Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  (p. 98.)

  These are lucid and moving statements, I like and respect the ‘high and orthodox emphasis’ upon divine transcendence. And that the divine is above the gods (as in Buddhism and Platonism). Yet the point to which the speaker is driven seems unnecessarily extreme. We posit an unknown God; religion (and indeed God), which we have chosen as ‘better’ is our personal spiritual striving toward the ultimate goal of free spirit. A subjectivist non-cognitive philosophy of will separates spirituality from knowledge. No myths, no idols. The less we know of God the more spiritual we are made to become. Religion is thus secluded and purified, separated from the world of fact and science, and from the old illusions. This may indeed be a possible form of personal theism. Voluntarism seeks autonomy, human potential, freedom. These are good things; but isolated and in a religious context the programme may remind us more of Feuerbach and Sartre. Agnosticism about God, an unknown God, or a complete denial of God does not (as it seems to me) involve a surrender of the spiritually informed understanding of ‘all the world’ which traditional theism has implied. The words ‘subjectivist’, ‘expressivist’, ‘non-cognitive’ suggest such a surrender, and a picture of religion as a matter of private (existentialist) choice. The idea of choosing the spiritual or religious as (an item among others) better, seems oddly abstract. Demythologisation is not a single road, nor need it imply or mean a disappearance of myths and icons, or some profound ‘rectification’ of ordinary language. The modern scene includes (I hope) an enlargement of our concept of religion through our greater tolerance and knowledge of other religions. Here the concept of an ‘idol’ must come under new scrutiny. What can we say about the relation of religious (moral) persons to (in the widest sense) their images? Here we must also think about the difference between the sophisticated and the unsophisticated worshipper. (The Tibetan merchant’s problem.) Perhaps the best way to understand idols is to think again about Plato’s hierarchy of subjects and their objects. A progressive alteration of ‘images’ is not in the pejorative sense idolatry, the human imagination engages with the world at many levels. There are many occasions of ‘taking leave’. Expressivist voluntarism is, in tune with structuralist formulations, anti-Platonic. Voluntarism, segregating intellectual factual language, forces itself to discover a pure non-factual expressive language appropriate to religion. Jacques Derrida makes a somewhat similar distinction between old ordinary prose and the ecstatic poeticised rhetoric of post-philosophical reflection. Theological crisis no doubt poses linguistic problems. (Does the word ‘God’ mean something different now, should we go on using it?) But these problems can be dealt with by all the vast resources of our ordinary reflective procedures and our ordinary metaphorical evaluative language. We are not cut off from St Paul. A division of language itself between fact and value not only isolates and diminishes value, it may damage the concept of truth. (As it is damaged by Derrida.) The picture of religion as a ‘cluster of values’ suggests a corner, a place among places, a thing among things. We have not been driven out of a brightly coloured mythical world which now belongs to a false illusioned past, leaving us with many facts, an imageless striving will and an expressive language. We still live in the old familiar mysterious world and explain and clarify and celebrate it in the old endlessly fertile and inventive modes of speech. We enjoy the freedom of a moral imagination. The idea of ‘the world as full of images of God and hierarchies pointing to God’ is, as I see it, fundamental in religion and (mutatis mutandis) in morality. I think this is what (if we put Good for God) the world is full of! The affirmative way, which can find the divine everywhere in all the desire-driven burrowings of cognition, relates spirituality to the whole of our being.

  Cupitt has published other works since Taking Leave of God. His brave and ferocious book Radicals and the Future of the Church is far on from the mild tinkerings of Ramsey and Robinson. The book contains many sayings which I like and respect. Religion concerns everything in life, it is not just an occasional or special matter. We have to learn to think of God in a new way, not as an object, not as a person. That there is no God is also God. I like too the frequent references to Buddha and to Void, and in this context to Kierkegaard. Cupitt, in this respect like Buber, insists upon the retention of the word ‘God’, while suggesting various ways in which it can be filled with sense. He also quotes Bradley that God has no meaning outside the religious consciousness. I am not so happy with Cupitt’s attitude to Plato and to philosophy generally. ‘So far as all the varied movements of the day have a common theme it is anti-Platonism. Plato impressed upon the entire history of Western thought what now looks like a wholly unjustified and superstitious supernaturalism of thought, a supernaturalism of our intellectual standards, a supernaturalism of meanings (essentialism) and of knowledge, and finally a supernaturalism of philosophy itself – all of which has suddenly come to seem utterly absurd and unendurable. Nietzsche and Heidegger were right after all...’ (page 40-1, Cupitt’s italics.) To accuse Plato of ‘superstitious supernaturalism’ is to misunderstand his philosophy (my view of Plato need not be repeated here). As for Nietzsche and (late) Heidegger, roughly, I regard those great writers as essentially demonic. Nor do I picture women’s liberation in terms of feminine wiles (rhetoric) versus masculine reason (logic)! (p. 50.) ‘A number of the most original and creative modern philosophers (including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida) have been rediscovering rhetoric and using its wiles against blundering one-eyed theoretical reason.’ Here I would rather back analytical philosophy against rhetoric. The conclusion may well be that (p. 22) ‘Nietzsche has been vindicated and that we are indeed all aestheticists nowadays’ and (p. 13) we ‘cannot help but take a thoroughly aesthetic and anarchistic view of meaning and truth’. So, after all, it’s a game? However, in spite of these few contentious matters I think Cupitt is a very brave and valuable pioneer and a learned and accessible thinker, who stirs up thought where it is most needed. He speaks directly, as few do, about the necessity of new thinking about God and religion as something which concerns us all.

  It may be said that ‘demythologisation’ is ipso facto hostile to images, to comforting pictures which arrest our progress, and that a certain tough savagery is required in their removal. We may recognise other similar moments in the history of religion; and now, as in some lutte finale, the task is given to the Protestant theologians. So a language must be developed for a religion without dogma? But religion has already been ‘put into a corner’ when we begin to talk of its ‘language’ or its (special) ‘values’, which then seem to be wandering aliens in the big world of intellect and fact. The concept of ‘freedom’ too appears with a difference according to whether or not it is connected to a ‘will’ which is detached from intellectual knowledge. These concepts are functions of each other. We are all the time exercising and learning freedom and truthfulness as we deal with the whole world. As I have mentioned before the word ‘will’ should, in my view, in philosophy and strictly speaking, be given a limited use, where something like an ‘effort of will’ or a ‘force’ or ‘imposition’ of will is indicated. This is close to ordinary usage where ‘will’ often refers to certain kinds of self-consciously effortful movement. Schopenhauer used the word to describe his primal cosmic power which rises through the whole of creation into man where it becomes intellectualised as ideas. This picture, which portrays will as generalised energy, in a sense not unlike that of the presocratics, removes the concept from its ordinary uses, in the interests of (for instance) emphasising our unity with the whole of created being. It also however offers a background in which a sense of, or theory of, determinism can lodge, and indeed Schopenhauer regards the ordinary human state as a determined condition from which rescue, by higher ‘Ideas’, may be thought of as exceptional. The word ‘energy’ seems more in place if one is considering some general human ‘drive’ (such as sex) which is particularised in individuals. Plato’s concept of a human energy which joins intellect and (good or bad) desire offers a
more satisfactory account of our continuous and unavoidable moral activity. Morality must engage the whole man, being neither an intermittent spring nor a cosmic force. Ordinary language and ordinary cool observation serve best here. A good text-book is St Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine, here following Plato and Plotinus, and anticipating Freud, was aware of the human soul as a huge area, largely dark. We have to keep moving, working, walking in order not to be enclosed by the darkness. (Confessions X 23.) Freedom, as free choice, as right choice, depends upon achieving a certain unity of thought and desire. The pain of Angst, the sense of an empty ‘freedom’, the lack of substance in any path taken, is movingly described by Augustine in Confessions VIII 8. He rushes out of the house followed by his friend, they sit at the far end of the garden, Augustine, tormented by indecision, tears his hair, beats his brow. He is conscious of a ‘wounded will’ which ‘staggers and tumbles ... now on this side, then on that side’. This recognisable state is however not one to which we are condemned, nor is it one which is what it (perhaps) seems. The lonely tortured ‘will’ of which we are conscious at such moments is not the agent of our freedom and our morality, but rather a symptom of lack of freedom and moral strength. It is indeed not solitary but appearing like a flickering flame before a darker background of habits, principles, ideals, ideas, desires, memories. Out of this substantial region the help must come which unites the choosing self and enables it to be responsible and intelligent and free. We can appeal to a force and a substance which is already within us and always in process of change. Augustine would say we appeal to God. We wait, we reflect, we conjure up good things out of our soul, lights, sacraments, attachments. Seen here, freedom must be thought of as a love of good which enables a unity of thought and desire. A picture which lodges ‘the spiritual’, and its language, in a detached will may also in effect segregate religion as ‘enthusiasm’, or a form of drama, to be distinguished from ordinary social ‘morals’ which inhabit the ordinary ‘real’ world.

  A separation of will from intellect and fact from value may suggest, or go with, a dramatic (or tragic) view of life. The factual world may then appear as a place wherein spiritual heroes live out publicly and edifyingly the contradictions which are less consciously and bravely suffered by the rest of us. This is not far from the spirit of structuralism. We, as spectators in the great arena, see ‘the dust cloud of the Olympic battle and the flash of divine spears’. No wonder we are led to conclude that ‘the world is the game Zeus plays’. (Nietzsche interpreting Heraclitus, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.) A view of art as essentially heroic, challenging, paradoxical, iconoclastic, a sort of force, is not by any means always appropriate. It is even less appropriate to use such a terminology about the religious life. The struggle against evil, the love of what is good, the inspired enjoyment of beauty, the discovery and perception of holiness, continues all the time in the privacy of human souls. This process is more like eating or breathing than like a dramatic conflict with clashing swords and contradictions. The word ‘tragic’ is out of place. Of course there are dramatic moments and situations, but these are, if we look at the long threads of human lives, intermittent. ‘Tragic’ is another comfort word. We invoke the theatre of the tragic to help us to bear sufferings which it would be too painful to consider in all their detailed structures of accident and muddle. There is no deep analysis of terrible suffering. The horrors of the world recede into darkness.

  Anything may become hallowed and be religiously powerful, as in the Tibetan story of the dog’s tooth which because it was sincerely venerated glowed with a miraculous light. But can one simply decree this sort of status for the risen Christ and still keep a Christian structure and observance as before, as if it did not matter all that much? The transformation of Christianity into a religion like Buddhism, with no God and no literally divine Christ, but with a mystical Christ, may be, if possible at all, a long task, and needs a reflective backing stronger and more complex than that which an existentialist-style voluntarism can provide, as if it were a matter of suddenly choosing a point of view. Or could an individual perhaps decide one day to ‘look at it in this way’? Do not people so decide? And suppose a good many of them do? Is one being too rigid and solemn about it all? Do not a large number of those who go to church already think in a new non-literal way without bothering about theology and metaphysics? We may relevantly note that in the past literalist thinking was also mythological thinking. Perhaps the term ‘demythologisation’ is radically misleading; and we only need a shift in our sense of ‘myth’, rather than radical surgery involving distinctions (for instance between fact and value) and arguments against these distinctions? However that may be, churches are institutions and problems of true and false arise for those in authority, and people ask their priests: is it true? Priests leave their churches because of an unbearable discrepancy between their own beliefs and the beliefs of their flock. Philosophers and theologians have to go on thinking, and laymen are driven to reflect by what they see and hear.

  In his poem on the death of W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden tells us that time worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives. Those who wish to persuade us that our language is in crisis and already in process of radical change, may try to impress us by reference to the languages of science. Modern biology does not talk about individual creatures, but about things which most people do not understand, such as genes and DNA; and the self-referential systems of modern physics are remote from Newton. These ultimate models of precision affect (and benefit) our lives, but our everyday language (its modes, its truth-conveying structures) is only peripherally touched by them. This language remains as it has been since say (in Europe) Homer and the Psalmist, an instrument which orders and expresses our multiple relations to a reality outside us and to the depths of our own minds. We are mixed into the world around us which we touch and assimilate largely through a vast natural medium of metaphor, and achieve, fundamental to human life, truth, out of which in turn we are able to set up and ‘place’ the necessary systems of the strictly factual. How we can do these things may seem, if we pause and stare at it, a mystery. But out in life we perform all these feats without difficulty. Techniques of political oppression in modern civilisation may tend (as pictured in Orwell’s 1984) to weaken and simplify and starve ordinary speech, depriving it of concepts. However time, mentioned above, will (we hope) continue at intervals to restore the divine power of language (as it has begun to do in eastern Europe since 1989). It may indeed be the case that deep slow changes (only roughly indicated by ‘the scientific temper of the age’) render it difficult or impossible to think about religion in the old literalistic way. But this need not (must not) imply that we now have to lodge it in a small safe self-protective ball of specialised language. We are still the same people whose dilemmas are described in Greek literature and in the Bible and these descriptions are uttered in our language. Human nature is the abode of spiritual intimations and spiritual imagery and we are not forced by ‘science’ or ‘modernism’ to live by the will, by a simple ability to leap right out of a bleak ‘factual’ world.

  The ‘demythologisation’ of religion is something absolutely necessary in this age. However if it is carried out in too Feuerbachian a spirit it may be in danger of losing too much while asserting too little. The loss of the Book of Common Prayer (Cranmer’s great prayer book) and of the Authorised Version of the Bible (which are now regarded as oddities or treats) is symptomatic of this failure of nerve. To say that people now cannot understand that ‘old language’ is not only an insult, but an invitation to more lax and cursory modes of expression. The religious life and the imperfect institutions thereof should continue to represent the all-importance of goodness. At a lower level lies the arcane power-seeking and magic (including spiritualism, scientology, and other forms of gnosticism) toward which human activities naturally tend to fall; and without which thrilling ‘fringe’, some may argue, institutionalised religion would not continue. ‘Spirit
uality’ is always ‘breaking away’, and is indeed at present ‘all over the place’. (Spirit without Absolute: the time of the angels.) This continual defection may in our time favour a self-important autonomy and sense of an available ‘instant freedom’ presented as a moral ideal: the spirit of Sartrian existentialism joined to the impoverishing reductionism of the structuralists. In this situation religious-minded moralists and new thinkers may be tempted toward a cautious withdrawal, as if this were some meritorious realism, some sensible delimitation of their claims. In general, theology is shaken and there are still new places where thought can go. The ‘new theology’ of South America, which recognises a live and present Christ who, poor and barefoot Himself, is the champion of the poor, represents something of the openness and vitality of the changing scene. St Paul said we find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.

  15

  Martin Buber and God

  I want now to look at a different kind of apologist, or ‘prophet’, a Jewish one, Martin Buber, whom I have mentioned earlier. In common with Heidegger, whom he critically admires, and Jung whom he detests, Buber speaks of the present age as a period of darkness or silence which awaits a new revelation. Like Heidegger, he thinks of Plato as having made a mistake, the substitution of eidos for phusis as the basis of metaphysics, of visible form for natural growth, of vision for movement or flow. I quote here a passage where Buber tells us that, influenced by Plato, European philosophy has tended to picture spirituality as a looking upward, rather than as a movement or making of contact here below. ‘The Greeks established the hegemony of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered.’ They also gave an optical character to philosophy, ‘the character of the contemplation of particular objects ... The object of this visual thought is the universal as existence or as a reality higher than existence. Philosophy is grounded on the presupposition that one sees the absolute in universals.’ (Eclipse of God, p. 56.) As I have argued in other contexts, the view expressed in the last two sentences represents a misunderstanding of Plato’s doctrine. Of course morality is action, not just looking (admiring), but the light of truth and knowledge should be falling upon the path of the agent. For better or worse we look, we see something, before we act. The Forms are magnetic, not just passively stared at, they enliven the energy of Eros in the soul and participate in the world, they are both transcendent and immanent. The activity and imagery of vision is at the centre of human existence, wherein we are conscious of ourselves as both inward and outward, distanced and surrounded. Plato’s break with the presocratic tradition: all is patently not one, our human world is not determined by a hidden unity or universal harmony, we are strained and stretched out (like the Anima Mundi in the Timaeus), we live with intuitions of what we also realise as very distant. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. (I see what is better and applaud it, I follow what is worse.) Fundamental moral teaching (which can be given to small children) concerns knowledge and truth. The visual is an image of distance and non-possession. This idea of space and quietness, thinking, seeing, attending, keeping still, not seizing, is important in all education, and not only (where it is of course vital) in the appreciation of art. Reflection, reverence, respect. A picture of an ultimate erotic union as ultimate knowledge, as in union with a god, figures in some religious practice and is a special property of some religious mysticism. It can scarcely be taken as a general picture of moral aspiration, even as mediated through ideas of social participation! Plotinus spoke of union with the One, but Plato spoke only of (perhaps) glimpsing the Form of the Good, not of presuming to touch it. Seeing is essentially separate from touching, and should enlighten and inspire appropriate movement. There are proper times for looking, and, after looking, for touching. (Uzza died because he touched the Ark. Many people touched Christ.) Of course we ‘move through life’, as upon a ‘road’, but are required to see our way. Speaking of morality in terms of cognition, the imagery of vision, which is everywhere in our speech, seems natural. Sight is the dominant sense, our world, source of our deep imagery and thought-modes, is a visual world, our idea of the world is of a visual world. St Paul speaks of what is seen as bodying forth what is not seen. Perhaps what is not seen, understood, known, appears as an intimation or orientation, perhaps later it may be understood and visible, while other more distant things begin hazily to appear. These are images of our thinking and our moral life. We speak of the veil of appearance. We know when we are being satisfied with superficial, illusory, lying pictures which distort and conceal reality. Metaphorical preferences are not mere matters of temperament. Dominant metaphors in metaphysics have large implications. By looking at something, by stopping to look at it, we do not selfishly appropriate it, we understand it and let it be. We may too, in such looking, take the object as shadow, intuiting what is beyond it. All our most ordinary thinking, in the moral activity of every day involves familiar picturing. Blind desire, of which lust is an image, reaches out to grasp and appropriate. Desire with vision looks first, and in approaching what is near is aware of what is far. Looking can be a kind of intelligent reverence. Moral thinking, serious thinking, is clarification (visual image). The good, just, man is lucid. These persuasive reflections are not exactly philosophical discourse, but are ancillary to a study of metaphysics, arising in connection with Buber’s charge that Plato ‘opticised thought’, a charge to which I shall return.