Research Group Seminar: Protocol of the meeting of 29 October, 1999 Dutch-Flemish Association for Intercultural Philosophy NVVIF
	Nederlands-Vlaamse Vereniging voor Interculturele Filosofie

meeting of 30 October, 1999; reported by Wim van Binsbergen, with a few additions by Henk Oosterling



Wim van Binsbergen distributed three papers for this meeting:

(Wim van Binsbergen) ‘In search of spirituality: Provisional conceptual and theoretical explorations from the cultural anthropology of religion and the history of ideas’,

(Wim van Binsbergen) ‘Theoretical and experiential dimensions in the study of the ancestral cult among the Zambian Nkoya’

(Wim van Binsbergen & Peter Geschiere) ‘Outline of a modes-of-production approach to ideology, belief and ritual’

of which the first was specifically written for this meeting. Although the paper was unfinished and started out from too narrow a focus on spirituality, it generated a lively and fruitful discussion. The thrust of the discussion is rendered here, without always identifying the interlocutor to whom a particular idea might have been attributed in the course of our exchanges.

Marty Monteiro opens the discussion by stressing that his concept of spirituality revolves on the contradiction with non-spirituality, in other words materialism -- not as a school of thought favouring a particular solution to the mind/body problem, but simply in the popular meaning of consumerism. He suggests that we should allow our concept of spirituality to take its cue from this general societal concern; however, Wim points out that the disadvantage of such a position is that we then allow public opinion to forge our philosophical concepts, which might be conducive to imprecision and superficiality. This would jeopardise our search for a concept of spirituality which would be an eminently critical term, deliberately opposing societal tendencies instead of reflecting them.

Henk Oosterling sees three major approaches in Wim’s paper which he agrees are crucial dimensions of our chosen topic:

1. religion and ritual
2. the etymological, historical approach to the concept, which reveals the idealist heritage of the concept of spirituality
3. the specific meaning which has been given to spirituality in our own time

Henk elaborates on his writing strategies, coining such Dutch words as spi-ritualiteit (= the above sub 1) and spirituali-tijd (= the above, sub 2).

He disagrees with Wim that use of the term spirituality would seem to advocate a particular view of the relation between body and mind/spirit; e.g. Nietzsche’s spirituality ‘deconstructs’ the mind-body opposition by aknowledging the material basis of the ‘spirit’ as the sense that synthesizes the other senses and as such creates the coherence which is ascribed to consciousness.

What we seek to develop is, once again, spirituality as an eminently critical term. It would, among other things, be critical of Cartesianism, but need not fade into anti-materialism. e.g. Leo Apostel and his ‘Atheistic religiosity’.

Bruno Nagel fails to see the link between the first part of Wim’s paper (a brief inventory of resources in the field of the anthropology and sociology of religion) and the other two parts. If that first part would advocate giving up the term spirituality for a simple term religion, such a suggestion would appear to Bruno to be old-fashioned. The very potential of the concept of spirituality is that it refers to something which cannot be grasped in terms of established, organised religion. [ But Wim’s mention of Turner’s communitas and of psychoanalytical approaches to religion show that the emphasis need not be on organised or established religion ].

Henk stresses, in line with the work by Erik Davis ‘Techgnosis’, that a useful concept of spirituality need not oppose technology but might go hand in hand with technology. Like Davis shows with every new step in technology, there is a corresponding specific historical form of spirituality. E.g. Mesmerism in the Enlightenment and the early industrial revolution. That would make spirituality a mode of relating technology to religious or ecstatic experiences

Bruno has great hopes for a concept of spirituality which reflects the evaporation (‘vervluchtiging’) of the institutional framework.

Henk and Wim insist in a critical dimension of the concept of spirituality. We are looking for, one which would particularly have to be anchored in a micropolitical dimension. This does not at all rule out a recognisable religious dimension. e.g. St Ignace, St Francis: it is undeniable that, in the course of history, we witness the emergence of spiritual communities which develop in themselves a certain dynamism and on the basis of this dynamism subsequently engage in a particular relationship with the world and fellowmen

We detect the dimension of holism which seems to be generally implied in the concept of spirituality and acknowledge teh need to discern our concept from this holism.

Henk stresses that we have to develop a term which encompasses more than the terms which we have already at our disposal. We do not simply wish to rephrase Hegel in a different terminology.

Wim: On the other hand we need to develop terms which can be recognised to be somehow in continuity with established historical usage of concepts. But we have to surpass these.

Henk suggests that we should try to situate spirituality in the most trivial acts. That would -- as the following general discussion make clear -- persuade us to accept a whole range of things:

•                spirituality would turn out to be not a phenomenon of consciousness, but a practice
•               we would turn out to internalise spirituality with our mother’s milk
•                spirituality would appear to be some kind of a world view which allows us to attribute value, to evaluate
•               in order to serve the purpose we are looking for (micropolitical, critical, innovative) the concept of spirituality would have to be not holistic, but build around tensions, contradictions, and differences
•               one of the tensions being that we would intuitively be inclined to speak of spirituality as soon as one attributes a surplus value to one’s immediate experience, but that would mean that it is a form of consciousness after all
•                spirituality sees to make a link beyond the boundaries of material practice
•                spirituality is a transversal vector (we agree to provisionally define a vector as a point with a direction cutting throug the surface determined by horizontal and vertical coordinates), i.e. not so much horizontal or vertical, but the resultant of a movement which is horizontal and vertical at the same time (somewhat like Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘vers le haut et en avant’ although this scarcely appeals to Henk. His references are mostly Deleuzean)
•                spirituality would tend to imply a synthesising activity
•               in spirituality we would tend to concentrate on the attitude attending the act, in its non-phenomenological intentionality
•               in spirituality we would concentrate not on the result but on the effect of the act

Henk stresses that although there is no validity in the idea of a general progress in philosophy, at the same time we should accept that we do not have to duplicate certain debates which have been carried to conclusion, e.g. the debate on the synthesising effect of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or on Kant’s Anspruch auf absoluterzu Totalität

In spirituality we would also recognise the tendency, impulse (‘aandrift’) to bring people together, i.e. to communicate

This give rise to the question as to what does not constitute spirituality. E.g. at one historical stage nazi ideology claimed to possess its own spirituality: Germanic lore, astrology, occultism etc. Obviously we would not wish to include that sort of phenomena in the concept of spirituality we are looking for. How can we define these undesirable forms as non-spiritual?
- they have no synthesising effect
- their non-community-forming nature has already been born out by historical evidence

But in an intercultural comparative context it may not be so easy to demarcate the realm of spirituality. Henk refers to the work of Pierre Clastres in the Amazon basin, where that anthropologist pursues a post-structuralist anthropology focusing on aggression, cannibalism etc.

Thinking along the metaphor of spirituality as a transversal vector a very abstract and formal approach to the definition of spirituality begins to present itself. There is here an obvious resemblance with the concept of sacred and profane as advocated by Durkheim: also for that author not the meaning or contents, but the logical form of the paired concepts was their essence, religion as a whole (and hence all social life, he claimed) hinged on the contradiction between these paired concepts. But for Durkheim this was a static binary opposition, and that was the reason why he was incapable of defining spirituality along the lines of his approach. [ In passing one wonders whether it is not at this point that we may explore the possible integration between the religion/ritual, and the spirituality sections in Wim’s paper; somehow it is not convincing to simply dump all the insights from the social sciences of religion for no better reason than that they stress the social and the institutionalised ]

One problem haunting our definitional attempts with regard to spirituality (as it haunts contemporary philosophy in its entirety) is recognised to be that of the lack of an external - transcendent(al) or critical-ideological - position. Marxism was still fortunate in that it could flatter itself to have an external position by reference to history. But we now have to accept the fact that we have become post-historical or readically historicized: we have been so thoroughly imbued with historicism that history not longer offers an external position to us.

This leads us to ponder on spirituality and ideology; the spirituality we seek to define ourselves, and the peculiar forms of spirituality as peddled by new Age.

Also idea of the transversal vector hinges on the problem of the external position. 

Meanwhile we admit that criticism as an inherent-timely positioning (tijd) remains possible even if we do not have an external position.

In fact, much of contemporary thought is about the growing acceptance of the impossibility of an external position. Nor is this a privilege of North Atlantic contemporary thought: it appears to be a basic orientation in animism, or in Japanese Shintoism, that an external position cannot be thought in those contexts. From there it is only one step to the immanentism of Deleuze , Lyotard and Derrida, and one is tempted to attribute these authors’ ideas in part to a Japanese inspiration as Henk did in Door schijn bewogen.

For many of the above reasons there is a clear continuity between our present discussion on spirituality, and our earlier discussions, in the NVVIF, on sensus communis (our conference of 1997)

The question is raised to what extent the specific commitment of the individual members of our Research Group to specific forms of spirituality (e.g. Buddhist; Hinduist; African mediumship) may make it impossible for us to arrive at consensus with regard to the definition and the appreciation of spirituality.

It is agreed, in conclusion, that minutes will be made of every discussion so as to preserve whatever accumulation takes place, and also in order to inform those members who could not attend.

disclaimer: Bruno Nagel later took exception to the above rendering of his contribution to the discussion, but the precise phrasing of his objection was lost in a computer crash, for which we apologise

homepage