In their groundbreaking work on spiritual capital, Zohar and Marshall outline a chain of intentional steps to stimulate the formation of spiritual capital: “
We need a sense of meaning and values and a sense of fundamental purpose (spiritual intelligence) in order to build the wealth that these can generate (spiritual capital).”
1Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), 4. Emphasis in original. A working theory of this difficult-to-define concept has been proposed by Palmer and Wong as “the individual and collective capacities generated through affirming and nurturing the intrinsic spiritual value of every human being.”
2David Palmer and Michele Wong, Clarifying the Concept of Spiritual Capital. Prepared for the Conference on the Social Scientific Study of Religion. The Chinese University of Hong Kong. July 10–13, 2013, https://www.socsc.hku.hk/ExCEL3/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Concept-of-Spiritual-Capital.pdf (accessed July 30, 2023). Emphasis in original. I do not use the word “spirit” in a mystical sense. Instead, I use it to mean “the essentially social and intersubjective character of knowledge and thought.” See https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophical-anthropology/The-idealism-of-Kant-and-Hegel#ref1011505 (accessed July 6, 2023). Furthermore, while the term “spiritual capital” might seem inherently contradictory, I would contend that this confusion arises from the shared perception of “capital” as referring to property, financial, economic, or material capital or other tangible assets. In this chapter, the term “spiritual” can be thought of as signifying the mind, values, morals, ethics, knowledge, intellectual endeavor, and also, importantly, reciprocal intersubjective empathy and understanding.However, closer to Palmer and Wong’s working definition of the concept, Danah Zohar proposes that the human self comprises three levels, which are “the mental, the emotional and the spiritual.”
3Danah Zohar, The Quantum Leader: A Revolution in Business Thinking and Practice (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016), 37. The last level she suggests is the spiritual, which, according to her, is “that deep layer of the self from which we are in touch with questions of meaning and value.”
4Zohar, The Quantum Leader, 37. Zohar reminds us that depth psychology shows how the mental and emotional aspects of the self “are [also] underpinned by our quest for meaning, by our visions and deepest values, that is, by our spiritual side.”
5Zohar, The Quantum Leader, 37. Or, as Martin Swales succinctly notes in his discussion of Hesse’s
The Glass Bead Game, “
Geist is a realm which allows the limiting dimension of the real to be transcended by the abundant potentiality of human consciousness.”
6Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 141.Informed by these working definitions and to illustrate and understand both the creation of spiritual capital and its intersubjective influence, I now explore how two of Hesse’s later works provide examples of the value of inwardness, that is, being in touch with one’s essential spiritual being, before tracing positive outcomes of the influence of spiritual capital as it is unfolded into social relations.
7Referencing The Glass Bead Game and The Journey to the East, Murray Peppard writes that “they have the common purpose of keeping alive in Hesse’s readers a sense of spirituality and a faith in the ideals and the life of the mind. The Journey to the East is in particular ‘a return to inwardness.’” Murray Peppard, “Hermann Hesse: From Eastern Journey to Castalia,” Monatshefte 50, no. 5 (1958), 247.