Chapter 1: 'Cataspect' Defined
In which we start things off
“To philosophize is nothing more than to prepare for death” – Michel de Montaigne (paraphrasing Cicero)
“The most general formulation of the religious problem is the question whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities, bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss” – Alfred North Whitehead
This is the first chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.
The knowledge of mortality is a problem to be solved. Not everyone thinks about death a lot, not everyone even necessarily fears death, but most people see death as at least problematic. This is a book about the fear of death, the related threat of meaninglessness and how to deal with these things. The task of religion has historically been, among other things, to disclose the meaning of human life and to console us in our times of trial, so it’s only natural that we begin there.
The term ‘religion’ comes to us from the Latin word ‘religio’ or ‘re-ligio,’ meaning ‘connection’ or ‘re-connection.’1 In its own time, it referred to the connection between man and the gods: the duty of humans to provide offerings and piety, and the loyalty shown by the gods (sometimes, if they felt like it) in recognition of these acts of service. Nowadays, the term ‘religion’ is often reserved for the “major religions,” which is a traditional list usually including at least Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Any organized belief system that doesn’t fall into the list of “major religions” but deals with God, gods, supernatural forces undetectable by scientific means or other similar phenomena is generally called a “folk religion,” “cult” or a “new religious movement” depending on the context. Unorganized involvement or interest in these subjects is termed “spirituality.” In my view, any project of reframing the terms ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’ would be hopeless, but also undesirable. It would be hopeless because the words are too freighted with emotion. I’m referring both to those who are repulsed by the stench of “woo” that surrounds ‘spirituality’ and those who would declare this whole discussion heretical from a religious perspective. It would be undesirable because the psychological needs which religion and spirituality seek to satisfy are capable of being satisfied by beliefs and practices that do not deal with supernatural phenomena, meaning that we require a broader term than ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’ to describe the set of beliefs and practices which satisfy these needs.
What I landed on for a replacement term was ‘cataspect’, from the Greek ‘kata-’ (which has various meanings, but which I here mean to convey a combination of ‘down’ or ‘against’ as in ‘catastrophe’ as well as a sense of completeness as in ‘catalogue’ or ‘catalyst’) and the Latin ‘-spect’ (meaning ‘look’). I define a cataspect (think of its usage like the word ‘aspect’) as a way of looking at first-person experience that provides consolation about mortality and often connection to the sacred as well. It’s how you look (-spect) at your situation when the chips are down (cata-). It has to deal with mortality, but as I said, it will often do this by bringing in a concept of the ‘sacred’, or whatever is the most important thing in the world, and explaining one’s connection to it.
Two metaphors that are useful in thinking of cataspects are the castle keep and the lens. A cataspect is like a castle keep in that it is where you retreat when the barbarians are at the gates. It is much like the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy popular among online debaters, in which the accused has conflated a controversial, complicated point (the bailey) with an easily defended truism (the motte or keep). In our case, it’s not that anything in the bailey is necessarily incorrect, just that it tends to be useless if one is trying to deal with mortality. You can hold onto all kinds of identities, theories or rituals, but the core that sturdies you against your own death is the only one that can be called a cataspect.
A cataspect is like a lens in that it usually discloses the world at a certain scale. Some cataspects zoom so far below the scale of normal human life that no element of personhood is at all relevant there, deeming the self an illusion and experience merely a fleeting property of certain arrangements of matter. Some zoom out a bit, still seeing the ego as illusory, but finding within each person a spark of impersonal, eternal awareness, maintaining at least a small aspect of selfhood. For lenses that sit at the more everyday scale of human life, the self as a person is taken for granted and held as sacred in itself; no other persons are in frame, except perhaps as relatively small, fuzzy blips around the edges. At the furthest remove, the self becomes smaller and smaller until it is dwarfed by one or more Others, whose collective or individual personhood is the locus of sacredness. For the sake of convenience, I’ll occasionally refer to those cataspects that are below the scale of personhood as ‘lensing inward’ and those above as ‘lensing outward’.
My thesis in Part I will be that the need for a cataspect is psychologically unavoidable for humans. The physicist and writer Alan Lightman argues that the human spiritual drive is a spandrel, an “accidental” byproduct of evolution that doesn’t itself tend to increase reproductive success but which is nevertheless conserved, since it is the result of other adaptations that do so.2 The self-concept exists to help us navigate social reality, but it also has an unfortunate side-effect in its interaction with the instinct of death-fear: we uniquely know that we will all someday die, and that knowledge makes us afraid, potentially all the time. Cataspects, in providing consolation about mortality and in many cases providing a sense of connection to the sacred, fulfill the function traditionally held only by religions, or what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “thanatotechnics that… remove the fear of death and produce a feeling of duration” providing “a horizon of meaning extended beyond bare life.”3
It has also been suggested that it was originally derived from ‘re-legare’, or “to read again,” in the sense of paying close attention to ritual observances and duties.
The Transcendent Brain. Pantheon, 2023, pp. 125-126.
The Burnout Society. Stanford Briefs, 2015, p. 18.