Is There Progress in Philosophy?
Where Philosophy might meet Spirituality
Science accumulates. I can use gravity without ever rederiving Newton, build on a result I could not have reached myself, start higher than the person before me. Knowledge is handed down and the next person inherits the summit. That is the whole point of a field.
Philosophy looks like it fails at this. The same questions return in every generation, rederived from scratch, as if nothing carried forward. But that reading misses the actual progress. Philosophy progresses by subtraction. The moment a question becomes answerable by a reliable method it stops being called philosophy and becomes a science. Physics left home. So did mathematics, logic, much of psychology. Every success is renamed and exported, hence what we call philosophy at any moment is only the residue, the questions that have not yet found a method, which is exactly why it looks like it never moves.
That still flatters the idea that philosophy is special in being non-transmissible, and it is not. At the frontier of any field you have to rederive. Nobody builds at the edge of physics on borrowed results either. The real difference is granularity. Physics has functional lower rungs. I can use the formula correctly my whole life without touching its foundations, and the rung works in isolation.
Spirituality has no such rung. Anything below the peak is not a working partial version, it is borrowed vocabulary, which is why Stoicism arrives as fifty life tips with the metaphysics stripped out and changes nothing. The lower rungs of physics are functional. The lower rungs of spirituality are counterfeit. The reason is directional. Philosophy looks through the lens at the object. Spirituality turns and looks at the lens. An outward field has an object you can build an instrument around, and the instrument becomes the rung you hand to the next person. The inward turn has no object, only the seeing itself, hence nothing to instrument, hence nothing exportable, hence permanent rederivation.
The obvious objection is that the contemplative traditions clearly do map their interiors. The jhanas are ranked. The mystics chart their stages. A teacher names the next obstacle. But these are maps of the path rather than transmissions of the insight. A map of a mountain shows you the route and the places people fall. It cannot carry you up. The formula carries you, it launches the satellite without the climb. So spirituality has navigational granularity and never the substitutive kind. The rung guides the rederivation, it never replaces it.
It is also what you feel coming off certain people, a teacher, a monk, someone wholly inside it. Not a transmission of the content. An existence proof. It tells you the thing is real and reachable, the way watching someone solve a problem you cannot yet solve proves it is solvable without handing you the answer. It orients. It does not deliver.
Which leaves the questions I cannot answer, and I would rather pose them than counterfeit a rung.
Is the spiritual the far end of a single spectrum with physics at the other, a difference of degree, or a different kind of thing altogether? Is the real cut between fields the direction of attention, through the lens or at it, or is that too neat? And the one I keep returning to: the turn from seeing the apparatus that throws the shadows to whatever lies past it, is that a turn toward something real that no description ever reaches, or is the beyond just the name we give the questions we have given up making tractable?
I do not know. That may be the point.
Sparked by the Modern Wisdom interview with Alex O’Connor and Joe Folley (#1012, “Is Being Smart Worth the Depression?”).