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In Praise of Mindfulness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Michael McGhee
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool

Extract

I have meditated regularly, following simple Buddhist procedures, for more than ten years, and that seems just about long enough for me to start to offer some preliminary account of it, despite the limitations of my progress and experience, and the difficulty of describing the more intimate and less explored reaches of the mind. I think I have learned enough to say that through prolonged spiritual practice one arrives at the springs of action and at root attitudes, and is in a position to be possessed of them in a purer, stronger form. It may seem difficult to see how the practice of philosophy can be reconciled with the practice of meditation, but I shall describe how I have tried to do so, and say how I think the one bears on the other. In fact all I can do in the present paper is to attempt a limited discussion of moral psychology, and its relation to the foundations of ethics, a discussion, I must concede now, in which I waver uncertainly in my expression of the key issues. But I think that I cannot delay indefinitely, and if I can sketch out the terrain even roughly, better work on it can come later. My references to mindfulness and to meditation will be elementary and not systematic, though adequate, I hope, to what I want to say about ethics. What I am writing in praise of is mindfulness, or awareness, which I take to be a virtue that is developed through the practice of meditation or some comparable contemplative activity. I am also concerned for the future direction of philosophy. It seems to me that our attaining to this virtue will transform its practice, so that it moves closer to traditional expectations, somewhat disappointed in recent years, though supposedly less so now. If I am not deluded, there is an interior route towards the great questions of metaphysics, and we shall be known for not having taken it. It is a task for a new generation of philosophers, and I for one still scan the horizon for their arrival.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

page 65 note 1 I should like to express my gratitude to the Venerable Sangharakshita, and members of the Western Buddhist Order.

page 66 note 1 In Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

page 66 note 2 I am grateful to Martin Scott-Taggart for making me aware of this line of thought.

page 66 note 3 Cf. Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

page 67 note 1 Cf. Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Mankind.

page 67 note 2 I am indebted to my former teacher Peter Winch's discussion of the concept of an attitude in his ‘Eine Einstellung zure Seele’, PAS 1980–81.

page 67 note 3 From Wordsworth's Prelude.

page 68 note 1 Dr Probal Dasgupta, in correspondence.

page 70 note 1 Cf. Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics.

page 70 note 2 Cf. Winch's inaugural lecture, ‘Moral Integrity’, in Ethics and Action.

page 71 note 1 A System of Logic.

page 71 note 2 Cf. Heidegger's What is called thinking?

page 81 note 1 Cf. Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy.

page 82 note 1 I am very much in the debt of Professor K. J. Shah, of the University of Poona, who made this point to me very emphatically.

page 85 note 1 In Gravity and Grace.

page 85 note 2 Twilight of the Idols.

page 87 note 1 Again I am indebted to Martin Scott-Taggart for ‘educating’ me. Cf. also, in Timothy O'Hagan's book, The End of Law?, an important challenge to the idea of ‘a withering away of the state’.

page 87 note 2 In Aesthetic Education.

page 89 note 1 My former philosophy teacher, Godfrey Vesey, asserted this proposition during a ‘brains trust’ at an OU Summer School at York.

I am grateful to the Director and faculty of the Indian Institute of Education, Pune, to which I was affiliated during the academic year 1984–5.