Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The work of art may seem to be a limited whole enclosed in a circle, but because of contingency and the muddled nature of the world and the imperfections of language the circle is always broken. This picture of the broken circle suggests the imagery of Kant. We cannot make the phenomenal world perfectly intelligible nor our conduct in it perfectly rational, though the magnetic power of Reason continually inspires us to try. Kant’s concept of the sublime, though he did not himself apply it to art, suggests something essential to the nature of serious art: how the world overflows the art object, how it transcends it, how emotions attend the experience of this. There are various metaphors which suggest themselves here. The art object points beyond itself, the world is seen beyond it, somewhat as the artist saw it when he attempted his statement, although of course he is not just copying the world. The art object is porous or cracked, another reality flows through it, it is in tension between a clarified statement and a confused pointing, and is in danger if it goes too far either way. Much modern art instinctively tends to abandon complete clear statement and complete separate object in favour of a merging of art into the continuity of the world or its withdrawal into self-referential autonomous sign-play. Traditional critics may regard this instinctive tendency as a passing fashion, but other (e.g. structuralist) thinkers claim it as a deep uneasy awareness of a metaphysical truth. A chapter in Jacques Derrida’s early but still fundamental book De la Grammatologie is entitled ‘la fin du livre et le commencement de l’écriture’. L’ecriture here indicates archi-écriture, ‘primal writing’ or sign-activity which is not derivative from spoken speech, as a fundamental ‘field’. This basic ‘writing’ is not (used by us as) indicative of reality, but is reality in a sense now being made clear by the languages of science which here provide a metaphysical model. Some of the insights of Wittgenstein appear also in structuralism; but Wittgenstein said that his arguments left ordinary language undisturbed. (Investigations 98.) He did not pose as a prophet or a critic, he disliked explanations of art, and once told F. R. Leavis that he ought to give up literary criticism! In philosophy, what was needed was not a new jargon or a system, but a certain kind of clarity, ein übersichtliche Darstellung.

  In its most consistently metaphysical form structuralism (deconstruction) demands a revolution in our ways of thinking about truth and reality. It is not easy to ‘explain’ this large and heterogeneous mass of theory. It enters the argument for a moment at this point as an atmosphere or influence which challenges traditional conceptions of art. The main tenet of structuralism is the denial of transcendence, and with it the removal of a deep motive to art. An idea of truth is at stake here. Such a considerable change of viewpoint must have moral implications, however much structuralism professes to be scientific. What art instinctively does proves nothing in metaphysics. Writers have long been aware of, and played deliberately with, the ambiguity of ‘the relation of language to the world’. An obsessive awareness of structuralist-style metaphysic, on the other hand, whether refined or vulgarly popularised, can result in an anti-intellectualist denial of the cognitive role of art, art as a form of knowledge. (At different times there are often motives, for instance political ones, for this denial.) Structuralism explicitly questions ‘old-fashioned’ generally accepted views of truth in literature, and in literary and historical studies. Many non-philosophers, such as literary critics, are excited by this atmosphere. In so far as structuralism professes to be ‘scientific’, in a post-Husserlian sense, it professes to be morally neutral. Moral philosophers in the analytical empiricist tradition have also at times professed this. In both cases, while a certain morality is rejected or set aside, another is usually tacitly assumed or promoted. There is a territory held in common between structuralist and Wittgensteinian philosophers. A part of the structuralist polemic is directed against ideas already discredited by Wittgenstein. Art, especially literature, has in the past instinctively operated as a form, the most profound generally accessible form, of moral reflection, being in this respect close to ordinary life which is saturated with moral reflection. Structuralism here contradicts common-sense, which philosophy often does, and carries with it a certain contempt for ordinary naive attitudes. This is something which Derrida has in common with Heidegger and with Sartre. It requires ingenuity to produce a work of literature devoid of moral judgments. Dullness may be the nemesis of such an attempt. One way to succeed without being dull is to produce a work which is puzzling and obscure. The structuralist text may resemble a koan in having no solution, but being a play of meanings which stirs the client into meaning-making activity for himself; whereas the traditional novel carries the ideal reader along, fascinated by the single authoritative ‘reality’ of its imagined world. A contrast between such proceedings has of course long existed unselfconsciously inside the huge realm of art.

  5

  Comic and Tragic

  To speak of the simplicity of art is not to embrace any Tolstoyan theory about the supremacy of folk tales. It is the height of art to be able to show what is nearest, what is deeply and obviously true but usually invisible. (Philosophy attempts this too.) Art makes place for simple statements, then seen as profound. Art is feared by tyrants because it gives weight and interest to what is various, obvious and ordinary. Tyrants fear funniness. (Western diplomats in certain countries are advised not to indulge in unrestrained laughter in public.) All tyrants try to mystify and may invent languages for that purpose. Bad artists are useful to tyrants, whose policies they can simplify and romanticise, as in Stalinist-style art. The quarrel between Lukács and the Hungarian Communist Party brought out some frank speaking on this subject. ‘The positive hero of the new Hungarian socialist realist literature should be the man at work carrying out the Five-Year Plan.’ (Joszef Revai’s polemical pamphlet against Lukács, Lukács and Socialist Realism.) One can, nearer home, imagine an Orwellian state where the elite read esoteric ‘literary’ texts, leaving the laity to a soothing diet of state-approved romantic novels and television. The absurdity of art, its funniness, its simplicity, its lucidity connects it with ordinary life and is inimical to authoritarian mystification. ‘Absurd’ here should be understood in a wide sense, and not in a local or esoterically technical way (as in ‘theatre of the absurd’). The absurd is the comic, as well as what defeats or teases the intellect. When Tolstoy said that art expressed the highest religious sensibility of the age he was also implying a concept of religion. Even good art may make us feel too much at ease with something less than the best, it offers a sort of spiritual exercise and what looks like a spiritual home, a kind of armchair sanctity which may be a substitute for genuine moral effort. The last volume of Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility ends with a graceful homage of art to religion. The elderly hero meets the Buddhist abbess whom he knew as a wild girl, and mentions a man who was once her lover. She remembers no such person. He mentions other people. No. At last he appreciates the religious point. So if these people never existed he too ... The selfish and fantastical ego is unreal, the true religious life has no stories. It is above mythology. In the end we give up everything, including God, as we are told by Christian mystics such as Eckhart and St John of the Cross. Of course for the unenlightened this paradox too is a kind of art, a shadow cast by a higher truth. It certainly has a thrilling aesthetic charm.

  What is absurd is very often funny, though it can be appalling too. There is a tragic absurd (King Lear). The absurdity of Kafka is terrifying and yet can manage to be funny at the same time. The funny may be distinguished from the witty and the ironic or satirical. Philosophy and religion may be witty and ironic, not funny. Jesus is witty not funny. In literature the funny can go deeper and is a great redeeming place of ordinary frailty. Consider the funniness of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. (The terrible tale told at the beginning of Crime and Punishment by the ridiculous Marmeladov.) As comedy and as tragedy literature abounds in, one might almost say consists of, value judgments. Comic art can be revolutionary and dangerous as well as
carrying the tender and the sentimental as far as they can be carried in good literature (Dickens). Comedy has an obvious built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing, we turn to our friends. The Greek playwrights did not mix comedy and tragedy, although Homer does this. It was evidently doubted that the same man could write both, and Socrates is found arguing this point at the end of the Symposium. Plato regarded both forms, and theatre in general, with suspicion. The content of tragedy, with the charm (of poetry, music, acting, etc.) removed, ‘is like the faces of adolescents, young but not really beautiful, when the bloom of youth is gone’. (Republic 601B.) Comedy is chaotic and concerned with accidental details and unreflective absurdities. We may imagine that the carpenter goes to the theatre and then cannot be bothered to measure his table accurately. (Not a bad parable.) Comedy, one might say, keeps the low man from rising. Tragedy on the other hand would be, according to Plato, even more objectionable because it would stop the high man from rising higher, by providing intelligent but false consolation, and a sense of achievement and self-satisfaction which impedes the highest vision. Plato banished the tragic poets. This ‘banishing’ is of course ironical and fictitious, but also serious. Plato’s view of comedy might appear more plausible than his view of tragedy. Tragedy seems to be something serious and profound, concerned with suffering, courage and virtue, and able to carry a religious message. Zen Buddhists are, as they point out, unusual in explicitly including a kind of jokiness in the region of spirituality, in contrast with the Indian conception that a saint may smile but not roar with laughter. Of course any religious or moral view will be rightly critical of the kind of humour which is fundamentally malicious. But on the whole we in the west attach value, prudentially and morally, to the possession of a sense of humour. It is an important fact, often neglected at a theoretical level by philosophers and theologians, that the funny is everywhere to be found. A morally high sense of the comic is ubiquitous in literature.

  The comic is often paired as an opposite with the tragic, but the two concepts are asymmetrical and different in kind. It is not that the comic is unserious and the tragic serious. The comic is capable of the highest seriousness, in life and in art; whereas the attempted tragic or bad tragic may be pretentious lying nonsense not capable of seriousness at all. Indeed, fortunately for the human race, the comic is everywhere, it is in the air which, as being every one of us an artist, we breathe. The tragic is not the same as sorrow – sorrow, grief, of course is also in the air we breathe. Tragedy belongs only to art, where it occupies a very small area. One might even be puzzled by the high prestige which the form enjoys, as if we needed for psychological reasons to inflate the idea. There are extremely few good tragedies and, one may say, bad tragedies are not tragedies. Compare: a bad ballet dancer is not a ballet dancer, a bad poet is not a poet. On the other hand we allow that a bad novelist is a novelist. This is to do with the generally accepted conception of ‘a story’. (Novels are like stories we tell each other.) Much of the greatest literary art is a tragi-comic, or perhaps one should say sad-comic, condensation, a kind of pathos which is aware of terrible things, and which eschews definition and declared formal purpose. Such pathos is everywhere in Shakespeare. We also see it in the great novels. The novel is the literary form best suited to this sort of free reflection, sad-comic and discursive truth-telling. (Art is cognitive.) What it loses in hard-edged formal impact, it gains in its grasp of detail, its freedom of tempo, its ability to be irrelevant, to reflect without haste upon persons and situations and in general to pursue what is contingent and incomplete.

  The concept of the tragic is obscure, one is tempted to say confused or incoherent. Real life is not tragic. Religion is not tragic. These are interesting and important border-lines. Plato’s famous banishment of the tragedians may be taken as a religious parable. ‘The tragic’ sometimes makes its appearance as a (serious, stoical) attitude to life: ‘We can live at a trivial level or at a tragic level.’ Newspapers talk about ‘tragic situations’ or ‘tragedies at sea’. When in real-life unhappiness we ‘live the tragic’ or ‘see something as a tragedy’ something false may be involved, possibly a forgivable reaching for consolation. Strictly speaking, tragedy belongs to literature. Tragedies are plays written by great poets. One might say of the Iliad that, in a supreme sense, it rises to a tragic level, which no prose work can reach. But it is too long and multiform to be a tragedy. There are no prose tragedies. Real life is not tragic. In saying this one means that the extreme horrors of real life cannot be expressed in art. (This relates to why religion lies beyond art.) Art offers some consolation, some sense, some form whereas the most dreadful ills of human life allow of none. Auschwitz is not a tragedy. Religious belief may console, but can it do so in the extreme case without some element of deception? As part of our awareness of death, we are uneasily conscious of absolutes of suffering. We become accustomed, in the technically perfect ‘art work’ of television, to structured glimpses, real and fictional, of human misery. There is in a sense ‘no reason why’ we should attempt to live ‘out there’ in a full consciousness of the horrors of life. If we can we forget them. Perhaps a saint can sustain such a consciousness without defiling it. Great sufferings are transformed by tragic poets, as the miseries of war are in the Iliad, or by analogy in the paintings of Goya. (Strictly, paintings are not tragic — why?) Christ upon the cross, that ultimate picture of human suffering, is probably the greatest single consolation in western history; it is also the most generally familiar of all aesthetic images. But we need only to reflect seriously upon really terrible human fates to see that they exceed art, are utterly different from art: bereavements such as we all suffer, oppression, starvation, torture, terrorism, the father murdered in front of his child, the innumerable people who at this moment die of hunger in deserts and suffer without hope in prisons. And the fate of the Jews under Hitler which has become a symbol of the capacity and strength of human wickedness. Catastrophes are of course constantly made the subject matter of bad art, such as we continually see on television or in the cinema. Sometimes, however, art which lies can also instruct. The Holocaust on television seems a blasphemous impossibility; and when a TV film was made about a Jewish family in Hitler’s Germany many people protested at the prettified inadequacy of the presentation. Yet the blunted art did convey some conception of the facts to a large audience, and according to some critics did so more effectively because the film resembled other sorts of TV films with which the viewers were familiar. This may be worth reflecting on.

  Tragedy belongs to art, and only to great art. But perhaps even here one is suffering from an illusion? Are there works of art which are real tragedies, real instances of the form? Or is tragedy just an ideal conception, something which we think we need, -something which we would like to exist? We feel: somewhere it must be justly recorded. Human life is full of such shadows, religion is full of them. Perhaps the concept works out as: quasi-tragic, having tragic aspects or moments, or a tragic atmosphere. The works we revere are more confused than we imagine, more indirect in making whatever point they make. Shakespeare’s tragic plays contain comic and irrelevant matter. To try to define and isolate tragedy we might look at some examples of things in life about which we might want to exclaim, ‘How tragic’ or ‘It’s a tragedy.’ And here we must keep in mind that anything which we describe is likely to be touched by art. Art work and value judgments are everywhere in human self-expression. Our evening story about the events of our day is a little evaluative work of art. How far do we want to press this idea? Is everything we reflect on or remember, everything we experience, aesthetically worked? What we feel inclined to say here will go with conceptions of art, thought, experience, and such speculation soon becomes, but not trivially, conceptual or metaphysical. Let us take a real-life example. I read in some account of the matter that on one of the last days in Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war, when Dr and Mrs Goebbels were hustl
ing their children up to bed, about to poison them with cyanide, one of the children, jesting with one of the guards, whom she was fond of, said to him, ‘Misch, Misch, du bist ein Fisch.’ This episode has a piercing touchingness composed partly of tragic irony. It touches us too as evidence of the innocent vitality of the human spirit under terrible conditions. (Stories from the concentration camps.) And we picture children in that place. There is also the fact that someone remembered it. But this is not tragedy, it is a fragment of something far more awful, not just because it is ‘real’, but because it is different; it has no formal context, is not modified and solaced by any limited surround. The story could be told in different ways, but this touch of art does not make it tragic.

  Thus in real life there occur what one might call ‘pieces of tragic utterance’. But then who hears them, who repeats them, and when, for what purpose? A joke is a joke however often repeated, it is portable and has its conventional belongingness in life. But the ‘tragic fragment’ embarrasses and disturbs us or begins to sound suspiciously and inappropriately like art. There are stories which we hesitate to repeat lest we seem to be gloating over horrors or trying to gratify unworthy emotions in ourselves or our hearers. One might tell someone’s dying words to his mother, but not repeat them at a dinner party. Of course pieces of historical data constantly detach themselves as repeatable stories, and the same is true of memorable words, like Vanzetti’s last speech in the law court. ‘If it had not been for these thing I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die unmarked, unknown, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as we now do by an accident.’ Taken out of a fuller context (and there would be many ways of supplying that) it certainly moves us; but we soon also think, what a splendid rhythm, how good this would sound in a play. And who recorded it, has it not been touched up? I do not think one would want to repeat these words idly, though one might quote them in a history lesson, or in a book on prose style, which is where I came across them. (Herbert Read, English Prose Style.) An example of another kind is the account by Thucydides of the sufferings of the Athenians on the Sicilian expedition, where the terrible facts are made more moving by the cool tone of the historian. If we think of it as ‘tragic’ it is because these graphic descriptions emerge as great literature, because of a backward glance at the mistakes and the hubris (a word belonging to discussion of tragedy) which brought it all about, and because we identify ourselves with the Athenians as with tragic heroes. It is difficult to talk about terrible things and we tend to turn ‘the facts’ into quasi-tragic art in our minds. History and folk history, including our personal and family ‘chronicles’, are full of such portable anecdotes and tales. These examples suggest a continuum from conversational reportage through more formal stories and history towards (Shakespearean and Greek) tragedy, along which we might move in either direction. We instinctively use art for consolation at an immediate personal level as well as at that of Titian, Mozart and Homer. Terrible events may be fiddled with by art, but as they appear in the stream of life, in conversation, newspapers, television, informal or formal books (and so on) these aesthetic ‘limited wholes’ tend to be unstable, so that we may see through the tale into the horror beyond. We are moved by the well-formed anecdote, but we mistrust it, do not pause upon it, take it as a mere pointer. Such considerations may also lead us to delight in (Shakespearean and Greek) tragedy, which reminds us of our own defensive reactions to what appals us in real life, and at the same time to question the ability of art, in this area, to tell truth.