What Is Spirituality?
The word spirit appears deceptively simple, yet its ambiguity conceals several fundamentally different ways of thinking. I will therefore avoid asking what the word means and instead ask what it refers to, since reference situates the term within a logical context rather than a private definition.
The most immediate use of spirit presupposes a subject–object distinction. Spirit is taken to be something other than the individual’s own self-consciousness—something encountered, felt, or experienced as external to the ego. Used in this way, spirit functions as a noun: a “thing,” though not a material one. Whether such a thing exists independently is not the issue here. What matters is that spirit, in this sense, is conceived as an Other.
A related usage appears in the notion of the numinous, as developed by Rudolf Otto and taken up by Carl Jung. Here again, the term is used phenomenologically—describing an experience—yet it is treated grammatically and logically as though it referred to something objective. Both authors, in different ways, assume that the numinous points beyond the merely subjective. What that “beyond” ultimately is remains unknowable, in keeping with the Kantian limit on knowledge. This does not mean, however, that nothing can be said about it. It means only that such knowing cannot be empirical.
This brings us to a third and decisive sense of spirit: Spirit (Geist) in the Hegelian sense. Here spirit is not an object, nor an experience, nor an inner state. It is a Notion—and not a notion in the casual sense, but in the strict logical sense. Spirit names a movement, not a thing. It is the unfolding of meaning through history, culture, and thought itself.
Hegel’s achievement lies in showing how spirit realizes itself through the finite, not beyond it. The infinite does not stand opposed to the finite as a separate realm; it works itself out in and through material, historical, and cultural forms. In our terms, this means that the familiar subject–object split is itself taken up into a larger movement, one in which that very opposition becomes an object of reflection. What initially appears as a division between self and world is itself surpassed—not by abolishing the division, but by comprehending it.
This claim must remain partially opaque for now. To clarify it, I want to turn briefly to alchemy—not to its technical procedures, but to its cultural level of consciousness.
Brenton L. Delp