Paradox & Spiritual Leadership (PART ONE)
Over the next 5 weeks I will be sharing the five parts to a work I authored for 'Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
Dear reader,
Over the next 5 weeks I will be sharing the five parts to a work I authored for Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by
and and recently published by Philosophy Portal Books. You can find a link to the paper copy of the text here. Many excellent writers contributed to this work including Last, Rose, and several others.
—
PARADOX & SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
This work began as a series of aphorisms: connected compressions as outgrowths representative of a whole-making inspiration. Many have been cut, others compressed further and cobbled into those which weren’t. In the end this is work in process, in return over years to come, which I hope offers at least some notes of clarity and inspiriting influence, even as readers may find vines obscuring trunks, and other foliage bloom and weed all manner of ways about the vista.1 For the breadth of concept and notion touched, there isn’t always the detail and explication ready at hand. My intention is to publish on this at a later date. Most quotes were inserted after the fact of writing as an offering of poetic calibration—notably in respect to this anthology being, after all, a relating with Thus Spake Zarathustra. Except for the final section, this work is neither a direct commentary on Nietzsche or any other philosopher—though it is well influenced, inexorably, by many deep currents. What follows is intended to assist transformative contemplation for those with an interest in the questions: what does it mean to relate with spirit? What is the nature of spiritual leadership? How does spirit relate with religion? Is there a difference between spiritual and religious leadership? And what is the relation between spirit, religion, and ecology?
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe
William Blake2
For joy, though woe be deep: Joy is deeper than heart’s agony.
Nietzsche3
He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.4
Nietzsche
I - Presumptions To Speak On Paradox
An initial challenge to contributing something of value on the topic of spiritual leadership is an overcoming of presumption. First, the presumption toward the definition of spirit and the spiritual itself, and second, the presumption toward contribution of (at least some) knowing of leadership in this domain. This is, after all, a matter which draws on a profound affectivity as well as intellectual intrigue.
The affectivity is known by a mark of deep and involved concern: as sure as we each pulse with so many finite heartbeats, so we each must reckon a private involvement with spirit and the cultivation of our spirituality. Thus we are piqued like the heartbeat that quickens, even if subtly so, by that which speaks with confidence on the matter. For language that contours a shape on this subject, or which plucks a string and fills the channel with one tone or another, reverberates a notion that if imbibed, meets the digestive process of identity as such.5 It speaks, that is, to the nature and predicament of identity itself. But perhaps we could say the same for most (some) philosophy? The stakes are always so high when we are true to the power of words, honest and dishonest. So it matters what we say and how (as the way) we say it. And affect in general is known more in the way than the what.
On the other hand, intellectual intrigue in matters spiritual recognises the individual, cultural, and historical movements spirit makes in the becoming of the lifeworld. It is in general concerned with nailing the what and risks blindness to the way as a living, creative process. In naming this what of spirit, maybe one intellectual or another prefers instead to name the passions, or a fervour that grips a people, or to speak of energy or psychological imperatives which light some prophet or evolutionist on their mission to share an important truth at the turning of an age. In other words, the nebulous spirit is used or defined or replaced in terms preferred by a specific language game which adorns spirit in a great many costumes across discourse, often disguising the thing itself to the point we no longer see disguise.
I am not opposed at all to intellect as intelligence relating with the notion spirit, but I am uninspired6 by the way intellect as cold reason attempts to meet the notion. When intelligence is neutered by an inflated mode of analysis, it is intellect without (at least) humility and courage—is unaware of the whole-making already informing its orientation toward delineating parts. Intellect alone lacks capacity for comprehensive understanding of the living reality of spirit as silent world shaper and rejuvenator of life-affirming creativity. That is, on the languaging here, there is something non-enclosable about the dynamic spirit which thereby renders it impossible to reduce finally into a neat ‘part’ to be dissected and traded back and forth. So at least we must endeavour a way as well as a what with these words in the here and now.
Rewinding the record, we are talking about something of deep importance that we each have a stake in. Something we each have the capacity to know and relate with in more or less depth and richness. And the consequence of this knowing-as-immanent-participation will influence the reality of the lifeworld to which we belong.7
So what we say and how we contribute on the matter (if we care about any of this at all) seems to me especially consequential yet also in a paradoxically flirtatious touch with an absurd and energy-sapping banality: the ever important effort to convey a truth which, when shared in effective transmission, passes from the voice of speaker and animates with unique particularity in the living process of receiver, by waypoint of a shared relational channel. For the way of spirit enlivens in context, not text. And to spark or kindle or jostle the context of that process should always be the extent of it—after all, there is no greater fire to fan. The aim is to give enough and not to over-give, for the sake of each, as Zarathustra would perhaps agree.8
So in any case then, why not give it a good old crack? Where it is is:9 known once as a relating with truth in the many voiced solitude of perceptual process, unique to the subject. And known more mysteriously still in the sharing of voice as discernment on the Way, an onward dance of loving transformation—creativity through ashes, for a meeting with the real.
Will to love: that means to be willing to die, too.
Nietzsche10
Now solitude itself yields and breaks apart and can no longer contain its dead. The resurrected are to be seen everywhere.11
Nietzsche
1.1
To know the spiritual is to know the is of encounter (wave as undetermined, impending concrescence), and the pulse of orientation which is vessel at one (in process) with the wave, captained by a subject who may turn to no other for the defining act of captaincy: to alter or stay the course.
The it/is (spirit) I would like to share is a reflection of the it/is which I hope will aid, or ignite, or dissolve and re-form, with a shared dialogic movement towards deepened and clarified understanding. Just so, as the very best of what could be novel or original in this will be an echo of the poetic intention and effort-as-resonating-energy offered in these words, awaiting the reader’s animating breath. After all, the words will not wake themselves.
And therein lies the presumption we must overcome to speak on the spiritual and dance on with paradox: that spiritual leadership as teaching ever could do for the receiving subject the essential work of spirituality. Religious authority is one thing, but spiritual authority necessarily involves an inner author. I must digest my own food, and you yours. Yes, our digestion consists in an ecology of bacterial and other life-death processes better conceived as “we”—the “many” of my “one” as “I”—but your “we” is not mine, and mine not yours.
We all encounter, breathe, orient, metabolise… and we do so alone, together. But as I said, there is nothing truly new here. Apart from the animating reader. And so:
I overcome the first presumption in the sharing of voice as affirmation of loving transformation: words here offered as a reflection of the conditioned sum of my way in the here and now—with just a few, perhaps, for a moment, breaking their chains.
I overcome the second by affirming that self-same process, in a context seeking grapple with the question: a context I respect.
Effectively: giving it a good old crack. An instance, here, of ‘why not?’ Which is to say: affirmation as desire as nature: not a why. It/is what it/is.
And if there’s one thing the arc of Zarathustra makes clear: spirit seeks connection on the Way, even as it transits solitude.
END PART ONE
You can read part two here.
Discernment on the Way,
“But to make an end requires more courage than to make a new verse: all physicians and poets know that.” (Nietzsche 2003, 224)
(Blake 1977)
(Nietzsche 2003, 331)
(Nietzsche 2003, 67)
I see the recently published Systems & Subjects by Cadell Last as a profound exploration and meditation which explores this dynamic with breadth and depth.
Etymological roots of the word spirit are found in the Latin ‘spiritus’ and ‘spirare’ (to breathe). Inspire, etymologically, is then something like ‘into’ ‘breath’. And intellect alone does not breathe for me.
While I am not asking the term ‘immanent’ to be read exactly in the context of Forrest Landry’s Immanent Domain Metaphysics, and recognise its history of use in theology and philosophy, I have deep appreciation for Landry’s work, consider his thought among several threads of critical influence (among living authors), and recommend his work thoroughly to all who seek a unique breadth, depth, and clarity of insight in matters metaphysics, meta-ethics, and civilisational analysis.↩
‘This, indeed, is the most difficult thing: to close the open hand out of love and to preserve one’s modesty as a giver.’ (Nietzsche 2003, 107)↩
Where ‘it’ is the ‘what’ in terms of ‘quantity’, the ‘name’ and ‘fixation’, and ‘is’ is the ‘way’, ‘quality’, ‘transfixation’.
‘Will to love: that means to be willing to die, too.’ (Nietzsche 2003, 145)↩
(Nietzsche 2003, 292)
REFERENCES FROM THIS PART:
Blake, William. 1977. The Complete Poems. Edited by Alicia Ostriker. N.p.: Penguin Publishing Group.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Books.
Last, Cadell. 2023. Systems & Subjects: Thinking The Foundations of Science and Philosophy. N.p.: Philosophy Portal Books.
Landry, Forrest. 2009. An Immanent Metaphysics. N.p.: Forrest Landry.