by Iris Murdoch
So, we can only describe human life; fire, and fire’s likeness to sun, are of course impressive phenomena, one does not have to say why, we are not bound to explain or explain away or treat as an error St Augustine’s call upon God. These things are to be looked at, treated with respect. One must just arrange the facts in a clear and intelligible (perspicuous) manner and be satisfied with looking. (Übersichlichkeit, translated ‘bird’s-eye view’, in Philosophical Remarks, p. 52.) There is much here of what is right in the structuralist revolt against that sort of ‘scientific’ anthropology. Of course structuralist thinkers, far from being purely negative, have produced a massive counter-theory; whereas Wittgenstein, failing to satisfy the ‘other person’ of Tractatus 6. 53, has simply told us to look at how things are. Not always easy. Possibly he did not intend the remark about the magic of metaphysics for publication. The remarks about the perspicuous representation, the way we write and see things, the need to set out the connections, and the notion of Weltanschauung are repeated at Investigations 122.
Wittgenstein says that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’. (Investigations II iv, p. 178.) I would say that the best picture of most kinds of thinking is perception, and the best picture of serious contemplative thinking is serious contemplative perception; as when we attend to a human face, music, a flower, a visual work of art (etc. etc.). Such close mental attention involves the conception of ‘presence’. The Ontological Proof is an exercise in serious contemplative thinking of this kind. ‘Ontological Proof is mysterious because it doesn’t address itself to the intelligence, but to love.’ Simone Weil, Notebooks, p. 375. (See also pp. 80, 100, 108.) The ‘necessity’ of the Proof is a certainty which belongs to the battlefield of our existence as humans, and to the creative imagination and love which is part of this. The argument is (may be seen as) transcendental. The definition of God (the necessity and sovereignty of Good) is connected with the definition of a human being. We can ‘think away’ material objects from human existence, but not the concepts of good, true, and real. Is this an empirical matter? Here the sense of a logical certainty reaches out to join hands with an experiential one. Collingwood described Anselm as pondering upon the unavoidability of the idea of God, and finding ‘latent within it’ the Platonic idea that ‘real thinking’ has a real object. (An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 124.) What is at stake here if we wish to abandon ‘God’ and try ‘Good’ instead may be taken to interest moral philosophy, or both moral philosophy and theology. Perhaps moral philosophy may in some way be ‘forced’ to concern itself with the demythologisation of religion; that is with the ‘deep’ human reality upon which both religion and morality rest, and which may be easier to discern and discuss now that religion is detaching itself from supernatural dogma. This age, which produces pseudo-scientific anti-human ‘philosophies’, also makes possible new modes of reflection. Certainly theology cannot ignore, indissolubly includes, some form of moral philosophy. With these changes comes a deepened general understanding of great philosophers, such as Plato and Kant, who assumed as obvious the deep connection, indeed identity, between a moral and a religious view. Those who reject ‘God’ but are attracted by the Proof may do so in order to clarify a central problem in moral philosophy, or may also wish to arrive at some clearer view of a Godless religion. The reasons for rejecting God are themselves clarified by the Proof. No empirical contingent being could be the required God and what is ‘necessary’ cannot be God either. The concept of an existing personal being is too deeply embedded in the traditional idea of God. One might say that God is impossible, though (in obvious senses of ‘meaning’) not meaningless. Well, does not the Proof prove something to be necessary? It is about necessity and certainty and goodness.
Why the quest for certainty, why should that be so specially important? Certainty here is the subjective aspect of the necessary existence of God. It must be so. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’ And must not all morality rest, as Kant felt, upon a similar certainty? It is not a matter of accident or speculation. Yet moral confidence is often misplaced. This fact has a fundamental position in political philosophy. ‘Be tolerant’ is a political axiom. Should not the idea of certainty be regarded with sceptical caution? ‘Certainties’ occasion persecutions. This too must be kept in mind. The good citizen must use his private wisdom to deal with these public matters. In discussing the Ontological Proof I have wanted to move from ‘God’ to ‘Good’, taking ‘religion’ along too. There are various problems about ‘religion’ and being ‘religious’, which concern liturgy, rites, styles of meditation and so on. There is in an ordinary superficial sense a religious outlook, religious preoccupations, a religious psychology which is detachable from dogma. The word ‘religiosity’ might convey an adverse view of such a field. Religion is a mode of belief in the unique sovereign place of goodness or virtue in human life. One might put it flatly by saying that there is something about moral value which goes jusqu’au bout. It must go all the way, to the base, to the top, it must be everywhere, and is in this respect unlike other things (e.g. sex) of which something apparently similar might be said. It adheres essentially to the conception of being human, and cannot be detached; and we may express this by saying that it is not accidental, does not exist contingently, is above being. This is a theoretical philosophical way of talking which may or may not attract religious imagery. Anselm’s Proof has interested thinkers because it seems so concise and ‘logical’. But neither its Christian nor its logical charms must be allowed to conceal its fundamental sense. The idea of Good (goodness, virtue) crystallises out of our moral activity. The concept of good emphasises a unity of aspiration and belief concerning the absolute importance of what is done on this heterogeneous scene. What the Proof ‘proves’ speaks with an especially apt voice now when traditional supernatural religious beliefs fade, and seem to be inevitably superseded by scientific and technological modes and conceptions of human existence. The charm and power of technology and the authority of a ‘scientific outlook’ conceal the speed with which the idea of the responsible moral spiritual individual is being diminished. The fragmentation of morality menaces this individual, as it menaces the society in which he flourishes. Political utilitarianism may also lead people with high motives into a ‘specialised’ fragmented morality. In extreme situations of this sort, which may seem to some young people the only ‘moral’ situations with which they can engage, the idea of the virtuous individual tends to vanish. A cynic (or structuralist) might say of our age that it is the end of the era of ‘the virtuous individual’.
The unity and fundamental reality of goodness is an image and support of the unity and fundamental reality of the individual. What is fundamental here is ideal or transcendent, never fully realised or analysed, but continually rediscovered in the course of the daily struggle with the world, and the imagination and passion whereby it is carried on. We may seem to compartmentalise value, but if we look more closely these divisions take place against a base of possible further, better, deeper, understanding and achievement. This is characteristic of morality. We know of perfection as we look upon what is imperfect. The division of axiomatic political morality from private individual morality represents a recognition for general purposes that we cannot achieve a perfect harmonious good society composed of saintly citizens. A liberal view of society wisely imposes a certain modesty upon political idealism. The individual lives against a more extended and ambiguous vision of the impossibility of perfected virtue, and is consciously responsible for any limitation upon his will to be good. The human scene is one of moral failure combined with the remarkable continued return to an idea of goodness as unique and absolute. What can be compared with this? If space visitors tell us that there is no value on their planet, this is not like saying there are no material objects. We would ceaselessly look for value in their society, wondering if they were lying, had different values, had misunderstood. At the level of ‘no patterns’, ‘no experience’, ‘no consci
ousness’ things really break down, but then we cannot set up the example either. There is something here which can be expressed in terms of what is contingent and what is necessary in some non-tautological, not merely linguistic sense. This is where we press language to express the ubiquitous importance of the concept of morality, when it is seriously and strictly considered. This fundamental importance, this kind of (realissimum) reality, is what religion in all sorts of ways, with help from art, reveals and celebrates. What is revealed is ‘more important than itselfteristi in the sense of being its ‘essence’. Religious mystics have ‘taken leave’ of their gods to point to something central and mysterious and most real, and difficult to talk about. As for philosophers, they may either ignore the central point, or do the best they can. Religion reveals and celebrates virtue and also exhibits the sense in which its place in human life is mysterious. An ultimate religious ‘belief’ must be that even if all ‘religions’ were to blow away like mist, the necessity of virtue and the reality of the good would remain. This is what the Ontological Proof tries to ‘prove’ in terms of a unique formulation. This is for thinkers to look at. The ordinary fellow ‘just knows’, for one is speaking of something which is in a sense obvious, the unique nature of morality. The argument for the thinker, after certain clarifications, must largely take the form of a combing-over of experience, with special emphasis upon the connection between the ideas of truth and knowledge and reality, and the place thus made for the concept of love. In the Symposium, Eros is not the Good, he is not even a god, he is a spirit which moves toward good. Here, in this combing, the concept of Good may seem to recede while being omnipresent. The idea of perfection haunts all our activity, and we are well aware of how we try to blot it out. Here we see how it matters to talk or think about ‘the Good’ or ‘virtue’ as something unitary, rather than just instancing cases of admirable conduct. This ‘Good’ is not the old God in disguise, but rather what the old God symbolised.
This is Ontological Proof language. In trying to make sense of it we may return to the image of the craftsman and, in spite of Plato, to the artist. Kant, who took the duty of truth-telling to be absolute, also said that ‘the beautiful was a symbol of the morally good’. Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Analytic of the Sublime, section 59, ‘Beauty as the symbol of Morality’. This work, incidentally, shows Kant at his most engagingly readable, full of examples and jokes and light. The good artist is a sort of image of the good man, the great artist is a sort of image of the saint. He is only a sort of image, since in his whole person he may be a dreadful egoist. Artists have their own specialised temptations to egoism and illusions of omnipotence. Art is power. We are all specialists in morality (after all, we can’t be expected to resist every sort of temptation!), and it is difficult (impossible) for the whole man to be virtuous. But inside his work, and ‘in so far as he is an artist’, to use the device employed at the beginning of the Republic, he can be humble and truthful and brave and inspired by a love of perfection. Rilke, talking about painting and poetry: ‘We must work.’ There is always work to do. We can always work at something, somehow, for someone, for some truth or some good, though this may seem in many contexts a hard saying. Art and craft are formal images of all our busy activities wherein we do well or badly. In general, in the ‘combing-through’ of experience, good art can figure, not only as an image, but as a kind of evidence, a sort of Ontological Proof, since here we may see more clearly on display how when we connect what is real with what is good we find out what truth means, and how in seeking truth (the right formulation, the better work) we also understand virtue and the ‘feel’ of reality. Here we may experience the unity of the moral life. In fact the good man, if we can find him, is probably not an artist. Artists have great quasi-spiritual satisfactions, false ‘highests’, which may arrest progress (Plato’s fear). Artists celebrate saints, Plato celebrated Socrates, Paul and the evangelists celebrated Christ. Even this is picturesque. Perhaps some artists can manage it. St John of the Cross was an artist. But what (as I said earlier) do we really know about the detailed lives of famous holy men? What do we even know of Christ, who is and has been for innumerable people the human individual to whom they feel closest? He certainly seems to be a unique case, a hapax legomenon, a personal Ontological Proof. (A role, incidentally, in which Kant rejected him: we must look not at Christ, but at our own rational conscience.) But the Christ who saves is the mystical Christ whom we make our own, whose figure is a mixture of essence and accident, partly a creation of art as well as being compact of everything we know about goodness. We look through this Christ into the mystery of good. And so also with the figures and images of other religions including those which, like Judaism and Islam, have made their ‘medium’ the pointed absence of the image. It may be said that all saints may be used as icons, but are as individuals merely imaginary. There are innumerable unknown saints and martyrs, such as the dissident who is shot down crying out the truth, or perishes incognito in prison. The contingently existing saint who, if we were ever fortunate enough to meet him or her, might stand to us in the guise of a demonstration (to show it can be done), might be some quiet unpretentious worker, a schoolteacher or a mother, or better still an aunt. Mothers have many egoistic satisfactions and much power. The aunt may be the selfless unrewarded doer of good. I have known such aunts. In the activity of such workers egoism has disappeared unobtrusively into the care and service of others. The egoism of the good artist or craftsman is ‘burnt up’ in the product. Rilke again, about Cézanne: ‘The consuming of love in anonymous work.’ And we may also think of Shakespeare. Here we see how Kant’s ‘practical love’ is given warmth by Plato’s Eros. The possible saints, aunts, dissidents, social workers and so on, may or may not have any sort of religious vision. How can one know anyway? Some saintly figures are self-evidently ‘religious’, others may be invisible, buried deep in families or offices or silent religious houses. The vision if any may have been entirely dissolved into the work. ‘Christ? Who is he? Oh yes — I forgot.’ At the highest level this is practical mysticism, where the certainty and the absolute appear incarnate and immediate in the needs of others.
The proof of the necessity or unique status of good runs through our grasp of an idea of perfection which comes to us in innumerable situations, where we are trying to do something well or are conscious of failure. Kant rightly suggests that there is often a unique ‘feel’ about such situations. This way of looking at the matter binds together the two arguments in Anselm’s Proof. What is perfect must exist, that is, what we think of as goodness and perfection, the ‘object’ of our best thoughts, must be something real, indeed especially and most real, not as contingent accidental reality but as something fundamental, essential and necessary. What is experienced as most real in our lives is connected with a value which points further on. Our consciousness of failure is a source of knowledge. We are constantly in process of recognising the falseness of our ‘goods’, and the unimportance of what we deem important. Great art teaches a sense of reality, so does ordinary living and loving. We find out in the most minute details of our lives that the good is the real. Philosophy too can attend to such details, using as examples or ‘evidence’ experiences which are frequently, and of course emotionally, portrayed in literature. Poets, whose ‘evidence’ is in their work, may also generalise about it more boldly. ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.’ (Keats.) ‘At its highest point, love is a determination to create that which it has taken for its object.’ (Valéry.) The appeal to evidence, to reports of experience, and to the direct experience of the reader, is precarious, but is in some regions of philosophy not only the last resort but the proper and best move. A fundamental idea here, and one which in ordinary life is a familiar one, is that of certainty or (its different face) necessity, connected with the sense of a pure untainted source of spiritual power. Herein our most ordinary modes of cognition become connected with strong convictions and vi
sion, of which the conviction and vision of the great artist is both an image and an instance.
14
Descartes and Kant
In continuing the argument I want now to turn away from Plato and look at the same or similar ideas reflected in Descartes and Kant. But before that I shall say something brief by way of introduction. I quote Paul Tillich again:
‘The limits of the ontological argument 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 was no longer 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.’