Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Love of Life

I read it for a class i took, but it is really interesting. It is difficult reading and very intellectual. Some of the concepts are veyr interesting and i they really made me question my ideas on spirituallity. It is good book to add to your library.

In Spirituality for the Skeptic, as in several of his other books, Robert Solomon laments what he sees as philosophy's relinquishment of wisdom and the consequent hijacking of spirituality by religion. In chapters that focus on spirituality as it relates to reason, the passions, freedom of the will, facticity, suffering, society, and the self, Solomon seeks to show that questions concerning spirit--human aspirations, human creativity, human tragedy--are independent of religion. One's spirituality may, of course, be informed by religious convictions, but there's no necessary connection between the two.

Ultimately, Solomon wants to argue that spirituality is about the "enlargement of the self" (p. 123), an expansion of our horizons that recognizes that it's life itself, not something transcendent to life, that bestows meaning. As we recognize, with gratitude but also a sense of the tragic, that a "thoughtful love of life" is worth committing to, our empathic connectedness with the world expands. Our selves enlarge.

Solomon's case for a spirituality for the skeptical has little patience with dogmatic religiosity, but equally little patience with reductive materialists who pooh-pooh the possibility or value of self-enlarging experiences. In making his case, he invokes arguments and examples from an extraordinarily rich range of sources, western as well as Asian.

To my mind, the best chapters in the book are the ones dealing with tragedy (chapter 5) and death (chapter 7). Readers familiar with Solomon's work will find little new in Spirituality for the Skeptic. But the grace with which the book is written, the humility with which Solomon approaches his topic, and the insights which punctuate his arguments, make it well worth reading.

This book was really a level above what I like to read casually - not a lot of potential for skimming or chapter highlighting. The author is a bit heavy on Nietzsche and Sartre - he seems to draw a parallel to one of them in almost every passage, but it was a nice twist to see the old guys from this particular angle. In the end, the book was more a review of concepts than any sort of declaration - it read a lot like a dissertation. He sort of bounced from topic to topic, redefining spirituality about a hundred times and never really resting on any particular conclusion.

The gist of his thesis: Anyone is spiritual if they consider themselves spiritual, since you can define spirituality most any way you want to.

I really prefer a book with more of an opinion, whether I agree with it or not. But it was a nice flexing of the cortex.

This is a great book, but try to avoid approaching it with any SPECIFIC expectations. If you're hoping for a bullet-proof philosophical argument, you'll be disappointed. If you're hoping for a "self help" book, you'll be incredibly disappointed. But if you've struggled with your own "spirituality" or lack thereof, and if you feel like morality and deep meaning are still possible without positing a dogmatic "God," then read this book. I call it "almost" revolutionary because I think it could eventually be the beginnings of a new way to think about spirituality. But it's not a manifesto for spiritual revolution; nor is it intended to be. It's a collection of ideas.

Even if you believe in, say, a Judeo-Christian God, this book is still worth a read. It's an interesting and important exercise to ponder which components of your religion are universally true regardless of the specific dogmas and scriptures unique to it.

As a final check to decide whether or not this book is worth your time: have ever felt deeply connected to something bigger, like "nature" or maybe "community," even in the absence of a belief in God? You're not alone, and Robert Solomon has some very interesting ideas to discuss with you.

The answer is a qualified "yes," same as the answer to the question, Is it possible to be gay but not homosexual? You simply have to qualify what you mean by the words, state the restricted sense of your operating definitions of "spiritual" and "gay." "Spirit" is multi-faceted, with at least 30 senses of the word in common use; "spiritual" is more restrictive but still a slippery adjective, and all you have to do to answer the question in the affirmative is "spirit" the S-word away from the church by semantic legerdemain.

Here, for example, is Robert Solomon's definition of "spirituality" (from his book-on-tape "The Passions"): "Spirituality is simply the recognition that the universe is much, much greater than yourself, utterly unfathomable... a sense of sublime and humility... nothing to do w religion, per se." I don't buy this, and I doubt that anyone else does either. A sense of awe and humility might be a component of spirituality, but in common parlance, there's much more to spirituality than that; if Solomon wants to hijack spirituality, he'll have to try harder.

And so he does; in this book, "Spirituality for the Skeptic," Solomon dances around the issue for 140 pages, waving both hands and blathering on and on about spirituality, offering up at least 100 definitions or aspects of the S-word, launching them like trial balloons to see which might fly. In the end, I would have preferred that he simply coin a new word for the ersatz spirituality he is trying to sell.

In his treatise on free will, "Freedom Evolves," Daniel Dennett does much the same thing, desperately dancing around and waving his hands frantically throughout an entire book, trying to rescue free will from determinism's death-grip, but in the end all he can come up with is a very restricted sense of the term, as "subjective" free will (in effect, he admits that we do not have free will, but it feels like we do, so there).

Both Solomon and Dennett are academic philosophers, and they are both superb BS artists. But I find their writing entertaining and their thought stimulating, so perhaps you will too; put your thinking cap on, tune up your BS filter, and enjoy the ride.