The Uses and Value of Contemplation*

 

 

‘What is this life, if full of care

We have no time to stand and stare’.

W.H. Davies, ‘Leisure’.

 

‘I have no life, Constantia, now but thee,

Whist, like the world-surrounding air, thy song

Flows on and fills all things with melody’.

Shelly, ‘To Constantia, singing’.

 

‘When on some gilded Cloud, or flowre

My gazing soul would dwell an houre,

And in those weaker glories spy

Some shadows of eternity’.

Henry Vaughan, ‘The Retreate’.

 

Whatever Macmurray may have said about contemplation, some forms of it are genuine ingredients in his philosophy. But there are others which he explicitly rejects or ignores. These three quotations suggest, in same order, an ascending scale of forms of contemplation in terms of increasing depth and personal involvement,1 and provide a convenient way of revealing which forms of contemplation Macmurray does acknowledge or could well incorporate into his philosophy as it stands, and those which he omits. There may be other forms but these will suffice to show the value of contemplation.

But first, What is contemplation? One approach is to contrast it with meditation, which can be a step towards it. To mediate on something, such as a feature of the world or human life or the meaning of a text, is to attend to it and apprehend it for what it is. But then meditation characteristically develops into thinking about it, what it is, what its connected to, what further meaning and implications it has, and so on. It is notably active and explicit operation. In contrast, contemplation is not so notably active, and is, rather a more sustained dwelling upon its object as the three quotations suggest.

 

§1 The simplest form of contemplation has two sub-forms: (a) the simple stare, of which Davies wrote. and (b) imagining some possible future state of affairs whether desired or feared.

(a) This is a stare directed to the realities of the natural world and their beauty, which the busyness of modern life causes us to overlook and, we may add, from which urban life too often excludes us: light pollution now hides all but a few stars from us. Davies detracts from his theme by comparing it with how long sheep and cows stare. For human staring transcends that of animals by being deeper and involving more of the person so that mere staring at becomes dwelling upon and dwelling in its objects. This is what Macmurray, in effect, values as the basis of an education of the emotions in ‘living in the senses’, not primarily for pleasure but to be in touch with reality, but, unlike Davies, Macmurray does not restrict its objects to the beauty of things nor, by implication, even to the natural world.2 This sub-form also offers refreshment from the tiresome phases of the daily round, and perhaps in moments in the daily round itself.

(b) This sub-form of contemplation is often a necessary prelude to decision and then to action, and perhaps thence to promoting or enhancing friendship. To picture vividly the possible outcomes of what is happening around us and what various courses of action may bring about, is the way of wisdom when there is time to engage in it. Thus it would significantly enhance Macmurray’s emphasis upon the active life. Yet it can be a substitute for and distraction from involvement in the world, and thus be what Macmurray calls ‘Idealism’ in both its philosophical and popular meanings. It is then the ineffective and irresponsible activity of the dreamer who could engage with the world but prefers not to.

§2. As Macmurray points out, art is the individual expression of what the artist who do in any medium contemplate and thus at a deeper level which engages more of artist and ordinary looking and listening. Contemplation at this level aims at knowing the object in its full reality or at fully developing his themes, such as the characters their situations and interactions, in their individuality, rather to know and think about it and them. Thus the practical function of art is the refinement of sensibility.3

It is here that Macmurray’s fundamentally utilitarian valuation of knowledge and action leads him to shut out contemplation for its own sake and the role of contemplation in natural science and mathematics. ‘All meaningful knowledge’, we recall, ‘is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action is for the sake of friendship’.4 True, he was far from the crudities of historical Utilitarianism and close to the ‘Ideal Utilitarianism’ of G.E. Moore, who held friendship and aesthetic contemplation to be the true ends of personal life to which action should be orientated. Again, it is true that aesthetic contemplation can enhance sensibility, and not just to its immediate objects. But what is the value of that if aesthetic contemplation is not itself of inherent value apart from its effects, which are more in the way of by-products? There a truth in ‘art for art’s sake’, without which it declines into mere amusement and propaganda for some ulterior purpose.

Furthermore, contemplation is at the heart of the natural sciences and mathematics. Here I refer to the many references to it in Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. I shall now briefly summarise one of the most detailed is. The aim of any intellectual or aesthetic pursuit is not to handle nor observe its products but to dwell in them. Scientific discovery, in particular, often requires a breaking out of its established framework and creation of another in an intense moment of heuristic vision, in which the discoverer’s mind directly experiences its content instead of controlling it with a pre-established mode of interpretation. Likewise, contemplation of the stars is attending to them without thinking about them as in astronomical observations, in which they are regarded as mere instances of laws which then are the focus of attention to which what we actually see has become subsidiary. Contemplation thus has no further aim or meaning, but we become immersed in the inherent quality of our experience.5 Just so is the immersion of the poet in Constantia’s song, doubtless deepened by his obvious love for here.

Again, the progress and very existence of natural science and science depends upon the appeal of the beauty of what they discovered, the contemplated background to the particular efforts of their practitioners, which otherwise would be the merely routine performance of standard procedures, conducted with little interest and resulting in no further discoveries, and in the subordination of science to political and economic purposes, as happened in the USSR and at times still threatens science and all other disciplines today, when they are valued only for their immediate benefits, and thence end in its stultification.6

 

§3 As the quotation from Shelly suggests and as the one from Vaughan expresses, contemplation can also take the yet higher, deeper and more intense form of transcending finite realties altogether. This is something of which Macmurray is certainly wary, because he thinks that any concern for another world is a sign of ‘Idealism’, that is, preferring ideas above the realities to which ideas refer. True we should seek God and not the idea of God. But Macmurray then limits this to seeking him in this world and not also through it.7 Thus he concludes with that, ‘The task of religion is to co-operate with God the creation of the true community of the kingdom of heaven on earth, which [ is the (?)] creative act in history. Idealism can only paralyze us in the face of this task’.8 But, in face of the realities which he himself lists, this is surely Idealism at its most extreme as in all millennial aspirations. I would invoke the truth that really to achieve one aim it is necessary to aim at something on the level above, as in the paradox of happiness.

 

Finally, I would like simply to mention some enemies of or hindrances to contemplation today: too much busyness, as noted above; with it the secular Puritanism that work is what matters and anything else is idleness; aggressive secularism which aims to prevent people from thinking about transcendence of this world and life; fear of realising that life is meaningless and voluntarily shutting out all thoughts about such matters; and seeking distraction in amusements, work, drugs and other indulgences.

 

Notes

  1. 1. On scales of forms, see R.G. Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method, 1933, 2nd ed. with additions, 2004.

  2. 2. See Religion, Art and Science, pp. 42-7, 51.

  3. 3. Ibid. pp. 32-47.

  4. 4.

  5. 5. pp. 6, 7, 46, 48, 99, 133, 192, 195-202, 348, 353-4, 360. See also references to beauty in science and mathematics.

  6. 6. ibid. pp. 67, 195-7: See also, ‘Rights and Duties of Science’, in Science, Economics, and Philosophy., and Part I of The Logic of Liberty.

  7. 7. ‘Idealism against Religion’, p. 19.

  8. 8. ibid. p.22.

  9.  

  10. * This paper is a revised version of what was read at a seminar on ‘John Macmurray and Contemplation’ by the John Macmurray Fellowship. In the discussion I realised that there was more to what Macmurray had written about contemplation than what I had found.