Equanimity: The somatization of a moral sentiment from the eighteenth to late twentieth century (2019)
Mckay, Francis (Author)
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume: 55
Issue: 4
Pages: 281-298
Over the past 40 years, mindfulness-based therapies (MBTs) have gained a reputation among the biomedical community for their ability to contribute to health, mental capital, and human flourishing. Recently, however, critical mindfulness scholars have questioned the moral import of MBTs, claiming that, in modernizing meditation, they strip Buddhist practices of their ethical and soteriological content. Inspired by Harrington and Dunne's (2015, p. 630) recent call to historicize this present discontent, I offer an account for this perceived “de-ethicization” of mindfulness, locating it in a long history of changes in the ontological infrastructures supporting moral reasoning from the eighteenth century onwards. Through the example of equanimity—a virtue that has been a part of Western and Eastern character ethics and theories of flourishing from the ancient period to the modern age—I show how, from the eighteenth century, research in the natural sciences on nervous diseases, stress, and relaxation, provided a frame for rethinking moral equanimity as a somatic experience of physiological calm. This transformation reaches its peak in the late twentieth century in research on mindfulness, which builds upon that tradition by folding into its ambit Eastern conceptions of equanimity as well. Insofar as modern MBTs continue to somatize moral virtues, I argue that they raise questions about the degree to which they are conducive to human flourishing and well-being, as opposed to the related but narrower notions of health and mental capital.
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