’ account). He finds in Derrida a means of mourning that he describes as ‘spiritual’ because it goes beyond the ethical requirement of caring for the dead and instead “affirms our continued connection to those who have inspired us to become who we are, and our sense of belonging to a community—or the stream of life—which includes both the living and the dead” (160).
White’s decision to focus only one of the nine chapters on a female philosopher is disappointing but ultimately unsurprising for a field that has traditionally been dominated by male voices. However, at a time when discussions surrounding gender are particularly heated, White’s decision to make that sole female—or really, non cisgendered male—philosopher Luce Irigaray is deeply troubling. There is much of value in White’s discussion of love, but he fails to adequately address the debates surrounding the implications of Irigaray’s gender essentialism (and the homophobia and transphobia it seems to entail). The entire issue is seemingly dismissed with a single line: “The love between a man and a woman can become the model for other relationships, including same-sex relationships and friendship of every kind” (173).
Overall, there is tension between White’s stated embrace of what cannot be objectively measured or evaluated and his subsequent attempts to justify the value and utility of spirituality. He seems deeply concerned with offering clear definitions and descriptions of spirituality as something related to but distinct from religion (e.g., it “involves a sense of being connected to a greater power or meaning, and the need to affirm that connection”), with the express purpose of showing that spirituality can be taught at a secular, state-funded institution (7). Scholars of religion, already quite familiar with the distinction between teaching religion and teaching about religion, are unlikely to need such convincing.
Perhaps, at a time when humanities programs are being gutted left and right, a better lesson to take from White is the notion that rather than competing with STEM departments on their own terms, we would do well to offer innovative classes—like his own “Ultimate Questions”— which give students a safe place to ask questions about love, death, nature, and other things that matter most to them.
Samantha L. C. Kang is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Samantha Kang
Date Of Review:
October 11, 2022