by Iris Murdoch
I return (briefly) to Schopenhauer as an example of empiricist know-all, confused metaphysician, and simple-hearted moralist. (I have refrained from commenting on his views about women, expressed in Studies in Pessimism! It should be kept in mind that he was probably expressing opinions held at that time by a majority of men. And that time is still not far away.) Schopenhauer’s ebullient fiddling with his concepts provides us with the elements of a partly recognisable picture of our world. It is as if he had all the pieces but could not modify them suitably in relation to each other. He dodges between metaphysics and common-sense. He is a cheerful pessimist and not a cynic. (Kierkegaard’s remarks about him are apt.) In a passage where he compares and contrasts Kant’s Thing-in-itself and Plato’s Idea, he remarks on ‘the remarkable diversity of the individuality of their authors’, and says that ‘they are the best commentary on each other, for they are like two entirely different roads that conduct us to the same goal’. (WWI, Book III, ‘The Platonic Idea: the Object of Art’.) I like the notion of ‘the best commentary’: also ‘Western philosophy is a dialogue between Plato and Kant’. I see the deepest aspects of moral philosophy as contained in this dialogue. However to attribute ‘the same goal’ is to fasten on one aspect only of their thoughts. Schopenhauer puts it as follows, ‘that both explain the visible world as a manifestation, which in itself is nothing, and which only has meaning and a borrowed reality through that which expresses itself in it (in one case the Thing-in-itself, in the other the Idea)’. This way of putting it may sound like some understanding of eastern philosophy, and may seem to ignore the sense in which both philosophers are empiricists; but Schopenhauer is aware of how the difference between appearance and reality has to be sought piecemeal in this ‘visible world’ which is thereby not abolished but revealed. The ‘veil of Maya’ can (should) also be understood in this way. One may certainly say that both Plato and Kant envisage some deeper reality which lies behind ordinary superficial appearances. This is not just a metaphysical or religious dictum. That our awareness in all its variety, of our daily ‘world’ is normally hasty and perfunctory, and may be deepened, revealing more truth and reality, is on reflection something obvious. However, Kant in his role as modern scientific man, attributes to our rationality a noumenal, not a phenomenal, role, whereas Plato unites intellect and moral will; and, as moral philosophers, Kant sees the active principle as cool reason, Plato as rational virtuous passion (Eros). Schopenhauer is usually more concerned to find his own visions in great philosophers rather than to expound theirs, and later in the same section interrupts a discussion about whether and how Plato fails to distinguish between Ideas and concepts by declaring, ‘We leave this question alone and go on our way, glad when we come upon traces of any great and noble mind, yet not following his footsteps but our own aim.’ This is of course something which any philosopher must say at times, and should say explicitly.
Neither Kant nor Plato would care for Schopenhauer’s cosmic will which seems to leave no place for the human individual and the absolutes of morality. The energy of Plato’s Eros moves between good and evil. However the idea of the unity of all being in a cosmic flux which transcends individuality (as offered also in some accounts of modern physics) may imply and include a ‘natural’ capacity to have sympathy and empathy with the whole of creation, an idea shared with Buddhism and Hinduism. The transcended individual may of course be seen as the now selfless and enlightened individual. ‘God is everywhere’ in Christianity too. Plato who does not pay much attention to plants and animals (Socrates notices a tree in the Phaedrus, but prefers the city) says however in the Timaeus that man should attempt to perfect the created world, working thereby on behalf of all aspirations towards consciousness of all created beings. Our natural (since we are part of it) awareness of and sympathy with the rest of being, our reverence thereby for all life, may be said to provide us, in Schopenhauer’s general picture, with another way to escape from determinism. Our attention is continually caught by the details of our surroundings, we can be touched and surprised into an ability to change, to move ‘out of ourselves’, by all sorts of attentions to other things and people, instinctive overcomings of the barrier between self and world. Our ability and tendency, continually in all sorts of ways, to do this, is an important part of Schopenhauer’s contention that compassion, not Kantian rational law, is the basis of morality. He gives numerous examples, of which one, already mentioned, is tenderness to animals. As I said earlier, Schopenhauer is I think unique among notable philosophers in saying, not just coolly, but with feeling, that cruelty to animals is wrong, and any training that includes it is bad training. He chides Kant for ignoring the huge perceptible world, the innumerable individual things, of innumerable kinds, which crave for our attention and (as also indicated in the Timaeus) our protection. (Modern ‘green’ politics, ecology, care for wild life, is a welcome extension of utilitarianism in the direction of everything.) Schopenhauer, who cannot see the point and essential importance of the idea of duty, gives of course an unfair rendering of Kant’s imperative. He is right however to indicate the multiform workings of compassion. In The Basis of Morality (section 19, ‘The Foundation of Ethics’) he concludes that ‘boundless compassion for all living beings is the firmest and surest guarantee of pure moral conduct’, and that the genuineness of this moral incentive is ‘further confirmed by the fact that the animals are also taken under its protection’. (His italics.) Schopenhauer here exhibits how argument in moral philosophy moves to and fro between abstract principles and immediate moral instincts. Evident sympathy with animals can ‘confirm’ a general rule. He remarks, in praising compassion, that it is ‘the basis of loving-kindness even more obviously than justice’. This is not so clear. Duty and justice must not be eclipsed. The cause of the liberation of women has depended largely upon these concepts; sometimes compassion only arrives later.
‘Will’, ‘the Will’, can be a confusing concept, especially in its grandiose uses, as by Kant, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein. It can be a term which, seeming to deal with or explain a large matter, halts reflection at a crucial point. It may be better, as I suggested earlier, to restrict the term will, as ‘willing’ or ‘exercise of will’, to cases where there is an immediate straining, for instance occasioned by a perceived duty or principle, against a large part of preformed consciousness. What moves us – our motives, our desires, our reasoning – emerges from a constantly changing complex; moral change is the change of that complex, for better or worse. Herein intellectual experiences, states of reflective viewing of the world, are continually moving in relation to more affective or instinctive levels of thought and feeling. Experience, awareness, consciousness, these words emphasise the existence of the thinking, planning, remembering, acting moral being as a mobile creature living in the present. Such, as it might seem here, obscure and complicated pictures are, we should remind ourselves, frequently and convincingly described by great novelists. St Augustine too, using a great many real-life examples, pictures will as a blend of intellect and feeling. (Plenty of experiential volume.) The problem of the freedom of the will must be thought of as lying inside such a picture. Freedom (in this sense) is freedom from bad habit and bad desire, and is brought about in all sorts of ways by impulses of love, rational reflection, new scenery, conscious and deliberate formation of new attachments and so on. There are good modes of attention and good objects of attention. ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.’ (St Paul, Philippians 4. 8.) Any look at the contingency of our strange and interesting world, its oddity, its surprisingness, its jumble or its neatness can provide such objects and occasions. These ‘things’ which are just and good assist our attention when we try to make just and compassionate judgments of others or to judge and correct ourselves. Faced with difficult problems or terrible decisions we may feel th
e need, not so much of a sudden straining of unpractised will-power, but of a calm vision, a relaxed understanding, something that comes from a deep level. This darkness must be stirred and fed, as the deep mind of the artist is fed intuitively by his experience. There is a ‘moral unconscious’. This is how morality leads naturally into mysticism and has a natural bond with religion. (By religion I mean a religious attitude and form of life, not a literalistic adherence to a particular dogma.) There can no doubt be a mysticism of the extreme ascetic. But there is also a natural way of mysticism, as indicated by St Paul, which involves a deepened and purified apprehension of our surroundings. The truth-seeking mind is magnetised by an independent transcendent multiform reality. Unselfish attention breaks the barrier of egoism. Living in the present: I really see the face of my friend, the playing dog, Piero’s picture. These visual cases also have a metaphorical force. We instinctively dodge in and out of metaphor all the time, and in this sense too are fed or damaged spiritually by what we attend to. Simone Weil uses the image of becoming empty so as to be filled with the truth. She speaks of the mountain walker who sees many things besides the mountain top. Eckhart speaks of emptying the soul so that it may fill with God. A moral position much higher than our own may only be imagined as deprivation. The idea of negation (void) or surrender of selfish will is to be understood together with the idea of purified desire as purified cognition.
Someone may say that this line of thought could degenerate into a relaxed surrender to an aesthetic attitude, an ethic of ‘beautiful thoughts’; and theories which thus ‘swallow’ or transform the concept of will may run this risk, even though they may also seem more empirical and realistic. After all, it may be said, the idea of plain stark duty, so contemptuously rejected by Schopenhauer, and following him by Wittgenstein, as a mere theological survival, is also a widely recognised and surely rightly prized part of the everyday moral life. Certainly the idea of duty must not be analysed or ‘reduced’ away, though it must also be seen in a wider landscape. It would be misleading to suggest that morality could be reduced to a list, perhaps a short list, of duties. The concept of duty is sui generis, its separateness is an aspect of its efficacy. It is not the whole of morals, but is an essential rigidly enduring part. Moral rules appear (should appear) early in life when morality itself is being taught. Ideally, these rules may be surrounded by some degree of explanation. These early conversations are very important. Behind the slow natural working of education and example the idea of certain absolute requirements should remain visible. Duty is not to be absorbed into, or dissolved in, the vast complexities of moral feeling and sensibility. Love may carry us on, natural generosity, instinctive compassion, as Schopenhauer thought. But the concept of duty as moral rules of a certain degree of generality should stay in place. Do not lie, do not steal, be helpful, be kind. Fortunate children imbibe such ideas in a scene which promotes honesty and kindness and mutual love. Truth is taught in an atmosphere of truthfulness. Primary duties may seem later to find their places in a general development of moral texture, while remaining on call as discrete individual commands. Particular moral taboos may remain intact in an alien environment, certain inhibitions, even thought of as ‘irrational’, may remain valuable: such as, in a life of reckless selfishness, the impossibility of stealing. The nearness of duties is a persistent form of education. Duty can appear when moral instinct and habit fail, when we lack any clarifying mode of reflection, and seek for a rule felt as external. Most often perhaps we become aware of duty when it collides head-on with inclination. (A place for the concept of will-power.) Anyone may suddenly find himself, in an unforeseen situation, confronted in his stream of consciousness by the notice DON’T DO IT. (Socrates’s daemon told him only what not to do.) Duties, because of their use as a bridle placed on egoism (Schopenhauer thought an ineffective one), may seem more often to carry a sign of negation. ‘Don’t lie’ is a clearer command than ‘be truthful’. Be kind, be generous — these requirements seem a vaguer part of our lives, unclear in their limits. But the idea of duty must often in these vague areas be cherished and especially illumined — as when we are ‘forced’ to exhibit ‘loving kindness’ in the captivity of some unavoidable service. Here the quiet pressure of duty may bring about the move from negative to positive. The concept is indispensable, though it cannot stand alone; it is a formal way of asserting both the orderly pattern-like nature of morality, and its uniquely absolute demand, quite different from that of inclination. A totally good being would not experience the call of duty, might be said to lack or not need the concept, since all acts and decisions would emerge from virtuous insight and its orderly process. God has no duties. An imperfect being often feels and recognises the moral demand as external, contrary to instinct and habit, contrary to usual modes of thought. The idea of duty serves here. If thought of without the enclosing background of general and changing quality of consciousness, of moral experience, of acquired moral fabric, it may seem stark, inexplicable except as arbitrary orders given by God, or be considered as mere historically determined social rules. It may also be taken to suggest that morality is an occasional part-time activity of switching on the ethical faculty on separate occasions of moral choice. But to return to an earlier metaphor, we can only move properly in a world that we can see, and what must be sought for is vision.
The conception of an absolute requirement, whether or not adorned with metaphysical justifications, is shared with religion where it is connected with an absolute ground, that is some idea of a persisting and necessarily existing reality. How far can a demythologised religion go in that direction and still be called religion? The ‘reality’ or ‘ground’, traditionally thought of picturesquely as ‘elsewhere’, may be seen as available to ordinary cognition, intuitable, veiled and so on. Some Kantian views, and part of the mind of Kant himself, would wish to check for questioning any movement from morality into religion because this would be to accept a heteronomous principle. It is easy to see this dilemma. If we recognise an absolute which is more extensive than our own sense of right we are giving away our judgment to an external authority. If God appeared physically before us on His throne and said ‘Do this’ we would still be able to wonder if we ought to. Wittgenstein, commenting on the old question of whether something is right because God wills it or willed by God because it is right, preferred the former because it ‘cuts off any road to an explanation’. That is, any explanation or justification (pictures, accounts, dogmatic formulations) of religion is a kind of lie, a misleading clutter; a religious person does not explain what ‘God’ is, he goes there directly and not-through any external paraphernalia. God, the Divine, is unique, not a thing among others to’be given ‘place’ in the world. Properly understood this point is like that of, properly understood, the Ontological Proof. We may feel that Wittgenstein’s aphorism silences us too quickly, and (especially Protestant) theologians like to emphasise that the only acceptable religion must be one which could accord with a purified conception of autonomy. These are very old and ever new problems to which I shall return later when talking about religion and the Ontological Proof. I look here at the question of duty in the context of the possible charge that the sort of neo-Platonic moral view on which I have been reflecting is really a sort of aesthetic view, a kind of wander through pleasant groves of quasi-religious experience. I spoke just now of a move from morality on into religion. I could think rather in terms of a move from religion into morality, that is a rediscovery of religious modes of thought deep inside morals. That religion and morals somehow overlap or ‘blend’ may seem obvious: yet in the secular atmosphere of today may need stating as well as studying. The exercise of duty is not a cold look at the facts and a jump to a moral intuition or dictate of reason: the picture implied by a sharp distinction between fact and value. We are all the time building up our value world and exercising, or failing to exercise, our sense of truth in the daily hourly minutely business of apprehending, or failing to apprehend, what is real and
distinguishing it from illusion. ‘The absolute’ may be thought of as a distant moral goal, like a temple at the end of a pilgrimage, a condition of perfection glimpsed but never reached. Or of course it may be thought of as being, or being the property of, a personal God. But the idea of absolute, as truth and certainty, is contained in ordinary exercises of cognition, it is already inherent in the knowledge which suggests our duty, it is in our sense of truth; however feeble or ‘specialised’ our response to it may be. Our justifications of our moral failures pay it homage. It should not be seen as a dangerous possibly heteronomous property of religion (or a kind of transcendent ‘thing’), but as something innate in morality which can also bind or connect morality with a certain understanding of religion.
I have suggested that we may look at these matters by making use of a concept of consciousness. Of course, as I said above, we may properly reflect upon our conditioning, our deep prejudices, our received ideas, etc. I mean ‘consciousness’ in a common-sense understanding of ‘where we live’. Many states of consciousness are touched by art, and not only in a sentimental or weakening sense. Art is a mode of cognition, the artist in us is aware of the problem of formulating what is true. The good artist destroys false work. We depend on intuitions which go beyond what is distinctly seen, we are out on frontiers where methods of verification are at stake. We exist in many different ways at many different levels at the same time. There are qualities of consciousness and levels of cognition. We think and speak of ourselves in hypothetical dispositional terms. There are unconscious good habits, an aspect of civilisation. But we also know that we are not just a network of dispositions. This knowledge is part of our sense of our freedom. We need and want to come home to what is categorical not hypothetical, to return to the present, where we also and essentially live. There are patterns and there are events, there are moments and ‘long presents’. There is busy preoccupied activity, obsessed gazing, concentrated watching, attention, meditation. We look at trees and at television sets. These fundamental uses of our time may be hard to delineate. We ‘make them our own’; we can move from fine shades of behaviour to finer shades, we can move toward what is less readily identifiable but indubitably present. The question of ‘the inner’ can be seen as one of identification. We are involved in the mysteries of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. This is, in my view, not a problem which philosophers can successfully analyse into any sort of minute or quasi-scientific detail. ‘Temporalisation’ or (French) temporalisation is an extremely unclear concept. But philosophers might be wise to deal with time-problems as aspects of particular contexts. An example would be: can we properly condemn a man of seventy for crimes he committed when he was twenty? We can attempt to clarify this. A general philosophical theory of time is likely to be unbearably abstract. The argument is not just Moore versus McTaggart. The mountain walker can be aware of very many things ‘at the same time’. Our memories and expectations enter into the quality of our categorical present. ‘What this is like’, what I ‘see it as’ is not a problem which can be, as it were, handed over to empirical psychology and then received back in a helpfully sorted state; non-scientific concepts, value concepts, philosophical concepts are involved in setting the scene, indicating what we want to characterise and why. Here ordinary language is best, and to describe the indescribable we must resort to it. Serious discussion of states of consciousness, thinking, moral reflection, quality of being tends to use imagery and resort to art.