Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  I quote from Perry Anderson’s prophetic 1968 essay Components of the National Culture:

  ‘The novel has declined as a genre, not — as is often alleged — because it was the product of the rising bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and could not survive it. The true reason is that it has disappeared into the abyss between everyday language and the technical discourses inaugurated by Marx and Freud. The sum of objective knowledge within the specialised codes of the human sciences has decisively contradicted and surpassed the normal assumptions behind exoteric speech. The result is that a novelist after Marx and Freud has either to simulate an arcadian innocence or transfer elements of their discourse immediately into his work. Hence the entrenched bifurcation between pseudo-traditional and experimental novels. The ingenuousness of the former is always in bad faith. The opposite solution, the inclusion of frontier concepts from Freud and Marx within the novel, has no viable outcome either. The novelist can only forge his art from the material of ordinary language. If there is a radical discordance between this and objective knowledge of man and society, the novel ceases. It has no ground between the naive and the arcane.’

  (Quoted in Bernard Sharratt’s book Reading Relations, and in David Lodge’s review of Sharratt’s book in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 April 1982.)

  This interesting piece, written in an interesting year, utters prophecies which are still worth reflecting upon. For instance, the distinction between the naive and the arcane, the traditional and the experimental: is not this now everywhere in view in literature, in painting, in music? And the specialised codes of the human sciences are indeed surpassing the normal assumptions behind exoteric speech. Anderson’s strong words may still be taken as a warning. What has clearly changed (since 1968) is the status of Marx, and to some extent that of Freud. The tendency to join these two together has lasted a long time. Freud would probably now be seen (by ordinary sophisticated observers) not strictly as a scientist, but as a great thinker who has considerably altered our view of human nature; whereas Marx, though larger and more influential, seems more like a historical phenomenon. Many people have profited more from a rejection of Marx than from his insights. Both these thinkers have now been gathered up into structuralism, merging into a new form of ‘human science‘. I would take a less extreme view than Anderson of the effect of the racing Zeitgeist upon art. Thinkers may try to jolt art, the surrealists did it, the structuralists are doing it. But the artist makes everything his own. (André Breton and Roland Barthes did not ‘control’ or ‘inspire’ Picasso and Robbe-Grillet.) Here the novelist is (I conjecture) even more at liberty since he does not have to exhibit his work in galleries or in concert halls, he is a private secluded individual offering his art to another private secluded individual. Of course, if he is lucky, his books are displayed in shops — but they are consumed in solitude. I do not think that literature has fallen into the predicted abyss. It has certainly changed, but is saved by the superb versatility of authors. Novels are stories such as humans have always used. The traditional novel can look after itself, tradition develops, experiments are infinitely various. The novel has flourished abundantly in the second half of the century. I have quoted out of context (and out of time) the stirring words of Perry Anderson because they seemed clearly and aptly to epitomise dangers which still lie ahead. We must indeed preserve and cherish a strong truth-bearing everyday language, not marred or corrupted by technical discourse or scientific codes; and thereby promote the clarified objective knowledge of man and society of which we are in need as citizens, and as moral agents.

  Hume (as philosopher) held that the self was a sort of ‘illusion’, just as the material object was an ‘illusion’; that is, it was, both as empirical knower and as moral agent, a lot of fragmentary experiences held together by strong habits of imagination. Here the idea of the material object may even be regarded as the dominant illusion, in that we usually regard the inhabitant of the same body as the same person, however great the time span involved, and however incoherent the intervening consciousness. Illusions are of many different kinds, perceptual mistakes, fantasies, ghosts, wishful thinkings, literary fictions, and so on. Hume’s ‘self’ and ‘object’ illusions may be thought of as natural necessities, necessary though perhaps scarcely justifiable ideas. ‘I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible and universal, such as the customary transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes; and the principles which are changeable weak and irregular. The former are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin.’ (Treatise of Human Nature I iv 4.) We must believe in causality, in persons and objects and in the substantial continuity of our own being. What would it be not to? We might compare and contrast this belief with metaphysical ideas such as the Marxist theory of history or Kant’s Universal Reason. There are also axioms or axiomatic fictions with moral and political uses such as Locke’s natural rights or Hobbes’s concept of the individual or Hume’s doctrine that, politically, every man should be deemed a knave. I shall discuss the status of such ‘axioms’ later. The problematic ‘self’ does not really fit these categories, though it could, to stir reflection, be considered in all three, as a necessary illusion, not further discussable, as a historically determined persuasive idea, which the Zeitgeist could remove, or is removing, or as an ideal mode of thinking, of obvious value in morals and politics. The notion that the continuous self is a fiction may occur to us in ordinary situations, in puzzling about memory or responsibility for the past. Is the Nazi war criminal unearthed many years later the same person who did those terrible things in a concentration camp? We may sometimes feel, in exasperation or despair, about ourselves or others, that an entity so prone to error, so stuffed with illusion, is itself an illusion. Platonic philosophy and some religious positions take ordinary egoistic consciousness to be a veil which separates us from the order and true multiplicity of the real world: reflectively understood this is obviously true. Moral progress (freedom, justice, love, truth) leads us to a new state of being. This higher state does not involve the ending but rather the transformation of the ‘ordinary’ person and world. There is a false unity and multiplicity and a true unity and multiplicity. There is the selfish ego surrounded by dark menacing chaos, and the more enlightened soul perceiving the diversity of creation in the light of truth. Buddhist and Hindu religious art is often expressive of the play between appearance and reality and multiplicity and unity, and how what is infinitely multiple can appear either as terrifying or as soul-shakingly beautiful. This imagery may remind us of Kant’s sublime, and of what Kant did with Hume’s compulsory illusory belief. Habit and unexplained belief could not, for a scientifically minded and religious man such as Kant, be the founding basis or ground of human existence. One might say of Hume that he had performed the Copernican Revolution without noticing. Kant’s categories and his phenomenal self explain and establish the compulsoriness of the empirical world. Hume’s unitary self held, as part and support of his continuous being, very strong habitual beliefs and feelings about society and morality, similar to his beliefs about objects. Kant’s separated noumenal rational self transcends the mechanical multiplicity of the phenomenal world toward a unified intelligible moral order. The individual experienced being of the Kantian man resides in the tension between the two orders. These are traditional metaphysical pictures of self and self-being which consider as a matter of course the moral and epistemological nature of the person, and indicate better and worse activities and states of consciousness. Even Hume who, in his study, holds the self to be an illusion, persuasively pictures an ideal temperate tolerant man with civilised feelings who eschews the excesses of abstract rationalism. To describe the self may seem to involve describing the self as moral being, to discuss consciousness to involve discerning qualities of consciousness. The self or soul, in these traditional images, is seen to live and travel betw
een truth and falsehood, good and evil, appearance and reality.

  The theological idea of the soul has been a support to the concept of the self in philosophy. Now as theology and religion lose their authority the picture of the soul fades and the idea of the self loses its power. Questions about the unity or identity of the self have been discussed in contemporary philosophy in technical post-Cartesian anti-Humian terms as matters fairly easily dealt with and set aside, or else as pseudo-problems. With this goes a (taken-for-granted) setting-aside of consciousness, inwardness, as a bearer of moral substance. There are of course, outside philosophy, in sociology, psychology, political theory, speculations about the self as historical individual, language-user, victim of identity crises, etc., which it might do philosophers no harm to peruse. But such accounts will normally treat ‘morals’, if mentioned, as a social or historical, etc. phenomenon, rather than worrying about the self as moral being. In the field of philosophy Charles Taylor’s wise and learned work Sources of the Self explores in reflectively presented detail those surrounding fields, while pursuing a philosophical argument which involves establishing ab initio that ‘orientation in relation to the good is essential to being a functional human agent’ (p. 42).

  Schopenhauer protests against Kant. (The Basis of Morality II 6.) ‘Kant does not represent the so-called moral law as a fact of consciousness ... Human consciousness, as well as the whole of the external world, together with all the experience and facts in them, are swept from under our feet ... What are we to hold onto? Onto a few concepts which are entirely abstract.’ ‘By discarding every empirical basis of morals he rejects all inner, and even more definitely all outer, experience. ’ (My italics.) Elsewhere Schopenhauer praises Kant for removing morality from definition or determination in empirical terms (for instance explaining it as a natural phenomenon among others). Here he is objecting to the sharply segregated nature of Kant’s Categorical Imperative as a unique command from elsewhere, and as our only direct contact with what is spiritual. This charge may not seem entirely just since in the exercise of reason the moral agent is forced to attend to the multiplicity of the world. But Kant does say that the impetus of the sense of duty is not an (ordinary) experience and not part of our multifarious (causally determined) phenomenal awareness. What Schopenhauer is here demanding instead is that our morality should be fed by our whole experience and conscious awareness of our world, which is already filled with intimations of good and evil. Our personality and temperament, and the daily momently quality of our consciousness, our ability to look at particulars, must be thought of as an organic part of our morals, and soaked in value. His claim made for ‘consciousness’ as the very stuff of quality of being is in fact close to Plato and to his imagery of different levels of awareness wherein each subject has the object he deserves.

  In philosophy we exhibit deep motives in our selection of tasks; and in the omnipresence of scientific explanation philosophers may not be motivated to speak in the context of ethics about these problems which trouble Schopenhauer. It seems to me that one cannot ‘philosophise’ adequately upon the subject unless one takes it as fundamental that consciousness is a form of moral activity: what we attend to, how we attend, whether we attend. This need not imply that all states of consciousness are evaluating or can be evaluated. (‘Every second has moral quality’ would have to be a synthetic a priori proposition!) Of course as soon as we look at it in this way we encounter grave problems about how to describe and explain what we are looking at; but these problems arise in any attempt at describing mind and mental process, and are best met (in my view) as posed at this level (the level of our general conception of consciousness), and discussed in ordinary language and not in specialised jargon. Of course, any attempt, by a philosopher or psychoanalyst, to exhibit ‘the mind’ in terms of a clear conceptual framework with firmly distinguishable parts is likely to be at least thought-provoking and in this sense hermeneutic. The difficulty of relating the explicans to the explicandum may be reminiscent of that of relating languages of art criticism or literary criticism to the objects they are designed to illumine. These languages can assist us, even ones we find alien can often throw light; but if we are to learn from such discourse, our eyes must be fixed upon the thing itself which is much closer to us than the suggestive schemata which are being wheeled up against it, and whose language gains sense only from our primary animation of what it is. Technical meta-language terminology must be ancillary to basic looking, and not something which (as in deconstruction) takes its place. We look at the picture, we read the poem. We follow the instruction to consider this rhythm or that ambiguity. What the critic says is secondary, a suggested way of looking. Of course philosophy is unlike aesthetic critical pointing in that what is indicated is so very much more difficult to elucidate. What is similar is the required attempt to find a way of being faithful (true) to the thing itself.

  Morality, unless put into the picture at the start, cannot be adequately represented by anything inserted later. Anti-Cartesian thinkers who remove metaphysical subjects seem in doing so simply to update the old divisions which have the effect of paralysing attempts to think in fresh and independent and realistic ways about what morality or being a person is like. Such reflection is often explicitly handed over to ‘sociology’, a ‘scientific’ subject which increasingly invades the philosophical field and attracts young people away from the (far more difficult) study of philosophy. Here, as I suggested earlier, utilitarianism, dismissed when I was young as an old discredited doctrine, survives to provide for many an entry into philosophical thought and a free open space for philosophical reflection. In a (since television even more manifestly) suffering world utilitarian ideas and projects make evident sense and can always win respect. How refreshing it is to turn from the nightmarish schemata of deconstructionist thought to the open meditative pages of John Stuart Mill, who really seems to be thinking about recognisable human beings. G. E. Moore’s ideas, moreover, in Principia Ethica, about ‘good states of mind’, however eccentric, can promote reflection. J. M. Keynes’s delightfully intelligent discussion of Moore in My Early Beliefs, from which I quoted earlier, indicates some of the major difficulties and also exhibits how much he and his contemporaries were inspired to think by their chosen sage. ‘Indeed it is only states of mind that matter, provided that we agree to take account of the pattern of life through time, and give up regarding it as a series of independent instantaneous flashes, but the ways in which states of mind can be valuable, and the objects of them, are more various and also much richer than we allowed for.’ This is a model example of radical and good-tempered reaction against one’s teacher. Keynes recalls with particular affection the ‘sweet and lovely passage, so sincere and passionate and careful’ in which Moore ‘discusses whether, granting it is mental qualities which one should chiefly love, it is important that the beloved person should also be good-looking’! (Principia Ethica, ch. VI, section 122.) The case of Keynes and his friends also illustrates the way in which clever young people can be absolutely taken over by a philosophical view, later seen to be intolerably abstract and implausible. ‘I have called this faith a religion, and some sort of relation of neo-platonism it surely was. But we should have been very angry at the time with such a suggestion. We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character.’ Keynes speaks of Moore’s world as being pre-Marx and pre-Freud (that pair again) and possessing the atmosphere of Plato’s early dialogues.

  It may be helpful here, before going further, to look at what novelists do. It may be that the best model for all thought is the creative imagination. We cannot exactly say that novelists are unaware or unconscious of these problems, since they have constantly to invent methods of conveying states of mind or to choose between different styles of doing so. Novels moreover exhibit the ubiquity of moral quality inherent in consciousness. We may rightly criticise novels in which characters’ thoughts (as well as actions) exhibit a lack of moral sensibility which seems calle
d for by the story. This is an important kind of literary criticism. Indeed the judgment passed upon the moral sensibility of the artist is a primary kind of aesthetic judgment. Of course, some artists can talk about how they work and others cannot, or will not, and it is the art object which is great or otherwise, and not the ‘how it is done’. Artists are famous for not knowing how it is done, or for perhaps rightly feeling that at their best they do not know what they are up to. (This darkness of aesthetic inspiration worried Plato.) At any rate, the novelist’s problem (the traditional novelist’s problem), solved intuitively or otherwise, is precisely a unification of fact and value, the exhibiting of personal morality in a non-abstract manner as the stuff of consciousness. Here the use of figurative highly toned evaluative language seems natural, in showing the movement between immediacy and abstraction and the instant sorting and evaluating of the world in our awareness of it. I spoke of the philosopher as (sometimes) lacking motives. The novelist (unless corrupted by recent critics who think that not only criticism but literature is a scientific pursuit from which value must be excluded) does not lack motivation. Novels, both old and new, from Murasaki (The Tale of Genji) onward, seem to have had no radical difficulties with the concept of consciousness. The variety of solutions is one of the charms of the art form. Let us take an example.