by Iris Murdoch
One difficulty for interested analytical philosophers is to see Derrida’s problems as problems and so to see the need and nature of his solutions. In the British empiricist tradition there has been no Thomism, no Hegelianism, and generally no urge toward complete (metaphysical or logical) system. Perhaps contingency and muddle were always closer, and a willingness to believe that perhaps A did not have to be either A or not A. Notions of sealed integrity of super-hard God-established concepts were not in charge. Behind Derrida stand the Aristotelian tradition, also Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, also Nietzsche, Freud, Joyce and the poetic aestheticism of the symbolists. A critique of Descartes is now common to both traditions. What must strike one in a comparison and contrast is that Wittgenstein is plainly a philosopher, whereas Derrida is not. Indeed it is difficult to know what to call him, he is sui generis. Their aims and motives are different. Toward the end of his book (in an interesting discussion of Austin) Staten remarks that
‘perhaps what we have in this debate is a conflict between modern Anglo-American clean-mindedness or sincerity and a more archaic moral rigour that insists on reminding us of the residue of darkness in man’s intention. If there is any scepticism in Derrida, it is a moral, not an epistemological scepticism — not a doubt about the possibility of morality but about an idealised picture of sincerity that takes insufficient account of the windings and twistings of fear and desire, weakness and lust, sadism and masochism and the will to power, in the mind of even the most sincere man.’
(3. IV, pp. 126 – 7.)
He goes on shortly to say that his (a particular) criticism of Austin might even seem unfair ‘since Austin was not even trying to do anything like what Derrida wants to do. Derrida has more in common with Montaigne and Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud, than he does with Austin, the straightforward investigator on the scientific model.’ Yes, analytical philosophy is doing something different, less dramatic, less all-embracing, more precise. I have been talking about moral philosophy. It is not easy for philosophy to deal with evil. On today’s scene I think (analytical) neo-Aristotelian, neo-Thomist philosophers such as Philippa Foot and Charles Taylor are finding a way. Nietzsche and Freud, who in their different ways romanticise or sterilise the subject, are perhaps not the best guides. We must beware of coming too close to ‘the game’. Simone Weil kept a cooler and clearer head. The dark side, the deep evil in the soul is not to be played with, Shakespeare did not play with it. Derrida’s position suggests a more tolerant Jungian approach. ‘Archaic moral rigour’ may name something profound, and we may certainly have to turn to the Greeks. But what they show us, and what Shakespeare shows us, is a teaching which is conveyed by the highest art. Derrida is an ‘authority’ who sets up laws of contingency and rules of grammar. He cannot but appear as a sort of moralist, his work carries a strong emotional charge, a whiff of some new-style liberation. He is far more like Nietzsche and Freud than like Wittgenstein. He is a remarkable thinker, a great scholar, a brilliant maverick polymath, a pharmakeus. But if thought of as philosophy, the aesthetic requirement of the doctrine itself tends to exclude sober plodding reflection, slow lucid explanation, simple clear thinking. Heidegger desired a poeticised philosophy. A poeticisation of thought.
I read L’ecriture et la différence, an early book of Derrida, when it was first published in 1967, and was impressed and disturbed by it. I have read, or read large parts of, other books of his since, brilliant difficult books full of learning and thinking and the ironic and playful light of a remarkable intelligence. Any book of his attacks many subjects and may adopt many styles. More lately and wildly, for instance, to be ‘experienced’, Glas, a poetic anthology presenting (and burying) Hegel (etc.) in a mass of literary and philosophical reflections and erudite word play and crazy wit. Psyche, a headlong commentary on everything and everybody. One should not ignore (as some of his critics do) these unique literary marvels. So what is wrong, what is there to worry about, should we not enjoy and profit from his versatile writings, his scholarship, his gorgeous prose, his large literary achievement? I have been relevantly concerned here only with a certain band or aspect of his work: the jargon, the poeticisation of philosophy, the hubris, the ‘transcendental field’, the concepts of archi-écriture and différance. What is disturbing and dangerous is the presentation of his thought as philosophy or as some sort of final metaphysic, and its elevation into a comprehensive literary creed and model of prose style and criticism, constituting an entirely (as it were compulsory) new way of writing and thinking.
10
Notes on Will and Duty
To be indifferent to one’s own misery is not like being. indifferent to that of others. And what about the unavoidable scrutiny of the extensive and various workings of one’s own mind? From many positions life not only ought not to be, but cannot possibly be, looked at as a whole, like a work of art. I shall discuss ‘certainty’ shortly and also argue that the concept of duty, though not constituting the whole of morals, cannot be dispensed with. Schopenhauer chides Kant for his exclusion of experience, the fact that he ‘does not represent the so-called moral law as a fact of consciousness’. He also doubts whether the idea of duty is alone strong enough ‘to put the bridle on the impulse of strong desires, the storm of passion, and the gigantic stature of egoism’. (The Basis of Morality, section 6, ‘On the Basis of Kant’s Ethics’.) Heroic endurance and indifference to worldly goods is not only not the whole of virtue, it cannot be a plausible programme for virtue. Can we say that the man who has this courage and this indifference, who has in these respects conquered egoism (not a mean achievement), automatically or ipso facto cares for other people? (Wittgenstein gave up a fortune, and worked in a hospital during the 1939 — 45 war.) To see the whole picture one may have to stop being neat, not everything therein can necessarily support or imply everything else. Stoical endurance and lack of worldly values do not seem essentially to ‘contain’ a purification of desire or practical concern for the needs of others. It is possible to imagine such concepts or characteristics as mutually independent or even antithetical. And (of course) philosophers (such as Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Heidegger) who celebrate or indicate mysticism, do not thereby qualify as mystics. (Mystics are good. A ‘bad mystic’ is a magician.) Many moral philosophers or preachers will seek for principles of unity, perhaps through some central ‘deeper’ idea (such as love or truth or reason). In ‘ordinary life’ we often tend to be specialists in morals, as if we had a limited amount of moral energy, and could not spread it over the whole field; and ‘specialists’ may often want to accuse of hypocrisy those who pretend to a larger capacity. The motives to endure one’s own misery are not the same as those whereby we ‘endure’ the misery of others: these latter may be various, we may for instance hold that pretended ‘help’ is really interference, pretension, exercise of power. Desire for intense self-scrutiny does not necessarily excite desire to forgo worldly advantage. Here the idea of a list of duties, or a list offered by a religious figure (as in the Sermon on the Mount), might seem attractive, with or without some absolutely clear principle of connection. Certainly many people who recognise duties would be hard put to explain their mutual implication. We may attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s stoicism by an extension or deepening. (Can aesthetes be stoics, can evil men be stoics, is stoicism a virtue or a defence of the self?) Wittgenstein rejects ‘duty’ and ‘experience’ (consciousness), and places the idea of significance (a kind of truthfulness, a closeness to facts, a saying only what can be said) at the point where Kant puts the entry into phenomena of the noumenal beam of duty. Kant allows us an experiential shudder in the apprehension of duty (Achtung, respect for the law), and one may find a similar emotion in the author of the Tractatus, expressed in his aphoristic literary style. Truthfulness eschews florid sentimentality, irresponsible generalisation, development of vague concepts.
Our world cannot properly be said to wax and wane as a whole. Certainly morality must be seen as ‘everywhere’ but
in a fallen and incomplete sense. I would regard the (daily, hourly, minutely) attempted purification of consciousness as the central and fundamental ‘arena’ of morality, but the nature of the world must be thought of as essentially ‘in’ this place too. Truth is central, energising a perpetual unsystematic (that is un-Hegelian) dialectic of subject and object. (Love is truth, truth is love.) My moral energy is a function of how I understand, see, the world. There is continual strife in the deep patterns of desire. There are many ways in which people become better, all kinds of inspirations and illuminations, points of clarity and rays of grace. What is objective here, what is subjective? Concepts, truth, reason, love, may seem to us sometimes as ‘our own’, sometimes as external judges. I do not think philosophy can establish any closely knit system here. As Kant and Schopenhauer point out, a complete ‘solution’ is precluded by our finite nature. The word ‘dialectic’, which may suggest such system, should thus be used with care or avoided. (The concept of ‘intentionality’ is also likely to cause confusion; I think we are better without it.) One can only attempt to place ideas in various magnetic relationships to each other. I have been discussing the concept of consciousness (also experience) as indispensable. But from here one can also see the necessity of the idea of duty as something alien, the outer not the inner, the command whose authority may be recognised as running against the stream of the inner life. I shall discuss shortly the concept of ‘axioms’ as essentially isolated statements of values. This idea (axioms) has a particular importance in politics. Utilitarian arguments may also be thought of as possessing this isolated status. (Like brown, not in the spectrum.)
The concept of the individual as it has been developed and exhibited in the west since Homer requires the idea of consciousness, inwardness, privacy, separate worlds. Our increased awareness of local historical and psychological ‘conditioning’ does not separate us from Locke and Hobbes. Our conception of the, properly, ‘inviolate’ individual is enlivened by our knowledge of how persons can be de-individualised, brutalised out of individuality, by hunger, fear, extreme deprivation or manipulation of concepts. We constantly reflect upon the inner life of others, we are driven to do this. The concept is forced upon us. Such coercion may be a source of enlightenment or of despair. To say that I can know what other people are thinking but not (in the same sense) what I am thinking, makes a philosophical point. But of course our conception of ourselves is, properly, far richer and more detailed, as well as of course more ‘interesting’, than our conception of others! It may also, of course, be more subject to illusion; though our illusions about others are often a function of our illusions about ourselves. The concept of the individual is certainly a political flag; its value in politics derives from and depends upon a more general moral sense of the value and status of privacy and the ‘inner life’. Here we may remind ourselves of the importance of literature, poetry, the novel, as a continued exploration of, and reflection upon, the inner world of appearance and illusion, and the problem (often so crudely simplified in philosophy) of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, which is also the problem of truth. Here the border-line of what is expressible, to others and to ourselves, is very blurred. Plato’s Seventh Letter speaks about this blurred edge. We are often out at this edge, and do not have to be philosophers or ‘writers’ to be there, it is often a good place to be.
A study of the idea of moral change is a useful mode of reflection here. In this context we may go on to reflect upon the part played in our lives by desires and attachments. Here we make sense of the idea that it is our duty to have good desires and remove or weaken bad ones. A good desire includes the urge to see truly. Truthful vision prompts right action. Kant said ‘Never lie.’ We may, with Schopenhauer, wish to allow some exceptions. But Kant’s absolutism emphasises the status of truthfulness, upon which Schopenhauer’s worldly realism casts a shadow. We should not want to tread the road of ‘it doesn’t matter all that much’. A ‘list of virtues’ must establish not only a hierarchy, but also a sense of interpenetration, otherwise it may mislead us. The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding. Being dutiful involves being just, justice must make a pact with mercy. Christ’s ‘list’ spoke of love as fundamental and inhering in all. Plato’s moral forms cohere and interweave, making a koinonia or communion. One point of certainty supports another. ‘If there is no God, how can I be a captain?’ cries a character in Dostoevsky. These mutual coherences of the values we feel sure of, and the things we desire, develop (for good or ill) the thickening density of our lives. Here we may understand the feelings of Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein when they rejected ‘duty’ as a mere arbitrary listing of divinely commanded particular tasks, as opposed to a more general moral sensibility. On the other hand if we go too far toward an intuited unity, an identification of moral concepts with each other in a hazy mass of internal relations, this may lead to a stoical or aesthetic morality of ‘style’, a reduction of morals to some single concept (as in Schopenhauer’s ‘compassion’), a loss (as in Hegelian idealism) of our sense of the independent contingency and diversity of the world. Husserl wanted to analyse the ‘natural standpoint’. Sekida wished to change it, virtually rejecting the idea of any general standpoint, since we are always in motion toward or away from what is more real. It is not difficult to understand the view that our ordinary consciousness is full of illusions. Our ‘grasp’ is superficial. Anxiety, malice, envy, greed, all sorts of selfish preoccupations and instinctive attachments may deform or hide what confronts us. Here we see the ubiquitous nature of moral value. The term ‘transcendence’ is present in a moral sense. At every moment we are ‘attending’ or failing to attend. (‘What, can’t we ever rest?!’ There are different kinds of resting.) Blameless ignorance, misery, affliction can also darken the scene and at such times we may lose ‘our world’ altogether. The terminology of appearance and reality, in quite familiar senses, is in place here. Philosophy too should attempt to use ordinary language and avoid pre-emptive jargon. All right, traditional metaphysics has a certain amount of specialised terminology, but it is not for us to presume to add to it. Meta-languages gain their sense from the language they are explaining; the ‘thing itself’ must be constantly in view. Of course our conversation lives in history and is local and changeful. Yet western philosophy since the Greeks, that continuum of which Derrida announces the end, offers an area of general discourse, a hall of reflection, wherein the difficult conceptions of great thinkers have constantly been broken down, examined, used and passed on into our thinking while at the same time retaining their identities. St Augustine mediated Platonism into Christianity, by innumerable channels the thoughts of Freud have filtered into our minds. Meanwhile, fortunately (so far) the original texts remain on the shelves. Anyone who has taught philosophy is likely to know of the surprise with which one re-reads a text one has been teaching for some time. In philosophy, as in other studies, one must continually try to return to ‘the beginning’, which involves discovering what ‘the beginning’ is. In this persisting light we can still try to proceed without becoming pseudo-scientists.
Simone Weil uses an image of the human situation as being like that of a mountain walker who is aware of what is very distant, what is less distant, what is near, as well as of the uneven ground beneath her feet. Our confused conscious being is both here and elsewhere, living at different levels and in different modes of cognition. We are ‘distracted’ creatures, extended, layered, pulled apart. Our most obvious unifying feature is methodical egoism, the barrier which divides the area of our interests and requirements from the rest of the world. Morality thought of as the achievement of virtue, ‘becoming good’ (anyway becoming better), involves the breaking of that barrier. How can it be done, should it be done? There is no lack of comments including those of Freudians (and to some extent Freud) to the effect that the ego need not and should not allow its structure to be damaged by ‘ideals’. To be an effective moral being you must be an effective being. Morali
ty is best thought of as doing what is right if it is also fairly easy. This may indeed be (roughly) a code which most of us follow. But if we consider how multiform and unpredictable and huge is the ambiguous border-line between subject and object, us and world, and how consciousness is at all times unavoidably active in evaluation and in control and development of desire, we are ‘forced’ to see how a larger picture is required. The felt need for this picture, or field of force, is answered by metaphysics and religion, and by general moral values, our sense of right and wrong. This is not a matter of specialised isolated moments of moral choice, appearing in a continuum of non-moral activity. These movements and responses are occurring all the time. The reality of the moral requirement is proved by the world. Reflection here can suggest how morality is ‘naturally religious’ as well as religion ‘naturally moral’. This would be part of a (in the west) changing concept of religion. We may also see, through reflection on both, how we might and why we should ‘break the barriers of egoism’; how it is that spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality, is the reality of our everyday appearance, is all here, not elsewhere: which is also a fundamental religious view.
Philosophical doctrines which profess neutrality, whether they are professedly analytic (against preaching) or scientific (against value) cannot help, by what they obliterate or what they emphasise, making moral judgments. (Structuralist thinking is full of moral judgments.) Moral philosophers should be frankly and realistically high-minded in the sense of recognising the unique and profound presence and importance of a moral sense. They should be liberal-minded, not cynics, reductivists, relativists, but able to scan a wide vista of human life. Such thinking involves a sensitive empiricism and grasp of detail. For instance (some of Plato’s dialogues are exemplars here) it is necessary to consider with the help of examples what egoism is, whether it is wrong, how it relates to truth, love, freedom. What is happiness, what is ‘true happiness’, why did Mill find he could not do without the concept of higher pleasures? These are not just theoretical exercises in seminars, they indicate the nature of our everyday problems.