by Iris Murdoch
Anselm believed in a personal God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with whom the Psalmist held converse. Anselm prayed to this Person, talked with him and experienced his personal presence. He knew that God existed. Plato knew that Good was not only real but supremely so, a certainty less apparently simple than belief in God. He knew that morality, an orientation between good and evil, was in a unique sense fundamental and ubiquitous in human life. Anselm was inspired, for the sake of others and to please himself and God, to utter his faith in the form of a metaphysical statement. His argument is striking and memorable because of its condensed form and appearance of being a sort of logical proof which could be offered to sceptics. It contains an appeal to experience which implicitly includes experience of God; as Plato’s arguments include appeals to various kinds of moral experiences, in learning, love, politics and so on. Plato knew that mathematics and philosophy were very difficult and that goodness was difficult too. The prisoners in the Cave are pictured as able to get out. But the distance involved is very great. In general Plato was an austere moral thinker. Few could rise high. The ‘gravity’ of sin compels us. Herein he agrees with Jewish thought, though (as mentioned earlier) it is unlikely that he knew anything about the Jews. How much he was interested in and ‘touched’ by other forms of oriental wisdom is disputed. The myth of Er recounted at length at the end of the Republic is (perhaps) Zoroastrian. (There is a reference to Zoroaster in Alcibiades I (122A), but taken by Momigliano (Alien Wisdom, ch. 6) to be ‘one of the many arguments which make this dialogue almost certainly spurious’.) Plato certainly knew something about oriental religions, and myths about life after death, though his connection with these may have been exaggerated by later Greeks. He may have been (was probably) involved in forms of ‘mystical’ rites. He recounts myths, and invents his own myths. But he cannot be said to have taken any form of myth literally, and constantly draws attention to its status of an edifying or hermeneutic ‘as if’. At Meno 86BC (quoted earlier) Socrates, speaking of how anamnesis seems like knowledge remembered from a previous life, adds that he cannot be confident that such things could be the case, but if we think about them we shall be braver and better, having faith in our ability to discover the truth. In the Republic (592) we are reminded that the ‘ideal state’ is not to be found on earth but may exist perhaps in heaven. So with the myth of Er, when the long amazing story of the other world and the fate of the soul after death has been completed (621B), Socrates says,
‘And the tale is saved, as the saying is, and was not lost. And it will save us if we believe it and we shall safely cross the river of Lethe and keep our souls unspotted from the world. But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever, that we may be dear to the gods, both during our sojourn here and when we receive our reward, as victors in the games go about to gather theirs.’
The idea of the soul’s immortality must, if its ‘saving power’ is to remain pure, be taken in and acted upon in this life, whatever may be said, in a story, about another one. This is (in my view) the sense in which the story is saved, that is put to its proper use as a spiritual myth or metaphor. And Phaedo 114DE: after a long tale of another world, another life where those who have ‘purified themselves by philosophy will live henceforth without bodies’, Socrates adds:
‘But, Simmias, because of all these things which we have recounted we ought to do our best to acquire virtue and wisdom in life ... It would not be fitting for a man of sense to maintain that all this is just as I have described it, but that this or something like it is true concerning our souls and their abodes, since the soul is shown to be immortal, I think he may properly and worthily venture to believe, for the venture is well worth while; and he ought to repeat such things to himself as incantations, which is why I have drawn out the story to such length.’
That is, as it seems to me, these mythical pictures should be kept and used, not as literal factual information, or as magic, but as enlivening spiritual images. As in Buddhism and in mystical or demythologised Christianity. Indeed innumerable Christians probably did and do instinctively use (or save) the Christian stories in this way. Plato, whatever he may in this respect have ‘dabbled in’, positively excludes theistic magic and belief in gods. The Form of the Good is never identified with God. The author of the Laws, with diminished hope for human nature, prescribes picturesque popular religion as suitable for those who cannot rise. It is of course a part of Anselm’s faith that an omnipotent God can save any creature, that all, however benighted, may receive grace, distinguish right and wrong, have intimations of light, pray to God and experience his presence. In this respect Anselm is closer to Kant than to Plato. Kant too thinks that anyone can be good; he attacked Anselm’s argument but produced his own Proof in the form of the Categorical Imperative. Anselm, like Plato, and indeed Kant, would see the truth of his picture as everywhere evident to serious reflection on human life.
Stated by itself, as Anselm first states it, the argument may indeed seem frail, only to be given substance by a belief or faith deriving from another source, a specious way of expressing a personal certainty which is already tacitly concealed in its premises. Anselm amends the argument, which he presents twice, the second time in answer to Gaunilo’s criticisms. In the first statement he seems to say that the idea of a most perfect being must entail the existence of that being, which would otherwise lack the quality, which in the case of a good being is a perfection, of existence. His fellow monk objected that one could thus argue anything into existence by conceiving of a perfect instance. Anselm replies that the Proof refers to God alone, not just a thing among others which happens to be ‘best’, but a unique being, existing not contingently but of necessity. The idea of necessity here joins the certainty of an ardent faith. The difference between the two statements has interested some modern critics who argue that only the first version is vulnerable to Kant’s contention that existence is not a predicate. In defending himself at the stage of the second version of the logical argument, Anselm also offers the argument from experience which is omnipresent in Plato. (One may notice a similar progression in modern discussions of the problem, wherein a primary consideration of the essence-existence argument is then joined by a more tentative ad hoc appeal to experience.) The argument from the idea of a series, as conveying the idea of the most perfect, is an abstract form of the full Platonic degrees-of-reality argument, the appeal to which provides us with contrasts between illusion and reality as contrasts between good and bad. Anselm resorts to St Paul, and implicitly to Plato, as providing a proof from all the world, proved by the whole of human experience. His definition of God both clarifies his earlier intuitive statement and opens the way for a wider argument.
Anselm, as he now develops his thought, appears to offer two mutually supportive arguments, a ‘logical’ argument about necessary existence suitably amended, and an ancillary argument from experience to support or enlarge the idea, required by the first argument, that we can conceive of God. The logical argument presents God’s existence as being (uniquely) necessary not contingent. The argument from moral experience may be stated in the metaphysical terminology of degrees of reality, or as a more homely ad hominem appeal to our sense of God (Good) as discovered everywhere in the world. Plato uses both methods, presenting large mythical pictures, and explaining them by examples from work, politics, intellectual studies, human relations. The Forms are pure, separate and alone, the Form of the Good is above being. We are saved by Eros and techné, by love and toil, by justice, by good desires and by the search for truth, by the magnetism which draws us to innumerable forms of what is good; whether we are philosophers or mathematicians or politicians or lovers, or craftsmen like the carpenter in Republic Book X. Thus we are continually shown the reality of what is better and the illusory nature of what is worse. We learn of perfection and imperf
ection through our ability to understand what we see as an image or shadow of something better which we cannot yet see. The idea of Good, perceived in our confused reality, also transcends it, Good is not a particular, it is not a thing among others. (The mythical Olympic gods are persons, rather like us, but more powerful, and often just as nasty. Good is above gods.) This is what Anselm expresses when he quotes Romans 1. 20, joining Platonic metaphysics, and the neo-Platonic conception of a perfect being, to the Judaeo-Christian experience of the omnipresence of a personal God. The argument from experience emerges as it were under the pressure of the logical argument. If we are able to distinguish necessary and contingent we can see that God cannot be contingent. Experience shows us the uniquely unavoidable nature of God (Good, or Categorical Imperative), its omnipresence, its purity and separateness from our fallen world, in which its magnetic force is nevertheless everywhere perceptible. God either exists necessarily or is impossible. All our experience shows that he exists.
Philosophical discussions of the Proof, whether Kantian or modern, have usually tended to take the logical argument, stated by itself, as primary (as if one could talk of God without reference to morality) and in this guise it has attracted some amused observers. It was in this diminished form rejected by Gaunilo and treated by Schopenhauer as a joke. Its more recent (twentieth-century) critics have sometimes felt moved to append an appeal to experience, but as a personal contribution of their own, not quite part of the picture. I would argue that the Proof, as something to be taken seriously, must be understood by looking at Plato. Its deep sense, whose restatement is now of importance in servicing our concept of religion, lies in the degrees-of-reality argument joined to the Platonic, and Pauline, reference to all the world: the argument about necessary existence can only be intelligibly stated in this frame. We gain the concept of this unique form of necessity from our unavoidable experience of good and evil. If God (or the ‘unconditional element’) is a reality anywhere it is a reality everywhere and is in this sense unlike other considerations. Kant makes this point in his distinction between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative: we are not gentlemen volunteers but conscripts in the army of the Moral Law. Much of the tissue of the original Proof is lost in modern views of it. We shy away from Anselm because of Kant’s argument, and because Anselm is concerned with a Supreme Being, God as an entity with a proper name, which is unacceptable to modern secularists and also to some modern believers and theologians. A Platonic and Christian idea of love as a, in some sense unitary, positive force is absent from recent ‘logical’ moral discussions. Kant, whose dualism admits no degrees of reality and no love, more clearly marks the breach with Plato, which is then taken for granted in modern discussions of Kant. Many thinkers believed, and no doubt believe, that Kant finally refuted Anselm by pointing out that existence is not a predicate. (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, Book II, ch. III, section 4; Kemp Smith translation.) We do not add anything to the idea of something by saying that it exists. ‘We do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is. Otherwise it would not be exactly the same thing that exists.’ Moreover there can be no ‘necessary existence’, which is to be contrasted with ‘contingent existence’. Necessity is conceptual. ‘Under condition that there be a triangle (that is, that a triangle is given) three angles will necessarily be found in it.’ ‘To posit a triangle and yet to reject its three angles is self-contradictory; but there is no contradiction in rejecting the triangle together with its three angles. The same holds true of the concept of an absolutely necessary being. If its existence be rejected, we reject the thing itself with all its predicates; and no question of contradiction can then arise.’ Kant here expresses something like a modern view of necessity as existing only inside a deductive system, belonging to a sign-system and not to the world. The tautologous, non-empirical, nature of such necessity, which belongs only to definition and cannot be exported to entail anything else, is clear in the case of the triangle. We cannot think something into being simply from the conception of it, as Anselm seems to be arguing. Someone may say when thinking about the Proof, ‘What about material objects, aren’t they unavoidable, couldn’t God be in that sense, why should we stay with triangles?’ Kant would refer the speaker back to the Critique of Pure Reason where the strict limitations of human knowledge are transcendentally deduced. Material objects belong among fundamental conceptual forms of our experience. It is, precisely, the case that God is not thus experienced and indeed cannot be. We cannot conceive of him in the sense required by Anselm. The borders of empirical knowledge and human reason must be strictly drawn to make room for religious faith, which must acknowledge a certain agnosticism. Kant, as I mentioned above, establishes in the space thereby created his own proof of our ineluctable spiritual destiny in the form of the Categorical Imperative, unique, necessary, non-contingent, thereby supplying the ‘unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality’ to which Tillich wishes us to attend. Kant’s command of duty, linked to the concept of freedom, is unavoidable in a sense analogous to that of Plato’s Good, and equally to be understood as something which is everywhere in human experience. Thus a (differently stated) philosophical Proof can be said to belong to Kant as well as to Plato. Both reject, and this brings them closer to us today, the concept of supernatural deity as not only irrelevant to the spiritual life, but as harmful to it.
Kant’s refutation certainly entertained Schopenhauer who cannot see how the Proof was ever taken seriously. He reproves Descartes for attempting his own version of it. ‘We find even the excellent Descartes who gave the first impulse to subjective reflection, and thereby became the father of modern philosophy, still entangled in confusions for which it is difficult to account.’ Schopenhauer, who does not share Kant’s particular quasi-Christian piety, rejoices in his attack on Anselm and goes on to deride the Proof. ‘Oh for the prophetic wisdom of Aristotle! He had never heard of the Ontological Proof, but as though he saw into the night of the coming dark ages, detected in them that scholastic dodge, and wanted to bar the way thereto, he carefully demonstrated in the seventh chapter of the second book of the Posterior Analytics that the definition of a thing and the proof of its existence are two different and eternally separate matters.’ (The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, ch. II, section 7; trans. E. F. J. Payne.) Schopenhauer concludes that ‘considered by daylight ... this famous Ontological Proof is really a charming joke.’ It is interesting that Schopenhauer, blinded by Kant, does not seem to have noticed that Anselm is using more than one argument, and that one of his arguments is Platonic, and in this sense close to Schopenhauer’s own sympathies. Hegel, in rejecting Kant’s sceptical idealism, made the idea of the reality of the rational into an all-inclusive system, which could be described as a huge Ontological Proof. Yet this would (as critics of Hegel could point out) be a misnomer, since Hegel’s system excludes the idea, essential to the Proof, and common to Plato and Anselm, and even Kant, of morality as encounter with an (unassimilable) external other. One of the great problems of metaphysics is to explain the idea of goodness in terms which combine its peculiar purity and separateness (its transcendence) with details of its omnipresent effectiveness in human life. This problem (as Kierkegaard contended) ‘gets lost’ inside Hegel’s system, where it is (and a fortiori in Marxism) dissolved (some would say solved); it thereby parts company with the aspects of the Proof which I wish to pursue into relationship with contemporary moral and religious problems.
In spite of Kant’s authoritative intervention the Ontological Proof has not lost its charm, and has received, with new modes of philosophy, new modes of criticism. Russell and Moore were interested in it. Wittgenstein thought about it. Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm drew attention to the two versions of the argument and suggested that Kant’s objections were fatal only to the first version. Both these critics, in attempting to rehabilitate the ‘logical’ argument, also offer, but as something ra
ther personal and without any major discussion, ancillary arguments from experience. Anselm thought the visibility of God in the world was obvious. Both Kant and Plato appealed to experience in arguing the special status and absolute necessity of their own ‘Good’. Malcolm’s article, in the Philosophical Review, January 1960, initiated a new phase of controversy. Both Malcolm, and Hartshorne who raised the matter earlier, regard the plausible version of the Proof as a sort of hypothesis which might be put (Hartshorne) as ‘If “God” stands for something conceivable, it stands for something actual.’ In relation to this they agree in finding Kant’s argument guilty of a petitio principii. Malcolm puts it this way. Kant claims that the subject can simply be rejected, that is, not posited.
‘I think that Caterus, Kant, and numerous other philosophers have been mistaken in supposing that the proposition “God is a necessary being” (or “God necessarily exists”) is equivalent to the conditional proposition “If God exists then He necessarily exists”. For how do they want the antecedent clause “If God exists” to be understood? Clearly they want it to imply that it is possible that God does not exist. The whole point of Kant’s analysis is to try to show that it is possible to “reject the subject”. [That is, to refuse to posit it ...] Let us make this implication explicit in the conditional proposition so that it reads: “If God exists (and it is possible that He does not) then He necessarily exists.” ’