Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  (This startling admission represents a paradox of all art: if you are not deeply personally engaged the work will be trivial, if you are it may be half blind.) As Simone Weil points out, Mauriac has failed to emphasise the unsavoury background of the marriage in terms of money and power (he is an ‘accomplice’), and to show how remote even understandable self-deception is from goodness, and thus to analyse the thoroughly evil nature of the event. He fails because he has at once leapt forward to considering Thérèse as an interesting, because so extreme, recipient of divine grace. (Our sympathy with the Prodigal Son should always be tempered by a respectful awareness of the virtues of his brother.) The notion, familiar and popular in various forms, of an internal relation between sin and grace, so that the bad act automatically contains the grace, is always in danger of becoming sloppy and sentimental, and removing the fact of evil-doing from the eye of the sinner, and even of society. The concept of grace stands in need of translation into terms of visible movement, and in extreme cases must be regarded as a (in some sense religious) mystery. Mauriac’s book does however, in its best part, portray how easy it is to continue doing evil, when it becomes habitual, a way of life, something which one just ‘has to go on with’. (Compare Hannah Arendt’s much quoted remark about the banality of evil.) We may look from here to Shakespeare’s wicked characters, such as Iago and Macbeth, to see what Simone Weil called ‘the colour of evil’, evil as ‘duty’, or ‘inevitable fate’, the natural irresistible exercise of a depraved vision, taken for granted as an aspect of sexual cynicism or ambition, the circumstantial working of ‘original sin’ as indicated by Schopenhauer. Evil is terrible and also very close.

  The concept of original sin, the crime of existence itself, may be seen as a reasonable generalisation about the natural sinfulness of humans. No one is without sin. It may of course also be used as a fantasising protection of the ego, a deterministic myth, concealing chance and obliterating freedom, and making everything we do seem innocent because inevitable. Contingency should be apprehended not as fate or genes, but as a reminder of our frailty, of death and of the vain suffering of the frustrated ego and the emptiness of so many of its worldly desires. There are indeed situations, in real life and in fiction, when evil, once deeply entered into, seems ‘forced’ to continue. However, evil people are not usually (morally) excused on the plea that ‘once started they couldn’t stop’. In Macbeth much of the awfulness lies not only in Macbeth’s wickedness but in his remorse. (‘I could have done otherwise’ recognised as true.) Schopenhauer’s picture of a rigidly determined phenomenal world must here be detached from his genuine insight. (A ‘tragic’ situation for today: the young terrorist, once inside the organisation, repents, and has to choose between continuing, or dying at the hands of his comrades. Perhaps there are many of these.) Tragedy concerns the difference between suffering and death. Simone Weil says that exposure to God condemns what is evil in us ‘pas à la souffrance mais à La mort’. Not to suffering but to death. Plays in which people suffer but do not die are not (strictly speaking) tragedies. Our concept of tragedy must contain some dreadful vision of the reality and significance of death. Here sin, evil, is the evasion of the idea of death; refuge is taken in exercise of power, heroic fantasies of will or fate, cults of suffering or the passing-on of pain as damage to others. The tragic art form is rare because it is difficult to keep attention focused on the truth without the author slipping into an easier sentimental, abstract, melodramatic (and so on) mode. In the truthful vision evil is justly judged and misery candidly surveyed. The language which can achieve this is a high poetic language. Tragedy is a paradoxical art because to succeed it must really upset us while exhibiting, but not as mere consolation, some orderly and comprehensive vista of evil and catastrophe. Death threatens the ego’s dream of eternal life and happiness and power. Tragedy, like religion, must break the ego, destroying the illusory whole of the unified self. Ordinary works of art may be seen as illusory unities, the reassuring image of the satisfied ego, pleasing through a felt unification of the sensibility, an intuited harmony: a frolic between the imagination and the understanding producing a quasi-thing (Kant), or a collusion between the unconscious desires of the artist and those of his client (Freud). Tragedy, resisting these comforts, must be in a positive, even thoroughly uncomfortable, sense a broken whole; the concluding process of the idle egoistic mind must be checked. Many people find King Lear almost unendurable. Tragedy must break the charmed completion which is the essence of lesser art, revealing the true nature of sin, the futility of fantasy and the reality of death. Since it is art it must have borders, it must be some kind of magic, but must also inhibit magic in its more familiar and consoling uses.

  Before going on to say more about Shakespeare, and especially about King Lear, I would like to stay a little longer with the philosophers. The danger to drama is melodrama, sentimentality, anything which makes the story into a lie. A prime difficulty in human life: we must have stories (art forms), but stories (art forms) are almost always a bit or very false. As a Dostoevsky character remarks, we have to mix a little falsehood into truth to make it plausible. The true story may not even look like a story because it will inhibit the automatic movement of egoism, with its imposition of a pleasing innocuous form. We want to control the tale ourselves and give it our ending (which need not of course be in the ordinary sense a happy one). We want to make a move to a conclusion, our conclusion. Part of this process, to return to Freud, may involve those secret personal fantasies whose details might seem repulsive or childish. ‘The essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that arise between our single ego and the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique. The writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal – that is aesthetic — yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies.’ This aesthetic love-play is the ‘fore-pleasure’, like that which leads on to the ‘end-pleasure’ of orgasm, the desired and manoeuvred-for conclusion. (See ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, vol. IX, 153 and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, vol. VII, ch. iii, 211.) We may compare with this what Simone Weil has to say when she puts the tragedians in their places. What checks the movement of fantasy is felt as immobile. She uses the image of what is ‘motionless’ when speaking of Greek statues. ‘Only drama without movement is truly beautiful. Shakespeare’s tragedies are second class with the exception of Lear. Those of Racine are third class except for Phèdre. Those of Corneille nth class.’ (Notebooks, p. 620.) Another quotation explains more of what she means. ‘If we look upon ourselves as an end in the world, the world is chaos and without finality. If we eliminate ourselves, then the finality of the world is manifest; but there is no end.’ This sounds like Kant’s view of art as purposiveness without purpose, finality without end; also like the later part of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The moral will or vision removes itself outside the pattern of the (contingent) world where everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. We must look at the world from the outside, sub specie aeternitatis . That is the good life. However the positions are different. Kant’s beautiful object pleases us because it has the completeness of an ordinary thing but no conceptual label, it is ‘just itself’, formally pleasing but without moral message, a happy creation of the imagination and the understanding, but not of the reason. Wittgenstein’s view seems more like an aesthetic stoicism, a vision of a dignity and courage independent of vulgar egoistic desires and pains. Here the moral will, separated from the total contingent world (all the facts), moves silently as a kind of invisible moral style. (This can be a secretly self-satisfying condition.) Simone Weil continues, making her own use of Kant’s aesthetic:

  ‘God is the sole and unique end. But he is not really an end at all, since he is not dependent on any means. Everything which has God for an end is finality without en
d [purposiveness without purpose]. Everything which has an end of its own is deprived of finality. That is why we have to transform finality into necessity. And it is what we manage to do through the notion of obedience. The suffering which goes hand in hand with necessity leads us to finality without end. That is why the spectacle of human misery is beautiful. Beauty is the only source of joy open to us.’

  (Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 613; my italics and parenthesis.)

  When, how, can human misery be beautiful? Seeing it as beautiful is what we do when we enjoy great tragedy. Perhaps one could say that the art form of tragedy is the image of a (rarely achieved) moral condition. (Compare the image of Nirvana.) Plato (Phaedrus) said that enjoyment of beauty was the only spiritual pleasure that was natural to us. Hence we must think not of mere aesthetic gratification but of something high. What does it all look like to a saint? Can we imagine? (What does it look like to a great artist?) This is metaphysical persuasive description. The ‘true saint’ believes in ‘God’ but not as a super-person who satisfies all our ordinary desires ‘in the end’. (There is no end, there is no reward.) This is also to do with time, how we live it. It is a religious position where the concept of God is in place, indeed, in a fundamental sense, defined. A proper understanding of contingency apprehends chance and its horrors, not as fate, but as an aspect of death, of the frailty and unreality of the ego and the emptiness of worldly desires. So, our evil part is condemned ‘not to suffering but to death’. (I expressed this once in an aphorism: the false god punishes, the true god slays.)

  Love as well as God is being defined here. The viewpoint might be compared with that of the mythical Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, where the divine artist, looking with love toward a perfect model, paradeigma (the spiritual Forms, qua the Good), creates out of contingent given material an imperfect copy. The Demiurge (Demiourgos, craftsman, artificer) a mythical god, an entirely good but not omnipotent being, is doing the best he can with the alien matter at his disposal, which already has inherent properties. Plato distinguishes here between two kinds of causality, the necessary, which belongs to the given matter, and the divine, which is the work of the Demiurge. The world as cosmos comes about through reason persuading necessity. (48A.) Plato, turning to us, says that we must distinguish these, and ‘in all things seek after the divine for the sake of gaining a life of blessedness so far as our nature admits thereof, and to seek the necessary for the sake of the divine, reckoning that without the former it is impossible to discern by themselves alone the divine objects after which we strive’. (68E-69A.) We are (potentially) spiritual beings but also finite, seeking the divine in a contingent spatio-temporal material scene. (The visible things which conceal and intimate the invisible.) The Creator is looking at the world ‘as a limited whole’. But he is also looking away from it at the perfect original and seeing the world in its light. The Forms are untainted, separate and eternal. The copy is imperfect but illumined by Good. Creation, which is both activity and contemplation, evokes joy. One might perhaps pursue the thought about the Timaeus by saying that the Demiurge looking at his creation is like the perfect spectator looking at the perfect tragedy. The Demiurge, who is among other things a chemist and a physicist, has created our cosmos as a region possessing ‘laws of nature’, persuasively fashioned out of the inherent causality of the original material. (This gave Plato an opportunity to exhibit some of the science he had picked up from the western Greeks.) The cosmos is also (34B) endowed with a soul, the Anima Mundi (World Soul), which is essentially good but not entirely rational. The Anima Mundi, incarnate, stretched out through the whole of the world and wrapped round its exterior, may be thought of as suffering therein from its experience of the distracted nature of things, brought about by the uneasy combination of divine magnetism and natural laws with the recalcitrant necessity of the original alien and non-rational material. Timaeus 35-7 describes the complex creation of the Anima Mundi which when completed ‘initiates a divine beginning of unending intelligent life forever’ (36E); and ‘when the Father who had made it saw it moving and alive, astonishing the immortal gods, he rejoiced.’ (37C.) After this success, the Demiurge, realising that he cannot confer upon the cosmos, because of its mixed nature, the eternal being of the Good, invents, ‘a moving image of eternity’, our time. (The Timaeus is a late dialogue, the main account is given by Timaeus, an astronomer.)

  We may seek to ‘be with’ the divine cause, as exhorted by Plato, but we cannot avoid necessity, and indeed need it (as he tells us) to force upon us the reality of our situation as mortals. Let us return here to Simone Weil’s beauty as a source of joy and her concept of ‘obedience’. This is of course for her something ultimate and not just ancillary to a quasi-aesthetic experience. One might attempt here a comparison with Kant, seeing ‘obedience’ as more like Kantian sublimity than like Kantian duty. This would involve an interpretation of Kant which stresses the surreptitious way in which the experience of sublimity, and of Achtung, joyful painful respect for the moral law, supports or inspires the non-experiential operation of duty (obedience to reason). The connection (in sublime and Achtung) with a partly pleasurable emotion may indeed reduce their force or starkness by contrast with the relentlessness of duty. Simone Weil’s obedience and necessity are better understood as a confrontation with what is not just unintelligible but pointless. Sublime experience is of course just this (the Alps, the stars). But Kant allows, indeed insists upon, the spiritual value of the self-aware satisfaction of the free rational spectator, as sturdy pride in his reason mingles with his awe and fear. Simone Weil’s picture is grimmer, more as if she saw necessity and malheur, affliction, as subjection to a koan. No ‘fruits of action’, no quasi-aesthetic experience, just attention, truthful obedience, where even to regard suffering as a punishment would be a consolation. Not stoicism or presocratic harmony of opposites. We are to confront, not only the pointless necessity of the world, but also (Timaeus) its obedience to alien law. Here our purification takes place as exposure to a pure source. Void. The difference between dianoia and noesis in Plato, between (good) discursive thinking and (mystical) imageless attention to what is unconditional.

  These reflections have led us to high matters and to a lofty conception of Aristotle’s purging of the emotions. Let us review the argument using more sober terms. Morality, as virtue, involves a particular acceptance of the human condition and the suffering therein, combined with a concomitant checking of selfish desires. Our desires, our life-energy or Eros, can be purified through our attention to God, or to some magnetic Good unescapably active in our lives. An appreciation or image of necessity as law of nature can exhibit the futility of selfish purposes. This insight could lead to haughty stoicism or detached passivity. Schopenhauer, who explicitly (or officially) rejects stoicism, saw that his thought could be misunderstood in this sense. Stoicism may be said to include the sensible, or ‘reasonable’, egoistic aim of ceasing to suffer, and might be seen as part of any ordinary decent moral life. Wittgenstein (seeing that the world cares not for his will) may appear as a genuine stoic. Simone Weil connects necessity with a spiritual obedience prompting purification and love. She stays with the reality (the truthful experience) of suffering, affliction, malheur, seeing this as a kind of absolute condition capable of a spiritual use. Obedience is the freedom wherein the good man spontaneously helps and serves others. Suffering remains but accompanied by a kind of passion, a high Eros, or purified joy, which is the vision of good itself which comes about when, or brings it about that, selfish desires, and the distress involved in their frustration, are removed. We can then see the world, nature and its laws, in the light of the good, and experience a purified suffering which is a unique form of rapture. In obedience we can see the whole cosmos in this light and take an inspired joy in its obedience, rather as we can then experience (the one thing might image the other) a purified (not self-satisfied) ‘sublime’ emotion when watching a stormy sea. Here the idea of a purgation of emotion is necessarily in place
. The spectacle of power or of pain evokes those deep ambiguous emotions designated ‘sado-masochistic’, especially expressive of the double nature of Eros. When these are purged of egoistic matter and of base (of course not necessarily all) erotic (sexual) matter we can experience a pure joy, or one might say an innocent spiritual thrill. No doubt this very rarely, perhaps never altogether, happens; and indignation at the cosmos may often seem more proper than a selfless sympathy with natural law! Who are we to feel such sympathy? We are not gods. (It is a new blessing in our modern age that we are learning to love the planet and care for its natural ways. This too teaches something.) Simone Weil is envisaging an ideal definition in terms of an ideal moral achievement. Moral philosophy may work from a conception of an intensely imagined ideal man. We may judge a man’s virtue by his actions, but also demand or hope to know the ‘substance’ which lies behind them, as in our own case we apprehend a value-bearing base of being from which actions spring. Here a part of our understanding of ‘the good man’ may be thought of in terms of a spectator of a tragedy. How are we to think of, to dare to think of, to make sense of, the awful sufferings and awful wickednesses of the human race? We should not always, and cannot always, refrain from judging. In making use here of the concept of tragedy we may further reflect upon the deep working of imagery as analogy in our understanding of morals.

  I want in parenthesis to glance at a few fragmentary things said by Wittgenstein, who only mentioned such matters en passant. Art is not the only deceptive resource to which we turn in order to be able to think more comfortably about death, and about suffering so awful that it is (spiritually, psychologically) a form or equivalent of death. Pseudo-scientific beliefs often help out our political attitudes and affect the way people view their own lives. Ideas which may belong genuinely to science often live also at a popular or cult level. No doubt this has always been so and Marx is right to emphasise the deep historical working of technological change. Only now we have more powerful technology and more ‘information’. Advertisements appeal, with a perfected charm, to popular science. Science, which we ‘make our own’, may acquire in doing so an aesthetic aspect. Wittgenstein’s conversational remarks about Freud offer a criticism of popular science, and of pseudo-science which Wittgenstein took Freud’s theories to be.