Concluding Views of Thom Hartmann’s book 
“The Prophet's Way” on Spiritual Experience

“I waited for the extraordinary, but it never came so I gave up and followed my intuitions, then strange things started to happen, but still within the realm of the mundane and ordinary.”--Anonymous 

I came to a definitive conclusion concerning only my understanding of Thom Hartmann’s best book, “The Prophet’s Way.”

For me, this book has defied conventional philosophical categorization. There is something very familiar about its approach to...spiritual experience—and that is the answer. The book, “The Prophet's Way,” is in my very humble opinion, a phenomenological description of a spiritual life. You would think I would of known that immediately. The question that stumped me was “How did the author know how to write this description of a spiritual life without knowing anything about Husserl’s phenomenology or the 'epoche’?” I am somewhat sure he did not know this formally, or explicitly. I now better understand that the Husserlian “epoche” is not, as I assumed, just a pan-mathematical-logico-formalistic methodological tool to suspend belief to achieve a “pure” description of phenomena. With the later Husserl, the “epoche” was given a spiritual connotation.

It turns out that critical theorist and sociologist Max Scheler (1874-1928) understood phenomenological observation to be akin to a “spiritual posture.” The later Husserl likely adopted Scheler’s interpretation of the phenomenological method of the Epoche. Scheler viewed Husserl’s phenomenological method as “an attitude of spiritual seeing...something which otherwise remains hidden....”[2] :

“Rather, that which is given in phenomenology 'is given only in the seeing and experiencing act itself.' The essences are never given to an 'outside' observer with no direct contact with the thing itself. Phenomenology is an engagement of phenomena, while simultaneously a waiting for its self-givenness; it is not a methodical procedure of observation as if its object is stationary. Thus, the particular attitude (Geisteshaltung, lit. 'disposition of the spirit' or 'spiritual posture') of the philosopher is crucial for the disclosure, or seeing, of phenomenological facts. This attitude is fundamentally a moral one, where the strength of philosophical inquiry rests upon the basis of love”(Wiki: Max Scheler).

So what hermeneutical principles of interpretation did the author use in writing “The Prophet’s Way?”

The answer is truthfulness, and faith.

Truthfulness as a principle for the description of experience is enough. He made no absolute commitment to the naturalistic scientific status of his experience presented as description. But as we all know no pure phenomenological description is possible according to the four modes of circularity as Boedeker defined them.

Not only that, but he had encountered the always present problem of methodological circularity of description and conceptual deconstruction. This is also an epistemological problem that no rational philosopher can escape. In order to describe the spiritual life, one has to participate in the spiritual life just as one has to participate using a saw to experience cutting wood--with a saw! In scientific experience the subject is abstractly negated in the name of objectivity and scientific truth. For the religious phenomenologist, the subject must participate in the spiritual life to gain access to the phenomena she seeks to un-conceal.

The reader who at first approaches the book will most likely by default have the passive “naturalistic attitude,” but one has to analytically suspend that cognitive stance to gain insight and this happens slowly after reading this phenomenological description of a spiritual life. So in a paradoxical way, like the epoche, this book in effect adopts Cartesian methodological skepticism—not absolute skepticism--to un-conceal the spiritual dimension of human existence.