#Humanism, Meaning, and Purpose: #Post-Denominational Much?
The Greeks haunt Western thinking in some very eerie and very damaging ways. The body / soul split is the worst. As in most damaging. But there are others vying for most damaging, including the idea of dialectics and categories, and a general over-optimism concerning concepts such as beauty and virtue.
As the differences between liberal (“mainline”) Protestant denominations disappear in the U.S., and even the difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, it’s time that we reassess a whole host of assumptions and definitions. Happily, a good many philosophers questioned and dropped a good many Greek modes of thinking a long time ago.
Consider this bit on consciousness from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1896):
Human attention inevitably flickers; we survey things in succession, and our acts of synthesis and our realization of fact are only occasional. This is the tenure of all our possessions; we are not uninterruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest conviction.
What wonder, then, that we are not constantly conscious of that perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our preferences and desires? We view it only in parts, as passion or perception successively directs our attention to its various elements.
Some of us never try to conceive it (that perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our preferences and desires) in its totality. Yet our whole life is an act of worship to this unknown divinity; every heartfelt prayer is offered before one or another of its images.(The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory)
Here in a study of beauty Santayana sums up what came to be known in the twentieth century as “spiritual practice” and in the twenty-first century as “mindfulness.”
Notice that Santayana describes life as a sort of abstract, hazy rut; a rut in which we do not quite recognize the things around us; do not quite realize what we ourselves are doing; and do not focus on our central concerns in life — our meaning and purpose
This is, Santayana claims, the normal mode of being alive in the world — our default auto-pilot. But that’s not a good thing:
. . . our whole life is an act of worship to this unknown divinity; every heartfelt prayer is offered before one or another of its images.
“Perfection.” That’s the Latin meaning of the word virtue. That, Santayana claims, is what we long for. We carry an ideal (read “Platonic ideal”) in our heads that convinces us that we need a total body-mind make-over in a series of peak moments.
But that’s not how life works. Actually we are living in perfection all the time. It’s just that habit makes it hard to see. Art or nature or wonder or what we today call mindfulness can re-awaken us to that perfection.
And we need to access that perfection to keep aware of meaning and purpose — and the simple joy of living and breathing, for that matter.
The ancient Greeks left a good many good things behind, but also some damaging assumptions that need reevaluation in our time of post-denominationalism and post-Christianity. The expectation that Beauty or Truth will strike like lightning or knock us off our horses in a moment of sudden revelation, as St. Paul claimed to have experienced, leads us down some rabbit holes.
Santayana understood that a concept such as beauty doesn’t seize us and change our lives in an instant. The Greeks got that wrong and set up a lot of people to fail.
Similarly, meaning and purpose don’t often strike like lightening and leave us forever alert, awake, and changed.
Rather, living a life of meaning and purpose comes back to focus in living in the here and now, which is sometimes (often) a slow slog. Rather than striving for peak experiences, we do best to live in the here and the now. This moment. This passion. This life.
