Natural enthusiasm: A Western spiritual context for the contemporary humanistic orientation in psychology and education

A contemporary "humanistic" approach to psychology and education was formulated during the early 1960's which sought to liberate body, mind, and emotions from Western scientific, religious, and other enculturation processes that lacked the ability to adequately reflect the spirit and aliveness of the full human potential. By the 1980's, however, the humanistic effort to untangle the human potential from limiting categories of Western thought had itself become entangled within its own lack of conceptual clarity--specifically in regards to its willingness to include spiritual ideation within an open definition of the human experiential capacity.;The problem of clarifying contemporary humanistic spiritual ideation is approached in this study through the method of historical inquiry into Western religious and intellectual traditions and comparative analysis of humanistic tenets with those traditions. The basic finding is that a major source for the confusion surrounding humanistic spiritual ideation is the contention that the contemporary humanistic image of human reality is something new to Western thought. The study identifies a trajectory in Western thought that parallels the experiential, organismic, holistic, teleologic, and growth strategies that are central to the contemporary humanistic effort to counter mechanistic and negative religious images of human nature. This trajectory has been operative since the beginning of the Modern era, having received its formative expression in the early eighteenth century writings of the English philosopher, Lord Shaftesbury, and his naturalistic re-interpretation of religious enthusiasm. Full development of the trajectory is found in the philosophical and theological systems constructed during the Romantic period. The most basic identifying characteristic of the trajectory is a two fold opposition to interpreting natural and spiritual reality solely in terms of either mechanistic philosophy or the tenets of Judeo-Christian orthodoxy. Additional characteristics of the trajectory include a collapsing of the traditional Western dualistic separation between the natural and spiritual and a subsequent identification of both with an organismic, growth, and wholeness oriented source of wisdom that is intrinsic to the human experiential processes of life. The study concludes that the contemporary humanistic orientation is but a sketchy outline of the fully developed historical philosophies and theologies that have been constructed within the modern Western trajectory of "natural enthusiasm," and that much of the confusion and controversy surrounding the contemporary humanistic orientation has accompanied this trajectory through the centuries.