The Life of the Spirit

Richard Ostrofsky
(November, 2001)
It is difficult to write about things of the spirit without implying some belief
in supernatural entities, but I intend nothing of the sort. What I do believe is
that some aspects of our existence are attributable only indirectly, only at
several removes, to the body’s imperatives and capabilities, and to the
mind’s abilities to distinguish, connect and calculate. For this residual
category, the word “spirit” is convenient. All the feelings – e.g. fear, shame,
guilt, anger, envy, desire, pride, and love preeminently – can be thought of
as movements of the spirit – not conveniently explicable either as bodily
appetites or as artifacts of thought, though they will certainly have
physiological and cognitive correlates. The concept of “spirit” is useful here
because it points at something that is neither (conscious) mind nor body but
an emergent feature of the two together: the quality and directedness of a
living creature’s vitality.
As that which guides and focuses the creature’s awareness, spirit works
largely beneath consciousness, but its stirrings can be felt, and its
manifestations readily observed. We all know what is meant by a spirited
horse, or a spirited musical performance. When a Japanese school teacher
wants to say “Pay attention!” the phrase she uses means literally, “Place
your spirit (ki)!” In English, we speak of doing something “half-heartedly,”
or “with all one’s heart.” I doubt there is or could be a human culture for
which this distinction was meaningless – between the “listless” or
“apathetic” and the spirited.
The concept of spirit points at that which energizes and directs both
mind and body, causing each to reach out (on some terms or other) toward
the objects of its interest. Indeed, it is through movements of the spirit (so to
speak) that things become interesting. From this perspective, as the so-
called “mystics” understood and taught, spirit is just another word for love
in all its forms; but, as already suggested, it includes all those negative
feelings that interfere with the free flow and expression of love. There is,
accordingly, negative spirit as well as positive: Devil as well as God – if
you like this anthropomorphic language, which I do not, because it asks to
be taken literally, and then confuses too many issues.
I take spirit to mean the faculty, possessed by each of us, to allocate
attention, interest, love, desire and caring, and to direct intention and
volition at their highest levels. The infant’s spirit centres in the needs and
functions of its own body; and this remains largely true throughout life, for
most of us. But, also throughout life, the spirit expands where it can, and
contracts when it must. Hardship, remarkably, can prompt it either way:
Some people seem to become increasingly expansive and noble of spirit –
magnanimous, in a word – as the result of age and suffering. Think of
Beethoven, in his music at least, for an example. Others just get meaner,
more bitter, egoistical and encapsulated of spirit, as they grow older. The
logic behind the flood, ebb and selective directedness of our spirits – what
do we love? to what do we attach ourselves, and why? – is surely the
deepest question of psychology.
The distinction between education and mere training, it might be said,
hinges on development of the spirit. Apart from technique and skill and
knowledge, the true teacher has a double task: to build the pupil’s courage
and zest for exploration, and to humble him toward an encounter with the
vastness and beauty of his own world – how much there is to be explored.
Here, compulsory schooling utterly fails – and gives away that it is not
genuinely concerned with education at all.
Much more than mind or body, it is plausible to think of spirit as trans-
personal – attaching not exclusively or essentially to the individual, but to a
group, a period of history, or even the world as a whole. We habitually
speak of “team spirit” (esprit de corps) and “the spirit of an age” (zeitgeist).
Hindu and Buddhist psychology is based on the idea that fundamentally
there is only a single Cosmic Spirit. All these phrases assign a derivative,
even illusory, status to the personal spirit of the individual; and though
Western thought has tended to reject the notion of collective spirit, it lingers
all the same.
It’s best not to take the concept too literally, since no one can say exactly
what spirit is. Indeed, it probably has no metaphysical reality of its own. All
the same, we know it when we see it. Without spirit, the body is just a
deteriorating machine whose workings are beyond understanding; and the
mind is a device for classification, storage, and computation whose driving
energy and values are likewise not to be understood. We might translate the
language of spirit into a language of affect and unconscious mind but only
with great effort, and very great loss of convenience. Only the language of
spirit (or something like it – e.g. energy or will or motivation) lets us talk
easily about the patterns of arousal and intention that we live by, and deal
with in others. To this extent, the life of the spirit is life itself: the
availability of the creature to love, joy, suffering and experience.
Actualization of spirit (one way and another) in the world of material things
is perhaps our deepest notion of what life is about.