SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD. ATHEISTIC SPIRITUALITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF ANDRE COMTE-SPONVILLE

The article engages with the issue of spirit and spirituality in the work of Andre Comte-Sponville. The authors' starting point is his understanding of spirit within the naturalistic position that denies its freedom and sees it as a product of nature. This points towards the fundamental problem of determinism and denial of freedom that Comte-Sponville postulates when it comes to spirituality. Relying on the Buddhist tradition, he attempts to ground spirituality that is free of God and religion. However, the difficulty arises when it comes to understanding of negation that, in Buddhist as well as Comte-Sponville's sense, ends in affirmation of, on the one hand, Nirvana and, on the other hand, Comte-Sponville's trust towards reality and everything that is. His concept of absolute that is without consciousness, will, or mind ends in spirituality that diminishes itself, insofar as it is revealed as just another human projection, while the practice of liberation from ego does not show that the ego does not participate in its own liberation from itself. The irruption of the spirit that questions every imaginable certitude presupposes the claim that the spirit transcends its own determinacy and that the irruption of the spirit can only be real out of freedom. The most excellent achievement of the spirit is love for which it is capable and which it recognises in the call of the absolute that has a face. Comte-Sponville tries to put what is spiritual, unutterable, mysterious into the centre of human reflection and that is a great contribution to philosophical thought.