Abstract
If there is a new face to subjectivity, it may well be that of ontology. Where subjectivity once bracketed off questions of ontology (with the exception of visions of ontology operating in versions of subjectivity and epistemology), ontology now carries matters of subjectivity within a broader framework of ethics, meaning and becoming. Revisiting this historical submergence of ontology through the social psychological classic When Prophecy Fails, the paper inquires into how the split of epistemology and ontology was assumed fundamental to secularization, to repositioning knowledge and knower, world and wonder, and for which the question of prophecy played no small role. This revisiting asks: what did it mean to secure ideas of a rational psyche through oppositional registers of psychology vs religion or spirituality? If there is indeed an upturn in ontological interest, in approaches concerned with an “historical coming-into-being”, these long-assumed fundamental splits will assume new significance to matters of subjectivity.
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Notes
I have learned many things during my historical research into When Prophecy Fails from family, friends, colleagues, former students, and those I have had the opportunity to interview with more and less direct ties to the original study. To those colleagues who have offered open criticism of ideas in one or another paper on this topic, I thank you for helping me to sort out ideas and understand more clearly the kinds of things (worries) raised by a project entailing spirituality. To Susan Henking, deepest thanks, as always, for guiding me through the thicket of history of religion and religious ideas, for asking questions in ways that move this work along, and for being there through all of the ups and downs of research.
Several well-known spiritual leaders are also overseeing groups directed at social change. Deepak Chopra, for example, heads up a group called alliance for a new humanity, www.chopra.com/alliance. Andrew Harvey, for another, oversees a 2-year program called spiritual activism, www.andrewharvey.net/sacred_activism.html. Feminist Starhawk, author of numerous books, including Webs of Power (2002), practices earth-based spirituality as a “peace, environmental, and global justice activist and trainer, a permaculture designer and teacher”, www.starhawk.org.
Spirituality and religion are not being used interchangeably. Neither, however, are the two unrelated to one another or to secularization. Any number of books have been devoted to their separate and intertwined histories. Heelas (2006) offers a summary relevant to arguments developed herein. Most germane to this article is the relation between spirituality, religion and modernity's development of the autonomous self. The autonomous self and its subjectivities “favo[r] those forms of spirituality which resource one's subjectivities and treats them as a fundamental source of significance, and undermines those religions which do not” (p. 57). Said another way, “take away the theistic God of religious tradition, and there is little left … take away the God of theism, and New Age spiritualities of life remain virtually intact” (p. 46). Secularization is thus not explained by a decline in religion and rise in spirituality, and spirituality does not indicate the “last gasp” of the sacred.
See Deborah Coon (1992) on the debate between William James and G. Stanley Hall over spirituality and science as a founding moment in the history of psychology. Also see Ann Taves (1999) on spirituality, religion and psychology. The larger historical context is that of the formation of modernity, and struggles between religion and science, for which Daston and Galison provide good discussion. Also see David F. Noble (1997) who attends as well to how technology is “suffused with religious belief” (Noble, 1997, p. 5).
In this, Dorothy Martin is not alone. A half century or so earlier, for example, debate arose between James and Hall over spirit medium Mrs Leonora Piper, for which scientific tests of Mrs Piper led to conclusions about a divided consciousness, or madness. Though less direct, feminist reflections on Freud's Dora and on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's (1899/1973) The Yellow Wallpaper are also relevant. In regard to Freud's case histories, see van Herik (1985) who argues that for Freud science is to ideal masculinity as religion is to femininity. In the case of Gilman, a juxtaposition of The Yellow Wallpaper to her book on religion His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of our Fathers and the Work of our Mothers (1923/1976) may well instruct on other relations of science and religion to constructions of madness and gender.
Garber's point on the loss of cultural imagination applies here. The tendency to explain away wonders also stems from a rather literal focus on things. I was reminded of this recently when giving a history paper on When Prophecy Fails (Bayer, 2007). The paper considered how technology (telephones, phonographs, brain imaging) fed spiritualism's “culture of imagination” and how the two together were involved in naturalizing the sacred in cognitive psychology as in sacralizing psychological cognition in religion and spirituality. Rather than engage the function of a culture of imagination – in spiritualism as in histories of psychology – responses tended to follow a more literal line concerned with the self-evident nature of spirituality as quackery, end of story. Any history of spirituality was expected to follow the path of debunking, as if any history of it ultimately serves this single purpose. Missed entirely was consideration of the interplay of cultures of imagination in the formation of kinds – including spiritualism, the psyche, and so on.
Not unrelatedly, William James (1902) argued earlier that religion or the spiritual was becoming more personal, signaling perhaps an ontological change.
This estimate is based on citation counts using the psychological abstracts database.
Of equal interest is how this split fails to garner attention from those interested in the popularization of the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance introduced in When Prophecy Fails.
This search was conducted on WorldCat, and, while interesting, it offers but a rudimentary gauge on a shift change from subjectivity to ontology. Caution is likewise advised concerning a similar trend in thesis/dissertation titles from 1980 to 2007.
The America Public Media website reports Kanter's January 2005 Miami Herald article, http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/globalization/davosessay-kanter.shtml (accessed 19 February 2008).
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Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
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Bayer, B. Wonder in a World of Struggle?. Subjectivity 23, 156–173 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.10