Spirituality, Philosophy and Education

David Carr, John Haldane, David Carr, John Haldane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134434596
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The possibilities and importance of a spiritual dimension to education are subjects receiving increased consideration from educational practitioners, policymakers and philosophers. Spirituality, Philosophy and Education brings together contributions to the debate by a team of renowned philosophers of education. They bring to this subject a depth of scholarly and philosophical sophistication that was previously missing, and between them offer a wide-ranging exploration and analysis of what spiritual values have to offer contemporary education.
The contributors address such subjects as what we mean by 'spiritual values'; scholarship and spirituality; spirituality and virtue; spirituality, science and morality; the shaping of character; the value of spiritual learning; spiritual development and the curriculum and many others. All students of the philosophy of education and anyone interested in how spiritual values might play a part in informing education policy and practice will find this stimulating collection a rich source of ideas and a major addition to the thinking on the meaning, role and possibilities of spirituality in education.

Part I

Philosophy and spirituality

Chapter 1
On the very idea of spiritual values¹

John Haldane

‘Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.’

Epicurean saying

I

It is rare for an academic philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to discuss the subject of spirituality. This might once have been attributed to a view of philosophy as confined to conceptual analysis and the theory of logic. Now, however, when almost every aspect of human life has been made the subject of some department of ‘applied philosophy’, it could hardly be said that the subject of spirituality lies outside the sphere of reasonable philosophical enquiry. Yet it is almost entirely neglected.

There is another reason why academic philosophers might not think to explore the subject. For ‘spirituality’ smacks of religion, and not of the interesting metaphysical aspects that form the subject-matter of natural theology, but of those devotional and pietistic preoccupations that are felt to belong to the affective domain, if not to the sphere of irrationality. Occasionally a passing philosopher will, so to speak, stop at the church door and approach the credulous man in the pew in order to point out what nonsense talk of spirituality really is. In an essay entitled ‘What is “spirituality”?’ (Flew 1997), Antony Flew performs such an exercise by looking at several terms with which the word is linked: these are ‘spirited, spirit, spiritist, spiritual and spiritualist’. He distributes these into various categories: psychological disposition (spirited), incorporeal substance (spirit), those believing in the latter (spiritists and spiritualists), and then that pertaining to higher human characteristics, or to non-earthly matters (spiritual). As an atheist who regards immaterialism as absurd, Flew barely lingers over the incorporeal, but he dwells awhile to denounce modern educationalists who favour policies of spiritual development in the (state) ‘maintained school system’. Readers familiar with Flew’s spirited writings may feel that by this point he had been joined in the aisle by a couple of restless hobby horses.

Certainly, when educational theorists talk about ‘spiritual development’ they are usually either struggling to take a last dip in the shallows of the ebbing tide of faith, or engaged in the practice of aggrandising the ordinary, or else doing both at once. The appreciation of art and music and the cultivation of a concern for the feelings of others are worthwhile educational activities, but their point and value is made less and not more clear by describing them as parts of ‘spiritual development’. Yet increasing numbers of educationalists are adopting this way of speaking, and requiring teachers to act upon it, specifying the need, for example, to induce in children ‘experiences of awe and wonder’ (National Curriculum Council 1993, and Office for Standards in Education 1994). One may well ask at what? Are attitudes grouped under the heading of the ‘spiritual’ intelligible, save as focused upon transcendent phenomena? Even putting the point in terms of intentional objects and appearances, the question is whether the spiritual can be anything other than the religious. That indeed is one way of introducing the subject of this essay: can there be nonreligious spirituality? And if so, what might be its forms?

Within religious domains the ‘spiritual’ certainly has definite meanings. Theologically its uncontested home is Christianity in which it refers to matters concerning the indwelling of the Holy Spirit whose gifts are courage, knowledge, reverence, right-judgement, understanding, wisdom, wonder and awe, and whose fruits are listed by St Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians. Widening out from this, one may say that the spiritual life is that given to the search after an inner awareness of God, a condition pursued through prayer and meditation and attained through grace. My concern here, however, is not with the theology of grace. Rather I am interested in the possibility of non-religious spirituality, and in the thought that this may not just be philosophically credible but that it is a central aspect of philosophy itself.

II

English-language philosophy consists very largely of logic, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Since there is so much of the last of these, an increasing amount of which is practically oriented, this might seem the place to look in expectation of finding something relevant to my interest. In fact, however, contemporary ethics is remote from what I have in mind in thinking about non-religious spirituality. It was not always so: the ancients, especially, engaged in styles of reflection about conduct that bear the mark of spiritual meditations. Before coming to that, however, let me say more about the contemporary scene.

One may conceive moral philosophy in terms of three levels of thought and discourse. At the base lies ordinary pre-philosophical moral thinking involving judgements about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and virtuous and vicious. At the next level there are more or less systematic structures of justification of these first-level judgements (such moral theories as utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and so on). At the third, top-most level there are philosophical accounts of the status of first-order claims and of second-level justifications (metaethical theories). The last of these levels draws on general arguments and theses in logic, metaphysics and epistemology and is not distinctly ethical in content whereas the second is. Interestingly, however, the main growth in recent moral philosophy has been in ‘applied ethics’ which consists in deploying particular moral theories in relation to the problems encountered in first-order moral thinking. It is a downward movement from theory to practice (Haldane 1996).

As such, applied ethics is often of little autonomous intellectual value, which is not to say that it may not be well done and useful. More problematically, however, it can sometimes be corrupting of the spirit of true enquiry into value and requirement. So far as the first limitation is concerned, this style of thought often contributes little to the identification of moral dilemmas and problems than that already accomplished by those whom they affect, and it rarely questions the adequacy of the moral theories it applies. The tendency to intellectual corruption, meanwhile, arises from the applied nature of the exercise. There is a real sense in which the philosophical work has already been done, and this means that the applied ethicist is just working out the conclusion of a series of syllogisms whose major premises express the favoured moral theory and whose minor premises are provided by the facts of the case. This leaves out of account the possibility that looking hard at the situation and at related ones may itself disclose moral features not previously conceptualised within the theory. In this sense applied ethics prejudges moral issues and thereby disposes the practitioner to exclude the possibility that he or she might learn something new and of general moral interest from attending to cases.

In this respect it differs from traditional casuistry, for the casuists were generally alive to the possibility that particular departments of human activity might have area-specific moral features whose adequate characterisation requires the formation of concepts that are not specifications of broader ones defined within a general moral theory. Certainly there are philosophers who think hard and well about moral, political and cultural issues and who make imaginative and helpful contributions to thinking about them, but this activity is not essentially philosophical and similar styles are often adopted by high-grade journalists and social commentators.

What we have within contemporary academic philosophy is a good deal of necessarily technical epistemology and metaphysics, some of it deployed in metaethics; a fair amount of subtle moral theory; and considerably more applied ethics. In almost none of these areas taken individually or collectively is there scope for, let alone evidence of, anything that begins to look like spirituality. In order for that to seem surprising, however, I need to show why one should expect philosophy to have anything to say about this aspect of human experience.

III

Let me offer two pathways towards this expectation: one phenomenological, the other historical. In the middle of the nineteenth century Thoreau wrote that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Evidence of this is provided in literature, in the press, in doctors’ surgeries, through personal acquaintance, and by knowledge of one’s own circumstances, all of which suggest that many people are ill at ease with the human condition as they experience it. Many of us are desperate and many of us are sad; and the sources of our distress are not easily removed.

While many privations may not befall one, their very possibility casts a shadow across human lives. Those who are betrayed or bereaved, those who long for recognition or for love, those who experience rejection, those who fear their own impulses, those who are ill or dying, those who are clinically depressed, or who fear creeping insanity, those who labour with mental or physical handicaps, or who struggle with sufferers, those who are victims of injustice, all are in a position to discern the frailty of the human condition, and to see beyond the possibility of immediate and temporary relief to the facts of unredeemed suffering, weakness, solitariness and death. Given all of this, human beings often ask whether there is any spiritual truth that might counter, alleviate or help to deal with these facts, and they often suppose that it might be the task of nonreligious philosophy to say whether there is any such truth. Clearly this supposition reflects the still popular belief that philosophy has something to do with the meaning of life. Such, however, is the growing ignorance within the profession of the broad history of the subject, and such has been the extent of specialisation with accompanying technicality, that many philosophers are genuinely puzzled when they encounter these expectations. The fact that ‘philosophy’ means love of wisdom (philosophia) will be set aside as being of purely antiquarian interest.

Not all academic philosophers are as unwelcoming to questions about the possibility of finding meaning in life (or even of finding the meaning of it). One who has taken them seriously is David Wiggins, who explored the first of these themes in an important lecture given to the British Academy. Entitled Truth, invention and the meaning of life’ (Wiggins 1976) this has been the subject of some discussion but mostly for the bearing of parts of it upon certain metaethical issues. As interesting, however, are Wiggins’ attempt to structure the quest for meaning and his suggestion that progress towards discerning it calls for a phenomenology of value. He writes:

Working within an intuitionism or moral phenomenology as tolerant of low-grade non-behavioural evidence as is literature (but more obsessively elaborative of the commonplace, and more theoretical, in the interpretative sense, than literature), [the theorist] has to appreciate and describe the quotidian complexity of what is experientially involved in a man’s seeing a point in living. It is no use to take some existing moral theory—Utilitarianism or whatever it is—and to paste on to it such postscripta as the Millian insight ‘It really is of importance not only what men do but what manner of men they are that do it’… If life’s having a point is at all central to moral theory [as Wiggins had suggested it is] then room must be made for these things right from the very beginning.

(Wiggins 1976:136–7)

Wiggins has not, to my knowledge, pursued this aspect of his essay further. One reason is perhaps the thought that it is not for the theorist qua theorist to say what meaning consists in but only to say what finding meaning is. As a corrective to preaching this may be apt, but it also suggests a residual attachment to the view that philosophy can only be conceptual analysis, and it assumes a distinction between describing an activity and engaging in it which is in some tension with the recommendation to the theorist (not the non-philosopher) to adopt the method of moral phenomenology. It also puts strain on the idea associated with Wiggins’ metaethical epistemology, that certain concepts are only available to one who shares the evaluative interest they express. In other words, describing what it is to find meaning may require evaluative concepts fashioned in the effort to describe the constituents of meaning itself.

More to the present point, however, is Wiggins’ assumption that the issue of the meaning of life is among the central questions of moral philosophy. Whether that is true depends upon the scope of the expression ‘moral philosophy’. Among definitions of the term ‘spiritual’ identified by Flew is ‘of or pertaining to the higher moral qualities’. Noting that this is offered in explanation of one of the earliest uses of the term, Flew speculates that the word ‘moral’ should be interpreted as it was in the old contrast between moral and physical sciences; in other words as pertaining to higher human faculties. In this very wide sense the meaning of life may be a subject for moral philosophy, but it is clear from what he writes that Wiggins is thinking more narrowly and locating it within moral theory.

This is inappropriate and one consequence of placing the topic there is that it is unlikely to receive the attention it needs. This indeed may be part of the reason why this aspect of Wiggins’ lecture has not been pursued by moral theorists. The relevant point is best developed by returning to the attempt to identify non-religious spirituality as a subject for philosophical attention. Hearing that someone was interested in this a philosopher might well direct them to ethics, or perhaps to aesthetics having in mind experiences of the sublime. But if I am right spirituality is not to be located entirely within either of these domains or even in their union, and, if we confine ourselves to these fields, we shall not make much prog...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: PHILOSOPHY AND SPIRITUALITY
• PART II: ASPECTS OF SPIRITUALITY
• PART III: SPIRITUALITY AND EDUCATION