Kierkegaard is often regarded as a precursor of existential philosophy whose religious concerns may, for philosophical purposes, be safely ignored or, at best, regarded as an unfortunate, if unavoidable, consequence of his complicity with the very metaphysics he did so much to discredit. Kierkegaard himself, however, foresaw this appropriation of his work by philosophy. ‘The existing individual who forgets that he is an existing individual will become more and more absent-minded’, he wrote, ‘and as people sometimes embody the fruits of their leisure moments in books, so we may venture to expect as the fruits of his absent-mindedness the expected existential system—well, perhaps, not all of us, but only those who are as absent-minded as he is’ (Kierkegaard, 1968, p. 110). However, it may be rejoined here, this expectation merely shows Kierkegaard's historically unavoidable ignorance of the development of existential philosophy with its opposition to the idea of system and its emphasis upon the very existentiality of the human being. How could a form of thought which, in this way, puts at its centre the very Being of the existing individual, its existentiality, be accused of absent-mindedness? Has it not, rather, recollected that which metaphysics had forgotten? Yet the impression remains that Kierkegaard would not have been persuaded himself that such recollection could constitute remembering that one is an existing individual, for he remarks, of his own ignoring of the difference between Socrates and Plato in his Philosophical Fragments, ‘By holding Socrates down to the proposition that all knowledge is recollection, he becomes a speculative philosopher instead of an existential thinker, for whom existence is the essential thing. The recollection principle belongs to speculative philosophy, and recollection is immanence, and speculatively and eternally there is no paradox’ (Kierkegaard, 1968, p. 184n). We must ask, therefore, whether the recollection of existentiality can cure an existential absent-mindedness or remains itself a form of immanence for which there is no paradox.

While I was quietly thinking these thoughts [about misfortune] over to myself and giving vent to my sorrow with the help of my pen, I became aware of a woman standing over me. She was of aweinspiring appearance, her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men. She was so full of years that I could hardly think of her as of my own generation, and yet she possessed a vivid colour and undiminished vigour … Her clothes were made of imperishable material, of the finest thread woven with the most delicate skill … On the bottom hem could be read the embroidered Greek letter Pi, and on the top hem the Greek letter Theta. Between the two a ladder of steps rose from the lower to the higher letter. Her dress had been torn by the hands of marauders who had each carried off such pieces as he could get. There were some books in her right hand and in her left hand she held a sceptre … As she spoke she gathered her dress into a fold and wiped from my eyes the tears that filled them … the clouds of my grief dissolved and I drank in the light.

I will begin by considering some themes from Proust's wonderful essay on Chardin, Chardin and Rembrandt (Proust, 1988). Proust speaks of the young man ‘of modest means and artistic taste’, his imagination filled with the splendour of museums, of cathedrals, of mountains, of the sea, sitting at table at the end of lunch, nauseated at the ‘traditional mundanity’ of the unaesthetic spectacle before him: the last knife left lying on the half turned-back table cloth, next to the remains of an underdone and tasteless cutlet. He cannot wait to get up and leave, and if he cannot take a train to Holland or Italy, he will at least go to the Louvre to have sight of the palaces of Veronese, the princes of van Dyck and the harbours of Claude. Doing this will, of course, make his return to his home and its familiar surroundings seem yet more drab and exasperating.

The matched pair ‘love’ and ‘attention’ is familiar to most of us from the essays in Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good.Although she tells us in that book that there is, in her view, no God in the traditional sense of that term, she provides accounts of art, prayer and morality that are religious. ‘Morality’, she tells us, ‘has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism’ (Murdoch, 1970, p. 74). The connection here is love and attention: ‘Virtue is au fondthe same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ (ibid, p. 41). Art and morals are two aspects of the same struggle; both involve attending, a task of attention which goes on all the time, efforts of imagination which are important cumulatively (p. 43). ‘Prayer’, she says, ‘is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love’ (ibid. p. 55).

Jonathan Edwards identified the central act of faith as ‘the cordial consent of beings to Being in general’, which is to say to God (see Holbrook, 1973, pp. 102ff). That equation, of Being, Truth and God, is rarely taken seriously in analytical circles. My argument will be that this is to neglect the real context of a great deal of past philosophy, particularly the very Cartesian arguments from which so many undergraduate courses begin. All too many students issue from such courses immunized against enthusiasm, in the conceit that they have answers to all the old conundrums, which were in any case no more than verbal trickery. ‘By uttering the right words but failing to use them in propria persona, philosophy induces a kind of soporific amnesia bewitching us into forgetting our God-given task. That task is, of course, to do what Socrates did and to live as he lived' (Burrell, 1972, p. 4). Burrell's words are not wholly fair to academic philosophers, nor to the Lady Philosophy. Plenty of philosophers really mind about the truth, and want to be Socratic in pursuit of it. But the danger is a real one. If all that matters is debunking past philosophers, how does that differ from the repeated refutation of the Chaldaean Oracles or the Prophecies of Nostradamus? A pretty enough pastime for the young, but hardly serious business for adults (as Callicles remarks: Plato, Gorgias 484 c 5ff). ‘If the history of philosophy is a process of ‘salvaging’ what you yourself have already thought, then why bother?’ (MacDonald Ross, 1985, p. 502).

In a volume devoted to philosophy, religion and the spiritual life, I would like to focus the later part of my essay on a comparison of two Christian spiritual writings of the fourteenth century, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing in the West (1981), and the Triadsof Gregory Palamas in the Byzantine East (1983). Their examples, for reasons which I shall explain, seem to me rich with implications for some of our current philosophical and theological aporias on the nature of the self. Let me explain my thesis in skeletal form at the outset, for it is a complex one, and has several facets.

In the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience William James distinguishes two types of belief in the supernatural, conceived as an essential component in religion, crass or piecemeal supernaturalism, on the one hand, and refined supernaturalism on the other.

In some recent theological writing, imagination is presented as a power of the mind with crucial importance for religion, but one whose role has often suffered neglect. Its fuller acknowledgment has become a live issue today. ‘Theologians’, wrote Professor J. P. Mackey, ‘have recently taken to symbol and metaphor, poetry and story, with an enthusiasm which contrasts very strikingly with their all-but-recent avoidance of such matters’ (1986, p. 1). As well as relevant writings by Eliade and Ricoeur, there have been treatments of religious imagination by Professor John Mclntyre in his Faith, Theology and Imagination (1987) and in J. P. Mackey's composite volume entitled Religious Imagination.

Those who have had the benefit of a reasonably lengthy familiarity with the philosophy of religion, and more particularly with the God question, may be so kind to a speaker long in exile from philosophy and only recently returned, as to subscribe, initially at least, to the following rather enormous generalization: meaning and truth, which to most propositions are the twin forces by which they are maintained, turn out in the case of claims about God, to be the centrifugal forces by which they disintegrate. In simpler language, the greater the amount of intelligible meaning that can be given to the idea of God, the less grounds there would appear to be for assuming let alone asserting, that God exists, at least as a being distinguishable from all the things in this empirical world which are the source of the range of meanings available to us; on the other hand, the more we insist that God exists, a being over and above the things that make up this empirical world (the more we take the proposition ‘God exists’ to be a true proposition in this particular transcendent sense, for the adjective ‘transcendent’ has many uses) the less the amount of commonly available meaning we appear to be able to apply to God. Or, to put this in a manner which might obviate an obvious objection to it; either everything we know is tout ensemble, God, and then nothing in the world that we know is distinctively divine; or else nothing in this world is God, and then nothing that we appear to be able to know is God. That same formulation will work, it should be noted, even if we substitute for ‘things in the world’, ‘an aspect or aspects of things in the world’.

The philosophy of religion, as commonly understood by Christians in both the Catholic and Reformed traditions, whether they think it a worthwhile enterprise or not, begins with arguments for the existence of a deity, proceeds to show that this deity is necessarily unique, eternal, and suchlike, and leaves it to reflection on divine revelation to consider whether this deity might be properly designated as ‘three persons in one nature’. Much later, after discussing the metaphysical implications of the incarnation of the second person of the triune godhead, one would arrive at theories about the death of Jesus Christ as putatively redemptive, and describable as sacrificial, atoning and the like.

Islamic philosophy makes a sharp distinction between different categories of believers. Some, and indeed most, believers follow Islam in an unquestioning and natural manner. They adhere to the legal requirements of the religion, carry out the basic rules concerning worship, pilgrimage, charity and so on, and generally behave as orthodox and devout Muslims. Some are more devout than others, and some occasionally behave in ways reprehensible to the teachings of Islam, but on the whole for the ordinary believer Islam presents no serious theoretical problems. There may well be practical problems in reconciling what they wish to do with what Islam instructs them to do, but this for most people is not something which leads them to question their faith as such. It merely leads them to wonder how to reconcile in a practical way the rival demands of religion and their personal wishes.

The Dalai Lama is fond of quoting a verse attributed to the Buddha to the effect that as the wise examine carefully gold by burning, cutting and polishing it, so the Buddha's followers should embrace his words after examining them critically and not just out of respect for the Master. A role for critical thought has been accepted by all Buddhists, although during two and a half millennia of sophisticated doctrinal development the exact nature, role and range of critical thought has been extensively debated. In general doctrinal difference in Buddhism has been seen as perfectly acceptable, reflecting different levels of understanding and therefore different stages on the path to enlightenment. Buddhism has tended not to look to or expect doctrinal orthodoxy, although there has always been a much stronger impetus towards orthopraxy, and common (largely monastic) code and behaviour has perhaps played a comparable role in Buddhism to common belief and creed in some other religions. Nevertheless an acceptability of doctrinal divergence has not lessened the energy and vigour devoted to lengthy and sometimes fiercely polemical debate between teachers and schools. This was nowhere more so than in Tibet, where doctrinal debates—sometimes lasting all night—to the present day form the central part of a monastic education in most of the largest Tibetan monastic universities.

To be told, ‘know thyself’ is to be told that I don't know myself yet: it carries the assumption that I am in some sense distracted from what or who I actually am, that I am in error or at least ignorance about myself. It thus further suggests that my habitual stresses, confusions and frustrations are substantially the result of failure or inability to see what is most profoundly true of me: the complex character of my injuries or traumas, the distinctive potential given me by my history and temperament. I conceal my true feelings from my knowing self; I am content to accept the ways in which other people define me, and so fail to ‘take my own authority’ and decide for myself who or what I shall be. The therapy-orientated culture of the North Atlantic world in the past couple of decades has increasingly taken this picture as foundational, looking to ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-realization’ as the precondition of moral and mental welfare. And the sense of individual alienation from a true and authoritative selfhood mirrors the political struggle for the right of hitherto disadvantaged groups, especially non-white and non-male, to establish their own self-definition. The rhetoric of discovering a true but buried identity spreads over both private and political spheres. The slogan of the earliest generation of articulate feminists, ‘The personal is the political’, expresses the recognition of how this connection might be made.

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’.