Brief Reflections on the Entanglement of Principled Compassion, Morality, and Mind Joan Halifax, PhD

“I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.” Dr. Albert Schweitzer

What role does compassion play at the intersection of mind and morality? Are mind and morality connected through principled compassion? What is compassion? And why would one modify the word “compassion” with the word “principled”? And why might it be important to connect compassion and morality?

Years ago, at a Mind and Life meeting in Dharmasala, India, I heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama opine obliquely on the nexus of compassion and morality. In a response to a neuroscience presentation, he said something like: “Compassion is not religious business; it is human business. It is not a luxury; it is essential for our own peace and mental stability. It is essential for human survival.”

I believe that His Holiness and many others feel that one of the most curious and powerful processes of being fully human and of having moral character is our capacity for compassion. And yet, in our world today, there seems to be an ever-increasing deficit of what we know of as compassion. This deficit seems to be primed by a number of factors, including our idea of what it means to care, and our diminishing capacity for feeling the suffering of other beings in an ever-increasing technological world.

Compassion is sometimes looked on as “extra” or downstream of what needs to be really done to care for others and to care for our world. Some people regard compassion with a dubious heart or even feel it is a religious idea only. Others feel it might be harmful, and so they back away from opening themselves to the whole catastrophe of life.

But might these perspectives be in error? Perhaps we need to take a deeper look at compassion and its relationship to mind and morality.

Just as an electron microscope pierces through the skin of an atom, we might want to look through the skins we have laid over what has been described as compassion to see what is beneath. We can begin by asking ourselves what is compassion? Is it a foggy religious idea or an essential human attribute? What is this entangled process that disentangles suffering? How does it work? How can we engender it? What are the obstacles to it? Why has it become a source of suspicion for some? How can compassion be re-valued in our time? And how is it that this human mind is the medium for a morality that is based on altruism and affection, intention and insight, and action that is fundamentally unselfish and selfless, a bundle of qualities that enables compassion?

These are too many questions for our brief exploration of compassion, mind, and morality. Yet to open up these questions we can explore the elements that seem to comprise compassion in order to understand more about this important human capacity, without which, some feel, we won’t survive.

Like water that is made up of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom that are bonded to each other, compassion seems to be comprised of bundled processes. I began to see this one spring years ago, when I was fortunate to be appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I left Santa Fe and went to Washington in the late winter, where I moved into a friend’s house for the duration of my appointment. Daily, I took a bus from a quiet neighborhood in DC to the Library, riding with mostly people from Ethiopia in the early morning, who were on their way to better parts of town to clean houses; in the afternoon I rode the bus with secretaries of every hue, their faces dulled by long hours in closed offices.

These long rides through DC every day afforded me time to reflect on the questions I would be exploring in the vast trove of our nation’s library. On the way to my office in the Thomas Jefferson Building, I walked past the Supreme Court, often with protestors holding signs proclaiming injustice. It was in these minutes of transit between the bus stop and the Library that I was invited to wonder about the relationship between compassion and justice, compassion and ethics, compassion and what it means to live a life characterized by moral sensitivity. I began to realize that compassion was a process that could be characterized as principled, or honorable and upright. And from this vantage point, I realized that compassion was a powerful expression of moral character, and found myself agreeing with the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who said: “Compassion is the basis of all morality.”

While in the Library, sitting with the winds of the Justice Department against my window, I asked myself what elements are important as features of compassion, if compassion is not just a kind of singularity? To begin with, I realized that compassion seems to have four main attributes, including the capacity to attend to the experience of others, to feel concern for others, to sense what will serve others, and potentially to be of service to others. According to neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues, compassion is succinctly defined as “the emotion one experiences when feeling concern for another’s suffering and desiring to enhance that person’s welfare”. (Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011). These definitions bring to mind the deep moral ground of compassion.

On these long bus rides to the Library of Congress, I would explore compassion as a granular process that had a dynamic quality. As the cherry trees pushed blossoms out of their warming limbs, I saw that compassion would not be possible without some key features being engaged. It was on one of those long bus rides that I said to myself: compassion is made of non-compassion elements.

These elements are not static, however. They really are processes, dynamic processes that interact with each other. Moreover they unfold in a context, which is dynamic as well. Compassion, besides being in the mind/body, is context dependent; it arises in a field of lived experience that is not apart from the setting (environmental, social, cultural, and relational) in which it is happening. In other words, it is not just a brain phenomenon, or just something that happens in the mind; it is embodied, and as well it unfolds in context. Putting it another way, compassion arises in a mind and body that are embedded in a field of lived experience, what neuroscientist Francisco Varela and philosopher Evan Thompson have termed enaction.

Evan Thompson has written extensively about the enactive view of mind. The enactive view posits all living beings to be fundamentally sense-making creatures. These beings enact or bring forth meaning in their intimate interactions with their environments. (Thompson, 2007; Thompson & Stapleton, 2009)) The term enaction, as originally proposed by Varela, Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, is grounded in the interactions between living organisms and their environments. “A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition.” (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991)

From this perspective, enactive principled compassion can be considered an emergent process in a dynamic adaptive relationship between mind, body, and the environment. These domains are reciprocal, asymmetrical, and engender sense-making. To elaborate on compassion’s internal dynamics, compassion arises as an emergent process from the ground of a number of interrelated attentional, somatosensory, and cognitive processes that are embedded in and responsive to context. As such, a subject who is compassionate enacts the world he or she is part of, and this world reflects social, ethical, and political values.

What are the internal features that need to be aligned for compassion to be engendered? The features that came to me in that DC spring are the following: our capacity for immersive, stable attention and as well, our tendency toward prosociaiity. Other key features presented themselves, including the importance of intentionality as primed by the awareness of our interconnectedness and the deep responsibility our species has to not engender suffering and to end suffering whenever and where ever possible. Another feature relates to our capacity for insight, for wisdom, and our ability to have a metacognitive perspective. And, finally, we are embodied creatures, so the braided streams of enactive and ethical embodiment are essential; our lived experience in the wider context of the world within and around us is important because here is where ethical action, compassionate action, principled compassion is manifested.’

I think it is important to note that these processes “inter-are”, each one interconnected with the other. In considering this view of compassion as an interdependent weave of processes in the wider weave of the world, one can look through the lens of one process and discover all the other aspects. For the purpose of this deliberation, we can choose to look through the lens of our intentionality. In doing this, compassion, principled compassion, could be considered to be the foundation of moral character, and that compassion cannot be separated from moral sensitivity. As Arnold Toynbee said, “Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.”

From this perspective, then principled compassion can be viewed and lived as central to our human experience and what it means to be fully human. I believe, as do others, that principled compassion is essential for personal, moral, social, and environmental health, and is a core path to and manifestation of human resilience and robustness.

In conclusion, the Benedictine monk Thomas Merton said: “The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.” Merton’s statement reflects a profoundly moral and enactive perspective, and points to a vision of all of life as interdependent, entangled, and embedded. This orients one toward action that is fundamentally unselfish and selfless. This is what I have been endeavoring to suggest is meant by “principled compassion”, compassion which has a clear moral foundation, a foundation that is based on love and positive regard for and respect of all beings and things.

These brief deliberations on morality and mind in relation to our human experience of principled compassion are a simple beginning of a longer exploration.