Abstract
The trajectory from ‘Schopenhauer to Irigaray’ is clearly not going to be a straight line. And so it proves: Richard White invites us to engage with thinkers as disparate as Nietzsche, Kandinsky, Benjamin, Jung, Hillman, Foucault and Derrida, and the reader’s journey is something of a zigzag. White’s idea of who should count as a philosopher is extremely hospitable, as is evident from the roll call of the thinkers he discusses. A lot therefore depends on his making clear what they have in common: more precisely, what he means by ‘spiritual’.
White admits that it is difficult to articulate. Nevertheless, he attempts to characterize the different dimensions of this elusive concept, which he emphasizes does not signify disconnection from the material world, or absorption in otherworldly hopes, but a more complete attunement to this world here and now. It encompasses spiritual virtues – the focus of the chapters on Schopenhauer (compassion), Nietzsche (generosity) and Benjamin (wisdom). Such virtues go beyond ‘doing our duty’ and ‘involve self-overcoming and confirm our connection to something higher or greater than we are’ (p. 182). Some chapters concentrate on spiritual practices – different forms of spiritual striving – and they discuss Derrida (on mourning), Foucault (on the care of the self) and Irigaray (on love). Other chapters look more closely at what White calls ‘spiritual points of focus’: Jung on religion (anchored to his heretical interpretation of the Book of Job), Kandinsky on art (where some pretty large claims are made by the artist for his canvases), and post-Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman on the soul. For White, these thinkers have something important to say to a world in which ‘advances in science and social progress have called established religion into question’ such that it ‘is often viewed as a source of discord and conflict’ (p. 5), while a purely secular view seems impoverished.
I am not fully persuaded that these philosophers can supply what is missing in a disenchanted world. Their views, often interesting, sometimes wildly eccentric, are set out; but the case for accepting them, or even taking them seriously, is not always made. Irigaray – who once infamously dismissed E = mc2 as a ‘sexist’ equation because it privileged the speed of light – is here seen embracing the view that ‘becoming spiritual signifies a transformation of our energy from a merely vital energy to a more subtle energy at the service of breathing, loving, listening, speaking and thinking’ (p. 177). Make of that what you will. And did the reader need to be told that ‘[i]n listening, we must make every effort to put aside all of our prejudices and fixed ways of looking at the world’ (p. 177), though admittedly it is not easy to do this?
White’s ‘spiritual philosophers’ are a motley crew and his book is best read as a collection of separate essays, rather than being judged by his overarching thesis. This said, there are incidental riches in all of the chapters, and the essay on Walter Benjamin is a gem.