The Secular Mind [Hardcover]

Robert Coles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1999

Does the business of daily living distance us from life's mysteries? Do most Americans value spiritual thinking more as a hobby than as an all-encompassing approach to life? Will the concept of the soul be defunct after the next few generations? Child psychiatrist and best-selling author Robert Coles offers a profound meditation on how secular culture has settled into the hearts and minds of Americans. This book is a sweeping essay on the shift from religious control over Western society to the scientific dominance of the mind. Interwoven into the story is Coles's personal quest for understanding how the sense of the sacred has stood firm in the lives of individuals--both the famous and everyday people whom he has known--even as they have struggled with doubt.

As a student, Coles questioned Paul Tillich on the meaning of the "secular mind," and his fascination with the perceived opposition between secular and sacred intensified over the years. This book recounts conversations Coles has had with such figures as Anna Freud, Karen Horney, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day. Their words dramatize the frustration and the joy of living in both the secular and sacred realms. Coles masterfully draws on a variety of literary sources that trace the relationship of the sacred and the secular: the stories of Abraham and Moses, the writings of St. Paul, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Darwin, and Freud, and the fiction of George Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, Flannery O'Connor, and Huxley. Ever since biblical times, Coles shows us, the relationship between these two realms has thrived on conflict and accommodation.

Coles also notes that psychoanalysis was first viewed as a rival to religion in terms of getting a handle on inner truths. He provocatively demonstrates how psychoanalysis has either been incorporated into the thinking of many religious denominations or become a type of religion in itself. How will people in the next millennium deal with advances in chemistry and neurology? Will these sciences surpass psychoanalysis in controlling how we think and feel? This book is for anyone who has wondered about the fate of the soul and our ability to seek out the sacred in our constantly changing world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robert Coles employs a gestalt method for describing contemporary spirituality in The Secular Mind, a memoirish meditation on the replacement of religion by science as the determining force of Western intellectual culture. The book offers a wide range of reflections on its eponymous topic, inspired by conversations Coles had with such figures as Paul Tillich, William Carlos Williams, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy--all of whom felt conflicted about feeling comfortable living in both the secular and sacred realms. Coles also offers lively readings of the Bible, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Freud, and others, to demonstrate ancient and modern definitions of secular culture.

Coles's basic historical point is not very controversial: "Once an alternative to entrenched religious life ... secularity became an aspect of individualism, as societies became less and less dominated by church life, more and more capitalistic in nature." More interesting are his thoughts on the future of secularism. He predicts that the mind's curiosity will ultimately master the brain's most complex functions (including emotion and creativity). Yet for all his confidence in the power of psychopharmacology, Coles avers that the scientific victory will never be complete. There will always be need of "an 'otherness' to address through words become acts of appeal, of worried alarm, of lively and grateful expectation: please, oh please, let things go this way, and not in that direction." This "introspective, moral pause," Coles writes, is the secular mind's "very own kind of sanctity." --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

Coles, a Harvard professor of psychiatry and social ethics and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis, is one of those rare writers who can gracefully combine intellectual rigor with the idiom of spiritual quest. Here, despite the title, Coles is concerned not just with the secular mind?the mind that exists and exerts its will in the contentious world?but with the blurry intersection of the secular and the sacred. "I try," he writes, "to explore this matter of two minds, secular thinking and its constant search for moral, if not spiritual, sanction." Over the years, Coles has interviewed notable theologians, psychiatrists, novelists and poets, juxtaposing their clinical and aesthetic takes on the psychology of the human soul with experiences of ordinary people. He discusses the writings of Freud, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, William Carlos Williams and Kierkegaard, among others. Throughout the book, Coles meditates on the paradox that it is as a scientist that he approaches questions traditionally deemed religious or spiritual. It's a paradox that, as Coles notes, manifests in many ways: Freud, who despised religion, became an object of "secular idolatry" as his work displaced the interior spiritual world that "had been the territory of religion." Coles also includes the not-at-all-famous, such as an Italian immigrant woman who realized the high cost of her Americanization: "When I prayed to God, I used to talk to Him, now I talk to myself." Finally, Coles assesses the impact of technology, including the possibility that science, in the form of neurology or genetics, may discern?and eventually mediate with drugs?human qualities, such as "goodness" or "badness," that once were in the realm of the spiritual. The brevity and conversational style of the book is deceptive; this is a potent and powerful work readers will think about and return to again and again.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; 2nd prt. edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691058059
• ISBN-13: 978-0691058054
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,505,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Coles is professor emeritus at Harvard University and the author of numerous books, including his series Children of Crisis, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. He has also won a MacArthur Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a National Humanities Medal. He lives in Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars quirky insight into fundamental questions, July 25, 2001

By 

Michael Guttentag (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Secular Mind (Paperback)

I am a Robert Coles fan. I remember him as the most inspiring lecturer at Harvard with his quiet and sincere voice. That said I have found most of his writing a disappointment. Finally, with "The Secular Mind" Coles has written a book that is accessible; it may not be as stirring as his lectures (which might show just how important his actual voice is), but at least with this book the reader can get a sense of the quirky and exciting way Coles strives to address the most basic human questions.

The reason this book succeeds more than his others is, I think, because it retains much of the spirit of his lectures. Coles takes a few simple questions: what is the difference between the religious life and the secular life? When, how and why has the secular way of thinking become more dominant in the last two hundred years? How do we deal with these changes given our shared desire for faith and purpose? Coles then consider how many thinkers he respects, including William Carlos Williams, Anna Freud, Dorthy Day, and Walker Percy, have responded to these questions. Part of what is unique about Coles is that he had the chutzpah to seek out and spend plenty of time with these thinkers. The result is a book that is intimate as well as profound.

But this book is not without its faults. I don't understand why Coles insists on making his books so inaccessible. For one thing, this book lacks any kind of index. And then there are his sentences. He can't resist the parenthetical. At every turn there is a clause within a clause. This sentence about George Elliot is typical: "She was, of course, decades ahead of Freud, in her acknowledgement, that way, of the unconscious, its raw power constantly assertive, no matter our notion of ourselves as in (conscious) control of what we say or do." (p. 65)

On balance, Coles is an interesting thinker, willing to raise the most profound personal questions about faith and purpose, and this book is a nice taste of his way of talking and thinking.

20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Rambling disappointment, September 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Secular Mind (Hardcover)

I'm a big Robert Coles fan, so perhaps my expectations were too high for this book. It purports to chart the "fate of the soul...in our constantly changing world," but instead seems to drift from chapter to chapter and even from paragraph to paragraph without direction. His favorite method of introducing the reader to legendary figures in politics, literature and the arts does not work here; he doesn't devote enough time to putting flesh on them (e.g. Kierkegaard, Darwin, Freud, Eliot, O'Connor). Re-read Harvard Diary instead.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing esp. at end, March 8, 2002

By 

"henningrights" (New Haven, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secular Mind (Paperback)

I like Robert Coles' work - he's been an important influence on decades of Harvard undergraduates, of which I was one. This book was useful in some of his reflections - esp. of Walker Percy & Flannery O'Connor and their strategies for exposing the grande folie of the secular mind in an age when the sacred is often ignored, or even its presence not known of. But the end section, "looking ahead," revealed the underlying flaw of his somewhat rambling book - (were these speeches? they read like it - but there's no evidence in the book these were lectures). He seems to have bought into the "promise" of biology, through psychopharmacology, to reveal human truths and expose our mystery, as it were. So his book reads as an elegy for the sacred, bowing to the human mind here where not before (Freud, Communism, etc.) But, he brought up biology in the first place, in the context of how we once thought state-control (fascism and communism) would forever crush the human spirit - and it did not. What happened to his argument in the case of biology? My own thought, is that he has chosen to make his home at Harvard, which is the nerve-center of the secular mind in this country. He seems to have no self-awareness of this, so accepts scientific biology (Harvard Med School stuff) as the final word -the death-knell of the sacred. This left me feeling very unsatisfied - some defender of the sacred here, he does not earn the high ground to diagnose "the secular mind".