Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  We may look back from here to Anselm’s Proofs and to the distinction between them which has interested modern philosophers. Credo ut intellegam, I believe so that I may understand, represents a faith born out of experience of the relations between truth and good; or, if one wants to extend the picture, out of experience of the internal relations between truth and good and cognition and freedom, and (we may add) beauty. The great artist makes beauty out of necessity (contingency) as the divine cause persuades the necessary cause in the Timaeus. The beauty of the world as an image of obedience. The extension of the equation goes beyond Anselm, but in his spirit. As soon as we remove the concept of God the two Proofs co-operate with each other. The second Proof, in terms of necessary existence, proves the (necessary) non-existence of God, thereby, and with its co-operation, leaving the way open for the first Proof, in terms of the idea of perfection, to ‘prove’ or indicate the real, in a unique mode, existence of good. No existing thing could be what we have meant by God. Any existing God would be less than God. An existent God would be an idol or a demon. (This is near to Kant’s thinking.) God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured. That is, it is real as an Idea, and is also incarnate in knowledge and work and love. This is the true idea of incarnation, and is not something obscure. We experience both the reality of perfection and its distance away, and this leads us to place our idea of it outside the world of existent being as something of a different unique and special sort. Such experience of the reality of good is not like an arbitrary and assertive resort to our own will; it is a discovery of something independent of us, where that independence is essential. If we read these images aright they are not only enlightening and profound but amount to a statement of a belief which most people unreflectively hold. Non-philosophical people do not think that they invent good. They may invent their own activities, but good is somewhere else as an independent judge of these. Good is also something clearly seen and indubitably discovered in our ordinary unmysterious experience of transcendence, the progressive illuminating and inspiring discovery of other, the positive experience of truth, which comes to us all the time in a weak form and comes to most of us sometimes in a strong form (in art or love or work or looking at nature) and which remains with us as a standard or vision, an orientation, a proof of what is possible and a vista of what might be. I see here no need for a dramatic voluntarist ‘way’ to be pressed upon us by theologians. The ordinary way is the way. It is not in that sense theology, and the ‘mysticism’ involved is an accessible experience. The ‘proof’ may be said to resemble the Cartesian cogito in that it is an intuitive movement which we may prompt ourselves to make, a proof by morality and by love, not by logic. As an explicitly reflective insight this is something which we might summon to our aid in times of moral difficulty, as when believers might pray especially ardently to God. But our general awareness of good, or goodness, is with us unreflectively all the time, as a sense of God’s presence, or at least existence, used to be to all sorts of believers. The proof concerns the unique nature of moral perfection, as contrasted with the relative means-to-an-end (hypothetical) ‘perfection’ of existing things. We easily distinguish moral from functional uses of ‘good’, in Kantian terms we recognise categorical imperatives. Kant is right to draw attention to our experience of the recognition of duty, though he also places reason beyond experience. A picture of humanity must portray its fallen nature. We must keep constantly in view the distance between good and evil, and the potential extremity of evil. We are ineluctably imperfect, goodness is not a continuously active organic part of our purposes and wishes. However good a life is, it includes moral failure. Is this an empirical hypothesis or a tautology or a synthetic a priori proposition? Never mind, let it be in this context a metaphysical conjecture. It is certainly ubiquitously suggested by experience and true enough to exhibit as fundamental our sense of the purely good as essentially beyond us. Great saints and avatars may, in this age too and onward, live with us as mysteries, as mythical mystical exemplars and saviours. The truth, the light, which they bestow ‘floats free’ from contingent detail and is not at the mercy of history. When, in ordinary life, we are rescued or changed by a meeting with a very good person, we do not assume that he is sinless. With or without avatars, we are perpetually reminded of our natural selfishness and led to see our thoughts and acts as under a judgment which is not a natural part of ourselves. Can we think away the idea of ‘the moral’, the idea of the authority of good, from human life?

  St Paul, Romans 4. 17: ‘God, who quickeneth the dead and calleth the things that are not as though they were’. Karl Barth comments: ‘Faith beholds life and existence where the man of the world sees nothing but death and non-existence; and contrariwise it sees death and non-existence where he beholds full-blooded life ... The living must die in order that the dead may be made alive. The things which are must be seen as though they were not in order that the things which are not may be called as though they were ... A similar faith appears on the borderland of the philosophy of Plato, of the art of Grünewald and Dostoevsky, and of the religion of Luther.’ Here we find the name of Plato in interesting company. And Schopenhauer’s man who has practised dying gives up the existence we know and gets nothing in exchange, because our existence is, by contrast with his gain, nothing. In reflecting upon these sayings we may see too how close to religion certain parts of philosophy can come; Plato and the presocratics would not have made any sharp distinction between philosophy and religious reflection. Nor do thinkers in India make such a distinction now. Plato’s work is full of images and myths at which we must work to see what they mean in terms of everyday morals. Plato is not a remote abstract or purely ‘intellectualist’ thinker. He is very close to our own religious and moral tradition, being indeed one of its founders. The mythology of religion does not necessarily vanish but finds a new and different place as religion is newly understood. As A. N. Wilson says, at the end of his splendidly critical book, ‘Jesus has survived’. (Jesus, p. 253.)

  In thinking about the work of great metaphysicians one has to seek a balance between ‘faithfulness to the text’ and a tendency to invent one’s own metaphysician. If one is too ‘faithful’ one may merely reproduce unassimilated ideas which remain remote and dead; if one is too ‘inventive’ one may lose the original and present one’s own thoughts instead of the great thoughts to which one should have attended more carefully. This is of course a dilemma which belongs to any sort of interpretation. Structuralism, which tends to emphasise inventiveness at the expense of faithfulness, is also interested in this matter. Theorising about such difficulties can become an end in itself. Such theorising may be another way of losing the original. Methods of interpretation in various fields are all the time under scrutiny by individual thinkers, and sometimes, as in biblical criticism, it is worth while making a large general issue of the matter. Theological discussions of this kind form a background of contemporary problems concerning the ‘demythologisation’ of religion. In my own case I am aware of the danger of inventing my own Plato and extracting a particular pattern from his many-patterned text to reassure myself that, as I see it, good is really good and real is really real. I have been wanting to use Plato’s images as a sort of Ontological Proof of the necessity of Good, or rather, since Plato himself has already done this, to put his argument into a modern context as a background to moral philosophy, as a bridge between morals and religion, and as relevant to our new disturbed understanding of religious truth.

  Plato departed from the monistic presocratic view of a self-relating moral-natural cosmos, the cosmos in short as ‘God’: that is, roughly, Logos (intelligibility) is Zeus, and Zeus (not an Olympian god) is the One. I have not in these pages attempted any general account of the great presocratics who ‘began it all’ and differed considerably among themselves. Modern physics, and philosophical views which derive from it or refer to it, may seem ‘close’ to these cos
mic conceptions. Plato by contrast places, and explicitly places, the Absolute outside the existing cosmos, but not in the supernatural sense familiar in traditional Christianity. Christianity now, faced with the withdrawal of belief from the supernatural, may be tempted by various forms of the ‘cosmic answer’ of which Jung’s view is one. Religion as a sort of science. I attach, as I have been arguing, great importance to the concept of a transcendent good as an idea (properly interpreted) essential to both morality and religion. How do you mean essential? Do you mean it is empirically found to be so or are you recommending it? This is the ‘beginning’ to which such enquiries are frequently returned, except that it is not the beginning. The beginning is hard to find. Perhaps here the beginning is the circular nature of metaphysical argument itself, whereby the arguer combines an appeal to ordinary observation with an appeal to moral attitude. The process involves connecting together different considerations and pictures so that they give each other mutual support. Thus, for instance, there appears to be an internal relation between truth and goodness and knowledge. I have argued in this sense from cases of art and skill and ordinary work and ordinary moral discernment, where we establish truth and reality by an insight which is an exercise of virtue. Perhaps that is the beginning, which is also our deepest closest ordinary experience.

  Paul Tillich describes theology as a response to ‘the totality of man’s creative self-interpretation in a particular period’. We need a theology which can continue without God. Why not call such a reflection a form of moral philosophy? All right, so long as it treats of those matters of ‘ultimate concern’, our experience of the unconditioned and our continued sense of what is holy. Tillich refers us to Psalm 139. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend into heaven thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the following very kind persons who helped and encouraged the production of this book: Carmen Callil and Ed Victor who patiently nursed it into print, Jane Turner who scanned every page and made valuable suggestions, Anthony Turner as scholarly copy-editor, and Cecily Hatchitt who gallantly typed and retyped the seemingly endless text.

  The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material as follows:

  Victor Gollancz Ltd for extracts from Language, Truth and Logic, 1936, by A. J. Ayer; HarperCollins Publishers, New York, U.S.A., for extracts from The Eclipse of God, 1953, by Martin Buber; SCM Press for extracts from Radicals and the Future of the Church, 1989, and Taking Leave of God, 1980, by Don Cupitt; Faber & Faber Ltd. for an extract from Selected Essays, 1932, by T. S. Eliot; the Hogarth Press, London, and W. W. Norton Inc., New York, for extracts from The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953-74, translated and edited by James Strachey; Insel Verlag, Frankfurt-on-Main, and Macmillan London Ltd for extracts from Selected Letters, 1946, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by R. F. C. Hull; Weatherhill Publishers, New York, for extracts from Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, 1976, by Katsuki Sekida, edited by A. V. Grimstone; the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, for extracts from Systematic Theology, 1968, by Paul Tillich; Routledge for extracts from Notebooks, 1956, by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills; Basil Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, for extracts from works by Ludwig Wittgenstein: Culture and Value, amended edition 1980, edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman; Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs, 1978, edited by Cyril Barrett; Notebooks 1914-1916, 1961, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition 1958, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe; Philosophical Remarks, 1975, edited by Rush Rhees; and also for the following works: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann, 1967, edited by B. F. McGuinness; Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982, by Saul Kripke; Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, 1979, recorded by Friedrich Waismann and edited by B. F. McGuinness; the Brynmill Press, Gringley-on-the-Hill, Doncaster, for extracts from Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, 1979, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by A. C. Miles, revised by Rush Rhees; Routledge for extracts from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, in two editions: C. K. Ogden’s translation of 1922 and D. F. Pears’ and B. F. McGuinness’s translation of 1961.

  Index

  A la recherche du temps perdu

  Abbott, T. K.

  Abraham

  Acropolis Museum, the

  The Acting Person

  Adorno, Theodor

  Aeneid

  Aeon (time)

  Aeschylus

  Against Epistemology

  Agamemnon

  Alcibiades

  Alien Wisdom

  All’s Well That Ends Well

  Ambassadors, The

  The Ancients and the Moderns

  Anderson, Perry

  Anima Mundi (World Soul)

  Anselm, St

  The Answer to Job

  Antigone

  Antony and Cleopatra

  Appearance and Reality

  Aquinas, Thomas

  Arendt, Hannah

  Aristotle

  Arnold, Matthew

  Ashbery, John

  Auden, W. H.

  Augustine, St

  Auschwitz

  Austin, J. L.

  Ayer, A. J.

  Baillie, J. B.

  Barth, Karl

  Barthes, Roland

  The Basis of Morality

  Beckett, Samuel

  Beethoven

  Benjamin, Walter

  Bentham, Jeremy

  Berkeley, George

  Bettelheim, Bruno

  Beyond Good and Evil

  Bhagavad-gita, the

  Biographia Literaria

  Blake, William

  Bleak House

  Blue Book, The

  Boehme, Jacob

  Bonnard, Pierre

  Boswell, James

  Bradley, F. H.

  Brahma

  Brave New World

  Brecht, Bertholt

  Breton, André

  Bricks for Babel

  The Brothers Karamazov

  Browning, Robert

  Brugger, Bill

  Buber, Martin

  Bukovsky, Vladimir

  Bunyan, John

  Burnyeat, Miles

  Cahiers

  Canetti, Elias

  Capra, Fritjof

  The Categorical Imperative

  Caterus

  Celan, Paul

  Cézanne

  Chemins de la liberté, Les

  China

  China,: the Impact of the Cultural Revolution

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

  Collected Papers (Freud)

  Collingwood, R. G.

  Components of the National Culture

  The Concept of the Mind

  Confessions

  Conrad, Joseph

  Constant, Benjamin

  Cook Wilson

  Corneille, Pierre

  Cornford, F. M.

  Cowan, Marianna

  Cranmer, Archbishop Thomas

  ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’

  Crime and Punishment

  Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

  Critique of Judgement, ;

  Critique of Practical Reason

  Critique of Pure Reason

  Critique de la raison dialectique

  Cultural Revolution, Chinese

  Culture and Value

  Cupitt, Don

  Cymbeline

  Dalai Lama, the

  Dante

  De Civitate Dei

  D’Entreves

  De la grammatologie

  De Quincey, Thomas

  Derrida, Jacques

  Descartes, Rene

&
nbsp; Der Spiegel

  Dialogues on Natural Religion

  Dickens, Charles

  Dodds, E. R.

  Donne, John

  Dostoevsky, Fyodor

  Early Greek Thinking

  Eckhart, Meister

  The Eclipse of God

  L’ecriture et la différence

  Einstein, Albert

  Eliot, T. S.

  Engel, Morris

  Engelmann, Paul

  Engels, Friedrich

  English Prose Style

  Ens Realissimum

  Epicurus

  Epistle to The Romans (a commentary)

  Essay on Philosophical Method, An

  Essential Frankfurt School Reader, The

  Ethical Studies

  L’Etre et le néant

  Eumenides

  L’Existentialisme est un humanisme

  Fear and Trembling

  Ferenczi, Sandor

  Feuerbach, Ludwig

  Ficker, Ludwig

  Fielding, Henry

  La Fin de la Nuit

  Findlay, J. N.

  First Circle, The

  First Contributions to Psycho-analysis