The Embodied Inter-be(com)ing of Spirituality: The In-Between as Spiritual Sphere in Practically Wise Organizations

For example, Levinas with his focus on ethics, spirituality, and Jewish philosophy, emphasized radical alterity and the primacy of the other, thus are reversing earlier phenomenological self–other emphasis on the privileged status of the epistemic constituting self or ego. Or Ricoeur, with his hermeneutical interpretation of meaning provided insights on religious language, symbolism, evil, and narrative. Furthermore, Derrida developed a deconstructionist philosophy, investigated spiritual dimensions based on a post-phenomenological critique of presence with an affirmation of the religious other. Recently a theological turn in phenomenology (e.g. Marion, Henry) gained traction that manifests a renewed interest in the philosophical essence-oriented phenomenology of religion. This turn includes discussions about the claim that the phenomenological project itself, tout court, tacitly presupposes a religious or theological element (Reynolds 2008; Benson and Wirzba 2010). However, there the danger of such theo-phenomenological orientation is that it is promoting a theological agenda under the guise of phenomenological scholarship.

Such rational spirituality involves understanding the “relationship with the unknown or the ‘absent presence’ paradoxically present in every human life and thus directly open to individual experience, systematic research and collective understanding in full accordance with the rules of investigation, production of knowledge and distribution of insight rightly set by modernity” (ibid. 51). However “for philosophical and spiritual reasons alike, the late postmodern mind, although already ‘proto-spiritual’ in some of its trajectories, turned out to be limited in its scope, its cognitive capacities and its boundaries of validity and legitimacy (ibid. 58). As Benedikter and Molz show, contemporary integrative frameworks and approaches share “inclusive, emancipatory understandings of the multi-faceted complexity of human being, of society and of nature, as well as insight into the non-separateness of the individual and social planes, and of the objective and subjective realms” (ibid. 61). As diverse and marginal they are they are “in process of making a potentially sustainable impact on the global intellectual landscape, especially when defending their well-grounded claims both in theory and in practice (ibid. 61).

According to Merleau-Ponty (2012: 172), ”ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think has always several senses” and particularly the experience of our own body reveals an ambiguous mode of existing (ibid, 204). The body’s inherent ambiguity lies in its ability to simultaneously encompass presence and absence, incarnation and transcendence, being and consciousness (Carey 2000). Accordingly, if human existence is a field of ambiguity (Sallis 1973), and ambiguity is also integral to professional life-worlds (Dall’Alba 2009) a phenomenological approach and description of ambiguities need to see how embodied human experience participates in structures and no structures, time and no time, personal, pre-personal and transpersonal dimensions. Spiritual maturity as the lived ability and embodied practice to sustain the integration of focus of these spheres as well as wholes and parts; unities and differences etc., where ambiguity is not merely repressed, but included and embraced (Todres 2000: 234). In such embodied spirituality, ambiguity reconciles with its source, spacious stillness, and the emergent ‘stillness in chaotic motion’ (Combs 1995). If we understand that ontological ambiguity and its hermeneutics describes an existential revealing task that works itself out bodily and historically in human and evolutionary developments that participates in a non-deterministic openness and freedom, through which a being-in-becoming unfolds. Attending to, and dwelling with, ambiguities—while recognising them as ambiguities, not simply conflicts to be resolved—can open possibilities for enriching organizational life and make it more meaningful. Even more “good ambiguity” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, p. 11) can be found by recognizing the salient function of expression, in which we find a spontaneity that offers the possibility of authenticity, that is, the possibility of speaking and listening imaginatively, poetically, yet with integrity. Such lived ambiguity possibilizes an authentic voice, an authentic way of Being-in-the-World as a communicating subjectivity within relational or social performances (Eicher-Catt 2005: 127, 132).

Interestingly, late postmodern and post-postmodern worldviews were also exploring a productive void as an absent present (of a living energy) that is a “pre-positive constructing process, empty in itself’ connected to a non-identifiable awareness, or even something like ‘pure consciousness’, however it may be designated” (Benedikter and Molz 2011: 57). “Postmodern spiritual awareness is scientific and primordial, originating in the bio-cognitive ‘fact’ of creative void” (Schreiber 2012: 7).

In a certain way, Flesh subverts both immanence and transcendence,(as concepts that depend on a dualistic structure of bifurcation and thus on each other, sedimented with meanings which obscure, than reveal) by making or letting everything be(com)ing inseparable en-fleshed. Incarnationally, as much as immanence is inherently transcending, transcendence emerges as a possibility of, dwells and unfolds in this very world, both being and becoming mutually implicated (co-implicated). Ultimately, if the world is realized and recognized as flesh, the thought of immanence becomes redundant, as does the thought of transcendence as the earthly enfleshed world and any words or expression about it are always ‘imminent-trans-a-de-cending’, always on the limen, neither absent nor fully present. Merleau-Ponty’s ontological story scandalises our already-existing stories and our established categories. As much as these function for the separation of things, and making distinctions that certainly initiated a tremendous advance in human understanding and living, we are called for learning to put nature and logos, things and thoughts, body and consciousness as well as lives and strives, leadingly forward back together, without replacing dualisms with an undifferentiated, monistic unity.

As Merleau-Ponty stated “For me, philosophy consists in giving another name to what has long been crystallized under the name of God” (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 240), while he bids adieu to the God of metaphysics and traditional religion. Merleau-Ponty’s proto-anatheistic (Kearney 2010) attitude seems ultimately to be one of gratitude, humility, and wonder before the entwined oneness and multiplicity of Being as he has been enthralled by a kind of numinosity of nature, perceptual faith, communion, the hidden and revealed source of being and the miracles of creativity. Accordinlgy, affinities between Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and certain mystical schools have been made (Akhtar 2010).

“Gelassenheit” translated as releasement, serenity, composure or detachment refers to a non-objectifying ethos of active and ongoing passivity. This ethos entails an attitude of accepting by a careful ’letting’ that is an abandonment of habitual, representational and appropriating orientations as well as corresponding actions. This bearing appears as very challenging in contemporary organization and leadership with its performance-driven ‘practicalism’ and corresponding constraints. But it is exactly because of this increasingly unviable form that Gelassenheit is and will become even more urgently needed for a more sustainable present and future. In this letting-be also of things, practitioners in organization do not attempt to manipulate, master or compel. Instead, in a post-heroic mode, practitioner and practices let things appear and process in their revealing and vital ways. Importantly, this is not indifference or lack of interest in things, but rather an ‘engaged letting’. This letting orientates towards ‘rescuing’ things and experiences from appropriating projection and totalising closures of enframing. Entering a modus of letting-be is realized through a receptive waiting and listening, thus more an ‘active non-doing’ in relation to things and what ‘matters’, rather than a willing and controlling business as usual. Specifically, it moves from a representational and calculative mode towards more poetic relations, intermediated via a presencing, atmospheric sensitivity and proto-meditative tuning.

Proto-meditative embodied minding, calls for patience and silence, being in relation to all doing. It presupposes that organizational members step back and recollect themselves. It requires conditions in which they can practice ‘open-minded sensing, listening and looking. It is a kind of awareness that we or they experience when we truly, unselfishly love someone or something—when we love the truth. Through the cultivation of Gelassenheit, “we silence habitual and calculative modes of thinking and open ourselves to the prompting that come from the ontological depth of the becoming of other beings. This openness clears a space for the Being of the other to emerge as is in itself… preserving the other’s irreducible otherness” (Carey 2000: 27–28). Through Gelassenheit it may be possible to suspend or at least becoming aware and redirect instrumental modes of thinking and routinized behaving. Thereby it becomes possible to openly receive promptings that come from the uplifting depth of other beings in their otherness. This receptive openness clears a space and time for the be(com)ing of an othering to emerge. In preserving the other’s irreducible otherness, organizational members preserve their own integrity, while deepening their experiences also in relation to things and what they mean. By stepping back away from or out of customary and habitual representations of beings within the horizon of objectivity with its limited, quick-fixing hasting operations, Gelassenheit allows them to enter into a letting mode that is not in a hurry to impose its ordering and grasp on things. Thus, such orientation is not on a mission to pursue the modernist project of putting questions to phenomena and forcing them to answer or being exploited or ill-treated. While viewing things and others not in a biased or appropriating way, cultivating releasement towards them enables to say care-fully ‘yes’ and/or ‘no’ to what happens in organisational practices. Thereby, it is discouraging mindless organizing or exploitive misusing practices. Developing a relatively free relationship to what appears does not mean to aspire for a life free from usages of resources or devices, for example of information- and communication technologies, but instead leading a life that is not pervasively ordered or penetrated respectively addicted to them. Designated times for email or email sabbatical respectively deliberate time away from your devices, as well as more mindful usages of mobile-phones and other media for a wiser form of connectivity are practical was of realizing this. The practical side of Gelassenheit denotes an incarnated and collective attitude and attunement that express a mode of comportment towards reality that does not reify the world into a containable totality. Rather, as creative nexus of a ‘form-media’ it engenders a poetic sense of (be-)longing together based on heterogeneity, rather than symmetry and of the disclosive nature of the physical with its or re-presentations of things as static substances self-showing dynamisms and sensuous particularities in all its appearances.