Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘You often repeat that I assert that what is greater than all other beings is in the understanding, and if it is in the understanding it exists also in reality for otherwise the being which is greater than all would not be greater than all. Nowhere in my writings is such a demonstration found. For the real existence of a being which is said to be greater than all other beings cannot be demonstrated in the same way with the real existence of one that is said to be a being than which a greater cannot be conceived.’

  ‘It is possible to conceive of and understand a being whose non-existence is impossible; but he who conceives of this conceives of a greater being than one whose non-existence is possible ... What he conceives of must exist; for anything whose non-existence is possible is not that of which he conceives. Of God alone it can be said that it is impossible to conceive of his non-existence.’

  Gaunilo’s reasonable doubt about whether he can conceive of God is answered by Anselm as follows. We recognise and identify goodness and degrees of good, and are thus able to have the idea of a greatest conceivable good. God is taken to be ab initio and by definition good, it is moral perfection that we are concerned with, which must be in at the start and cannot be added later. This notion would be supplied by faith or intuition, and supported by metaphysical arguments (yet to be considered) concerning the special status of the concept ‘Good’. It must also be assumed that other attributes of God, such as omnipotence and omniscience, should be seen as aspects of, or deducible from, his goodness. Anselm’s reply also clarifies his first argument. He is, he says, not speaking of something which is, or happens to be, greater than all other beings, but of something than which a greater cannot be conceived, and whose non-existence is impossible. This is the respect in which God is unique. To put the matter in the terms in which it has later been handled, God and God alone exists, not contingently or accidentally, but necessarily; what the Proof defines and proves is his necessary existence. In this case alone if you can conceive of this entity you are ipso facto certain that what you are thinking of is real. The definition of God has having necessary not contingent existence is an important clarification for any interested party. God cannot be a particular, a contingent thing, one thing among others; a contingent god might be a great demonic or angelic spirit, but not the Being in question. Anything that happens to exist, and could perhaps not exist, or about whose existence one might speculate as about empirical discoveries, or about which one could state ‘what it would be like’ if it existed, is not what is thought of here. God’s necessary existence is connected with his not being an object. God is not to be worshipped as an idol or identified with any empirical thing; as is indeed enjoined by the Second Commandment.

  We are in process of transition here to what may be seen as another and supplementary argument, a metaphysical argument which is also an appeal to experience. Of course good metaphysical arguments are successful appeals to experience, and can be seen too, as this one can, as aspects of other arguments which cluster round in support. Anselm himself makes the transition with natural ease. God is something necessary not contingent, he is not an empirical object in the world. How do we know about him then, and from whence do we derive the unique idea of good which can be extended into a concept of perfection? (Why should not a perfect devil exist non-contingently and necessarily?) God, who is invisible and not an object in the world, can be seen and clearly seen everywhere in the visible things of the world, which are his creatures and shadows. ‘So easily then can the Fool who does not accept sacred authority be refuted if he denies that a notion may be formed from other objects of a being than which a greater is inconceivable. But if any Catholic would deny this, let him remember that the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.’ Anselm is here quoting St Paul, Romans 1. 20. We ‘see’ God through the morally good things of the world, through our (moral) perception of what is beautiful and holy, through our ability to distinguish good and evil, and through our just God-fearing understanding of what is not good. So we find God both, and inextricably both, in the world and in our own soul. (This is like the argument, or intuition, of Descartes.) We have instinctive faith in God, and also conceive of him by looking at the world; and when we consider what we conceive of we understand that it exists necessarily and not contingently. The idea of necessity emerges both from God’s evident omnipresent majesty and from his parently non-accidental nature. God exists, he exists necessarily, we conceive of him by noticing degrees of goodness, which we see in ourselves and in all the world which is a shadow of God. These are aspects of the Proof wherein the definition of God as non-contingent is given body by our most general perceptions and experience of the fundamental and omnipresent (uniquely necessary) nature of moral value, thought of in a Christian context as God. This is essentially an argument from morality not from design. It appeals to our moral understanding, and not to any of the more strictly rational considerations relied upon by Aquinas, who did not accept Anselm’s Proof. Some supporters of the Fool might agree that ‘God’ might name something non-contingent, but in precisely this case something impossible. Others who feel that perhaps the Proof proves something, but not any sort of God, might return to Plato and claim some uniquely necessary status for moral value as something (uniquely) impossible to be thought away from human experience, and as in a special sense, if conceived of, known as real. This claim might be associated with concepts of religion which reject a personal God and other supernatural beliefs. Such a return to Plato leads back into other problems. Anselm’s Proof is offered to anybody, even to Fools. Gaunilo, a professional holy man, wondered whether he could conceive of God. God (mythically) seems like a person with a proper name, and this can be, certainly psychologically, important in thinking Anselm’s Proof.

  Anselm quotes Romans 1. 20 in the course of arguing that of course we can conceive of God, seeing the invisible in the visible, the uncreated in the created, the great Good in the lesser good. The context in Paul, interestingly enough, concerns the inexcusable conduct of those who can or could see God, but turn away. (‘Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools’: verse 22.) There seems to be no evidence that Paul knew about Plato. Similarities are noted (e.g. by E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 37) between Paul’s references to demonic powers and the ‘intermediaries’ of the Symposium, of which Eros is one. But of course the Symposium story, and the Timaeus story, are myths. Plato was not a Manichaean, and neither was Paul, though both were acutely aware of the power of evil, and lived in societies which believed in ambiguous spirits. Paul was certainly breathing Greek air and his intense mystical religiosity, which has so long and variously fed and disturbed the church, might find a home in Platonism. Romans 1.20: ‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.’ Karl Barth comments on this verse, agreeing with Paul about the unrighteousness of those who turn away from what they ought to be able to see clearly.

  ‘This we have forgotten, and must allow it to be brought back once more to our minds. Our lack of humility, our lack of recollection, our lack of fear in the presence of God, are not in our present condition inevitable, however natural they may seem to us. Plato in his wisdom recognised long ago that behind the visible there lies the invisible universe which is the Origin of all concrete things. And moreover the solid good sense of the men of the world had long ago perceived that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The clear honest eyes of the poet in the book of Job, and of the preacher Solomon had long ago rediscovered, mirrored in the world of appearance, the archetypal, unobservable undiscoverable Majesty of God.’

  (Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.)

  Barth, although he admits that our experience may be darkened, appeals to the ‘solid good sense’ and ‘clear honest eyes’ of accessible witnesses.
We see in our lower things the shadow of higher things, and thereby our continual (daily, hourly, minutely) sense of the connection between the good and the real can lead us to believe in the supreme reality of what is perfect: the unique place of God, or Good, in human life. The appeal to experience is not just to esoteric strictly contemplative or religiously supernatural experience, since so many situations and activities can suggest this connection. Gaunilo raises doubts about whether we can be said to conceive of God or discover him through knowledge of any other reality, since Anselm says he is unique. Anselm answers that we see him in his creation. If we can see God in the world we can see him everywhere in the world and must be able so to see him. The part played by love in this seeing is implicit, but again need not be thought of as something unusual, specialised or remote. All our best activities involve desires which are disciplined and purified in the process. We often long to understand a truth which we already intuit. Reflection upon our ordinary perceptions of what is valuable, what it is like to seek what is true or just in intellectual or personal situations, or to scrutinise and direct our affections, can thus also lend support to the argument about existence and essence which appeared at first as a kind of logical argument offered to clever sceptically minded Fools.

  Anselm’s passionate certainty springs from his personal communion with God. His metaphysical argument concerning an Ens Realissimum has a background in Plato through Plotinus and Augustine, and the neoplatonic transformations of Plato’s Form of the Good into a personified One. Plato’s philosophy expounds a fundamental connection between epistemology and ethics; truthful knowledge and virtue are bound together. For purposes of considering the Proof it is important to separate strands in his thought. The Theory of Forms, in so far as it arose out of attempts, such as we see in the early dialogues, perhaps made by the historic Socrates, to define certain moral concepts, is ab initio involved with both epistemological and moral problems. The Forms later appear in discussions about ‘universals’, thought and truth, opinion and knowledge, general ideas and particulars. The connection of the Forms with morality and the spiritual life emerges at the same time naturally, together with their ‘ontological’ or existential function, out of reflection upon what serious truthful thinking is like. Metaphysics is inspired by a gifted thinker’s scrutiny of his own thought. Thought ‘aims’ at reality, but with varying degrees of success. An object of serious thought must be something real, serious thinking is moral truthful thinking, goodness is connected with reality, the supremely good is the supremely real. Plato pictures objects of thought at different levels of insight as possessing different degrees of reality. The contrast between states of illusion (selfish habits or egoistic fantasy) and honest clarified truthful serious thinking suggests a moral picture of the mind as in a continuous engagement with an independent reality. ‘Truth’ is not just a collection of facts. Truthfulness, the search for truth, for a closer connection between thought and reality, demands and effects an exercise of virtues and a purification of desires. The ability, for instance, to think justly about what is evil, or to love another person unselfishly, involves a discipline of intellect and emotion. Thought, goodness and reality are thus seen to be connected. The intensity of Plato’s vision of this connection forces him (if one may put it thus) to separate an idea of goodness as the supreme and fundamental requirement, the essential human aim or task, and to separate this idea in a unique manner from the imperfect hurly-burly of the human struggle. The idea of Good cannot be compromised or tainted by its inclusion in actual human proceedings, where its magnetism is nevertheless, and even at the lowest levels, omnipresent. Good is unique, it is ‘above being’, it fosters our sense of reality as the sun fosters life on earth. The virtues, the other moral Forms, are aspects of this central idea, increasingly understood as interconnected parts of it. The attributes of God may also thus (in Christian theology) be deduced from an original intuitive concept of him. It must be kept in mind that Plato is talking in metaphysical metaphors, myths, images; there is no Platonic ‘elsewhere’, similar to the Christian ‘elsewhere’. What is higher is, as Eckhart observed, inside the soul. The Theory of Forms never really solved ‘the problem of universals’. Nevertheless Plato’s metaphysic founds a basic connection between knowledge and morals. The unique elevation of the Form of the Good is a metaphysical argument supported, in the Republic, by many discussions of various human activities and problems. It is also illustrated by the most memorable of all philosophical metaphors, expressive of the distance between good and evil. The argument is also of course a mythical religious vision, which in Plato’s mind has nothing to do with a personal God or gods.

  In the Cave myth the Theory of Forms is presented as a pilgrimage where different realities or thought-objects exist for individual thinkers at different levels, appearing at lower levels as shadows cast by objects at the next higher level: an endlessly instructive image. The pilgrimage is inspired by intimations of realities which lie just beyond what can be easily seen. The concept of ‘an object of thought’ has been a source of confusion in philosophy, suggesting intermediary entities necessary to convey thought to reality. In the myth of the Phaedrus the disembodied soul sees the moral Forms individually. The Demiurge in the Timaeus, creating the world, looks at and (in so far as his alien material will allow) copies the Forms. The virtuous man sees and knows what is more real, the saint what is most real. The idea of the perfect object is one with its reality, which is not the case at other levels, where the light is obstructed and something is always to be intuited beyond. It may be noted that Plato is less democratic, or less optimistic, than Anselm, who thought that anyone could conceive of God. Of course the Christian deity gives to individual pilgrims direct supernatural help, not offered by the Form of the Good. The latter exerts a magnetic force, but is also impersonal and very distant. It would of course be a mistake to interpret Plato’s ‘objects of thought’ in terms of sense data or Husserlian essences or Christian metaphysical being. The best commentary on, or supplementary explanation of, the idea is probably given by Plato himself in the Meno, in the myth of anamnesis. The slave solving the geometrical problem is orienting himself towards, bringing his attention to bear upon, something dark and alien, on which light then falls, and which he ‘makes his own’. He ‘sees’ an object invisible but grasped as ‘there’, he is able to concentrate and attend. (To attend is also to wait.) These familiar metaphors are important. It is then as if he always knew it and were remembering it. The process of discovery is to be thought of as accompanied or motivated by a passion or desire which is increased and purified in the process. (As portrayed by Dante in Paradiso I, 7 – 9.) This is something which we can all recognise and which can be illustrated in many different kinds of human activity.

  In learning, loving, creatively imagining, we may be inspired or overcome by a sense of certainty at a particular point. (Compare the intuitive leap in Descartes’s Proof.) The importance and value of this disturbing experience is not diminished by the fact that ‘certainties’ or ‘recollections’ are not solitary revelations, but take place in a general world where they can also be judged by results. As Plato’s picture indicates, you can only see at your own level and a little above. Perception here is, and properly, the image of thought and spiritual insight. Truth and progress (or some truth and some progress) are the reward of some exercise of virtue, courage, humility, patience. The creative artist is like the slave, he attends to the dark something out of which he feels certain he can, if he concentrates and waits, elicit his poem, picture, music: it is as if he remembered it or found it waiting for him, veiled but present. He hopes to be taught, and places himself in a situation where this is possible. In the case of the slave in that moving but in some ways distressing scene, the certainty is assisted by Socrates and his friends. But this too is like life. Paul Valéry, with poetic, and spiritual, inspiration in mind, says that ‘the proper, unique and perpetual object of thought is that which does not exist’. ‘A difficulty i
s a light. An inseparable difficulty is a sun.’ And, ‘At its highest point, love is a determination to create that being which it has taken for its object.’ (Mauvaises Pensées et Autres, Pléiade edition, vol. II, pp. 785, 795, 818.) This states a kind of Ontological Proof. Valery’s use of the word ‘unique’ casts a glance, in Platonic style, toward other comparable activities, as if at a certain level of seriousness and love all strivings have not only similar objects but the same object. (End of Dante’s Paradiso.) Simone Weil, with reference to Valery, speaks of ‘an orientation of the soul towards something which one does not know, but whose reality one does know’, and an ‘effort of attention empty of all content’ which then ‘catches’ what is certainly its object, as when we try to remember a word. Also: ‘Ontological Proof is mysterious because it does not address itself to the intelligence, but to love.’ (Note books, p. 375.) In Pensées sans ordre concernant l’Amour de Dieu (p. 136) she puts it more simply: ‘For everything which concerns absolute good and our contact with it, the proof by perfection (wrongly called ontological), is not only valid, but the only proof which is valid. It is instantly implied by the notion of good.’ Also (more diffidently) Collingwood (An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 124): ‘Anselm, putting these two thoughts together, the original Platonic principle that when we really think (but when do we really think, if ever?) we must be thinking of a real object, and the neo-Platonic idea of a perfect being (something which we cannot help conceiving in our minds – but does that guarantee it more than a mere idea?), or rather pondering on the latter thought until he rediscovered the former as latent within it, realised that to think of this perfect being at all was already to think of him, or it, as existing.’