Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  In Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl Maggie Verver realises that her husband is enjoying a long-standing love relationship with her best friend.

  ‘It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it — that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow; looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now — such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mohammedan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one’s putting off one’s shoes to enter and even, verily, of one’s paying with one’s life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short – though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool, smooth spot, and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.’

  How is it done? Well, like that and in innumerable other ways. Do we understand? Yes, of course, we follow, in context, these descriptions of states of consciousness with no difficulty. We are able to think of the imagery both as something which the character is continually, like the author, coining as she goes along, and as something ‘deeper’ or ‘beyond’, which the imagery evokes or points to. This may be seen as two levels of a region wherein we can discern many levels. Figurative language, metaphor, is everywhere in our thinking, apprehended by the thinker as ultimate or as pointing beyond. How we proceed here can be a matter of our deepest thoughts. We recognise this dialectic, these levels, these differences of style and image, in our own thinking as we understand a writer and as we are at other times led to reflect upon what the stuff and quality of our consciousness is. We do this; but can we also talk intelligibly, philosophically, about what it is that we do? Is there a philosophical problem of consciousness; rather than, say, a lot of peripheral problems so arranged as to remove any allegedly central problem which could be so called? Problems are set up in philosophy with ulterior motives. I want there to be a discussable problem of consciousness because I want to talk about consciousness or self-being as the fundamental mode or form of moral being. As contrasted with what, or distinguished from what? Well, as distinguished from conceptions depending solely upon choice, will and action, from voluntarism and ethical behaviourism, and indeed from Kant for whom phenomenal awareness (the mess of actual consciousness) is without value, also from theories in the style of Husserl or of Freud which depend upon technical terminology. Philosophers are supposed to clarify, and should attempt to write in ordinary language and not in jargon. The present problem particularly illustrates the importance of this aim. We may also note at this point respects in which the formulation of present disagreements is not new. A similar conflict concerning the deep sources and background of virtuous action arose between Pelagius and St Augustine. Augustine emphasises the importance and ambiguity of motivation, the dense and fallen nature of the soul, so subject to selfish habit, so precariously and imperfectly free. He pictures our consciousness as existing continuously in the presence of God, continually aware of sin and of the necessity of prayer. The Confessions is a long passionate loving speech addressed to God. ‘Perfect me, O Lord ... Behold thy voice is my joy, yea, thy voice exceedeth the abundance of all pleasures. Give me what I love, for verily I do love it, and this love is of thy giving.’ (Book XI, ch. 2.) This relationship to the Good may be contrasted with Kant’s picture (no doubt more like the usual human scene) of the moral agent sunk in egoism but able at times to notice the outcry of Duty. Schopenhauer, when sufficiently muddled and relaxed, offers in his concept of compassion something more like Augustine’s blurred image of our imperfect freedom. It is enough to emphasise the strength of temperament and habit and the difficulty of altering the natural set of one’s desires. The neo-Kantian concept of will is here too abstract and superficial, it cannot be carried to a deep enough level. Philosophies of will in descent from Kant which discard Kant’s metaphysical background and religious moral intent, and work with some concept of non-universal reason, are in danger of falling into behaviourism.

  Is what we want to put into the picture essentially the moral aspect of the mind? If there were no value judgments would a behaviourist account suffice? (Simply taking what we do to be real, and what we think to be unreal.) Post-Cartesian philosophers have usually been concerned with ‘immediate awarenesses’, perceptions for instance, as bearers of knowledge rather than of value, and have in this interest reduced the ordinary concept of ‘inner’ activity. Certainly a strong belief in the moral (evaluative) nature of (almost all) private inner reflection is a motive here. (Almost all? Why not say all?) But something more radical is involved. The volatile variegated force, the ever-flowing energy, the temporal pressure, the unfailing presence of what we call ‘the stream of consciousness’ — surely this is something fundamental, surely if we are searching for ‘being’ this is it? Yet after this declaration which way do we go? Not only many questions, but many different kinds of questions, present themselves. How does the alleged ‘stream’ relate to time? How do ‘general’ and ‘particular’ relate therein? Should we, and can we, distinguish mental contents which have some degree (what degree?) of clarity, form and body, for instance by consisting of sentences which could be uttered aloud? What is the value, use, status of contents which fail this sort of test? What do we do with items which have personal ‘colour’ but no public classification, are there such items? (Is there private language?) How immediate is immediate awareness? Are there mental entities (images, icons, lights, dark clouds, verbal admonitions, etc., etc.) which are always in our minds? What about ‘unconscious mind’, is there such a thing? If we flounder and ‘cannot say’ what kind of difficulty is involved, is this a mystery, or some sort of transcendental check or ordinary failure of description? The scene is so vast and the problems lead away in so many directions, we may feel there is no unitary subject or concept here at all. What are we worrying about or fighting for? A neat purposeful analysis proves too reductionist, it tells us too little, while an attempt at scrupulous description may have to use so many and various devices that it answ
ers no questions at all, but merely presents the problem in another form. I think these were difficulties which confronted Husserl. An acute realisation or impression that after all there is not only nothing else but consciousness, but nothing else but present consciousness, is the road to Cartesianism, solipsism, idealism, mysticism, and insanity. Yet the layman lives at peace with ‘consciousness’, with all its obscure implications of ‘ownership’ and ‘presence’. It is what is most his own, he is responsible for it, even though it may seem to include so much that is not momentary or personal or private or clearly visible.

  The presocratic Greeks worried about the origin and substance of all things (water? water and earth? fire?) and how the (eternal) One related to the (arriving and departing) many. Parmenides held that thinking and being were one. Or was it all a game played by the gods (a view favoured by Heidegger and Derrida following Heraclitus, Fragment 52)? In general the Greek philosophers took the world and our being in it for granted. Plato would have regarded the Cartesian idea of immediate cogitatio as a philosophical starting point as absurd, and indeed this is contradicted by his whole philosophy. He was not concerned with ‘contents of consciousness’ in a Cartesian or Humian sense. The idea that we could have knowledge of something momentary would be alien to his thought. The discussion about ‘What is knowledge?’ in the Theaetetus exhibits (151Eff.) the thoroughly jumbled and baffling nature of the concept of ‘perception’. (No general conclusion is reached, but as Myles Burnyeat remarks in the introduction to his excellent commentary, ‘there is much to be learnt from raising questions and then discovering in detail why a tempting wrong answer is wrong.’) Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge and truth from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools. The speaking person is fundamental. Insight into truth is the flash which in live conversation upon serious matters carries one beyond the words. G. E. Moore and his friends would understand that. Plato assumes that speech, as the immediate present thought of the individual, is more direct than writing. As epistemologist, he does not define or describe any general ‘ordinary consciousness’, but as moral thinker posits a scale of (increasingly) refined personal awareness. His picture demands the concept of change of consciousness. Such states of being, or ‘states of mind’, are of course implied in the spiritual pilgrimage of the Republic. This is more realistically suggested, pictured as real ‘thinkings’ and ‘discernings’ of individuals, in the attacks on writing, and in the high rhetoric of the Phaedrus and the Symposium , which are concerned with personal salvation as personal vision and change of being. This double movement, away from the private and personal and then back again, may remind us of views, more simply put, of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, thinkers who do not make philosophical theory out of immediate awareness in a Cartesian (or phenomenological) sense, but attach an ultimate importance to the continuous lived existence of individual beings. The vague word ‘existential’, which I shall in general avoid, might seem in place here. Modern theologians struggle to relate spiritual ideas of some complexity to everyday inner lives. I shall shortly be quoting from a Zen thinker, Katsuki Sekida, whose criticism of Husserl is also in the spirit of this ‘double movement’. Plato would agree with Sekida in regarding the ordinary apprehension of the ordinary man, even if not taken in anything like an atomic Cartesian sense, as a form of largely illusory awareness. Egoistic anxiety veils the world. This may be taken in a logical sense. Knowledge cannot be something immediate, the possession of solitary individual perceptions or thought-data. Knowledge implies ideas, concepts, linguistic networks, connections. The rejection of Descartes by Wittgenstein, later by structuralists, rests on the connection of knowledge with concepts. (We may note here that Descartes’s solitary thinker is released by a moral intuition!) The Platonic ‘true knowledge’ must also be understood in a moral-religious sense which pictures salvation or enlightenment as wisdom or true vision, brought about by a refinement of desire in daily living, and involving a clearer perception, including literal perception, of the world. Education is moral education. Taken in either sense the Platonic view implies that ordinary consciousness is full of illusion. The (ordinary) egoist lives in a small world. Our objects of knowledge are at the level of our deserts. Both the savant and saint know more and see more than the ordinary man. The Theory of Forms is suspended, sometimes awkwardly, between the logical and the mystical. Whitehead said that western philosophy was all footnotes to Plato. The truth of this epigram becomes especially evident in the second half of the twentieth century as we realise how many of our current problems Plato was aware of. This is the end of the Cartesian era, and may be the end of the Aristotelian era, but in the strange cosmic astronomy of the wandering Zeitgeist we are closer to Plato now than in many previous centuries.

  Kierkegaard’s version of the Hegelian dialectic (aesthetic — moral — religious) is closer in its purpose and mode of exposition to Plato, and can be read as a picture of change of consciousness in the Platonic manner. Kierkegaard however, inspired by hatred of Hegel, was hostile to philosophical system, ergo to philosophy, and makes his own teaching by myths into a self-confessed and sustained form of fiction as ‘indirect communication’. It may be apt here, as a warning, to quote some of Kierkegaard’s remarks on Schopenhauer (Journals, trans. A. Dru, 1354). ‘Schopenhauer is so far from being a real pessimist that at the most he represents “the interesting”: in a certain sense he makes asceticism interesting — the most dangerous thing possible for a pleasure-seeking age which will be harmed more than ever by distilling pleasure even out of — asceticism; that is to say by studying asceticism in a completely impersonal way, by assigning it a place in the system.’ This comment is aimed at one of Schopenhauer’s vulnerable points. The term ‘interesting’ is indeed in place. Schopenhauer, who seems far from ascetic, may indeed be said to romanticise asceticism, gratifying himself by speaking grandly of it, as if he could glimpse the state of selfless being and award it top marks. He even, deliberately and impertinently, separates it from the virtue, which must surely be required for its achievement. His ‘impersonal study’ might be compared with the experience of someone who imagines his spiritual understanding is increased by reading books about eastern philosophy. The practice, the exercise itself, is absent. Schopenhauer could reply urbanely that he is a metaphysical thinker who has studied the religions of the orient and regards ‘impersonal’ as a term of praise; and if he has succeeded in making asceticism interesting then surely this is, from any point of view, something to be desired! In fact Kierkegaard, disliking Schopenhauer’s style, misses his passionate seriousness. Kierkegaard does not seem to have been attracted by Plato, and is here attacking Schopenhauer’s Platonism as well as his orientalism. Philosophising about goodness may produce a gratified lethargy in the individual at whom Kierkegaard’s disturbing teaching is aimed. Philosophical celebration of virtue may be like the empty admiration we have for our ‘heroes’.

  ‘It is everlastingly untrue that anyone was ever helped to do the good by the fact that someone else really did it; for if he ever comes to the point of really doing it himself, it will be by apprehending the reality of the other as a possibility. When Themistocles was rendered sleepless by thinking about the exploits of Miltiades, it was his apprehension of their reality as a possibility that made him sleepless. Had he plunged into enquiries as to whether Miltiades had really accomplished the great things attributed to him, had he contented himself with knowing that Miltiades had actually done them, he would scarcely have been rendered sleepless. In that case he would have become a sleepy or at the most a noisy admirer, but scarcely a second Miltiades. Ethically speaking there is nothing so conducive to sound sleep as admiration of another person’s ethical reality. And again ethically speaking, if there is anything that can stir and rouse a man it is a possibility ideally requiring itself of a human being.’

  (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Part Two
, end of chapter III.)

  Kierkegaard shuns Plato’s system but emulates his charm, that charm which Plato himself saw as dangerous when he attacked the artists. Every age is pleasure-loving and attracted by ‘the interesting’; and in spite of the dangerous nature of art and philosophy, thinkers must think and writers must write, under the inspiration of their individual Eros. How the warning uttered by Plato to art and by Kierkegaard to philosophy is to be internalised is a matter for reflection. With this in mind we resume. Plato’s moral education is to be seen in terms of a change of self-being, of mental and spiritual activity and ‘stuff’, and the modern moral philosopher in search of a concept might profitably reflect upon the myth of the Cave as implying a progressively changing quality of consciousness. Subjects begin to see different objects; they have a deeper and wider and wiser understanding of the world. The pilgrim will not only produce a better series of acts, he will have (down to last details) a better series of mental states. He can literally see better, see people’s faces and leaves on trees, he will more rapidly and easily expel an unworthy thought or improper image. Herein the concepts of knowledge, truth, justice and moral passion are internally bound together. Knowledge informs the moral quality of the world, the selfish self-interestedly casual or callous man sees a different world from that which the careful scrupulous benevolent just man sees; and the largely explicable ambiguity of the word ‘see’ here conveys the essence of the concept of the moral. The connection between ethics and epistemology is something which we are intuitively grasping all the time in our non-philosophical lives.