It has been both a pleasure and a challenge over the past few months to open and sit with Simone Kotva’s Ecologies of Ecstasy (Columbia University Press 2026), and King-Ho Leung’s Spiritual Life and Secular Thought: A Phenomenology (Oxford University Pres, 2026). As is so often the case with work that resonates with our own, the pleasures and challenges are closely tied to one another. In all cases, our collective efforts can be said to pool around the notion of “spirituality,” a term and concept that has lived many lives for many different people in many different times and places, and which continues to thrive in both new and perennial forms. What strikes me most about the work that Kotva and Leung have given us is that they offer up analyses and conversations around concepts, practices, experiences, and indeed figures that both are and are not typically placed under the banner of the spiritual, and they do so in ways that challenge and expand the very notion of spirituality and the possible senses of the terms and concepts that we share.
In my own work, it is above all the ways in which this notion of the spiritual, however construed, describes, mediates, or guides our relation to others that concerns me most, whether on the ethical level of the other, or the political level of others and of the city. Here, I most align with Kotva, in not simply “thinking” with the other, and not exactly “breathing” with the other as she does, but in considering the conditions under which others may continue to breathe at all. It is through this lens of the care of the other that I approach these two books, in the form of an exercise in thinking with them, together. Specifically, they have helped me bring into view at least one troubling question raised in my own work and at least one possible way through that challenge: the problem of the role of the “spiritual” in the cultivation of the self toward immoral or unjust ends. I think Kotva and Leung have something vital to lend to this problem, even if I may only sketch those contributions briefly here.
Kotva’s work takes the form of a kind of genealogy of vegetal themes —that is, attention to the ways of living and being associated with plants—across the history of contemplative mysticism within Western Christendom. This historical work is taken up in the service of analyzing and developing aspects of existing mystical engagement with plants in dialogue with contemporary philosophical and scientific ways of understanding plant life, with a compelling emphasis on the shared, inter-species process of respiration, among others. As she reminds us, in one form or another, all living things breathe. To do so together is to radically transform ourselves, to take up experiences of radical difference, the perspective of the Other, even non-human others, just enough to transform what it means to be human.
Leung’s philosophical method is rather different from Kotva’s historical and first-person analyses. For him, the spiritual is approached in the form of a conceptual analysis, with the aid major figures in the phenomenological tradition in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and others. As my own work focuses on a different but somewhat adjacent set of twentieth-century philosophers, our respective books have the productive possibility of recognizing one another across the conceptual street. Leung, further, begins with and works his way through his sources on the basis of a clear definition of the spiritual, which he locates within “the ethos of attaining a unity or alignment of life and thought.” (Leung, ix) It is his task across the book to ground and define this understanding for the benefit of anyone who seeks to understand the notion of the spiritual in general, but also those forms of life that fall under the heading of “spiritual but not religious” in particular.
Among the questions worth registering here, Kotva reminds us that insofar as we seek such an alignment, it cannot simply amount to a unidirectional accommodation of life to thought. Rather, our thought must be attentive to life, and we must be willing to transform our thinking to align with forms of life which we recognize as in some way valuable, good, or marked by something worth learning. We require a kind of spiritual empiricism, in other words, one that keeps ever in view that the world and life have as much to teach us as critical reflection, and which allows philosophy and critique to transform themselves accordingly. Here of course, we must be careful, and for a number of reasons. For one, it is not always clear when and why we should bring philosophy in line with life, and vice versa. Often enough, the kind of attentiveness cultivated through forms of spiritual exercise, including the mystical contemplation Kotva emphasizes, can show us that this point of confluence is a moving target, or meets somewhere in the middle of the nexus of thought and life in which we find ourselves at any given moment.
But this ambiguity again gives rise to a greater challenge, noted tentative in my own work, and which I think is to some extent identified in Leung’s, even as neither text takes up the challenge just yet. If the meaning of the spiritual is to be found in some conception of self-change, then we must wrestle with the problem of the spiritual transformation of oneself toward ends that are politically or ethically pernicious. As I note elsewhere, we spend a great deal of time transforming ourselves into monsters. Despite any differences in our ways of defining “spirituality,” I think that this same danger is present in the background of Leung’s affirmation of the “alignment of life and thought.” It is this shared challenge that I want to explore here, and conclude by suggesting that Kotva’s work may help us see through this particular darkness.
While my own book brackets the challenge of the spiritual telos of political and ethical monstrosity, it remains a vital question, one that I am working to address in future writing. My initial encounter with this problem came years ago when reading primary source investigations, especially legal and ethnographic interviews, with individuals imprisoned for acts of religiously-informed ideological violence. It struck me then, as it strikes me now, that many of these cases can be read through the framework of “spiritual exercises.” Insofar as that latter concept describes a formal relationship, and the notion itself does not entail any specifically moral or politically liberatory end goal, cases of this kind may fall within the category of the spiritual. Here, we find individuals and communities that hold a pernicious or violent outlook, for whatever reason, and cultivate themselves to carry out acts in accordance with those views. In other words, within the vast archives of political violence there are individuals who have indeed formally aligned life and thought, regardless of the contents of that life and thought.
On my reading, Leung’s book is also aware of this danger, if implicitly. Leung’s first few chapters consist, after all, in an analysis of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party in 1933 and remained a member until the end of the Second World War. Many have debated whether or not Heidegger’s political affiliation was connected to his philosophy, or whether it constituted a personal moral failure in spite of his own philosophical output. And yet, as Leung notes, since the publication of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” in 2014, it has become clear that “Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was not only personal, but also philosophical.” (Leung 82). While I cannot delve too deeply here into the nuances of this link, Leung’s work admirably addresses the challenge. It is rather my first concern to note what a terrifying proposition this all is, especially when read in terms of the very alignment of life and thought Leung engages with in Heidegger’s work. It is, however, the particular nature of that alignment that I believe opens a space for Kotva’s work to crucially intervene.
All to briefly, and as Leung describes it, Heidegger does indeed hold that “life” itself is both necessary for philosophy, and conditions it. (28) However, we come to see that for Heidegger certain forms of life are preferable, and even normatively situated above others. It goes without saying for Heidegger that human lives are both unique and special, with the lives of non-humans relegated to a lower status, being “poor in world” as he puts it (see Leung 42-46; 81-83). As Kotva shows us, and as a great deal of new and exciting philosophical and scientific work in plant and animal studies further reinforces, Heidegger’s claims may serve his own project, but are in fact questionable. Further still for Heidegger, certain forms of human life and indeed the forms of life particular to certain peoples hold a philosophical and existential pride of place: they have a “world,” where others do not. Among those “worldless” human beings were for Heidegger, as Leung so clearly explicates, the victims of the Nazi regime. Even Hannah Arendt takes up this schema, linking the “world” to the state, describing—even with great sympathy—that given peoples are “worldless” insofar as they are stateless. (Leung 83) The problem, to paraphrase the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas—who is by no means without his own radical failures even along these very lines—is sameness; that is,placing self-identity at the heart of our ethics and indeed our politics. As our own present continues to so viscerally ask us, is it not the nationalist who is truly the poorest in world? Is it not the one whose concepts and institutions fail, indeed refuse, to see the face of the Other, who cannot constitute a genuine world?
The “world” that conditions such thought, and the thought which seeks to align itself with such a “world,” must be broken apart and subject to a radical realignment of both life and thought. And it is precisely here that I see the spiritual exercises that Kotva describes, practices of contemplating and practically engaging life forms in whom we initially do not recognize ourselves, to hold such radical potential. As she so well says, “‘Displacement’ is the literal meaning of ‘ecstasy,’ from the Greek ekstasis, meaning ‘movement outward,’ and it leads not to a negation of agency or to a glorification of inferiority, but to a refiguring of subjectivity in terms of becoming, dependency, and vulnerability.” (Kotva 13) The contemplation of the careful, still, “faceless,” worlds of vegetal and eukaryotic life, may well constitute forms of spiritual exercise capable of leading us outside ourselves and into new, freer, and more just realms of ethical and political possibility.
Here I return to that notion of spiritual empiricism: if our thought leads us toward forms of life that entail or result in the dehumanization of others, both that life and that thought must change. In such a moment, life and thought must be decoupled, and each assessed anew. If an argument, no matter how convincing on the surface, holds that another must be displaced from their home, subject to a secondary legal status, corralled into a camp, starved, relegated to the status of “collateral damage,” and worse, then we must recognize an obligation to abandon such thought, subject it to ruthless critique, and reorient ourselves. It may well be that we will not at first know which new direction to point our ourselves in, and that new thought and new life will take time to cultivate. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a regimen of spiritual exercises that asks us to contemplate what is radically other, as in Kotva’s contemplative vegetal mysticism, may well be of liberatory service. When faced with the active political ugliness of the human world, we may, I think, take that as a cue, a moral imperative, not simply to look elsewhere, but to look to, and indeed breathe with, the radically other: whether other human beings or wholly other forms of life.
