If you turn a broken umbrella upside down, you end up with a capacious dustbin. Spirituality has become an umbrella term that, often, is treated like a wastepaper basket. In scholarship and in the media, spirituality is a broad category into which we like to deposit all sorts of things – to the point where it’s very difficult to talk about spirituality in any constructive way.
Spirituality can refer to the “spirituality/wellness” section of a bookstore – the kind of place that houses a combination of self-help, philosophy and pop psychology. Some scholars view this as a social category and talk about spirituality to describe people who identify as “Spiritual but not religious.” Others use it in a broader sense to discuss the implicitly religious nature of certain secular and atheist philosophies.
Spirituality can also be invoked to make sense of the terrible things people are encouraged to do for the sake of a “greater purpose.” Here the discussion no longer revolves around self-help books but activities like suicide-bombing and the formation of high-control groups. A lot of stuff that people call political extremism might very well have another explanation: a spiritual one.
These are just a few examples of the way spirituality is used today. The fact that it’s an umbrella leaves it open to the dustbin effect. I say “dustbin” because it’s not just that we throw a lot of things into the term, “spirituality”; it’s that what we throw and the way we throw it often signals some degree of opprobrium.
For this reason, it’s refreshing to read Daniel Wyche’s The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation, and King-Ho Leung’s Spiritual Life and Secular Thought: A Phenomenology. Both books give spirituality a much-needed makeover. In part, that makeover is possible because both Wyche and Leung, in different ways though with a shared horizon, narrowthe concept of spirituality. In these books, spirituality isn’t an umbrella term for everything-and-nothing – but it’s also not reduced to an empirical social category. Instead, spirituality is defined in relation to specific practices: the practice of political activism (Wyche) and of philosophical enquiry (Leung).
For both writers, pejorative understandings of spirituality are linked to the concept’s deep ties with modern individualism. The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously identified spirituality with self-actualisation and placed it at the top of his pyramid of needs, reinforcing a paradigm that’s proven very hard to shake. Whether consciously or no, many discussions of spirituality assume that attending to the self is a kind of luxury. What both Wyche and Leung achieve in their respective books is a clear picture of why it’s important to query this idea.
The problem with Maslow’s approach is not that it’s always wrong but that it makes it difficult to understand how spirituality could matter, in any useful sense, to politics and philosophy. Wyche even proposes a term for the pyramidal, or Maslowian, understanding of spirituality, calling it “spiritualism.” For Wyche, it’s “spiritualism,” rather than spirituality, that’s bad news. By valorising the individual and treating their whims as axiomatic, “spiritualism” encourages humans to neglect the needs of others and become monsters. Leung, for his part, also points to the corrosive effects of individualism. He reflects that the strong association between spirituality and individualism has led many philosophers who might otherwise find spirituality congenial to eschew the category altogether.
At the same time, neither Wyche nor Leung are keen to reject the centrality of the self in spirituality. Rather, they want us to rethink what it means to attend to the self. This is where spirituality gets a makeover.
The picture of spirituality that emerged for me as I read Wyche and Leung imagines the self differently. The self is not isolated at the top of a pyramid but thrown into relation with other selves. Wyche, for instance, suggests we think of spirituality as a view from above that is also, as he puts it, “a view from below.” Lueng, taking a similar approach but putting it into the language of metaphysics instead of politics, argues that spirituality is what happens when philosophers connect their individual thinking to the life we all share in common. I’d describe this as Wyche’s and Leung’s inversion of the Maslowian pyramid.
That inversion is a nod but also a corrective to the legacy of the French classicist and philosopher Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), whose influence is pronounced in both Care of the Self and the Care of the Other and Spiritual Life and Secular Thought. Hadot famously compared ancient philosophy to spiritual exercises, arguing that Stoics and other philosophical schools weren’t teaching worldviews or beliefs so much as encouraging students to achieve – through a set of daily spiritual exercises – a particular view of the world, what he called “the view from above.”
For Hadot, the “view from above” was reached through two exercises: introspection, what Hadot (following Plato) described as “care of the self,” and contemplation, or what Hadot sometimes referred to as “cosmic consciousness.” Through introspection or self-care, a person paid attention to their inner motivations and came to know themselves. Through contemplation or cosmic consciousness, they came to understand their relationship to other selves and recognise their unity with Being.
Hadot, though, spent a lot more time discussing self-care and introspection than he did reflecting on contemplation or cosmic consciousness. Perhaps for this reason, Hadot has often been read as someone whose understanding of spirituality ultimately aligns with modern individualism. It’s easy to come away from Hadot’s work with the impression that self-care is all about crafting a self-image, something that Michel Foucault attempted (not always successfully) to kick back against in his extensive engagement with Hadot’s work during the 1980s. Wyche’s and Leung’s readings are both Hadotian – Wyche’s debt is particularly evident in the title of his book, with its reference to self-care. Yet both writers also think beyond Hadot, providing new tools for scholars and writers to access Hadot’s ideas.
For Wyche, Hadotian self-care is inseparable from the political life and embodied in a community’s struggle against oppression, something that is never articulated in Hadot’s work (despite Hadot’s own conviction that spiritual exercises were about enabling peaceful coexistence between creatures – his final work, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, is a testament to the eco-political side of Hadot’s thinking). Wyche’s Hadot is worked out through a careful reading of prominent civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. but also Audre Lorde, the arresting voice with whom Wyche lingers in the book’s final pages. Lorde, a Black feminist writer and civil rights activist, described political warfare against an unjust society as inseparable from a continued act of self-care and of placing personal needs first.
Because systems of oppression break the individual will, for those resisting its power, tending to the self isn’t something that can be put off until other needs have been met; resistance, for Lorde, becomes synonymous with self-care. In Wyche’s book, Lorde challenges the (Maslowian) idea that spirituality’s investment in self-care is a luxury. By the same token, Lorde questions the idea that spirituality has no role to play in needed political transformation. These impulses have an Hadotian root in Wyche’s book but are developed in decidedly post-Hadotian ways.
Leung’s idea of spirituality as a practice of philosophical enquiry that leads from the individual to an experience of shared life is also Hadotian in nature – though not in articulation. One thing that Hadot never quite managed to show readers was how modernphilosophy might be a spiritual exercise. In one of his interviews, Hadot suggested that philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson were practicing philosophy as a spiritual exercise. But Hadot never provided a detailed guide to this comparison, nor did he give any real sense of what spiritual exercises might look like in the context of contemporary philosophy.
Unsurprisingly, few have wanted to take Hadot’s lead on this question, not least because labelling Husserl and Bergson “spiritual practitioners” seems rather indelicate. Leung, however, shows how to make good on Hadot’s intuition without appropriating modern philosophy to a dustbin version of spirituality that would compromise the integrity of philosophical enquiry.
Leung describes the way influential, recent philosophers who didn’t identify as spiritual – including that arch-atheist, Gilles Deleuze – went about doing philosophy, and try to see, from this analysis, whether philosophical enquiry looks anything like spirituality. Spirituality, in turn, Leung defines as “thoughtfulness.” He reflects that what’s at stake for spirituality is not a proclaimed belief or self-identification (the “Spiritual but not religious”) but, instead, a certain kind of attentiveness.
What Leung finds is that among the philosophers he analyses – including Deleuze but also Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben – those who maintain a strident polemic against religion or theology nonetheless think in ways that fall into the Hadotian understanding of spirituality. Here, the Italian philosopher Agamben becomes an important touchstone. Agamben is someone who distances his work from orthodox texts and institutions alike and yet places the practice of contemplation at the heart of philosophical work, where it becomes a way of connecting thought to its source, to “life.”
Leung’s claim is not that post-Heideggerian philosophies are secretly, or even unwittingly, religious. Rather, his claim is phenomenological, a method Leung invokes although the writers studied by Leung aren’t all students of Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. Leung calls his method phenomenological because his book considers how a philosopher philosophises, rather than focus on their opinions.
This is significant and, once again, something Hadot hinted at but never articulated fully. If philosophy is a spiritual exercise, how does such practice pan out in the actual doing of philosophy? Leung’s book gives a surprisingly rich picture of what such practice might look like, even if his book, as he avers, is not a spiritual manual. But perhaps manuals don’t need to be prescriptive to touch a practical nerve? In any case, like Wyche’s book, Leung’s study gives those of us working in the field a welcome set of finely-honed tools for cultivating the potentials – as well as tackling dangers – of spirituality.
