Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Toulmin and Janik, in their book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, describe the intellectual reaction in that city at the turn of the century against a soft corrupt Austro-Hungarian political atmosphere in favour of harsh precise epigrammatic truth-telling in the style of Karl Kraus. Wittgenstein detested muddled emotional talk. Let there be plain truth and forthright action, and no high-minded generalising or fuzzy chatter. Philosophy too should be austere and laconic. In answer to someone who praised his work: ‘No. If this were philosophy you could learn it by heart.’ Also, ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.’ A philosopher may enlighten himself and others by reflection upon his temperament. What seems like a logical or technical argument can go far in recommending a way of life. By ‘poetic composition’ Wittgenstein means of course not (in the ordinary sense) poetry, but something beautifully concise, purely clarified and condensed, thus memorable and indubitable. Something quite different (judging from his later work) is intended by Heidegger who tells us that now the language of philosophy, if it is to tell the truth, must be poeticised and become a new sort of prose-poetry. This terrible wish is also expressed by structuralists. When young, Wittgenstein liked the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and even (Toulmin and Janik inform us) read some of it to a meeting of the Vienna Circle. I was also told (by a friend) that Wittgenstein was very fond of a play by Tagore called The King of the Dark Chamber, a mystical Hindu morality play. Who is the real King, he who is handsome and powerful and decked with jewels, or he who is ragged and poor and plain? Conclusion: ‘I am waiting with my all in the hope of losing everything.’ Tagore now seems a poet ‘of his period’, but evidently conveyed to Wittgenstein something of ‘the mystical’. Schopenhauer’s excursions into Hinduism and Buddhism impressed him. His evidently deep feelings about mysticism may derive also from the German tradition, for instance through Jacob Boehme in whom he was interested.

  One desired effect of the distinction between fact and value is the segregation or liberation of the will. The will as the carrier of value is detached from the ordinary factual world. Kant set the (real, noumenal) will free from the (apparent, phenomenal) world of causally determined events. Wittgenstein, without talking of ‘cause’ or ‘reality’, set it free (removed it) from the world of fact; a separation which is essential to the ‘moral purpose’ which he attributes to the Tractatus. Will, as silent attitude or style, changes the whole of the world but not the facts. (6. 43.) Jean-Paul Sartre, one might say, with his distinction of inert mind from active mind, sets the will free from the conventional (bourgeois) world. The distinction, the setting free or setting apart, appears as the instrument of a kind of revolution, or purification, or renewal. Such a distinction and such imagery is to be found in structuralism and (some) Protestant theology. (Salvation by faith is a formidable release.) If we feel uneasy here it is no simple matter to clarify the problems which the uneasiness indicates. (Wittgenstein said in the preface that the Tractatus showed ‘how little is achieved when these problems are solved’.) If we feel loss, what kind of mistake do we think has been made? Is there then no ‘moral knowledge’ or ‘moralised fact’, such as common-sense seems to demand? Does not value colour almost all our apprehensions of the world, and is this colour something which must be withdrawn in order to purify the will? We struggle here with imagery. Are our ordinary personal (and precious) ‘value perceptions’ to be made either impossible or ineffable?

  Simone Weil says that will does not lead us to moral improvement, but should be connected only with the idea of strict obligations. Moral change comes from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease in egoism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily of course other people, but also other things. Such a view accords with oriental wisdom (and with Schopenhauer) to the effect that ultimately we ought to have no will. This would be the ‘life of knowledge’, to use the Schopenhauerian phrase, which was in Wittgenstein’s head when he wrote the 1914-1916 Notebooks. This picture is helped out in Schopenhauer’s case (though not in Wittgenstein’s) by a theory of human nature which emphasises our capacity for compassion, for identifying with other people and thus reducing our egoistic impulses. If we picture morality in this way the will is no longer the prime agent and may be seen as morally (or as Wittgenstein says, philosophically) a kind of fiction. Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein reject the Kantian concept of duty. But a realistic view of morality cannot dispense with the idea; duty is for most people the most obvious form of moral experience: Kant’s starting point. One might say that morality divides between moral obligation and spiritual change. The good life becomes increasingly selfless through an increased awareness of, sensibility to, the world beyond the self. But meanwhile requirements and claims, which we still recognise abstractly and as it were externally, demand to be met. (So, though of course not all duties have a utilitarian basis, a part of every moral philosophy must be utilitarian.) And we must at least listen to the person who says, If you recognise enough duties, why bother about spiritual change? Or, Why spend years in meditation to achieve a spiritual condition with which you will have little or no time left to benefit mankind? Simone Weil firmly ‘sets will on one side’, ‘finds a place’ for it. (Concepts must find their places with help from philosophers.) ‘Will’ seems to belong with duty rather than with spiritual change. The regular performance of certain duties may favour such change, but not necessarily. The concept of duty does not require the concept of will, innumerable duties are performed without any place for it: Hume’s ‘habit and custom’ for instance, and perhaps Wittgenstein’s ‘Forms of Life’. In a good man duties are more like habits. (A holy will is not a will; but then there are no holy wills.) However, as many duties are abstract in relation to our nature (we do not want to do them, we do not identify with them), there may be a place for the concept of will as a name used for the strain which is then felt. Someone might say that something like Kant’s Achtung (respect for the moral law) or Sartre’s angoisse is not a sign or accompaniment of will, but will itself.

  ‘Of the will as the subject of the ethical we cannot speak. And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.’ (Tractatus 6. 423.) In Schopenhauer’s terms, the will as phenomenon is merely egoistic impulse; whereas the ‘moral will’ is the indescribable energy which changes the whole personality, enabling a denial of the will to live. Against this background we may understand Wittgenstein’s non-phenomenal (noumenal, though he would not use this word) will: not a particular thrust or emotive drive among others, but a total change of being in relation to everything. ‘Is the will an attitude of mind?’ Yes, if this is something which makes the world become ‘altogether different’ and wax and wane as a whole, an image which takes over the weaker ‘attitude of mind’ and focuses our attention upon the strictness of the separation (between a phenomenal will and ‘something higher’). Looked at in this way, it may begin to seem that here the word ‘will’ is out of place, must be explained in other terms, is even misleading and unnecessary. Change of being, metanoia, is not brought about by straining and ‘will-power’, but by a long deep process of unselfing. ‘Will’ may be used ad hoc in contexts which are to be casually passed by or which demand deeper consideration: someone needs will-power to carry on, has a great will, lives by the will, wills people to obey him, etc. Posed as something deep or serious, ‘will’ may turn out to be superficial, even a pseudo-concept. If not trivial, the idea appears as dramatically metaphysical, as in its use by Schopenhauer, passed on to Nietzsche and young Wittgenstein: a liberating force capable of removing the illusions and miseries of mundane egoism. As naming a recipe for moral improvement it is better (as Simone Weil says) ‘set aside’. Wittgenstein’s ‘profession of faith’ at the end of the Tractatus is eloquent, epigrammatic and brief, fitting in with the earlier sections of the work with which it is essentially related by separation. Wittgenstein is not concerned, as Simone Weil is, with the detai
ls of a road to virtue. He offers us a strong impression of his own moral style. The ‘Life of Knowledge’ of the 1914-1916 Notebooks (13.8.16). Happiness ‘in spite of the misery of the world’. A brave young man might well believe that it could be achieved.

  So, some philosophers assume, while others do not, that morality is deep, fundamental to human nature, the most important thing. Moral relativism, or ‘naturalism’, whether or not based on determinism, the view that morality is epiphenomenal, superficial, just a matter of historically induced conventions or irrational emotions (etc.), is probably not really held by any one. Moral cynics or reductionists, from Thrasymaehus (Republic I) onward have usually employed such arguments to promote moral attitudes of their own. Even the simplest hedonism can contain moralistic views about freedom, and much existentialist and structuralist ‘anti-establishment’ social criticism uses relativist arguments in aid of strong moral positions. Relativism, scientific naturalism, belief in determinism, may also be professed by social theorists who are traditional moral agents in private life, but just not interested in morals as a form of human activity. We do not have to have a theoretical interest in morality. There is indeed a kind of (instinctive) orientation or certainty which is rejected if we emphasise free will and individual decision. Are there however some ways in which, if we reflect about moral value, we cannot properly avoid picturing the world? Metaphysicians try to persuade us that this is so. To put it slightly differently, are there fundamental concepts and problems which moral philosophers have to (or ought to) deal with? If one feels uneasy with the various forms of the fact — value distinction can this suggest what problems lie at a deeper level? I want to refer here to something said earlier about Plato, and also about Wittgenstein, contrasting them with Descartes. Philosophers attempt to make models of the deep aspects of human life. The metaphor of depth, generally understood, is difficult to explain in other terms. ‘What’s it all about, padre?’ There is something about the human spirit which seems to some thinkers to demand a search for ‘deep foundations’. Herein, it is often felt, there is something essential; and this essential thing must be built into the explanation at the start, or else it tends to fly away and become problematic and remote and extremely difficult to integrate. On the other hand, if it is built in at the start, the thinker may be accused of an unwarrantable act of faith or intuition, since there remains something fundamental of which he appears to be saying: well, it is so. Descartes isolated the thinking mind and made for himself the problem of how the mind could know the world, to solve which he required God, and an intuition about the nature of truth. Berkeley and Hume, similarly, made out that all we actually experience are mental data (impressions, ideas), and created the problem shared with modern phenomenalism, of how we then fabricate the notion of a material object. Here laymen, and other philosophers, may say, ‘But surely the idea of the material object is primary.’ Structuralist thinkers, and writers under their influence, are excited by their fundamental assumption that language does not refer to ‘the world’, it refers to itself. Dr Johnson, that excellent philosopher, who would not have liked structuralism, refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone, and determinism by saying to Boswell, ‘Sir, we know the will is free, and there’s an end on’t.’ It is one of the felicitous aspects of the Tractatus that the referential nature of language is not questioned. There just is a method of projection whereby language can picture the world. The Investigations, which in many ways ‘corrects’ the Tractatus, does not, in its attention to particular problems, contradict the general assumption about reference of language to the world. Kant equally finds it perfectly clear and primary that we all recognise the absolute call of duty, know the difference between good and bad, and are capable of distinguishing between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative. This is ipso facto the possession of freedom. When Kant tries (in the Grundlegung) to establish these ideas upon a more profound basis he admits the circularity of the argument. Plato makes the assumption that value is everywhere, that the whole of life is movement on a moral scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind seeks reality and desires the good, which is a transcendent source of spiritual power, to which we are related through the idea of truth. ‘Good is what every soul pursues and for which it ventures everything, intuiting what it is, yet baffled and unable fully to apprehend its nature.’ (Republic 505E.) The ‘proof of these strong fundamental pictures is provided through numerous examples. Plato’s Eros as pharmakeus (alchemist, magician), an energy potentially good or bad, pictures the infinite variety of human experience. The philosopher’s own primary certainty is present as an influence, towards understanding though of course not necessarily towards agreement. Some great philosophical pictures are also great religious pictures, and illustrate how close philosophy and theology can come to each other, while still wisely staying apart. Heraclitus tells us that ‘The One who alone is wise does not want and does want to be called by the name of Zeus.’ (Fr. 32.) This is indeed the problem. We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realise to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it. No wonder ‘that which alone is wise’ is in two minds about how to proceed. (The order of the wishes may be significant; fundamentally it does not want, but is forced by the frailties of human nature into wanting.) The instinct to protect the intuitively known essential by a circumstantial or picturesque theory is very strong and corresponds to a persistent human need. Goodness and holiness have traditionally been protected by establishing them, their source or exemplars, somewhere else, separate and sole, under the guard of dragon-like concepts. The idea of the absolute reality of a pure good is found on both sides of the divide which separates Kant from Plato, either as moral rationality distinct from intellectual rationality, or as a transcendent source incarnate at various levels in our cognitive and emotional experience. This divide is of interest to theology. The most familiar (western) concept which gathers all value together into itself and then redistributes it is the concept of God; and of this too it may be said that unless you have it in the picture from the start you cannot get it in later by extraneous means. Here there is a well-recognised metaphysical circularity (as in Kant’s concept of freedom). The Ontological Proof, unlike other alleged proofs of God’s existence, shows, indeed uses, an awareness of this.

  3

  Schopenhauer

  Schopenhauer inspired Nietzsche (who called him ‘the only serious moralist of our century’) and overwhelmed Wagner as well as touching Wittgenstein. He held that the dialogue between Plato and Kant underlies the whole of western philosophy. (I am inclined to agree with this.) He takes from Kant the contrast between (hidden) Thing-in-itself and phenomenal appearance. He takes from Plato the concept of Ideas as conveying Thing-in-itself (ultimate reality) to the world, and as being models or archetypes of innumerable particular ideas. He does not accept Kant’s intimation of a noumenal (God-like) reality manifesting itself as duty, nor does he picture the work of Ideas as illumined by anything like Plato’s supreme unique Form (Idea) of the Good. Schopenhauer’s Thing-in-itself, the fundamental power which moves and underlies all things, the Will to Live (ancestor of Nietzsche’s Will to Power), is not known to us, it is not an object for a subject. Schopenhauer chides Kant for having failed positively to deny the objective existence of his (Kant’s) Thing-in-itself. The world of phenomena, our world, appears as ideas, objectifications of the Will, rendering it as object for subjects. The title of Schopenhauer’s main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, already poses a problem of translation. The older English translation by Haldane and Kemp (which I shall use in quoting from Schopenhauer) renders Vorstellung as ‘Idea’. The more re
cent one by E. F. J. Payne renders it as ‘Representation’. Idea should be understood as any object of consciousness. ‘Platonic Ideas’ are, as in Plato, postulated universal concepts or models of which particular ideas are instantiations. There are many grades and degrees of objectification, as in stones, plants, animals, humans, also thoughts, states of consciousness, etc.; nevertheless the Will is ‘present and undivided in every object of nature and any living being’. Schopenhauer gives no finally coherent account of his metaphysical structure. How does a timeless eternal Will as unknowable Thing-in-itself relate to a plurality of beings? How does intellect relate to will, and human wills to the Will? What are Platonic Ideas, how do they relate to the particular ideas which ‘copy’ them? At Parmenides 130 Plato portrays the youthful Socrates struggling with some similar problems. Schopenhauer ‘decrees’ this metaphysical structure as a starting point, but freely departs from it when it suits him. Much of his moral philosophy refers itself to salient features of his metaphysic (the Will objectified as egoism for instance), but can be discussed without clarification (if such were possible) of the questions raised above. Schopenhauer is in many of his instincts an empiricist, and readily switches to plainer styles of argument and observation, leaving more abstract matters to look after themselves. (Note. The World as Will and Idea, hereinafter referred to as WWI, consists of: four books, each of several chapters, with a numbered sequence of sections continuous throughout the four; and Supplements to these books consisting of a single sequence of numbered chapters.)