Undoing such essentialized oppositions, however, is precisely Bender’s intention. American spirituality, she argues, tends to be marginalized by the sociology of religion. It is often defined as distinct from religion, an individualized “lifestyle” choice enabled by modern consumerism, and a residual practice in a secular age. She brilliantly dissolves the binary distinctions between religion and spirituality, as well as enchantment and secularism, by analyzing the experiences, activities, traditions, and spaces of spiritual practitioners. Such “fields” are multiple and overlapping, confusing the neat categorizations that scholars of religion have generated since the early twentieth century: “Particular metaphysical . . . traditions thrive through practices that locate and dislocate, historicize and dehistoricize, spiritualize and secularize, embody and offer an escape from embodiment.” For all of its fuzziness and complexity, Bender maintains that she can identify a “something” called spirituality, which is actively produced within the “entanglements” of manifold fields in contemporary America. Thus, her book, rather than being a local history of an atavistic outlook, significantly explores “how the nonsecular remains woven deeply into our language and habits.” It is a welcome addition to other recent exposés of how Western modernity remains enchanted in historically specific ways, not least by its own peculiar faith in secular disenchantment.

Bender’s choice of terms—“entanglement,” “fields”—suggests a conceptual outlook influenced by the “New Physics” of quantum mechanics, rather than the preceding Newtonian physics that significantly shaped Max Weber’s understanding of modernity as “disenchanted.” For Weber, the rationalization of the West meant that everything could, “in principle,” be quantified and calculated. The traditional world of spirits had become a mechanistic world of brute matter; extrinsic meaning had been evacuated from a universe governed by the impersonal laws of force and motion. In a passage that continued to influence views of Western secularism until the late twentieth century, Weber claimed that in modernity,

there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather . . . one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.

This Newtonian outlook was hospitable to the essentialist logic of binary oppositions, however much Weber himself insisted that his own definitions were “ideal types” intended to explain complex phenomena. The quantum outlook of recent scholars like Bender replaces such equal and opposite dualisms—enchantment and disenchantment, spirituality and secularity—with a notion of complementarity. Seemingly opposed elements are now understood to be mutually constituting and entangled; apparently discrete items change their configurations when viewed from new vantage points or fields. In the past two decades, scholarship on modernity has tended to adopt a “both/and” perspective rather than the “either/or” categories that characterized earlier analyses.

Bender proves false the common distinction between religious practice, as being organized around institutions and traditions, and spiritual practice, as being individualist and market-driven. Many of those whom she interviewed in Cambridge belonged to overlapping organizations, both secular and religious, which shaped their practices and experiences. Some were connected to alternative medicine clinics, or art collectives, or mainstream congregations, or a combination of groups, which became entangled with how spiritual experiences were manifested and understood. Yoga, for example, could have different spiritual implications when practiced in a church than when practiced in an alternative medicine clinic or the relatively ecumenical space of a Health Fair. She also shows that the sociological distinction between a religious experience, on the one hand, and an account of that experience, on the other, is undermined by the testimonies of her subjects. A number insisted that their accounts manifested the vital energies of their original encounter with a metaphysical order.

Bender acknowledges that “spirituality,” like “religion,” is a fuzzy category: there are “many overlapping spiritualities that relate in different ways to various institutional fields in American society.” Nevertheless, her own subjects maintain that spiritual practices have “family resemblances,” partly because the spiritual networks in Cambridge overlap in terms of interests and membership. Bender seems to believe this as well; there are discernible contours to the representation of spirituality that her book provides. She uses terms like “mystics” and “metaphysicals” as synonyms for the “spiritual,” and traces the historical affiliation of contemporary spiritual practices to nineteenth- and twentieth-century antecedents, such as Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and New Thought, which Catherine Albanese has deemed “the American metaphysical religion.” Bender’s subjects believe in a metaphysical realm of vital energies, etheric bodies, and past lives that can be accessed through esoteric techniques as well as “scientific” methods like astral photography and hypnotic regression. Although she doesn’t state this categorically, the implication of The New Metaphysicals is that modern American spirituality is grounded firmly in metaphysics, for plausible historical reasons.

At various points in her stimulating exposition, I wanted to leave the world of quantum scholarship, with its tolerant emphasis on “both/and,” and resurrect some binary distinctions, however tentative and qualified. One of these distinctions has to do with the new metaphysicals’ concept of science, and its institutionalized practice around the globe—the version of science that is arguably at the core of Western modernity. Bender notes that the Cambridge metaphysicals believe that their spirituality “fully conforms to modern society. Like all things modern, they tell me, it is grounded on verifiable facts, objective truths, or experimental results.” Many perceive the spirit and its manifestations as a form of energy, and thus as capable of being explained scientifically. Yet, when they inform her about the “scientific” existence of the “esoteric planet” Vulcan, which consists of etheric matter, and is located between the Sun and Mercury, Bender doesn’t prod them about their understandings of science. Instead, she observes impartially that even social scientists have recourse to mysterious explanatory “forces.”  This “both/and” outlook is hardly convincing. A metaphysical force like “astral energy” is not comparable to a heuristic force like “the economy.” The latter tends to be employed self-reflexively and contingently, whereas the former tends to be buttressed by mere assertion and blind faith. Bender is not always so neutral; she does critique her subjects for their unreflective imperialistic attitudes when it comes to religion, as they blithely assume that the rest of the world shares their American concept of a perennial philosophy. But she never interrogates them about what they mean by “science.”

“Both/and” won’t do here: there is a fundamental tension between the sanitizing language of science employed by Bender’s subjects and the normative practices of the global scientific community that would have been useful to explore. She points out that many metaphysicals derive some of their notions from pseudo-scientific works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when accounts of lost continents, reincarnation, mind-over-matter, and the like flourished. Some of these works were compatible with the scientific knowledge of their day, but have since been debunked. Why, then, do they continue to exert such a compelling influence today upon a widely educated and information savvy populace? And what might this embrace of pseudo-science suggest about the metaphysicals’ resolute claims to be “modern,” or about our own understanding of how “modernity” is defined?  Could spirituality be compatible with scientific naturalism? Bender’s new metaphysicals would seem to say “no,” but the topic is not addressed.

There will be many readers of this sophisticated and accessible book who, though they define themselves as “spiritual,” won’t recognize their experiences or practices in those of the new metaphysicals. They may even find “metaphysical” and “secular” to be incompatible terms. There are forms of spiritual practice today that revel in self-reflexivity, contingency, and provisionality. Bender’s subjects can at times be critically detached from their own outlooks, but overall, they appear committed to their metaphysical beliefs regardless of evidence. Numerous others, however, retain a sense of “spirituality” alongside healthy doses of skepticism about improbable claims (including scientists like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins). Critical reason can be a source of spiritual enchantment: this is why Sherlock Holmes has remained an iconic modern figure in the West for over a century, whereas his creator’s later belief in spiritualism and fairies puzzles us. Many find a non-metaphysical spirituality through the artifices of the imagination, from the art enshrined on museum walls to the virtual worlds of the media. Fans of Middle-earth, Star Wars, or “World of Warcraft” will often admit to being drawn to the implicit or explicit spirituality embodied by these imaginary worlds, while remaining dubious of essentialist claims that aren’t supported by evidence and critical inquiry. They might be intrigued by the chakras, auras, astral voyages, and out of body experiences embraced by Bender’s subjects, but for them, “esoteric evidence” is insufficient for modern spiritual practice. (Reliance on such “evidence” might even appear anti-modern.)

There are Other Worlds of spiritual practice, no doubt thriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that are inadvertently occluded by this book’s singular focus. At the same time, Bender’s nuanced methodology will help us to clarify them. Her new metaphysicals might be the most visible element in the American spiritual spectrum, but we need to cast our observations wider if we are to take the full measure of its ongoing radiance.

One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of debates that we take to be self-evident.  In An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stefanos Geroulanos shows us this fluidity by focusing on the French history of objections to (and reformulations of) humanist discourse from 1929 to 1952, a history that suggests that the rigidity of the categories of “religion” and “humanism” in Anglophone discourse is exceptional and unnecessary.  In Geroulanos’s history, the first chinks in post-Feuerbachean humanism in France appeared in the 1930s as a result of advances in quantum physics, particularly Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  These made it impossible to see the mind as truly mirroring the world, and thereby made it impossible to construct a metaphysics of man that could open up a path of progress toward a telos of history in which truth would be made universally manifest.  One wonders how our culture wars would play out today if the philosophers who intervene in them were as trained in physics as they are in evolutionary biology.  Indeed, as Geroulanos notes in his concluding pages, the long shadow that the philosophy of physics has cast over Francophone philosophy of science means that contemporary French philosophers of biology such as Henri Atlan can affirm a non-theological and non-dogmatic, yet antihumanist, stance that is absent from the popular press in the UK and America.  (Geroulanos is co-editor of Henri Atlan: Selected Writings, to be published late this summer by Fordham University Press.)

This antihumanist turn can be a turn away from religion.  Indeed, in the customary story of philosophical antihumanism—I think of the compact and powerful narrative of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s antihumanism near the opening of Reiner Schürmann’s Heidegger on Being and Acting—antihumanism is part and parcel of a broader attack on foundational discourses, including theology.  The potential of a phrase such as “antihumanist atheist,” then, is that it could serve as a category that could offer arguments against the foundationalist narratives of religious authorities as well as of those who describe human animals in essentially computational terms.  Its articulation of what Geroulanos calls an “antifoundational realism” would cast a pox on the houses of both the buffered and the porous.

Nevertheless, such a phrase—if it were to be useful as an expression of skeptical voices in our contemporary discourses—would have to defend its own stance.  More specifically, it would have to show that atheism proceeds apace from antihumanism, that the attack on one foundational discourse (the metaphysics of man) entails an attack on all possible foundational discourses.

In this regard, the story that Geroulanos tells is less helpful, although no less fascinating a story for it.  His title comes from a description by Emmanuel Levinas (in an essay on Maurice Blanchot) of the Heideggerean and Sartrean intellectual scene: “contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist.”  This makes it seem as if antihumanism and atheism emerge in French thought together, but antihumanism emerges earlier, and more clearly, than atheism does.  The broad array of pre-WWII antihumanists whom Geroulanos treats in the first two-thirds of his book includes both secular and religious thinkers.  In addition to an account of Kojève’s atheist anthropotheism, Geroulanos also offers treatments of Catholic attacks on liberal humanism, such as those offered by Jacques Maritain and Henri de Lubac; of Alexandre Koyré (described by Henri Corbin as “a great mystical theosopher”); and of Emmanuel Levinas, whose criticism of essentialist accounts of humanity in the mid-1930s was paired with the claim that only Judaism, and specifically the temporality underlying its account of repentance, could redeem history from hyper-Hobbesian brutality.  It is in the last third of the book, where Geroulanos offers sketches of postwar thinkers, that atheism begins to emerge as the telos of Geroulanos’s story of French antihumanist claims.  Thus, in a 1946 essay by Maurice Blanchot on de Lubac and Nietzsche, “the negation of God” becomes a key element of an account of the human as the site of freedom.  What accounts for this atheist lag?

Part of the answer surely has to do with the complexities of the antihumanist project at this point in French intellectual history, but part of it may also have to do with a lack of clarity about the nature of atheism.  Let me elaborate, with apologies for brevity.  (My reflections here are inspired by Levinas’s 1968 essay “Humanism and An-archy.”)

What binds all of these antihumanisms together is the denial that self-consciousness can serve as a ground of meaning.  Nevertheless, the claim that self-consciousness is finite (determinate, negative) can be the basis of two apparently opposed claims.  On the one hand, it can lead to a claim that humans cannot definitively access any meaning that would allow them to plan the course of future history for the better; this would cover Jean Hyppolite’s articulation of the “unstable equilibrium” between the human subject and history that Geroulanos treats in his final chapter.  On the other hand, it can lead to the positing of meaning outside the boundaries of a philosophical system; this would cover Levinas’s phenomenology of sensibility and its groping toward a transcendence that can never be conceptualized (it belongs to the “prehistory” of the ego) as the ground of alterity.  Both of these moves are atheist insofar as they deny a place to the concept “God” in systematic thought.  Yet the latter is certainly religious, and somewhat more sanguine about the possibilities of skepticism to achieve short-term liberationist goals.

If the antihumanist atheist can be either “secular” or “religious,” then a fuller account of this position could perhaps lead to the formation of common ground between various persons in their opposition both to those who claim to speak on behalf of God and to those who think that one cannot refuse theology without also refusing religion.  (For this latter claim, see Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.)  But those who would find themselves on that common ground should be careful.  An antihumanist atheist might conclude of the Yeshiva University conversation that there is no good reason to say that divine commands have the determinate content that Orthodox religious authorities say they do.  Yet even if that statement is correct, such an expression of antifoundationalism will be rejected by others as expressing merely another dogmatism that polices culturally strange temperaments.  The ability of the skeptic to be undone by his or her opponents’ own skepticism serves as a reminder of the truth of antihumanism: humans can capture nothing beyond self-consciousness.  Selves are not just porous—they are leaky.