Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The Will to Live is something fundamental. Our world, all that we are aware of, the ideas or representations of Will made known as object, is a composition of phenomena, appearances, Maya. Schopenhauer’s use of this word (Maya) refers us to eastern philosophy, but we must also think of Plato. His Cave image (Republic 514f.) suggests levels of consciousness rising from illusion to truthful reality. This indeed offers us a recognisable picture of the human scene. Schopenhauer’s (ordinary, our) world seems in this light to consist only of the lower levels, the darkest part of Plato’s imagined Cave. In our world, according to Schopenhauer, the Will manifests itself as miserable perpetual struggle. All entities suffer, and fight fiercely for existence. The human scene is a place of restless desire and ruthless egoistic striving, devoid of freedom, ruled by the overwhelming determinism of the Will. However there are a few possible mitigations of this state. One is the existence of an instinct of compassion, another lies in a total denial of the Will. A third is through a contemplation of Platonic Ideas, whereby we look through the veil of Maya, lose our egoistic personal identity and overcome the divide between subject and object. This is made possible through good art. Here Schopenhauer follows Plotinus and parts company with Plato; the (good) artist does not copy particular things, he sees and copies the Platonic Ideas (the universals or conceptual exemplars) themselves. The general notion of a spiritual liberation through art is accessible to common-sense as an account of our relationship to works of art when the walls of the ego fall, the noisy ego is silenced, we are freed from possessive selfish desires and anxieties and are one with what we contemplate, enjoying a unique unity with something which is itself unique. The conception of the artist seeing beyond the particular to the universal is a striking one which suits some kinds of visual art. (Van Gogh’s chair, Van Gogh’s peasant shoes which so impressed Heidegger.) It is less easy to apply in literature, though one might instance some poetry and mention T. S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’. We see through, pass through, the busy multiplicity of particulars and contemplate, touch, become one with, ‘the thing itself’. Many forms of art however pursue the busy contingent rather than the still icon. About music, with a felicitous daring which is characteristic of him, Schopenhauer has something different to say. ‘Music is by no means like the other arts, a copy of [Platonic] Ideas, but a copy of the Will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are.’ (Schopenhauer’s italics. WWI, Book III, section 52.) Music is the most powerful of the arts, not expressing Ideas, but acting directly upon the Will, that is the emotions of the hearer. ‘The connection of the metaphysical significance of music with its physical and arithmetical base depends upon the fact that what resists our apprehension, the irrational relation or dissonance, becomes the natural type of what resists our will; and conversely the consonance of the rational relation which easily adopts itself to our apprehension, becomes the type of the satisfaction of the will.’ (Schopenhauer’s italics.) Music portrays the movements of the human heart, that is the Will, in ‘whose essential nature is always satisfaction and dissatisfaction’. When the elements of the melody are disunited we feel uneasy, when they are reconciled we are at peace. So ‘we gladly hear in its language the secret history of our will and all its emotions and stirrings’. (Supplement to Book IV, ch. xxxix, ‘On the Metaphysics of Music’.) This account is of course delightful, and where traditional western music is concerned (Schopenhauer instances Beethoven) ‘has something in it’. Later twentieth-century music, it may be said, draws attention to our desire for satisfaction by refusing to give it.

  It would appear from this picture that, although music is the strongest of the arts, affecting us more deeply and directly, it is less ‘spiritual’ than the other arts which involve the effort of overcoming the ego – whereas music moving with the will (though in a pattern of resistance and reconcilement) does not banish but soothes the ego. However this may be, the release or remission granted by the arts would seem to be temporary, and not part of any steady progression toward a higher life. And why does Schopenhauer connect this refuge from the ego especially with aesthetic experience? In these two respects also he differs from Plato, who envisages a definite path out of the Cave, seen in terms of intellectual and moral betterment. Schopenhauer keeps moral values out of the ordinary world which is ruled by the Will. A strict dualism must be fundamental. We are captives, subject to determinism. Kant’s dualism pictures a realm of necessity, where the phenomenal self is subject to determinism, and a realm of freedom and reason which is available to every rational being. Schopenhauer pictures a scene of egoism and suffering from which it is almost impossible to escape. He may be said to be in love with the Will. What he here invokes is indeed a vast and ubiquitous concept with a huge ancestry and innumerable descendants: cosmic energy of being, fundamental creative power, Taoism, the presocratics, Heraclitus’s eternal fire, his Logos, the Christian Logos, Plato’s Eros, Freud’s Libido, Jung’s Unconscious, Heidegger’s (later) concept of Being as a cosmic gamester. Present-day Hindu religious philosophy, a suggestion of a possible account: ‘A Mind, a Will seems to have imagined and organised the universe but it has veiled itself behind its creation; its first erection has been this screen of an inconscient Energy and a material form of substance, at once a disguise of its presence and a plastic creative basis on which it could work as an artisan uses for his production of forms and patterns a dumb and obedient material.’ (Aurobindo, The Life Divine, ‘Indeterminates and Cosmic Determinations’, p. 302.) This, offered as an example of a possible theory, might remind us of the Timaeus. These great ‘wills’ or cosmic forces differ in respect of their omnipotence, their roles as accessible or inaccessible, ruthless or kindly, and their status as mythical, mystical, philosophical, or scientific objects. Schopenhauer’s Will is, with Nietzsche’s and that of the later Heidegger, one of the nastiest. Plato’s daemon Eros is capable of baseness but also of the highest spirituality. Plato does not invoke any omnipotent divine figure. The mythical Demiurge has limited powers, the Forms are not gods. Human beings yearn for these great things and metaphysics has to deal with them.

  The only complete escape from Schopenhauer’s ravenous energy of egoism is an absolute denial of the Will, achieved by an asceticism which lies beyond the virtues. ‘It no longer suffices to love others as himself and to do as much for them as for himself; but there arises within him a horror of the nature of his own phenomenal existence, the Will to Live, the kernel and inner nature of that world which is recognised as full of misery.’ (WWI, Book IV, section 68.) Schopenhauer’s totally will-less state is not to be thought of as an automatic release into an unselfish condition of virtuous activity (return to the Cave), it is above or beyond compassion and any ‘ordinary morals’. At times he seems to preach simply stoicism and amor fati. ‘Death does not concern us ... When we are death is not, and when death is we are not. Epicurus.’ (WWI, Supplement to Book IV, ch. xli. See also Tractatus 6. 4311.) But the Schopenhauerian ‘denial’ is something much more radical. The whole world of individual egos and universal suffering is phenomenal and unreal and its removal, which must be wished for, leaves behind the true reality of our being, from which submission to the Will has been an aberration. This non-phenomenal and non-personal something represents what is eternal and real and free from the Will. ‘Death is the great opportunity no longer to be I.’ This salvation by dying to the world is not suicide (rejected by Schopenhauer, and by Wittgenstein) or ‘ordinary’ death or anything to do with survival. As non-personal it is not in any accessible sense experienced and cannot be described. Here we may be tempted to posit something magically arcane as what Schopenhauer has to offer; or else take refuge in assuming some ‘benefit’, for others, for the world, which is somehow bound to result from such a great ascesis. Schopenhauer ends the chapter: ‘To die willingly, to die gladly, is the prerogative of the resigned, of him who surrenders and denies the Will to Live. For only he wills to die really and not merely apparently and consequently he needs and desires no co
ntinuance of his person. The existence we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead is in our eyes nothing because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, that is extinction.’ We may gloss this by picturing the completely selfless person as indescribable and unimaginable in the language and concepts of the world. What he is seems to us as a stripped-down nothing, to be like him would indeed be for us nothing. Can we really imagine the life of the extreme ascetic who exists without all those infinitely many worldly things and experiences which compose the life of the ego? Do we not shudder and turn away? What, existing without ... and without... and without ... ? Yet must we live with so austere a picture, as if we are to be utterly damned or utterly saved? This is certainly one among many religious pictures. But did not Christ and Buddha speak of a way? What Schopenhauer tells us about the mystical metanoia may seem too puritanically absolute. He does not claim that he himself is living an ascetic life. It is not just that he hates the world. Let us rather say that he feels that only what is extreme will crack the hard ego. As his numerous writings reveal, he is fascinated by the world and its bright diversity. He is a self-proclaimed pessimist – but he is also merry, like Hume whom he genially admires. His religious passion is sincere and the negativity of his picture, the absence of light, is a just image of, as we can see it, the surrender of worldly pleasures. He stirs us to thought and has the great merit of having made a serious attempt to introduce eastern philosophy to western philosophy. Western philosophy cannot be said to have profited much by the introduction. Indeed neither side pays as yet much attention to the other. Nevertheless numerous western individuals have been helped by even a little knowledge of eastern spirituality.

  Plato spoke of appearance and reality, but Schopenhauer’s Maya is certainly not Platonic. Plato’s pilgrim is able, at various stages in his journey, his escape from the Cave, to construe the difference between the apparent and the real in accessible terms which do not detach him from the continuum of the world as a whole, or imply a ‘horror’ resulting in complete severance. Talk of liberation by Ideas may seem close to the Cave imagery. But Plato postulates no blind merciless Will as fundamental energy. The power, for good or ill, of his mythical Eros is to be seen within the world. What is ultimate and above being is the Form of the Good, whose magnetic influence reaches to all. Plato, like Kant, makes morality central and fundamental in human life. Schopenhauer speaks of an asceticism which is above virtue. However, in many parts of his work he adopts quite a different tone. There is no divinity and no supreme good in his system, but there is a scattering of sensitive understanding; as in The Basis of Morality which contains much humane wisdom on the subject of morals. Schopenhauer here indulges in cheerful spirited argument and attention to detail. He, who takes so much from Kant, discards the Categorical Imperative and also Kant’s strong emphasis on absolute truthfulness. Truth-telling, says Schopenhauer, may be important but is not fundamental. All sorts of reasonable lying is in order. We may properly lie to ‘robbers and ruffians’. An extorted promise is not binding. A right to lie also extends to cases of unauthorised prying into our private affairs. Even Jesus told a lie. (John 7. 8-10.) Malice, not lying, is the worst vice. The fundamental command of morality is ‘Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva’ — ‘Hurt no one, rather help everyone as much as you can.’ This saying indicates the two cardinal virtues upon which all the others depend, justice and compassion. Both these virtues ’have their roots in natural compassion. But this itself is an undeniable fact of human consciousness, is essential to it, and does not depend on presuppositions, concepts, religions, dogmas, myths, training and education. On the contrary it is original and immediate, it resides in human nature itself and, for this very reason, it endures in all circumstances and appears in all countries at all times.’ (The Basis of Morality, section 17.) Compassion impedes the sufferings which I intend to cause another person. ‘It calls out to me “stop!”, it stands before the other man like a bulwark, protecting him from the injury that my egoism or malice would otherwise urge me to do.’ There are in general, Schopenhauer says, only three fundamental motives of human activity: egoism, malice, and compassion. He deplores Kant’s classification of sympathetic feelings and motives as ‘pathological’, non-rational, purely phenomenal, and non-moral. Instinctive sympathy and compassion is closest and most evident in human nature: compassion is an ‘everyday ... immediate participation’ in the suffering of others. This is what Schopenhauer contrasts with ‘duty’ and ‘conscience’, which depend upon ‘the dogmas and commandments of religion and the self-scrutiny undertaken in reference to them’. A man’s conscience ‘probably consists of one-fifth fear of men, one-fifth fear of the gods, one-fifth prejudice, one-fifth vanity and one-fifth habit. So he is essentially no better than the Englishman who said quite frankly, “I cannot afford to keep a conscience”.’ These sceptical comments, Schopenhauer adds, do not in any way deny the existence of genuine morality; though they do ‘moderate our expectations of the moral tendency in man and consequently of the natural foundation of ethics’. The natural omnipresence of compassion ‘is certainly astonishing, indeed mysterious. In fact it is the great mystery of ethics; it is the primary and original phenomenon of ethics, the boundary mark beyond which only metaphysical speculation can venture to step.’ The ultimate foundation of morality in human nature itself ‘cannot again [after Schopenhauer’s explanation] be a problem of ethics, but rather, like everything that exists as such, of metaphysics’. We are here up against the barrier, the limits of our knowledge, the mystery, a primary phenomenon. It is an ultimate (and the most important) aspect of human nature, that we sympathise. This cannot be a problem of ethics (as in ‘ought we to sympathise?) but is, in so far as it can be spoken of at all, something for metaphysics to state, and if not justify, at least clarify.

  Schopenhauer is here ‘running free’, discarding the complex Kantian machinery, and not worrying about Nirvana or how Will relates to Ideas. ‘Don’t hurt anyone, help everyone’ is certainly a good shot at a, or the, fundamental maxim. However, he stays close to Kant, and indeed Plato, in his attempt to think the spiritual without the supernatural. He agrees with Kant that the moral claim upon us is unique, unconnected with happiness or (in any scientific sense) nature; but objects to its appearance in the form of the Categorical Imperative as an a priori law comparable to that which ordains the necessary form of all objects. Kant’s separation of a priori forms from a posteriori experiences (as set out in the Critique of Pure Reason) is, Schopenhauer says, ‘the most brilliant and potent discovery of which metaphysics can boast’. But this formulation, illuminating in relation to the factual world, cannot (according to Schopenhauer) be applied to the world of value; where (according to Kant) ‘ethics too is to consist of a pure, i.e. a priori knowable part and an empirical one’. Kant rigidly separates freedom from determinism, observance of rational rules from subjection to pathological emotions. Ought, the Categorical Imperative, arbitrarily set up ‘without further authentification’, essentially implies reward or punishment, and is thereby impossible as a moral concept. There is no unconditional ought. All these decrees and severances, Schopenhauer holds, divide morality from the details of ordinary life and the real experience of human individuals. Nevertheless, Kant’s great service to ethics consists in this, ‘that he has freed ethics from all principles of the world of experience, that is from all direct or indirect doctrines of happiness, and has shown in a quite special manner that the kingdom of virtue is not of this world. This service is all the greater because all ancient philosophies, with the single exception of Plato ... sought ... either to make virtue and happiness depend on each other ... or to identify them ... This charge applies with equal force to all modern philosophers down to Kant.’

  An attractive aspect of Schopenhauer’s ethic is, together with his concept of compassion, this affirmation, shared with Kant, of the fundamental nature of the moral. Kant however is haunted by, or has int
imations of, a veiled unknown God. Schopenhauer, who chides Kant for this, allows no God, and no Form of the Good either. The highest things we know (experience) are Platonic Ideas, purer objectifications of the Will, but lacking any sovereign image of a unique Idea (or Form) of Good. (The mystical state is not describable or in the ordinary sense experienced.) Here there is certainly some hint of a Platonic pilgrimage, away from the domination of the Will as egoism and strife, toward some higher condition. The contemplation of art, which temporarily silences the ego, shows that this can be done. Compassion (not love, which Schopenhauer sees as tainted by egoism), instinctive sympathetic identification with others, suggests that we are able (after all) to move a little against the Will. Schopenhauer often returns to examples of selfless care and kindness, not only among humans but between humans and animals. This endearing, and among philosophers rare, emphasis must connect with, but need not depend upon, his Hindu and Buddhist perception of the whole cosmos as bound together and worthy of respect in all its parts. His humane philosophy is marred however, even contradicted, not only by the omission of the concept of duty, but by certain other equally firmly held views. Schopenhauer’s chief stumbling block is his concept of Will as fundamental, all-determining and (qua neutrally relentless) evil. Even in the benign pages of The Basis of Morality he tells us that ‘the difference of characters is innate and ineradicable’. We cannot change the nature we are born with. We are ruled by the determinism of the Will under which some people are innately good and others innately bad. After explaining this he allows that he has ‘long been listening to the reader putting the question: Where are guilt and merit to be found?’. He refers us to ‘Kant’s greatest and most brilliant’ ethical doctrine of the coexistence of freedom and necessity. The empirical character of man as phenomenon (active in the phenomenal world of time and space) is determined by the underlying Thing-in-itself, which is outside space and time, and constitutes the intelligible character which is present in all the actions of the individual ‘and is stamped upon every one of them like the signet of a thousand seals’. The phenomenon must ‘show the constancy of a natural law in all its manifestations’. Acts of will are necessarily determined by motives (which originate in character). This necessity, Schopenhauer tells us, has been clearly demonstrated by Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Holbach, and Priestley. ‘In consequence of the irrefutable arguments of these predecessors Kant also regarded the complete necessity of acts of will as a settled affair.’ Thus the ‘inflexible rigidity of everyone’s empirical character, which had been observed at all times by thinkers (whenever the rest imagined a man’s character to be capable of being reformed through rational remonstrances and moral exhortations) was reduced to a rational basis and consequently also established for philosophy’. Guilt and merit lie in what we are, not in what we do. What we do is necessitated. Nevertheless we recognise our deeds as our own. ‘Freedom, which proclaims itself alone through responsibility’, can only be found in what we are. Reproaches of conscience only ostensibly concern what we have done, but really and ultimately concern what we are. ‘Conscience is acquaintance with ourselves’, and our remorseful thought that we might have been another, better, man.