The Spiritist Philosophy
“This book (The Spirits’ Book) was written by the order and dictation of the higher Spirits to lay the foundations of a rational philosophy, free of the damage caused by the spirit of systems. (Prolegomena/SB)”. By saying that Spiritism is a philosophy, Allan Kardec was not excluding its scientific character, quite the contrary; moreover, as ethics or morality is one of the areas that Philosophy embraces, such denomination did not exclude the moral aspect of Spiritism, which is the essence of so-called spiritist religion. (CHIBENI, S.S. Spiritism’s triple aspect).
Philosophy has much to gain by seriously considering the facts of Spiritism, not only because such facts are the solemn sanction of its moral teaching and by themselves will prove to the most hardened spirits the responsibility of their behavior (...), the detailed study of the consequences deduced from the existence of the soul in a disembodied state (...) the knowledge of the essence of the soul will lead philosophy to know the essence of things and the attributes of God. Philosophy means the search for the answers, meaning, rationality, understanding of things, and Spiritism, by the very nature of the issues it manages, is Philosophy. (PIRES, JH, 1983).
What is the philosophical originality of Spiritism? It was born among the French rationalist heritage (formed in the West since Greek philosophy), it admits the self-identity, as an individual soul researched after death; it admits the intelligibility of the real, yet it admits the effectiveness of human action as a factor of evolution; it accepts the intuition, the possibility to access the spiritual side of life, therefore under this historical and objective reason’s control. (INCONTRI, D. 2004).
In other words, the being, as the immortal Spirit, builds his interexistentiality, his spiritual identity through successive lives. The Spiritist Philosophy, far from being conflicting and unsystematic, assumes the role of conceptual synthesis of all knowledge developed in secure foundations of reason leading to full understanding of natural laws, the divine presence in creation. More than that, it guides the being to a fully identification with his Father, and makes him to know his own religiosity in spirit and truth, so that one day the being might say as Jesus said, I am one with my Father.
