Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  What is absolute and unconditional is what each man clearly and distinctly knows in his own soul, the difference between right and wrong. It is something intimate, deep in consciousness, inseparable from one’s sense of oneself, like the Cartesian sense of one’s own existence and as directly grasped. Kant is confident that we all recognise it; and the man in the street, if untainted by theory, would probably assent at once to both ideas, to cogito ergo sum and to his ability to discern right from wrong. This is a not unimportant fact. The Categorical Imperative, locked into the concept of freedom, is Kant’s Ontological Proof, his established vision of an absolute at the centre of human existence. Intuitive certainty, and a sense of truth which is drawn from experience of testing truth, again work together as in Descartes. Truthfulness is for Kant a fundamental virtue; and the rational will, beaming in upon each practical maxim (principle or rule of action) justly discerns and clarifies the particular human situations in which action takes place. Moral good is certainly established as cognitive, the unconditional is seen to belong to the structure of human reality, the evidence is everywhere in our experience. As for God, must we just say that it is as if he were there, there is a space left for faith? The idea of the empty space might seem attractive but is dangerous, since the conclusion that the space is empty may lead (has led) to some kind of moral relativism. Kant did not (in his main doctrine) think in these terms. There is space for the possibility of religious faith. But the Categorical Imperative is not only evident, it is enough. Anselm and Descartes, in different fashions, love God and this love irradiates their speculations. Plato loves Good. Kant reveres Reason, might even be said to fear it, but gives, as far as I can see, no sign of loving God. In later life he observes that God is an Idea of Reason, though one of great practical efficacy. God is not an external substance, but a moral idea in our minds. The idea of God is nothing but the inescapable fate of man. We may recall (perhaps as a warning) the amor fati expressed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and in the 1914-1916 Notebooks. The concept of God may be forced upon us. Perhaps some satisfaction is derived from this coercion? Kant allows us a certain thrill when we discipline selfish desire in respecting the moral law, and when, with sublime emotion, we turn from fear of the violence and huge inconceivability of nature to consciousness of our sovereign dignity as rational beings. Scientific law and moral law touched each other in Kant’s thought in a way which stirred emotion. Newton and Rousseau. Kant says (late in life) that to think God and to believe in him is one and the same; this sounds like Anselm, but the ‘necessity’ involved has a different background. For Anselm to think God and to love him were one and the same. Kant, as philosopher, seems to have gone on thinking, perhaps puzzling, about God, but without being moved to report any friendly loving dialogue. God appears as a distant essence without local existence. Kant of course officially consigns the emotions to the world of phenomenal appearances, no question of any Kierkegaardian emotional proof, even at the dangerous border-lines indicated above. His psychology also excludes any sort of purified love-energy, a notion which he would have regarded as a dangerous disguise of heteronomous egoism. One may regret or deplore the way in which Kant’s dualism seems to deny to human passion any access to the spiritual. Here a general appeal to experience would scarcely be on his side. The dualism of phenomenal fact and noumenal value when transformed by secularism into a world of technological reality haunted by a small peripheral activity of serious evaluation is a cruel nemesis: Kant without his Ontological Proof. But though one may be uneasy about Kant’s picture, especially in the light of these particular results (of course it has many results) one cannot but admire and value the ruthlessness with which, in establishing reason as a pure source, he excludes the least hint of a consoling loving divine father. Nothing here about existential dialogue or the communion of I and thou. The appeal to an experienced certainty is the appeal to the sense of duty. Nothing further is needed.

  Schopenhauer suggests (WWI, Appendix, Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy) that Kant, who was led to his view of the a priori nature of the concept of cause by Hume’s scepticism, may also have been affected in his criticism of speculative theology by Hume’s criticisms of popular theology. (Hume’s Natural History of Religion and Dialogues on Natural Religion.) Hume attacked popular theology, but in the Natural History ‘points to rational or speculative theology as genuine and worthy of respect’. Kant attacks the latter, but leaves popular theology untouched, even ‘establishes it in a nobler form as a faith based upon moral feeling’. This idea was later distorted into religious experience, ‘rational apprehensions, consciousness of God’, etc., ‘while Kant, as he demolished old and revered errors, and knew the danger of doing so, rather wished through moral theology merely to substitute a few weak temporary supports, so that the ruin might not fall on him, but that he might have time to escape’. I do not know if Kant thought in those terms. Such questions were for him a matter of passionate concern. However there may, in a longer run than Schopenhauer (writing here with his usual charm) envisages, be truth in the idea that Kant contributes to establishing popular theology in a nobler form. It is, after all, popular theology which ensures the de facto continuation of a faith. Kant’s attack on rational theology serves the cause of religion in excluding a ‘demonic’ (external, material object, literalist, person) God, by showing that the existence of such an entity could not be proved, and by adding that true religion is a matter of free individual belief and practice. The veracity of science is established by Kant in the same movement which limits reason and opens a space of agnosticism which makes way for an untainted faith. We may here compare the (less clearly systematic) way in which Descartes shuffles his counters of ‘clear and distinct’, ‘the natural light’, ‘veracity’ to accommodate God and science in the same picture. Kant here clearly observes the Second Commandment. Any God we could meet or see would be a demon, a mere idol. Even looking at Christ can be dangerous, Kant tells us. Christ can lead back to self. The consoling forgiving figure may weaken the moral fibre and serve as a substitute for moral will. Stories are dangerous. Christianity itself is open to corruption in its role as a story, a drama. Stories can be taken too literally. That way lies weakness and illegitimate consolation. Kant sometimes allowed his teleological dream to occasion hints about how we might proceed from the unconditional moral demand to an idea of God as a lawgiver and judge who rewards the good with happiness and (perhaps) blends with natural forces to favour just societies. Kant’s examples (in the Grundlegung) of what he takes to be fundamental and self-evident maxims which are both universal and very general suggest a confidence (not shared now) in the prompt emergence of social good out of certain inflexible high principles. Modern liberal political thinking employs, for instance in the field of human rights, a small number of very general inflexible universal axioms (about freedom, tolerance, etc.) but without any accompaniment of teleological optimism. Kant’s extremely shadowy teleological deity later, of course, became the property of Hegel and Marx. Even the shadow of such a ‘God’ is, on Kant’s part, a lapse. Kant’s Ontological Proof lies in his own superb certainty about the fundamental and unconditional nature of the moral demand and the reality of the goodness which this contains. The ordinary man has the capacity of perfection; while at the same time the perfectly fitting transcendental barrier inspires a sense of the silent awe which befits an impenetrable mystery. There is no short cut to salvation through forgiveness offered by a personally friendly God. Kant thus puts us, and deliberately puts us, in the best possible position for denying that God is there at all. We must then do the work ourselves, but under another and higher obedience. The moral will acts necessarily and automatically if barriers to it are removed. No magnetic Other, or desire for God, attracts us toward a glimpsed transcendent object. Kant’s absolute is like a Platonic Form in being totally impersonal; and unlike the Christian Trinity, which is a mutually adoring set of thous. Kant and Plato are alike in their intense certainty of the reality of a p
ure moral source. They are unlike because Kant has no moral role for what Plato calls Eros, the high force which attracts the soul toward Good. Plato’s Good is not personal but it is magnetic. Kant had no philosophical concept of Eros, but he has enormous philosophical Eros. As an intellectual, and one may say as a theologian, he is a passionate man. His religious passion together with his critical philosophy bring him near to the deep problems of this age and the turmoil of its theology.

  I have been speaking of certainty (a dangerous concept) and its coexistence with ideas of truth and reality. Certainty: clarity. In Anselm’s spiritual life these ideas are intimately connected. In Descartes they are a little more loosely joined. Descartes aims at connecting them more closely, and does so to his own satisfaction. How could he bear to think that God could falsify his mathematical insights or that he could exist without God, although he can conceive of these things? How could science be without God? In Kant, Anselm’s One has virtually ceased to be, and the certainty which was faith is on the road toward conviction, even commitment: a very different scene. Kant is a dualist not only because he wishes to picture morality as something pure and real lifted (by metaphysical magic) out of the rat-run of egoism, but because he is a modern scientist, a Newtonian, in spirit, observing how a large part of the cosmos is purely mechanical. Many present-day thinkers are impressed and deeply moved by scientific discovery in a similar way. In a significant, probably early, fragment Kant joins the names of Newton and Rousseau. ‘Newton was the first to see order and regularity combined with simplicity ... and since then comets move in geometrical paths. Rousseau was the first to discover ... the deeply hidden nature of man and the concealed law in accordance with which Providence is justified through his observations ... Since Newton and Rousseau God is justified.’ (See H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative, p. 162.) One might say that such a justification amounts to a discreet removal. For today, if we put Einstein for Newton and Freud for Rousseau the obliteration is even more final. Of course this game begs many questions: Freud is an odd sort of moralist, but then so was Rousseau. Can one suggest a better modern Rousseau? For Kant the severance of science and morality was in itself something thrilling. Wonder at the universe occasions a special (sublime) moral feeling: how can we individual specks be free and moral? We can! This is also the road to Romanticism. Today information technology may tend to make us bored with science, or to take it for granted. Man on the moon was a brief marvel. More deeply perhaps fear inhibits our moral pleasure in the great machine, which now passes human comprehension. In Kant’s vision, ‘God’ who for Anselm was everywhere, is now lodged outside, present only, but with supreme certainty, as our sense of duty, intimated perhaps in religious faith, keeping open the empty space made for him in the critical philosophy. Scientific (law of nature) and moral law are mutually alienated, joined only by emotional, almost aesthetic, experiences, and by Kant’s unconvincing anthropological teleology. God as a super-scientist could be only a paradoxical symbol. Anselm is innocent of science and his God is omnipresent in a Platonic and Hebrew, not a presocratic, sense. Descartes is a scientific religious thinker, who retains the cognitive moral vision, presocratic and Platonic, which naturally unites all knowledge as God-discovering activity whereby all truth reveals him. Kant’s metaphysical machinery deliberately precludes this; certainty about right and wrong, appearance and reality, springs up in the bosom of the conscientious man, who is living as an alien in the factual world of phenomenal causality. The subject of the cogito intuited the deity. Kant’s dutiful man is a modern individual capable of making free independent judgments on the subject of God.

  Kant is one of the greatest systematic ‘demythologisers’ of Christianity, and in this role, as in others, has a variety of followers. The demythologising theologian has an interesting choice of philosophies. Sartrian existentialism perpetuates Kant’s separation of the free will as source of value from the causally determined phenomenal world; except that the will is bereft of the universal rational certainty and spiritual authority with which Kant endowed it, and which Schopenhauer condemned as ‘theological’, and appears (in Sartre) as individual power, self-assertion, commitment or choice. Virtue lies in the sincerity and courage with which I realise my solitude and make my choices. My free creativity can choose my own ‘creation’ of God. Cowardly insincerity, lassitude, mauvaise foi, is the condition of imagining that I can find values given to me ready-made, by society, or priests, or theological tradition. Here, in some vistas, the enemy appears as the complacent bourgeoisie, also detested by Kierkegaard, who ‘institute’ an unjust class-divided society and a ‘material’ God. The determinism which is pertinently contrasted with freedom is not that of a scientifically conceived mechanism, but of the dull lifeless drift of those who will not rethink their fundamental concepts. Here one possible picture is that of a brave sincere ‘authentic’ individual (as portrayed by Heidegger) as against a spiritless conformer; another that of a decent humble adherent of traditional virtues as against a wilful and conceited adventurer! Modern fiction, as well as modern theology, has explored these themes. The extreme case of the existentialist adventurer would be that of a Dostoevskyan character whose actes gratuits may be seen as determined by unconscious forces, or as the free activity of God’s fool. Dostoevsky too is a modern theologian. A more sober version of existentialism appeared in the work of philosophers who explained morality in terms of a less dramatised and non-universal rational will exercising imperative force. The implicit message of this cool and would-be complete account might be that we can thoroughly understand morality, and have no need of God, who can be left aside as an optional private activity. Others who tire of having uncharted freedom as the only fundamental value may turn toward the independent, self-evident (axiomatic) values of utilitarianism; this choice is in effect compatible with religious faith of varying degrees of simplicity, and spiritual energy can be channelled into good works, leaving no time for theological speculation. On the other hand, following the path of John Stuart Mill, the need to distinguish qualities of happiness (how does one help people, and to what?) leads back to more traditional problems. Thus the drama of fact and value as inaugurated by Kant continues, and enters in various ways into our ethical and theological conflicts. Kant’s practical reason mysteriously joined the noumenal world of value and the phenomenal world of fact by framing universal maxims of varying degrees of generality for particular actions. When the light of moral certainty is withdrawn the world of phenomena can appear as an alien scene, outside which the creation of value flashes like intermittent lightning in gratuitous acts, or anguished religious doubts, or possibly in poetic creation. We may see this image too in the metaphysics of the Tractatus. The Sartrian world of fact was a wilderness of mauvaise foi occasionally lightened by sincere individual free acts. A more alarming wilderness is that of modern technology, so full of brilliant devices and easy entertainments, where numerous self-referential scientific languages shake our belief in old natural language and old traditional truth.

  In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant says that ‘the proper problem of pure reason is contained in the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?’ The synthetic a priori is a mediating area of thought (reality) which lies upon the border-line of human capacity as a kind of necessary ‘reaching further’. Such propositions (judgments), found in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, are neither analytic (tautologous) nor synthetic (factual), representing a kind of necessary unprovable, or unclarifiable, speculation. Every event has a cause. The world had a beginning in time. Such speculations and formulations are ‘forced upon us’. Kant’s problem concerning the status and truth of metaphysics is indeed difficult and persisting. The metaphysic of morals has its own baffling enigmas. Scientifically, psychologically, we are determined, but spiritually we are free. Moreover, does freedom imply morality, or does morality imply freedom? What is clear is that we all recognise the moral law. But what is its basis? Kant has to sp
eak of what is ‘unprovable’, and of what ‘for us men is impossible to explain’ and ‘can never be discerned by human reason’. In his later book the Critique of Practical Reason Kant puts it as: if our reason had not already distinctly thought the moral law we would not have been justified in assuming freedom, but if freedom did not exist we should never have discovered the moral law. We are also led, through the concept of freedom, to conceive of God and immortality. However, ‘we cannot say that we know or understand either the reality or even the possibility of these ideas ... To serve their practical function it suffices that they do not contain any internal impossibility (contradiction).’ More firmly, later in the book, Kant says that if we were certain of God’s existence and were able to see him, we would have no free will and would be merely puppets. He thus establishes agnosticism as a condition of morality. (Critique of Practical Reason, Beck’s translation, pp. 119 and 248.) In a yet later book (Kant was nearly seventy when he wrote it), Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, he explains his agnostic position in more passionate and informal and less metaphysical terms, saying in the preface to the second edition that to understand the book ‘only common morality is needed’. Here too he repeats that the subjective ground is inscrutable and that if we had certain knowledge of God we would lose our freedom. The words inscrutable, inconceivable, unfathomable, inescapable, occur; also the words God and holy. ‘Morality leads ineluctably to religion, through which it extends itself to the idea of a powerful moral Lawgiver outside of mankind.’ This ‘venturing’ might even seem to move beyond respect for the moral law toward a love for or adoration of the so-naturally postulated God. ‘But anything, even the most sublime, dwindles under the hands of men.’ We must beware of such instinctive paths which lead us through the comforts of religion toward superstition and illusion. (Religion within the Limits, Greene and Hudson trans. pp. 12, 5, 7.) Kant goes on to speak in newly emphatic terms about morality as a struggle between good and evil. The Stoics ‘mistook their enemy’, who is ‘not to be sought in merely undisciplined natural inclinations ... They called out wisdom against folly’ instead of ‘against wickedness, the wickedness of the human heart’. Kant quotes Ephesians 6. 12, ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ This adjuration, Kant says, ‘is not to extend our knowledge beyond the world of sense, but only to make clear for practical use the conception of what for us is unfathomable’. Christianity rightly saw good and evil not as heaven and earth, but as heaven and hell. This prevents us from ‘regarding good and evil, the realm of light and the realm of darkness, as bordering on each other and as losing themselves in one another by gradual steps’. (pp. 50, 52, 53.) This warning also has its relevance today. We must see evil, and reject any pact (Heraclitus, Jung) between evil and good. Kant looks at Genesis 2. 16 — 17, and 3. 6. How did sin originate? This remains inscrutable to us. However, humanity is represented as having been seduced into evil, and hence as being not basically corrupt but capable of improvement. This, Kant says, is a historical account put to moral use, ’wherefrom we can derive something conducive to our moral betterment’. (p. 39fn.) Religion may thus be thought of as good for us, but only as moral principle. ‘Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is a mere religious illusion and pseudo-service of God.’ (p. 158.) The only true church is the invisible church, a ‘mere idea of the union of all the righteous under direct and moral divine world-government, an idea serving as the archetype of what is to be established by men’. Kant adds that ‘man must proceed as if everything depended upon him; only on this condition dare he hope that higher wisdom will grant the completion of his well-intentioned endeavours’. (p. 92.) (This ‘as if’ may remind us of sayings of Plato in the Meno and the Republic.) Here we are to join with him who cried, ‘Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.’ (Mark 9. 24.) And also, we might add, with Anselm’s ‘I believe so that I may understand’. The (awkward) figure of Christ, whom of course Kant cannot take as the founder of religion (that is of the moral law), is hailed by him as ‘the founder of the first true church ... Let historical records be what they may ... in the idea itself is present adequate ground for its acceptance.’ Further to convince us Kant quotes at length from the Sermon on the Mount. ‘These commands are not mere laws of virtue but precepts of holiness which we ought to pursue, and the very pursuit of them is called virtue.’ (pp. 147 — 8.)