Spirituality for the Godless starts right in the middle of things. By page 2 we have mused briefly on Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece and witnessed the “Cordelian voice,” from King Lear, in dialogue with the Karaṇiyametta Sutta from the Pali Canon. To call McGhee’s work eclectic is a bit of an understatement: the book consists of twenty-four chapters, some as short as three pages, with titles like “Wittgenstein’s Cool Temple” and “Only a Little Snivelling Half-Wit Can Maintain That.” It reads like a whirlwind tour of continental and Buddhist philosophical and literary traditions with an obscure itinerary, but relentless enthusiasm.
McGhee holds an appointment in philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and he describes his work as “a modest set of proposals about how Buddhism can offer a non-theistic contribution to an intercultural conception of the philosophy of religion” (5, emphasis by the author). He refers on at least three occasions to Daya Krishna’s (1924–2007) intervention at a 1960 symposium in New York, calling out the ethnic and religious parochialism of most Western thought. At stake is more than an additive or strictly comparative venture into new territory; instead, engagement with Eastern traditions facilitates a transformative “return to the sources” for the whole philosophical project. “Personally,” McGhee writes toward the middle of the book, “my own Buddhist practice, such as it is, has made me aware of strands or aspects of Western philosophy that I might otherwise have overlooked or neglected, and has seemed congenial to the ancient conception of philosophy as a form of therapeia” (89). Elsewhere he uses different language for the same idea: philosophy as right mindfulness (55–56), as cultivated practice (64–65), and as “an inventive convergence of methods” or “a set of resources within a community that strives to live well” (75).
The allure of such an approach appears to be twofold: it recenters questions of moral agency on one’s intrinsic character rather than extrinsic commands, while also offering a nontheistic spiritualization of contemporary secularism. The argument is not systematic, nor are the chapters organized into sections. One can, nevertheless, intuit successive waves of inquiry inching up the beach. A first such wave (chapters 1–7) develops through a series of short illustrations, a notion of spirituality as a form of seeing or perception of reality, both within and beyond its pervasive concealment by selfishness, egoism, and a shared grasping for domination. A second wave (chapters 8–13) extends this insight to the practice of philosophy, discussed previously. A third wave (chapters 14–18) takes up the issue of moral agency explicitly, and this is followed by an extended meditation on the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anātman or anatta) in chapters 19–22. I found this section of the book the most intriguing, insofar as McGhee attempts to retrieve a realistic, if not substantialist, account of Buddhist selfhood and engages in a spirited, critical comparison with nondualist (Advaita) Hinduism. The final wave of the work (chapters 23–24) suggests that such Buddhist accounts of self and spiritual practice may offer a valuable corrective to the attenuated anthropologies of Western secular humanism.
McGhee’s book is a worthy read. At the same time, the accounts of Buddhism and Hinduism are somewhat weak in historical contextualization, and the work would also benefit from a stronger focus and argumentative structure. I was frustrated, for example, that aside from the last two chapters, McGhee’s accounts of secular humanism were usually marginal, such as his passing comment that “If anything is ‘missing’ in secular accounts, it is this background spiritual community dedicated to this kind of practice, as a preparation for life” (104). There’s a lot to unpack in that short statement!
Or perhaps this desire for focus and system is yet another form of grasping, when what is required is something more like aesthetic receptivity, holding oneself ready for a glimpse of reality when the moment is right. Either way, the book merits a place in any academic library, as well as in upper-level or graduate courses in comparative philosophy and philosophy of religion.
