Abstract
This book by King-Ho Leung is to be welcomed as a significant achievement in describing the phenomenology of spiritual life. It opens with a discussion on Augustine and his conception of God, associated with the natural, moral and rational divisions of philosophy. For Augustine, God is identified as the source and perfection of being, life and thought, in whom ‘all things are held together’ (City of God, VIII.4). The human being who thinks is always already also alive. This unity of life and thought is both a spiritual ideal to be attained as well as a ‘factical’ ontological condition for human existence (p. 15).
In the opening chapter we are introduced to Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot (a lapsed Catholic) and Hadot’s conviction that philosophy, by definition, cannot be religious. Even when it is understood as a spiritual exercise it is never religious and always secular. Hadot argued that a triadic metaphysical schema of (1) being, (2) life and (3) thought is found in Plotinus’s understandings of the structure of reality and also in the broader Platonic or even Greek philosophical tradition (p. 11).
Leung’s book thus sets out to offer a definition of spirituality that might be applicable to religious and non-religious practices alike and to provide starting points for generating reflections on what this means. Martin Heidegger – in his application of phenomenological analysis to interpret the structures of human existence – provides much of the background for the book. However, the book has wider interests than Heidegger or continental philosophy. It takes as its context those readers interested in the conception of philosophy as a spiritual exercise and the notion of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ and the philosophy of religion (p. x). The focus on Heidegger is maintained throughout Chapter 2, continuing into Chapter 3, which shifts to two of his notable students, Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. While both frequently draw on religious sources and ideas, their respective philosophical outlooks are by no means religious, but rather explicitly secular (p. 81). The notion of ‘contemplation’ (one of Agamben’s areas of study) has many obvious religious connotations, as well as an established religious tradition, but, like Arendt, Agamben is not attempting to revive religion; instead, he seeks to relocate such ideas and motifs in a non-religious and non-sacred but profane and secular domain – what Agamben calls a ‘plane of immanence’ (p. 131).
Heidegger states that an ‘atheistic’ practice of philosophy does not necessarily (or actually) entail rejecting the existence of God or religious practices and that one can be ‘genuinely religious’ in one’s practice of philosophy. And yet, for Heidegger, only a philosophy, free from any predetermined or metaphysical commitments, can be honest with itself. This form of philosophy does not consist in the conviction that God does not exist; rather, it springs from the endeavour to grasp the most authentic possibilities of human existence. Inanimate objects have being and ‘extantness’; animals have being and ‘life’; humans have being, life and thinking = ‘existence’ (Table 2.1, p. 46). In other words, Heidegger’s ‘philosophical spirituality’ is informed by his ‘phenomenological analysis of the human condition’ (p. 76).
Chapter 4 falls squarely on the shoulders of Gilles Deleuze, albeit informed by an array of philosophical and theological thinkers, including, but not limited to, Augustine, Nietzsche, Descartes, Foucault, Hume, Spinoza, Bergson and Kant. Like Arendt before him and Agamben after him, the author contends that Deleuze sees unity of life and thought as an ideal attainment through the practice of philosophy as a secular and spiritual but ‘not religious’ exercise. A unity of the transcendental and empirical informs Deleuze’s account of immanent ethics. Leung argues that Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence entails not only a non-religious spirituality but even a kind of ‘secular faith’. A belief in the world is indeed a common condition for all those who seek to lead a spiritual life, whether religious or ‘spiritual but not religious’ (p. 179).
Leung seeks to uncover this sense of spirituality and is meticulous in the exploration of his project, employing a wealth of references to support and unpack his arguments (the footnotes, for example, are extensive but also helpful). He devotes careful attention to this, and in so doing brings a clarity to the text that shouldn’t leave any committed reader behind. For example, in explaining the use of the German word Dasein to mean ‘existence’ (or literally ‘there-being’, Da-sein), the author devotes some 40 pages to pick over just what is intended by the term in its various uses. The benefit of so doing is that we are left in no doubt as to what is being expressed in the subsequent exposition. The ambition of the book is to devote thought to the meaning of life and to live life in accordance with those thoughts that shape our lives. This entails not simply thinking about life, but as Leung puts it ‘thinking life’ in living it – a practice in which life and thought are ‘intimately and immanently integrated’ (p. 205).