philosophies Article
Spiritualizing Anarchism, Making Spiritual Practices Anarchistic Mark Losoncz Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia; mark.losonc@ifdt.bg.ac.rs
Abstract: This article not only mentions spiritual anarchism nominally, as do so many previous articles, but tries to define it as precisely as possible. The definition assumes that the self itself can be a source of unjustifiable authority and a limitation to freedom, and that spiritual anarchism is nothing more than being open to that which transegoically transcends our narrow perspective. The article critically revisits previous overviews of spiritual anarchism, and itself proposes to take into account traditions that have been neglected. Finally, the article reverses the approach; that is, it considers how some of our spiritual practices can be made more anarchistic, including meditation, the psychedelic experience and the mystical experience. Keywords: anarchism; spiritual anarchism; spirituality; authority; religion; meditation; psychedelic experience; mystical experience
1. Introduction
Citation: Losoncz, M. Spiritualizing Anarchism, Making Spiritual Practices Anarchistic. Philosophies 2023, 8, 65. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/philosophies8040065 Academic Editor: Abraham P. DeLeon Received: 2 June 2023 Revised: 29 June 2023 Accepted: 12 July 2023 Published: 21 July 2023
Copyright:
© 2023 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article
The paper starts with an overlooked Eastern European anarchist tradition in order to emphasize a point that will be important throughout the paper: that for spiritual anarchism, the individual is not an absolute secure basis from which all else is questionable, but is itself inherently authoritarian, and its narrowness and limitation per se are not worthy of anarchism’s claims to freedom. The starting point of spiritual anarchism must therefore be self-liberation, the transformation and self-transcendence of what Darren Allen calls the “mental-emotional ego”. This article aims to maintain this focus throughout. It will be suggested that this can be done by relying on transcendence, but also in a secular way. Examples will be given of how not only anarchists can have spiritual thoughts and tendencies, but spiritual authors often also express themselves in a quasi-anarchistic way—there is therefore the possibility of a fruitful dialogue. At the same time, it will be also emphasized that an alternative reading of the past can be liberating, i.e., discovering that certain authors and activists have said things that may be illuminating for spiritual anarchism today. It will be considered, using the examples of Malatesta and Landauer, how flexible the concept of spiritual anarchism might be, especially when contrasted with that of religious anarchism. In the later part of this paper, three authors who have dealt with spiritual anarchism in the most depth and with the greatest claim to completeness will be critically reviewed (Hakim Bey (also known as Peter Lamborn Wilson), Anthony Fiscella, Simon Critchley), and while paying close attention to what they consider affirmable from the past, in a digression, authors will be listed who have been neglected in previous articles on spiritual anarchism. In the concluding part of this article, the focus will not be on the spiritual interpretation of anarchism, but on the contrary, on the inherent anarchist potential in existing spiritual practices (such as meditation, psychedelic experience, mystical experience). This analysis will be consistent with the main argument of the paper, that spirituality is a paradoxical self-transcendence of the self.
distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Philosophies 2023, 8, 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8040065
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies