Spirituality and bioethics: the place of horizontal transcendence from the point of view of a lay bioeticista and agnostic

DOI: 10.15343/0104-7809.200731.2.2

Abstract

In this text, I intend to approach, in an introductory way, the complex and controversial question of the sense of spirituality in ethics
in a secularized and “globalized” world. In particular, I intend to show which is, or could be, the place reserved for spirituality in the form of applied
ethics known as bioethics, in a world ever more conscious of its contingency and historicity, but at the same time full of several different yearnings
relative to desire and frustration, life and death, corporeity and suffering, intersubjective relationships, relationship with otherness and deity, salvation
and perdition, amongst others, and that refer in some way to what we can call, generically, transcendence. The text intends also to supply a sort of
map on some questions, practical and theoretical, related to the question of transcendence, which must be better defined, distinguishing a vertical
transcendence from a horizontal transcendence. The first one is a stricto sensu transcendence, defended, for example, by Christianity; the second
is a transcendence defended, for example, by contemporary atheistic existentialism and humanism and that would have to be characterized more
correctly as a form of immanentism, but that can, at the same time, rescue an aspect of the first one when it associates the concept of Man to the
concept of God in the expression God-Man (Ferry, 1996). This is, in fact, a reformulation of the Christian symbology of the cross, which indicates,
substantially, the possibility of a meeting between the domains of the sacred and the profane, but without lexically prioritizing the first one and
inverting the direction of the hyphenation represented for the concept of “God-turned-man” symbolized by the figure of the Christian Jesus.