Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Mao Tse-tung said that the idea of human nature was a bourgeois concept. Perhaps he had in mind the kind of axiomatic non-systematic non-totalising political theory of which I have been speaking, which tends to disrupt tyranny by a conception of the idiosyncratic individual as valuable per se. ‘Stop. You can’t do that to a person.’ Subsequent Marxist explanations of, or apologies for, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, later said to have been a ‘mistake’, ‘incorrect’, ̒overenthusiastic’, ignored the fact that innumerable people were murdered during this period, and thousands, millions, had their lives permanently ruined. The price paid by individuals for ‘socially desirable’ change must never be lost sight of. Of course our sort of democracy cannot at present live everywhere (and we cannot know how or whether it will survive into the more than ever unpredictable future) but humane ideas and enlightened axioms and conceptions of human rights can. History is indeed a slaughterhouse and this is in numerous ways an inhospitable planet. Draconian measures may be necessary to prevent people from starving, for example. This too must be remembered. But herein the notion of the fundamental existence and value of the individual should not be, need not be, and ultimately cannot be obliterated. This is where the negativising appeal to an idea of human nature comes in. You must not do this. There are barriers of principle which are not reducible to system; and this irreducibility confronts political systems and theoretical and metaphysical systems of any sort, including religious ones. Human beings are valuable, not because they are created by God or because they are rational beings or good citizens, but because they are human beings.

  Slogans, by contrast, are simplified political directives or battle cries addressed to immediate objectives. ‘All power to the soviets’: a crucial moment in the Russian Revolution aimed at preventing the establishment of bourgeois democracy. ‘Struggle, criticism, transformation’, the slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. ‘In carrying out the proletarian revolution in education it is essential to have working-class leadership ... The workers’ propaganda teams should stay permanently in the schools and take part in fulfilling all the tasks of struggle ̶criticism-transformation within them.’ (China: the Impact of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Bill Brugger, p. 97.) Also, and differently, in England in World War II, ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ In ordinary (peacetime) situations democracies are not much given to exhortation or direction by slogan. (Except at general elections.) Sloganising has rather become the property of the advertising industry. What I mean by axioms are isolated unsystematic moral insights which arise out of and refer to a general conception of human nature such as civilised societies have gradually generated. Axioms are outside the main moral spectrum, a different and unconnected colour. Utilitarian thinking is in effect axiomatic: attempts to present utilitarianism as a complete moral philosophy fail, for a number of well-known reasons, such as that it does not give a coherent account of virtue. But utilitarian considerations are in general prima facie relevant because we all understand the importance of happiness. It is always a, not necessarily final, argument against doing something to someone, that it will reduce his happiness. Of course the formulation of such arguments may be difficult because of lack of agreement about the concept. (̒But he enjoys being miserable’ etc. etc.) Did the Greeks have the ‘general conception of human nature’ referred to above? Yes, only slaves and barbarians did not count. Have we got such a conception? Yes, which may also have, when in use, its tacit exceptions and limitations. General principles of this type may remind us of Kant and of the large maxims which he considers (in the Grundlegung) to be so obvious. Do not lie. Be compassionate. Develop your talents. Do not take your life. Kant however regards such commands as fundamental utterances of Reason and thus integrates them into his total system of morality. These orders given ‘as if by God’ can be internalised as rational moral principles and we may or may not conceive of reason as a single system. (Most modern Kantians probably do not.) We may adopt such principles without holding any particular view of God or reason. One might speak here of ‘intuition’; but people who hold unsystematic political or socio-political principles, for instance about capital punishment or abortion or euthanasia, can usually say quite a lot of quite sensible things about them. References to ̒reason’ as to a single and unified authority are usually rhetorical and otiose and should be victims of Occam’s razor. Of course individuals may relate such principles to (for instance) their religious beliefs. But in the context of political argument and activity the absence of metaphysical background is the point. The successful use of persuasion depends on a certain waiving of dogma. A good (decent) state, full of active citizens with a vast variety of views and interests, must preserve a central arena of discussion and reflection wherein differences and individuality are taken for granted. (For instance, religious differences.) Here there are no authoritarian final arbiters, certainly not God, Reason or History. Here general good will, consent, maintains a kind of justice which is ̒intuitively ̓understood. That this is, in western democracies, something ‘obvious’ is important too. It is also fragile.

  The term ‘axiom’ points to piecemeal moral insights or principles which are active in political contexts. How far the concept of a political context may reach into peripheral areas, I shall consider later. Talk about ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rights’ is axiomatic in this sense, but cannot be accused of being derived from an idea of human nature. There is, rather, a mutual relationship between particular insights and general idea. As we ‘come to see’ that certain things are good and some intolerable these convictions are built into a wider conception of how humans should behave in their societies. It was obvious to Schopenhauer that cruelty to animals was wrong. It was not obvious to previous other and greater philosophers. It is only now becoming obvious in advanced free societies that women have certain rights, including that of being priests. Dr Johnson found the idea of a woman preacher ridiculous. Here again, it would be wrong to attempt to derive these changes from a scientific theory of history. Of course societies change, not as predictably as some might think or wish to think. Who predicted the 1989 liberal revolutions in eastern Europe? History can bring good as well as terrible surprises. Vast complex unplanned changes reveal new vistas and prompt new moral judgments; and of course some of the machinery of this change can be (variously) explained, even controlled. But there is no prior or fundamental metaphysical or scientific system which radically explains it all or provides its general justifications. This is an important commonplace of liberal political thinking. Axioms must be mutually independent (externally not internally related) in order to be able intelligibly to fight each other and to go on existing in defeat. Within a general consensus about what things are right and proper, different views can contend in a reasonable manner. W. D. Ross (The Right and the Good), a self-styled intuitionist, used the term ̒prima facie obligation’ to picture this aspect of morality, but offered his neo-Kantian theory (‘deontological intuitionism’) as an explanation of the whole of morals. Some liberal political axioms might appear to indicate prima facie obligations (in legislation, always consider happiness), others may be uttered as absolutes (torture is wrong).

  Someone may say, so you want to distinguish rough general rules of morality, such as constitute important inspirations and barriers in politics and public life, from a private progressive spirituality, connected with a total change of consciousness? Yes, but the situation is more complicated, since (political) axioms must also be distinguished from imperatives of duty. I certainly want to suggest that the spiritual pilgrimage (transformation — renewal — salvation) is the centre and essence of morality, upon whose success and well-being the health of other kinds of moral reaction and thinking is likely to depend. ‘Axioms’ appear as part of an assertion that of course political activity is, among other things, or is often, moral activity, but one where values are dealt with in a different way. The idea of a separation is better here than that of a dialectic or a tension within a total
ity: it both emphasises a very general (liberal) political value, and also helps to make sense of political scenes. Those who organise society so that people do not starve, or so that certain rights are respected, may be acting properly, and we may neither know nor care about their spiritual life or their motives. They too may not care, and may thereby incur criticism from other points of view. In politics a dash of cynicism may be an aspect of tolerance, as it is in the thought of Hobbes and Hume. Don’t expect too much of the citizens. Everyone is an egoist. Everyone seeks his own private happiness, why not. The privacy and inwardness of the individual are here seen as the justified pursuit of private not social ends. This is the sense in which everyone may reasonably be deemed a knave, and the proper object of every man’s will is some good to himself. Government should legislate with human frailty well in view. The citizen whom Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty protects is an irreducible atom composed of private ends. The whole cannot be saved. Society must be thought of as a bad job to be made the best of. ‘The social domain is unreservedly that of the Prince of this World. We have but one duty in regard to the social element, which is to try to limit the evil contained therein.’ Simone Weil, Notebooks, p. 296. The individual is contingent, full of private stuff and accidental rubble, and must be accepted as such, not thought of as an embryonic rational agent, or in terms of some social theory. Sovereigns envisaged by Hobbes were of course not endowed with the technical expertise of the modern dictator, they could not get at their subjects in the ways now available to technological sovereigns, who may require every citizen to have a television set. So it did not matter too much to Hobbes who the sovereign was, so long as he was strong enough to govern, since he would be unable to destroy the egoistic core of his subject individuals. Looking to the future: the Hobbesian concept of sovereignty assumes the existence of the traditional nation state. Will this continue in a more closely integrated world?

  So, in political public life, axioms protect values which are irreducible to each other. Axioms can be more or less local, more or less general or particular. No theory could set up a ̒king ̓axiom. ‘Be tolerant ̓? Yet a democratic society is often rightly intolerant. Compare, in morality at large, setting up a single moral guide such as ‘Be loving’. Christ reduced the Ten Commandments to two, and moral philosophers have often looked for a single principle. Political liberalism is pluralism, the cost must always be counted and there are different ways of counting. Thinking about politics is in certain special respects different from thinking about private morals. One may be ruthless with oneself but not with others. An acknowledgement of irreducible contingency is an acknowledgement of the rights of individuals. Politics must be concerned with happiness, and is a natural and proper sphere for utilitarian values. Bentham, and James and J. S. Mill, and Marx and Engels were deeply moved by the spectacle of suffering, especially that of the industrial working class. So was Schopenhauer who speaks of work in cotton mills as ‘purchasing dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath’. Its utilitarian content made Marxism attractive to people in democratic countries who were not concerned with the whole theory; and many people who were not Marxists became impatient with traditional politics and devoted their idealism to the relief of suffering and the prevention of damage. Help the poor, help the hungry, protect wildlife, ban nuclear waste, save the countryside, save the planet, save whales. These are good political ends, but may replace and exclude wider and deeper thinking about the whole of the political sphere. What will fill the vacuum made by the disappearance of Marxism?

  These thoughts about the place of utilitarian thinking in politics may prompt reflection upon later developments in Marxism, in particular the work of the Frankfurt School. It was Marcuse and not Sartre who made Marxism (for a time) a new popular moral philosophy. These thinkers between them divided Marxism into a modified traditional orthodoxy in the style of Lukács and Marcuse, and a neo-Marxist line of more freely philosophical criticism of the thought of Hegel and Marx, which might be said to lead Marxism, deformed by its pragmatic connections with existing regimes, back into the general tradition of European philosophy, where it may cease, or has ceased, to be Marxism. The latter line of thought is represented by Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno and I am here mainly concerned with Adorno, who regarded himself as a Marxist, and whose fundamental philosophical idea may be entitled ̒the primacy of the object’. Adorno takes his argument back into a critique of Kant’s and Hegel’s picture of the relation of subject and object. As Adorno sees it, Kant’s subject, composed of rigid rules prescribing the form of the object, cannot be regarded as an original spontaneous upsurge of subjectivity, but is really an object itself, framed in the image of the object which it constitutes. The Kantian Thing-in-itself, the inaccessible ̒given ̓, is attractive as suggesting the contingent independence of the object, but is not a genuine object for the subject because of its lack of relation with it. Hegel’s correction of Kant over-privileges the subject, or per contra abolishes the subject by envisaging an ultimate totality in which subject and object merge. The subject is meanwhile given complete power over the object, and the dialectical progression is a continual reconstitution of the object by the subject in the interests of a more complete domination. Adorno’s ‘negative dialectic’, which denies the idea of ‘the totality’, aims to introduce contingency and doubt into this picture, to portray the object as primary, while retaining the necessary connection between subject and object to be thought of as an unsystematic dialectical tension. Adorno here also uses the term ̒field of force’. In Kant, contingency is represented by the general, abstract, idea of a timeless unknown, and by the mechanical causality which rules the phenomenal world, including the psychological empirical self. In Hegel contingency progressively vanishes into the ideal totality, as the opposing object is constantly found to be an intelligible part of the subject. In this picture the all-powerful subject might just as well be seen as nothing, a mere moment in the construction of some final perfectly clarified super-object : a thought ‘not far from Hegel’s mind’, as Adorno suggests. Adorno wishes, as metaphysical philosopher and neo-Marxist, to alter these two misleading conceptions and to give a more true, more realistic, account of the relation between subject and object. This he does eloquently and succinctly in his essay ‘Subject and Object’ (in German in his Stachworte, in English in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader). The separation of subject and object is both real and illusory. There is the real experienced dichotomy of the human condition; but this separation must not be hypostatised, set up as something invariant and rigid. One might use the world ‘reified’ here. The relation is ̒dialectical’ but not in Hegel’s sense. Adorno’s opponents, it turns out, are not only Kant and Hegel, but also reductionism, positivism, popular (or ‘philosophised’) science, Freud, and most understandings of Marxism. The object must not be swallowed by the subject; equally it must not be set up as if entirely independent of the subject. This dialectical give-and-take mutually necessary relation between subject and object is not to be understood in a Hegelian manner as taking place within any sovereign determining totality, whether Hegel’s Absolute, or a Marxist idea of history as a story with a happy ending. ‘The whole is false.’ It is in this sense that the dialectic is ̒negative ̓: there is no complete self-reflection, no final unity of subject and object, our world is irreducibly contingent. This stand taken by Adorno, which put him at odds with orthodox Marxism, is expressive of the most general philosophical objections to idealism. However, Adorno retains a special place in political thinking for the purely Utopian aspect of Marxism. All thought and knowledge should carry an awareness of its own social conditioning, and of the suffering of individuals, and include the persistent hope of a much better society.

  Utilitarian values and ideas informed and supported Marxism from the days of Engels’s Manchester and of the philosophy of Bentham. More recently a not unrelated motive was a general hatred of western ‘bourgeois’ society. Loathing for our society, for its injustice, its vulga
rity, its low moral standards, its permissiveness, its hedonism, its materialism, its indifference to the crippled lives which its arrangements bring about, can make people impatient with the weak muddled procedures of democratic government, and angry with the numerous forces, overt or hidden, which tend to keep things as they are. In such arguments, the terms ‘bourgeois’ and ‘late capitalist’ are sometimes used to accuse, not only evils which exist also in non-democratic societies, but those which attend upon the human condition itself. It is a paradox of our scene that, inspired by this hatred of the west, intellectuals and artists could (while enjoying the freedom of bourgeois society) embrace the creeds of other societies in which they were well aware that they and their works would be suppressed. Here faithfulness to Marxism whatever the situation and outlook, whatever the record of self-professed Marxist states, appeared as an almost religious last resource of those who could see nothing but evil in the western world. Adorno is (was) a metaphysician and a moralist, one might call him a puritan, he was also an artist, a pianist, a composer, a writer upon the sociology of music. He regarded good art as a redeemer of society. By good art he did not mean art which preached a revolutionary creed (as in the ‘committed literature’ of Sartre and Brecht), but free individual art which, through its aesthetic honesty and power, could (incidentally) criticise society by exhibiting the deep horrors and sufferings of the human lot (as in Kafka and Beckett). (I like this preference.) For other reasons he was for Schoenberg and against Stravinsky. (Stravinsky was a sentimental romantic.) Adorno objected to Kierkegaard’s view which placed ‘the aesthetic’ at the lowest stage of moral development, below the ethical and the religious, a demotion shared in effect by Hegel.