Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Seen in this context, Sartre’s treatment of consciousness, of which I spoke earlier, seems very abstract, perfunctory, a priori and non-empirical, although he is good at describing certain carefully selected states. The conditions which he chooses (in La Nausée and L’Etre et le Néant) are offered as cases of inert mauvaise foi, habit-ridden reverie, or at best an appalled fascinated sense of contingency which is a kind of experience of, or preliminary to, freedom, a broken-down descendant of Kant’s Achtung or of Kierkegaard’s Angst. The ‘truly valuable’ in this picture is as it were invisible (as it is in the Tractatus), being for neo-Kantian Sartre the empty substanceless movement of freedom (choice, decision) itself. In this philosophical psychology what is bad is visible and substantial, whereas what is good only ‘shows itself’ in certain willed behavioural movements; and consciousness itself is seemingly set down as morally negative. Kant of course also ‘abandons’ phenomena, including psychological ones; but Sartre’s theory of morality as freedom has no place for Kant’s concept of duty. Response to duty demands an enlightened assessment of the relevant world; and to this ‘seen’ world the colours of morality and value are restored by the discerning look, in a way which enables us to modify Kant’s dualism. The concept itself, of duty, rejected by Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Wittgenstein, thus provides for its own salvation. We understand what a bad texture of consciousness is like, equally we understand what a good one is like, and what sort of changes lead from one to the other. Consider what novelists can do, and how variously and successfully they can do it. I quoted earlier Henry James’s elaborate simile which describes Maggie Verver’s apprehension that all is not well. Of course this is not stream of consciousness. We are not necessarily to think of Maggie as picturing her pagoda in detail. Perhaps she does picture it, perhaps nothing exactly or even roughly like it occurs in her mind at all. We are subject here to the magic of the author. But we know where we are. The reader easily, without even noticing, transcribes the simile into an awareness of an immediately recognisable state of mind. With machinery less elaborate but just as subtle Tolstoy conveys and evaluates conditions of conscious being, the way in which states of mind, for better or worse, colour surroundings. ‘The world of the happy is not the world of the unhappy’; and equally the world, and moment-to-moment experience, of the kindly, loving person is unlike that of the malicious, vengeful person. (Of course we may all of us be such persons at different times.) To continue the colour metaphor, within any life there is general or prevailing colour, and also local colour, and both may be spoken of in terms of states of consciousness which are not reducible to dispositions. The move from (to use general or rough terms) benevolence to envy, or amiability to malice, may be a deep slow growth, or something prompted by a sudden event or thought. Such changes are well-known phenomena. Anna Karenina’s consciousness of Kitty’s family before she falls in love with Vronsky is quite different from what it is afterwards, the children too notice this difference. Pierre sees a different world after he realises that his marriage to Helen was a moral mistake. Levin’s character, his goodness, also his naivety, is portrayed in Tolstoy’s art even in the consciousness of Levin’s dog.

  At the moment towards the end of A la recherche, when Proust’s narrator steps on an uneven paving stone, he experiences an intense joy and sense of certainty which removes all anxiety, all intellectual doubts, all fear of the future, all fear of death. Proust describes this moment as set free from the order of time, an experience of time in a pure state, an enjoyment of the essences of things. This intense perception-memory which the narrator realises he has often experienced before without understanding or profit, prompts the reflections upon illusion and reality, general and particular, the unreality of the self, the nature of art, which enable the narrator to begin writing the book. The revelation in Proust’s story plays its part in the tale, explaining its inception and joining together certain significant experiences of which the reader knows already, and which reach back into the narrator’s childhood. In this context the revelation appears, or may appear, as an aesthetic one, whereby the dead serial moments of ordinary life, with its obsessions and illusions, are contrasted with a vision which sees them as of value as the material of art. Here, even those people one most dearly loved must in the end be seen as having posed for the writer, as for a portrait-painter. Nothing endures save by becoming general, the ‘lesson of idealism’ is that what is material can only find its truth by passing into thought. Redemption or salvation is the discovery of oneself as an artist. Then, when one writes, one seeks scrupulously, and with closest attention, for the truth; whereas, out in life, one destroys oneself for illusions, on se tue pour des mensonges. The narrator here recalls how he never really believed in Albertine’s love, but was ready to destroy his health, his work, his whole life for what he really knew to be a lie. And Swann: ‘j’ai gâché ma vie pour une femme qui n’etait pas mon genre.’

  Proust’s narrator (and we must remember that he is a fictional being talking inside a work of art) speaks of his renewal as something remarkable experienced by an artist. But his revelation may be seen as implicitly carrying a larger meaning, a meaning already offered to the reader in the book (which, in the book, is about to be written) wherein is portrayed (for instance) the contrast between the narrator’s love for his grandmother and his love for Albertine. From here we may allow ourselves to be reminded of Katsuki Sekida’s ‘pure consciousness’, and even compare and contrast his ‘hand touching the cup’ with the narrator’s experience (soon after the paving-stone incident) of hearing a spoon touch a plate. This sound, recalling (as the paving stone does) a previous experience and its associations, prompts another visitation of perception-memory, bringing the confidence, the certainty, the joy, wherein the narrator intuitively grasps his ability to recapture time in art. Proust’s examples concern and illustrate a particular way in which reality is suddenly apprehended in the midst of illusion, an experienced contrast of dead impure time with live pure time, serial time with lived time, which may lead toward a recovery or ‘redemption’ of life through art. His state, or moment, of perception-memory may be seen as like Sekida’s pure consciousness, or Simone Weil’s perception without reverie, but it is also unlike. Proust’s essential illuminations are involuntary, gifts from the gods, not experiences or states which could be attained or prolonged by a (morally, spiritually) disciplined way of living. Proust is here celebrating, as capable of a truthful ‘recovery’ or vision of his own life, the artist in the ordinary sense (an exceptional person), not in the ‘we are all artists’ sense. ‘In the end’, in Proust’s story, the narrator discovers pure time and pure experience, he feels joy and certainty because he has learnt about, indeed experienced, truthfulness, and can now set about recovering his life in the light of truth. But of course, in an important sense, the narrator’s life cannot be recovered, and those, including himself, whom he harmed by an imperfect way of living, remain irrevocably harmed; how much harmed the story ruthlessly reveals, the story which also exhibits true goodness and true love, as well as the mensonges for which the narrator was ready to destroy himself. In writing the book Proust has of course revealed himself (as the narrator will reveal himself), as every great novelist does, as a great moralist as well as a great artist. But the narrator’s final revelation is not, as presented, a general guide or pointer to a good or spiritual way of life, it is about the artist, not about the saint. Nor, of course, is this (artist’s) recovery of time the same as that of a penitent who feels ‘at the end’ that God has forgiven him. We have here to be our own moralists if we want to use Proust’s states of pure consciousness as part of a moral, or moral philosophical, argument. Put it this way, why do we have to wait for accidental inspirational experiences which may, if we are lucky, make us artists? Should we not attempt to turn most of our time from dead (inattentive, obsessed, etc.) time into live time? This is an attempt which can be made, in various manners, as a disciplined way of living. ‘Inspiration’ is always avai
lable, truthful experience is a touchstone, something, in Proust’s words, pareil à une certitude. Such states are of course not guaranteed just by their own intensity or feeling of insight, their status as truth-bearing can also be tested by longer-term examinations and considerations. But we can in general see and appreciate the difference between anxious calculating distracted passing of time when the present is never really inhabited or filled, and present moments which are lived attentively as truth and reality. In selfish obsessional calculation or resentment we are ‘always elsewhere’; and the anxiety and fear and grief which come to us all may be lived, from moment to moment, in a variety of ways as illusion or as reality. Proust contrasts his visionary meaningful experiences with inattentive truthless memory which is like the idle turning of pages in a picture book, when, with the egoistic vanity of a collector, we tell ourselves what a lot of fine things we have seen. J’ai tout de même vu de belles choses dans ma vie. So much of our lives is thus passed and wasted ‘elsewhere’, as with the tourist who does not look at the famous monument, but fiddles with his camera to get a good ‘view’ which he can display later to his neighbours. The disappointment at the longed-for place which we find ourselves unable to take in is then compensated for by the reflection that, well, I can always say I’ve seen it. (For above, see Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Pléiade edition, vol. III, 1954, pp. 866-73, 905-10.)

  We have no difficulty in understanding novelists, and it is natural here to speak of awarenesses, perceivings, experiences, consciousness, and of someone’s ‘world’. One is speaking here of what is categorical, not hypothetical. Maggie Verver, sitting alone in her room, breathing quietly and biting her lip, is to be imagined as, at intervals, having the experiences indicated by the pagoda image, and at some point reflectively remembering the process. Philosophically, one has to do battle against an excessive use of the idea of a ‘disposition’ (a general tendency to think and act in a certain way). Of course any account of virtue or of human frailty must include reference to good and bad dispositions and habits; but these are not concepts to which everything can be or ought to be reduced. A purely hypothetical or dispositional account of the mind of a moral agent omits something essential in a way analogous to the omission of the essential in a phenomenalist analysis of perception. What is omitted is what the novelist talks so much about, and what we all know about when we are not being misled by theories. The temptation to simplify by saying that ‘he has a bad quality, or state, of consciousness’ means ‘he is likely to commit a bad action’, must be resisted. This is important not only on empirical grounds, but because we need the concept of consciousness to understand how morality is cognitive; how there is no ubiquitous gulf fixed between fact and value, intellect and will. Reflection on this concept enables us to display how deeply, subtly and in detail, values, the various qualities and grades between good and bad, ‘seep’ through our moment-to-moment experiences. This argument concerns our ability to see that value, valuing, is not a specialised activity of the will, but an apprehension of the world, an aspect of cognition, which is everywhere. Of course the novelist knows more than we do in ordinary life, he knows the insides of people’s minds to a degree that we usually do not. In an ordinary sense and as part of a philosophical picture we know that we can, or must, ‘read’ (as it were) backwards as well as forwards and out to in as well as in to out. I mean, we often do regard actions as primary, and states of mind as less important, or unimportant, merely inferred entities or hypotheses. We may properly say to someone, ‘Stop brooding, act!’ We see, and suffer or benefit from, people’s actions; their states of mind are often secret and felt to be inaccessible. Yet what is inaccessible? We can seek for truth, we can imagine the past and test our imaginings, and we can do the same about other minds, and about our own. We have various methods of verification. We can examine our own states of mind and test them, we see ‘into’ them, we need not accept them at their face value (do I really intend this act, do I really love this person?), nor are we bound to dismiss them as mere dreamy fancies or drifting rubble. Our ‘innerness’ may be elusive or hard to describe but it is not unimportant or (necessarily) shadowy. Of course these inward happenings are not (in the sense attacked by Wittgenstein) significance-bestowing processes of meaning, or intermediaries, prior to or essential to thinking or speaking. Remembering is not having images; it may or may not be accompanied by them. We can test memory without speculation about mental events. Such (valid) arguments present the strongest form of a philosophical view which may also discourage talk about consciousness or experiential contents.

  In pursuing these reflections one may at times find oneself poised between uttering nonsense and laboriously saying the obvious. Philosophically, the path lies perilously between naive realism and some form of idealism. The mode of description proper to ‘consciousness’ presents evident difficulties. Maggie’s pagoda is clearly a literary device, whereas Tolstoy’s account of Anna’s or Pierre’s or Levin’s consciousness sounds more like a literal description; and yet not quite, for would not ‘literal description’ come out more like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf? But are not these too literary devices? Must one not, to describe here, be a master of metaphor? In an Aristotelian Society symposium to which I also contributed a paper (Thinking and Languages, Aristotelian Society supplementary volume 25, 1951), Professor Gilbert Ryle made a distinction between ‘chronicles’ and ‘histories’. If we consider a period of time during which we have been ‘brooding’ or ‘thinking’ we may attempt a description in the form of a moment-to-moment chronicle of introspectible events, such as images, or words uttered to oneself. Even when one is trying to think carefully and consecutively the ‘inward stream’ may contain, or be interrupted by, chance items, such as perceptions suddenly illuminated by irrelevant significance. Consider the case of the tree root, or the braces of the café patron, in La Nausée. Such intrusions, if at all intense, may, as in Sartre’s novel, cause a kind of disgust, a feeling of senselessness, inability to concentrate, describable as a fear of contingency; but may also (as in Proust) occasion joy, or if for instance they check a revengeful fantasy, provide a valuable relief from egoism. Gabriel Marcel attacked Sartre for finding contingency an occasion for horror rather than for grace. Such cases are not odd or exceptional. The outer world often enters the inward eye with an intensity of significance which punctuates a reflective reverie which does not initially concern it: as when Wittgenstein’s stove becomes ‘the true world among shadows’. These are not unusual experiences or ones especially connected with aesthetic or philosophical reflection; nor need we, to put ‘inwardness’ on the map, run to extreme examples of ‘extension of consciousness’ by drugs. These marvels are happening all the time. What Ryle called by contrast a ‘historical account’ would bring out a direction or a conclusion without reference to experiential details. ‘What are you thinking?’ Answer, ‘Where to go on holiday’, not ‘I am having memory images of Venice.’ Ryle was prepared to admit this distinction, but not to attach any, or more than minimal, importance to the items of the chronicle. The sense was to be drawn away into the history, in accord with a linguistic philosophy which emphasised public rules and activity. After all, we locate a good man by his actions, and when someone says he has ‘decided’, we wait to see what he does. My argument wants to focus attention upon the experiential stream as a cognitive background to activity, without suggesting that it is in any idealist (Hegelian, Husserlian) sense primary, or that it is the only place to which we need to look to assess moral quality.

  Of course we can remind ourselves at intervals that we are, in a sense which perhaps has to be learnt, dealing with pictures. These pictures often do not in any way affect our ordinary activities. Wittgenstein claimed that his did not; he just pointed out philosophical mistakes and offered perspicuous accounts and descriptions. In general, we are not in any immediate way disturbed by metaphysical imagery. A phenomenal table remains just a table. We may be aware that great metaphysical s
ystems ‘change the world’, but the process is slow and, for ordinary purposes, not perceptible. Yet the influence of the ‘pictures’ may at times be more directly perceived. Hegel influenced Marx who influenced innumerable people. Derrida has influenced a generation of literary critics. A behaviourist moral philosophy may also contribute to creating an atmosphere. The image of the transcendental barrier lends itself to various further pictorial adventures. Can we touch it (like Maggie touching the pagoda)? Perhaps this is dangerous — it may certainly be exhilarating. I see this image at work in structuralism where the codified many may be thought of as sunk in a deep ocean while the (aesthetically, intellectually) enlightened few disport themselves upon the surface, rising up into the sunshine while still belonging to the sea. (Like dolphins perhaps.) The touching of the barrier is also admitted by Kant in his celebration of genius and great art. Consider too the place given to poets, especially a poet (Hölderlin), by Heidegger; who actually demands, as the sole form of profound thinking suited to this age, a poeticised philosophy. Heidegger’s prophetic proclamations, and Derrida’s arcane prose, actually damage philosophy by renouncing the requirement of a careful sober lucidity and a quiet truthful clarified reflection which has characterised great philosophical writing since Plato. Pictures, yes (such as Plato used, declaring them to be pictures), but explained, used, related to human life, surrounded by clear plain language. Structuralist (monist, idealist) thinking, by inflating coherence at the expense of correspondence, loses our ordinary everyday conception of truth. ‘Correspondence’ contains the awareness that we are continually confronting something other than ourselves. Some exceptional people may gaze upon uncategorised manifolds and create new meanings, discover fresh categories, reinvent language, donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu and so on. But we all, not only can but have to, experience and deal with a transcendent reality, the resistant otherness of other persons, other things, history, the natural world, the cosmos, and this involves perpetual effort. We are amazing creatures, no wonder Sophocles calls us deinos. Most of this effort is moral effort. This is the sense in which morality (value) is transcendental, concerned with the conditions of experience. We do not have to go as far as genius, but only as far as the category of the existing individual which Kierkegaard asserted against Hegel. Philosophy, if it is to give much-needed help to the human race, indeed if it is to survive, must stay with its austere traditional modes of truth-telling. Heidegger (‘The Anaximander Fragment’, Early Greek Thinking, p. 58): ‘What if Being in its essence needs to use the essence of man? Then thinking must poeticise on the riddle of Being. It brings the dawn of thought into the neighbourhood of what is for thinking.’ This is not the path of philosophy. The words sound stirring and may seem to suggest something religious. But as religion and as philosophy I reject late Heidegger’s personified, historicised, and ultimately fateful and wanton, Being. Sein und Zeit brought about a philosophical revolution. Heidegger’s dismissal of Descartes is less ‘logical’ than that of Wittgenstein, but it is (while being philosophy and not phenomenology) more humanely interesting. Here Heidegger is (though loveless and heroic) a moral philosopher. Later pronouncements suggest more the religiosity of a false prophet.