Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  This excursion into pictures follows on from what I was saying about the fascinating image of the work of art (the illusory unity, the limited whole), and illustrates too the pictorial nature of philosophy, which one does not always notice because ‘picturing’ is so natural. In thinking about abstract matters one instinctively produces images, such as duty being like a laser beam coming from above; an image which may itself elicit figurative rejoinders. Are not many duties more like an unchanging fall of shadows from a permanent light-source at ground level? Does not duty live here below in networks of rules? If the ‘demythologisation’ of theological and moral thinking means the removal of pictures, can this be more than a substitution of one picture for another, so that (for instance) instead of God we have the mobile jumping will, and instead of metaphors of light, metaphors of movement (and so on)? Philosophers are artists, and metaphysical ideas are aesthetic; they are intended to clarify and connect, and they certainly satisfy deep emotional needs. The image of the unified limited whole is a product of philosophical art, and is like a work of art. Popular physics now portrays to us the cosmos (everything that is) as a ‘whole’; and the idea works deeply in religious and metaphysical thinking. This may seem both natural and inevitable since our world is full of things and persons and stories. We constantly weave our experience into limited wholes (art works), as when we ‘tell our day’ in a series of vignettes. Many problems in philosophy concern the status and authority of these familiar entities. What are these ‘limited wholes’? Are ‘persons’ really real? Hume said they were ‘bundles of perceptions’.

  (Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, iv 6.) Stories, which involve the difficult concept of cause, are surely ‘artificial’, perhaps ‘superficial’. Painters, that unphilosophical tribe who make pictures of the world, dissolve the solid object into planes and colours and space. Can all such ‘things’ be regarded as ‘basic norms’ or ‘fundamental aspects of human nature’, of which other things appear as analogies? Or are they illusions which, inside the philosopher’s study at any rate, can be analysed away? Even in philosophy it is hard to think in other terms. At least we can remember, to use a warning from the Philosophical Investigations (II vii, p. 184) that the picture is in the foreground while the work which the picture does is often in the background. The concept of evolution: we form a picture, the higher animals emerging and so on. ‘What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Clearly however it must be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use.’

  It is difficult for the philosopher, and a fortiori for the theologian, to surrender the quest for satisfying sovereign imagery which is to indicate a very, or absolutely, important reality. Philosophers divide between those who do, and those who do not, think that morality is such a reality. Philosophers who separate value from fact may belong to either group. (Hume, for instance, portrays morality in a way which shows it as important, but not supremely so.) Plato’s image (metaphor) for the Form of the Good is another separate spherical object, the sun: an ideal unity, a transcendent source of light. Good is above being, non-personal, non-contingent, not a particular thing among other things. Plato illumines it with stories which are deliberately cast as explanatory myths and must not be mistaken for anything else. Plato’s ‘sun’ is separate and perfect, yet also immanent in the world as the life-giving magnetic genesis of all our struggles for truth and virtue. Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos at Republic 597B is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods’. There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with Good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person. At least, we find it easy to imagine; but must remember that (some) great philosophers in the past were able to believe in a personal God in a way which is increasingly inaccessible to the thinkers of today. They (Descartes for instance) could think God, and thereby unify the idea of Good, in a way which we begin to find difficult. The question can even arise whether we are able to think systematically at all about morals (Wittgenstein thought we could not) and what kind, if any, of expression we can give to a belief, if we hold it, in the sovereign status of morality. Hegelians may appear to be the most comfortable theists. Hegel’s immanent ‘god’ is, like Plato’s mythical Demiurge, an artist, but, unlike the Demiurge, is not handling irreducibly recalcitrant material; so Hegel’s Whole, which seen philosophically from the outside is a limited one, can be (ultimately) perfectly coherent and good: another large round object.

  The Tractatus may be seen as, in the Platonic sense, a myth. Its ethical purpose is to exclude talk about ethics. Such talk would be a running against the limits. (Such running against nevertheless indicates something.) Derrida’s structuralism, much later, sharing some of Wittgenstein’s (for instance anti-Cartesian) ideas but not his method, may be seen as more like a science, excluding morality in the way in which science excludes it. In general the picturesque traditional (for instance existentialist) philosophies are being ‘seen off’, their solutions exposed as merely watered-down or dehydrated versions of great old solutions (those of Descartes, Kant, Hegel). Derrida announced the end of philosophy and named Heidegger as the last metaphysician. The Cartesian era is coming to an end. Wittgenstein said that he was ending it. In moral philosophy it may appear that the Kantian era is coming to an end. Theology not only reflects these problems but is forced to struggle with them in ways which bring it closer to philosophy now than it has been for some time. This is so in spite of, and partly in reaction to, the fact that in a materialistic technological society, theology might be expected to be increasingly isolated from general trends of thought. The question, what can be said about value and how can we picture it and grasp it, raised by the Tractatus and implicitly by structuralism, would not have occurred to Plato or to a quasi-Platonic thinker such as Hegel, for whom the world is a system of truths and values; whereas the question suggests that value is something personal and dramatic (perhaps a silent movement of the will), or mysterious and arcane (residing in creative uses of language), or a bourgeois illusion, or an illusion tout court: at any rate that it is something separate, lodged in a part of the world, and not a light in which the whole world is revealed. This setting at a distance of what is closest (material objects, knowledge of the world, emotional aspects of evaluation, etc.) is a persistent, and of course not necessarily unfruitful, technique for dealing with, or inventing, philosophical problems. How is it done? By magic. ‘Metaphysics as a kind of magic.’ (Wittgenstein; see introduction to his Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’.) Plato assumes the internal relation of value, truth, cognition. Virtue (as compassion, humility, courage) involves a desire for and achievement of truth instead of falsehood, reality instead of appearance. Goodness involves truth-seeking knowledge and ipso facto a discipline of desire. ‘Getting things right’, as in meticulous grammar or mathematics, is truth-seeking as virtue. Learning anything properly demands (virtuous) attention. Here the idea of truth plays a crucial role (as it does also in Kant) and reality emerges as the object of truthful vision, and virtuous action as the product of such vision. This is a picture of the omnipresence of morality and evaluation in human life. On this view it would seem mad to begin philosophy by asserting a complete separation of fact from value, and then attempting to give a satisfactory account of morals.

  The dualism in question may of course be traced in some form very far back in western thought, even to a distinction between mortals and gods. As a pre-Kantian philosophical viewpoint it may be seen in the Aristotelian tradition in familiar distinctions of faith from reason, and intellect from will. In pre-Kantian British empiricism, we might see it in Hume’s contention that we ca
nnot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’, or value from fact, although he wants no drama made of this since habit and custom and semi-reflective feeling are not only the best but the only available guides to conduct. This in effect allows an instinctive, if not intellectual, connection of fact with value. This sensible anti-rationalist attitude makes Hume an ancestor of both conservative and liberal political thinking. Of course both Platonic and Kantian morality reject any crude derivation of value from fact or ‘nature’, as in a definition of good as happiness, or what the dictator says, or what the priest says. This is about the connection of virtue with freedom. The moral agent should be able to distinguish (not always easy) a benign influence from a surrender of conscience. The extreme modern form of the fact-value distinction derives from Kant, who unlike Hume had some clear idea of science. Kant was impressed by Hume (who, Kant says, woke him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’), but repudiated Hume’s vague (sloppy) psychological account of space, time, causality, morals and conceptual knowledge. A protection of science then went with a segregation of value, and vice versa. The austerity of this severance also had a part to play in the drama of the Romantic Movement, as involving the liberation of the individual into an open space wherein to construct his morality, stirred and edified by reflection upon freedom versus necessity, passion versus reason, value versus fact. Kant of course connects the two relentlessly severed realms by the experience of duty and the postulation of practical reason. We are to believe that they connect, though the exact mechanism of the connection remains somewhat clouded. Post-Kantian developments in moral philosophy outside the Hegelian tradition have been largely attempts at different versions of this fact — value distinction, which also appears in its more histrionic form in Sartre’s existentialism (en-soi and pour soi) and Heidegger’s contrast of ‘everydayness’ with heroic authenticity. A distinction of intellect from will still imparts its flavour to some, Catholic and Protestant, theology. Tractatus Wittgenstein is as usual elegantly unlike his colleagues in that, with more sober logic, he tells us that if we absolutely separate fact and value we can say nothing about the latter. And this is just as well since, as he hints elsewhere, things which people do try to say in general about value are usually pretty messy and false (just gassing). Wittgenstein is not simply enjoining philosophical silence in the Tractatus. He enjoins ordinary-language silence. He also, in peripheral observations, indicates that the (to use Kierkegaard’s phrase) indirect communication of art may perhaps be able somehow to say something about value, morality, and ‘the human heart’; but he would not think it the philosopher’s task to say how this could be done or to evaluate attempts to do it.

  Wittgenstein has had many followers in the analytical tradition, most of whom he would regard as having misunderstood him. The preface to A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (published 1936) tells us that

  ‘The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume. Like Hume, I divide all genuine propositions into two classes: those which, in his terminology, concern “relations of ideas”, and those which concern “matters of fact”. The former class comprises the a priori propositions of logic and pure mathematics, and these I allow to be necessary and certain only because they are analytic. That is, I maintain that the reason why these propositions cannot be confuted in experience is that they do not make any assertion about the empirical world, but simply record our determination to use symbols in a certain fashion. Propositions concerning empirical matters of fact, on the other hand, I hold to be hypotheses, which can be probable but never certain. And in giving an account of their validation I claim also to have explained the nature of truth ... I require of an empirical hypothesis, not indeed that it should be conclusively verifiable, but that some possible sense-experience should be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood. If a putative proposition fails to satisfy this principle, and is not a tautology, then I hold that it is metaphysical, and that, being metaphysical, it is neither true nor false, but literally senseless.’

  Having discussed and disposed of various objections to the idea that all synthetic (non-tautological) propositions are empirical hypotheses, Ayer confronts a final one to the effect that, surely, ‘statements of value’ are genuine synthetic propositions, but cannot be represented as hypotheses, which are used to predict the course of our sensations, and therefore the existence of ethics and aesthetics presents a difficulty for Ayer’s ‘radical empiricist thesis’. He proceeds to argue, and attempts to demonstrate, that ‘in so far as statements of value are significant they are ordinary “scientific” statements, and that in so far as they are not scientific, they are not in the literal sense significant, but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false.’ Non-normative descriptions of ethical terms may be held to be factual, descriptions of moral experience are consigned to the science of psychology. Normative expressions of ethical terms and exhortations to virtue ‘are not propositions at all, but ejaculations or commands’. The truth of ethical judgments cannot be tested because they depend upon pseudo-concepts.

  ‘The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. If I say to someone “You acted wrongly in stealing that money”, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said “You stole that money”. In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said “You stole that money” in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, add nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker.’

  I first read Ayer’s book in 1940 when I began to study philosophy and was, together with many others, amazed and impressed by its wonderful clarity and simplicity. We were unprovided with any weapons with which to confront it, and in any case it was a welcome change from the scraps of Bradley and Cook Wilson with which we had been fiddling, and considerably easier to understand than Kant and Aristotle. The first chapter is entitled ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’, a ‘rejection of the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a transcendent reality’. This was long before Derrida. Schlick and the Vienna Circle are mentioned. Kant is claimed as an ally in having rejected metaphysics in the sense of knowledge of the transcendent. Plato, Aristotle and Kant were not metaphysicians but analysts, not concerned with the existence or properties of things, but ‘only with the way in which we talk about them’. ‘The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character ... they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. We may say that philosophy is a department of logic.’ Such thoughts belong to the earlier days of analytical philosophy and are, before their time, often suggestive of structuralist aims and modes of reflection. This brilliant young man’s book certainly poses deep problems, even if these problems are given, to say the least, a rather hasty treatment.