Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  I speak here of St Paul because his Christ seems more like a personal creation and a work of art than does the calmer figure of the Gospels. Christianity was indeed fortunate (if one may put it so) to find available, at the crucial moment, five geniuses including two great thinkers. Five artists of genius one might also say; Christianity, providing us with a mythology, a story, images, pictures, a dominant and attractive central character, is itself like a vast work of art. The great painters, with their impressive, memorable, authoritative works, helped to create the unified pictorial conglomerate with which we are so familiar. Religious imagery colours and fixes and bodies forth moral ideas. This is obvious and characteristically essential in Christianity, although of course other religions have mythical figures and stories and didactic parables. Western art, so solid and so clear, has helped us to believe, not only in Christ and the Trinity, but in the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, innumerable saints and a whole cast of famous and well-loved scenes and persons. Christ as Logos is unifying principle and guarantor of thought, Christ as Redeemer the suffering saviour of man from sin and horror. In the traditional picture redemption is not only new being as amendment of life, but also the triumph of suffering over death, the substitution of punishment (penance) for death. Religious motivation is inevitably mixed. A central Christian idea is the transformation of sin into purifying pain. The light of God’s presence makes consciousness of sin into pure suffering, combined in the traditional story with the removal of death; Christ is the image of suffering without death. (This is an idea which leads into a discussion of tragedy.) Of course many modern Christians do not believe in survival. But the idea of suffering as triumph over death, as ransom from death, is deep and deeply consoling. Even the idea of a just judgment, cum vix iustus sit securus, can be a satisfaction and a comfort. (Obviously as it concerns others, but also as it concerns oneself.) Pornographic art presents a degraded erotic object. It is a function of God to be a non-degradable erotic object. This is an important religious idea. The Greeks were fairly detached about their gods. Jews and Christians (in different styles) take God as a supreme love-object, with a profound confidence that impure feelings can be purified by being directed upon a pure (untainted, unstained) object. Plato’s Good is such an object, and can shine through lesser, even false, goods; there is a place in Platonism for a doctrine of grace. However, God sees us and seeks us, Good does not. It would be a matter of faith in Christianity that if we sincerely imagine we are praying to God we really are.

  I have been suggesting ways in which religious imagery partakes of the nature of art, and how understanding what art is, its charms, its powers, its limits, helps us to understand religion. This is not of course to suggest that religious experience is merely aesthetic or any nonsense of that sort. It would be more just to say that great art is religious, as Tolstoy believed. This too would need explanation and qualification. I have already quoted Keynes’s thought that Moore led him and his friends to classify general human experience as ‘aesthetic’. One merit of this classification is that it emphasises a sense of ‘experience’ as ‘consciousness’, which is often philosophically neglected or made invisible. We make classifications and set up analogies in order to illuminate an aspect, and this illumination may cast a shadow which makes another aspect less visible. To assimilate the one-making aspect of religion to the one-making aspect of art, and then to assimilate the ‘demythologisation’ process in both areas is of course only a part of an argument. One could not, for instance, properly define religion in such terms, although a modern thinker, Jung, virtually does so when he explains it as a unifying story emerging from the unconscious. The drama of God versus Job moves to a satisfactory conclusion when God is forced by his conscience to become Job, the innocent victim, in Christ. (The Answer,to Job.) Another significant one-making picture is said (by Jung) to be forming itself in our age with the incorporation of Satan into the Trinity, or into the Quaternity if we count the Virgin Mary as having been already incorporated. This inclusion of the ‘dark opposite’ as an essential part of the religious ideal, of course no novelty, is a Gnostic, Taoist, presocratic conception. Jung admits to being a Gnostic. This is indeed religion as art, history as myth, the unfolding of a coherent story, or play with successive acts, the production of a series of satisfying syntheses, answering the needs and pressures of different times. More general and acceptable is ‘the Motherhood of God’, under the protection of Julian of Norwich. The image-play of theology, as in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, has always been an important part of religion but cannot be all of it. It may be said that if you must have a metaphysical picture it can never be a complete one. A new unity, involving perhaps a new dichotomy, is likely to lose, make ineffable or conceptually inaccessible, visions and values which were elsewhere evident, and indeed the eclipse of these may have been one of the aims of the metaphysician. The rulers in Orwell’s 1984 alter the language so as to make certain things unsayable. Consider what values Marxism squeezed out of view, or how a strict pietistic Kantianism excludes the generality of a Benthamite outlook, while on the other hand utilitarianism lacks a detailed picture of virtue. Ideas about beauty and virtue expressed in terms of quality of consciousness or quality of happiness find no appropriate vocabulary in many recent styles of moral philosophy. Theologians tend to frown upon the concept of ‘religious experience’; and the concept of ‘moral knowledge’ has been even more frowned upon by philosophers. For purposes of ethics, and indeed in general, we lack a suitable philosophical view of ‘consciousness’ and ‘the self’. John Stuart Mill, an ancestor of J. M. Keynes’s mentor G. E. Moore, is an interesting case of a philosopher who adopted, or was indoctrinated into by his father and Bentham, a ‘progressive rational’ philosophical system, and then passionately and inconsistently tried to lodge therein traditional values which the system seemed to have excluded: a case of faith. Mill’s essays on Bentham and Coleridge elegantly illustrate this dilemma. Mill could not surrender the idea of qualitative levels of happiness and experience, a conception whose glow, somewhat modified, also illumines what Moore had to say about ‘states of mind’. We might indeed look to these, not altogether consistent, utilitarians for something like a philosophy of consciousness. These are examples of how a metaphysic or Weltanschauung may be felt to omit something which then peripherally and disturbingly haunts it, or else disappears to be rediscovered later. One could also instance the way in which intuited axioms lead a continued life outside theoretical systems which they may or may not positively challenge. Notions of natural rights would be examples of such axioms. Sometimes of course the inconsistent fellow travellers are best acknowledged as both valid and unassimilable. We might also think of St Paul’s list, at Romans 8. 38, of the things that will not separate him from the love of God in Christ. There is an exercise of freedom, or act of faith, or expression of certainty (of which of course we may or may not approve) when someone is moved to proclaim, ‘In spite of any system which makes X invisible or ineffable or professes to disprove X, I hold to X.’ There are moments in history when concepts are suddenly found or when they are suddenly lost. When some strong unifying idea is sceptically challenged there is a loss of conceptual tissue. The contemporary challenge to unity affects (in various areas of thought) ideas as diverse as God, the self, virtue, the material object, the story. The conceptual loss involved poses moral and theoretical problems for the sceptics, for philosophers and artists and demythologising theologians. Can, and should, what is lost be recovered in some other way? In such contexts we see how deep metaphysical imagery goes down into the human soul. Farther than we can see?

  I have spoken about unity and illusions of unity in relation to the idea of a work of art. The art object may be looked at as analogous in function to certain moral and religious concepts (or pictures) and also as an analogy of the self. I am an artist in the imaginative, or fantastic, creation of myself. I shall shortly discuss a very potent aesthetic conception, that of tragedy, whic
h plays an ambiguous role in religious and moral thinking. I want now briefly and in summary to go on talking about art itself. Is the work of art a kind of hoax, something which seems complete but is really incomplete, completed secretly by the private unacknowledged fantasies of the artist and his conniving client? A consideration of this question can also throw light on the nature of virtue, so that art can turn out to be an image of good, though in a sense different from that which might at first occur to one. Our illusions about art and morals are in some ways similar. Do we expect too much from art? The Greeks did not. At certain times in history (for instance in the Romantic Movement) we tend to deify it. Yet artists are human individuals, no work is perfect, though our hearts may claim perfection for some. The material of art is contingent limited historically stained stuff. Nevertheless art is a great source of revelation. Bad art displays the base aspects of human nature more clearly than anything else, though of course not so harmfully. One might even say that the exemplification of human frailty in bad art is a clearer warning to us than its representation in good art. Great art (often) cannot help casting light, sparkles of charm, upon its villains, perhaps through the felicitous working of their role, or through admiration for their courage or compassion for their sins. (Something of this can be expressed by inspired detail. Rubens’ picture, in the Brera, of the Last Supper represents Judas’s dog sitting underneath his chair.) In bad art the self-magnifying illusion-making lying ego is shamelessly on display. Bad art (that is ordinary bad art, not vile pornography) is also in general a sound producer of that unpretentious low-grade happiness (consolation, escape), harmless or not very harmful, which Benthamite utilitarians reasonably regard as a human right. There are worse ends than the pursuit of an unexacting happiness; it is better to be cheered up by a silly magazine than by plans of revenge. (It is of course also true that we ought often to be out helping our neighbour rather than reading Proust or Tolstoy.) The art object as false unity is an image of the self. The bad story is the sentimental untruthful tale of how the brave attractive ego (cf course he has his faults) triumphs over accident and causality and is never really mocked or brought to nought. It is difficult for any artist not to falsify, the discipline of art must include the persistent recognition and rejection of easy natural falsification: the temptation to the ego is enormous since it really does seem here to dispose of the godlike powers it secretly dreams of. Truth is always a proper touchstone in art, and a training in art is a training in how to use the touchstone. This is perhaps the most difficult thing of all, requiring that courage which the good artist must possess. Artists indicate or invent, in the invention of their work, their own relevant tests of truth. A study of good literature, or of any good art, enlarges and refines our understanding of truth, our methods of verification. Truth is not a simple or easy concept. Critical terminology imputes falsehood to an artist by using terms such as fantastic, sentimental, self-indulgent, banal, grotesque, tendentious, unclarified, wilfully obscure and so on. The positive aspect of the avoidance of these faults is a kind of transcendence: the ability to see other non-self things clearly and to criticise and celebrate them freely and justly. This is a place for a definition of freedom, and for a distinction between trapped egoistic fantasy, and imagination as a faculty of transcendence. The analogy with virtue is here very plain; and of course the artist’s discipline includes the exercise of virtue: patience, courage, truthfulness, justice. As a father or a citizen the good artist may of course be less than admirable. As moral agents we tend to specialise.

  Art is artificial, it is indirect communication which delights in its own artifice. The work of art is, to use W. H. Auden’s words (he is speaking of a poem), ‘a contraption’. But it is, as he goes on to say, ‘a contraption with a guy inside it’. The art object is a kind of illusion, a false unity, the product of a mortal man who cannot entirely dominate his subject matter and remove or transform contingent rubble and unclarified personal emotions and attitudes. He cannot, by rendering his work unambiguous, render it timeless. Nor can the artist, to use Auden’s words again, ‘prevent his work being used as magic, for that is what all of us, highbrow and lowbrow alike, secretly want art to be’. (Poets at Work, ‘Squares and Oblongs’.) Or from being used as pornography, for instance. This is like the anxiety expressed by Plato in the Seventh Letter. The written word can fall into the hands of any knave or fool. Only in certain kinds of personal converse can we thoroughly clarify each other’s understanding. The thinker’s defence against this may be, like that of Socrates or Christ, not to write. Or it may be, like that of (for instance) Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Derrida, to employ a careful obscurity. I think some literary writers, consciously or unconsciously, avoid ‘telling a good story’ because if the story is ‘good’ enough the idle lazy reader will fail to appreciate its deeper meaning. Better to have fewer and more worthy readers. However that may be we, as clients of art, take pleasure in the enclosed form of the object to whose ‘completeness’ we imaginatively contribute. We are also aware of incompleteness, and peevishly criticise novels or pictures or music for careless or unsatisfying design. Much modern music (post-Schoenberg) defeats our old-fashioned wish for the melody to ‘come home’. A lack of ‘finish’ may result from artistic failure or from a deliberate internalised disunity which only the perceptive client will understand. King Lear is a very high instance of a broken pattern which indeed makes the play intolerable to many. ‘Loose ends’ may be a, frequently used, way of indicating patterns or realities which attend the work ‘from the outside’. The landscape goes on, ordinary life continues, the musical questions find no solution within the piece. The intelligent critic can talk about such matters. (To take one fairly recent instance, about the influence of photography upon painting.) This too is art, an intimation of our mortality and our limitation, a reminder of contingency, presented to us as a source of energy and understanding and joy. Art expands our present consciousness and teaches us to live inside it. We seek in art of all kinds for the comforting sense of a unified self, with organised emotions and fearless world-dominating intelligence, a complete experience in a limited whole. Yet good art mirrors not only the (illusory) unity of the self but its real disunity. The pseudo-object need not mislead: though in a sense complete it proclaims its incompleteness and points away. Good art accepts and celebrates and meditates upon the defeat of the discursive intellect by the world. Bad art misrepresents the world so as to pretend there is no defeat.