Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  These philosophical. distinctions can be roughly but readily seen in terms of different states of consciousness, resembling Plato’s hierarchy of levels of knowledge with differing objects. We can make sense of a scale or series with egoistic fantasies at one end and creative imagination, culminating in genius at the other. Plato would of course put mystical selflessness (noesis) above artistic genius. We distinguish the genius from the saint. Herein imagination too is to be thought of as sanctified. We can recognise ‘automatic’ uses of imagination, and the points at which (good, serious, strong) imagination fails, as in the layman ‘imagining’ physics, or in certain moral and religious situations. We can thus ‘picture’ Plato’s distinction between dianoia and noesis without claiming to ‘think both sides of the barrier’. To mark the distances involved we need, for purposes of discussion, two words for two concepts: a distinction between egoistic fantasy and liberated truth-seeking creative imagination. Can there not be high evil fantasising forms of creative imaginative activity? A search for candidates will, I think, tend to reinforce at least the usefulness of a distinction between ‘fantasy’ as mechanical, egoistic, untruthful, and ‘imagination’ as truthful and free. The role of ‘personal fantasy’ in ‘high art’ (for instance) is a subject which merits consideration. This ‘fantasy’ and ‘imagination’ is not the same as Coleridge’s pair ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. Coleridge is contrasting fancy as a shifting-about of given pieces, with imagination as creative fusion. ‘Fancy has no other counters to play but fixities and definities ... Fancy must receive all its materials ready made ...’ (Biographia Literaria, chapter XIII.) Fancy: as when a story-teller creates a character by roughly tying together, in an unfused collection, separate characteristics from different people he knows. Whereas I want to see the contrast more positively in terms of two active faculties, one somewhat mechanically generating narrowly banal false pictures (the ego as all-powerful), and the other freely and creatively exploring the world, moving toward the expression and elucidation (and in art celebration) of what is true and deep. ‘Deep’ here invokes the sense in which any serious pursuit and expression of truth moves toward fundamental questions, as when a political problem refers us to a view of human nature. ‘Truth’ is something we recognise in good art when we are led to a juster, clearer, more detailed, more refined understanding. Good art ‘explains’ truth itself, by manifesting deep conceptual connections. Truth is clarification, justice, compassion. This manifestation of internal relations is an image of metaphysics. Art at play can be a metaphysician too, expressing spontaneous delight at the connectedness of things, or else at their absurd unconnectedness. Jokes have their contexts, even when their point is to have no point. The work of imagination in art may be seen as a symbol of its operation elsewhere; this might also be expressed by saying that there is artistry in the sorting, separating and connecting movement of the mind in other areas, in science and scholarship, and in morals and politics where an ordering activity is fused with an ability to picture what is quite other; especially of course to picture and realise, make real to oneself, the existence and being of other people. Imagination in politics: to imagine the consequences of policies, to picture what it is like for people to be in certain situations (unemployed, persecuted, very poor), to relate axiomatic moral ideas (for instance about rights) to pragmatic and utilitarian considerations.

  The concept of imagination is, on reflection, an essential one, not least perhaps because it can strengthen or clarify the sense in which ‘we are all artists’. It is on the other hand so ubiquitous that it is in danger of seeming empty. Perhaps, having seen its point or points, we should dismantle it into parts? I think we need the familiar word to designate something (good by definition) to which the contrast with fantasy (bad by definition) gives substance. The human mind is naturally and largely given to fantasy. Vanity (a prime human motive) is composed of fantasy. Neurotic or vengeful fantasies, erotic fantasies, delusions of grandeur, dreams of power, can imprison the mind, impeding new understanding, new interests and affections, possibilities of fruitful and virtuous action. If we consider the narrow dreariness of this fantasy life to which we are so addicted the term ‘unimaginative’ seems appropriate. (Contrast, as St Augustine observed, the amazing inventiveness of some sleeping dreams.) ‘Stop having those fantasies about getting your own back.’ And grief has its fantasies too. ‘Stop picturing that awful scene again and again.’ What may seem to happen as a healing process, mysteriously in extreme situations, may be seen more clearly in ordinary situations where imagination appears as a restoration of freedom, cognition, the effortful ability to see what lies before one more clearly, more justly, to consider new possibilities, and to respond to good attachments and desires which have been in eclipse. This effort may be compared with that of ‘composing’ and ‘holding’ a difficult work of art in one’s attention, an effort which is similar in the good artist and in the good client. (Teaching art is teaching morals.) ‘Be more sympathetic, imagine her situation, see it from her point of view.’ Fairly everyday advice. Imagination is here a moral discipline of the mind, which would, for instance, help people not to become embittered or brutalised or stupefied by affliction. Why not call it courage? (One seeks clarification by moving concepts around.) Of course it is courage too. Courage is imaginative, imagination brave. But the concept of imagination is another side of the figure. Courage suggests sturdiness and will, the ability to act. Imagination suggests the searching, joining, light-seeking, semi-figurative nature of the mind’s work, which prepares and forms the consciousness for action. In a context of reflection, one elaborates a distinction and defines a concept, so as to see further. In a way this is a speculative ladder to be thrown away, in a way there are also instinctive movements which take place in ordinary language. (A good language provides instruments of reflection for all.) As philosophers and as moral agents we decide what concepts we need, we reach out for these tools. (Wittgenstein used to say to his class, ‘You’re the boss.’ Humpty Dumpty also took a tough line with words.) What do you do with your mind when you are in prison? Or bereaved or suffering irremediable injustice, or crippled by awful guilt? What you are able to do with it then will depend very much on what you were doing with it before. The mysterious imaginative power of the artist, creation ex nihilo, the attentive waiting for the response of the unconscious power, is not remote from moral imagination, it is like, or is, prayer. Here we can experience the force and movement of imagination in conscious waiting and periods of attention.

  We are fantasising imaginative animals. The larger moral concepts are ‘porous’ in character. Of course language works through networks of combined exclusion and mutual relation; concepts are not solitary individuals, words are not proper names. This is the general point much emphasised since Saussure and Wittgenstein. It is the context of the ‘porous’ image. If we study one moral concept we soon see it as an aspect of another. It is true on the one hand that as moral agents we tend to specialise. The high-principled statesman may be a negligent father (and so on). It may seem as if we have a limited amount of good motivation available and cannot be expected to be decent ‘all round’. There are familiar ways of characterising people in terms of individual characteristics. Yet also a closer look may show this as superficial, and we then wish to say that the impulse toward goodness should stir the whole person. This demand does not isolate goodness in the way in which ‘good’ is isolated in an existentialist scheme, where it is merely an empty box into which chosen items are put. The existentialist choosing will is separated from other moral terms in a way which renders them otiose. If ‘free choice’ alone confers value, then all that is needed is a pointing finger; no place for cognitive struggle involving specialised informative moral concepts. (‘I wouldn’t call that bravery, it’s just an egoistic gamble.’) Value is neither contextless choice nor is it at the other extreme identical with some sort of filled out coming-into-existence. It is neither void nor plenum. The sun is separate from the
world, but enlivens all of it. Courage is composed of imagination. Truthful imagining requires courage and humility. Truthfulness is aware of the obligation not to cause distress. In this way of seeing, there are not just external clashes between alien principles (an idea which is at home in politics). It is a matter of deepening the concepts in question through a relation to each other. There is a continuous and spontaneous interplay. ‘Becoming better’ is a process involving an exercise and refinement of moral vocabulary and sensibility. Yet we must also in discussing virtue, as distinct from practising it, beware of seeming to suggest that the articulate educated man is better than the inarticulate uneducated man because he can think rationally and formulate and verbalise his distinctions. Such a suggestion might lead people to accuse Plato of confounding virtue with intellectual learning, and Kant of identifying it with cold rationality. Morality (as both these philosophers were well aware in their different ways) is right up against the world, to do with all apprehensions of others, all lonely reveries, all uses of time. Virtue shows in actions, goodness can be simple. Here the idea of imaginative grasp of one’s surroundings may be preferred to that of a rational survey or an ability to learn, or we may like to insist that good reasoning and learning is imaginative. The virtuous peasant can imagine the results of what he does and knows in his experience what truthfulness is. There is no need here to go to the other extreme of exalting intuition or instinct or speechless goodness (as for instance in Tolstoy’s peasant Platon Karataev in War and Peace) in preference to a more talkative morality. The human situation is much more mixed-up than theorising about it can suggest; Kant is right to say that every man understands good and evil, and Plato that learning is a spiritual exercise.

  The traditional, still influential, dualism of fact and value, intellect and will, can profitably be looked at again in the context of the present discussion. Some of Kant’s later followers, in emphasising the ‘purity’ of the moral will, in separating it from a factual determination (argument from fact to value), have in effect turned the Kantian universal rational will into an individual non-rational will. The end-point, not far from the stark existentialist view of the matter, would be: no need for thought, imagination, words, just point or jump. This would omit the continuous detailed conceptual pictorial activity whereby (for better or worse) we make and remake the ‘world’ within which our desires and reflections move, and out of which our actions arise. A consideration of the place of imagination in morality also makes clear the need for a reflective ‘placing’ of consciousness. Imagination is an (inner) activity of the senses, a picturing and a grasping, a stirring of desire. At a more explicitly reflective level, in everyday moral discussion as well as in metaphysics, we deploy a complex densely textured network of values round an intuited centre of ‘good’. We imagine hierarchies and concentric circles, we are forced by experience to make distinctions, to elaborate moral ‘pictures’ and a moral vocabulary. We work with value concepts, value words. Moral acts do not usually, and cannot essentially, rest on isolated pure arbitrarily ‘willed’ decisions. We can change what we are, but not quickly or easily, there is such depth and density in what needs to be changed. A part of such change is an ability to understand (in practice) what virtues consist of and how they relate. A child is told to tell the truth. Truth is important. In growing up he elaborates his own conception of what truthfulness involves. (This is one of the most important and central parts of any moral evolution.) Here again the spectator (theorist) is inclined to say that the egoist has a narrow moral world, the better man a larger and more complex one; yet must also add that there is a sense in which the good man’s world is again simple: simple in the sense that he may see what is right without prolonged doubt and reflection, large because, being less egoistic, he can see more of life. (He returns to seeing, now really seeing, rivers and mountains as rivers and mountains. He has fewer temptations.) Truth is very close to good, closer than, for instance, generosity. ‘Generosity’ may be a form of egoism, which needs to be purified by a patient use of intelligence and a sense of justice. Humility requires realism and humour. Often we must forget our dignity but not always. Integrity is an ambiguous concept, so is sincerity. What is so called can be a form of pride or self-assertion. ‘A sense of humour’, often treated as an identifiable faculty all on its own, needs to be looked at critically, even with suspicion. There is a perfectly familiar distinction between amiable joking and malicious or corrupt mockery. We must shun spiteful wit, yet not forget the social uses of satire.

  So we may talk and think, constantly examining and altering our sense of the order and interdependence of our values. The study of this interweaving is moral reflection, and at a theoretical level makes intelligible places for defining and understanding central concepts which may have become isolated and attenuated in our argumentative and emotional usage of them: happiness, freedom, love. Freedom is not an isolated ability, like the ability to swim, which we can ‘exercise’ in a pure form. The idea of ‘the freedom of the will’ can only be understood in the context of the complexity and ubiquity of value, it is inseparable from modes of cognition. Freedom is a matter of degree and a mode of being. If we isolate the idea of a free will it becomes incomprehensible and conjures up as its companion the ghostly empty philosophical concept of determinism. The liberal political (external, negative) sense of freedom as ‘doing what one wants’ must be distinguished from the positive moral meaning of the term. I will shortly be discussing this important difference, and the Hobbesian sense in which ‘morals’ may be said to differ from ‘politics’. The idea of moral freedom may in part be clarified by this contrast; it may also be defined in terms of the triumph of imagination over fantasy. ‘Happiness’ also, so often spoken of as an intelligible end, becomes multiform under the pressure of surrounding values. A Benthamite conception of it as uniform stuff may be in order in some situations as a political fiction. Mill’s relation to Bentham exhibits some of the difficulties of attempting to treat it for general moral purposes as a fundamental concept. ‘Love’, often taken for granted to be fundamental, is even more (another Platonic image) ‘densely textured’. Sex-love can be entirely egoistic. But purified love is surely not sexless, or should we say not necessarily sexless? Which way shall we press the concept on this border-line? A paradox about religion: religion concerns the acceptance of death, which drives away the idea and force of sex. Yet religion is also the passionate love of good, which is the sublimation of sex (as seen in the Symposium). Nietzsche tells us that ‘the degree and kind of a man’s sexuality extends to the highest pinnacle of his spirit’. The concept of sex alters (or need it be thought to depart?) when subjected to the sort of pressure involved in being interpreted together with other moral concepts at a high level. (Metaphors.) Religious chastity, love of God. Here again we may be enlightened by considering the case of the artist who in creation endeavours to purify his passion; and also by remembering the sense in which we are all artists. (The ego is passionate; yet without passion no high work.) Such persuasive shifting about among concepts, such metaphorical picturing of their mutual influence and function, is characteristic of metaphysics, and also of ordinary moral and aesthetic thinking. There are huge ambiguous inspiring or frightening moral concepts without which we could not live; there are also secondary, tertiary terms, narrower, more specialised, easier to define, which may do essential work for us. We develop an evaluative (moral) vocabulary which is in constant use. Disorder (for better or worse, at least it promotes reflection) results when we seize upon a minor concept and promote it to do major work. A demythologising theologian, wishing to avoid the difficulties of a more traditional terminology, suggests the word ‘disinterested’ to indicate our highest moral condition. Such a move, intended perhaps to ‘cool’ the argument, may involve too great a loss of ‘being’. Words vanish or alter their meanings ‘naturally’ in the course of language-use and social change, but thinkers too can tinker with the process. Theology needs speculative imagination. A
most important case: the word ‘God’ is less often used. Should its traditional meaning be left alone unquestioned? Should we let it dwindle and go, together with the person whom it used to designate? Or should we, while allowing its sense to change (that is, no longer designate a person) try to preserve and renew its ancient power? However that may be, we need to surround our ‘great words’ (concepts) with narrower more specialised ones with smaller clearer meanings. We must protect the precision of these secondary moral words, exercise them and keep them fit. The artistry of good prose writing, moral reflections in fiction and non-fiction, can serve this purpose. Living is making distinctions and indicating order and pattern.