This Doctor Works On Soul Philosopher Taps Into Search For Spirituality And Meaning

With a chuckle, Jacob Needleman recalled his mother’s explanation of his doctorate in philosophy.

“She said, he’s not the kind of doctor who does anybody any good,” Needleman said.

His growing audiences around the United States would disagree. To them, the white-haired cultural philosopher is a doctor of the soul and a healer of hearts.

The 60-year-old San Francisco State professor and author has tapped into a national resurgence of interest in spirituality, community and meaning.

That interest was evident Saturday on the Gonzaga University campus, where more than 200 people turned out for a daylong dialogue on wisdom with Needleman and a panel of respondents.

Educated at Harvard, Yale and the University of Freiburg, Germany, Needleman is perhaps best known for his seventh book, “Money and the Meaning of Life,” which led to his appearance on Bill Moyers’ public television series, “A World of Ideas.”

Modern society, with its explosion of computers and consumerism, has led to a “metaphysical repression” of questions of the heart, Needleman told his Gonzaga audience.

The philosopher recalled a class of high school students he asked to write a one-page essay on life’s most important questions.

On every paper, the students wrote important questions like “Why do we live and die?” around the margins.

“They left the center blank. I suddenly realized that the impulse to ask these questions has been taken away from us,” he said. Such discussions are shunted aside by our culture, he added.

“Yearning for wisdom is not a drive for information. Today, we have a pollution of information. The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook,” he said.

“Time-saving” devices have not given us more time, he noted.

“We are a time-poor society. We are paying for things with the coin of time. Every problem we solve through technology breeds two new problems.”

Wisdom requires a detachment from the world and from material possessions that ultimately leads to more engagement in life and a “capacity to love,” Needleman said.

The great religious traditions, including Christian and Jewish mystics and Native American sages, all have at their hearts the search for wisdom, he said.

While not all suffering is uplifting, “most wisdom acquired in life has come through suffering… You cannot have compassion without being wounded yourself,” he said.

Workshop sponsors included the Francis-Ignatian Center, the Jesuit Community, St. Michael’s Institute and the Gonzaga departments of communication arts, education and religious studies.

The workshop was part of a continuing “Culture and Spirituality” series on the Gonzaga campus.