Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Mystical writings usually take ordinary virtue for granted; that is, the approach to God or Avatar (or Form of the Good) is achieved not through any annihilation of the world, but by a purification of virtue. ‘Throwing everything away’, which is indeed a general enough precept, should involve (as we would expect ‘pure compassion’ to involve) care for others. Love of God, love of Good, love of your neighbour. This would seem, as in the Platonic pilgrimage, to involve the world in all its variety. Schopenhauer’s ‘religious doctrine’, although stated so sincerely and based upon learning even if not practice, is marred by his idea of the world as given over to an evil Will from which escape is achieved by the (almost impossible) move which annihilates self and world. The world has to be not only dismissed but hated. Of course Schopenhauer did not hate the world. But he may, in the desperate extremity of his ‘dismissal’ of it, have been influenced, as other adjacent thinkers have been, by the example of the Greeks. We may be reminded here of Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1224: ‘not to have been born is best’. Heidegger in similar mood (An Introduction to Metaphysics, ‘The Limitation of Being’) draws our attention to Antigone 332. ‘There are many very strange things but none more strange than man.’ The word deinos is translated by Liddell and Scott as (first meaning) ‘fearful, terrible, dread, dire’, and (second) ‘marvellously strong, powerful for good or ill’, and thirdly ‘wonderful’. Heidegger pictures something violently powerful, and with this unheimlich, strange, weird, uncanny, in the fundamental sense of unhomely, estranged, unable to be at home.

  ‘Deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who uses power, who not only disposes of power [Gewalt] but is violent [gewalt-tätig] in so far as the use of power is the basic trait not only of his action but also of his being-there [Dasein]. Here we use the word violence in an essential sense extending beyond the common usage of the word as mere arbitrary brutality. In this common usage violence is seen from the standpoint of a realm which draws its standards from conventional compromise and mutual aid, and which accordingly disparages all violence as a disturbance of the peace ... To say that man is to deinotaton, the strangest of all, is not to impute a particular attribute to man, as though he were also something else; no, the verse says that to be the strangest of. all is the basic trait of the human essence within which all other traits must find their place. In calling man ‘the strangest of all’ it gives the authentic Greek definition of man. We shall fully appreciate this phenomenon of strangeness only if we experience the power of appearance and the struggle with it as an essential part of being-there [Dasein] ... We shall fail to understand the mysteriousness of the essence of being-human, thus experienced and carried back into its grounds if we snatch at value judgments of any kind.’

  Elsewhere (p. 177) Heidegger connects the ‘violence’ involved in being-human with the conception of a ‘daring refusal of being’ (as envisaged in Oedipus at Colonus). These observations, occurring in a discussion of Heraclitus and Parmenides, certainly ‘carry us back’ into a non-Platonic, non-Christian ‘ground’. For us to exist at all is to commit some sort of breakage, in continuing to exist we use force. This is nothing to do with morals, it is ‘deeper’ than morality, we must not ‘snatch at value judgments’. Violence is more profound, more noble, more beautiful, than the weak ‘values’ of compromise and mutual aid. (An Introduction to Metaphysics, published 1953, was based on a 1935 lecture.) Nietzsche, who is often in Heidegger’s mind, tells us in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (translation by Marianna Cowan, pp. 60 — 61, 64 — 5) that Heraclitus (may have) believed that ‘the entire world process’ was ‘an act of punishment for hubris. The many the result of evil-doing? ... Is guilt not now transplanted into the very nucleus of materiality and the world of becoming and of individuals sentenced to carry the consequences of evil forever and anew?’ ‘The many’: the multiplicity of phenomena, breaking the unity of the One. Heraclitus (perhaps) finally concludes that we can make no sense (certainly not a moral or teleological sense) of what exists. Nietzsche also points us to Fragment 52: ‘Time (aeon) is a child playing draughts’. So it is all (he says) ‘the beautiful innocent game of the aeon’. As Heraclitus (Nietzsche tells us) exclaims: ‘It’s a game! Don’t take it pathetically and, above all, don’t make morality of it!’ See the scene as it is, with contemplative pleasure; and do not let aesthetic perception of cosmic play be vulgarised as consideration for the world’s useful ends. Heidegger looks back to Nietzsche and Nietzsche looks back to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer does not share the ferocity of Nietzsche or the (ultimate) pessimism of Heidegger. The idea that ‘it’s all a game’ is handled by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Nietzsche and Heidegger regard as somehow fundamental what they take to be ‘the Greek view of life’, as they extract it from the tragic poets and the presocratic philosophers. This ‘view’ implies the exclusion of anything moral from the ‘ground’ of things: the ground, which has been, and is, so ardently fought for in a different way by religious thinkers and philosophers. Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, in a section (pp. 196-9) called ‘Being and the Ought’, discusses the ordinary sense of value as a superficial form of thinking which has separated itself from Being, seeks a ground in itself and claims a ‘being’ of its own. Briefly: Being (Heidegger tells us) as understood by the presocratics, was originally phusis, the supreme creative power which emerges and discloses. Plato however set up the Idea (of the Good) above mere existent beings who were related to it as to a model, as to what ought to be. Logos (as statement) led on toward the supremacy of self-sufficient reason. The process was completed by Kant, for whom ‘Being’ was nature as determined by (scientific) reason, and, opposed to nature, the ought (Categorical Imperative), determined by and as (moral) reason. Nineteenth-century science, now including the human sciences, took over Kant’s scientifically determined nature. ‘Ought’, diminished and undermined, had to seek a ground in itself, claiming an intrinsic (baseless) value, itself as value, as opposed to fact. Even Nietzsche, with his ‘revaluation of all values’, failed to understand the questionable origin of this concept. Here Heidegger adds that ‘works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism ... have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)’. Of this brief history Heidegger says that, ‘This interpretation never rests exclusively or even primarily on philosophical exegesis.’ Phusis, as the power that reveals, and conceals, and disposes, travels in Heidegger’s thought as an aspect of Being.

  Heidegger here is not just rejecting a crude formulation of ‘facts versus values’, he is telling us that our ordinary, evaluative modes of thought are superficial and that what is really real is a nature of man of which the Greeks alone were fully aware and which since then has been covered over, though sometimes glimpsed by artists and thinkers. This basic nature or being is not touched by morality, it is as if it were a terrible secret, the ultimate state of man’s homelessness. One may comment here that this radical vision, which may indeed be glimpsed in Greek poets and presocratic thinkers, appears, perhaps necessarily, in later thinkers as something not really recovered or shared but as a kind of romantic heroism. Nietzsche, whom Heidegger chides for using the concept of value, also takes the ‘tragic’ preplatonic Greeks as those who saw what was really real, and that it was deinos. Nietzsche, here opposing his admired Schopenhauer, claimed to be ending the era of Plato. Returning to the pages of Schopenhauer, we are, for all his attempted ‘frightfulness’, in a milder, more secure, more common-sensical, less terrified world. He cannot resist rambling, he constantly makes jokes, when (agreeing with Nietzsche and Heidegger) he rejects teleology as a disguised form of theology he uses as evidence, for both the plausibility and the unacceptability of theology, a mass of facts which he has culled from books about animals, insects, fishes. ‘If we give ourselves up to the contemplation of the indescribably and infinitely ingenious construction of any animal, even if i
t were only the commonest insect, lose ourselves in admiration of it, and it now occurs to us that nature recklessly exposes even this exceedingly ingenious and highly complicated organism daily and by thousands to destruction by accident, animal rapacity and human wantonness, this wild prodigality fills us with amazement; but our amazement is based upon an ambiguity of the conceptions, for we have in our minds the human work of art which is accomplished by the help of the intellect and by overcoming a foreign and resisting material and therefore certainly costs much trouble. Nature’s works on the contrary, however ingenious they may be, cost her absolutely no trouble.’ (Supplement to Book II, ch. xxvi, ‘On Teleology’.) The contingent carelessness of ingenious nature, and our realisation that we too, our sturdy egoistic selves, are ‘worthless’ or ‘nothing’, opens a space for another road. In Kant and Plato this road is made clearly visible. Schopenhauer can only dimly point at this. Meanwhile he finds the ordinary world full of interesting wonders. In spite of his metaphysics and his mysticism, Schopenhauer may in general appear as a genial empiricist. His views on Hegel (in WWI): ‘clumsy and stupid ... a repulsive mindless charlatan, an unparalleled scribbler of nonsense ... such as has previously been heard only in madhouses ... shallow, crudeness, folly ... barefaced mystification’, etc. etc. His views on Hume: ‘In every page of David Hume there is more to be learnt than from Hegel’s, Herbart’s and Schleiermacher’s complete philosophical works put together.’ (Studies in Pessimism, ‘The Misery of Life’.)

  A Note on the Riddle

  One might put part of Tractatus Wittgenstein’s view, which excludes inner life, moral states, and (my word) ‘elsewhere’, as being that one should live very close to ‘the facts’ or, to use an image from the Investigations , the ‘stream of life’. (Not to be confused with the stream of consciousness.) The facts cannot be changed. One should go with the stream of life and agree with the world. This would be a stoical ‘style’ of living, which would leave no space between oneself and the world in which illusions could lodge. Self and world agree, they match. The limitation placed by Tractatus Wittgenstein on language, the sense in which logic is transcendental (shown not said) connects with, indeed guarantees, the limitation of the moral life, the sense in which ethics is also transcendental (shown not said). For the ‘happy’ (enlightened) man who ‘lives in the present’ these limitations coincide. Where Schopenhauer (or common-sense) would say experience, Wittgenstein says significance. The world we have to live close to is the world as rendered into facts by significant language. Moralising speculation or image-making or a priori metaphysical inferences are precluded by these limits. ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling. For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist.’ (Tractatus 6. 44-6. 5.) This riddle is Schopenhauer’s riddle. Schopenhauer (WWI, Supplement to Book I, ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy’): ‘The world and our existence presents itself to us necessarily as a riddle’. He refers to Kant’s dictum to the effect that ‘the source of metaphysics must throughout be non-empirical; its fundamental principles and conceptions must never be taken from either inner or outer experience’. Kant:

  ‘First, as regards the sources of metaphysical knowledge, it lies in the very concept of metaphysics that they cannot be empirical. Its principles (which comprise not only its fundamental propositions but also its fundamental concepts) must never be taken from experience; for it is not to be physical but metaphysical knowledge, i.e. lying beyond experience. Thus neither outer experience, which provides the source of physics proper, nor inner experience, which provides the basis for empirical psychology, will be the ground of metaphysics. Metaphysics is thus knowledge a priori, or out of pure understanding and pure reason.’

  (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic,

  Preamble, section I; P. Gray Lucas translation.)

  That is (says Schopenhauer) ‘everything must be excluded of which we can in any way have immediate knowledge’, but rather be ‘sought only in that at which we can arrive merely indirectly, that is by means of inferences from universal principles a priori’. Schopenhauer objects that there is no proof of this contention.

  ‘We have no grounds for shutting ourselves off, in the case of the most important and most difficult of all questions, from the richest of all sources of knowledge, inner and outer experience, in order to work only with empty forms. I therefore say that the solution of the riddle of the world must proceed from the understanding of the world itself; that thus the task of metaphysics is not to pass beyond the experience in which the world exists, but to understand it thoroughly because inner and outer experience is at any rate the principal source of all knowledge; that therefore the solution of the riddle of the world is only possible through the proper connection of outer with inner experience effected at the right point, and the combination thereby produced of these two very different sources of knowledge. Yet this solution is only possible within certain limits which are inseparable from our finite nature, so that we attain to a right understanding of the world itself without reaching a final explanation of its existence.’

  Schopenhauer here expresses a new (modern) definition of metaphysics or metaphysical craving (one which would also be acceptable to Plato) when he speaks of our finite nature together with our passionate desire to understand ‘the world’ which we attempt to intuit ‘as a whole’. Metaphysics may thus be connected with a mystical state. Wittgenstein’s ‘proper connection of outer with inner experience’ which solves (or removes) the riddle is effected when the ‘two Godheads’ (the world and I) are in harmony. Wittgenstein uses the idea of the work of art, the ability to see the world sub specie aeterni as a limited whole, to explain what this harmony is like. (Ethics and aesthetics are one. Tractatus 6. 421.) The ability thus to see (or feel) depends on keeping close to the reality of the world, accepting the facts and following the stream of life. This is described as ‘mystical’. Within the ‘limits’ of our ‘finite nature’ we are able to feel or intuit the world as a whole, though not as a totally comprehended whole. We are at peace with the world, as we are with a work of art. Wittgenstein uses Schopenhauer’s metaphysical imagery in a succinct form. It is as if he wanted to shrink it to the dimension of an aphorism. In terms of philosophical style Schopenhauer represents what Wittgenstein shudders from: an insatiable omnivorous muddled cheerful often casual volubility. Schopenhauer’s relation to his reader is relaxed, amicable, confiding, that of a kindly teacher or fellow seeker. He tells stories and makes jokes. Wittgenstein does not relate to a reader, he passes by leaving a task behind. Even the imagined interlocutor in the Investigations, the ‘someone’ who ‘might say’, is isolated from us inside the text.

  4

  Art and Religion

  Kant claimed to be checking scientific empirical reason (defining its role) in order to liberate moral spiritual reason, to preserve it and keep it autonomous and pure. What was so preserved was ipso facto morality, with its unique and special Categorical Imperative which came to us from a higher source, allowing perhaps some tacit sense of the presence of God, supported by the very idea of faith. (Philosophical metaphors: reality perceived as being above us, or below us.) Plato kept his unique source separate and pure, uncontaminated by the ‘supernatural’. The Christian God has been mainly absent from post-Kantian philosophy, the problems he poses relegated to theology. Hegelian thought, which so horrified Kierkegaard, provides an elaborate analysis to prove the idea superfluous, ‘overcome’ in the Absolute. Heidegger, looking to Holderlin, sometimes speaks as if he believed in gods; in an interview with Der Spiegel in 1966 he said that ‘Nur ein Gott kann uns retten’, only a god can save us. Philosophically God is not present, though said by some thinkers to be in eclipse, gone to the catacombs to use Martin Buber’s image, or like Heidegger’s personified Being, to have ‘wit
hdrawn’. On the other hand, away from abstract thought, and although it is true that many young people now grow up entirely outside religion, the idea of God remains familiar, intuitively comprehensible, and religious institutions continue to function and have influence. Religion may still be an answer to guilt and fear, may be expected to save us from technology; the hope of the salvation of the individual and the redemption of all fallen things remains in many forms. Belief in a personal God seemed a prime guarantee of general morality. The charm, attraction, and in many ways deep effectiveness, of faith in a personal God must constantly strike the critical or envious outsider. It is just this practical and consoling God whom the bolder demythologising theologians want us to take leave of. In doing so they may well point to the Second Commandment. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.’ (Exodus 2.0. 4.) This indeed sounds like a veto not only upon idolatrous symbolic visual art, but upon any art and even upon the development of a pictorial theology. The spirit of the Commandment has been observed by Judaism and Islam; but not by Christianity, where all the talents of art, not least those of the painters, have been dedicated to presenting God as a kind of super-art-object. The work of art unifies our sensibility. Its authoritative unity and thereness guarantees and stabilises our existence, while removing our petty egoistic anxiety. The art object is an analogy of the person-object, we intuit our best selves in its mirror, and not only when we are under its spell. Art with which we are familiar stays with us as an intimation that love has power and the world makes sense. God combines the characteristics of a work of art and of a philosophical idea with those of an ideal spectator. We see in God in a magnified form the analogy between work of art and person; and Christ as God provides both personality and story. Art sets us in order, the ideal unity of the object makes us also one. In a relation with God this unification takes place by being observed as well as through observing. The magnetic beyond looks back. In the west, God creates the individual and guarantees him as a real unity, responsible and morally judged, even perhaps able to survive death. The structuralist attack on traditional art, the ‘removal’ of morality from art and art criticism, is an attack on God and understood as such. Christianity has of course recruited not only great artists but plenty of mediocre ones too. In religion as in art, base emotions are often closely related to their redeemed counterparts. Christianity is a religion of suffering, its central image is of a man in torment. There are all kinds of consolation here: such as an invigorating sense of guilt combined with a countermanding experience of innocence and of salvation through some imagined punishment. The endeavour to remove the ‘interesting’ is also of religious origin. (‘Do not be fascinated or excited by your spiritual condition.’) Our teachers, from the Psalmist and St Paul, have pointed to a sense of sin as a starting point: an idea which would not have occurred to a classical Greek thinker. (The distinction between sin and shame has force here.) We enact our guilt in the presence of God so as to feel freed from it, a procedure which may induce amendment of life, or renewed security in carefree sinning. Causality and the contingent aspects of time are ideally overcome, in our own case and by extension in that of others, so that, as in tragedy, we can survey the misery of the world more calmly. St Paul has been a major purveyor of these great spiritual images which have touched and comforted so many.