Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Such assertions constitute liberal-political moral judgments about what politicians ought to value. We also judge the politicians and societies of the past in a certain light. Let us consider an example involving the founding fathers of western philosophy. Our distress at the (on available evidence) attitude of the classical Greeks to slavery is a certain kind of distress, unlike our distress about nineteenth-, or twentieth-, century slavery. Both Plato and Aristotle take slavery coolly for granted. By convention of course Greeks did not enslave other Greeks. Barbarians might be regarded as slavish by nature, and so naturally enslavable. A slave was considered to be an irrational being, without Logos; people unable to reason were said to be ‘like slaves’. (Laws 966B). Women might be thought of as like slaves in that respect. Laws 720 describes the difference between the sensible free doctor and the stupid slave doctor. At Laws 777E Plato says that slaves should be punished justly, but not spoilt by being merely admonished as if they were free persons. On the other hand, Callicles (Gorgias 483-4) argues that by nature (as opposed to by moralising convention) it is a worse thing to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Xerxes had no ‘right’ to attack Greece, he followed nature, a natural right, indeed a natural law. So a sufficiently spirited slave might rise in revolt and make himself the master, in the ‘bright light of natural justice’. (484A.) Plato lends eloquence to this intelligent dissident voice, but the argument continues without any pause for discussion of ‘natural justice’. Callicles condemns philosophy as a rather juvenile pursuit and (like Thrasymachus) applauds the strong man who can enforce his will. Plato uses the word ‘slavery’ (douleia) in picturing other hierarchical situations, in a state, in a soul, even in the cosmos (in the Timaeus). Aristotle (Politics 1253-60) discusses the institution of slavery, and the use of the slave as a household instrument. At 1253B he says, ‘There are some who hold that the exercise of authority over slaves is a form of science. They believe ... that the management of a household, the control of slaves, the authority of the statesman, and the rule of the monarch, are all the same. There are others, however, who regard the control of slaves by a master as contrary to nature. In their view the distinction of master and slave is due to law or convention; there is no natural difference between them: the relation of master and slave is based on force, and being so based has no warrant in justice.’ He does not tell us who those people are who thought that slavery was contrary to nature. At 1 260B he says that ‘it is clear that the master of a household must produce in the slave the sort of goodness we have been discussing [that is, moral goodness] and he must do so not as a manager giving instructions about particular duties. This is the reason why we may disagree with those [for instance Plato presumably] who are in favour of withholding reasons from slaves, and who argue that only command should be employed. Admonition ought to be applied to slaves even more than it is to children.’ And in the Nicomachean Ethics VIII xi 7, ‘Master and slave have nothing in common: a slave is a living tool ... Therefore there can be no friendship with a slave as slave, though there can be as human being: for there seems to be some room for justice in the relations of every human being with every other that is capable of participating in law and contract, and hence friendship also is possible with everyone so far as he is a human being.’ This may sound a little confusing. However, these extracts show Aristotle as taking slavery for granted, but viewing it in a more humane light than Plato gives evidence of in the Laws, his last, and least attractive, work! In general (I think) the Greeks regarded slavery as a fate, and one which they too might suffer. To return to Plato, with Callicles’s robust views may be read Republic 588-92.. Socrates tells Glaucon to imagine a creature composed of man, lion, and a beast with many heads, some wild, some tame. The unjust man feeds the lion and the beast, while enfeebling his own nature; the just man is master of the whole, taming the lion and caring for the beast. Law and custom judge between good and bad, deeming good those things which subject our brutish nature to our human nature, or rather perhaps our divine nature. Why is the idea of mechanical or unskilled work a sort of term of reproach? It is so only when the best part of the man is weak and subordinate to the brutish part. Then should not such a one, so that he may gain the self-control which belongs to the best, become the slave of the best man who has the divine governing principle within him? It is better for everyone to be under the control of divine wisdom, which should if possible come from within, but failing that should be imposed from without, so that as far as possible we may all become equals and friends under the same authority. The purpose of the law, which is the ally of everyone in the state, is to use control, as we do with children, fostering the best in them by the best in us, before letting them run free. (I have condensed this passage, so no inverted commas.) This would not please Hobbes or Hume either, though Hume might appreciate the reference to law and custom. The imagery repeats Plato’s general theme that the higher part of the soul must discipline the lower part, and that the wisest people, those who partake of the divine nature, are worthy teachers and (ideally) rulers. Taken crudely as ‘politics’ it certainly offends against the axioms of individualism! On the other hand, if we take it simply, it belongs in many human situations, where one would be glad of the privilege of being the ‘slave’ of some great scholar or saintly person. We may think here of Plato’s relation to Socrates. (And of Alcibiades’s passionate homage to Socrates in the Symposium.) In any case the end of Book IX, 592B, makes clear (what must always be kept in mind) that the Republic is primarily a spiritual guidebook, a myth of the soul, and not (though it instances many practical matters) a political programme. Socrates goes on to describe the good wise man who sets free his higher nature, is indifferent to wealth and honours, and will enjoy only such powers as make him a better man and do not damage the steady tenor of his being. Glaucon says, ‘So he won’t go into politics!’ Socrates says, ‘Yes, he certainly will, though not perhaps in the city of his birth, except through some divine event.’ Glaucon says, ‘You mean the city we have been talking of is an ideal city, not to be found on earth?’ Socrates replies, ‘Perhaps its pattern is laid up in heaven where he who wishes may see it, and in looking become its citizen.’ A final quotation, to cast a kinder light upon the author of the Laws: we are ‘not precluded from asserting in our doctrine that the female sex must share with the male, to the greatest extent possible, both in education and in all else.’ (Laws 805C.)

  We ‘forgive’ people in the remoter past because we can (we think) see more clearly the limitations of their situation, whereas we cannot see our own limitations so clearly, and, being still alive and free, do not readily accept the idea of being conditioned. Thinking about the past is moral thinking too, wherein the good historian exhibits a certain delicacy, for instance in describing the (then) tension between morals and politics. That evidence presents the larger issues and the views of the successful, must be kept in mind. Politics is a matter of life and death, but is also the language of politics, its modes of justification. A state may be ‘placed’ by its rhetoric, wherein even hypocrisy can have its value. It can be bad when a politician hesitates to say what he feels; it can also be good. It may be a mark of progress when certain prejudices are not uttered in public. On the other hand, ‘this is a free society’, surely we can say what we please. The politician who wishes to be re-elected often does not say what he pleases. Here the wavery line runs between private and public; and we may become better, or worse, by ‘conforming’. Hypocrisy can be our good friend in a moral situation where we weaken an evil intent by not uttering it. The bad tyrannical state exhibits and imposes itself in an established unchallengeable public value-language in which truth cannot be uttered, and from which many citizens can only ‘emigrate’ into the more private language of their own souls. Needless to say, there are no good societies, decent societies are partly bad, but there is a crucial difference, here taken for granted, between open societies and others. Observance of human rights is one good test. So, public rhetoric can be decent or fal
se, but in any case occupies a specialised and small area compared with the vast private region of our personal being or soul, wherein we are, to use a religious (variously interpret-able) image, alone with God.

  The argument led into politics by a consideration of different senses of ‘privacy’, ‘inwardness’, and ‘individual’, and in that context I tried to indicate the concept of ‘axioms’ as the assertion of isolated intuited general values. The idea of intuition in an ‘unexplained’ sense seems in place here, where publicity and universality are claimed in contexts which leave private morals deliberately obscure. Utopian political thinking, the detailed imagining of an ideal society, set in a political programme, is checked in a liberal scene by tolerance, individualism and (related to these) agnosticism, and by Hobbesian common-sense concerning human nature. Of course people in public political situations may speak from the heart, but must also, if they wish to persuade, consider the actual effect of their words, and the results of being misunderstood. The moralist, in the liberal state, must in this sense play the political game by the political rules. Innumerable moral problems and moral passions touch on and emerge into political situations, and private feeling and reasoning may provide the ‘heat’ for the forging of political policy. Much political policy is the public accommodation of, sometimes socially inconvenient, private wishes. Such struggles and adjustments are always going on. Politics remains the art of the possible, it is engineering; political choices, which concern many and various people, have to be larger and cruder. A better state makes the large choices with a degree of sensibility, as when conscientious law-breakers (or in war time conscientious objectors) are treated with discrimination and understanding. As I said earlier, the point of making a distinction between the political and the private ‘moral scene’ is itself a political point. The realm of axioms and the realm of densely textured moral cognitive consciousness are (morally) connected through the (limited) operation of abstract rules in private life in the manner I tried to describe earlier, through the work of sympathy and imagination (compassion) which leads us to make certain axioms ‘our own’. In practice of course all sorts of reasons of self-interest or idiosyncratic preference lead people to espouse political views and causes. The ‘politics’ of the individual has a background in his consciousness and his world. The decent state works with a mixture of morality and expediency. It is a prima facie duty of any government (sovereign) to defend its citizens’ interests. This is in a felicitous sense self-perpetuating in so far as election to political power involves adherence to certain (practical) moral objectives. Citizens wish, for instance, to elect a government which will concentrate on reducing unemployment, or making poor people less poor, or improving education. Politicians who think these goals only minimally feasible have to explain why. Individual voters check their ideals against their self-interest. We may identify with deprived or persecuted people through our imaginative understanding of their plight. Such understanding is an instance of moral knowledge. How much do we know, what do we know, about ‘what it is like to be’ other people? As moralists, as political moralists, we specialise, we have favourites. We sympathise with, know about, some sufferers not others, we imagine and desire some states of affairs not others. One could reflect on this matter of knowledge and desire in relation to many types of political dissension. There is in ordinary morals a give and take between an axiomatic and abstract level, and the deeper more densely cognitive personal level of my consciousness and my world. The battle between selfishness and unselfishness is enacted in this scenery. Rational argument may persuade us to embrace a cause or adopt a rule which is out of key with what our experience had led us to value and desire. Later on imagination may have ‘colonised’ the area which at first seemed so alien. Perhaps we trusted some intuitive sense that this might be done. Or, if we do not reject the original argument, the process may work the other way, leaving as dry imperatives, soon to be abandoned, modes of action which once seemed natural.

  13

  The Ontological Proof

  ‘The limits of the ontological arguments are obvious. But nothing is more important for philosophy and theology than the truth it contains, the acknowledgement of the unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality ... Modern secularism is rooted largely in the fact that the unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality no longer was seen, and that therefore the idea of God was imposed on the mind as a “strange body”. This produced first heteronomous subjection and then autonomous rejection. The destruction of the ontological argument is not dangerous. What is dangerous is the destruction of an approach which elaborates the possibility of the question of God. This approach is the meaning and truth of the ontological argument.’

  Paul Tillich (Systematic Theology,

  Part 11 ‘Being and God’, section I.)

  The Ontological Argument for, or Ontological Proof of, the existence of God is different in type from other ‘proofs’, which rely on conceptions such as cosmic design and a first cause. These latter proofs interest us very little now, and not only because we have other ways of accounting for the cosmos. The argument from design seems unsound in any case. Even if we leave aside the fact that almost every sentient being seems to be condemned to continual fear and suffering, why should swallows have to fly to Africa every year? And why should we venerate a Supreme Being whose most convincing claim to existence and importance is that of having created an impressive machine? A demon could have created the world. Such reasoning dwindles in the climate of today. The Ontological Proof, though often treated as an absurdity (Schopenhauer called it ‘a charming joke’ and even Tillich says its limits are obvious), is a deeper and more mysterious matter. Its effective ancestry is Platonic, but its ambiguities give rise to a variety of styles of interpretation. As a formal argument it was put together by a Benedictine monk, St Anselm of Canterbury (1033 — 1109), who in his preface to the Proof speaks, or prays, to God as follows. ‘I do not endeavour, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding therewith; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.’ These moving words may seem to indicate a limitation upon the claims of the Proof. Anselm’s formulation emerges from a context of deep belief and disciplined spirituality, and may be seen as a clarified or academic summary of what is already known, rather than as an argument to be put to an outsider. It may be seen too as a proof which a man can only give to himself, herein resembling cogito ergo sum, to which it is indeed related by Descartes. Yet these reminders do not set the Proof aside as a piece of history or item of private piety, and in spite of having been apparently demolished by Kant it has continued to interest philosophers and theologians. Credo ut intellegam (I believe in order to understand) is not just an apologist’s paradox, but an idea with which we are familiar in personal relationships, in art, in theoretical studies. I have faith (important place for this concept) in a person or idea in order to understand him or it, I intuitively know and grasp more than I can yet explain. The Meno speaks of a kind of ‘grace’ which brings to us what cannot be said.to be either natural or taught. Anselm loves God’s truth. Faith (loving belief) and knowledge often have an intimate relation which is not easy to analyse in terms of what is prior to what.

  Anselm states the Proof more than once, the second time in reply to objections made by another Benedictine monk. The formulations differ in ways which have interested modern philosophers. For purposes of the Proof God is taken to be the Ens Realissimum, aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit, the most real Being, than which nothing greater [or more perfect] can be conceived. The first formulation, engaging battle with the Fool in the Fourteenth Psalm who said in his heart that there is no God, distinguishes between what exists (or is conceived of) in the mind (in intellectu) and what exists in reality outside the mind (in re). To exist in re is taken to be a quality (predicate), in the
case of something good a perfection, which is extra to that of existing only in intellectu. It is then clear that if we can understand the idea of God, which we surely can, then we must also understand that God exists, since if he did not then he would lack one important quality or perfection, that of existence, and would fail to be that than which nothing greater can be conceived, in intellectu and in re being greater than in intellectu alone.

  ‘Whatever is understood exists in the understanding. And assuredly that than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.’

  In this formulation the idea that God, thought of as supreme perfection, cannot be conceived not to exist, and that if we can conceive of him we know that he exists, appears to depend upon the distinction between in intellectu and in re and the positing of existence as an extra quality. Critics of the Proof (most famously Kant) argue that existence cannot be so treated. The idea of existence adds nothing to a concept, existence is not a predicate. The conviction that God exists is contained in the believer’s initial idea of God which appears in the premises. Anselm’s earliest critic, a contemporary monk, Gaunilo, who of course believed in God, anticipates such an objection. He challenges Anselm’s assumption that he can frame an idea of God. ‘I do not know that reality itself which God is, nor can I frame a conjecture of that reality from some other reality. For you yourself assert that there can be nothing else like it.’ If one is going to argue from perfect essence to real existence then could one not argue anything into existence from the imagined idea of a single perfect instance (for example the idea of a perfect island)? ‘Whether ... so long as I am most positively aware of my existence I can conceive of my non-existence I am not sure. But if I can, why can I not conceive of the non-existence of whatever else I know with the same certainty?’ In his reply Anselm answers Gaunilo’s doubt about whether we can conceive of God. ‘Everything that is less good, in so far as it is good, is like the greater good. It is therefore evident to any rational mind that by ascending from the lesser good to the greater we can form a considerable notion of a being than which a greater is inconceivable.’ He also enlarges the argument about essence and existence which rests upon the conceptual difference between ‘God’ and all other cases.