Spiritual Journey versus Ethics is the Question Sometimes

Mark Vernon

The perennial philosophy is an appealing doctrine, what with its combo-promise of universal brotherhood and ultimate truth. But it is actually a dehumanising doctrine, and one that does the pursuit of truth a disservice.

To get a feel for why, it's worth asking where much of the impetus to identify a perennial philosophy comes from today.

First, there is the consumerist agenda, which seeks to sell anything from cars to spirituality itself by appealing to the mystical. The telltale sign is the juxtaposition of product against oriental image, be that a Buddha or an incense stick. "Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon", observes Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. This looting works best when backed up by a vague, perennial philosophy.

Or there's evolutionary psychology, and its attempts to understand religion. Richard Dawkins, for one, puts religious belief down to an evolutionary misfiring, "an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity". Quite what causes that misfiring is, as yet, unclear. He has his own favourite thesis. But, he continues, "I am much more wedded to the general principle that the question should be properly put, and if necessary rewritten, than I am to any particular answer." Note the form: a variety of phenomena, but one underlying principle. It's a philosophia perennis in anti-religious guise, and that's an a priori requirement for those who want to explain religion, and thereby explain it away – and another reason to be suspicious of the notion.

Then there's the quintessential experience associated with the perennial philosophy, of supposed "pure conscious events". They are much associated with Aldous Huxley and his experiments with drugs, as well as the identification of peak experiences with religious insight, by the psychologist Ivan Maslow. But as Jeremy Carrette and Richard King reveal in their book, Selling Spirituality, " ... sampling disillusioned college graduates, Maslow would ask his interviewees about their ecstatic and rapturous moments in life." He associated the search for the meaningful with a kind of super-feel-good experience. It's an approach that finds it hard to tell the difference between a bungee-jump and the ecstasy of Saint Theresa. (And for not dissimilar reasons, medieval mystics, like Meister Eckhart, were precisely against experientialist perennialism. "If thou lovest God as God, as spirit, as person or as image, that must all go", he preached – challenging religious experience.)

Now, all that said, I suspect there is a common human characteristic that lies behind the appeal of the perennial philosophy. We are the creature who is blessed, or cursed, with the desire for more. We are the animal for whom our own existence is too small for us. We crave understanding and purpose. Philosophy, science and religions alike are some of the diverse manifestations of this need. (Conversely, those philosophies that seek to contain and curtain the desire for more only achieve what Jonathan Swift recognised when he noted: "The stoical scheme of supplying our wants, by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.")

However, the mistake is to collapse the diversity which springs from that desire into one undifferentiated whole. And there's at least two reasons for that. One is that human experiences are inevitably particular. My experiences are conditioned by my context. Yours by yours. The differences should not be minimised – consumed, say, by some high expression of benevolence. Rather, they should be maximised – sorted and sifted. This is because our growth as individuals lies in discerning our experiences, and that means keeping them sharp, not dissolving them in some soggy universal.

Second, our ethics needs the same treatment. Immanuel Kant noticed this in relation to the golden rule, often cited as a feature of the perennial philosophy. He called it "trite", arguing that a criminal could refuse their sentence on the grounds of doing to others as you would have done to you. With that, though, goes justice. Rather, we need the grit of particularity for our ethics to gain a grip on us. Without it, ethics ceases to make serious demands.

And there's a final reason to resist the pull of perennial philosophy. It forgets that truth, ultimately, lies beyond us. To be human is to see through a glass darkly. The only way to pursue truth is, therefore, to deploy a dialectical approach. One "insight" must be challenged by another. My experience undermined by yours. Critique is of the essence. But we need to keep talking. We need to find ways of engaging conflicting differences in an open spirit. Journeying is all for we humans, the creature that seeks more. But we must keep journeying. For the perennial philosophy, treated as an arrival, is deadening to us.