Facing Truths: Ethics and the Spiritual Life

Extract

In this paper I continue an enterprise begun in earlier work (McGhee, 1988, 1989) in which I attempt to naturalize into a western philosophical context concepts that derive from the practice of Buddhist meditation. In particular I shall try to make use of the notion of samādhi (sometimes translated as ‘concentration’) and vipassanā or insight. I should stress that I make no attempt at a scholarly explication of these terms but try rather to establish a use for them through reflection on experience, and by making a connection with concerns from aesthetics about expression and intentionality: I do so as a moral philosopher seeking to retrieve the Greek virtues of continence and temperance, which I have tried to relate to stages in the emergence of what I call an ‘ethical sensibility’, so that temperance, for instance, is the natural state of one in whom such a sensibility is flourishing. But I see the development of that sensibility as the concentration or gathering of a person's energies into its structure, into the sustaining of the thought or perception upon which action or non-action depends, as well as into the sustaining of action itself. In talking of ‘energy’ here I am trying to develop an idea of Simone Weil's in which she refers to ‘the energy available for action’.