by Iris Murdoch
An important question to ask about any philosopher is whether he is deeply interested in morality. The Platonic soul, picturing the whole experience of a whole person, is a mixture of knowledge and illusion, immersed in a reality which transcends it, failing or succeeding to learn, in innumerable ways, the difference between true and false, good and evil. Descartes, and also Berkeley, held deep Christian beliefs, and both picture faith in God as an essential part of the escape from solipsism. Descartes’s version of the Ontological Proof, in the Third Meditation, appears in the context of his theory of knowledge. Berkeley’s God, as guarantor of knowledge of ‘external’ reality, seems perfunctory compared with that of Descartes, but the idea is comprehensibly similar. God too is inside the lonely soul, and this indubitable presence must involve the idea of truth and of an ability to judge what ‘seems to be the case’. In general however Cartesian thought (after Descartes) has not been (in the sense in which Platonic thought has been) fundamentally moral and religious in its inspiration. Cartesians seem on the whole to have taken the attractive clarity of the certain starting point as founding an empiricism more friendly to science than to ethics or religion. Hume, relaxed and benevolent, may here figure as a predecessor and kinsman of Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill and G. E. Moore. Though certainly interested, in a critical spirit, in religion, he presents morality (including political wisdom) as civilised, reasonably altruistic, virtue, comprising happiness and social harmony, resting on a deep foundation of tradition, imagination and habit. The self as ‘bundle of perceptions’ turns out to be quite complex enough to represent a decent man. Hume separates reason from passion (intuition, feelings etc.). Reason, which cannot distinguish good and evil, ‘is and ought to be the slave of the passions’. (This ‘slave’ however is to be seen as more like a friendly adviser, an old family solicitor as someone has suggested.) (Treatise of Human Nature II iii 5 and III i I.) Kant was disturbed by Hume’s scepticism, his demotion of reason, his relaxed moral theory, and his messy insecure reliance on feelings, associations and habits. Surely world, science and morals must depend upon some deeper and more necessary structure. Kant’s portrayal of a radically divided self contrasts with Hume’s tolerant compromise and his worldly calm. For Hume similar habits and movements of imagination set in order both the factual and the moral. For Kant the clarified justified account of scientific and factual knowledge has the intended effect of displaying as totally different the free activity of mind in moral choice and discernment. (As in the Tractatus.) Kant’s man as knower of the phenomenal world (exercising theoretical reason) is to be distinguished from his man as moral agent (exercising practical reason). Schopenhauer, after exhibiting ultimate reality (Thing-in-itself) as ruthless all-powerful Will, allows in his ramblings the ordinary unenlightened self to be someone rather like Hume’s man, subject to deterministic pressures, yet sometimes blessed (by temperament) with a little altruism (compassion) and even a sense of justice. Looked at in a more morally ambitious light, the soul is capable of being disturbed by Platonic Ideas, and even able to deny the egoistic Will altogether.
Later forms of empiricism have, until lately, exhibited less interest in morality and a fortiori in religion. Early (from the nineteenth century) psychological studies, endorsing Hume’s idea of the importance of habit, proposed to philosophy various quasi-empirical ‘selves’ based on principles of association. Phenomenalists (at times for instance Bertrand Russell and Ayer) were empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley and Hume, their problems concerned with the creation of the world out of experiential atoms or ‘sense data’. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Wittgenstein’s Investigations finally disposed of these doctrines. The local phenomenalism was taken over by linguistic philosophy, which excluded psychological speculations and usually dealt with morality as a separate matter, discussed in terms of emotive language, imperatives, persuasions, and other tentative formulae. This style of philosophy, innocent of Hegel or Bradley, was neo-Kantian in style, assuming a distinction between fact and value, the purpose of which is not so much to elevate or purify moral philosophising, as to isolate it as respectable though peripheral. It could then be considered as a ‘special subject’ wherein the philosopher worked as a neutral technician. Surely an age which at last clearly separates myth from science should be at pains to distinguish between conceptual analysis and preaching! Bertrand Russell exhibited in parable form his own version of the alienation of fact and value. The contrast between his logic and his admonitory essays illustrates how far ethics had then strayed out of philosophy. The ‘factual world’, also the posited world of language, could receive strict philosophical treatment, whereas morality was a personal affair. Anti-Cartesian dismissal of the solitary knower, with his purified access to clear and distinct private data, was sometimes taken to imply that all private inner reflection was in some sense incoherent, inaccessible, and vague. With this, ‘self’ theories, whether psychological or metaphysical, were to be ‘eliminated’. Those who found this situation unsatisfactory have sought in utilitarianism and pragmatism a field for further fruitful development of empiricist thinking. More recently forms of Aristotelian moral philosophy, both Thomist and phenomenological, have given much-needed attention to the concept of the inner life (Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self). Also read, sui generis, Stanley Rosen who has I think the clearest grasp of the modern scene.
Popular deconstructionist literature challenges the traditional conception of fictional characters. The notion of the person as having a particular private flow of consciousness begins to be a trifle shadowy. ‘Just being a person doesn’t work anymore’, a poem of John Ashbery suggests. Perhaps the whole human race is changing? Marxists regarded the bourgeois concept of the individual as moribund. Derrida’s structuralism took over from Marxism. Language and feeling and value (and thoughts and emotions, etc.) are henceforth not ‘owned’ by ‘private persons’ in the old familiar sense. The ‘metaphysics of presence’ is to be rejected: the notion that ‘the present’ is what it seems to be as a reality in the consciousness and experience of the individual. As I said earlier, these dicta are made plausible by reference to truisms and half-truths. We may be quite prepared to be told that there is no God, that we are limited contingent beings affected by forces beyond our control, and that ‘language’ (now studied by scientific experts) is a huge area of which we know little. All this may seem obvious, easily put up with, part of living in this age. We then find that further steps have been taken which purport to deny our ordinary sense of a transcendent (extra-linguistic) real world ‘out there’; indeed there is no ‘out there’ since language, not world, transcends us, we are ‘made’ by language, and are not the free independent ordinary individuals we imagined we were. This alarming mystification gains some of its plausibility from moves, critical of traditional concepts of ‘self’ and ‘mind’, effected by (for instance) Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, Ryle and others. How far do these moves take us in the direction of finding that the ‘individual’ with his boasted ‘inner life’ is really some kind of illusion? Are not these moves just ‘technical’, inside philosophy, not to do with us? Perhaps philosophers were influential in the past, but now we think more scientifically. Is it just that ‘the elimination of the self’ is in the air, have we not been prepared for it by Marx and Freud? Does it matter? Wittgenstein says that (his) philosophy leaves everything as it is; whereas Sartre and Heidegger are by contrast prophets who want to change our picture of the world. Derrida (who is not strictly a philosopher) seems to have been, after all, by imparting his doctrine to literary writers and critics, the most generally influential.
How limited here is the philosophical point, what is its purpose and what its, intended or otherwise, effect? The operation has roughly two moves, based on two questions. Are there introspectible mental contents? What, if they exist, is the role or function of such contents? In judging this approach, we must recall that much recent philosophy, analytical and structuralist,
has been concerned with removing mistaken views (such as those of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and more recently Husserl) concerning ‘contents of the mind’. We learn now rightly that Cartesians and empiricists were wrong to begin their epistemology by positing private experiential mental data of indubitable clarity and separable integral existence. Thinking is not a mental composition repeated aloud verbatim, spoken words do not have to have mental equivalents, recognition and remembrance do not depend on comparison with inner pictures, words are not names of things, there is no God-named reality lying under the net of some single correct meaning-bearing language. In fact Schopenhauer pointed out such errors before linguistic philosophy was invented. Wittgenstein established a ‘new insight’ (the end of the Cartesian era) in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s activity was, he claimed, negative, he was simply pointing out philosophical mistakes. (I consider Wittgenstein’s position later.) However (some) Wittgensteinians as well as structuralists carried this (reasonable and proper) sort of discussion on, the former toward behaviourism, the latter, with greater panache, toward a more thorough denial of the ‘inner life’. The argument might be pressed on as follows. There are fewer ‘private mental contents’ than we are inclined (casually or under the spell of a theory) to imagine as present. To identify or describe them is a dubious, as well as an inessential and unimportant, proceeding. They do not play any necessary or primary role. Such as may be discerned are shadowy, messy, indeterminate and vague, entities such as mental images, pressures, pictorial or kinaesthetic, verbal fragments uttered ‘in the mind’ and so on. Thought and language must depend entirely on the use of public concepts, the interlocking of public concepts and public activity. A ‘decision’ is not a mental act — the concept depends on (is verified by) public outward action. (If he has not done it, he has not ’decided’ to do it.) There is in this sense no private coherent mental activity, no mental reality. It has moreover been properly pointed out by both Saussure and Wittgenstein that language develops and depends upon internally related groups of concepts, wherein sense is modified by relation to the group. Sometimes such groups are readily visible; but we must now (the structuralist argument goes on) realise that all of language consists of internal relations, is in fact an internally related network which no individual can survey. We are not masters of language, we are ourselves, as utterers, simply parts of language, we do not and cannot really know what we are saying, or possess any intelligible ‘present’ which is ‘our own’.
Language is now a prime philosophical concept, whether thought of in a Wittgenstein (unsystematic, empiricist) or a Derrida (systematic, metaphysical) style. These forms of argument in removing old Cartesian errors, may indeed seem to render problematic the common-sense conception of the individual self as a moral centre or substance. The concept of ‘consciousness’ in Hegelian and Marxist theory (as belonging to a supra-personal whole) has the same effect of displacing the vitality and significance of the individual; this displacement has assisted in the acceptance of structuralism and remains in alliance with it. In such contexts we feel that we have lost something: our dense familiar inner stuff, private and personal, with a quality and a value of its own, something which we can scrutinise and control. Moral reflections especially may move us in this direction. Example of moral activity: inhibiting malicious thoughts. Let us leave aside here the ordinary sense in which we may be accused, or accuse ourselves, of being automatons, ‘manipulated’ (a frequent word) by advertisements, governments, our unconscious minds and so on. We do not normally take such accusations too seriously or really envisage ourselves as conscious machines. We are not, in ordinary life as opposed to philosophy, determinists; and in philosophy a doctrine of total determinism has never been intelligibly stated. What we have to deal with in philosophy is a ghost of determinism, which finds support in various non-philosophical desires to believe that ‘it cannot be otherwise’. Popular Marxism and popular Freudianism gained strength from such desires, which function also in religious contexts and in the everyday wish to feel that fate and not one’s own folly has brought things about. (Thy will be done.) But surely the ‘person’ we wish to defend here, endorsed by common-sense, is not so easily magicked away. Our present moment, our experiences, our flow of consciousness, our indelible moral sense, are not all these essentially linked together and do they not imply the individual? How are we to frame our question? Let us look at how various thinkers have considered the concepts of consciousness and self.
Jean-Paul Sartre was attracted by the romantic figure of the lonely gratuitous chooser; but he wanted also to present this ‘authentic’ figure as a spokesman for the best aspirations of the human race. (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme.) Marx saw the Proletariat as playing this role of being the bearers of freedom and truth and thus the saviours of humanity. Sartre carried his libertarian views on into a form of Marxism. (Critique de la Raison dialectique.) At first his philosophical point was Kantian, to keep the realm of value (as choice and freedom) pure, to defend it from contamination by dead fact in the form of convention or blind bourgeois ‘value’. Later he removed value from the free unillusioned individual will and lodged it in the ‘new structure’ of the ideal Marxist society. Both these movements are characteristic of our age and can be executed as de facto or deliberate rejection of the concept of self as whole person. Both Sartrian existentialists and Marxists often took the stand of high-minded puritans. Wittgenstein (also high-minded and puritanical) established his epistemological metaphysical subject in Kantian style in the Tractatus by identifying him with his ‘world’, but also allowing a (silent ineffable) moral will to exist outside the closed circle of factual propositions. Wittgenstein elegantly shuns explanation. Sartre is all explanation. In L’Etre et le Néant, and in La Nausée, he makes a head-on attempt to describe the ‘flow and texture’ of consciousness, and does succeed in describing something which we can recognise. See for example the characterisation of le visqueux, viscosity or viscousness, in L‘Etre et le Néant IV 2. 3, p. 695 ff. The section is called ‘De la qualité comme révélatrice de l’Etre’. Quality as revealing Being. Sartre’s description of a quality of consciousness as gluey, liquid, jumbled, cloudy is intended to illustrate the senseless messiness of the ‘inner’ by contrast with the clear clean effective visible nature of outer commitments and choices. However, Sartre’s own temperament and talent (which also make him a good novelist) lead him to linger fondly with this ‘inner’, developing a rich vocabulary in his account of its states. Another phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty in his first phase, was interested in quasi-empirical quasi-scientific descriptions of consciousness for their own sake. Sartre’s purpose is metaphysical; and we may note here that it is indeed difficult to describe this, which is nearest to us, our conscious being, without having, or developing, particular motives and value judgments: such is indeed the essence of the problem. Almost any description involves an evaluation; and this in turn may need to be appropriately justified. Sartre tells us what the stuff of the inner is mainly like, and that it is devoid of knowledge and spirit, a contingent fellow traveller of the free soul. Following Kant who regards the phenomenal self as spiritless and causally determined, he sees the inner ‘consciousness’ as something comparatively inert which resists the pure free lively movement of moral choice. Here we see one of those leaps, familiar in philosophy, when we move in a flash from one picture to another which is superficially connected but deeply unlike and with different implications. Hume comments on the magical movement from a factual argument to an evaluative one.