The abundance of being
Abbondanza (or Abundantia) was the personification of abundance and prosperity in Roman mythology. She carries a cornucopia from which fruit and flowers flow, and in her other hand, ears of grain – symbols of plenty. William James Desmond, the Irish philosopher, also speaks of the “abundance” of the world in his philosophical writings. He means not only the abundance in nature, but a world full of wonders, overflowing with life and meaning: For him, being is more than we can ever grasp or comprehend. And yet, in everyday life, we usually limit our focus to the tasks ahead of us, to what needs to be done, to functioning – William Desmond describes this as existential dissonance:
In our lives, we repeatedly experience significant things. We fall in love, we suffer illnesses, accidents, sorrow; We make sacrifices, we create art, we have and raise children, we experience loss, we grieve – all of this is meaningful to us. But our learned worldview (see also our article on Jeremy Lent) tells us something different: In an outdated biological perspective, we are nothing more than a highly developed species, consciousness just an epiphenomenon of neural processes. Love is a neurochemical illusion that conceals the fact that we are driven by instincts. Meaning is a story we tell ourselves to better cope with life.
But we don’t function like machines. The separation between functioning on the one hand and the experience of value and meaning tears us apart from within. Thus, moments of love, a starry sky, or a newborn child can touch us deeply, while none of this is socially considered extraordinary. Not exactly a miracle.
Values and Wonders
Donald Hoffman speaks of this paradox in interviews: Why do we take it for granted when a child is born? So, when a completely new, independent consciousness emerges and unfolds? We consider this normal and commonplace, while at the same time glorifying the advances being made in artificial intelligence – which should really be called “simulated intelligence,” since AI merely generates complex data sequences. We experience this as “intelligent” because we can, in turn, derive meaning from the data. But isn’t the greater miracle actually what lies beyond generated or reproduced data?
How little space we have (or take for ourselves) for life’s deepest experiences can also be seen in the grieving process: Those who have lost a loved one usually have to return to work after a short time and fulfill responsibilities. The “year of mourning” that used to exist in the church context, or the months or years of wearing black clothing, as was common among widows in previous generations – all these rituals have since disappeared. In our psychotherapeutic work, we repeatedly experience that those who are grieving also put this pressure on themselves to function quickly again. After a short time, there are hardly any opportunities left to give space to their own grief, and those around them soon lose awareness that a person is experiencing a radical upheaval and going through profound life experiences.
William James Desmond describes religio (Latin: religio, “consideration, conscientiousness, care”) as the sacred dimension of reality we actually long for, a deeper form of attunement: the sacred bond that connects us to reality, to everything and everyone, in all its depth and fullness.
Religio, therefore, does not mean religion in the institutional sense, but in its original meaning: the unifying force, the connection between self and world. The lived realization that meaning cannot be manufactured, but is revealed to us – when we are reconnected. This includes the connection to others – family, friends, community – but also to the world. When we, for instance, gaze up at the night sky and feel awe, or when a deep dialogue with another person touches and changes us. And the relationship with ourselves: the capacity for action (agency), the sense of ongoing identity (selfhood), and the unfolding depth as a moral and spiritual being (personality).
Religio describes the meaningful fabric in which everything fits together coherently. It enables us to live in a world rather than merely occupy a space.
In this sense, according to William Desmond, we cannot avoid metaphysics. We all have assumptions about the nature of being and its value. We live an implicit metaphysics – either in the sense of usefulness, usability, “disposability” (see also our article on Desmond and Mary Oliver), or in the sense of religio, essential values.
“I remember a time when to mention God or religion in the company of advanced intellectuals was like mentioning sex in a prudish Victorian drawing room. An icy silence would descended, and the silence communicated more than the argument possibly could: We do not now talk of these things.”
W. J. Desmond 2005
Modernity has largely forgotten religion while preserving its outer shell, organized religion. And as these institutional forms erode or lose credibility, many people assume that the sacred is no longer accessible. But this is not the case.
What people long for – often without having words for it – is a return to this connecting depth, the felt contact with what is real and valuable. For Desmond, then, it is not about reviving religion in the old sense, but about realizing it anew in order to experience ourselves, each other, and the world again in its profound meaning.
Humans have always been beings seeking orientation – and we need something that transcends ourselves to guide us. Something that can lead us on a path of transformation. All spiritual movements have been pointing to this for millennia. And especially in times of multiple global crises, the experience of religion, in the sense of connection and reconnection, is perhaps more important and valuable than ever.
Awe and Reverence
What’s special about Desmond’s approach is that he deals with our sensory experience of the world in the broadest sense. For him, aesthetics isn’t limited to art or literature; it begins with the “aesthetics of happening”, the stream of sensuality that constantly flows through us. We aren’t self-contained subjects, isolated from the world “out there” – we are, as Desmond says, “porous.”
We can understand the world as a process of continuous unfolding of meaning. Just as we only truly grasp a tree, when we see it in its context: A tree signifies sun, light, oxygen, carbon dioxide, worms, fungus, earth, birds, insects, wind, cells, DNA – it’s a self-organising, interconnected process of creation that is constantly changing. Humans, too, wouldn’t be a meaningful living entity without trees, since we couldn’t exist without them.
We are embedded, not only in nature, but in the entire universe, which created the conditions for the emergence of life on this planet – and possibly elsewhere in the galaxies. Instead of sober, supposed objectivity, this view of the universe evokes feelings of awe and reverence, as soon as we glimpse the vast mystery.
“Life is more than we can comprehend” – the inexhaustibility of life, the superabundance and “overdetermination” – for Desmond, therefore, refers not only to the cornucopia of Abbondanza, the inexhaustible aspects of nature and life, but also to the fact that wonder, awe and the experience of miracles are actually inexhaustible.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” Albert Einstein wrote. William Desmond invites us to rediscover the mysterious miracle of life with all our senses.
More about William Desmond also here: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is”—Mary Oliver.
