Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  I have been following a sort of history of the concept of consciousness, as it is indicated or implied in metaphysical systems, and I want here to say something briefly about the aims and influence of Husserl. One purpose of this will be to indicate a contrast between a Husserlian view and another very different view. ‘Phenomenology’ might sound like the name of a ‘philosophy of consciousness’, but its history exhibits the ambiguity of the term. The career of Merleau-Ponty, for instance, may be said to begin in phenomenology and end in structuralism. Wittgenstein wrote in the 1914-16 Notebooks (1.6.15.): ‘The great problem round which everything that I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?’ This is the main problem of traditional metaphysics and is the programme of Husserlian phenomenology and of Derrida’s structuralism (the discovery of ‘a transcendental field of experience’). Husserl’s ambitious project is an attempt to found an ‘eidetic science’, a fundamental theory of essences, to be the basis of all other forms of scientific or philosophical enquiry. Husserl’s theory is about ‘What is happening now’, and in this respect looks like a philosophy of consciousness. The method is Kantian and transcendental, concerned with the conditions of experience, the fundamental formative net or structure of consciousness. Kant however pictured the net or screen at a level of deep generality in terms of basic general categories such as cause and substance and formal intuitions of space and time, and distinguished those from ordinary (boots and shoes, mud and hair) concepts whose operation, philosophically uninteresting, was within experience and not a priori. Kant’s view, which would classify language as empirical (or ‘local’), is a mode of thought which is strictly ‘logical’, or using the word in this sense ‘metaphysical’, in style, framed to be untainted by any degeneration into mere empirical psychology. We may here compare Wittgenstein’s ‘general form of the proposition’, and the logical cleanness of the Tractatus picture. It was Wittgenstein’s aim throughout, also of course in the Investigations, to separate philosophy clearly from psychology. The Kantian ‘synthesis’ which produces the representation or idea, which is the stuff or unit of experience, unifies the (manifold) world in a single grasp or grab which puts together a priori concepts, space and time, and empirical concepts. Kant is concerned with consciousness or experience only in its most general aspects. Husserl’s transcendental philosophy is Kantian but also Cartesian and through this tendency more empirical, allowing a closer approach to psychology. Indeed phenomenology, of which Husserl is said to be the father, may be called a would-be logical kind of psychology. Husserl’s fundamental philosophical unit of experience is something very much less general, something more individual and detailed, than that of Kant, thus facilitating a move to a philosophy of language. Roughly, structuralism (against a background of Herder, Rousseau, Hegel) reaches a philosophy of language (language as being, as transcendent network) through linguistics and phenomenology (including Heidegger). Wittgenstein, disturbed by Russell and influenced by Schopenhauer, went to it straight without metaphysical ontological presuppositions. (See Schopenhauer, WWI, Book I, section 9.)

  According to Husserl, the basic unit of consciousness is the ‘intentional object’. This term expresses the notion that all consciousness points beyond itself, is an indication, a holding or framing, of something beyond: a desire is for something, a fear of something, a puzzlement about something (etc.). Consciousness is a series of psychic acts which have intentional objects. Husserl here follows and transforms Kant’s method of connecting consciousness with logic through thinking of the mind as making judgments which have logical form; Husserl enlarges the kind of judgments or intentional acts whose performance he thinks he can discern. The discerning takes place by a Cartesian move to a philosophical standpoint. The intentional objects, or ideas, can be isolated and identified for purposes of study by a special process of reflection, an epoché, a check or pause, a suspension of judgment, a ‘putting into parenthesis’ or into ‘brackets’, the so-called phenomenological reduction whereby the essence (fundamental structure) of mental activity can be immediately and intuitively grasped as pure phenomenon. (Derrida inherited this use of parenthesis.) This mode of reflection involves the suspension of the movement of thought toward ordinary empirical awareness; it is like the Cartesian move from an unphilosophical awareness of an objective world (the natural standpoint) to a philosophical awareness of the ‘objective awareness’, now grasped as a mental content only, and one about which one has clear immediate self-evident knowledge, pure knowledge, as contrasted with one’s more dubious knowledge of a transcendent reality. ‘Intentional’ (inner, in the mind) objects are thus clearly distinguished from transcendent (outer, in the world) objects, and one of the former may or may not adequately represent one of the latter; the illusory judgment is just as real, when held in suspension for purposes of study, as the veridical judgment. This ‘eidetic science’ is supposed by Husserl to be prior to all other sciences since it analyses mental activity at its most fundamental level in the consciousness itself. Consciousness constitutes all objects and so all knowledge. Looked at in this way there is indeed nothing else but consciousness, it is the only thing that exists in and of itself: a thought to be found also in oriental philosophy but with different theoretical surroundings and implications. It may also be seen by ordinary modes of reflection as something (in a sense) obvious! The meaning and truth of the world is composed, as it were, of the intentional objects which can be found in the pure, clearly seen, consciousness, which the reduction reveals. The existence of these indubitable intermediaries makes language and knowledge possible. Husserl insists that this system is not subjective idealism, nor is it mere psychologism, the two abysses into which it might fall. It is a logical-metaphysical truly transcendental science. Husserlian phenomenology is not idealism even in the Kantian sense, in that the exclusively mental area of ideas which the reflective reduction examines is to be thought of as quite separate from the world of real empirical objects or states of affairs which may or may not be there to correspond to the mental acts. On the other hand, the mental realm is really primary in that it is the source of every sort of concept, without which the external world would not be an object of knowledge, and might just as well not exist at all, like Locke’s ‘substance’ and Kant’s Ding-an-sich. This is what Husserl means when he claims that his eidetic science is prior to all other knowledge, restoring philosophy to its sovereign position as ‘queen of the sciences’. Heidegger, who totally rejected Husserl’s Cartesian approach, nevertheless admits his influence. Whether or not Heidegger is a phenomenologist is an interesting (even important) question. (Gilbert Ryle, in his review of Sein und Zeit in Mind 38, 1929, treats the work as phenomenology.)

  The comparison and contrast with the Tractatus, and also with the Investigations, again comes to mind. ‘Logic is transcendental.‘ Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian method and the idea of an explanatory mental intermediary. In what sense could one examine such an object, what role could it perform? Once one has postulated such a philosophical entity one is confronted with false philosophical problems about its relation to the world. How does language refer to the world? Wittgenstein’s early answer, in accord with what Dr Johnson would say, is that it just does. The accord with the world is affected by fiat in the Tractatus. The ‘propositions of natural science’ at 6. 53 are an instance and image of what (factual) language can say; as contrasted with the (moral) things which can only be shown, not said. Language pictures the world (somehow) and we cannot include in the picture the method of projection by which it does so (by which the picture is made). Language is transcendental, a final network which we cannot creep under. Here Wittgenstein rejects the possibility of any general systematic philosophical account of meaning and thought in terms of a deep psychological structure. In the Investigations a variety of ways in which language deals with the world are examined with minute, not always conclusive, care. ‘How do sentences do it? Don’t you know? For nothing is hidde
n.’ (435.) There are all sorts of methods by which sentences do it, and one can look at these without the use of any large unified theory, or any doubt about the ability of language to refer. Husserl’s ‘eidetic science’ has proved too ambitious a project, even for those whom he influenced. It is, I think, impossible to clarify the idea of an ‘intentional object’, that is, it is not possible to perform the change of standpoint required by the reduction in such a way as to discern and exhibit a coherently connected range of ‘essences’. The flow of consciousness is indeed observable, but cannot be arrested so as to display isolated items as pure phenomena. Descartes’s cogito is a different matter; it is a momentary, though always available, movement which exhibits the alleged contrast between inner certainty and outer doubt. Descartes never suggests that one could, by prolonged and intense introspection, classify the cogitationes in a scientific or logical manner. Both views are vulnerable to Wittgensteinian objections. We cannot be said to have knowledge of what is momentary or purely introspectible; the ‘identification’ of the inner involves a variety of concepts whose meaning is established, and whose use in such a context justified, in the external world remote from the ‘deep’ position taken by the cogito and the phenomenological reduction. Cogito is an illusion; the feeling of certainty provides the plausibility. These objections point the transcendental seeker toward a study of language. After Husserl, phenomenology, as a search for deep or transcendental structure, has taken a variety of paths toward the two errors feared by Husserl, some toward psychologism and at least one (if structuralism may be called linguistic idealism) towards idealism. Merleau-Ponty’s early book The Phenomenology of Perception is filled with, frankly declared, material from experimental psychology: a form of investigation later felt to be unsatisfactory by purists (including Merleau-Ponty himself) who wanted to find more philosophical and conclusive answers to their questions. Derrida’s structuralism, taking fundamental patterns from Saussure, attempts to ‘swallow’ a certain amount of Freudian psychology. ‘Deconstruction’ of literary texts often adopts a style of doctrinaire psychologism, for instance by assuming that a writer’s unconscious motives provide deepest clues to meaning. Derrida’s philosophy, formally stated as a search for transcendental structure, is in general more like a deterministic idealism of language, wherein psychological categories are to receive a more basic analysis. The authoritarian aspiration to a unique systematic truth distorts what could be valuable in a more humble hermeneutic; and promotes (at its worst) the haze of pseudo-scientific jargon in which gross divergences from common-sense are announced without any philosophical justification. Wittgenstein, discussing meaning without the postulation of quasi-psychological intermediaries, assumes that language refers to the world, and (in the Investigations) that unsystematic philosophical things can be said about how this happens.

  These problems about ‘deep structure’ may prompt an outsider (including the outsider who dwells inside every philosopher) to ask whether there is any deep structure. Of course we recognise that our very small number of philosophical geniuses have suggested structures which have dominated and guided centuries of thought not only inside philosophy but in science, in theology, in morality, and in the most general sorts of world-view held by unreflective people. Philosophy, it may be said, collects and formalises new ideas which, at various times, for various often mysterious reasons, are hanging about in the air, sensed by thinkers of all kinds. This ‘universal’ role of philosophy has led to it being thought of as a sovereign discipline. Since Hegel this mystery too, the Zeitgeist, has been a subject for metaphysical theorising. But after it all, and in spite of the undoubted influence of philosophical pictures, does anybody really believe, in any close or even quasi-literal sense, in Kant’s system or Hegel’s system? Is Kant’s ‘machinery’ supposed, even by Kantians, to be really there ‘in the mind’, what would it be like to believe this? Do we think that all these operations are taking place now? This may be considered a very naive question which, if pressed, might seem like an attempt to dismiss philosophy altogether; as philosophy is in fact, for just such considerations, dismissed by many people who know only a little about it. Of course the ‘outsider’ receives various sophisticated answers, of which one may be derived from Plato who, in the midst of hard detailed discussion and the use of innumerable examples, presents fundamental ideas metaphysically in the form of myth. You have to work hard to understand, and then throw away the ladder. (Tractatus 6. 54.) The work must be understood in relation to a conclusion which is not to be thought of as ‘containing’ it. Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. Doubtless learning anything difficult may be said to involve what may be called intuition; and the idea will be less than enlightening unless one can suggest where it is and what it does. Plato’s myths ‘cover’ and (often) clarify intuitive leaps which in other philosophers are also required but not (for better or worse) similarly adorned. The term ‘intuition’, often opposed to ‘reason’, is perhaps a dangerous one to use. It may be said that an ‘intuitive leap’ must be either a wild guess or a piece of unusually fast reasoning! What I mean to indicate here is that what is ‘deep’ in philosophy is not something literal or quasi-factual or quasi-scientific. A careful explicit use of metaphor, often instinctive, is in place. This may seem to leave the final utterance open to a degree of (carefully situated) ambiguity: which may in itself be a philosophical position. Formal philosophy can come only so far, and after that can only point; Plato’s Seventh Letter suggests something like this. This is not mysticism but a recognition of a difficulty. Philosophers who feel able to dispel all ambiguity also have to explain that a philosophical schema is not like a literal account of the functioning of an engine, but is a special method of explanation, not easy to understand, but having its own traditional standards of clarification and truthfulness. Discussions and arguments proceeding from here are also philosophy, and philosophers, in the British and American empiricist school for example, have been much concerned with them. The continual demand for what has been called the ‘cash value’ of abstract philosophical statements represents this very proper unease. This can also go too far in the direction of literalism, as when difficult concepts which cannot easily be explained in simple terms are classified as ‘emotive’ or dismissed as meaningless. In general, empiricism is one essential aspect of good philosophy, just as utilitarianism is one essential aspect of good moral philosophy. It represents what must not be ignored. It remembers the contingent. There is also, in the down-to-earth or anti-metaphysical style, the attitude, sometimes expressed by Wittgenstein, that the philosopher has no positive role, but is to sit at home until particular problems are brought to his attention. (See ‘the right method of philosophy’, Tractatus 6. 53.) If Wittgenstein was preaching this, he certainly did not practise it, and it would be a difficult programme for a gifted philosophical thinker to carry out. Well, is there, discoverable by philosophy, deep structure, and if we assume (as of course we may not) that (somehow) there is or must be, what mode of philosophical speech can deal with it? Is it, initially, something psychological, or physical, or moral, which philosophy may comment upon, and set out in a formal manner in philosophy of mind, or philosophy of science, or moral philosophy, or philosophy of religion?

  I hope in what follows to ‘talk around’ some of these questions. Such ‘talking’ may constitute or indicate answers. If we see why a certain kind of explanation must fail this will help us to see what to do next. Husserlian phenomenology and some of its descendants or (in similar style) rivals seem to me to constitute a philosophical dead end, because the chosen method of description or analysis of consciousness is too abstract, too rigid, inappropriately specialised, is at the wrong level, misses the nature of what it is attempting to explain. The detailed mobility of consciousness, its polymorphous complexity and the inherence in it of constant evaluation, is lost. Such theorising fails because it aims at a kind of scientific status, mixes philosophy with over-simplified p
sychology, or attempts to offer a ‘neutral’ analysis which ignores morality (value) or treats it as a small special subject; whereas the inherence of evaluation, of moral atmosphere, pressure, concepts, presuppositions, in consciousness, constitutes the main problem and its importance. The charm of Hegel is that he accepted this aspect of consciousness as fundamental. At the other end of the spectrum those who share Husserl’s approach will be saying: but if morality is to be put into an account of mind we shall have nothing but confusion. States of mind are too mixed and complex, subject to various modes of continuity, and coloured by presupposition and evaluation for classification in terms of desires, beliefs, etc., to be useful. Hegel observes this in the quotation given earlier from the Phenomenology, where he speaks of mental contents so sorted as constituting a ragbag. Of course the mind is like a ragbag, full of amazing incoherent oddments. This must be set as part of the philosophical problem of finding ways of talking about fundamental matters. Hegel so sets it, but in the context of a solution which obliterates the picture of individual people in an accidental world.