Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The novel form more frankly admits, indeed embraces, the instability of art and the invincible variety, contingency and scarcely communicable frightfulness of life. The novel is a discursive art. Novels are, however sad or catastrophic, essentially comic. When one rereads a great novel one is often surprised to find how funny it is. The novel, in the great nineteenth-century sense, attempts to envisage if not the whole of life, at any rate a piece of it large and varied enough to seem to illuminate the whole, and has most obviously an open texture, the porous or cracked quality which I mentioned earlier. The object is as it were full of holes through which it communicates with life, and life flows in and out of it. This openness is compatible with elaborate form. The thing is open in the sense that it looks toward life and life looks back. We ask ourselves, would it be like that? There is an evident stimulus to our sense of verisimilitude and our everyday feeling for truth. This high art also takes it for granted that the world transcends art. In the traditional novel the people, the story, the innumerable kinds of value judgments both illuminate and celebrate life, and are judged and placed by life, in a reciprocal process. We read great novels with all our knowledge of life engaged, the experience is cognitive and moral in the highest degree. These huge objects mock the attempts of dogmatic critics who wish to reduce them to non-evaluative codes. Our pleasure herein is an open-textured pleasure, and this sometimes in spite of the novelist’s movement toward closing the object and making it into a limited whole. Characters in novels partake of the funniness and absurdity and contingent incompleteness and lack of dignity of people in ordinary life. We read here both the positive being of individuals and also their lack of formal wholeness. We are, as real people, unfinished and full of blankness and jumble; only in our own illusioning fantasy are we complete. Good novels concern the fight between good and evil and the pilgrimage from appearance to reality. They expose vanity and inculcate humility. They are amazingly moral. They are funny, as funniness is everywhere. People make jokes in prison camps. Most traditional novels are to some degree ironical, and irony is inimical to tragedy. Tragic irony, so called, exists for the spectators not the characters. An ironical character (lago) can endanger a tragedy just as much as a pathetic character (Malvolio) can endanger a comedy. (These are risks which clever directors love to run.) The great novels contain, often embedded in sadness, some of the funniest things in literature. And the awful things are contained in open surroundings, aware of contingency and absurdity, absolute ultimate loss of dignity, and the impossibility of an aesthetically complete presentation. The highest art here trails away into life. The context modifies the ‘tragic moment’ even when its. point is a senseless death like that of Petya Rostov in War and Peace. We tend to recall the terrifying scenes in Wuthering Heights and forget the funniness and the sophisticated ironical modes of narration. The tension and the cruelty are also softened by an exciting sense of the magical and the demonic, which ‘spoils’ the tragic as it spoils religion. The tragic irony that Cathy and Heathcliff are in fact brother and sister leads to the climatic dénouement, and is kept concealed in a way which makes its discovery almost funny. (Where did that little gypsy child appear from? Are we to believe Mr Earnshaw’s improbable tale that he ‘found him’ in Liverpool? Clearly he is Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate son. Once explained this is obvious.) The ghost-story genre is not far away. It would not occur to us to regard The Turn of the Screw as tragic. The frightfulness of The Heart of Darkness has a narrative container which refers us back to the atmosphere and tempo of ordinary life, with its banalities and crude judgments. The high demonic is not the tragic, and neither is the high pathetic, such as the death of Jo the Sweeper in Bleak House, which is mediated by the surrounding air of unhurried sentiment (less well done it would be sentimental), and by the direct reference to religious faith. Gods may be characters in tragedies but God cannot be; even if He is seen to refuse human categories and defeat human ends His authoritarian presence cannot but be reassuring. The Book of Job is not a tragedy.

  To say of this and that that it is not tragic, or not a tragedy, implies a positive concept. Yet it may be easier to see why certain sad or frightful things in art are not tragic, than to say what sort of art is tragic. Someone has got to die, it has to be a play, it has to be poetry, it has to be very good. Is it simply that we (in the west) have been enormously impressed by a certain literary genre? If it must be a play, is it not necessarily too short and simple? The paradox about tragedy may be compared with the paradox about religion. It must be about the deepest things, it must be true, and also comprehensible, or ambiguous, enough to be appropriated by all sorts of individuals. The statement must be impressive but not too complete, the object must be pierced, the circle broken. This, which happens spontaneously and easily in the comic, is harder to achieve and more formally essential in the tragic, where high fantasy completions, secret conniving modes of ‘happy ending’, must be excluded. The intelligent truthful creator must keep his material open enough, must keep, as it were, pulling it apart. We constantly formulate and express the sense of ordinary life in comic forms. But for very awful things we have, as ordinary citizens, no appropriate mode of expression. It is as if we had to borrow our language from elsewhere. Black humour may console and cheer, but is markedly indirect communication, obliquely related to the horror, not an attempt to understand, portray or comment. It begins to sound as if a tragedy is a rare bird. Perhaps there are none, or only one? If we use the word in a non-normative sense of course there are many bad tragedies. Bathos is the revenge of the fragmentary world upon a pretentious pseudo-unity. So, if we fail so many, we must have an idea of what is good? The concept is not unimportant, indeed we seem to attach some considerable significance to it. We must not be too much consoled. All art tends to console, as the presence of God consoles Job. We turn to the work of a few geniuses, where an account of what is achieved is not easy to frame.

  Aristotle (Poetics VI 2.) tells us that ‘a tragedy is a representation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, each form of verbal adornment [sung and unsung verse] being placed separately, consisting of action not narrative, and by pity and fear bringing about a purification of these emotions.’ That is, pity and fear, or ‘such emotions’, meaning presumably strong emotions. The definition stresses action and completeness. The idea of a purification of emotion promotes thought and seems in place. Such purification must surely be part of our general moral enterprise and should engage the interest of the moral philosopher. We tend to feel that tragedy is connected with high morality and is good for us. Aristotle’s account (Poetics VI-XIV) is superbly apt and lucid. Tragedy, he tells us, is primarily an action or happening (praxis), requiring a story or plot (mythos), portrayal of character (ethos) and intelligent spoken presentation (dianoia). There must be a beginning, a middle, and an end. There must of course be dramatic moments, reversals (peripeteia), recognition scenes, representations of suffering (pathos), and also wounds and deaths. (Plays where no one is killed should be classified as comedies.) The pity and fear thus induced must be clarified and purified. For this we should not simply see the virtuous man overthrown or the bad man successful or the total villain destroyed, but rather the not especially good man brought down, not by evil or wickedness, but by some fault, frailty, or weakness of character (akrasia). The Greek word hamartia is usually translated as (in an ambiguous sense) failure, fault; only (as Liddell and Scott put it) ‘in the language of philosophy and religion’ as sin or guilt. The corresponding verb hamartano means primarily ‘miss the mark’ (as with one’s spear) and also, fail, miss one’s purpose, make a mistake, or (lastly) do wrong or sin. This may seem to invite a comment upon the general character of the Greeks; but it certainly suggests something important about the nature of tragedy. (I return to this later.)

  Plato, as we know, is less inclined to praise the art form which he thinks charms us into identifying with bad and extreme people and indulging in unbridled emotions which we woul
d condemn elsewhere. Kant tells us that tragedy joins the sublime and the beautiful together. The sublime is the proud energetic fear with which the rational being faces the contingent dreadfulness of the world. The beautiful (says Kant) is the experience of a pleasing formal completeness in a purposeless conceptless object. The sublime is a special exercise of reason, a kind of moral adventure. The beautiful is a free play of the imagination in a frolic with the understanding, working sensuously upon an empty notion of ‘an object’ offered by the latter. The concepts are dissimilar; the sublime is moral, the beautiful is aesthetic. We cannot separate ‘tragic experience’ from our general sense of humanity. Kant elevates the noble sublime above the playful beautiful. Tragedy then would be a (unique) moralising or redeeming of the beautiful. Only within a high morality can the spectacle of terrible human suffering become a thing of beauty. If only saints can watch awful pain without some subtle degradation or evasion, then tragedy might be a temporary, perhaps edifying, simulation of sanctity. These are attractive lines of thought. Fear of the contingent, fear of chance, of the dreadful machinery of human fate, certainly seems to be in place here; but Kant’s sublime is an adventure of the rational self, a rather peculiar experience which strengthens confidence in reason and is thus saved from contingency. Hegel suggests that tragedy portrays the collision of two systems of thought (or being), each with its own respectable justification, as in the Antigone. This idea may help us to look at certain works; but it does not seem morally eloquent or deep enough, is too abstract and narrowly rational, to deal with the terrible unintelligible fates of individual men, the suffering of the innocent, the nature of evil, which we feel that tragedy must concern.

  Schopenhauer, with his refined unhurried common-sense, comes nearer to the centre of the matter and nearer to Aristotle. So far from being a Victorian antique, Schopenhauer stands as a modern and prophetic thinker. The voice is calm and discursive, the argument detailed and rich in examples.

  ‘The demand for so-called poetic justice rests on an entire misconception of tragedy and indeed of the structure of the world itself. It boldly appears in all its dullness in the criticisms which Samuel Johnson made of particular plays of Shakespeare, for he very naively laments its absence. And its absence is certainly obvious, for in what have Ophelia, Desdemona and Cordelia offended? Only the dull optimistic Protestant rationalistic view of life ... will make the demand for poetic justice and find satisfaction in it. The true sense of tragedy is in the deeper insight that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for but original sin, i.e. the crime of existence itself.’

  Schopenhauer goes on to say that it is equally inadequate to define tragedy in terms of the work of wicked men (Iago) or blind fate or perverse causality (Oedipus). The highest tragedy shows how ‘characters of ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them knowingly and with their eyes open to do each other the greatest injury without any one of them being entirely in the wrong ... It shows us the greatest misfortune, not as an exception, not as something occasioned by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of the actions and characters of men, indeed almost as essential to them, and thus brings it terribly near to us.’

  (WWI, Book III, ‘The Platonic Idea: The Object of Art’.)

  Schopenhauer points to the metaphysical nature of tragedy, its connection with ‘the structure of the world’. Tragedy is a communication about the deepest matters, purporting perhaps to reach as far down as metaphysics itself. Schopenhauer says that tragic catastrophe is occasioned by ‘original sin’, and he suggests what that is like when he speaks of ordinary, not necessarily very wicked, people coming to a point where they knowingly and inevitably damage each other and cause the innocent to suffer, a point where evil seems inevitable, necessary, even a kind of duty.

  It is not easy to picture either great evil or great good in literature without sentimentality or caricature. Simone Weil, who was often a perceptive literary critic, criticises François Mauriac’s novel Thérèse Desqueyroux for its failure to portray evil justly.

  ‘The picture he draws of evil is defective ... where the culminating point of contact between self-deception and good is reached, he has made a muddle of things, has not rendered sensible the difference at the same time as the resemblance. Very nearly a great book (but in fact a trivial one). Something monstrous about the conception of life of those years (1918-1940). What is lacking is the colour of evil, the monotony and facility of it, the feeling of emptiness and nothingness. Money. He conceals the rôle played by this factor in this crime. He is its accomplice. But worthy of note: the way in which the crime begins and develops, and “it was like a duty”. (Thus evil immediately takes on the monotony of duty.) [That is what ought to have been depicted] ... In thinking that crime conceals a form of grace, they take away whatever grace lies therein, for if it does, in fact, conceal a form of grace, this can only be in the form of a dark night.’

  (Cahiers, p. 128; Notebooks, trans. Arthur Wills, p. 80.)

  The novel describes how Thérèse, after making a dazed family-induced marriage connected with money and land, becomes bored and frustrated and unsuccessfully attempts to murder her bourgeois and slightly boorish husband by poisoning him slowly with arsenic. (He is not bad or cruel, just tedious!) Thérèse is tried and acquitted and subsequently forced by the husband’s family (for a period) to ‘keep up appearances’. What may strike the reader as obvious is that a peculiarly revolting and inexcusable crime has been committed by a very nasty woman. (Poor Bernard Desqueyroux surely deserves considerable sympathy, as does his literary relation Charles Bovary.) Mauriac’s skill, however, so envelops Thérèse in a cloud of sin-conscious religious understanding that it might be just possible to regard her as an interesting and touching heroine. A second novel (La Fin de la Nuit) portrays her later on as not exactly repentant (she seems never fully to realise what she has done) but made (somehow) wiser and nicer by suffering. Simone Weil’s comments clearly indicate what makes one thoroughly uneasy about this, in some ways remarkable, book. The attempted murder is dwelt upon in detail by the author not so much to exhibit and explain its wanton wickedness (she did not have to marry him, she could have tolerated him or left him) but to reinforce our concern with the state of Thérèse’s soul, and her consequent sufferings. Mauriac is of course more than a little in love with Thérèse, as he admits in a frank preface:

  ‘Thérèse, people will say that you do not exist. But I know that you do, I who for years have watched you, often halted you upon your way and unmasked you. When young I remember having seen you in a suffocating courtroom, the prey of lawyers less ferocious than the befeathered ladies, your little face lipless and white. Later, in a country drawing room I saw you as a haggard young woman irritated by the attentions of elderly relations and a naive husband: “What’s the matter with you, surely we have given you everything.” Since then how often have I not been moved to see you clasp your wide and lovely brow with a hand just a little bit too large! How often through the living bars of family life, seen you pad to and fro with wolfish step; and you have stared upon me with your sad and wicked eye.’