The Ethics of Detachment in Santayana's Philosophy

M. Brodrick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137472489
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Knowing that we are finite, how can we live to the fullest? Philosopher George Santayana suggested 'spirituality' enables us to enjoy what we have. This book clarifies and extends Santayana's account of spirituality, while suggesting how the detachment of spirituality can relieve human suffering, enrich our lives, and make us better human beings.

1

Ultimate Value in Psychology

One of the most important distinctions in philosophy is between means and ends. Means are valued as tools for the improvement of life, whereas we find ends inherently valuable, making any improvements to which they might lead irrelevant. For example, working is often viewed as a means of making money, leading to the end of buying things we like. Sometimes what we buy improves our lives down the road, but those who enjoy shopping as an end know that eventual outcomes are beside the point. They do not shop for the sake of a better tomorrow but for the sheer enjoyment of the present. Another important difference is that means and ends stand in opposite relations to satisfaction. While means lead to satisfaction, ends supposedly yield the satisfaction we seek when we engage in means. Eating right and exercising, for instance, are often viewed as means of achieving good health, which is supposed to bring satisfaction in and of itself.

In theory, at least, there is nothing wrong with the idea that means lead to the satisfaction found in ends. The trouble is that most ends turn out to be less than fully satisfying. More often than not, achieving the ends at which our actions aim yields only fleeting satisfaction, prompting us to search for satisfaction elsewhere. Like the pleasant sensation of fullness that comes after eating, the satisfaction of getting what we want is merely palliative, masking but not truly satiating the underlying hunger. The pleasure of a new pair of shoes lasts at most a few days before yielding to the desire to own something else. In the professional realm, an increase or promotion provides a short period of heightened self-esteem that soon gives way to the desire to climb higher. We even grow tired of husbands, wives, and partners, imagining the prince or princess we never met but should have. We say we love a challenge and note that adversity strengthens, but what drives us is the longing for true satisfaction. As a wise philosopher once said, “the nectar is in the journey”¹. But the nectar must satisfy, or it is not really nectar. The journey must include destinations, pauses complete in themselves consisting of unalloyed satisfaction. The vicious cycle of means leading to ends that fail to satisfy our desires fueled the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw no permanent escape from such vain striving.

Unfortunately, Schopenhauer’s pessimism about means leading to disappointing ends is even more appropriate now than it was in his time. Much of the westernized world embraces an ideology of endless progress in all areas of life, with each achievement sending us in search of a greater one. No accomplishment is too good to be surpassed, making satisfaction arguably more elusive now than in previous eras. The expectation of endless progress exponentially increases the pressure and stress of living. Still out of reach, true satisfaction is desired that much more, making the failure to achieve it all the more painful.

Now more than ever, we need a way of breaking the cycle of means and ends. But that requires finding an activity that is valuable not as a means, nor even as an end, but as an end-in-itself transcending the cycle of means and ends altogether. Such an activity would be unconditionally valuable, engaged in purely for its own sake, without reference to anything in the past or to come. An activity of that kind, if it can be found, promises to bring satisfaction that, if not everlasting, is at least complete, unlike the partial satisfactions found within the means and ends framework. An unconditionally valuable activity would yield moments of unassailable inner peace and contentment.

It may seem odd to consider the instrumental value of what is inherently valuable, but taking these different views of ultimate value does not disturb its inner nature as a reality transcending means and ends. It does, however, shed light on the experience of those longing for relief from stress and worry, whether caused by the rat race in the prime of life or by chronic illness during life’s final stages. For them, peace of mind is a goal to be achieved, and inherently valuable activities are a means of achieving it. Nor does the fact that engaging in such activities instantly reveals their true nature as ends-in-themselves transcending means and ends diminish the perspective from which ultimate value is a means to an end. More importantly, that perspective provides a framework for discovering how ultimate value can enhance our lives. Describing it this way mobilizes ultimate value for the relief of human suffering and pain, although such descriptions are somewhat misleading. We can then say, for example, that unconditional value brings inner peace to those who are weary of striving. That is not literally true, because ultimate value in and of itself is not a means, but it does capture the way in which unconditional value frees us from concern.

Those competing in the rat race of life have much to gain from the inner peace of ultimate value, but not as much as the frail elderly. When searching for satisfaction as one’s capacities decline and chronic pain descends, there is often little comfort to be found in the external world, no matter how commodious one’s environment. The caring presence of loved ones is of great importance, but there is only so much they can do. They do not know the distress firsthand and cannot reverse the physical decline from which it springs. Here ultimate value can do what no medicine or human contact can. Transcendence of means and ends, even if it lasts but a moment, brings peace to the ailing old by sinking discomfort and worry in the immediacies that surround us.

In this increasingly secular age, psychology is a natural place to look for ultimate value. If there is an activity that transcends means and ends, it probably lies in the realm of psychology, and chances are good that psychologists have described it. After developing an account of the general features of ultimate value, this chapter examines the theories of Aristotle, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Martin Seligman, and Abraham Maslow on what is inherently and perhaps unconditionally valuable. My purpose in examining those theories is to determine whether they in fact provide an account of the unconditionally valuable. I conclude that, while they do describe special ends, the value of those ends is not ultimate. I then introduce what American philosopher George Santayana called “spirituality”, arguing that spirituality clearly is a form of the unconditionally valuable. The chapter concludes with a brief review of recent work in psychology that finds a correlation between spirituality and well-being in later life but that, unfortunately, fails to provide a clear account of the nature of spirituality.

Searching for anything requires at least a general idea of what one is looking for. What, then, are the general traits of an unconditionally valuable activity? Aristotle offers the basic distinction that sets ultimate value apart from other goods, namely that some things are valued as means while others are prized as ends. Ultimate value cannot be one of those goods that is a means, because then its value would not be ultimate, nor, for that reason, would it be capable of providing the sort of final satisfaction that must characterize ultimate value. Nor does it suffice to say that all activities valued as ends are of ultimate value, because, as Aristotle observed, some goods are both ends and means. That which is unconditionally valuable cannot be valued as a means at all, or else some part of its value would be derived from something external, making it less than unconditionally valuable and not entirely satisfying. Aristotle goes a step further by distinguishing what he calls “final ends”, those that are “chosen always as an end and never as a means”.² A final end, moreover, is “self-sufficient”, an activity that “merely standing by itself alone renders life desirable and lacking in nothing”.³ It is also a good for the sake of which all other goods are chosen.⁴ Aristotle’s account of final ends as self-sufficient activities always chosen as ends and never as means and for the sake of which we choose all other goods provides a convenient model on which to begin to understand the general nature of ultimate value. But are there specific activities fitting that description?

To Aristotle, there was one end in particular that clearly qualified as final, namely happiness. As he understood it, happiness consisted of “the active exercise of [the] soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them. Moreover, [that] activity must occupy a complete lifetime”.⁵ In other words, happiness as defined by Aristotle is a permanent condition. Does such happiness qualify as unconditionally valuable? It does inasmuch as it single-handedly renders life worthwhile. It also qualifies in that “no one chooses happiness for the sake of ... anything whatever other than itself”.⁶ However, while Aristotle defined ends with respect to human choices alone, there is another way of defining ends that must be taken into account.

If the nature of an activity can be determined by subjective appraisal, it can also be decided with reference to its objective consequences. There are self-sufficient activities that no one ever chooses except as ends that, inasmuch as they lead to objective consequences in the external world, are also means. A lifetime of behaviors, whether virtuous or not, produces objective consequences. The fact that happiness is a final end, with respect to how we appraise it, does not make it objectively final. Nor can happiness ever be final objectively, since its consequences extend beyond the life of the virtuous individual indefinitely. That is what led Aristotle to wonder whether it is even possible to call a person happy after his death, with ongoing events in the objective world always threatening to damage his reputation.⁷ The same ongoing events render happiness a means in an objective sense, while leaving intact its special status as a “final end” in relation to subjects. But that means that, all things considered, happiness is neither final nor ultimate. While happiness is a final end in Aristotle’s sense, it is not unconditionally valuable, an end-in-itself transcending means and ends altogether. Thus, the general form of ultimate value described above should be modified as follows. Unconditionally valuable activities must be self-sufficient – that is, never chosen as a means – and without direct consequences. They must terminate in themselves, both subjectively and objectively. Because they lack all consequences, such activities are also permanent in the sense of being complete.

A modern descendent of Aristotle’s notion of happiness is what contemporary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “optimal experience” or “flow”. Such experience consists of a feeling of being “in control of our actions, masters of our own fate”.⁸ It amounts to “a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine”.⁹ Such experience occurs during vigorous goal-directed action that is proceeding successfully. “It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt – sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor’s veins”.¹⁰ The data collected by Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues indicated to him that “the best moments in our lives, are not passive, receptive, relaxing times”.¹¹ Instead, such moments “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”.¹² We create optimal experience by competing against ourselves to improve our best performances. “For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage”.¹³

Any activity associated with optimal experience obviously qualifies as an end in Aristotle’s sense because people do it “for the sheer sake of doing it”.¹⁴ To Csikszentmihalyi, “[t]he key element of optimal experience is that it is an end in itself”.¹⁵ He adds that it provides “deep enjoyment”.¹⁶ But does such experience constitute what Aristotle called a final end? More importantly, is it unconditionally valuable? There are several clues that optimal experience is not of ultimate value. The first is that activities associated with flow have direct consequences, making them, in an objective sense, means. Moreover, some passages suggest that we actually choose optimal experience for the sake of something else. Another clue that optimal experience falls short of ultimate value is that it is often intrinsically unpleasant.¹⁷ Even if optimal experience could survive these challenges, it leaves much to be desired in terms of availability to meet the needs of the suffering. Achieving flow is anything but easy, as it “often requires strenuous physical exertion, or highly disciplined mental activity”.¹⁸ Nor does it happen “without the application of skilled performance. Any lapse in concentration will erase it”.¹⁹ Rising to the challenge of achieving optimal experience is “difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present”.²⁰

It is clear that activities associated with optimal experience have direct effects. Whatever they are like as experiences, they are also actions in the external world, with consequences immediately impacting surrounding events. In fact, the preeminent examples of such activities offered by Csikszentmihalyi – sailing, swimming, running, rock climbing, and playing a musical instrument – are strongly physical, removing any doubt that they have direct effects. At least objectively, such activities are means, so they cannot be considered truly final or ultimate. But optimal experience may not even be a final end as understood by Aristotle. While final ends in Aristotle’s sense are never chosen as a means to something else, some passages suggest that, for Csikszentmihalyi, we often choose optimal experience as a means to psychological growth or personal development: “A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual”.²¹ If that passage can be read to say that optimal experience is chosen just for its own sake and not as a means to psychological growth, then Csiksentmihalyi writes that through knowledge of what he calls “the phenomenology of enjoyment”, “it is possible to achieve control of consciousness and turn even the most humdrum moments of everyday life into events that help the self grow”.²² Here the implication is that we should choose optimal experience not as an end-in-itself but as a means to the true end: growth. “It almost seems”, he goes on to say, “that occasionally giving up self-consciousness [i.e. engaging in flow] is necessary for building a strong self-concept”.²³ One statement even suggests that flow’s entire value is as a means. Optimal experience, Csikszentmihalyi writes, is “good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self”.²⁴ Such passages invite the conclusion that, at best, we choose optimal experience both as an end and as a means. If that is true, then flow is not even a final end in Aristotle’s sense.

Not only do we often choose optimal experience as a means, but such experience is not always pleasant and is sometimes positively unpleasant. Optimal experiences “are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur”, Csikszentmihalyi writes. “The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue – yet these could have been the best moments of his life”.²⁵ Moreover, he continues, optimal experience “can be definitely painful”.²⁶ Perhaps it is possible to choose an inherently painful experience as an end, but such experiences are more likely to be tolerated ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Ultimate Value in Psychology
• 2  Spirituality and Religion
• 3  An Ontology for Spirituality
• 4  The Outer Structure and the Inner Nature of Spirituality
• 5  Santayana and Schopenhauer
• 6  A Philosophical Defense of Spirituality
• 7  Spirituality and Human Finitude
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index