Spiritualism

SPIRITUALISM. - An ambiguous philosophical term whose meaning is not easily definable, given the variety of its acceptations. Moreover, under this name it is possible to group together metaphysical, moral, psychological, etc. doctrines that are even opposed to one another, some of which, examined in depth, prove to be negations of the spirit as such. Here we limit ourselves to examining the principal acceptations and to giving a valid theoretical orientation for distinguishing the true from the false. The entries ANIMA; INTELLETTO; SPIRITO; SPIRITUALE should be consulted together with this one.

There is a spontaneous form of spiritualism, in a certain sense instinctive in man: the spirit is above nature, the spiritual above the material. Upon this common experience, highly indicative, reflection is brought to bear, and to it there first presents itself the problem of the relation between spirit and nature. According to how this problem is resolved (metaphysically, of course), that is, according to the relation that is established (of identity, of opposition, etc.), one arrives at spiritualistic or materialistic, naturalistic, etc. conclusions, different or distinct according to the way in which spirit (v.), nature (v.), matter (v.) are conceived.

There is a spiritualism that may be called absolute: everything is spirit (a monism [v.] opposed to the materialistic one; "everything is matter"). In this sense, transcendental idealism has defined itself as absolute spiritualism: nature is a dialectical moment of the Spirit, always resolved within it; so-called matter is a pure "phenomenon" or an inferior grade that remains superseded by the very movement of the Spirit (this doctrine is common to all forms of acosmic pantheism [v.], which resolve and annul the world in God). But, if one considers it well, this radical spiritualism is, at bottom, absolute naturalism (v.) and also animism (v.), albeit philosophically more mature than the ancient and Renaissance kind (Telesio [v.], for example). In fact, the "spiritualization" of nature and of matter, given the perfect adequation between nature and spirit (inevitable in every immanentist conception), is resolved into the "naturalization" of the Spirit. It may seem paradoxical, but the spiritualistic monism of modern idealism is, at bottom, materialistic monism; so true is this that Marx (v.) derived his from Hegel (v.). Absolute spiritualism, in this sense, starts not from the Spirit (metaphysically), but from Nature conceived initially as unconscious thought that labors within it. In Greek antiquity, Stoicism (v.), for example, presupposes this original and final monism (which is materialistic), expressed poetically by Virgil in the celebrated verse "Mens agitat molem." In modern idealism its most coherent and significant form is found in Schelling (v.): Nature is the preparation of consciousness; it works unconsciously to produce it; therefore the I is nothing but a product of Nature, in which the unconscious thought that Nature is becomes conscious: Consciousness is nothing but Nature itself at the maximum of its self-empowerment, and Nature is nothing but Consciousness deprived of power, the prehistory of the spirit; Nature is visible Spirit, the Spirit is invisible Nature (Addition [1803] to the Ideas on the Philosophy of Nature, 1797). "The task of all science is to construct the arising of a fixed product" (Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799, § 6). Everything, from the point of view of absolute Reason ("total indifference of the Subjective and the Objective"), is one and indivisible. Outside of Reason "simply one and equal to itself" "there is nothing"; and nothing is a being outside of the absolute Identity, which is "one with Reason." In itself there is "no antithesis between the Subject and the Object," but only "quantitative difference"; "absolute Identity is not the cause of the Universe, but is the Universe itself" (coeternal with it), and "as to its essence" it is "the same in every part of the Universe" (Exposition of My Philosophical System, 1801, §§ 1-33). The movement of reason (of philosophy) is that of "de-differentiating," of proceeding from the differentiated to the identical, that is, reabsorbing the world into the Absolute which is the Spirit or Nature, indifferently. And so, as was said, absolute spiritualism, in the idealism of Schelling (but also in the logical idealism of Hegel and the "actual" idealism of Gentile [v.]), is absolute naturalism, or naturalistic monism, of which spirit and matter are two forces that balance the expansion of nature; which is as much as to say that undifferentiated Nature "appears" as matter and as spirit (see also System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800, sec. III, ch. II, C, II). A different form of absolute spiritualism is the "immaterialism" of Berkeley (v.): only spirits really exist; matter has no existence other than that of "being perceived" (Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713, D. 1).

Spiritualism, with the exception of the monistic form, always implies a dualistic conception: spirit and body (psychological spiritualism); spiritual life and animal nature (moral and sociological spiritualism, according as the individual or society is considered); spiritual substance and material or extended substance (ontological spiritualism) or mechanism and life; spirit or flesh (religious spiritualism in the Christian sense). But duality alone is not enough for a doctrine to be defined as spiritualist; it is further necessary to admit: a) the independence of the spirit from the body or from nature; b) its non-derivability from matter; c) its supremacy over the body. Naturally, the way in which the duality is understood (as opposition, heterogeneity, etc.) determines the way in which the relations between spirit and body, spirit and nature, are understood. And here, it may be said, is the testing ground of every spiritualistic theory: a) radical dualism between spirit or soul and body or matter? In that case, the unity of the human composite is compromised: the ontological opposition between spirit and body inevitably leads to attributing to the one attributes opposed to those of the other, to making of them two enemies in perpetual conflict; b) duality, yes, but understood in such a way as not to compromise the substantial unity that every single man is? This doctrine may present the danger (as in Aristotle) of rendering doubtful the ontological distinction between spirit and body (and, consequently, the personal immortality of the soul), but it has the advantage of not opposing the one to the other, of not rendering their relation inexplicable, and of not going so far as to deny to matter all positivity, to make of it "non-being or the absolutely formless." Thesis a) may be defined, in a broad sense, as "Platonic"; thesis b) as "Aristotelian," provided one keeps in mind that there can be a Platonic spiritualism without accepting the rigid ontological dualism of Plato (v.), for example, that of St. Augustine (v.), just as there can be an Aristotelian spiritualism without incurring the dangers of naturalism, for example, that of St. Thomas (v.). With this, the form of spiritualism is already indicated which, critically examined in depth, proves to be the only true and authentic one; precisely ontological spiritualism (which is then also psychological, moral, sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic and also religious), which is proper to the Christian tradition, Augustinian and at the same time Thomist, which, rationally founded, is found in harmony with revealed truth, inasmuch as it is founded on a theistic and creationist metaphysics (also rigorously rational, though not "rationalistic").

This said, in strict terms, perhaps one cannot speak of a true and proper spiritualism before Christianity, which made known, through Revelation (in fact, not in principle) the concepts of creation and of spirit as a personal substance created by God. In Greek philosophy the spirit is either still conceived materialistically (v. SPIRITO) or as an impersonal entity (soul), understood as an eternal element immanent in (or entering into contact with) physical and human nature; hence psychism: the ψυχή is the (cosmic) principle of life and, as such, is eternal; it is found in nature ("World Soul") and manifests itself in different degrees (as soul or vegetative life in plants, sensitive in animals, rational in men), of which the higher includes the lower one or ones. In this sense, the first to consider explicitly the Intellect (νοῦς) as the metaphysical principle of all things is Anaxagoras (v.); but, precisely, the Anaxagorean νοῦς is a physical "force," "the lightest (λεπτότατον) and purest (καθαρώτατον) of all things, of which it is the soul" (ψυχή), knowledge and order (p. 12, Diels); in short, the νοῦς is "the principle of movement," which shakes inert matter, provoking "the separation of all things" (ibid., p. 13). Hence, the νοῦς is an "animated" principle (psychism) and not yet a spiritual one, which resolves a problem of "physical" order; it is not yet spirit or consciousness, so much so that "intelligence" is not its primary quality and even less its essence. Plato (Phaed., 97b-98c) and Aristotle were aware of this, and the latter, like Plato, notes that Anaxagoras uses the νοῦς only "as a mechanism in the constitutive process of the world" (Met., I, 985 a).

Through Socrates (v.), spiritualism is formulated, for the first time, in an explicit and clear manner, by Plato with the dualism of the two worlds, the sensible or of things and the intelligible or of Ideas. Dualism: a) metaphysical, between Being (ideas) and becoming (things); b) cosmological, between the Demiurge, "fashioner" of the world, and eternal matter; c) psychological, between the intellective soul and the body; d) ethical, between the end of the soul (the contemplation of Ideas) and that of the body (attachment to sensible things). Platonic dualism, influenced also by religious beliefs (Orphic-Pythagorean), not only compromises, to the point of almost rendering them inexplicable, the relations between the soul and the body (and hence the unity of the human composite), but does not entirely go beyond psychism and cosmologism. In fact, even for Plato there is a "World Soul" (generated by the Demiurge and therefore not belonging to the intelligible world, Timaeus, 35a and 37a), to which a twofold movement is given without it being directly the cause of that movement itself (as earlier in the Phaedrus, 245 c). The soul proper to man, immortal because "similar" or "akin" to the Ideas (Phaed., 79-c-e), is conceived as a "daemon" or an entity in itself, which falls into a body, without forming a unity with it: the personal immortality of the soul is compromised (v. especially the Phaedo and Repub., l. X). Platonic spiritualism is led to these consequences by the conception of matter (χώρα ἀνάγκη), understood as pure negativity and principle of evil and corruption. This said, spiritual activity is entirely engaged in fleeing from the "prison" (σῆμα) of the body (σῶμα), to raise itself to the Beautiful in itself (Symposium), to the Good in itself (Republic), to Being in itself (Sophist), in short, to the world of Ideas or of pure Truth (Phaedo); Eros is satisfied only when the soul rises to the "sole science" of the Beautiful in itself, very far from mortal truths (Symposium, 210 c, 211 c; and also Repub., l. X, etc.). True philosophy "is nothing other than purification from every passion. And temperance, justice and fortitude and science itself are nothing but purification" (Phaed., 69 c). Thus metaphysical spiritualism presents itself coherently as gnoseological, aesthetic, moral and political spiritualism (the State understood as an ethico-religious society, having superhistorical and supersocial ends). But its principal difficulty is to devalue the sensible world without succeeding in explaining it and to nullify almost its reality (significant is the "myth of the cave" in Book VII of the Repub.), as well as not resolving the anthropological problem, given that man is a unity of soul and body, distinct but not separate. The theological problem also remains compromised: the Demiurge (God) is indeed intelligence, but metaphysically limited by the pre-existence of the Ideas and of matter; and is only intelligence "ordering" matter on the model of the Ideas. Plato calls him "best," "father," "wise artificer," "providence," etc. (Timaeus, 34b, 42e, 46b, 28c, 29a, 48d, etc.), but he always remains a purely cosmological God. The fact is that the true object of Platonic theology is not the Demiurge but the Intelligible World of Ideas, that is, the impersonal Divine, toward which in fact all things tend (Phaed., 75b) and not only man. But apart from these and other difficulties, Plato is the father of spiritualism as such in that he was the first to define its characteristics and its complex problematic; above all, despite the psychism noted, he discovered, once and for all, that the spirit is essentially intellective activity, whose object is transcendent Truth or Idea. Therefore Plato is also the founder of true "humanism" in the strongest sense: man is made for intellectual values and not only the True, but also the Good and the Beautiful are theoretical values, whose possession is the end of every man's life and hence also the end of education, which therefore can only be "humanistic," that is, spiritualistic.

Aristotle (v.) seeks to eliminate the difficulties of Platonic dualism, but the naturalistic accentuation of his philosophy is to the detriment of the spiritualistic essence given to it by his master. Nevertheless, spiritualism with the Stagirite gains on two points: a) the soul is not separated from the body, but united to it (concept of "synolon"); b) God is Intellect, which is "eternal life" and therefore God "is a living being, eternal, perfect, so that life and continuous, eternal time belong to him" (Met., 1072 b, 26). However, Aristotle remains: a) obscure and undecided about the immortality of the personal soul (it seems that the rational soul is a form immanent in the world, which is differentiated in individual human beings); and b) does not go beyond the cosmological conception of God, unmoved Mover of the physical world (Met., 1072, 3: 1072 b, 14). However, in Aristotle theism (necessary to spiritualism as such) is more speculatively founded than in Plato. In this and other respects, the Stagirite represents the culmination of pre-Christian thought. Plotinus, in fact, under the influence also of Aristotle and the Stoics, renews the difficulties of Platonic spiritualism, without resolving them; indeed, he accentuates the detachment between the One and the sensible world as well as the negativity of matter and compromises the transcendence of God with the (pantheistic and acosmistic) principle of emanation.

Only Christian spiritualism succeeds in resolving the difficulties internal to Platonic-Aristotelian thought. The key to this solution is the principle of creation: nothing is before or coeval with God; the world is a creation of God, as is also the spirit of every man as an individual. God the creator is personal Intelligence, Spirit that is also Will and therefore Love, as well as Truth (Ego sum veritas). The theological principle is no longer understood cosmologically as in Greek philosophy, and therefore spiritualism turns out to be founded quite otherwise. On the other hand, the creationist principle gives the body (and matter, insofar as it too is created by God with its own order) its positivity and makes it a good, even if inferior to the Spirit; and thus also the unity of the human composite turns out to be differently and better founded. Here spiritualism finds its whole soul of truth, utilizing whatever true things the Greeks had discovered, which is recovered and made true.

The father of Christian spiritualism is St. Augustine (v.). To reason, which asks him: "what do you wish to know," Augustine replies: "God and the soul" and nothing else (Soliloquia, l. I, ch. 3); only insofar as it is referred to man, in whom it finds its meaning, does Augustine deal with the problem of the world. Hence the essentially "spiritualistic" (and therefore "humanistic" and "Christian," because authentic and complete humanism is only Christian humanism) character of his thought, and no longer "cosmological." Nor is the soul, for Augustine, essentially voluntas; it is first of all intellectus ("intellectum valde ama"); and God is the Truth and the illuminating source of the human mens. Man is soul and is body; soul in a body to which it gives life: one cannot understand and therefore define man without taking account of the one and the other. Nor is man two separate substances: "man is a substance composed (constans) of soul and body," and he is man both in mind and in flesh. Yet neither does the essence of the body become that of the soul, nor the essence of the soul that of the body: they make one man without being the same thing. As is evident, here Augustine, on the basis of the principle of creation, departs from the Platonic position of the two substances and rejects the doctrine of matter as the source of all evils and of the body as evil, while nevertheless admitting that the body, if not dominated by the soul of which it is the instrument, can be an impediment to the realization of the good. However, the perfect state of man is not in the separation of the soul from the body, but in their union and collaboration for the good of the spirit and, after the rupture caused by death, in their reunion with the resurrection of the flesh (De quantitate animae, ch. 12, n. 22; De Trin., l. XV, ch. 7, n. 11; De anima et eius origine, l. IV, ch. 2, n. 3; De cura pro mortuis gerenda, ch. 3, n. 5; Sermo 154, ch. 10, n. 15). And thus another fundamental characteristic of Christian spiritualism as compared with Greek spiritualism is brought to light: the latter is a doctrine of the disincarnation of the spirit, the former of incarnation, in the philosophical sense (of the soul in the body, to which it is united) and in the theological sense (the incarnation of God in Christ).

It does not appear that St. Thomas (v.) disagrees or dissents from St. Augustine: the world depends on God, who gives it existence (only God exists of himself: Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 3, a. 3-4; q. 44, a. 1); the human composite is a "substantial unity" of soul and body. Intellect is essential to the soul as the principle of all psychic life; but since the intellectual function is "superorganic" (it has intelligible forms as its object), it follows that it can be carried out autonomously, that is, even when the soul has been separated from the body. Therefore the soul is preeminent over the body and can subsist separated from it, even though it aspires to reconstitute the union with the body, which, as faith teaches, will come about with the resurrection of the flesh (Sum. Theol., 1ª, qq. 75-78; De ente et essentia, ch. 6, etc.).

Later forms of spiritualism are either a deviation from or a deepening of this fundamental position of Greek-Christian spiritualism. In the Renaissance spiritualism returns in the form of psychism; with Descartes (v.), also through the influence of scientific doctrines, it returns in the Platonic form of the radical dualism of soul (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), that is, as a dualism of the two "substances," having opposite attributes (thought and freedom, on the one hand; extension and mechanism, on the other). Thus there emerges the dualism of "nature" and "spirit," of "mechanism" and "life," which troubles all modern thought down to Kant. In this sense, with the exception of human consciousnesses and of God, the Cartesian conception of nature is materialistic and prepares, though it certainly differs from that of Epicurus (v.) or of Gassendi (v.), the materialism typical of the Enlightenment (v.). On the other hand, Descartes, with the dualism of the two substances (Principi della filos., l. I, § 53), reopens the problem of the relation between soul and body and provokes, on the one hand, the monistic solution of Spinoza (v.) and, on the other, the occasionalistic one of Malebranche (v.) and the other ambiguous one of Leibniz (v.), whose monadism, which claims to be spiritualistic, can also be interpreted in a sense naturalistic sense. It must, however, be added at once that for Leibniz matter is no longer a substance (as it also is not for Spinoza) and the world is not a collection of mechanical and geometric phenomena. The body of man is composed of an infinity of monads, dominated by the monad-soul (Principles of Nature and Grace, §§ 3-4). Yet modern rationalism must be credited, apart from its errors, with having deepened the understanding of spirit as consciousness (cogito), which is not a given datum but a principle of knowledge and of conscious unification, consciousness of self, self-consciousness. But the same rationalism, on the one hand, opens the way to the identification of "intellectual" and "spiritual" and, on the other, to the conception of spirit as pure activity (and no longer as substance), consisting, as essence, in the intellectual bonds or relations by which it unifies experience. This compromises the personal immortality of the soul and opens the way to transcendental idealism, for which it is not individual egos that are immortal, but only eternal Thought or the absolute I. Already Kant (v.) limits knowledge of the soul to its functions alone (to "transcendentality") and denies any rational demonstration of its immortality (Critique of Pure Reason, Part II; Transcendental Dialectic, Bk. I, ch. 1, § 2); transcendental idealism from Fichte (v.) to Gentile (v.), which deduces everything, through unconscious and conscious processes, from absolute Thought, which is realized in the very becoming of nature and history and is this very becoming, whose outcome is the conquest that the Absolute makes of itself in the transparency of the fully unfolded Idea (Hegel), on the one hand denies the immortality and personality of the soul ("the only immortality that can be thought of... is the immortality of the transcendental I": Gentile, Teoria generale dello Spirito come atto puro, Bari 1924, p. 128, 4th ed.) and on the other identifies God with the very I think and this with History (absolute immanence). And thus spirit is lost, and the so-called "philosophies of spirit" ([v.] such as, for example, that of Croce) are, at bottom, philosophies of nature, once there is adequation between world and spirit, indeed identity (monism). Absolute idealism and absolute positivism, in this sense, are identified. But idealism, especially that of Gentile, has deepened the concept of self-consciousness (Spirit as thinking in act and self-positing); and such a concept, insofar as it has truth in it, must be recovered and brought to truth in classical-Christian spiritualism, also for its very notable contributions to pedagogical spiritualism, as attested by the Sommario di pedagogia (1912) of Gentile himself. In general, modern thought from Descartes to Hegel and post-Hegelian thought (with the exception of the currents that remained in the line of classical metaphysics) has lost or altered the concept of spirit and the principles of spiritualism, even if pre-Kantian rationalism, the criticism of Kant and the post-Kantian idealist currents kept for spirit its pre-eminence and energetically maintained that spiritual acts (intellectual and volitional) are not at all entirely explicable by physiological phenomena, according to the naive and crude claim of ancient and recent naturalism. The dualism (of Cartesian origin) between "nature" or mechanism and "spirit" or freedom was also maintained in the original and profound elaboration that Kant makes of it in the Critique of Practical Reason, which idealism, from Fichte to Gentile, then further elaborates in a conception in which the I think is assumed as the metaphysical principle of all reality as such. The antithesis between nature and spirit is taken up, from an original point of view, also by Bergson (v.) as an opposition between spirit and geometric necessity and spatiality (L'évolution créatrice, ch. 3) or between "intuition" and "intellect", or again between "dynamic" morality and religion and "static" morality and religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion).

But classical Christian spiritualism found a further development and verification in Italian spiritualism of the first half of the 19th century from a pedagogical point of view with Capponi (v.), Tommaseo (v.), Lambruschini (v.), etc., and above all philosophically with Rosmini (v.), more than with Gioberti (v.), who distorts it into a form of ontologism (v.) and pantheism (v.), influenced by Hegel (notable, from the psychological point of view, is the contribution of French spiritualism of the same period, especially that of Maine de Biran [v.]; of no theoretical interest is that of the eclecticism of Cousin [v.] and his school). Rosmini preserves all the essential concepts of spiritualism (unity of body and spirit and the supremacy and autonomy of the latter; God creator and transcendent, and the analogical relation between God and creation, etc.), but at the same time resolves the problems posed by modern thought (and above all those of spirit as consciousness and self-consciousness and of the critical foundation of metaphysics), whereby the whole universe, through man, has its summit in God: in tending toward God man truly loves himself, is free and actualizes all the infinite power of his spirit. In the inspiration and possession of God reside the ultimate end of integral life and human beatitude, and "here rests the supreme excellence of creation" (Principi di scienza morale, ch. III, art. IV). Classical-Christian spiritualism has had a further development, through Augustine and Rosmini, in contemporary Italian Christian spiritualism (v.), in the French "Philosophie de l'esprit" of Lavelle and Le Senne, as well as in certain Christian existentialists, such as Marcel.

Michele Federico Sciacca