Book contents
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Shakespearean Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Spiritually Enlightened Individual’
- 2 ‘The Resources of a Much Earlier Phase of the Tradition’
- 3 The Distractions of Baruch Spinoza
- 4 Immanuel Kant: ‘To Regard as Petty What We Are Otherwise Anxious About’
- 5 Wittgenstein’s Cool Temple
- 6 Rilke, Shakespeare … and a Little Freud
- 7 Concealment and Revelation
- 8 Mindfulness and the Form of a Philosophical Life
- 9 Epictetus: ‘The Beginning of Philosophy …’
- 10 Ted Hughes: Evaporation, Translation, Translocation
- 11 Philosophy as an Inventive Convergence of Methods
- 12 Richard Norman: ‘The Truths It Contains Are Human Truths’
- 13 Perspectives: Marmalade Stains on the Breakfast Table
- 14 David Hume: Wanting the Natural Sentiments of Humanity
- 15 ‘What is the Difference between Love and God’s Love?’
- 16 ‘Peace, Wild Wooddove, Shy Wings Shut’
- 17 ‘Only a Little Snivelling Half-Wit Can Maintain That’
- 18 ‘The World Is Too Much with Us’
- 19 Of Self and SELF, of Ātman and Anātman
- 20 ‘I Am Myself Alone’
- 21 The Five Heaps or Skandhas
- 22 ‘We Claim That There Is a Person, but We Do Not Say That He Is an Entity’
- 23 Birds, Frogs, and Tintern Abbey
- 24 Human Resources and Hubris
- References
- Index
5 - Wittgenstein’s Cool Temple
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Shakespearean Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Spiritually Enlightened Individual’
- 2 ‘The Resources of a Much Earlier Phase of the Tradition’
- 3 The Distractions of Baruch Spinoza
- 4 Immanuel Kant: ‘To Regard as Petty What We Are Otherwise Anxious About’
- 5 Wittgenstein’s Cool Temple
- 6 Rilke, Shakespeare … and a Little Freud
- 7 Concealment and Revelation
- 8 Mindfulness and the Form of a Philosophical Life
- 9 Epictetus: ‘The Beginning of Philosophy …’
- 10 Ted Hughes: Evaporation, Translation, Translocation
- 11 Philosophy as an Inventive Convergence of Methods
- 12 Richard Norman: ‘The Truths It Contains Are Human Truths’
- 13 Perspectives: Marmalade Stains on the Breakfast Table
- 14 David Hume: Wanting the Natural Sentiments of Humanity
- 15 ‘What is the Difference between Love and God’s Love?’
- 16 ‘Peace, Wild Wooddove, Shy Wings Shut’
- 17 ‘Only a Little Snivelling Half-Wit Can Maintain That’
- 18 ‘The World Is Too Much with Us’
- 19 Of Self and SELF, of Ātman and Anātman
- 20 ‘I Am Myself Alone’
- 21 The Five Heaps or Skandhas
- 22 ‘We Claim That There Is a Person, but We Do Not Say That He Is an Entity’
- 23 Birds, Frogs, and Tintern Abbey
- 24 Human Resources and Hubris
- References
- Index
Summary
A commonplace criticism of Buddhist and other traditions, including the Christian, is that they appear to see the elimination rather than the transmutation of the passions as a basic desideratum. This unfortunate misconception, which is not wholly without foundation – there are phases in various traditions which seem all too vulnerable – fails to recognize that it is a particular subgroup of human emotion that is problematic, the klesas, the unskilful roots from which other passions flow; but it doesn’t follow that they are to be repressed or ‘excised’. We could reserve the expression ‘the passions’ for this negative subgroup, although Descartes, Hume, and other Early Modern philosophers use the term more generically to refer to ‘emotions’ tout court and Hume himself distinguishes between the calm and the violent passions.
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- Spirituality for the GodlessBuddhism, Humanism, and Religion, pp. 37 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021