Spirituality Against Hierarchy
Many people today often simply equate the idea of being “spiritual” with the social phenomenon of the “Spiritual But Not Religious,” an emerging demographic in the contemporary world. As the name suggests, the “Spiritual but Not Religious” (SBNR) take an oppositional stance towards traditional forms of organized religion. Instead of adhering to institutionalized dogma, it is sometimes said that the non-religious spirituality of many who are SBNR consists of a “pick n’ mix” of practices from different religious traditions. In a sense, many features of the contemporary SBNR outlook can be found in Simone Kotva’s Ecologies of Ecstasy: Mysticism, Philosophy, and Vegetal Life (EE), which culminates with a discussion of the early modern “Quietist” mystic Jeanne Guyon, whom Kotva commends as an advocate and practitioner of a “do-it-yourself mysticism for the seventeenth century” in the guise of what Kotva (following Michel de Certeau) calls “a nonreligious exegesis of religion” (127, 194).
Kotva describes Guyon’s mysticism and spirituality as a “do-it-yourself” practice because it is “practicable without a spiritual director” (127, 160). This “do-it-yourself” character manifests itself through Guyon insisting that people across the social order — “kings, clergy, priests, lawyers, soldiers, children, craftsmen, workers, women, and the sick”— are all capable of practicing spirituality without the need of ecclesial or institutional mediation (126).
For Kotva, this opposition to social hierarchies is extended to natural hierarchies of living species. “Despite the lack of plant imagery in her writing,” Kotva suggests that “Guyon offers perspectives on what Marder calls mysticism’s vegetalizing of thought” (140). Drawing extensively on Michael Marder’s various works on vegetal life and plant-thinking, Kotva speaks of this “vegetalizing of thought” as the practice of recognizing “the plant in us” (137). For Kotva, “the plant in us” or “vegetal life” is the kind of life denoted by Aristotle’s vegetative soul: it is the most basic form of life whose self-sustaining nutritive activities are shared by all living beings (15–16, 197). However, while it is often imagined as the lowest kind of life within natural hierarchies of lifeforms, “vegetal life” operates as the most primordial form of life, as a kind of “lowest common denominator” of all life, or even what one might understand as the purest definition of “life” itself (154).
In this regard, understanding “vegetal mysticism” as the “vegetalizing of thought” by cultivating an “attentiveness” (Kotva’s favored term) to “the plant” or “life” within oneself aligns with the definition of spirituality as the pursuit of the unity or alignment of life and thought I advance in Spiritual Life and Secular Thought: A Phenomenology (SLST)—particularly in its phenomenological construal of Agamben’s project of attending to the most basic conditions of life (SLST,107–122) and, to some extent, Deleuze’s notion of contemplation (SLST, 168–170).
However, whereas my book is explicitly “not a ‘spiritual guide’” (SLST,xi), Kotva describes her Ecologies of Ecstasy as “a spiritual manual or handbook of sorts” which draws on her own “mixed religious, ethnic, and cultural background” and “experience of Nordic Catholicism [as] a tradition where many religious expressions mingled” (EE, 198). As opposed to the stated “descriptive rather than prescriptive” task of my book (SLST,xii), Kotva’s normative insistence that “the spiritual life should not be dictated by dogma but by openness and the ability to be changed” (EE, 175) as well as her emphasis on “practices” over “beliefs, theological ideas, and religious dogma” (EE, 199) might by comparison have much more resonance with many features of the contemporary SBNR outlook, especially some of its more “enchanted” expressions of nature-spirituality.
Spiritual Exercises Beyond the Self
If Kotva’s Ecologies of Ecstasy attends to vegetal life as “the lowest form of existence” (82), Daniel Louis Wyche’s The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation (CSCO) seeks to uncover “a view from below,” attending to spiritual exercises which pertain not just to “elite articulators” of spirituality but to “average people in everyday practice” or even more specifically to “the dispossessed, the disinherited, the most vulnerable, those who labor” (11, 74). However, Wyche’s account of spiritual exercises seems much less amenable to the present-day phenomenon of SBNR in comparison to mine or, indeed, Kotva’s.
Following Foucault, Wyche critically describes contemporary modes of popular spirituality as “the form of life of the moral dandy, the one committed to the ‘Californian cult of the self’ with ‘naught else to do but attend to himself’.” In Wyche’s view, contemporary expressions of spirituality such as those of the SBNR are often manifestations of what he calls “political quietism”—not to be conflated with the mystical “Quietism” of Guyon analyzed and affirmed by Kotva—whereby spiritual practice is envisaged as “a withdrawal into the self” which leads to “a retreat from everyday life and an abnegation of larger social and political responsibilities” (21).
Against such self-focused spirituality, Wyche posits that “the care of the self and the care of the other are coterminous” such that “to care for the city in and through the material conditions that constitute political life is to most fullycare for oneself” (150). Putting Hadot and Foucault into conversation with the political work of Martin Luther King Jr. and others, Wyche notes: “the care of the other and the care of the city are inherently forms of the care of the self, and vice versa… [W]hether intentionally, consciously, or not, one does not bring about a political transformation without bringing about a transformation of oneself, or a community, on the level of ‘who one is’” (186).
Wyche’s proposal that “in laboring upon the world, we labor upon ourselves” (123, 139) is similar to a phenomenological point I make in my book: one’s engagement with “the world” or “things in the world” always comes—even if implicitly—with an existential self-interpretation and self-understanding of “who one is” or “how to live” (SLST,32–38, 58–65), and part of the task of practicing philosophy as a spiritual exercise, I suggest, is to make explicit such implicit modes of self-interpretation (SLST, 196–200). While Wyche also pays much attention to the idea of spiritual exercises as “a formal category of practice,” his book’s main aim is “to show how they can indeed be employed towards liberatory ends” (188). To this end, as opposed to my phenomenological (if transcendental) focus on “interpretation,” Wyche’s emphasis is on the“transformation” of oneself and the world with it (253).
Throughout his book, Wyche uses “spiritual exercises” synonymously with “practices of ethical change” (his preferred term) or “the general language of self-transformation, self-overcoming, or ‘practices of the self’” (1). However, the transformations that occurs with spirituality or spiritual practices are not always political:
Insofar as something is a “spiritual exercise,” it is a practice of self-transformation. This term, as I have insisted, is a formal description of a form of practice and has no necessary political or ethical consequences. To say that something is a spiritual exercise… is not to say that it is “good.” Spiritual exercises as such do not produce the criteria of their own judgment, they do not generate moral codes, political values, or the like. (177)
I am broadly in agreement with Wyche that the spiritual life is not necessarily the same as “the good life”; however, I am not sure if I would agree that spiritual practices or exercises should, as he says, “hold no specific normative weight” or any “ethical or political value” (7, 177).
Here the distinction Foucault draws between “ethics” and “morality” is instructive. As Wyche acknowledges, when Foucault speaks of “spirituality” or “the care of the self,” he generally means something like “self-fashioning” or “self-transformation.” For Foucault, the “spiritual” is “concerned with ethics in this sense” and “not in the more familiar sense of determining and acting upon morally correct views or behaviors… not about parsing out what is right or wrong and why”—which Foucault associates with “morality” rather than “ethics.” It is in this way that “Foucault’s ‘ethics’ is related to but distinguished from ‘morals’ or ‘morality’” (CSCO, 3). If we understand “ethics” in a distinctly non-moral way, perhaps we can see how “spirituality” and “spiritual exercises” may entail some kind of ethical or even political value.
Spiritual Life and Political Thought
In a 1986 interview about Foucault, Deleuze concluded with some remarks on “what Foucault called ethics, as opposed to morality.” According to Deleuze, “Morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that’s bad…).” Ethics, on the other hand, is not interested in making such judgements but in one’s “ways of existing,” “the styles of life that make us this or that.” In short, whereas morality is concerned with what—or who—is “good” or “bad,” ethics is concerned with what makes one “this” or “that” (SLST, 157–65).
For example, consider being a teacher. Social norms or institutional guidelines may provide us with an idea of what it is to be a good teacher or a bad one, or indeed whether what it takes to be legally a teacher (e.g., having a certain license, qualification, or employment status). As opposed to these “moral” ways of approaching what it means to be a teacher, “ethics” is concerned not so much with social expectations or professional codes of conduct but, rather, with how one lives one’s life and dedicates one’s thoughts to being a teacher, discerning how the identity or even “life” of being a teacher is at stake for who I am or the kind of life I lead. “Ethics,” in this sense, pertains to how I “own” the identity or act of being a teacher, how the commitment to being a teacher gives my life its particular shape, how it makes my life this life instead of that life, some other way of life I could have lived (SLST, 173–77, cf. 50–53)
While Deleuze compares “ethics” to a kind of “faith” (SLST, 182), he holds that morality is always “a plan of organization,” “a theological plan,” or even “a judgment of God” (SLST, 158). For him, morality is exemplified by organized religion, which often fails to capture the “ethics” of attending to one’s ways of thinking and living. While Deleuze’s (and perhaps also Foucault’s) account of “ethics but not morality” has some resonances with the “Spiritual but Not Religious” sentiment against organized religion (SLST, 162–5), it can also bring to light some of the political potentials of “spirituality” beyond the opposition to institutionalized or even theologized hierarchies, as we find with “Guyon’s strong critique of institutions” depicted by Kotva (EE, 126, 160). Rather than understanding the “spiritual” merely in negative terms of being “not religious” (as the SBNR demographic label encourages us to do), perhaps the construal of the “spiritual” as “ethical self-change” can more positively name a particular way of comporting oneself—or one’s life and one’s thought—that is conducive to political engagement.
“Ethical self-change” is not just any kind of “self-change.” When Wyche defines “spirituality” as “self-change” or “self-transformation” (a definition we also find in Hadot, Foucault, and, to some extent, Kotva), he does not mean that all kinds of self-change or self-transformation are spiritual. “Spiritual” self-transformation does not simply mean any “transformation of the self” (e.g., ageing), but the “transformation of the self by the self”: a change of self that is not just arbitrary but thoughtfully considered or even cultivated. Spiritual or ethical self-change is, in other words, change that always involves thought.
Robert C. Solomon put it this way: “Spirituality is a process. The self is a process, and spirituality is the process of transforming the self” (7).[1] As living beings, we are always undergoing change and transformation as we endure through time. However, we do not always attend to these changes or think about the changes that make up our lives, that make up who we are (SLST, 174–77). To live our lives “ethically” or even “spiritually” involves some degree of self-interpretation or discernment—what I described in my book as a devotion of thought to life, to assess the way in which we live (SLST, 190–93).
This could mean deliberately changing our habits or the directions we want to take or prioritize, but it could also mean accepting the situation we are in or, so to speak, “owning” the cards which we’ve been dealt. What matters is that the thought, care, and attention we devote to how we undergo change or to how we grow (if we might use an organic vegetal term, following Kotva). The cultivation of such attentiveness and care—as Kotva and Wyche might, respectively, put it—or the devotion of such thought to life is, I contend, what lies at the heart of spirituality, whether spirituality might be expressed in a religious or irreligious way or in an explicitly political or apolitical manner.
I noted earlier that whereas Wyche emphasizes self-transformation or self-change in his construal of the spiritual, I prioritize self-interpretation in mine. This focus on “interpretation” as opposed to “change” might seem rather politically disengaged if not outright apolitical, especially if we recall Marx’s dictum that the point is not just to interpret the world but to change it. Perhaps. However, if spiritual or ethical self-change involves some degree of thoughtfulness, attentiveness, or care, then it seems to me that interpretation is an essential component to any genuine political transformation: we need to interpret the world and ourselves before we change them. Like the spiritual, the political does not merely consist of transformative action but also of thought: thinking itself can also be political.
The alignment of life and thought or the devotion of thought to life need not be a solipsistic act of self-care. Unlike the notion of “self,” “life” can also refer to a collective—to the political life of a community to which an individual belongs and contributes. We might even say that, by virtue of being born of someone other than ourselves, our possession of “life” always denotes a certain relation to some other: no human is an island because no human can give life to herself alone.
If we take “life” to always denote or entail relation to some other, then we might also say that any spiritual act of devoting thought to life always involves “the care of the other,” which Wyche characterizes as the essence of political engagement. If these terms are acceptable, then one might posit that the spiritual pursuit of the unity of thought and life is, in fact, always already a political endeavor. And if all political endeavors involve the dedication of thought to a vision of common life, then a political theologian might also hold that, in the final instance, all political discernment—all political thought—is always also a spiritual endeavor.
[1] Solomon notes that “spirituality is a process rather than a result” is “an old observation from Hegel” (140), and his attempt to articulate a “naturalized spirituality” could be compared to the more recent popular neo-Hegelian account of “secular faith” and “spiritual freedom” in Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York, Penguin Random House, 2019).
