Spirituality in Modern Society – Phap Tuyen
This essay is based on the chapter “Spirituality in Modern Society” by Peter van der Veer. The author Peter van der Veer (born 1953) is a Dutch anthropologist and academic. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science. He has taught Anthropology and held visiting positions at the Free University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New School in New York, and the National University of Singapore. He worked in the fields of religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe and published many valuable books. He was the founding director of the Research Center in Religion and Society in the Social Science Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam, and Chairman of the International Institute for Asian Studies. He received the Hendrik Muller Award for his social science study of religion.
This chapter is excerpted from the book, “Religion Beyond A Concept”, edited by Hent De Vries. Van der Veer’s initial inspiration was the book, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, by Wassily Kandinsky, published over 110 years ago (1911). Kandinsky’s goal was to instill the capacity to experience the spiritual in material and abstract things. According to Kandinsky, abstract art is considered “the most pregnant expressions of modernity”, and van der Veer expands on this idea and states that in looking at abstract art, “the spiritual stages a comeback as the return of the repressed.” Van der Veer continues to explore the concept of spirituality in modern society.
According to van der Veer, the concept of spirituality is a key to understanding modern society. Spirituality is notoriously hard to define and he suggested that its very vagueness, as the opposite of materiality, as distinctive from the body, as distinctive from both the religious and the secular, has made it productive as a concept that bridges various discursive traditions across the globe.
He acknowledges that the term spiritual might be a vague term, since it brings up confusion with other terms such as religion, belief and the secular. However, due to its vagueness, it can become functional for those who use it. Van der Veer makes the point that in contrast to the differences that can be found between world religions, the term spirituality can be used as a global, multicultural concept or a global bridge that can span the universal truths the different religions have in common. The term spirituality can be used to bring together the wisdom of many discrete traditions such as Hinduism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Van der Veer acknowledges that the term spirituality is free from restrictions to organized, institutionalized religious systems. Because of this multicultural and flexible nature, “spirituality escapes the confines of organized, institutionalized forms of religion.” Due to “its conceptual unclarity and undefinability,” spirituality “can make peaceful communication between different conceptual universes possible.” Furthermore, he suggests that the term spirituality makes it possible to talk about transcendental experiences and truths apart from organized or institutionalized religion.
To understand the term spirituality, the author addresses two issues. First, understanding the terms “belief,” “religion,” and “history” within the European tradition in the modern period. Second, he examines the place of history or historicity within a specific tradition.
The history of the terms:
There were two projects to answer the question of historicity, one in German, and the other in English. In the German project, a vast eight volumes on the history of German concepts was composed by Werner Conze, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart Koselleck. This project surveys the period (1750-1850) in which the rebirth of modernity transformed German political and social vocabularies. Koselleck believes that “concepts vary not only according to their semantic field but also according to the temporal associations built into them.” This “temporalization,” or a new sense of time and history, is the major aspect of modernity.
In the English project: by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, they focus on political discourse. A discourse is a complex structure containing vocabulary and grammar, with a set of language usages put together for political goals. The idea is to have multiple discourses coexist and the results of these discourses can be implemented in research to gain some knowledge into certain “Lebensform,” to use Wittgenstein’s term, as it exists in history. Due to conceptual difficulties, these German and English projects have not been communicated with each other and are rarely integrated into each other.
This brings the author to the question of how one can compare the Chinese and Indian conceptual universes and translate them into European concepts. With this goal, researchers began to create a project of global concepts based on timelines and history of India and China. One can acquire wisdom into a European concept of spirituality by referring to the way the West interacted with India and China. In India, Durmont found that “there is a conscious devaluation of time, just as in the concept of dharma there is a devaluation of the individual.” In China, there are cultural misunderstandings in translation. Ogden brought a Basic English project, a type of simplified English, into China to help with terminology translation and to bring about better communication between Britain and China. In his “Mencius on the Mind,” Richards expressed the importance of how Mencius employed language to communicate, in order to support the world’s communication and to save the Chinese civilization. However, both of these projects have failed because “the gap between the universes was almost unbridgeable.”
Another example is the use of the term “yi” in the bilateral trading agreement between the Chinese and British. “Yi” is used in Chinese to refer to a foreigner, but in fact it means “barbarian,” which would have been considered disrespectful to the British. Thus, when the Treaty of Tianjin was created in 1858, the parties agreed that the term “yi” would not be used toward the Queen of England or the British government and that the British government would use English as the main language of exchange with China.
According to van der Veer, a “vague term like spirituality has been adopted especially to make peaceful communication between different conceptual universes possible” even though it has also been used “as a trope to organize important ways of thinking in and about modern society.” He notes that Europe’s modernity is a result of interactions with societies outside of Europe. This factor is important in the understanding of spirituality in the West.
Spirituality and materialism:
To Kandinsky, “spirituality suggests an experience that goes beyond representation.” It implies a higher value opposite to the more mundane aspects of social life, including organized religion. It implies the essence of the people, their collective spirit, or the way the body transcends in achieving spiritual experiences. It’s a term employed in contrast to the term materialism.
There are elements to materialism to which spirituality has been opposed. The most notable is the transformation of the 19th century economic drive, best described as the idea of “invisible hand” or “the individual pursuit of happiness” by Adam Smith. This idea emphasizes the “rational choice of individuals” by economists and political scientists.
Marx’s dialectical materialism regards economics as the main driver and crucial purpose of society. Charles Taylor argues that the pursuit of excessive personal property was considered corrupt in ancient regimes, and is too today; this is what materialism rejected. Although spirituality is opposed to materialism, it is not antimodern in the sense that it turns back to traditional times. On the contrary, spirituality is a very alive and modern idea.
Spirituality actually relies on material conditions. Mahatma Gandhi had a rich spiritual life, living in poverty, “but it took a great deal of money to keep” him engaged with the public; video and broadcasts of Gandhi’s poverty in the 1930s cost a lot of money and resources. Spirituality was considered to be ahead of its time during the revolution against colonialism by England in the nineteenth century. “Spirituality is not religion, at least not established religion. Most important, the arguments for spirituality consider themselves to be scientific. Science itself comes to be seen as a transcendent spirit of the time. ”
In the early twentieth century, China was considered as having a “spiritual disease.” With the victory of the Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution, spirituality was eliminated from Chinese culture and today it is considered to be a culture of materialism. In contrast to the Chinese case, the language of spirituality has always played an important role in India. Vivekananda brought the spiritual message of Ramakrishna to the US in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. People from many different religions attended this demonstration of religious universalism.
Gandhi was well aware of the deep connection between spirituality and anti-imperialism in British intellectual circles as he participated in India’s struggle for independence. According to Gandhi, that struggle was mainly spiritual. He emphasized vegetarianism and celibacy as moral practices along with fasting as part of his non-violent way. “Truth, then, is moral and should be communicated in a moral way. It is striking that for Gandhi, the morality of communication is as important as for I. A. Richards. 1”
Spirituality is a global term that can bridge artists in Europe like Kandinsky, American transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and connect different religions like Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. The term spirituality is very important, with a wide range of uses, and van der Veer makes it worthy of academic attention.
Evaluation and Argument
Although the article is only about 11 pages, the author has given many examples, citing many famous thinkers from different countries, from Europe to Asia. As a scholar, van der Veer has cited many views and historical details regarding the concept of spirituality as a modern term spanning many periods of history. The article is very rich.
I agreed with the author when he said that “even though spirituality is a vague term, it can be functional for those who use it.” For religious studies students, it depends on the context in which the term spirituality is used. For me, to be “spiritual” equals having a capacity to be awakened. One cannot simply understand the term spirituality in the abstract, but must also experience it in their spiritual practice. Nations and cultures also affect one’s spiritual view based on their definition of spirituality and their orientation of spiritual understanding, especially for young people.
The author’s focus is on finding the origin of, and defining, the term “spirituality”. He appreciates what he found, and defines the term “spiritual” as a global bridge. It is difficult to define an object that is not “objectively true.” We tend to look outside ourselves for a definition, which is often easier than allowing the phenomena to be experienced within. The term spiritual is an indispensable term for every human being because it speaks to a potential in every person. As a religious practitioner, I believe that the body and mind of a person always go together. There is no disease of the body without an effect on the mind, and vice versa. Taking good care of our body is also a way to care for our mind and our spiritual life, so that we can deepen our spirituality and sense of well-being. In short, spirituality is an important part of our lives; it is us. So, we have to recognize spirituality as real, and what is important is the way we practice to touch spirituality in our daily lives. We need to learn ways to best care for our spirituality. Many people are cut off from the spiritual aspect of their experience, and I believe this leads to many problems for people in today’s society.
In the article, the author mentions the issue of vegetarianism. In my opinion, vegetarianism is an effective and practical way today to take care of our bodies and the earth. For spiritual practitioners, vegetarianism not only takes care of our physical bodies but also nurtures our compassion. All species have a desire to live and fear death and when we refrain from eating animals, we can cultivate our compassion in our bodies and in our minds. Cultivating compassion is an important way to nourish one’s spirituality.
Furthermore, the author said that “spirituality relies on material conditions”. This is true to some extent. There are cases of enlightened beings (for instance, the ascetics in India in the time of the Buddha), who tried to avoid sensual pleasures and material comforts in order to achieve enlightenment. I think it would be better rephrase it to say that “spirituality relies partially on material conditions.” In addition, it might be good to add that materialism depends on spirituality, since a material world without spirituality would be a great loss to humankind, and it would create an imbalance in the world. Indeed, as human beings, we cannot survive without material possessions, but we also won’t survive and thrive without the elements of true peace, true joy and true connectedness that are found in spirituality.
The term spirituality is important in regard to both Gandhi and Kandinsky’s answers to the transformations that they experienced. Van der Veer makes it clear that a vast measure of worlds is linked to the term spirituality, from American transcendentalists to European abstract painters like Kandinsky, to Neo-Confucian thinkers, to political leaders like Gandhi. Using the erudite knowledge of a scholar, the author has led us into the world of the term “spirituality,” which many of us rarely think about. This is a great article with lots of history from Europe, India, China, etc. The article helps us better understand the role of spirituality in modern history as well as in our own lives. This article is very worthwhile for us to read. Finally, the author asserts, “spirituality today deserves scholarly attention.”
To end this article, I would like to borrow from the scientist Albert Einstein2: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.” Understanding the history of the concept of spirituality in modern times helps us to better understand the importance of spirituality in our everyday lives. Once we have a personal experience of spirituality, we will understand better our responsibility to take spiritual care of ourselves and those around us.
Notes
1 I.A. Richards (1893 –1979): was an English educator, rhetorician, and one of the great twentieth-century literary critics.
2 Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955): was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science.
