Christopher Harding
Alan Watts, for All His Faults, Was a Wildly Imaginative and Provocative Thinker Who Reimagined Religion in a Secular Age
Alan Watts was a provocative and imaginative thinker who reimagined religion in a secular age. Watts divided opinion during his lifetime, with some praising his ability to communicate complex ideas and challenge traditional beliefs, while others criticized him for lacking academic credentials and peddling a mix of Eastern philosophies. His personal life also drew criticism, as his affairs and low view of fatherhood caused turmoil within his family. Despite these criticisms, Watts's ideas continue to resonate with many, and his work has influenced subsequent thinkers and religious figures. Watts's exploration of the tension between need, desire, and obligation in the religious instinct remains relevant today.
One’s aim instead should be to tackle the monstrous case of mistaken identity from which so many modern Westerners suffered: each believing themselves to be a small, anxious self when underneath lay a glorious greater Self, entirely at one with the rest of reality. (View Highlight)
A decade earlier, C S Lewis had completed his journey via Idealism and pantheism to theism. He was far from alone: many in that era, and since, have found the borders between these views – or experiences – of life to be quite porous (View Highlight)
Here was a difficulty that had bedevilled Western interest in Asian and especially Indian thought for centuries. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had fallen out of love with Indian Idealism when he began to suspect that it was little but a ‘painted Atheism’. For him, the value of nature and solitude lay – in part, at least – in their potential to lead people beyond themselves to the divine source of all. The Idealism of Indian philosophers like Shankara (c8th century) came perilously close, in Coleridge’s understanding at least, to picturing nature as a giant conjuring trick or a veil with nothing behind it. As Coleridge put it in one of his poems: > … If the breath > Be Life itself, and not its task and tent, > If even a soul like Milton’s can know death; > Oh Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant … Coleridge’s qualms about Indian Idealism emerged from an older European squeamishness about pantheism. And this was precisely the heresy of which some of Watts’s colleagues at seminary suspected him. (View Highlight)