by Iris Murdoch
We are close to problems about ‘religious experience’. People who do not hold traditional beliefs may recognise, or be attracted by, or recall from childhood, something like Buber’s ‘Thou’. How important is this matter of keeping or not keeping a personal God? Is this, in whatever disguise, the last piece of supernatural machinery; that which, for a religion likely to survive, must go? Is this an argument about what concepts one can morally, or aesthetically, tolerate, or about when it becomes patently cheating to speak of a personal God? There is a philosophical argument concerning meaning, but this is readily overwhelmed by considerations of experience which are difficult to handle. I mean, the philosopher may well ‘give up’ and say, religion is a private mystery, what is the point of thinking about it? Of course many philosophers take and have taken this view, and have been encouraged to take it, for many reasons, by religious people. Is it just important now, when ‘demythologisation’ proceeds whether we like it or not, to ask the theologian and the philosopher to communicate in a new way? In this context I do not see the eternal Thou as a concept likely to be at home in a demythologised religion. Is there Someone there? Or am I bound, or naturally led, to act as if this is so? Such acting ‘as if’ would not be like the mythical ‘as if’ in the Meno. The fiction would have to be perilously near to the centre of my faith, hardly discernible from a wishful thought. This is a Judaeo-Christian problem. The well-known contrast made by Buber (originally in his book I and Thou) between I — Thou and I — It relations can illuminate morality, the dealings of people with each other, can serve as commentary upon the concept of love. It is instructive too to compare and contrast it with Kant’s distinction between treating a person as a means and treating him as an end. Kant’s ‘practical love’ need not involve dialogue. Kant’s religious morality does not favour an intimacy with God such as that enjoyed by St Augustine and the Psalmist. Moreover acting rightly toward another person does not necessarily, in fact more often does not, involve face-to-face encounters. There is here a contrast of styles which can be comprehensibly illustrated in everyday terms. One man does good by stealth, attends carefully to the situation of others, sees their needs, helps them without close involvement, even anonymously, admonishes indirectly, by implication and example, shuns close encounter. Only in rare situations would it be a duty, or indeed possible, to achieve complete mutual understanding. Another man prefers to draw people close to him, to have confessions, frank meetings, warmth and friendship, to give support by voice and presence. No doubt the afflicted human race needs both of these philanthropists. There is an essential area of coldness in morality, as there is an essential area of warmth. Seen in a Kantian context, the I-Thou concept can seem (by contrast) thrilling and dramatic, readily compromised by various self-regarding consolations. It holds out a promise of experience and ever-available company.
Buber says that only God can never be an object. ‘God can never become an object for me. I can attain no other relation to him than that of the I to its eternal Thou, that of the Thou to its eternal I.’ (Eclipse of God, p. 68.) This sounds like the language of the Ontological Proof. God exists necessarily not contingently, and his not-ever-being-an-object, a thing among others, is a part of this unique necessary non-contingent being. However, as I have suggested, the Proof need not be tied to the idea of a person, which Buber’s I — Thou terminology attempts to make fundamental. Buber’s appeal to religious experience is very moving. But suppose we can no longer find this ‘necessary’ presence? ‘But if man is no longer able to attain this relation,’ Buber goes on, ‘if God is silent towards him and he toward God, then something has taken place not in human subjectivity but in Being itself.’ Buber rejects the explanation that we have just subjectively lost the concept, and now find the idea of a personal God incredible, and indicates that the change is, or would be, or could be, something very deep indeed. This must prompt the question, what next? Will God stay silent and ‘Being’ alter? Must we after all give up the necessary Thou, or consign him (it) to an area of ineffable faith? To refer here to what people generally can or cannot do seems in itself an acceptance of the language of ‘it’. Buber is prepared to glance at Heidegger’s prophetic notion that, after this dark interlude, the holy will return to us in new and unimaginable forms. Heidegger says that his view is not atheism, but is the making of a place for thought about the divine. Buber’s attitude seems ambiguous. He quotes Heidegger (in English see also The Question concerning Technology, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is dead”’, p. 100):
‘The place which metaphysically belongs to God is the place in which the production and preservation as created being of that which exists is effected. This place of God can remain empty. Instead of it another, that is a metaphysically corresponding place can appear, which is neither identical with God’s sphere of being nor with that of man, but which, on the other hand, man can, in an eminent relation, attain. The superman does not and never will step into the place of God; the place rather in which the will to the superman arrives is another sphere in another foundation of existing things in another being.’
Buber says of this, ‘The words compel one to listen with attention. One must judge whether that which is said or intimated in them does not hold true today and here.’ (p. 92.) Buber thus ends one of the essays of which his book consists. He seems here to consider it possible that the deep change in Being, the loss of God, can take place. In such a context the term ‘Being’ might well be translated into other terms; I would prefer to speak of our ordinary, fairly describable, experiences of ‘transcendence’, our apprehensions of what is true and good and real. A pessimistic prophecy might suggest that now, or soon, there are or will be fewer of these spiritual experiences and activities available to human beings. A nuclear war or an ecological catastrophe might blot out people and their potentialities. But if we escape such a fate, I see no reason to predict a ‘loss of spirit’. The human capacity to seek, and enjoy, the good and the true is versatile and endlessly creative. ‘The place which metaphysically belongs to God’ is empty in the sense that, in the western world, fewer people believe in the old personal God. The superman cannot fill that place because human frailty forbids the existence of such a being, unless we imagine him as a de facto tyrant, or a fake ‘religious’ superstar. There are of course such ‘leaders’ or pseudo-supermen. The idea of superman remains with us vaguely however, in the west, set up by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sartre, as the free powerful unillusioned fulfilled being. The tyrant of Republic Book One. ‘The place in which the will to the superman arrives ... another sphere in another foundation of existing things in another being’ might more plausibly, if expressed in less arcane language, be seen as a kind of fatalistic determinism, combined with a superior omniscience, which might emerge through a popularisation of developments in science. One may see this mixture at work in Derrida’s nightmarish prophetic theorising. But these matters are parts of human thought and human activity and not, in the sense in which talk of God, his presence or absence, might suggest, the whole basis of it.
Because Buber apprehends what is called ‘the silence of the Transcendent’, or more mundanely the fact that modern western people have difficulty in believing in traditional supernatural religion, and because he still deeply believes in God, he feels driven to think in terms of an interim or (to use a term employed by Jung) an interregnum. Religious belief then has to become a kind of prophecy. This temptation should be resisted and I think Buber, who comes to the edge of it, does resist it. He rejects of course Jung’s style of prophetic psychological historicism, and though fascinated by Heidegger does not follow him. Heidegger’s idea, adorned by references to (poor innocent) Hölderlin, of a sort of return of the gods or new undreamt-of renewal of the sacred and the holy is a piece of poetic metaphysical melodrama. The concept of ‘Being’, used as a substitute for ‘God’ or ‘Absolute’, is of dubious value; and in the thinking of late Heidegger becomes a sinister historicised Fate, a posited entity about whose future
‘structure’ or ‘intentions’ we may speculate. (A player of games.) Heidegger’s search for a universal language, or fundamental basis of language, in the language of poetry is also, whether we regard it as metaphysics, or ‘science’, or literary criticism, a false path, a search for ‘deep foundations’ where there are none. (Poetry is written by poets, there are not many of these, poetry is very difficult.) If one does want to believe in what is ‘deep’ in the form of the old God then let this belief be kept mysterious and separated and pure, and not mixed up with dubious history, or indeed with any history. Buber’s writing conveys eloquently what such a belief is like. The renewal of the holy and the sacred is and can only be here and now, and is indeed still happening all the time. To return to I and Thou. It seems to me that if God is a necessary Thou then he must be (in the old sense) a person. One cannot get round this by saying that since we are persons God must be at least a person, or that God becomes a person in order to talk to us. The concept breaks at this point. The eternal Thou that lives in secret, if it is not our own heart or conscience or higher self, or our Buddha nature or Christ nature, speaking back to us, is the old Father God in disguise; and this God (as a fortiori the God of the philosophers) is what modern demythologising thought rejects.
Such rejection does not of course involve a choice between ‘materialism’ and an existentialist theology. There are other paths. Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ seems to announce the end of moral as well as religious absolutes. But we continue to recognise moral absolutes just as we continue to use ordinary language. Kant was right to take our recognition of duty as something fundamental. We manage it. Let the philosophers and theologians worry about the background. ‘Human subjectivity’ may be said to have changed but only in some respects. We can lose God, but not Good. Prophecies about moral-less value-less societies of the future belong to science fiction, or would if science fiction writers could imagine them. We know the difference between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative. Buber’s salute to the philosophers is both apt and moving. But he is also of course suspicious of philosophers, who might try to set up an idea of God (as Hegel did). I have quoted his objection to the visual imagery of Plato, which ‘opticises thought’. Of course we ‘meet with’ reality all the time in the sense of ‘coming close’ to entities, all sorts of entities, and holding opinions and achieving knowledge. We have no difficulty in combining imperfect cognitions with ideas of perfection which haunt them. These are ordinary states of affairs. We grasp these matters all in one, the pure and separated source of light, and the reality which is revealed and imperfectly grasped. Buber says of Plato that he
‘gives us a glorious human and poetic account of the mysterious fullness of the concrete situation. He also knows gloriously how to remain silent. When however he explains and answers for his silence, in that unforgettable passage of the seventh epistle, he starts, to be sure, from the concreteness of “life together” where “in an instant a light is kindled as from a springing fire”. But in order to explain this he turns immediately to an exposition of the knowing and the known, meaning the universal. Standing in the concrete situation and even witnessing to it, man is overspanned by the rainbow of the covenant between the absolute and the concrete. If he wishes in philosophising to fix his glance upon the white light of the absolute as the object of his knowledge, only the archetypes or ideas, the transfigurations of the universal, present themselves to him. The colour-free, beyond-colour bridge fails to appear. Here also, in my opinion, is to be found the reason why Plato changed from the identification of the idea of the good with God, as presented in his Republic, to the conception appearing in the Timaeus of the Demiurge who contemplates the Ideas.’
(The Eclipse of God, pp. 57-8.)
These are interesting misunderstandings, to which I referred earlier, which appear here given a particular force by the image of the covenant as the rainbow bridge and by the reference to the Timaeus Demiurge. Briefly, the term ‘universal’, often used in explanation of Plato, suggests a logical role, which indeed the Forms also perform. The Theory of Forms (never entirely clarified) is constructed to deal with both ‘logical’ (or epistemological) and moral problems. ‘How does the one relate to the many?’, ‘how does the universal relate to the particular?’ The imagery of the Forms is a picture of how we think (use language). How do we classify entities as groups under singular concepts and names, and how do we recognise these entities as being the same in different instances? Wittgenstein worried about this too. The Forms are related to a hierarchy of knowledge and morality. Knowledge (language) is essentially related to morality by the idea of truth. Science too depends on truthfulness. There is an orientation toward goodness in the fundamental texture of human nature. We, as individuals, live in different worlds, we see (visual metaphor) different things, not just in general but down to last details. The Good is distant and apart, and yet it is a source of energy, it is an active principle of truthful cognition and moral understanding in the soul, the inspiration and love-object of Eros. It is not a logical universal, or a Person, it is sui generis. It is a ‘reality principle’ whereby we find our way about the world. Plato’s philosophy offers a metaphysical picture of that essential presence, together with (throughout the dialogues) many and various instances and examples of our relations to it. So there is, we may say, a rainbow bridge — but no covenant.
I used the word ‘detail’ earlier. Our pilgrimage (in the direction of reality, good) is not experienced only in high, broad or general ways (such as in increased understanding of mathematics or justice), it is experienced in all our most minute relations with our surrounding world, wherein our apprehensions (perceptions) of the minutest things (stones, spoons, leaves, scraps of rubbish, tiny gestures, etc. etc.) are also capable of being deeper, more benevolent, more just (etc. etc.). In the Parmenides (130) (as I quoted earlier) Parmenides asks Socrates whether there are Forms of little particular things which we think of as absurd and worthless, such as mud, hair, or dirt. Socrates replies, ‘No, I think these are just as they appear to us [that is, they have no deeper aspect] and it would be absurd to believe that there is an idea [Form] of them — and yet I am sometimes disturbed by the thought that perhaps what is true of one thing is true of all. Then when I have taken up this position, I run away for fear of falling into some abyss of nonsense and perishing; so when I come to those things which we were just saying do have ideas [such as the good, the just, man, water, fire], I stay and busy myself with them.’ Parmenides replies, ‘Yes, for you are still young and philosophy has not yet taken hold of you, as I think it will later. Then you will not despise them; but now you still consider people’s opinions, on account of your youth.’ A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of dialogue.
To come to the matter of God and the Demiurge. Plato’s view of good and virtue is not to be understood in any supernatural sense. He frequently indicates that the pictorial explanations to which he resorts are myths, metaphors. When in the Meno, anamnesis is explained in terms of how the soul before birth saw the Forms (the exemplars) with perfect clarity, Socrates remarks, ‘Well, something like this might be true.’ The happy almost playful ironic light (invisible to many readers, such as Buber and Heidegger) in which these beautiful world-changing constructions are set out, also and constantly gives us the clue to understand them. Plato’s art creates its own atmosphere of understanding, whereby what is deepest and most serious can be grasped with precision. The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo. The light of Good, as truthfulness and justice and love, gives life to reality for the enlightened knower. The good man perceives the real world, a true and just seeing of people and human institutions, which is also a seeing of the invisible through the visible, the real through the apparent, the spiritual beyond the material. Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give a sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the
contrary. Good is above the level of gods or God.
Buber speculates that Plato wrote the Timaeus to exchange the abstract absolute of the Republic (the Form of the Good taking the place of God), which excludes the covenant between man and God, for a more personal picture, wherein a personal ‘God’ appears as man’s creator. Plato’s motives for writing the Timaeus are doubtless complex. If one is to make guesses, one might also imagine that Plato wishes, in this later dialogue, to correct the imagery of the Republic by doing justice more overtly to the underlying contingency of the world, to the fact that irreducible non-rational rubble is mixed into the human situation. One might relate this wish to Plato’s increasing pessimism about politics and human possibility. The limitations of human powers, of capacities to become rational and knowledgeable and good, are certainly indicated in the Republic, but might be thought of there as in principle able to be overcome, rather than as ineluctable and to be taken as given. The Timaeus in no way abandons or softens the idea of the separate (implicitly) ‘cold’ Forms presented earlier. The love of the Demiurge for the Forms does not in any way affect, or infect, them, but is a mythical presentation of the energy of Eros as it pervades our world and inspires the creative activities of goodness which make it to be. F. M. Cornford (at the end of From Religion to Philosophy) takes a view not totally unlike that of Buber, of Plato’s ‘abstract absolute’ (though of course he does not share Buber’s theology), when he speaks of the world of the Forms as a rational ‘scheme of classification’, a construction of ‘the Intellect which can divide and analyse but not create’. Plato then