Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  In talking about consciousness and imagination and imagery I have come to use the term 'aesthetic’ in an extended sense. An analogous and more familiar word which is readily extended by discussion of it in this context is ‘love’. 'Love’ can be used to mean any desire or tendency. In a more solemn sense we speak of love for people. This love is often distorted by egoism. It is also one of the most important things in any life. Is this a religious, moral, or metaphysical view? Or a psychological generalisation? Religious people speak of love for God, which may be taken ideally to include or subsume love for people. Love can be learnt in family life. We know now of the particular importance of early childhood. Lessons about love may be given to us by religion, or religious atmosphere, but are more likely to come from experiences and examples. Is love a virtue – or a form of energy or a scattered polymorphous concept? Is it ‘ultimately’ identical with good? God is Love (I John 4. 8) is a sentence that used to be learnt early in life. Plato gives to Good a unique position, above being, real but not contingently existing, Ens Realissimum. This is like the unique status of the God appealed to in Anselm’s Ontological Proof, except that Good is not a god, but an Idea which inspires love. Good is what all men love and wish to possess for ever. (Symposium 206A.) What is desired is desired as, genuinely, good; though many desires reach only distorted shadows of goodness. We may love depraved 'goods’ (money, power). Good exerts a magnetism which runs through the whole contingent world, and the response to that magnetism is love. The myth in the Symposium (203), told by Diotima to Socrates, presents Eros as an ambiguous spirit, the child of Poverty and Ingenuity. Eros is not, as has been suggested earlier in the dialogue, by Agathon, a great god. He is neither a god nor a mortal but a spiritual being residing in between, a daemon, a great spirit (202-3). Love is poor and homeless and without shoes like his mother, but brave and ingenious and aspiring like his father. He lacks goodness and beauty, he is a lover who is forever seeking these, he desires wisdom which is supremely beautiful, he is a creative spirit, he is tension, exertion, zeal (206B). He is, in the strong and eloquent words of Diotima, a terrible magician, an alchemist (pharmakeus), a sophist. This creature, appearing amid the funny confused joie de vivre of the Symposium, is one of the most enlightening images in the mythology of morals. Christ, whom various non-Christians took to be a great daemon, said that he was the way, the truth and the life. Christians are however used to identifying Christ with God as Perfect Love. Love as a deprived and straining seeker, as enchanter and sophist, strikes a different note. The word pharmakeus is best translated here as alchemist, spiritual chemist. It means a user of drugs and spells, a sorcerer. A drug, a pharmakon, can be either beneficent or malignant. The word ‘sophist’ is interesting here too. Elsewhere sophists are attacked as charlatans and cheats. Plato separates spiritual energy from spiritual goal. The goal, the end, the absolute, is transcendent, impersonal and pure. The energy is something more mixed and personal, godlike yet not divine, capable of corruption, aspiring to wisdom, a needy resourceful desire. Eros is a great artist, not a pure being. He seeks goodness and beauty, and works and schemes for the happiness of possessing these. 'Love is the desire for the perpetual possession of the good.’ The image exalts perfect good above imperfect love. The theology of the Symposium accords here with that of the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. Beauty is a clue to good. Love is desire for good, virtue is being in love with good. As we refine our conception of beauty we discover good. The Artist-Demiurge, moved by his desire for, his vision of, the Forms, creates the World and its Soul. The Demiurge is good but not omnipotent, the Soul is imperfect and confused but desirous of good. Goodness is the perfection of desire. Plato viewed human artists with suspicion, but in these myths portrays the task and impulse of love as a spiritualisation of aesthetic and sexual energy. Here concepts of the aesthetic, and the sexual, are as it were broken by the concept of good. Our desire for beauty leads to and becomes our desire for perfection. The Ens Realissimum is impersonal, the desire which seeks it is an impure personal passionate energy, not itself an absolute.

  God is Love? The question of love and its metaphysical imagery has come up after a discussion of consciousness, imagination, aesthetic imagery, and relations between the aesthetic and the moral. Beauty can be an image of good, and thus a way to good; or a substitute for it. (Eros as alchemist.) Is not love a better, less ambiguous figure? Such speculations live near to the edge of nonsense, but are valuable, for instance in reflection upon theological pictures. The traditional Judaeo-Christian God is a Person whose main characteristic (though he is also feared) is loving and being loved. In so far as he is a God who is just and who punishes, he does so mercifully and in a loving spirit, always aware of the contrite heart. Christian attitudes and visions which emphasise God’s anger usually do so when advocating, and indicating the possibility of, conversion and penitence. Christ represents (or is) the accessibility of God, his closeness and caringness, his love, and the invitation to love in return. The Greeks did not in anything like this sense love their gods. They feared them and placated them and celebrated them. Plato’s Good is not a god, it is an impersonal object of love, a transcendent idea, pictured as a magnetic centre of vitality (for instance as the sun). It purifies the energy which is directed upon it. We are to love Good for nothing, we may experience this lively purification. In the Christian picture we are invited to sense an answering judging rewarding Intelligence and a comforting flow of love. Plato speaks of loving a beautiful person as (potentially) an education which leads on to a love of Beauty as something spiritual, as itself a love of truth and of virtue and a capacity (here below) for virtuous and truthful love. (Symposium 211-12.) Alcibiades, speaking of his love for Socrates (who was neither beautiful nor, then, young) likens him to a clay figure which is opened to reveal an image of a god. (Symposium 215 B.) (The love of Alcibiades for Socrates, the love of Plato for Socrates, the 'light’ of the dialogues.) A Christian might speak of loving people in and through God. Love is kind, long-suffering, unenvious, it is not conceited or self-seeking or easily provoked; it thinks no evil and takes no pleasure in ill-doing, it rejoices in truth, it endures and hopes and believes and never fails. (I Corinthians 13. 4-8.) So it is ideally, but not always, found to be. If one reflects: almost all human love fails in some way. Here we use the word ‘love’ as a normative term, distinguishing it from lust or mere selfish passion. Personal love exists and is tried in impersonal contexts, in a real large world which transcends it and contains other goals, other values, other people. We love in the open air, not in a private room. We know, and this is one of the things we know most clearly of all, which is indeed a knowledge that is 'forced upon us’, that the energy of Eros can be obsessive, destructive and selfish, as well as spiritual, unselfish, a source of good life. ‘Falling in love’ may be our most intense experience, when the world’s centre is removed to another place. It is difficult to be unselfishly in love, and the lover who lovingly surrenders the beloved may serve as an image of virtue, of the love that ‘lets go’, as in Eckhart: emptying the soul to let God enter and even, for God’s sake, taking leave of God. Eckhart was loved by Schopenhauer and also influenced Heidegger. Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung (as portrayed earlier while man was still the Shepherd of Being), a clearing, an opening of space to allow Being to be, expresses Eckhart’s denial of self.

  Plato envisages erotic love as an education, because of its intensity as a source of energy, and because it wrenches our interest out of ourselves. It may be compared with the startling experience in Zen (perhaps a literal blow) which is to bring about enlightenment. We may perhaps thus learn that other worlds and other centres really exist and have rights. But love can be a form of insanity whereby we lose the ‘open scene’: lose our ability to scatter our loving interest throughout the world, to inhabit a large world, to draw good energy from many sources, to have a large and versatile consciousness, to possess many concepts. There is often (as I suggested earlier) a duty to fall out of love, an
d there are sound techniques for doing so (of which falling in love with someone else is not necessarily the best one). This valuable exercise can occasion a rediscovery of the beauty of the world. Released, we return to our friends, our work, our ordinary pleasures! Successful obsessive love may be accompanied by intense joy, but also by jealousy and fear of loss. There is a better sunnier happiness when together with the beloved we are able to be aware of other things, other people, other joys, illumined by secure mutual love, when we can stand together and look at something else. This is a liberation of which a marriage ceremony is a symbol. In spite of all the warnings mentioned above, love, love of lovers, of family, of friends, is an ultimate consolation and an ultimate saviour. To love and be loved is what we all desire, and what we desire as, as we are able to see it, good. Eros may be wilful, but he is also said to be ingenious, and there are very many ways in which love between persons can exist and endure.

  These are matters often written about in works of literature. Human love, the love of persons for other persons, is sui generis, and among our natural faculties and impulses the one which is potentially nearest to the highest divine attributes (however these may be understood) though in practice often remote from them. It is unlike our more detached and unthreatened loves for art objects, for work, for nature, for the furniture of the world generally; but art and the world form its natural and proper context and habitat. Aesthetic experience is by definition unpossessive where we speak of contemplation in the ordinary usage of the word. One kind of love can be a figure or analogon for another, and any love can stir up, and reach down into, the deep breeding places of imagery. We see this in the context of religion where the furniture of the world is freely taken as spiritual pointers, and where unpossessive love is pictured as transcending selfish grasping desire. Here Christ is an icon of the irreducible individual endowed with human privacy and inwardness, exhibiting personal yet selfless love and proving that it is possible. Here, as well as, and I think not less than, the familiar story we find enlightening the atmosphere of the Gospels. With St Paul we are aware of human pride and passion, in the Gospels all is quieter and simpler. It is true that in Paul’s writings, after all they are letters, we see an individual; and we feel the vast energy of a passionate love, the demonic power of a magic force, light blazing in the dark. Whereas the Gospels take place in the open air, lit, in spite of everything they have to tell, by a calm sun. One might say that St Paul is Eros, and the Gospels are the world of the Forms. The human passionate urgency in St Paul makes him (I suspect) for many a more effective teacher. For many temperaments, it is easier to be moved by Paul’s warm outcry, by his sinful breast-beating persona with whom one can identify, than with the curious coolness of the Gospel narratives. The atmosphere of the latter conveys a picture of unpossessive love. Space and light are essential images in the description of morality. What is needful is inner space, in which other things can lodge and move and be considered; we withdraw ourselves and let other things be. Any artist or thinker will appreciate this picture of inner space; not Wittgenstein’s ‘logical space’, but a private and personal space-time. We might think here of spatio-temporal rhythm; a good person might be recognised by his rhythm. An obsessed egoist, almost everyone sometimes, destroys the space and air round about him and is uncomfortable to be with. We have a sense of the ‘space’ of others. An unselfish person enlarges the space and the world, we are calmed and composed by his presence. Sages in deep meditation are said sometimes to become invisible because of the absence of that cloud of anxious selfish obsession which surrounds most of us. (Let us hope they invisibly edify.)

  We must ‘give things their rights’. Contingent particulars, objects, in ways which I have mentioned above, can startle us with their reality and arrest obsessive mechanical thought-runs. Particulars which are not art objects or persons, and are thus more unlike us, more resistant to our fantasy, more self-evidently contingent, can play this role. A good consciousness does not ignore or blur these witnesses, or overwhelm their private radiance. Reflection on these rights may also help us to understand the analogous rights of those most important particulars, human individuals. Inner freedom and space, spatio-temporal rhythm, ability to let be, to consider, create, understand, sympathise: these are continually menaced by anxiety, obsessive imagery, base emotions, egoistic illusions. (As well of course as the fear and misery which is the unavoidable lot of so many humans.) This is like, or a case of, the way in which easy bad art drives out difficult good art. Any art form may have an authority which fascinates. Here in talking about love we may return toward the images derived from art which were considered earlier, and to the concept of consciousness. Changes in our desires go along with changes in instinctive imagery, including kinaesthetic images of space and movement, as well as with the more coherent activities of fantasy and imagination. Change occurs it seems automatically, yet also influenced by conscious orientations and decisions. We decide to read this book instead of that, to see this person instead of that, on a particular occasion to indulge or abstain. We decide to stop thinking about something. Can we? Will, as a subsidiary idea, may be connected with such decisions, as in the case I mentioned earlier of literally running away from temptation. The concept of will should be kept under restraint; if it becomes too powerful and abstract and simple it tends to swallow and segregate our ideas of morality, obliterate their omnipresent detail, and facilitate a treatment of 'morality’ as a small special subject. The nemesis of an inflated monistic view of moral will is a distinction of fact and value which diminishes the latter. The inner needs the outer and the outer needs the inner. In these pictures I have tried to ‘exhibit’ the inner; and resist tendencies which give value and effective function only to the outer (thought of as ‘moral acts’ or as linguistic activity), or regard the ‘inner life’ as fantasy and dream, lacking identity and definition, even as a fake illusory concept. Such views tend in effect toward a behaviourist moral philosophy, or toward an existentialist or structuralist reduction. Such nullification of the inner may also have a home in utilitarian moral thinking, where it receives understandable lay support from those who hold that 'soultalk’ is a luxury in a world where action to relieve suffering is our main duty. Mill, who cannot find an intelligible place for virtue, shrinks from analysing, though he imagines he can define, ‘higher pleasures’, a concept which he finds he cannot do without if he is to escape from Bentham. It is difficult to see how higher pleasures can be characterised without reference to states of consciousness. G. E. Moore found it natural to make this move.

  The appearance of J. S. Mill in the argument makes a bridge to observations about politics.

  12

  Morals and Politics

  Heraclitus, who said almost everything but rather briefly, tells us that: ‘Men awake have one common world, but in sleep they turn aside, each into a world of his own.’ ‘One must follow what is common; but though the word (Logos) is held in common, most men live as if they had a private understanding of their own.’ (Fr. 2.) Of course, in what we would call a logical sense, my experience is private to me and cannot be experienced by another. This logical or ‘grammatical’ privacy may be said to have an empirical base, in the sense that there is (it seems) nothing which we could call my having your perceptions. What Heraclitus is speaking of is something more familiar and more puzzling. Language has and must have public rules. Yet we have private insights and cognitions which go beyond what could be described as a private saying of public sentences; and even when we speak aloud may we not to some extent ‘make the language our own’? Men dream when they are awake too. The outer and the inner are in a continual volatile dynamic relationship. Such is the creation and growth of the individual, the person who is in innumerable ways special, unique, different from his neighbour. This is the concept for which, in 1989, the people of eastern Europe fought their tyrants. Kierkegaard fought Hegel. And belief in this person is an assertion of contingency, of the irreducible existence and importan
ce of the contingent. Everyday moral decisions normally involve consideration of details; political and social reflections tend to avoid these (de minimis non curat lex) but are sometimes felicitously forced to notice them. As we move from generalities toward the accidental and particular we introduce muddle but also variety and space. In obvious, but only generally specifiable, ways we are ‘historically conditioned’. Liberal political thinking posits the individual, but accounts of him can vary. Here, as often in moral reflection, one wants to combine 'ought’ with ‘is’ in a way which is not fallacious. When Hume says that ‘reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ he means that reason is bound, one way or another, whether we like it, or admit it, or not, to be swayed, or coloured, by desires; and moreover this is a good thing of which we should be more fully conscious. We must and can make the best of what happens to be the case. So (mutatis mutandis) with the concept of the individual we want to say that every human creature is an individual. We attach some ideas of freedom and reason to the concept ‘human’ and with these comes an idea of a self-created privacy. The philosophy of Hobbes exhibits such a fusion of ought and is. The individual, pictured as indestructible, is thereby pictured as valuable. Nemo me impune lacessit is better in politics than in morals. We assume individuality, from our experience of humans, and we add, as properly also present, the potentialities thereof. There are obvious complications in this picture. A man ought to be allowed to be free, and should also possess happiness, and knowledge — and moral sensibility. There are obligations which belong to his environment and others which belong to himself, and these overlap. Moreover, cannot a virtuous ignorant enslaved peasant be a better human being than a sophisticated liberated self-seeker? We move towards developing concepts of ‘good’, or ‘fulfilled’, human beings which connect with questions of rights.