Spirituality as weak experience
Spirituality is weak
It is more innate to spirituality being weak; it cannot and should not be “convincing”. I have written “convincing” in quotation marks to highlight the original, etymological sense of the term; that is, spirituality does not assert itself through arguments, both because there are no arguments that cannot be countered with equally valid criticisms and objections, and because our reasoning is largely conditioned by psychological and various other impulses, so an argument, even if the most stringent and mathematical, cannot stand against one’s impulse to defend their own need or to act on their own instinct.
Spirituality thrives on experience rather than reflection; reflection can be lived as an experience as well, but this just confirms the importance of living things as experience rather than by theoretical conviction. In this sense, even confrontation, debating, discussing, have their value and main sense in the experience that the protagonists, through them, carry forward, rather than in the content of the debating.
The persuasive capacity of spirituality cannot but be weak; in this sense, the idea of weakness is linked to the way Gianni Vattimo treated it in his “weak thought”. Unlike Vattimo’s thought, which is a philosophy, in human spirituality we find ourselves, rather than in a “weak thought”, in a “weak experience”. In summary, in our relation to other people, to those who think differently, spirituality modestly and essentially defines itself as making an experience exist in this world. Then experience itself will make its way in the world. Our task should be mainly listening to this experience that also makes its way within us, contributing to define it, and trying to practice forms of fidelity, of loyalty, to the extent that these virtues involve our sensibility and our appreciation. Even regarding fidelity and loyalty, they are not convincing values, but only ways of navigating within our humanity, among instincts, more or less rational, self-criticism, and our impulse to live and walk.
Additional notes
“Weak spirituality” practically means having to accept being meaningless, without a plan. It is a difficult thing for our mind because we, as humans, have some tendency to see some kind of logic in things, a tendency to consider the “why”, the reason, the meaning, where things are going to, where they come from, especially in an existential sense. “Weakness”, as an act of distancing ourselves from a traditional way of thinking, which originates from Greek philosophy, means practicing, training, not relying on this, because logic, meaning, are things that can be criticized and, in the end, do not hold up.
“Spirituality” as a life experience can be appropriately understood as a local experience. “Local” means limited to a certain time and space, in such a way that, outside of this time and space, this spirituality will be zero, even completely non-existent, but this has to be conceived not as a necessity, as a truth, but as a possibility: it may also be that spirituality is like this. So “local”, in a context of “time”, means that, when it ends, when I finish, I die, it could also be as if I had never existed, leaving no trace, no memory, nothing, total zero. In this sense it means that what we call “hope”, as a condition of our existence, is a beautiful thing, but not to consider necessary. Our difficulties about this idea can be traced back to our still current habit of thinking in a metaphysical way. Actually, nothing is banned in what I say, an alternative is always possible to every perspective.
In other words, it is a question about not divinizing, not deifying gods. In this sense, what we call hope could become a god to the extent that we establish that it is necessary, so that otherwise it is not possible to think, to live. Even meaning, our need for a meaning, risks becoming a god if we establish that meaning is necessary or even indisputable, that it just exists, whether we think about it or not. On the other side, we should also avoid deifying the denial of any god. It is therefore not a question of establishing certainties in the form of deifications or, vice versa, deifications in the form of certainties. It is rather a question of admitting possibilities, admitting the possibility of total nonsense.
In other words, spirituality is historical, it is part of history, it is nothing other than history, and history, from the Greek point of view, which requires certainties, universalisms, can be considered as a weakness, which is unacceptable for some people.
Speaking of history, spirituality can be considered historical because it requires contents, it needs facts, it needs something to happen. Spirituality is human, therefore it is born with us, is born with the world, it is realized with it, with the facts that occur in it and with the facts of which we are also creators.
Something that in spirituality is important even more than facts or contents of history is the style with which we consider them, we live them, with which we interpret them. In this sense, what matters for spirituality is our way of doing things, especially considering that evil is inevitable, we cannot escape it and so what matters is how to live it, how to deal with it; we are “dying” beings, as well as “living” being, we are beings for death, what matters then is how we die.
