Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  I intended here, thinking about holiness and reverence, not the exclusive property of believers, to quote from Francis Kilvert’s Diary (begun in 1870). Kilvert was a parson in country parishes on the Welsh border, a religious good man of simple faith. However, it is difficult to quote from the Diary because of the transparent artless lucidity of Kilvert’s account of his days. Any particular quotation can sound naive, or sentimental. ‘I went to see my dear little lover Mary Tavener, the deaf and half dumb child. When I opened the door of the poor crazy old cottage in the yard the girl uttered a passionate inarticulate cry of joy and running to me flung her arms about my neck and covered me with kisses.’ (12 June 1875.) ‘Old William Price sat in his filthy den, unkempt, unshaven, shaggy and grey like a wild beast, and if possible filthier than the den. I read to him Faber’s hymn of the Good Shepherd. He was much struck with it. “That’s what He has been telling me”, said the old man.’ (26 January 1872.) ‘The road was very still. No one seemed to be passing and the birds sang late and joyfully in the calm mild evening as if they thought it must be spring. A white mist gathered in the valley and hung low along the winding course of the river mingled with the rushing of the brooks, the distant voices of children at play came floating at intervals across the river and near at hand a pheasant screeched now and then and clapped its wings or changed his roost from tree to tree like a man turning in bed before he falls asleep.’ (27 January 1872.) Kilvert spent his days walking all over his territory, visiting everyone, noticing everything (people, animals, birds, flowers) and describing it all in simple humble extremely readable detail. ‘How delightful on these sweet summer evenings to wander from cottage to cottage and farm to farm.’ It may be said that Kilvert was lucky, but also that he deserved his luck. There is a serene light and a natural kindly selfless love of people and of nature in what he writes. He felt secure. He had faith. Wittgenstein was struck by a character in a play who seemed to him to feel safe, nothing that happened could harm him. Wittgenstein’s ‘Ontological Proof’ or ‘statement’ (Tractatus 6. 41) places the sense of the world outside the world, outside all of the contingent facts. Thinking of Wittgenstein’s picture of the world (all the facts) as a self-contained sphere, a sort of steel ball, outside which ineffable value roams, we might look at something similar but different. ‘He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, which seemed to lie in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with my eye of understanding, and thought “What may this be?” I was answered in a general way thus: “It is all that is made.” I wondered how long it could last, for it seemed as though it might suddenly fade away to nothing, it was so small. And I was answered in my understanding: “It lasts and ever shall last, for God loveth it. And even so hath everything being, by the love of God.”’ (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5.) Julian’s showing, besides exhibiting God’s love for the world, also indicates our absolute dependence as created things. We are nothing, we owe our being to something not ourselves. We are enlivened from a higher source.

  Kierkegaard would object to a moral — religious continuum. We, existing individuals, therefore sinners, feel guilt, feel in need of salvation, to be reborn into a new being. ‘If any man be in Christ he is a new creature: old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.’ (2 Corinthians 5. 17.) In Kierkegaard’s version of Hegelian dialectic it is not endlessly evolving toward totality, but is a picture of levels in the soul, or of different kinds of people, or of the pilgrimage of a particular person. The aesthetic individual is private, the ethical man, including the tragic hero, is public, the religious individual, the man of faith, is once more private. This dramatic triad also suggests the dangerous link between the two private stages, the aesthetic and the religious, so deeply unlike, so easily confused. The idea of repentance and leading a better cleansed and renewed life is a generally understood moral idea; and the, however presented, granting of absolution, God’s forgiveness, keeps many people inside religion, or invites them to enter. Guilt, especially deep apparently incurable guilt, can be one of the worst of human pains. To cure such an ill, because of human sin, God must exist. (As Norman Malcolm suggested when discussing the Ontological Proof.) The condition of being changed and made anew is a general religious idea, sometimes appearing as magical instant salvation (as in suddenly ‘taking Christ as Saviour’) or as the result of some lengthy ascesis. Here salvation as spiritual change often goes with the conception of a place of purification and healing. (We light candles, we bring flowers, we go somewhere and kneel down.) This sense of a safe place is characteristic of religious imagery. Here the outer images the inner, and the inner images the outer. There is a literal place, the place of pilgrimage, the place of worship, the shrine, the sacred grove, there is also a psychological or spiritual place, a part of the soul. ‘Do not seek for God outside your soul.’ Religion provides a well-known well-tried procedure of rescue. Particularly in relation to guilt and remorse or the obsessions which can be bred from these, the mystery of religion (respected, intuited) is a source of spiritual energy. An orientation toward the good involves a reorientation of desire. Here a meeting with a good person may bring about a change of direction. If Plato had never met Socrates and experienced his death perhaps western thinking might have been different. The mystical Christ too can be ‘met’ with. (The idea of redemptive suffering is repugnant to some; but such suffering is everywhere around us, where the innocent suffers through love of the guilty.) Of course it may well be argued that there are sound unmysterious secular equivalents to these devices, there are many resources for the afflicted who may use their enlightened common sense, or go to their friends, doctors, therapists, psychoanalysts, social workers, take refuge in art or nature, or say (as the religious too may say) to hell with it all. Many people hate religion, with its terrible history and its irrationality, and would regard resort to religious rituals as a false substitute for real morals and genuine amendment of life. Judaism and Islam, who have avoided the path of image-making, and have revered the name of [God], avoid many of the problems which now beset Christianity. Buddhists live with the mystical Buddha in the soul. (Like Eckhart’s God and Christ in the soul.) The Hindu religion also has its philosophical mysticism above its numerous gods. Religion has been fundamentally mystical, and this becomes, in this age, more evident. So will the theologians invent new modes of speech, and will the churches fill with people who realise they do not need to believe in the supernatural?

  Religion (even if ‘primitive’) is generally assumed to be in some sense moral. Mysticism is also assumed to be, by definition, moral. Thinkers of the Enlightenment however, and many since, have held, often rightly, that organised, institutionalised religion is an enemy of morality, an enemy of freedom and free thought, guilty of cruelty and repression. This has been so and in many quarters is so. Therefore the whole institution may be rationally considered to be discredited or outmoded. Many other influences from the past support such a line of thought. Kierkegaard saw Hegel as the enemy of religion and of, ipso facto, the existing individual. The vast force of Hegel’s thinking, followed up by Marx, is inimical to both. The Romantic Movement and the liberal political thinking which went with it have tended to look after the individual, and we associate high morality (idealism, selflessness, goodness) with many people in this century and the last who assumed that religion was finished. It must be agreed that, in very many ways, western society has improved, become more tolerant, more free, more decently happy, in this period. It may also be agreed that with the decline of religious observance and religious ‘consciousness’ (the practice of prayer and the fear of God for instance), some aspects of moral conduct may decline also. (Of course this decline can have other causes.) However that may be, Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, have had influence. Virtues and values may give way to a more relaxed sense of determinism. There is a more ‘reasonable’, ordinary, available relativism and ‘naturalism’ about. Hegel’s Geist is the ene
rgy which perpetually urges the ever-unsatisfied intellect (and so the whole of being) onward toward Absolute reality. Everything is relative, incomplete, not yet fully real, not yet fully true, dialectic is a continual reformulation. Such is the history of thought, of civilisation, or of the ‘person’ who, immersed in the process, is carried on toward some postulated self-consistent totality. Vaguely, such an image as something plausible may linger in the mind. I shall not discuss Hegel here, but look for a moment at a milder form of quasi-Hegelianism in F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. According to Bradley both morality and religion demand an unattainable unity. ‘Every separate aspect of the universe goes on to demand something higher than itself.’ This is the dialectic, the overcoming of the incomplete, of appearance and illusion, the progress toward what is more true, more real, more harmoniously integrated. ‘And, like every other appearance, goodness implies that which, when carried out, must absorb it.’ Religion is higher than morality, being more unified, more expressive of a perfect wholeness. But both morality and religion face the same insuperable difficulty. Morality-religion believes in the reality of perfect good, and in the demand that good be victorious and evil destroyed. The postulated whole (good) is at once actually to be good, and at the same time to make itself good. Neither its perfect goodness nor its struggle may be degraded to an appearance (something incomplete and imperfect). But to unite these two aspects consistently is impossible. If the desired end were reached, the struggle, the need for devotion, would have ceased to be real. If there is to be morality, there cannot altogether be an end to evil. Discord is essential to goodness. Moral evil exists only in moral experience and that experience is essentially inconsistent. Morality desires unconsciously, with the suppression of evil, to become non-moral. It shrinks from this, yet it unknowingly desires the existence and perpetuity of evil. Morality, which makes evil, desires in evil to remove a condition of its own being; it labours to pass into a super-moral and therefore non-moral sphere. Moral-religious faith is make-believe: be sure that opposition to the good is overcome, but act as if it (the opposition) persists. ‘The religious consciousness rests on the felt unity of unreduced opposites.’ (Chapters XIV and XXV.)

  Bradley, the son of an evangelical Anglican clergyman, was alienated from the church, but interested in religion. His earlier work, Ethical Studies (1876), which he refused to have republished in his lifetime, is more liberally and tolerantly empirical (descriptive) about morality. He asks (chapter on ‘Ideal Morality’), ‘Is evolution or progress the truth from the highest point of view? . . . To whom in England can we go for an answer?’ This ‘raises problems which nothing but a system of metaphysic can solve’. The question is a good one, and also suggests the kind of situation in which it was felt that metaphysics was needed. Appearance and Reality (1893) offers (with various empirically motivated qualms and hesitations) the system. I shall not discuss the details of this large argument. At least, siding with Kierkegaard’s anger, one may say that it is very improbable that Ultimate Reality is an apprehensible, even describable, total self-enclosed system which forms (ultimately) a rational self-harmonious whole excluding nothing. The merits, or charms, of the Hegelian picture lie, one might say initially and genuinely, in having conceived of such an idea in a modern form and having argued it in some detail as psychology, as history, as time, and as science. Parts of these arguments (for instance Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’) are full of substance. The idea of the rational totality, made ‘practical’ by Marxism, has been widely influential. I am concerned here with the account, in Bradley’s simplified version, of the self-contradictory nature of morality. Secretly good loves evil, because without evil it would not be good: good appears inconsistently as the absolute good (essential to morals), and as the struggle to become good which demands the co-operation of evil. Meditation upon this picture may lead to the conclusion that what ultimately makes sense is not the good but the aesthetic. (We are image-makers, what is finally harmonious is something aesthetic.) A remote ancestry of the Hegelian method is in Heraclitus’s creative strife of opposites as the base or matter or origin of being. ‘War is the father of all things.’ (Fr. 53.) War as creative evolutionary force. (A view held by tyrants.) Hegel returns to Heraclitus, as do Nietzsche and Heidegger. Plato’s dialectic lives in various, not entirely conclusive, debates, in which contingency (becoming) remains unreduced. What we may see in Hegel’s Geist is more like a (captive, systematised, totalised, utterly demoralised) version of Plato’s wild free yet potentially virtuous Eros. Other debased descendants of Eros are the ‘Wills’ of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the libido of Freud. The most obvious objections to Hegel may indeed be to the outrageous implausibility of the whole machine; but more sinister is a lingering shadow of determinism, and the loss of ordinary everyday truth, that is of truth. The loss of the particular, the loss of the contingent, the loss of the individual. The same consideration bears against another descendant in this line, the concept of archi-ecriture. Hegel’s system, and Bradley’s smaller more confused copy, ignore (destroy, magic away) the essential contingency of human life, its rejection of any idea of rational totality. The life of morality and truth exists within an irreducible incompleteness. The (charming aesthetic) notion of the love affair between good and evil reappears in the work of Jung, presented as a new ‘scientific’ religious picture. Isn’t this (we may be led to feel) worth reflecting upon? Yes, we do live with ideas, ideals, glimpses of some sort of goodness, while we are at the same time aware of ourselves as bad, vain, envious, jealous, struggling with strong selfish impulses. But surely (it is said) we can manage both pictures, both states, the tension between them, often invigorating and exciting, is the stuff of human existence? Did not ‘God’ perpetuate and hallow this tension? As I suggested earlier, the age of science does tend to introduce us to a certain relativism, we see the ‘deep causes of our imperfections’, we become more patient with our selfish ego; striving too hard, against our natural impulses, for a virtuous life may be a mistake. Better to be a well-adjusted moderate happier person than a would-be-good neurotic. Is there not (it may be argued) some sense in this view, whereby the notions of good and virtue fade in favour of a common-sensical balance between good and evil, wherein even the terms ‘good and evil’ begin to seem old-fashioned? It may be argued that, if required, ‘high morality’ can constantly return to us in the form of utilitarianism and political and ecological idealism. A final contention: anyway, really, most human lives are irretrievably sunk in misery and muddle and fear, and to this condition the light of morality is irrelevant. (I shall discuss this too later on.) To return to Bradley, his last chapter (of Appearance and Reality), entitled ‘Ultimate Doubts’, ends with the sentence: ‘Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality, and, the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real.’ (This is ‘the essential message of Hegel’.) This might be read as Platonism or a mystical dictum in the style of Eckhart. But in the context of the busy totalising Hegelian Geist it is not to be revered. There is even in it the shadow of a contradiction, the very one which was pointed out in the case of good. The idea of totality (nothing outside) is placed in contrast with the idea of search (the discovery of what is more real and more true); and the latter (search) is by definition held to be illusion. What is intolerable here is that the value and genuine existence of the moral and intellectual struggle is denied in favour of a postulated entity wherein both value and individual being are to disappear. Not all metaphysicians have a sense of humour. Does metaphysics founder on the funny? Not necessarily – a little light and air often improves the scene. Plato continually makes jokes. Heidegger has no sense of humour, and this is one of the reasons why he misunderstands Plato. Funniness mocks totality. (It is forbidden in totalitarian states.) Bradley, for all his brave attempt to gather everything in, admits near the end that there are some things which he has to leave outside in the realm of the contingent. In a footnote (p. 451) he says that h
e has not included the question of life after death in the argument. What is one to make of that belief, which consoles so many? How can one picture it? ‘Friends that have buried their quarrel in a woman’s grave, would they at the Resurrection be friends? ... The revolt of modern Christianity against the austere sentence of the Gospel (Matthew 22. 30) is interesting enough.’ (Here Christ says that in the resurrection people ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven’.) ‘One feels that a personal immortality would not be very personal if it implied mutilation of our affections. There are those who would not sit down among the angels till they had recovered their dog.’