Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 18 Fall 2000

              Spirituality Without Moral Concerns
Commenting on Thomas Alexander's searching and sensitive essay is both a
challenge and a pleasure. He is a thoughtful and sympathetic reader of
Santayana. He is a serious philosopher, seeking to relate great texts and
towering conceptions to his own experience of the world. He is also a learned man,
capable of detecting fruitful connections between divergent traditions and apparently
dissimilar ideas. The pleasure of commenting comes from seeing how much he
makes of Santayana's idea of spirituality. The challenge is in finding something to
say that carries the argument further in the spirit of open inquiry he embraces.1
Alexander thinks getting straight about spirituality is humanly and not only
philosophically important. His central concern is how to keep the moral life of
compassion and the spiritual life of detachment from becoming "disjointed" or
"irrelevant to each other." He thinks that though Santayana sees animal life as the
ground of both action and vision, the two seem nevertheless to be. inadequately
integrated and hence to pull in opposite directions in his philosophy. Santayana
appears to him to offer a spirituality of "icy tenderness," which is an insufficiently
inclusive approach to existence in the natural world. Alexander turns, instead, to
Buddhist thought for guidance in developing a compassionate spirituality or a life of
"contemplative compassion."
I understand the impulse that motivates Alexander to believe that spirituality
must overcome its contemplative distance and embrace concern and compassion. The
world is in desperate straits and life is awful for hundreds of millions of people.
Under such circumstances, detached enjoyment of the passing scene Is self-indulgent,
if not morally depraved, We should expend the energies of the world in making it a
better place and, when that is impossible, we must at least view the struggles of the
suffering with MitgefiM or sympathetic sadness.
This is the impulse that leads Alexander to seek the sources of the spiritual life
in "the problem of evil" and to refer to spirituality as an "escape" from the miseries
of life. God need not be a player in one's conceptual scheme to see evil as a problem.
Our everyday sense of justice revolts at the sight of undeserved suffering, of children
dying painful deaths and nasty children disposing of their aging parents. Such
Injustice and suffering weigh heavily on Alexander: they take up the center of his
vision. They loom so large that he finds it difficult to peer around them at the calm
landscape of spirituality. As a result, he sees even the spiritual life through the heat
of action and the indignities that beset this world.
Such vision, Santayana never tires of pointing out, provides the surest way to
miss the essence of spirituality. Pure intuition enables us to see the world under the
form of eternity or as "chronicles of ancient wars." This form of consciousness does
not call on us to act or even to feel much, for it is not knowledge of living and
suffering things but vision of essences. As play of light, it reveals nothing we must
set right or pity. It does not distinguish truth from fiction, what is from what might or
ought to be. Its objects are not the loved or hated things that surround us; its relation
to them is, accordingly, not one framed in desire and in pain.
1 An earlier version of this paper was read to the annual meeting of the Santayana Society in Boston
on December 28,1999, in response to the above paper by Thomas Alexander.