Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  17

  Axioms, Duties, Eros

  Philosophers have sought for a single principle upon which morality may be seen to depend. I do not think that the moral life can be in this sense reduced to a unity. On the other hand I do not think that it can be satisfactorily characterised by an enumeration of varying ‘goods’ and virtues. Of course it is true that, as moral agents, we pick and choose, we find some activities easy, some difficult. A person can be scrupulously honest but unkind, or generous but deceitful and so on. Schopenhauer said that malice was worse than lying. When assessing others and ourselves, we may discriminate between different ‘aspects’. But a human being is a whole entity, there is also something essentially one-making about morals, and we may seek to exonerate or accuse on the basis of a seen or felt unity. The idea of good or goodness remains a magnet; the higher part of the soul speaks to the lower part of the soul, the good lightens and reforms the bad, the bad darkens the good. This imagery is readily understood. The image of good here takes the place of God in its connection with a whole being. At our ‘deepest’ or most serious we may be ‘pulled together’, not felt as a collection of heterogeneous impulses. When people are morally ‘rent in two’, the very rending can effect a gathering of the good against the bad. However we may distinguish in philosophy, what in life is more confusedly experienced. I used earlier the image of a field of force, a field of tension, between modes of ethical being, divided under the headings of axioms, duties, and Eros. There is a necessary fourth mode which I name Void, which I have mentioned earlier and will return to. This picture is of course awkward since the entities, besides being of different types, are internally divided against themselves. I have said a good deal about these modes in preceding pages, and will now add a few brief remarks.

  The developed concept of ‘axioms’ belongs to fairly recent history and is important both in itself and as a clarification of thinking about politics. It is a matter of history when and why something comes to be axiomatic. This is not to say that axioms are merely relative. This is practical morals right up against it. Axioms are designed to be strict and sweeping, ignoring national, racial, etc., barriers. They are connected with justice and with rights, and are essentially of great generality. (Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) They are not to be confused with Kantian statements of duty which may also be very general in form; axioms belong in the Hobbesian rough-and-tumble of the field of ‘political morality’, which of course has its connections with ‘private morality’, but is properly to be distinguished. Not exactly under the same heading, yet a close relation, is the much larger and less localised matter of utilitarianism. It might be said that utilitarianism, intimately connected with politics, is an axiomatic philosophy. The actual idea is of great generality and apparent obviousness: every being desires happiness, the absence of pain, happiness is the only good and to promote it the only moral task. Bentham’s pure form of the doctrine was modified by Mill who introduced another, different, moral value by speaking of higher and lower happiness. As an axiom the utilitarian idea could be expressed as: ‘The question, how will this affect happiness, is always relevant to every moral decision.’ This would be taking a step beyond Mill, and offering a formulation with which many people might agree. As I said earlier, utilitarianism is probably, as an identifiable moral doctrine, the philosophy most widely in practice in the present world. The general command ‘Be kind’ is also in general use. Utilitarian ideals now support large political ends (ecology, feed the hungry) and might be argued to be (rather than the cultivation of private virtue) what the planet needs. Justice too might, roughly, be considered under this first section, and might indeed have been the title of the section. Justice (indifferent to happiness) should be thought of primarily as retributive, making even: this is not revenge, it works for, as well as against, the accused. Deterrence and reform are, however important, ancillary.

  The idea of duty is almost as familiar to us as the idea of happiness. It is perhaps, after the pursuit of happiness, the most evident fact in human life that there are some things we are (morally) required to do irrespective of inclination. Duty (practical reason, the categorical imperative) does not constitute the whole of the moral life. But the concept of duty remains with us as a steady moral force. Duty is formal, and though allowing of many formalisations (from the general to the almost disgracefully particular) can introduce order and calmness. Duty helps the formation of moral habits, partly because certain acts are thereby clearly and publicly defined (and we may be seen to fail), and also of course because we thereby internalise and take for granted certain patterns and values. A good habit of life, reliable decent behaviour, is to be welcomed; on the other hand the ‘dutiful man’ may be content with too little, with a mere observance of duty, following a rule without imagining that something more is required. (Or in extended Kantian terms, failing to formulate more complex or suitable maxims.) Kant sees the moral life as a struggle (we are aware of a noumenal reality by which we are touched) but he sees the fight in terms of the rational will straining against the massive unregenerate emotional psyche. This is what things are sometimes like, but certainly not always; the concept of duty, taken as the whole picture, identifies the moral agent with the good will. This will, especially when Kant’s religious metaphysical background is removed, may be seen as only occasionally active. What is thereby ignored are the ways in which, in so many moments and levels of our experience, we are morally involved.

  A large part of what I have been concerned with comes under the heading of Eros. ‘All things are full of gods.’ (Plato quoting Thales, Laws 899B.) Anyone who has been to India will have seen these gods. This is what is deliberately omitted by Kant. ‘In every grain of dust there are Buddhas innumerable.’ This road may be held to be morally dangerous, strewn with idols and warm emotional consolations and false delusive sacraments. Well, we will ingeniously find such consolations on any moral road, and the performance of duty is not necessarily a cold matter either, as Kant himself handsomely points out. Metaphysics both describes and recommends, and may be embraced or rejected on both counts. When Hume said that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions he was pointing, in an intelligible way, at a fact and a desideratum. A calm reflective realism about morals suggests a large complex picture which is outlined and underlined in a normative manner and cannot otherwise be adequately presented. This is a case of what (as I have been arguing) is constantly happening outside philosophy and here, as outside philosophy, we know roughly how to treat such pictures so as not to be cheated. Any moral philosopher must (should) appeal to our general knowledge of human nature. Morality is and ought to be connected with the whole of our being. I want here to restate in summary form what I have said earlier in discussing ‘consciousness’. The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar separate area of our existence. It is into ourselves that we must look: advice which may now be felt, in and out of philosophy, to be out of date. The proof that every little thing matters is to be found there. Life is made up of details. We compartmentalise it for reasons of convenience, dividing the aesthetic from the moral, the public from the private, work from pleasure. We feel we have to simplify, and in our busy lives cannot care about minimals. Yet we are all always deploying and directing our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it, and it is always easier to do a thing a second time. ‘Sensibility’ is a word which may be in place here. Aesthetic insight connects with moral insight, respect for things connects with respect for persons. (Education.) Happenings in the consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have moral ‘colour’. All sorts of momentary sensibilities to other people, too shadowy to come under the heading of manners of communication, are still parts of moral activity. (‘But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?’ Yes, roughly.) We live in the present, this strange familiar yet mysterious continuum which is so difficult to describe. This is what is nearest and it matters what kind of pl
ace it is. This is not to advocate constant self-observation or some mad return to solipsism. We instinctively watch and check ourselves to some extent, but much of our self-awareness is other-awareness, and in this area we exercise ourselves as moral beings in our use of many various skills as we direct our modes of attention. In traditional terms, ‘God sees me at every moment’ and ‘I do not pray just in the morning and the evening, I pray as I breathe.’ The word ‘spiritual’ may be tied to religion, in order to depict other areas as secular or aesthetic and so on, or it may be extended into the moral to connect morality with religion, or it may be taken over by the moral as a way of saying goodbye to religion. This word certainly seems to me to be at home in the moral sphere, suggesting the creative imaginative activity of our mind, spirit, in relation to our surroundings. Religion has no private property here. Thinking about religion throws light upon what morality means and is. And religious thinking too, as well as ‘thinking about’, should be taken back into moral philosophy, where it used to have a home in the past. Reflection in purely religious contexts, where mystics and artists haunt the borders of theology and enliven and humanise that ‘dry’ subject, has often revealed the human soul more truly than thoughts in the style of moral philosophy: for fairly discernible reasons concerning intensity of motive and availability of art, the naturalness for instance of working with images. Writers, poets, dramatists, novelists, without formal religious or philosophical aims, have of course done so too. We have many kinds of accessible wisdom. This is not in any way to suggest that philosophy should be softened, or merged or lose its own particular kind of steely rectitude and sense of truth. I think in this respect philosophy can look after itself.

  So, in those streets in India, at filthy meaningless street corners, there are images of gods with garlands of fresh flowers about their necks. Of course at every level of sophistication we have to beware, on our way, of idolatry and false deities. This wariness is an essential moral matter, one might almost call it a moral rule. But this too I think we know generally how to handle. On the road between illusion and reality there are many clues and signals and wayside shrines and sacraments and places of meditation and refreshment. The pilgrim just has to look about him with a lively eye. There are many kinds of images in the world, sources of energy, checks and reminders, pure things, inspiring things, innocent things, attracting love and veneration. We all have our own icons, untainted and vital, which we, perhaps secretly, store away in safety. There is nothing esoteric or surprising about this, people know about it, it is familiar. I have taken here the image (concept) of Eros from Plato. ‘Eros’ is the continuous operation of spiritual energy, desire, intellect, love, as it moves among and responds to particular objects of attention, the force of magnetism and attraction which joins us to the world, making it a better or worse world: good and bad desires with good and bad objects. It gives sense to the idea of loving good, something absolute and unique, a magnetic focus, made evident in our experience through innumerable movements of cognition. Good represents the reality of which God is the dream. It purifies the desire which seeks it. This is not just a picturesque metaphysical notion. People speak of loving all sorts of things, their work, a book, a potted plant, a formation of clouds. Desire for what is corrupt and worthless, the degradation of love, its metamorphosis into ambition, vanity, cruelty, greed, jealousy, hatred, or the parched demoralising deserts of its absence, are phenomena often experienced and readily recognised. If we summon up a great energy, it may prove to be a great demon. People know about the difference between good and evil, it takes quite a lot of theorising to persuade them to say or imagine that they do not. The activity of Eros is orientation of desire. Reflecting in these ways we see ‘salvation’ or ‘good’ as connected with, or incarnate in, all sorts of particulars, and not just as ‘an abstract idea’. ‘Saving the phenomena’ is happening all the time. We do not lose the particular, it teaches us love, we understand it, we see it, as Plato’s carpenter sees the table, or Cézanne sees Mont Ste Victoire or the girl in the bed-sitter sees her potted plant or her cat.

  So, the carpenter is dealing with wood, tools, measurement, Cézanne is looking at the mountain he knows so well and creating a work of art and saying to himself that he cannot paint what he sees, the girl is comforted by her plant, which is so beautiful and glossy and which she cares for and protects, and also by her cat, whom she also tends, who is a free being, a friend, a privilege to live with, they look into each other’s eyes. And the physicist too, whose thoughts we would not understand, loves the beauty of his formulation. Human beings love each other, in sex, in friendship, and love and cherish other beings, humans, animals, plants, stones. Imagination and art are in all of this, and the quest for happiness and the promotion of happiness. The myth in the Phaedrus (250) tells us that every human soul has seen, in their pure being, the Forms (Ideas) as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we ‘hold in honour’, when dwelling with the gods in a previous existence; and when on earth we are moved toward what is good it is by a faint memory of those pure things, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw then in a pure clear light, being pure ourselves. This seems to me an excellent image of our apprehension of morality and goodness. It also conveys, in brief, a proper understanding of the Theory of Forms in its moral application. (Of course Plato did not think that morality consisted in staring at an abstract idea.) The dialectic descends, returning to the particular. (As in Buddhist views and Parmenides 130.) What I have called Eros pictures probably a greater part of what we think of as ‘the moral life’; that is, most of our moral problems involve an orientation of our energy and our appetites.

  18

  Void

  This section, which could also be called ‘despair’ or ‘affliction’ or ‘dark night’, concerns a region, or category, which might seem to have been left out of too optimistic a picture. It appears to be different in kind from the other regions or categories, since the latter may, in the context of the argument, be treated as types of moral thinking, whereas this looks more like a tract of experience. As such it might be thought of as an opposing companion piece to happiness. It might also, in a different way, be placed in opposition to ‘transcendence’, a word that I have used to mean a good ‘going beyond’ one’s egoistic self, as in the Platonic pilgrimage or innumerable ordinary experiences. What I refer to here is something extreme: the pain, and the evil, which occasion conditions of desolation such as many or most human beings have met with.

  Someone may say, if you are always noticing images of God or Good or seeing spiritual ladders, or being some sort of artist, you are very lucky. Your view of spiritual refreshment as everywhere available is ridiculously optimistic, even sentimental. It seems to neglect how miserable we are, and also how wicked we are. The average inhabitant of the planet is probably without hope and starving. It is terrible to be human. It is deinos. This argument may go on to suggest that any cult of personal spirituality or ‘goodness’, presented as fundamental reality, is merely selfish pleasure in disguise, and all we can do which is in any way decent is to alleviate suffering whenever we come across it. From here various lines of thought proceed, most obviously utilitarian ones. Why waste time on private morality? There are dreadful human fates, even in ‘sheltered’ lives there is black misery, bereavement, remorse, frustrated talent, loneliness, humiliation, depression, secret woe. The misery of the world can be seen every day on television. There are places in lives, and geographical places too, where there is nothing but darkness, the devil has his territory, Christ stopped at Eboli. This could be a modern Manichaean morality. And when so many suffer is it not an impertinence to try to think of individual shattered lives? One must think statistically, consider how much money can be spared for relief by one’s country and oneself. Can one go on talking about a spiritual source and an absolute good if a majority of human kind is debarred from it?

  It is not easy to discuss such a matter or to take it as a single subject. Th
ose who have experienced such black misery and recovered may prefer to forget. Art, which consoles and to which we also return for wisdom, tends to, or may seem to, romanticise despair. Innumerable poems, stories, pictures, portray it in ways we are easily able to tolerate and enjoy. Christ on the cross is an image so familiar and beautified that we have difficulty in connecting it with real awful human suffering. Grünewald’s Christ may make us shudder but we admire it as a tour de force. Some great novels shake us, Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoevsky. Attempts by painters, even when producing great pictures, are ‘endangered’ by either charm or aesthetic frightfulness. (I think the Titian Pietà in the Accademia avoids these.) Great tragic poetry and great tragedy seem to succeed best. The Iliad. Lear’s pain is not romanticised nor is that of Oedipus. The classical Greeks seem to have been incapable of romanticism and a fortiori of sentimentality; they also, a related point, seem devoid of masochism. However and of course Achilles, Hector, Oedipus, Lear are inside works of art. Thucydides’ account of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse is great cold tragic writing, and one might even argue that a great historian is best equipped to ‘tell us’. Philosophers, even while consigning whole areas of human existence to blindness and suffering, do not feel moved to exhibit distress. Philosophy is supposed to be, in some sense, detached. There is perhaps a certain irony in good philosophical work which avoids appeal to the heart. The existential tradition (‘the existing individual’) made a point of coming nearer to the heart. But then such a move is in danger from art. Kierkegaard speaks eloquently and with emotion about dread and sickness unto death, but is also a romantic writer. Sartre’s néant, with its ancestry in Kant’s Achtung and Kierkegaard’s Angst, is more like an exciting springboard than a void. At the level of ‘human life begins on the other side of despair’ we are hearing the voice of the cheerful spectator. (I do not mean that Sartre did not suffer, but that the reality of suffering is not expressed.) A fine writer on the subject, outside art, and sui generis philosophical, is Simone Weil. It is just, for reasons which have their own obviousness, very difficult to ‘touch’ this dark condition. Perhaps art does it best after all, and one need not refer oneself only to the sublimely great. One of the most terrible of human woes, and also the most common, is remorse. Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim conveys in ruthless detail the horrors of extreme remorse, its coldness, its eeriness, its destruction of the person. Loss of honour, loss of any hope of pardon. Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death, ‘Despair over sin’) quotes Macbeth’s words after the murder:For, from this instant,