The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason

This monograph presents a systematic case for human transcendence through philosophical and phenomenological analysis. Robert J. Spitzer, a philosopher-priest working within the Catholic intellectual tradition, constructs a multi-faceted argument that human consciousness exhibits qualities pointing beyond material existence toward a divine ground.

The work unfolds through interconnected demonstrations drawing on both classical and contemporary sources. Spitzer begins by examining five universal human desires that he argues cannot be satisfied by finite goods: the desires for perfect truth, love, justice, beauty, and being. Following Bernard Lonergan's transcendental method, he contends these desires reveal an implicit awareness of and orientation toward infinite fulfillment. The persistence and universality of these longings, despite their frequent frustration in temporal experience, suggests they correspond to a transcendent reality rather than evolutionary misfirings.

Spitzer then analyzes near-death experiences through the lens of recent medical studies, arguing that verified cases of accurate perception during clinical death challenge physicalist accounts of consciousness. He supplements this empirical data with philosophical arguments about the immaterial nature of conceptual thought, drawing particularly on the Thomistic tradition's distinction between sense perception and intellectual apprehension.

The final sections develop what Spitzer terms "intuitions of the sacred" - experiences of the numinous, cosmic purpose, and moral obligation that he argues are best explained by positing a transcendent source. Throughout, he engages contemporary naturalistic explanations, particularly those from evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, maintaining that while these disciplines illumine mechanisms, they cannot account for the qualitative character and intentionality of transcendent yearnings.

The monograph's significance lies in its attempted synthesis of multiple argumentative strategies often kept separate in philosophy of religion. Rather than relying solely on logical proofs or mystical experience, Spitzer weaves together phenomenological description, empirical findings, and metaphysical analysis. His work particularly challenges reductive materialism by arguing that human consciousness contains features - universality of concepts, longing for the infinite, moral intuition - that resist purely physical explanation. While critics might question whether desires necessarily point to corresponding realities or whether near-death experiences admit of naturalistic interpretation, the work contributes a comprehensive contemporary statement of arguments for human transcendence, updating perennial themes for engagement with current scientific and philosophical discourse.