Sociology and spirituality: Toward an immanent-transcendent critique of modernity

Abstract

In this paper, I set up three thought experiments that mobilize nonmodern ontologies and epistemologies to explore the possibility of spiritual sociology. These experiments engage with Pierre Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist, Emile Durkheim as a New Age transpersonal psychologist, and Michel Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary. The three experiments illustrate that, while many worlds (consisting of objective and subjective structures) exist, they tend to collapse into a few through “echo effects” produced by the powerful; these powerful echo effects are counteracted by the evolution of Spirit or Collective Consciousness growing more enlightened; and the more individuals reconnect with Spirit, the more echo effects are transformed into resonances, pointing to the pluriversal future that permits many worlds to co-flourish. This spiritual–sociological experimentation not only articulates an immanent–transcendent critique of modernity (or any society), but also suggests that contemplative practice be incorporated into undergraduate and graduate education because the quality of sociological research depends fundamentally on that of the researcher's mind.

Over the last decade, sociological research on spirituality has slowly but steadily expanded (Flanagan and Jupp, 2016; Turner, 2010). This expansion was initiated by the well-established strand in the sociology of religion that investigated the so-called secularization thesis vis-à-vis modernization theory. While testing the secularization thesis based on arguments originally advanced by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and other ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, researchers found that people not only continued to practice conventional religions but also created new ‘spiritual’ forms (Lambert, 1999; Turner, 2014). This trend seemed to be coterminous with the worldwide popularization of yoga, meditation, and other spiritual practices under the purview of well-being (Jain, 2020; Purser, 2019), and was further reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic during which vaccine skeptics mobilized conspiracy theory and New Age spirituality – ‘conspirituality’ – to oppose vaccination (Parmigiani, 2021; cf. Asprem and Dyrendal, 2015).

Much of this sociological research on spirituality, however, remains anchored firmly in what Bruno Latour (1999, 2004) called ‘mononaturalism’, a modern ontology positing that the singular world exists objectively and independently of subjective experiences by humans, coupled with a modern epistemology – ‘Science with a capital S’ – positing science as the only legitimate way of understanding the world. Given the dominance of mononaturalism in universities and societies, sociologists who study spirituality tend to reduce the ontological question of how spiritual people might inhabit different worlds to the epistemological operation of using Science with a capital S to examine how they interpret the singular world differently. In other words, mononaturalism keeps sociology and spirituality asymmetrical by elevating the former as ontologically and epistemologically superior.

Nevertheless, such an asymmetry has been increasingly challenged by decolonial and contemplative movements around the world. On the one hand, the decolonial movement advocates the ‘pluriverse’ or the convivial coexistence of many worlds and knowledges (Escobar, 2018; Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2021) and, on the other hand, the contemplative movement embraces the co-arising of objective and subjective worlds (Barbezat and Bush, 2014; Benefiel and Lee, 2019; Gunnlaugson et al., 2014). Together the two movements have begun to relativize the singular world posited by the modern ontology vis-à-vis many worlds posited by nonmodern ones, while similarly relativizing Science with a capital S vis-à-vis nonmodern ways of knowing.

This paper builds on these worldwide movements to render sociological and spiritual ontologies and epistemologies symmetrical. To this end, I carry out a series of thought experiments to reinterpret Pierre Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist, Emile Durkheim as a New Age transpersonal psychologist, and Michel Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary. These experiments aim to stimulate the exploration of novel-and even radical-approaches to reexamining staple objects of sociological research, such as social structure and social change, and invite sociologists (and, more broadly, social scientists) to ‘emancipate’ themselves from the shackles of the modern ways of being and knowing.

Importantly, this experimentation with spiritual sociology is not merely a playful invitation to expand sociological imagination as Andrew Abbott did by using the fictional professor Barbara Celarent (2017) at the University of Atlantis. It also seriously engages with the latest critique of modernity advanced by Hartmut Rosa in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Specifically, the experimentation indicates that Rosa's critique may well be incomplete because its basis – resonance theory – lacks a ‘[c]omparative historical and transregional analysis’ of nonmodern ways of being and knowing, as he rightly acknowledged (Rosa, 2019: 393). By the same token, the experimentation illustrates that any critique of modernity needs to mobilize nonmodern ontologies and epistemologies that transcend modernity from within: modernity cannot be effectively critiqued and ‘reset’ for emancipation if the very means of doing so remains modern (cf. Latour and Leclercq, 2016). Put another way, spiritual sociology points to a critique of modernity that is simultaneously immanent and transcendent.

Preparing the ground with the help of decolonial and contemplative movements

Although ‘spiritual sociology’ may sound absurd at first, it is in fact consistent with decolonial and contemplative movements that are growing worldwide. The decolonial movement, for example, revolves around the concept of ‘decoloniality’ that aims to question the superiority of ‘Western modernity’ (Escobar, 2020; Mignolo and Walsh 2018) by taking inspiration from indigenous traditions that preceded the European colonization of the Americas. Specifically, nonmodern indigenous ontologies help foreground the possibility of a pluriverse capable of embracing many different worlds:

how worlds can be part of each other and radically different at the same time… where every world is more than one (not complete or total unto itself) but less than many (that is, we are not dealing with a collection of interacting separate worlds). (Escobar, 2018: 215)

This is a crucial ontological question in guarding against the danger of Western modernity and its imperial and colonial legacy: if the singular and common world existed objectively and independently of subjective experiences by humans, and if Science with a capital S were the only legitimate way of knowing the world, nonmodern others and their worlds must be either assimilated or eliminated (Latour, 1993).

Similarly, the contemplative movement has mobilized non-Western and nonmodern ontologies and epistemologies. Simply put, the contemplative movement aims to combine the third- and first-person investigations of both religious and nonreligious practices, ranging from chanting and meditation to music and dance, to explore how contemplative states of consciousness might be attained (Hart, 2004: 29–30; Roth, 2006: 1789). In addition to studying non-Western and nonmodern ways of being and knowing, the movement also emphasizes the importance of practicing contemplation, so that people can develop the awareness of their cognitive biases, emotional reactivity, and automatic thoughts, as well as wholesome qualities, such as openness, empathy, and compassion for themselves and others (Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, 2024; Kabat-Zinn, 2013). Cultivating such awareness and wholesome qualities is integral to living in the pluriverse, i.e. peacefully coexisting and even co-flourishing with the inhabitants of many different worlds.

The following experimentation builds on these two worldwide movements to mobilize nonmodern ways of being and knowing to break through modernity. To be sure, various attempts have already been made to challenge the modern ontology and epistemology. Take, for example, postmodernism and new materialism. On the one hand, postmodernism expresses ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ of modernity that celebrated science as the foundational epistemology (Lyotard, 1984; Seidman, 1991). On the other hand, new materialism advances the relational-processual ontology that makes sense of the world in terms of ever-evolving ‘assemblages’ of humans and nonhumans as an alternative to the dualistic, human-centered ontology that dominated modernity (Coole and Frost, 2010; Fox and Alldred, 2015). Nevertheless, the decolonial and contemplative movements take a step further in the sense that, while questioning modernity in both ontological and epistemological dimensions as postmodernism and new materialism do, they also expand the scale of inquiry to the entire cosmos, providing a more comprehensive foundation for launching an immanent-transcendent critique.

Equally important, while postmodernism and new materialism are largely academic movements confined within scholarly debates, the decolonial and contemplative movements exemplify critique-as-praxis. For example, the decolonial movement led to the removal of symbols of colonialism from university campuses in Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Bhambra et al., 2018) as well as faculty initiatives exploring how higher-education pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and policy might be de-linked from Western modernity and made more inclusive (e.g. University of Connecticut, 2024). The contemplative movement has also resulted in the creation of a large number of centers and programs at universities in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific to promote dialogue between modern and nonmodern ways of being and knowing (Saito, forthcoming). Because spiritual sociology aspires to offer an immanent–transcendent critique as praxis par excellence, it takes inspiration from the two movements that have successfully effected institutional transformations.

Even after hearing this intellectual and institutional background for ‘spiritual sociology’, those who take for granted an ‘exoteric’ version of the founding story of sociology may still find the phrase far-fetched. This is because the exoteric version presents sociology as a scientific project to make sense of ‘modernity’, a particular era in which

our cultural relationship to the world threatens to fall mute following the loss of metaphysical axes of resonance in the sense of a cosmological or theological resonant order, and in the wake of the emergence of instrumental, rationalistic, and disengaged relationships to the world. (Rosa, 2019: 40; emphasis added)

This exoteric version presents all the major ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, such as Karl Marx, George Simmel, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, as converging in their interest in ‘reification’ or ‘alienation’, the ‘blasé attitude’, ‘anomie’, and ‘disenchantment’ as manifestations of the loss of metaphysical, cosmological, and theological axes of resonance.

This exoteric story, however, is over-secularized. As Jason Josephson-Storm (2017: 6) illustrated based on his extensive archival research, ‘the disenchantment of the world’ is a myth: Max Weber and other canonically early figures in the discipline ‘were profoundly enmeshed in the occult milieu…. Indeed, the very objects of their concern, their methods, and even their self-definition still bear the marks of this important early encounter with the occult’. In fact, Edward Tiryakian (1972: 596) already acknowledged half a century ago that the development of Marxism had been significantly influenced by ‘theosophy, philosophical alchemy, and the Kabbalah, drawing much inspiration from the writings of earlier mystics’, and more generally, that modern scientific disciplines emerged in the milieu of esoteric symbolisms, imagery, practices, and cosmologies.

Historically, then, social and esoteric sciences were homologous to the extent that Rudolf Steiner (2019), the founder of anthroposophy, theorized the functioning of modern society in terms of three interactive components-the capitalist economy, the political state, and cultural–spiritual life-akin to various social theorists who proposed threefold models of modern society (Cohen and Arato, 1992; Habermas, 1996; Taylor, 1990). Given this homology, it might not be so outlandish after all to experiment with spiritual sociology.

Pierre Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist: What if there were as many objective structures as observers?

Now, let me start this experimentation by engaging with Pierre Bourdieu, for I deeply respect his extensive contributions to the longstanding sociological debate on the relationship between objective and subjective worlds, be it framed as ‘objective and subjective culture’ (Simmel, 1971), ‘structure and agency’ (Sewell, 1992), or otherwise. In particular, I appreciate his nonmodern impulse to overcome ‘dualism’ as a manifestation of mononaturalism: the dualistic separation of object and subject is part and parcel of the mononaturalist ontology that posits the singular world existing objectively and independently of subjective experiences by humans.

To go beyond dualism, Bourdieu constructed a theory of practice that was expected to successfully escape

the realism of the structure, to which objectivism, a necessary stage in breaking with primary experience and constructing the objective relationships, necessarily leads when it hypostatizes these relations by treating them as realities already constituted outside of the history of the group – without falling back into subjectivism, which is quite incapable of giving an account of the necessity of the social world. (1990a: 52; emphasis added)

Nevertheless, Bourdieu seemed to end up prioritizing objective structures by claiming that the ‘conditions associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus’ as subjective structures (1990a: 53; emphasis in original), despite his insistence on ‘a dialectical relationship’ between the two (1990b: 125). As a result, his theory of practice has been interpreted as biased for objectivism and criticized for lacking adequate accounts of agency for structural transformations (King, 2000; Vandenberghe, 1999).

From the nonmodern perspective of spiritual sociology, however, at stake is not so much how to interpret fairly Bourdieu's theory of practice (cf. Lizardo, 2004) as how to specify the ontological nature of the relationship between objective and subjective structures beyond the generic ‘dialectical’ one. Bourdieu as a sociologist displaced this ontological question into an epistemological operation through which the relationship between objective and subjective structures was assumed to be ‘objectively’ explainable for sociologists who are endowed with ‘scientific’ methods and ‘reflexivity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). But what if Bourdieu were a Buddhist quantum physicist? How might he specify the ontological relationship between objective and subjective structures differently than merely ‘dialectical’?

This thought experiment follows the lead of the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. Reflecting on the philosophical implications of his uncertainty principle, Heisenberg observed

the great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication for a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum-theoretical concept of reality when one has not gone through the naïve materialistic way of thinking that still prevailed in Europe in the first decades of this century. (1962: 190)

Subsequently, this affinity between Buddhism and quantum physics has been elaborated by ‘Eastern’ philosophers with scientific training (Capra, 1975; Sasaki, 2021); for example, there is a parallel between the uncertainty principle-the properties of an object can be determined only through an act of observation or measurement-and the Buddhist ontology of the co-arising of objective and subjective worlds.

Similarly, Dyson (1979: 249), a theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, also wrote

I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by electrons.

Dyson thus suggested not only that objective worlds (e.g. the brain) could emerge through subjective observations (e.g. the mind), but that elementary particles could be conscious in the first place à la the Buddhist cosmology that posits the universe and consciousness as always coexisting (Richard and Thuan, 2001).

From the perspective of Buddhist quantum physics, Bourdieu's idea of ‘a network of objective relations (of domination or subordination, of complementarity or antagonism, etc.) between positions’, each of which is ‘objectively defined by its objective relationship with other positions’ (1996: 231), needs to be relativized. This is because Buddhist quantum physics posits that there are as many objective relations as observations made by subjective structures (i.e. humans with habitus). Put in the language of the uncertainty principle, objective structures could only probabilistically exist as wavefunctions prior to their interactions with subjective structures. Thus, Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist would specify the ontological relationship between objective and subjective structures as ‘co-arising’, permitting as many objective structures as subjective ones to exist.

Typically, sociologists, including Bourdieu, prefer a socio-ontological solution to this relativistic problem of many worlds. They invoke ‘Power’ to explain how one dominant objective structure (or maybe a few), among many other possible ones, comes into existence as if a wavefunction collapsed due to an act of observation by the powerful (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991; Lukes, 2005). Interestingly, this socio-ontological solution assumes the most powerful of all actors to be sociologists capable of collapsing multiple objective structures observed by actors into one, thanks to ‘Science with a capital S’, as John Meyer (2000) aptly called sociologists and other scientists ‘Others’ who are epistemologically authorized to construct the singular and common world. Although such mononaturalism has been challenged by ‘pragmatic sociology’ (Boltanski, 2013) and ‘symmetrical anthropology’ (Latour, 2017), it still pervades sociology and other disciplines.

The extent of pervasiveness of mononaturalism can be found in ‘resonance theory’ developed by Hartmut Rosa, arguably one of the most prominent sociologists in his generation. On the one hand, Rosa (2020: 5–6) tried avoiding mononaturalism by developing ‘a sociology of our relationship to the world that assumes that subject and world are not the precondition, but the result of our relatedness to this presence’, that is, by conceptualizing relatedness as the ontological basis of the co-arising of ‘(experiencing) subjects and (encountered) objects’. On the other hand, he, just like Bourdieu, ended up displacing this ontological consideration into an epistemological operation by claiming that ‘it will be enough to analyze just the phenomenological side of the relationship between subject and world, that is, the ways in which we, as subjects, encounter and experience the world’ (Rosa, 2020: 50; emphasis added), as if the singular and common world already existed objectively for everyone. To move beyond this socio-ontological solution that posits the existence of ‘the world’ guaranteed by scientists, let me now turn to Emile Durkheim, who hinted at a way out with his concept of ‘conscience collective’, typically translated as ‘collective consciousness’.

Emile Durkheim as a new age transpersonal psychologist: What if collective consciousness were ‘spirit-in-action’?

As Durkheim (1997) argued in tracing the historical evolution of the division of labor, collective consciousness is associated with ‘mechanical solidarity’, a primordial source of solidarity based on similarities in beliefs and values, which was weakened but persisted in modern societies. Ultimately, collective consciousness is ‘the highest form of psychic life… [that] embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the intellect with frameworks that are applicable to the totality of beings’ (Durkheim, 1995: 445). Here, collective consciousness sounds like the divine source of individual consciousnesses. Indeed, Durkheim suggested,

if one is to call the distinctive property of the individual representational life spirituality, one should say that social life is defined by its hyper-spirituality. By this we mean that all the constituent attributes of mental life are found in it, but elevated to a very much higher power, [to the extent that] I see in the Divinity only society transfigured and symbolically expressed (1974: 34; 52; emphasis in original).

Thus, Durkheim arrived at his well-known concept of ‘Society’ as sacred and transcendent.

Importantly, this conceptual formulation was motivated by Durkheim's disagreement with both materialists and spiritualists. On the one hand, he rejected ‘those [psycho-physiological] doctrines that reduce psychological life to being a mere efflorescence of physical life’, because ‘most psychological phenomena do not derive from organic causes’; on the other hand, he praised ‘spiritualist philosophers’ for being ‘very rightly aware that psychological life, in its highest manifestations, is much too free and complex to be the mere prolongation of physical life’, though he eventually rejected their claim that individual consciousness is ‘independent of any natural cause or that it should be placed outside the realm of nature’ (Durkheim, 1997: 286). He thus located the ultimate cause of individual consciousness, neither in a material world nor in a spiritual world, but in a social world. This is why he concluded that ‘collective psychology is sociology, quite simply’ (Durkheim, 1974: 34).

In hindsight, it is easy to see how Durkheim's reasoning was biased against both materialists and spiritualists. To begin with, a psycho-physiological counterargument-collective psychic life is part and parcel of human nature-could have been made by Carl Jung:

In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we take on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited (Jung, 1959: 43).

In other words, while Durkheim (1995: 421) concluded that ‘if religion gave birth to all that is essential in society, that is so because the idea of society is the soul of religion’, Jung (1964: 23) could counter-conclude that the very idea of society came from the collective unconscious, ‘the matrix of all metaphysical assertions, of all mythology, all philosophy (in so far as it is not merely critical) and all forms of life which are based upon psychological suppositions’. This Durkheim–Jung debate thus ends in a stalemate, for their competing explanations constitute a chicken-and-egg problem.

A way out of this stalemate for Durkheim is to incorporate a more sophisticated ‘spiritualist philosophy’ advanced by Ken Wilber, an advocate of integral theory that encompasses Durkheimian collective-psychology-cum-sociology and Jungian transpersonal psychology. Drawing on diverse spiritual traditions in both the West and the East, Wilber articulated a nondualist position: collective consciousness is none other than ‘Spirit’, simultaneously material, mental, and spiritual, which ‘knows itself objectively as nature; knows itself subjectively as mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit-the Source, the Summit, and the Eros of the entire sequence’ (2017a: 278; emphasis in original). In this nondualist formulation, collective consciousness is immanent, in the sense of manifesting in individual bodies and consciousnesses and societies, and transcendent, in the sense of having the spiritual dimension that exists beyond physical, mental, and social worlds.

This nondualist integral theory also posits that individual consciousness emerges only because Spirit

illusorily ‘split’ and ‘divided’ itself into billions of individual selves, and two (or more) of those selves can, playing on the underlying unity between them, mutually resonate with and mutually understand each other… What else is mutual understanding but a hidden reaffirmation of the singleness of Consciousness underlying the communication, a miracle if ever there was one, the miracle of We (Wilber, 2017b: 610).

Equally important, Spirit is never static but always evolving: ‘Evolution, as Spirit-in-action, is starting to awaken on a more collective scale… Out of itself, as matter, it began; out of itself, as life, it continued; out of itself, as mind; it began to awaken’ (Wilber, 2000: 194). Here, evolution is purposeful, for Spirit splits itself into individual selves to accumulate information, knowledge, insights, and wisdom across times and places and feeds them back into itself to grow more enlightened.

From this vantage point of New Age transpersonal psychology, Durkheim might propose a new solution to the relativistic problem of many worlds identified by Bourdieu the Buddhist quantum physicist (Figure 1). First, as Spirit divides itself, it produces an infinite number of microcosms (Time 1). The relationship between each microcosm and the macrocosm Spirit is holographic in the sense that ‘all things are contained in all things’ (Wilber, 2017b: 223): the macrocosm contains all microcosms, and each microcosm in turn contains the macrocosm. Although each microcosm has a unique set of objective and subjective structures, some microcosms vibrate more powerfully than others, forcing less powerful ones to echo. To borrow Rosa's language, an echo ‘lacks its own voice; it occurs in a way mechanically and without any variance. What resounds in an echo is never a response, but only ever oneself’ (2019: 167; emphasis original). When this echo effect happens, less powerful microcosms lose their own voices, becoming isomorphic with and subordinated to more powerful ones (Time 2). In the eyes of sociologists (who are also microcosms), this appears to be the working of Power to collapse many worlds into a few.

Figure 1.

A trajectory of spirit-in-action.

Since Spirit is ever evolving, however, more microcosms choose to vibrate by resonating, not echoing, each other, i.e. they become awakened and enlightened. As Rosa (2019: 167; emphasis in original) rightly argued:

Resonance is not to be confused either literally or figuratively with the concept of echoing [because] the two entities in relation, in a vibratory medium (or resonant space), mutually affect each other in such a way that they can be understood as responding to each other, at the same time each speaking with its own voice. ¹

As more and more microcosms find their unique voices and resonate with each other in a mutually transformative manner, the macrocosm Sprit grows fuller, richer, and wiser (Time 3). While powerful echoes collapse many worlds into a few through anxiety, fear, greed, and other ‘negative vibrations’, resonances create the pluriverse, in which many worlds coexist and co-flourish, through love, kindness, compassion, and other ‘positive vibrations’.

This is why Rosa (2019: 438) astutely observed ‘emancipation means making it possible for individuals to vibrate and thus is a precondition of subjects’ capacity for resonance’. How, then, is such emancipation possible, through which a microcosm breaks away from powerful echo effects and starts vibrating for resonance toward the collective evolution of Spirit? To answer this question, let me turn to Michael Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary.

Michel Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary: What if spirituality could transcend power relations?

I have chosen Foucault for the third and last thought experiment for two reasons. One is that he fully relativized sociology (or any science) vis-à-vis other ways of knowing, and illustrated its performative involvement in power relations-his approach was much more ‘symmetrical’ than Bourdieu's and Durkheim's. From Foucault's perspective, sociology has no epistemological authority to collapse multiple objective worlds into the single and common one. Another reason is that Foucault dedicated the final years of his life to examining nonmodern ways of being, practiced by ancient Greeks, to explore how one might transcend modernity from within through the nonmodern technologies of spirituality.

Sociologists who know Foucault mostly from his pre-1980 writings are likely to read him merely as a historian and philosopher of modern-Western formations of power, knowledge/science, and self/subject-namely, how power relations co-operated with the regime of truth to shape human behaviors and subjectivities. In this orthodox reading, ‘Power’ is everywhere: disciplinary or biopolitical, various modalities of power permeate families, prisons and clinics, schools and universities, and other institutions in society to produce what has been taken as the most obvious and precious in modern societies, such as ‘(scientifically discovered) truth’ and ‘(free and autonomous) subject’ as the mechanisms of ordering individual and collective lives (e.g., Foucault, 2003, 2007).

During the final few years of his life (1981–1984) however, Foucault explored how one might break free from the modern regime of power through his investigation of a nonmodern world of ancient Greeks. Unlike the pre-1980 Foucault (1995 [1975]: 30) who stated rather cynically that ‘the man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself’, the post-1980s Foucault (1994 [1984]: 298; emphasis original) advocated creating ‘the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible’. This call for reconfiguring the modern regime of power for greater freedom inspired Rosa (2019: 456; emphasis original) to define the ‘critical next question, which can then be posed in the spirit of Michel Foucault, [as] whether power can generate, force, or impede resonance’.

But there is an important twist: prior to his death, Foucault left various hints for transcending Power altogether to attain emancipation, as he probed into spirituality as ‘the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself [sic] in order to have access to the truth’ (2005: 15). Access to this ‘truth’ enables the transcendence of ‘this world’ and ‘the self’, for spirituality is the ‘radical will for alterity with regard to oneself [to change] everything, and above all to change oneself, to become other, but essentially without knowing what that other will be’ (Foucault, 2020: 128). Thus, after reflecting on revolutions in modern Europe and other parts of the world, Foucault (2020: 124–127) concluded that spirituality could be ‘the root cause of all the great political and cultural upheavals’, and that ‘revolutions without spirituality are the exception’, because it creates the ‘possibility of rising up from the subject position that had been fixed for you by a political power, a religious power, a dogma, a belief, a habit, a social structure, and so on’.

Such ‘spiritual truth’ and ‘spiritual power’ seem to depart from the modern regimes of truth and power that Foucault extensively discussed in his pre-1980 writings. Indeed, taking inspiration from Socrates, Foucault introduced the concept of ‘parrhesia’ as a nonmodern form of truth-telling, in which one ‘says what is true because he knows it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true’ (2001: 14; emphasis original). Importantly, this ‘philosophical truth-telling’ was distinct from ‘political truth-telling’ and critical of political rationality (Foucault, 2010: 288–289), and made possible by Socrates's ability to hear ‘a sort of familiar, divine or daemonic voice, which makes itself heard from time to time, speaking in him and to him’ (Foucault, 2011: 77). Socrates had such an unusual ability because he practiced the nonmodern ethic of care for the self, ‘the principle that taking care of the soul is, for the soul, to contemplate itself and, in doing so, to recognize the divine element which is precisely what enables it to see the truth’ (2011: 126). Spirit thus manifested in Socrates, one of its microcosms, and delivered parrhesia in his unique voice.

The basis of philosophical truth-telling-nonmodern spiritual practice to gain access to Spirit and its divine truth-was never lost in the history of modern Europe. As Foucault (2005: 28) observed, in almost all nineteenth century philosophers, including but not limited to, G. W. Hegel, F. W. Schelling, Fredrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger,

the activity of knowing, whether [it] is discredited, devalued, considered critically, or rather, as in Hegel, exalted, is nonetheless still linked to the requirements of spirituality. In all these philosophies, a certain structure of spirituality tries to link knowledge, the activity of knowing, and the conditions and effects of this activity, to a transformation in the subject's being.

Such spiritual practice was not only preserved but also revitalized by Rudolf Steiner who combined theosophy, German Idealism, and various esoteric traditions to advance anthroposophy; for example, Steiner sought to

found ethical life not on some kind of abstract principle but on our inner moral experience…. Kant established the categorical imperative to act so that the principles of your actions can be a guideline for all other people. ‘Put on a coat that can fits all others!’. But the maxim of the philosophy of freedom says, ‘Act as the spirit directs you, in your highest human powers, in the specific moment, in the individual, tangible moment’ (Steiner, 2018: 130).

Here again, Spirit inspires its individual microcosms to know the right actions and carry them out.

It is therefore clear that nonmodern, spiritual ways of being and knowing continued to be alive and well inside modern societies, functioning as the reservoirs of a nonmodern critique of modernity, as Foucault sought to break through the modern regimes of truth and power via nonmodern spiritual practices. As illustrated in Figure 1, spiritual practices enable individual microcosms to reconnect with the macrocosm Spirit, remember their true identity, and hence break away from powerful echoes to start vibrating with their unique voices. Put another way, those who have practiced hearing their divine–daemonic voices come to know ‘not just how to realize the higher Self, but how to see it embraced in culture, embodied in nature, and embedded in social institutions’ (Wilber, 2017a: 290; emphasis in original).

This spiritual–sociological perspective articulates a critique of modernity (or any society) that is simultaneously transcendent, in the sense of being connected with Spirit, and immanent, in the sense of transforming the self, culture, nature, and social institutions to manifest Spirit more fully. By the same token, such a spiritual–sociological critique avoids falling into the trap of ‘spiritual bypassing’, by which changing one's understanding of society is thought to automatically or instantaneously change society as if jumping from one universe to another parallel one. Precisely because ‘a ‘change in awareness’ alone is not sufficient’ and ‘fundamental institutional reforms’ are needed (Rosa, 2019: 436), daemon-inspired revolutionaries act to transform not only the self but also culture, nature, and social institutions.

Moreover, daemon-inspired revolutionaries are ultimately optimistic because, from their spiritual-sociological perspectives, social change in a ‘positive’ direction is inevitable in the long run. If generational change is the most powerful force of social change (Mannheim, 1952), it is because a younger generation tends to be spiritually more mature than older generations because the former is born from the Spirit that has grown more enlightened than before. Put another way, Socrates and other daemon-inspired revolutionaries in human history were ahead of their times because they had much greater awareness of their true nature – individual manifestations of the ever-growing Spirit—than their contemporaries. Such awareness allowed them to transcend power relations from within, delivering the most penetrating critiques of their own societies, articulating the most exalted visions of future societies, and inspiring others to take actions for collective awakening.

Conclusion and implications

The foregoing experimentation has illustrated how spiritual sociology might arrive at an immanent–transcendent critique of modernity through Pierre Bourdieu, Emile Durkheim, and Michel Foucault, with the help of other relevant thinkers. First, Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist advances the nonmodern, nondualist ontology that permits the co-arising of objective and subjective worlds and hence the existence of an infinite number of universes corresponding to observations. Second, Durkheim as a New Age transpersonal psychologist helps explain how these universes are nonetheless microcosms that make up the macrocosm Spirit or Collective Consciousness in a holographic manner. If an infinite number of microcosms appear to collapse into a few ones in the eyes of sociologists, that is because the most powerful microcosms subordinate less powerful ones through echo effects. Finally, Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary suggests how subordinated microcosms might be emancipated by breaking through powerful echo effects via spiritual practices, so that they can start vibrating with their unique voices and resonating with other emancipated microcosms to create the pluriverse for advancing Spirit-in-action.

To be sure, this particular experimentation with spiritual sociology is limited in the sense that it has engaged only with the three French thinkers by drawing primarily on Western spiritual traditions (e.g., New Age, ancient Greece) and only secondarily on non-Western ones (e.g., Buddhism). While this has served the purpose to illuminate how nonmodern spirituality is immanent even in the ‘Western core’ of modernity, it is perfectly possible to conduct further experimentation with other thinkers from different times and places. For example, future thought experiments may draw more extensively on non-Western spiritual traditions-Islamic (Alatas, 2014), aboriginal (Smith, 2021), and many others-as well as on ‘comparative metaphysics’ (Izutsu, 1984; Yuasa, 1987), to articulate a variety of nonmodern ontologies and epistemologies as the basis of different ways of doing spiritual sociology.

Thus, to conclude this round of experimentation in anticipation of more to come, let me reflect on its implications for undergraduate and graduate education in sociology. This educational reflection is essential because spiritual sociology-and its aim to advance an immanent–transcendent critique of the status quo-requires a new way of practicing sociology. Indeed, if objective and subjective worlds co-arise as suggested by Buddhist quantum physics, and if the quality of one's being changes according to that of one's connection with Spirit and the resultant vibration suggested by New Age transpersonal psychology and the theory of daemon-inspired revolution, it means that the quality of sociological observation, as well as the power of sociological critique, fundamentally depends on the degree of enlightenment attained by the sociologist. This is why Wilber similarly suggested that mastering the integral theory requires not only learning content knowledge but also ‘the interior transformation of the researchers themselves’ (1997: 86; emphasis original) to understand experientially what great masters in various spiritual traditions have said.

As a first step, I suggest that undergraduate and graduate education in sociology incorporate contemplative practice to reflect on one's ontology and learn to see it in symmetry with nonmodern ones, while cultivating one's capacity to access suprasensible intuition and inspiration-and even the ‘divine-daemonic voice’–as nonmodern ways of knowing. In particular, contemplative practice can help sociologists experience and embody the insight that ‘another way of being-in-the-world, another form of relating to the world is possible’ (Rosa, 2019: 444; emphasis in original). If more and more sociologists learn ‘another way of being’ and ‘another form of relating’ capable of creating another world altogether, their spiritual–sociological praxis might make an important contribution to collective awakening.