After Retiring From The Practice Of Law in 2010, I pursued my love of philosophy. I have had the good fortune to become involved with the scholarly philosophical community, to write a small number of reviews and articles, and to present papers for conferences of the Josiah Royce Society, the APA, and the Metaphysical Society of America.As it did for so many, the pandemic led me to a time of increased solitude and reflection. I wanted to think philosophically about American democracy and its ideals as the country struggled both with the pandemic and with widespread dissension and anger.The Pluralist's call for papers inviting its readers to explore their philosophical lives during the pandemic stimulated further reflection on what I had been reading and thinking. I decided to take three American writers I had been reading before the pandemic and continued to read after the pandemic struck. I was grateful for the opportunity to formulate what I found valuable in these writers and to find some broad, shared themes.The first writer I selected is America's great poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). The second, Jacob Loewenberg (1882–1969), was a Jewish immigrant who came to the United States nearly penniless before earning his PhD in philosophy with Royce and proceeding to a long philosophical career. The third, Howard Thurman (1899–1981), overcame a childhood of poverty and Jim Crow to become a philosophical mystic, theologian, and civil rights activist. These three writers suggested to me a spiritual vision of the United States and its continued promise that had much to teach in difficult times.In what follows, I discuss my reading of each author before and during the pandemic. The goal is not to do scholarly analysis but rather to suggest what I found of inspiration during the pestilence.Before the pandemic, my most recent reading of Whitman had been in 2019, the two hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth. The Library of America had published a commemorative volume, Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America, edited by historian Brenda Wineapple. The book is an anthology of Whitman's thoughts during the last four years of his life as recounted by his friend Horace Traubel. Wineapple finds Whitman “a democrat in all things, though not without his prejudices” (Whitman, Walt Whitman Speaks xxv). The book afforded me, in Wineapple's company, the opportunity to “eavesdrop on Whitman speaking about Whitman and his work, about other poets, about critics, about religion, and about his beloved America” (Whitman, Walt Whitman Speaks xxv).When the pandemic struck the following year, I returned to Whitman by reading the Library of America's Whitman: Poetry and Prose (1982), edited by Whitman biographer Justin Kaplan. It was my first time reading through the volume in its entirety. The result of my reading was an enhanced feeling for the United States and its democratic ideals and for sharing Whitman's love for America in challenging times.In the preface to the original 1855 version of Leaves of Grass, Whitman said that “[t]he United States are themselves the greatest poem” (Whitman: Poetry and Prose 5). Whitman's entire output and American history may be viewed as a commentary. My reading focused, however, on Whitman's essay, “Democratic Vistas,” published in 1871 in the aftermath of the Civil War (Whitman, “Democratic Vistas”). Whitman's essay is often confusing and difficult to follow. It is also justly criticized for ignoring the plight of the freedpeople. Despite its faults, “Democratic Vistas” has aptly been described by philosopher Jacob Needleman as “the most powerful manifesto ever written about the inner meaning of American democracy” (Needleman 316–17). David Brooks has described the essay as “our most brilliant political sermon” which “captures in its hodgepodge nature both the high aspirations and sordid realities of everyday life” (Brooks).Whitman sharply criticizes the materialism and corruption he finds pervasive in American culture in the aftermath of the Civil War. But as the essay's title suggests, Whitman takes the long, visionary view that combines the seemingly disparate goals of democratic solidarity and individualism. Whitman, for the first time, sketches a philosophy called “personalism” that recognizes the worth and uniqueness of each individual regardless of their station in life. Whitman argues that American democracy requires the development of a spiritually based philosophy not tied to sectarian religious teachings in order to give Americans a sense of meaning and purpose in the shared communal life and in their individual lives. Whitman's vision of a spiritual democracy remains provocative and inspiring.I gave presentations on Loewenberg's writings on his mentor, Royce, at the 2020 Eastern and Central Divisions of the APA. In the process of reading several of Loewenberg's writings, I became interested in his work in its own right. These writings include his 1968 autobiography, Thrice-Born: Selected Memories of an Immigrant and his eloquent tribute prepared in 1955 for the centennial of Royce's birth, Royce's Synoptic Vision.I was moved by the unlikely story of Loewenberg's immigrant experience, which, as he said in his autobiography, gave him the chance to become the person he was capable of being (Loewenberg, Thrice-Born viii). I also learned from Loewenberg's sympathetic understanding and devotion to the work of his great teacher, even while disagreeing with Royce on many things and going his own way in philosophy. Although he disagreed with Royce's idealism and with the religious tone of his thought, Loewenberg took from Royce the conviction that the practice of philosophy required breadth of vision rather than merely division and language analysis. In his 1955 essay, Loewenberg wrote that “Royce's philosophic genius may be said to find its most distinctive expression in synoptic vision, in the ability to see together—and as related—things apparently divided and distinct” (Loewenberg, Royce's Synoptic Vision 15). No less than Royce, Loewenberg sought a philosophy of broad vision.Loewenberg learned from Royce a recognition of the centrality of community, which Royce expressed in his philosophy of loyalty. Recalling his own “thrice-born” experience as an immigrant, Loewenberg wrote: In the last analysis, the community has no anchor save in the hearts of men possessed of the propensity to extend themselves to a common history and destiny, and this propensity nothing else can foster but deliberate choice as cause of their loyalty such purposes and ideals as they may cherish together. (Loewenberg, Royce's Synoptic Vision 15)During times of pandemic and division. Americans need to take the thoughts of Loewenberg and Royce to heart and come together to understand the history and ideals that they share and may cherish together.I learned more about Loewenberg's philosophic breadth in reading his Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind. This book was published in 1965, when Loewenberg was 83 and Hegel was little studied in the United States. I read Loewenberg's book in June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and during the civil unrest resulting from the killing of George Floyd. Loewenberg's work is a predecessor to much contemporary study of Hegel in its exploration of the Phenomenology. It reads Hegel's classic not as a work of transcendental idealist metaphysics but rather as an attempt to engage with “the life of mind on earth” (Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology x).In order to illuminate the “tremendous debate” carried on within the Phenomenology on “the claim to exclusive truth on the part of every human persuasion” (Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology x), Loewenberg casts his book in the form of a dialogue. For Loewenberg, the Phenomenology presents “a confluence of the major persuasions of mankind, present in universal array, redolent of actuality.” Hegel's aim is to show how each “persuasion” overreaches itself to eventually pass into its opposite. For Loewenberg, Hegel's dialectic results “in impugning the excessive claims made for any and every special perspective” (Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology x). This reading of the Phenomenology brings the work from “the clouds” (Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology x) to the essentials of human experience.I thought of Loewenberg during the ongoing civil unrest. I remembered the diversity of the United States both in terms of persons and also in terms of the breadth of opinions in a democracy. I was reminded of the need to respect persons and to try to understand diverging points of view, frequently urged with passion. I was chastened by the realization that no opinion has a monopoly on truth. Mob action suggested to me the dangers of jumping to conclusions and of holding partial, dogmatic, and intolerant positions.A study of the philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., had led me to an interest in the African American mystical theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman. In addition to reading several of Thurman's own works, I had the opportunity to read and review (Friedman) Anthony Neal's 2019 study, Howard Thurman's Philosophical Mysticism: Love against Fragmentation. During the pandemic, I have been more involved with works by and about Thurman, including two new biographies (Eisenstadt; Harvey), than with any other thinker. I have been fascinated by his philosophical mysticism and monism and by his efforts to relate these broad philosophical commitments to his own African American experience and to the search for an expansive, inclusive American community.My reading included the 1961 pamphlet Mysticism and the Experience of Love, which consists of the text of a lecture Thurman gave in memory of his teacher, the Quaker mystic and Haverford College philosopher Rufus Jones. Thurman credits Jones for the insight that “the religion of the inner life could deal with the experience of man without retreating from the demands of such experience” (Thurman). He develops an understanding of mysticism as “the response of an individual to a personal encounter with God within his own spirit” (Thurman), and he weaves together the search for mystical unity on the one hand with his personal experience of the “cruel vicissitudes of the social situation in which I have been forced to live” (Thurman) as a result of anti-black prejudice, on the other hand. He finds that the mystical experience allows for a sense of love and connection to others, even with their fallibilities. A sense of the unity of all things, for Thurman, gives rise to a sense of love and community because “[n]o created thing, no single unit of life can be the source of such completeness. For in the experience itself a man is caught and held by something so much more than he can ever think or be that there is but one word by which its meaning can be encompassed—God” (Thurman). For Thurman, the mystical love and search for God is an integral part of the search to love one another.I have learned a great deal from Thurman, both in his philosophical mysticism and in his understanding of the way in which this mysticism may be brought to bear in leading an active life and in forming an inclusive community.In this essay, I have discussed my reading of Whitman, Loewenberg, and Thurman, both before and during the pandemic. I have focused on what I find of value in their writings in terms of suggesting a spiritual, philosophical approach to thinking about life in the United States and about the ideals of American democracy.