by Iris Murdoch
All this may sound like an achievement of ‘the aesthetic’. The ambiguity of the aesthetic sensibility is a puzzle for moral philosophers, and indeed for moral agents. Not all art is readily seen to be spiritual or truth-bearing, or concerned with details of the world in either Zen or Italian Renaissance senses. Art cannot and should not be so defined or confined. But in this context, and talking of ‘consciousness’, one may use an argument or example from art. A contemplative observation of contingent ‘trivial’ detail (insects, leaves, shapes of screwed-up paper, looks and shadows of anything, expressions of faces) is a prevalent and usually, at least in a minimal sense, ‘unselfing’ activity of consciousness. This might also be called an argument from perception. It ‘proves’, as against generalising and reductionist philosophical or psychological theories, that individual consciousness or awareness can be spoken of in theoretical discussions of morality. It is a place where the moral and the aesthetic join. It marks a path through the aesthetic. This is a path which neo-Marxists too have taken in the direction of a philosophy of the individual. Theodor Adorno’s assertion, against vulgar Marxism and against Husserl and against Hegel, of the concept of individual experience is framed in terms not unlike those of Sekida, and implies an idea of truth which arises from, but passes beyond, aesthetic experience. He attacked Kierkegaard for disparaging ‘the aesthetic’, and regarded its rescue as politically necessary. I shall return to Adorno in later discussions of politics.
I want now to quote some passages from Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1902 — 1926. Here Rilke describes looking at some pictures by Cezanne with a friend (Mathilde Vollmoeller):
‘Trained and using her eye wholly as a painter [she] said: “Like a dog he sat in front of it and simply looked, without any nervousness or irrelevant speculation.” And she said something else very good in connection with his technique (which you can see from an unfinished picture). “Here”, she said, pointing to the spot, “he knew what he wanted and said it (part of an apple); but there it is still open, because he didn’t yet know. He only did what he knew, nothing else.” ’
And about a self-portrait of Cezanne, Rilke speaks of
‘an animal attentiveness which maintains a continuing, objective vigilance in the unwinking eyes. And how great and incorruptible this objectivity of his gaze was, is confirmed in an almost touching manner by the circumstance that, without analysing or in the remotest degree regarding his expression from a superior standpoint, he made a replica of himself with so much humble objectiveness, with the credulity and extrinsic interest and attention of a dog which sees itself in a mirror and thinks: there is another dog.’
Rilke speaks of how much, in doing his own work, he has learnt from Cézanne:
‘I am on the road to becoming a worker... I was with his pictures again today; it is extraordinary what an environment they create about themselves. Without studying any single one, and standing between the two great halls, you can feel their presence gathering into a colossal reality. It is as if these colours took away all your indecisions for ever and ever. The good conscience of these reds, these blues – their simple truthfulness teaches you; and if you place yourself among them as receptively as you can they seem to be doing something for you. Also you notice, better and better each time, how necessary it was to get beyond even love; it comes naturally to you to love each one of these things if you have made them yourself; but if you show it, you make them less well; you judge them instead of saying them. You cease being impartial; and love, the best thing of all, remains outside your work, does not enter into it, is left over unresolved beside it: this is how the sentimentalist school of painting came into being (which is no better than the realist school). They painted “I love this” instead of painting “Here it is”. In the latter case everybody must look carefully to see whether I loved it or not. It is not shown at all, and many people would even assert that there was no mention of love in it. So utterly has it been consumed without residue in the act of making. This consuming of love in anonymous work, which gives rise to such pure things, probably no one has succeeded in doing so completely as old Cezanne.’
(pp. 150, 163, 151 – 2.)
These remarks (all to Clara Rilke) exhibit, in a way which we may understand if we are acquainted with any art or craft, what kind of achievement ‘pure cognition’ or ‘perception without reverie’ might be: to do with ‘animal attentiveness’, ‘good conscience’, ‘only doing what you know’, ‘simple truthfulness’, the ‘consuming of love in anonymous work’. Love becomes invisible (Cordelia), its activity and its being are inward. ‘A colossal reality’ which ‘removes indecisions’. Though here we must also quote another remark of Rilke in the same context: ‘Ah, we ought to work — that’s all we can do, in everything else we are tenth-rate.’ The words of an artist. I do not think that Simone Weil would feel that we had to, or ought to, resign ourselves to being tenth-rate ! (As if the artist were excused from morals.)
Simone Weil (Notebooks, pp. 395, 406) on Zen: ‘The primitive Zen method seems to consist of a gratuitous search of such intensity that it takes the place of all attachments. But, because it is gratuitous, it cannot become an object of attachment except in so far as it is actively pursued, and the activity involved in this fruitless search becomes exhausted. When exhaustion point has been almost reached, some shock or other brings about detachment.’ ‘The idea behind Zen Buddhism : to perceive purely, without any admixture of reverie (my idea when I was seventeen).’ The imageless austerity of Zen is impressive and attractive. It represents to us ‘the real thing’, what it is like to be stripped of the ego, and how difficult this is. (Plato’s distance from the sun.) Simone Weil felt a natural affinity with this ‘extremism’ which indeed she practised in her own life. She had studied Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. She at the same time loved Plato and the mystical Christ. Relentless asceticism may be suspect simply because we ‘do not know what is going on’. This indeed may never be known, even by the ascetic himself. (God only knows.) In religious houses, doubts constantly return: is it a spiritual dark night or is it just egoistic despair? Many dedicated self-denying recluses return to the world, or are in constant intermittent touch with the world, tending some few or many who come to them for spiritual help. (Such people have their own temptations, it must be wonderful to be treated as godlike.) In fact what we sinners usually want is love, to be in touch with pure just loving judgment. (Like God.) The secluded disciplined religious may provide this, or may provide some substitute, or may be wrapped in private egoism, or else simply mad. And even if mad, who can tell, spirit itself may seem, or be, mad. (Father Ferapont in The Brothers Karamazov.) Zen has become known and practised in the west for many reasons, for its spiritual aids of course, for its severity, for its bizarre methods, for its religious godlessness and imagelessness and apparent lack of ecstasy and for not being a philosophy. Not everyone approves of Zen. Arthur Koestler (in his book Bricks for Babel) connected it with Japanese militarism (Bushido). Traditional Zen stories involve senseless jokes, which may be given as koans, and even physical brutality. A koan: an arbitrary thing offered to concentration. (The most famous koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping?) ‘The search for the meaning of the koan results in a “dark night” which is followed by illumination.’ (Simone Weil, Notebooks, p. 396.) The Zen ‘attack on reason’ occurs within a religious discipline. In fact there is an air almost of cool rationality in the mounting of the Zen method. The question recurs, can such religious practice make people better? Certainly it may make them more calm, more ‘collected’, less given to egoistic passions, in many ways more ‘unselfish’. But when you are back again with rivers and mountains are you more able to understand and care for other people? What about love as it is understood by Plato and in Christianity ? Well, again, how can one say? What Christians call love may on closer inspection appear to be shot with egoisms and delusions. The figure of Christ means love, but this meaning is regularly degraded by its users. Perhaps Scho
penhauer followed a Buddhist path in making compassion, not love, the prime virtue. Here it may seem, in no idle way, a matter of concepts. But equally, ascetic disciplines cannot easily be judged from the outside. Zen may seem cold; yet Zen art lovingly portrays the tiny things of the world, the details, blithely existing without intelligibility; this too is moral training. Southern Buddhism makes a more liberal use of spiritual images and most evidently the ideal of respect, love, for all created beings. A ‘patriarch from the east’ comes to us in the form of the Dalai Lama, eastern religion may be becoming more visible and comprehensible. Christianity has of course its own styles of iconoclasm, and its own ecstasies. Many people leave their churches because reason forbids belief, not only in God, but in saints, visions, revelations, mystical states and so on. Buddhism and Hinduism have avoided the awkward unique figure of the Judaeo-Christian God as Individual Person. Roughly, if there are many gods or icons or godlike beings (the ‘polytheism’ shuddered at by the west) it may be easier to perceive, or come to perceive, these as sources of spiritual energy, and not as literal-historical supernatural people. Perhaps the deep nature of religion is (after all, and as it may seem now) better understood in the east where it is (if not destroyed by dictators) less vulnerable. There, I suspect, the difference between the sophisticated and the unsophisticated believer is less sharp, not because the sophisticated believer is idolatrous, but because the unsophisticated believer has a more multiform, though not less sincere and passionate, relation to the spiritual. Such speculations look no doubt toward the future; and of course nothing here belittles our essential light-giving truth-seeking western reason (or Reason), or ignores the horrors of religious intolerance and mutual hate exhibited not only (for instance) in India, but in many parts of our own civilised scenery. What will the future of religion be like on this planet, will we go on attempting to overcome the ego, will we even care about it? Can there still, now, be avatars, great teachers pure of heart in whose truth we can believe? I think there are such people, we are unlikely to meet them, but such presences can distribute light, they can prove something: even, in our more closely knitted planet, have influence. Profound change is the reward or privilege of few of us. We must be content with our local intuitions of what is good; Kant would say we require nothing more! On the other hand the concept of the holy must not be lost.
What is important is that we now take in conceptions of religion without God, and of meditation as religious exercise. There is, just as there used (with the old God) to be, a place of wisdom and calm to which we can remove ourselves. We can make our own rites and images, we can preserve the concept of holiness. The veil of Maya is not a single mysterious screen which can suddenly be whisked away by magic. We need the Platonic picture here. We are moving through a continuum within which we are aware of truth and falsehood, illusion and reality, good and evil. We are continuously striving and learning, discovering and discarding images. Here we are not forced to choose between a ‘religious life’ and a ‘secular life’, or between being a ‘goodie’ and being a cheerful egoist! The whole matter is far more complex and more detailed. Our business is with the continual activity of our own minds and souls and with our own possibilities of being truthful and good. Incidentally, and philosophically, we may see here the necessity of the concept of consciousness.
Plato uses an image of a philosophical problem as being like a hunted animal, carefully cornered in a thicket which on approach turns out to be empty. The idea of quality of consciousness seems an unavoidable one, but how is it to be handled? The ubiquity of value demands a link between consciousness and cognition. A good quality of consciousness involves a continual discrimination between truth and falsehood. This is something we may become better or worse at; it is, involving the formation of habit, the background of virtuous action. ‘Pure cognition’, picked up here from Sekida’s terminology as used by him in an attack on Husserl, must not of course be understood as indicating some improved Husserlian method whereby ‘essences’ could after all, with less difficulty, be surveyed. There are no such essences. It is rather to be thought of (and this is its point) as a penetration toward the true, real, aspects of the ordinary world. I shall not retain the phrase ‘pure cognition’ in discussions which follow as it is too ‘artful’ and open to misunderstanding. It is better to use simpler terms. Rilke’s words give us, in the context of art, an idea of what ‘pure cognition’, as something both pleasing and edifying, might mean, which we can use analogously in other moral situations. Perception unclouded by base and irrelevant thoughts. I want to say that the emergence of awareness, perception, judgment, knowledge, in consciousness is a process in which value (moral colour) is inherent. Both the necessity and the difficulty of discussing quality of consciousness was grasped, and in his awkward (valuable) frankness exhibited, by Schopenhauer.
‘The higher the consciousness has risen the more distinct and connected are the thoughts, the clearer the perceptions, the more intense the emotions. Through it everything gains more depth: emotion, sadness, joy and sorrow. Commonplace blockheads are not even capable of real joy: they live on in dull insensibility. While to one man his consciousness only presents his own existence, together with the motives which must be apprehended for the purpose of sustaining and enlivening it in a bare comprehension of the external world, it is to another a camera obscura in which the macrocosm itself is exhibited.’
(WWI, Supplement to Book II, ch. xxii.)
Schopenhauer is speaking in general terms about a gradation of intellectual and aesthetic awareness, to which he gives a Platonic spiritual sense. His language is a trifle blunt; we are all blockheads in some respects, and it is not easy to judge the sensibility of others. I do not care, either, for the camera obscura image, which suggests the ‘mirror’ rightly rejected by Sekida, and pictures the mind as a space separated from the world and with a different light. But Schopenhauer’s imagery is casual here and should not be taken in a systematic metaphysical sense. He is often better understood as a (sometimes blundering) empiricist with a large metaphysical erudition and a religious vision who dashes at problems again and again trying doggedly to illuminate them in ordinary terminology. One of his merits is that he is prepared to exhibit his puzzlement and to ramble. Wittgenstein accuses Schopenhauer of evading what is ‘deep’. Schopenhauer may thus ‘give up’, but he recognises his obstacle, rushes off at a tangent, tries to wander round it, talks, even chats, about it, and can instruct us in this way too. (An insuperable difficulty may or may not be a sun, but it gives some light.)
If it is evident that our stream of awareness is a bearer of moral judgment, and if we do not think that morality is an illusion, then this outlaws certain kinds of theories. There are many ways of ‘picturing’ consciousness, of which Rilke’s and Sekida’s are examples. Many philosophers, including Berkeley and Hume and many twentieth-century empiricists and existentialists, have been impressed by the elusive, fragmentary or messy nature of the so-called stream. Schopenhauer admits elsewhere, ‘In consequence of the inevitably distracted and fragmentary nature of all our thinking ... and the mingling of ideas of different kinds thereby introduced, to which even the noblest human minds are subject, we really have only half a consciousness with which to grope about in the labyrinth of our life.’ (WWI, Supplement to Book I, ch. xv; Schopenhauer’s italics.) Schopenhauer makes the point more precisely, and in a way which sounds for us a more modern note, anticipating Wittgenstein and Derrida, as follows:
‘Speech, as an object of outer experience, is obviously nothing more than a very complete telegraph which communicates arbitrary signs with the greatest rapidity and the finest distinctions of difference. [My italics.] But what do these signs mean? How are they interpreted? When someone speaks do we at once translate words into pictures of the fancy, which instantaneously flash upon us, arrange and link themselves together, and assume form and colour according to the words that are poured forth and their grammatical inflections? What a tumult there would be in our
brains while we listened to a speech, or to the reading of a book. But what actually happens is not this at all. The meaning of a speech is, as a rule, immediately grasped, accurately and distinctly taken in, without the imagination being brought into play. It is reason which speaks to reason, keeping within its own province.’
(WWI, Book I, ch. i, section 9. See on this topic also On the
Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, section 28.)
In speaking of imagination and reason Schopenhauer is using Kantian terminology. We see here however how forward-looking this great empiricist is, how amid his metaphysics he keeps the empirical temper and pauses to look carefully at details; his omnivorous industry reveals a more various world than that usually on display in a book of philosophy. He shows his width of vision and his grasp of the future not least in his philosophical discovery of Buddhism and Hinduism. Western ‘demythologising’ theology, seeking a less literal reading of scripture and a more mystical conception of spirituality, might even be ready to profit from a marriage of eastern insights with the Platonism which St Augustine introduced into Christianity. Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, in his official account of it, is a ruthless thoughtless force; but he also unofficially manifests a sense of our caring participation in a unity of nature, which is more true to his understanding of oriental wisdom. The Timaeus suggests that man saves or cherishes creation by lending a consciousness to nature, and these or similar ideas (noted by Schopenhauer) are in St Augustine. (Augustine, De Civitate Dei xi, 28, Schopenhauer, WWI, Book II, section 24.) Freud’s paper on ‘Resistances to Psychoanalysis’ (Collected Papers V) salutes Schopenhauer for proclaiming ‘the incomparable significance of sexual life’. Freud goes on to say, ‘What psychoanalysis called sexuality was by no means identical with the impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable sensation in the genitals; it had far more resemblance to the all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato’s Symposium .’ Well, Schopenhauer failed to appreciate Plato’s Eros, and his Will to Live was concerned with sex as ensuring the continuation of the species, and in that sense ‘all-inclusive and all-preserving’. (‘The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes’, Supplement to Book IV, ch. xliv.) Certainly the Will has nothing to do with superficial romance and may in this sense count as Freudian. Schopenhauer, as mentioned earlier, allowed a certain escape from the bondage of the Will through contemplation of art. We may also find, in his ‘unofficial’ doctrine, a ‘grace’ or liberation afforded by response to the natural world including kindness to animals. Here, in a concern for animals, absent from Plato’s outlook and (as Schopenhauer observes) from Kant’s, we can see a release or redemption in a new kind of recognition of our unity with nature.