Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  A despairing prophetic tone may be heard in some structuralist utterances, as from a desire to run forward to anticipate a terrible future, to make it present and prove that it can be lived with. The same note can be heard in writings of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin). This is a hint of realism which certainly challenges thought; we are being forced to consider how radical a time of change we are now living through. Marxists, after all, told us that technological change brings ideological change. There are disturbing ideas here which indeed concern the nature of language, the future of books, the meaning of the word ‘writing’. Traditional ideas of truth, freedom and personality are at stake, and we must remind ourselves that the frightening future is not yet with us and can be resisted. New and patently self-referential, invented not natural, languages of physics and biology are destined to enter our lives through our own use of technology and our general sense of a cosmos described by science. This new cosmos evoked for us by physicists is not discovered in the same sense as America or the South Pole was discovered. It is not, in the ordinary sense, imaginable, and not, in the ordinary sense, ‘really there’. Science fiction, an important literary form, soothes our disturbed frustrated imagination by picturing our more distant surroundings as being just like our domestic ones only, in our local terms, more weird; and though it may strain every nerve it cannot do otherwise. Science fiction has been praised as the most imaginative writing possible, but in fact, though there are many talented writers of it, it presents us rather with the poverty and limits of our imagination when projected in that direction. Imagination concerns the depth and working of the human soul and its truthful visions. We may think here of Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, fancy as juxtaposition of given pieces, imagination as deep fusion, deep creative understanding. Human life mingles horror and absurdity, and great art has the ability to mingle these and do justice to them in the process. Science fiction can please and edify us by exhibiting the latest scientific discoveries; it must also visit weird ‘unhuman’ worlds and endow them with human interest. This is certainly a difficult task, we are to be awed and frightened, at home and yet not at home. SF stories picture us as meeting with beings from elsewhere who are, and indeed must be, with picturesque differences, rather like ourselves. But modern physics bears a different and more frightful message. As Wittgenstein remarked, ‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’ What science fiction is concealing from us and at the same time making us uneasily aware of, is that we are surrounded by an external reality which can only be indicated in a language which almost none of us can understand and which is not in our ordinary local sense descriptive. Yet, we may feel, what could be more fundamental, basic, and so surely true, than what our greatest minds are now, in these fields, discovering? This is the scientific era when at last we discover reality, and that things are not as they seem. Indeed, for science, there are no things, only relations. The microcosm and the macrocosm are in these respects equally mysterious. Beneath human personality, free will, morality, lies a different ‘more real’ world of genes, molecules, DNA. Are we becoming used to the idea that, whether we are concerned with distant galaxies or with the deep structure of our own things and our own bodies and our own thoughts, the deepest language, the language we might say of the planet itself, is totally unlike our natural referential language with its familiar methods of verification? Notions of ‘probability’, ‘facts’ about atoms, protons, things that can be both waves and particles, become vaguely familiar to us, and are used in arguments about free will. We are told that, because of genes, no one can be blamed for anything. The spectre of determinism, appearing in new and convincing forms, may be in effect more attractive than horrific. So, in the end, it is all a matter of cosmic rhythms to which we must learn to surrender ourselves: a very old story, older even than the presocratics who were rejected by Plato. Under this spell we may begin to gain the impression that our ordinary language is being, as it were, prised off the world, and is thus withering away. We are being taught, in a new style, what the Hegelians also tried to tell us, that the individual is a special kind of illusion. What if this development continues, as it seems likely to, and as we must wish it to, not only because of the obvious benefits of technology, but because the collapse of technological civilisation could mean a return to barbarism? We cannot turn back this clock, we are (in ways both fortunate and unfortunate) destined to become surrounded by, used to, dependent on, clever machines which separate us from the old simpler furniture of the world and even from the activity of our own minds. Typewriters replace pens, word processors replace typewriters. Calculators replace mental arithmetic, data banks replace books. The era of alphabetic writing, which was originally thought of as secondary to verbal speech, an ingenious means of representing it, is also said to be coming to an end. The picture of speaking and traditional writing as prime methods of representation and communication is now, it seems, seen to be outmoded and essentially fallacious. We have to think in terms of an un-writing, writing proper, the writing of reality itself, of the planet, of the cosmos. Of course, in the time to come, which we are not told but might gloomily prophesy, the majority of people will make contact only with the childishly simple machinery, as the great machines which explore the depths of what will then be thought of as human reality will only be understood by brilliant and highly trained experts. Most people, unable to read, will be watching television. Television, the dictator’s best friend, already erodes our ability to read. What is, and not implausibly, envisaged here is an apocalyptic change in human consciousness, involving vast social changes and the disappearance of old local ideas of individuals and virtues. A loss of sovereignty.

  I do not believe that the structuralist nightmare, la fin du livre etc., can be set up as a really convincing prophecy, but it carries a serious warning. The doctrine is too emotive to be philosophy, let alone science. The future perhaps, one sometimes feels inclined to say no doubt, contains terrible things, but one thing we may be sure about is that it cannot be reliably predicted. (Who predicted the sudden collapse of Marxism in eastern Europe?) It has certainly never been so predicted in the past, and there are extra reasons now for an inability to predict. Is what is pictured here something very remote, or something very close indeed? Here too, looking ahead, the courage of philosophy may fail. Many voices proclaim the end of philosophy. Philosophy departments are closing. I think it is very important that western philosophy, with its particular tradition and method of imaginative truth-seeking and lucid clarification, should not fail us here. Philosophy is perpetually in tension between empiricism and metaphysics, between, one might say, Moore and McTaggart. This argument can take place within the same philosopher. Religion moves similarly between simplicity and elaboration, puritanism and its opposite (to which various names may be given). There are times for piecemeal analysis, modesty and common-sense, and other times for ambitious synthesis and the aspiring and edifying charm of lofty and intricate structures. Certainly philosophy’s recurrent task is to point out that a metalanguage has truth-bearing sense only if it can be suitably translated into a more accessible clarifiable terminology. It has sense through its relation to the original reality which has brought it into existence. The dialogue form in Plato helps to relate his myths to real cases. This task of philosophy is not less but more essential now, in helping to preserve and refresh a stream of meticulous, subtle, eloquent ordinary language, free from jargon and able to deal clearly and in detail with matters of a certain degree of generality and abstraction. We cannot see the future, but must fear it intelligently.

  We are all workers and, of necessity, in order to live at all, truth-seekers on that familiar everyday (transcendental) edge where language continually struggles with an encountered world. In this activity we are like, or are, artists. While our motives and abilities to grasp and express truth differ, the conception of true and false is essential to human life, which without it would perish and go to ruin. A radical sep
aration of meaning from truth not only ‘removes’ morally responsible truth-seeking speech in particular situations, it also leaves our ordinary conduct inexplicable. Art cannot be taken as proof that the separation is possible. Even bad art relies on some truth value, and serious art is a continuous working of meaning in the light of the discovery of some truth. The often difficult explanation of the truth of great art is a proper task of criticism. The concept of language-using must imply that of an individual person as a presence, that is, it must imply responsibility and the possibility of truth, upon which the possibility of falsehood depends. This concept of presence does not of course mean that any significant statement must be attributable; it is a way of expressing the necessary anchorage of language in a surrounding world. From here, and returning to here, every sort of ‘fiction’ can take off, including good and bad art and complex and simple lying.

  As Derrida says, ‘experience’ relates to a present, whether or not in the form of consciousness. Some or much of the time when we are ‘aware’ we do not have any vivid sense of presentness. Simone Weil expressed her wish for a lively present by saying that she wanted to be able to perceive without reverie. An inability to be fully present is something which we often feel. We move about in time in all sorts of strange ways which are also entirely familiar. We ‘live in memory’, we anticipate and plan, we discover unconscious wishes, we ‘sum up’ in spoken thoughts processes of mental stuff which we could not describe or temporally analyse in detail, our mental life is time-textured, and a certain mastery of time is required for living and in various sophisticated forms for living well. But our time-adventures return to and are based in presence and encounter. These concepts, experience, consciousness, presence, cannot be arbitrarily excluded from philosophical discussion. Certainly, reflection may soon feel confronted by a mystery. Heidegger seizes on that word of Sophocles to describe being human: deinos, unheimlich, terrible, weird, strange, wonderful. How do we do it? It is at this point that one must move steadily on, attempting to say, in ordinary language and without jargon, things which may seem obvious. Here philosophy has a negative technical task of removing (philosophical) errors, which must be combined with a positive task of finding a simple open mode of discourse concerning ordinary evident (for instance moral) aspects of human life. Of course philosophy is ‘abstract’: a term not easy to define or explain. It is a delicately managed conversation that moves between degrees of generality in order to promote understanding of very general features of our lives. Metaphysical systems, as positions, are abstract and difficult to understand, but their critics do in effect, as time passes, interpret, clarify, justify, modify, or refute them by relationship to what we know in ordinary ways about human life; and there are moments when such a reference is, philosophically, essential, and when the language of philosophy should be simplified. Philosophers are wise to attend to critics of the Dr Johnson variety, and if one is not a genius (and perhaps even if one is one) it is usually helpful to attempt a laborious expression in ordinary language of ‘what one is thinking’ or ‘how one sees it’. The negative error-correcting work of philosophy inevitably suggests a variety of general positions which require calm viewing, and this general look cannot be cast without reference to morality. That is, philosophy must be moral philosophy, as indeed, in the sense in which, it has usually been.

  An implication of the primacy of presence to and encounter with a non-linguistic world is that speech must be thought of as more fundamental than writing, as it has been by both philosophers and laymen. ‘Speech’ here must be extended to cover, not only audible utterance but all our awareness and reflections. These may well be unclarified, but (the point is) they are primary. We speak to ourselves. ‘Writing’ codifies and makes available what originates in and returns to individual minds and voices. The original bases of our life are in spoken encounter. Writings constitute a removal of thought from conditions in which it can be clarified and in which what lies beyond the words can be intuitively grasped. A book may be misused and misunderstood and cannot defend itself. This expresses a fundamental idea about the centrality of individual minds, a moral and religious idea which also belongs to common-sense. If this sounds like hubris, it is a hubris which is easily dispelled. Of course we are fantasising sinners, victims of accident, history, habit and unconscious motive, and of course books are essential, we need and rightly want books, and computers which menace books, and languages of science which can satisfy our curiosity and cure our ills. But we must retain our everyday and continually renewed awareness that no theory can remove or explain away our moral and rational mastery of our individual being. Books too are individual works of art, with the independence yet rootedness characteristic of such objects, made by individual persons for other individual persons. Of course ‘the meaning’ of a work of art is not just what its creator might say or have said it meant; but it is not disconnected from this either. What any man says is open to interpretation as well as to misinterpretation. Language has public rules as well as particular or private contexts. As critics and as ordinary persons we solve problems of this sort every day. The ‘writing’ which Derrida appeals to as being, in the direction away from the individual speaker, beyond books is a new ownerless language which evades context and verification.

  It may be argued that whether we like it or not such a language is possible as that of, at least, some people. Masses of human beings may be virtually persuaded that they are automatons and so used by others. (As in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.) Of course we speak of people being ‘dehumanised’ by depraved conditioning, by hunger, poverty, fear. But usually these are fates of individuals which can be looked at in detail. The human automaton as a total continuous being still seems to belong to science fiction. But it is worth conjuring up the picture as something cognate with an emotional or popular acceptance of deterministic theories. If we allow ourselves to be intimidated by new technological determinisms, based on scientific or metaphysical ideas, we may also weaken our faith in morality, rationality, and ability to discern truth, and this weakness can have political consequences too. Utopian political theories linked to historical determinism flourish when we lose the ordinary fundamental sense of contingency and accident which belongs with the concept of the individual. The structuralist Utopia is perhaps more cheerful than some others, picturing the average man as a quiet codified fellow, perhaps even happy in his simple way, and the artists and thinkers as an elite sporting in a jouissance of linguistic play, occasionally stirring up the average man a little by theatre, television or cinema. Perhaps a shadowy sketch of this state of affairs can already be seen in some of our free societies.

  The structuralist phenomenon can also be seen as a recent sophisticated version of the recurrent anti-rational anti-intellectual reaction of intellectuals against what seems to them an old tired tradition, heavy with unavailing thoughts which have been worked over innumerable times: an exasperated weariness with the old metaphysical world with its continually defended systematic rationality and its ancient superannuated God and its grand self-conscious conceited art. The new anti-metaphysical metaphysic promises to unburden the intellectuals and set them free to play. Man has now ‘come of age’ and is strong enough to get rid of his past. Such a revolution suits the mood at a time of fast and amazing technological change. This same mood of admiration for science and disgust with the inefficiency and frivolity of humanistic ratiocination can affect both intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike. The suspicion of the latter that the former are merely playing about instead of serving society can stabilise a tyranny as well as prompting a revolution. Here the severance of meaning from truth, and language from the world can be seen, not only as philosophically baseless and morally intolerable, but as politically suicidal.

  The fundamental value which is lost, obscured, made not to be, by structuralist theory, is truth, language as truthful, where ‘truthful’ means faithful to, engaging intelligently and responsibly with, a reality which is beyond us.
This is the transcendental network, the border, wherein the interests and passions which unite us to the world are progressively woven into illusion or reality, a continuous working of consciousness. This is to speak of what is closest to us. ‘Truth’ is found by ‘truthful’ endeavour, both words are needed in a just description of language. Truth is learnt, found, in specialised areas of art where the writer (for instance) struggles to make his deep intuitions of the world into artful truthful judgment. This is the truth, terrible, delightful, funny, whose strong lively presence we recognise in great writers and whose absence we feel in the weak, empty, self-regarding fantasy of bad writers. The world is not given to us ‘on a plate’, it is given to us as a creative task. It is impossible to banish morality from this picture. We work, using or failing to use our honesty, our courage, our truthful imagination, at the interpretation of what is present to us, as we of necessity shape it and ‘make something of it’. We help it to be. We work at the meeting point where we deal with a world which is other than ourselves. This transcendental barrier is more like a band than a line. Our ordinary consciousness is a deep continuous working of values, a continuous present and presence of perceptions, intuitions, images, feelings, desires, aversions, attachments. It is a matter of what we ‘see things as’, what we let, or make, ourselves think about, how by innumerable movements, we train our instincts and develop our habits and test our methods of verification. Imagery, metaphor, has its deep roots and origins in this self-being, and an important part of human learning is an ability both to generate and to judge and understand the imagery which helps us to interpret the world.