Solomon on spirituality

Abstract

Solomon’s thinking on spirituality interestingly connects a range of themes in his philosophical work. What he takes to be spiritual in the primary sense is a certain kind of ‘cosmic passion’ which implies a judgment about how ‘life’ or ‘the world’ is overall. Cosmic trust, for example, takes the world to be fundamentally trustworthy. Such a judgment, I suggest, can be justi fied even though its truth could not be ‘scientifically’ established on objective evidence: and I outline a defence of ‘doxastic ventures’ of this kind based on William James’s ‘The Will to Believe’. Noting that Solomon’s spirituality is naturalist only in the sense that it rejects the supernatural (and not in the sense that it views the world just from a natural scientific perspective), I consider whether it is coherent to adopt such a spirituality without at least implicit theistic or religious commitment. I discuss this question with special reference to the case of cosmic gratitude - thankfulness, not just for good fortune and advantages, but for all of life, including tragedy and death.