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An integrated philosophical account of human nature that places spirituality at its core while drawing on depth psychology, ethics, religion, and cross-cultural thought to bridge modern skepticism and lived spiritual experience.
What is human nature—truly? Is it confined to psychology, biology, or culture, or does it open onto something deeper that we have too often neglected?
In Spirituality and Human Nature, Donald Evans offers a bold and integrative vision of the human person that brings spirituality back into the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry. Drawing on Western depth psychology, Eastern meditation traditions, Christian thought, and contemporary philosophy, Evans argues that the spiritual dimension is not an optional add-on to human life, but its most fundamental reality.
Moving with clarity and intellectual range, Evans engages pressing questions at the intersection of skepticism, ethics, religion, and personal transformation. He explores the tensions between openness and closure in the self, the meaning of love and moral development, the nature of evil, and the relationship between spirituality and social action. Along the way, he critically examines modern skepticism and positivism while remaining attentive to lived experience and contemplative insight.
"This book has been written by a proven author and senior philosopher who knows western thought inside out, yet he sees the need for a larger conception of human nature that is open to the spiritual dimension and treats that dimension as the fundamental reality. In presenting such a view of human nature and spirituality, Evans draws deeply and insightfully from western depth psychology, Eastern meditation psychology, Christian thought, and his own experience. The book is very accessible to both general readers and scholars." — Harold Coward, University of Calgary
"I have recommended this book to a number of people as the best really up-to-date work of spirituality. It integrates insights from ethics, theology, depth psychology, and continental philosophy in a way that is especially the author's own, but which is to me totally convincing. It also throws a flood of light on phenomena associated with the 'new age' movement." — Hugo a. Meynell, University of Calgary
"What distinguishes his writings is a remarkable attempt to integrate those various segments of human existence which our culture has, over the centuries, separated: our mental life and our bodily awareness, our contemplative needs and the moral demands of our time, our secular endeavors and our sense of transcendence, our 'natural' sense of selfhood, and the 'supernatural' systems in which we have expressed its intrinsic dependence, our religious/cultural identity and our openness to other religions and different cultures. This book creatively deals with all of these oppositions." — Louis Dupre, Yale University
Donald Evans is Professor of Philosophy at Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada. His previous publications include Struggle and Fulfillment: The Inner Dynamics of Religion and Morality, and Faith, Authenticity, and Morality.
Preface
Introduction
Section 1. Spirituality and Depth Psychology
I. On Being Open and Closed
II. On Loving Oneself Well
III. Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Art of Therapy
Section 2. Spirituality and Skepticism
IV. Two Dogmas of Skepticism Concerning Spiritual Reality
V. Positivism and the Paranormal
VI. Positivism and the Genuinely Spiritual
Section 3. Spirituality and Ethics
VII. Mystical Humanism and Morality
VIII. On the Nature and Origin of Good and Evil in Human Beings
Section 4. Spirituality and Religion
IX. Spirituality and Social Action
X. Spirituality and Christian Openness to Other Faiths
XI. Spiritual Reality, Academic Skepticism, and Transfiguration
Postscript
Notes
Index