Spiritually-Engaged Knowledge: the Attentive Heart
by Jennifer Crawford
Published by Ashgate, ISBN 0-7546-5377-3 (2005)
xviii + 244 pp
£45

The Prologue of this book opens with scene from a time when the author was a backpacker in India during a period of drought:

a woman standing on a bridge above a dried-up river bed throws a small cloth bundle off the bridge onto the hot stones below. The cloth parts, revealing a baby girl who struggles briefly, cries and dies. Many people, including myself, watch, and not knowing what to do, do nothing.
We get the impression that her subsequent life was a search for how she, and the rest of humanity, could truly hear this act which the woman on the bridge had chosen to do in public, and hearing, how we could respond. No response would be meaningful unless it encompassed the global systems which had condemned the woman to total poverty; no change in the global systems was possible without a change in our knowledge of what it is to be human. So the author’s quest for a response, developed in a ten year PhD and then presented in this book, leads first into a theoretical analysis of the human condition and the nature of human knowing, and then back to the practicalities of building a culture based on “attentive love”.

The problem with our existing structures and the with dominant genre of knowledge is that they are rooted in a dualism between the observing subject and the observed object. As a result, we never fully encounter another person or another culture, and we are thus cut off from the roots of morality and compassion. Her core proposal for changing the human condition is that we recognise the current emergence of “a new genre of knowledge” alongside the linguistic, rational, analytical knowledge that dominates science, political studies and economics; a new non-dualistic genre that Crawford calls “spiritually-engaged knowledge”.

We need to start from where we are culturally, namely immersed in globalisation. By this Crawford does not mean unregulated global capitalism, but a recognition of the fact that the arena for spiritual, ethical and philosophical exploration is now planet wide. Until very recent historical time, all people (with the exception of a tiny intellectual elite) necessarily viewed the world through the stories and metaphysics of their particular culture. No other was accessible. Today millions have access to an instant comparison of views from Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and a multitude of other cultures and sub-cultures at the touch of a computer button. Crawford points to signs that many cultural identities are now becoming fruitfully “porous” to other views, while emphasising also the dangerous trends towards fundamentalist tendencies attempting to impose a hegemony of one culture across our planet, or towards the rise of a synthesised and contentless “global identity”.

In what follows I will try to reduce to its barest outline a richly detailed account, supported by immense scholarship. Crawford argues that globalisation, and the signs of cultures becoming mutually porous, first requires us to recognise an essential plurality of “narratives”: the stories that societies tell to themselves which define their world-view. She endorses two particular strands within the arguments of post-modernism: first, that there can be no valid overarching “metanarrative”, in the sense of an ultimate story that embraces all the narratives of individual societies – at the strictly verbal level of “narrative”, the level of discursive knowing; and second, that a key dynamic in society concerns the way in which its members relate to the “other”. This last term refers to the not-myself – in all its facets: from the Mother that the baby learns to distinguish as a separate being, through the lover whom we must free of our projections before we can truly relate to them as they are, to the differently-coloured stranger at the gate on whom we project our fears, and to the ultimate mystery that we may feel we encounter when we go beyond language. How we encounter the “other” holds the key to transcending subject-object dualism. The absence of a valid metanarrative does not leave us with a sterile relativism, in which one story is as good as any other, but encourages us to go beyond discursive knowing into a true encounter with every other. At this level one enters a knowing that is universal because it is rooted in the physiology of the human, rather than in culture. She quotes in this context Derrida’s appeal to prayer as “an experience of speaking not of, but to the other”, with a “resigned acceptance of ... incoherence inspired by a truth more profound than the logic of philosophical discourse ...” This encounter takes her into the realm of spirituality, where she adopts Kovel’s definition of Spirit as “what happens to us when the boundaries of self give way” – a transformational concept of spirituality.

The praxis that flows from this postmodern awareness is named by Crawford as attentive love, based on Lonnergan’s five “transcendental commands” which, he claims, encapsulate the fully mature cycle of human knowing: “Be attentive! Be intelligent! Be reasonable! Be responsible! Be in love!” Crawford here understands love as “a state of being-for the Other”, noting that this love is incompatible with the construction of the modern self as an individual separate entity. On this she quotes D H Lawrence: “We see, what our age has proved to its astonishment and dismay, that the individual cannot love. The individual cannot love: let that be an axiom.”

Morality (or “an ethic” as Crawford terms it) is in the first place the spiritual virtue that flows from a transformation to being-for the other. It is unavoidably “ambivalent” – in the sense of facing both ways at once – because there is no simple straightforward way of deciding what is an appropriate response to the other. Its ambivalence is, in Bauman’s words “permanent and incurable”. Indeed, “facing the ambivalence of good and evil ... is the meaning (the sole meaning) of being moral.” Crawford compares this concept of morality with Kohlberg’s “seventh stage” of morality which, in Kohlberg’s words, appears to “rely upon some type of transcendental or mystical experience – experience of a level at which self and the universe seem unified.” From this fundamental core of morality, she explains, systems of ethics are developed to cope with the ambivalent and unceasing demands of a non-discursive ethic of meeting. Providing the compromise involved is not obscured, this is right and necessary. But behind the unfolding of morality into ethics, laws and juridical systems must always lie the realisation the “the hope of morality lies in the never-ending deconstruction of all ethical systems.”

This praxis, this spirituality, is seen as the “leaven” in society. It is already present as a minority practice in many religions, and many new spiritual movements. In many instances, such as the current initiative for a “ministry of peace” in the UK and in the movement around Senator Kucinich in the USA, this new spirituality is finding a political embodiment. Writing in 1999, Crawford saw the potential, though not the present reality, of these movements forming “an effective alliance that could restructure the global political domain and institute a spiritually-engaged global politics. From this can come a society built on “global citizenship” in which “through attentive love ... strangers can be transformed into neighbours, neighbours into members of a common community or community into the warp and weft of our own Self.” The book concludes with an account of the further necessary move from a transformed human community to an inclusive Earth Community.

There will be many points which those on spiritual paths different from Crawford’s might wish to debate. Her spiritual position is strongly advaitic, aiming towards the total deconstruction of the self, and she critiques the deep ecology and feminist concepts of, respectively, the ecological self and the relational self as being only part of the way to this deconstruction. I would rather see these views, however, as proposing a “both/and” vision of the person, in which we each functioned both as individual locus of free action and also as a boundaryless current in the sea of matter-spirit. Others, perhaps, will react to the threat of the moral relativism of modernism by reaffirming an existing religious or philosophical basis for morality, rather than moving through post-modernism to the transcendental encounter described by Crawford. All readers, however, will benefit from the superbly comprehensive sweep of her survey of the impact of post-modernism on the spiritual landscape.

At the end of her quest, almost immediately after the award of her PhD, the author developed a “horrifically aggressive breast cancer” from which she died within six months, leaving her partner and colleagues to publish this book from the PhD. Reading it, one feels humbled and blessed to be recipient of the wisdom of a remarkable life.