Abstract
The option of being ‘spiritual but not religious’ deserves much more philosophical attention. That is the aim here, taking the work of Robert Solomon as a starting point, with focus on the particular issues around viewing life as gift. This requires analysis of ‘existential gratitude’ to show that there can be gratitude for things without gratitude to someone for providing things, and also closer attention to the role that metaphor plays in cognition. I consider two main concerns with gift and gratitude thinking, that the nonreligious justification is too instrumentalist in its approach and that viewing life as gift, whether in a religious or nonreligious way, is simply too optimistic.
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Notes
Joseph Epes Brown discusses the Lakota notion of sacred reciprocity, which he learned during his time spent with Lakota medicine man Black Elk, in (2001, Ch. 6). The Gift of the Sacred Pipe (1982), something akin to a Lakota ‘Bible’, recorded and edited by Brown under the guidance of Black Elk, details the major Lakota rites, including the Sun Dance. These rites consistently feature a personal relationship with all elements in the cosmos, a relationship which pervades day-to-day life for the Lakota.
Taylor describes four facets of this ‘secularization’ narrative (pp. 573–574).
Taylor also seems to suggest that the ‘middle condition’—a term that appears to be interchangeable with ‘middle position’ (p. 6)—is not satisfying, because the diminution of belief involved correlates with a diminution of a religious or spiritual experience of ‘fullness’ (pp. 4-14; cf. p. 595). If this is Taylor’s view, or at least a deep and important question in Taylor’s thought, I suggest that the approach to secular spirituality being developed here can help us to understand how there can be a certain kind of unbelief with something like fullness, if there can be gift and gratitude thinking without a transcendent gift giver. However, I do not believe that the metaphor of fullness is helpful ultimately as a guide for understanding the full range of spiritual experience.
After noting a commitment to materialism (p. 287), Santayana (1955) expresses a similar sentiment: ‘It would be a pity to abandon this consecrated word … especially as there is the light of intuition, the principle of actuality in vision and feeling, to call by that name. The popular uses of the word spiritual support this definition of it; because intuition, when it thoroughly dominates animal experience, transmutes it into pure flame, and renders it religious or poetical, which is what is commonly meant by spiritual’ (p. 288).
John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934) also outlines a rationale for secular spirituality (which he refers to as ‘the religious’ without ‘religion’). As with Solomon, one of Dewey’s primary motivations for pursuing spirituality outside of religion is avoidance of the supernaturalism common in religion. Dewey views the ‘religious’ mode (as a mode of experience that can exist outside of the dogmatic and supernaturalist institution of religion) as a pursuit of an imaginative ideal that unifies the self, an individual or collective social striving that requires no supposition of extraordinary entities, but which does require ‘faith’ in our imaginative ideals (see Ch. I). This emphasis on the ‘imagination’ also connects to some suggestions presented in this article, in that I am appealing to the imaginative resources of metaphor for use in spiritual living, which is not the same as engaging in make-believe. Concerned to show that ‘the religious’ is consistent with a scientific worldview, Dewey states concisely that the ‘aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. But they are not made of imaginary stuff’ (p. 49).
Richard Colledge (2013) defines ‘existential gratitude’ as ‘gratitude for one’s existence as such’ and states a preference for the term ‘ontological gratitude’ as gratitude ‘for the many aspects of lived being in its often tumultuous richness’ (p. 32, fn. 3). I am here using the term ‘existential gratitude’ more generally to mean any gratitude for something, close to what McAleer (2012) labels ‘propositional gratitude’.
Theorists commonly identify humility as a value connected to gift of language or gratitude. Humility is loosely defined by Sean McAleer (2012) as ‘a matter of properly appreciating the value of one’s character and accomplishment’ (p. 59) rather than a matter of undervaluing one’s achievements, as humility is sometimes understood by its critics. One may wonder whether it’s possible to conceive of a ‘proper’ understanding of one’s value, powers, and limitations without reference to an intelligent designer who assigns roles or comparison to some greater nonhuman entity (divinity and nature) in relation to which we find our proper place. In a thorough semantic and historic analysis of humility, James Kellenberger (2010) observes that a traditional ‘religious’ account of humility does set up such a metaphysic, but by no means does the idea of humility in itself (or in its many uses) requires a definite place for humanity in the overall scheme of things. It’s important to note, however, that viewing something as a gift—literally or metaphorically—can inspire the opposite of humility. For instance, a child receiving a literal gift can develop a swelled sense of self-importance out of this, a response adults can have to perceived metaphorical gifts as well. I do not believe that non-humility is clearly an improper response to a gift based in a misunderstanding of what it means to receive a gift. Ingratitude, on the other hand, is more clearly an improper response to gifts.
Kahane is more proximately responding to Michael Sandel’s ‘gift argument’ against enhancement (2007). I agree with Sandel’s critics that the gift argument fails to operate against enhancement, that is, without religious metaphysical support, like that made more explicit in (Sandel 2005), which has not received as much attention from critics. Ruiping Fan’s Confucian response to Sandel establishes this critical conclusion most effectively (2010), given that, in a Confucian religious framework, children could be viewed as gifts, yet this would not produce a general prohibition against enhancement of children. At the same time, critics of Sandel such as Carson Strong (2005) and Guy Kahane (2011) fail to see that metaphorical gift language, with its appeals to gratitude and humility, does not in itself commit one to metaphysical assumptions that violate secular norms. But the failure of Sandel’s gift argument helps us to see that a justification of gift and gratitude thinking does not justify all applications of it. In other areas of bioethics, Laura Simonoff and Kata Chillag (1999) have observed that gift language can be used to exploit a sense of obligation among organ recipients, causing unnecessary psychological anguish, while Elizabeth Anderson (1990) criticizes commercial surrogacy brokers for exploiting the surrogate’s sense of altruism by framing the surrogate’s service as a gift.
John Bishop (2010) makes a point like this (p. 532). But Bishop is apparently interested in the view that gratitude for life might imply the existence of someone to be thanked for life, suggesting, however, that this need not be understood as an omniGod (that is omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent, etc.). A point I’m making is that the existence of an agent to whom one is thankful is not necessary at all in a justification of existential gratitude.
I thank Benjamin Bayer for pressing me to make more clear the difference between feeling grateful and feeling lucky.
This fairly vague passage ties in with Solomon’s understanding of spirituality as a way to get beyond oneself or expand the self, as he discusses throughout Spirituality for the Skeptic. For instance: ‘When I say that spirituality is the enlargement and not the negation of self, it is this communal sense of self as soul, instantiated in its most immediate form as compassion, that I have in mind. But it need not just be negative, a painful awareness of the suffering of the world. It can also be the positive sense of the joy of the world, the euphoric sense of sharing life and sharing in the happiness of others. Soul and spirituality find their natural base in this concept of an enlarged and enhanced sense of the compassionate ordinary self’ (p. 139). I’m largely in agreement with this way of characterizing spirituality, similarly understanding spirituality as a set of values that balances a self-important, self-absorbed, and self-aggrandizing ego.
This theoretical approach had been developing since at least their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By.
See Table 4.1 (pp. 50-54) for a long list of examples.
‘It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 % of all thought—and that may be a serious underestimate. … Our unconscious conceptual system functions like a ‘hidden hand’ that shapes how we conceptualize all aspects of our experience. This hidden hand gives form to the metaphysics that is built into our ordinary conceptual systems. It creates the entities that inhabit the cognitive unconscious—abstract entities like friendships, bargains, failures, and lies—that we use in ordinary unconscious reasoning. It thus shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience. It constitutes our unreflective common sense’ (p. 13).
This is Max Black’s (1962) term in early metaphor theory for connotative associations with a word that may not be true of its reference, but which are taken to be true, whether generally or idiosyncratically, by the user of a metaphor (see especially pp. 40-47). As Black writes, ‘Imagine some layman required to say, without taking special thought, those things he held to be true about wolves; the set of statements resulting would approximate to what I am here calling the system of commonplaces associated with the word “wolf”’ (p. 40). It’s worth noting that Black’s language-oriented ‘interactionist theory’ of metaphor parallels in numerous ways Lakoff and Johnson’s later concept-oriented theory.
These are not intended to be a complete list or to act as definitional necessary and sufficient conditions for use of the word ‘gift’. Also note that I am not adopting the formal style of analysis applied by Lakoff and Johnson, which does not alter the substance of the analysis.
The idea of a gift not being compensation is separate from the issue in ‘gift theory’ of whether a gift demands compensation, or whether there is really any such thing as a ‘pure’ gift between people which is not just a market exchange. For more on the controversies in recent gift theory, see Mark Osteen’s editorial introduction to (Osteen 2002), and see Godbout (1998) for a compelling, extended rejection of the bare economic view of interpersonal gift giving. Although there is surely much more to say in this regard, I’m not here exploring the connections between how we must scientifically understand literal gifting and how we use metaphorical gift framing.
A resulting consensus of the late twentieth century debate in metaphor theory is that not all metaphors are based on resemblance, or the ‘is like’ relation of simile, as Black was among the first to observe (p. 37). If this were the case, then metaphors would be symmetric, but they are not (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 126–127). It matters which way the mapping is directed, and it is not clear in some metaphors that the mapping is motivated by similarity at all.
This may account for why Lakoff and Johnson do not pursue an analysis of gift metaphor. But I am about to suggest that the gift metaphor does track an abstract conceptual target domain for which the gift mapping is uniquely suited to help us grasp. This target domain likely gets overlooked owing to the difficulty of identifying it in the first place.
Bishop is seeking something more like ‘epistemic’ justification, though I think this is mainly because he does not seek out the specific attitude of existential gratitude that, again, requires appreciation of metaphorical gift framing. In his reflections on the ‘thankfulness spiritual attitude’, Bishop writes: ‘In one sense, an epistemic sense, it is to say that thankfulness is what we ought to feel in recognition of some feature of the real—and, arguably, that feature must be a really existing proper object of thanks. In a second sense, however, thankfulness may be a proper response to reality just because it is a fact that having, adopting, and cultivating the spiritual passion of thankfulness is instrumentally useful in achieving certain goals to which we are committed’ (p. 532). Considering the instrumental angle, he writes: ‘It is important to consider what kind of a goal it is with respect to which having and cultivating global spiritual attitudes such as thankfulness and trust may count as instrumentally valuable. … That goal can only be, I think, attaining fulfilment as the kinds of beings that we are’ (pp. 532–533). However, it seems to me that the value of gratitude can be made sense of without understanding it in (purely) instrumental terms (about which more in the next section) and without appeal to the fulfillment of human nature.
This sort of point about inappropriateness can apply to spirituality overall, which Bishop (2010) rightly observes in a criticism of Solomon’s naturalized spirituality: ‘Though Solomon himself employs the term spirituality so that having spirituality is good per se, in fact the possibility of bad, worthless, or perverse, spirituality needs to be accommodated’ (p. 527).
I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting that a justification of gift and gratitude thinking would seem to need to contend with pessimism like Benatar’s toward life in general.
In a footnote (p. 32, fn. 4), Colledge responds to an anonymous referee who suggests that gratitude for life (like that expressed by Richard Dawkins) would involve a position against suicide, but, while Colledge agrees with this in passing, I think it’s important to see that this is not so straightforwardly an implication. If we take Benatar to be a reasonable pessimist, then on his lights, even extreme pessimism does not imply an obligation of suicide.
Of course, Buddhism itself acknowledges that there is a path (an ‘eightfold’ path) of spirituality, not just an end goal, as Solomon observes: ‘The Buddhists (and Schopenhauer in the West) identified compassion as the key to the conjunction of individual self and all of the other selves with which it is conjoined, and for many Buddhists it also signaled the shift to spirituality. Very few Buddhists ever experience the nirvana described by the greatest sages, but every good Buddhist daily experiences the compassion for suffering that ties him or her to the world and to other people’ (p. 139).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Jason Berntsen for his support and critical reflection. Our interaction greatly stimulated the development of ideas for this paper.
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Chastain, D. Gifts without Givers: Secular Spirituality and Metaphorical Cognition. SOPHIA 56, 631–647 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0554-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0554-9