by Iris Murdoch
In art there are many familiar patterns by which art pain or relative pain is conveyed, and the idea of death played with and then removed; for instance, in images of purgatorial suffering or ordeals. Most stories indeed concern the tribulations of an ultimately successful hero, that is what we want to be told about. As I said earlier, we cannot regard Christ’s passion as tragic unless we regard his death as real death, which theology and art discourage us from doing; one could scarcely call it an ordeal. No one would call The Magic Flute or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tragic. The Arthurian legends, dominated by the attractive ambiguous symbol of the Grail, are not tragic. They have an intense but untragic atmosphere, they have a powerfully pleasantly sexual atmosphere, the Grail is a sexual symbol; whereas absolute pain, experienced or (if that is possible) justly perceived or portrayed, removes all sexual interest. (There is none in Lear.) It is in the more ordinary, more relaxed and pleasure-seeking vision of romantic artists, aesthetical spectators, psychological myth-makers, that sex and death, as these are usually understood, are connected. Their so interesting ‘connection’ is magical and an atmosphere of magic is alien to tragedy as it is to true religion. The death, and the love, that religion teaches are unlike our ordinary experience of these things; though it must also be admitted that Othello is a great tragedy, and that ‘the highest’, though very far away, is continuous with everyday life! It is interesting that Shakespeare did not use the Arthurian legends, or refer to them except for a sneer by Hotspur (I Henry IV, III, i, 48) and a joke by the Fool (Lear, III, ii, 95) directed against Merlin. Cymbeline is not Arthurian. He knew that that stuff was not for him, its sexy magical romantic world incompatible with the high art to which his instincts belonged. Of course Malory’s writings are beautiful, but Shakespeare’s own romanticism as seen in the comedies is clean and clear by contrast (it is ‘tougher’). This also has to do with his portrayal of women. His women are free individuals, brilliant images of a liberation which then lay (in many contexts still lies) in the future. Malory’s women are semi-magical charmers, worthy of being celebrated by pre-Raphaelite painters. Shakespeare created his own symbols. The powerful image of the Grail would have been a nuisance in one of his plays, and I suspect that he found it alien. Shakespeare’s plays have their own special moral and religious atmosphere. Morality and religion do not appear in abstract or doctrinal guises in the plays. Shakespeare’s great intelligence and high moral and religious understanding are otherwise on display, transformed by the poet into densely particular work. The plays are pre-eminently about the difference between illusion and reality, and the battle between good and evil, they shine with a positive sense of goodness, which is, by all those words, shown rather than explicitly or laboriously said. As I suggested earlier, we may in that respect, and in spite of the ‘old quarrel’, compare Shakespeare with Plato. Stanley Rosen, in his excellent book The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry, speaking of Heidegger’s failure to understand Plato, suggests that the elusive Being which Heidegger attempts to discover for us is in fact the light which illuminates the atmosphere of the Platonic dialogues. I think this same light is to be found in Shakespeare. Tragedy, which deals with what is most difficult, is dense non-generalised non-abstract work, herein resembling states of absolute pain in real cases where generalities are irrelevant; the tragic vision of such pain is condensed and non-discursive as is the condition itself. We are placed, as it were, right up against it; close to a real awareness of death, of the senseless rubble aspect of human life which is concealed under grand illusory names such as fate, destiny, history, providence. Something of this is expressed in Kant’s image of the broken whole, the inevitable defeat of reason and its inevitable aspiration. Here is exhibited the problem of truth in art, how can art tell truth, how can it not lie a little so as to console, even to convince? We wish to be persuaded that great art is analogous to moral knowledge, an absolute convergence of fact and value. It would then be immobile as Simone Weil said, an enlightened (just, ‘obedient’) vision of necessity, being for us, without evasion, ‘the thing itself’. ‘There is no way, there is only the end, what we call the way is messing about’: Kafka. The sense in which this is good advice to artists may suggest to us the sense in which it is also good moral advice.
Great tragedies are written in poetry where language reaches an extreme level of density and suggestive power. How short the plays of Shakespeare seem when we re-read them, compared with the vast radiant object about which we have in the interim been thinking. I have been talking about tragedy in a context of talking about religion, and have borrowed religious categories, hoping thereby to illumine both concepts. I have not attempted here to discuss the Greeks, who after all invented the form, and may be said to have had, in something like the sense in which I am discussing it, a ‘tragic view of life’. Their clear-eyed grimness concerning the awful facts of human suffering may attract, impress, or appal: for instance their sense of slavery as a human fate, a fate taken for granted, which might be one’s own. I said earlier that the Iliad, full of relentless images of war and pointless slaughter, might be called tragic. Yet there is something in the poem about the romance and heroism of war which softens the picture. The deaths of Patroclus and Hector prompt tears, but do not utterly appal. These deaths are beautiful, and unlike the deaths of Agamemnon and Antigone. The Iliad is full of a most intense pathos (the horses of Achilles weeping over Patroclus) which is also at home in Shakespeare. Euripides seems a ‘less pure’ tragedian for reasons which also make him more accessible and interesting to many modern readers. He presents us with more anthropomorphic and sympathetic gods who may be thought of as personifications of human passions; whereas the gods of Aeschylus are more remote, cold, appearing as fate and justice. Looked at in this perspective Lear is clearly the ‘most Greek’ of Shakespeare’s plays. Sex is absent from Lear, as is the notion of an ordeal, sado-masochistic suffering, transcended redemptive suffering or magical release; and the sense in which love is present is a stark and unworldly one. Cordelia is a religious figure (whom we might compare and contrast with Antigone), an image of the highest morality, the truth which wears the face of death and does not console or respond, yet (and so) can enlighten, bring about ‘new being‘. The comforting relation of ‘I and thou’ is absent. Lear feels its absence in that painful first scene. He seeks a ‘thou’ and fails to find one, and is offended by the unattractive negativity of truth instead. He meets the pure, difficult, at an ordinary level unacceptable, face of love. In this context it can also make sense to ask whether Cordelia ought not to have compromised by responding in a way which her father would understand! Of course it is her fictional task to make a revelation which would be lost if she behaved otherwise. In real life such a question is not an easy one. The Judaeo-Christian God has been treated as a supreme Thou. Hindu mysticism freely uses sexual imagery to speak of the soul’s union with the Godhead. Many mystical writings, neo-Platonic, oriental, Christian, invoke the idea of a sexual union with the Absolute (spiritual love as passion); and talking directly to God has been and is the most familiar religious experience of most believers. Part of the dismay occasioned and felt by modern demythologising theologians is connected with the loss of such imagery, the recognition of it as less than final. God may now appear as a symbol of an absolute demand, as an internalised categorical imperative, a traditional image of commitment to religious values, rather than as an external supernatural loving Father to whom we speak in our prayers, and who wants to be loved by us in return. The Absolute is not a person and is indifferent to us. This carries too the now more emphatic reminder that the daily bread of human affections and human relations is, from the fearful inmost point of view of religion, imperfect. Heavenly love is unlike earthly love. Christ broke up families.
There is a passage in Plato’s Sophist where the Eleatic Stranger, who in this dialogue plays the Socratic part, says to Theaetetus, ‘But for heaven’s sake, shall we easily let ourselves be persuaded that motion and rest and
life and soul and mind are really not present in absolute being, that it neither lives nor thinks, but stays there motionless, solemn and holy and devoid of mind?’ (249A.) Theaetetus answers that this would indeed be a terrible admission. This exchange about the nature of ‘ultimate reality’, which may be thought of as changeless or else in flux, having or not having a mind and soul, appears as part of a very much longer discussion. Plato was concerned with the difference between science and morals. He believed that religion cannot rest upon personal deity, and that the natural order (in the scientific sense) cannot be regarded as a fundamental spiritual reality. The concept of responsive and responsible God or gods, by drawing down providential power into the accidental and largely incomprehensible natural scene which we inhabit, was indeed in effect a way of covering up a rift between nature and spirit. Some forms of eastern religion and modern versions (for instance in Jung) join with presocratic ideas of a fundamental natural rhythm (as in strife of opposites) which unites the aspirations of the human soul to a harmonious background in the flux of nature, here understood not as contingent and various but as single and orderly. Plato, rejecting this imagined harmony, raises (as Kant does) the problem of how we are to relate these spiritual aspirations to our evident existence as accidental beings in an accidental world; how we are furthermore to spiritualise that relation so as to understand it as in some sense essential. Kant connected the possibility of free religious faith with the impossibility of a complete understanding of the natural world or harmonious unity with it. Our situation is essentially contingent; it is a persistent illusion to imagine otherwise. The image of unity and harmony is ‘ideal’. Herein Plato’s crucial rejection of the ‘cosmic’ religion of his predecessors initiates the ‘troubles’ of western ethics and theology. As the problem is posed in the Sophist, if we take ‘ultimate being’ in the moral-religious sense, the answer to the Stranger’s question must be ‘yes’. Plato makes clear elsewhere that the final demand or absolute is not itself a form of life, though as an object of (pure) love it can inspire (true) life. (Simone Weil’s ‘obedience’.) The moral Form, or Idea, is spoken of by Plato as being (he speaks here at Symposium 211B about the Form of Beauty) ‘Itself by itself with itself, single and eternally existent.’ Religion, concern with ‘the ultimate’, is in Plato’s view of it, as in the theology of Buddhism and Hinduism, above the picturesque or figurative level of ‘gods’. Such images are shadows which indicate something beyond. The lonely supremacy of moral goodness is also portrayed in the Trinitarian creation myth of the Timaeus, which I mentioned earlier when speaking of the divine Demiurge (perfectly good but not omnipotent) as an ideal picture of the artist. Plato’s Trinity (Forms, Demiurge, World Soul) may be seen reflected (surely not by accident) in the Christian Trinity as God the Father (Form of the Good), Holy Spirit (Demiurge) and Christ (Anima Mundi). Crucial differences between Plato’s mythical Trinity and the Christian one are that the supreme figure in the Timaeus (Good as sovereign Form) is impersonal and separate, the divine creator makes a fundamentally imperfect world, and the World Soul, fallible incarnate creature, is not wholly rational. Christ as Anima Mundi may be thought of as the exemplar of the highest form of incarnate being. Plato elaborates his imagery by distinguishing between the original world created by the Demiurge and that world as lived by us humans. The causality and laws and order of the original world are the work of pure reason confronted by contingent material. As we are far from completely rational, our concept of causality is local and ‘errant’ and much of our experience is that of ‘pure chance’. (In brief, we have mucked up a world which was inevitably imperfect to begin with.) This is an obscure part of the dialogue (46D onward). Pursuing the artist analogy, the original (not perfect) work of art is that created by the artist, the secondary work is that enjoyed and used by his clients. The beautiful Timaeus myth may seem to us both realistic and pessimistic. At least it induces humility, it puts ‘God’ (as Demiurge) in his place (secondary, not omnipotent) and also opens a space for the mystical incarnate Christ. The World Soul as Logos can also represent ordinary human activity, sunk in contingency and confusion, yet also vitally connected with the power of spirit. We must keep in mind that the whole thing originated in love. Religion is the attachment to an ultimate and fundamental demand, the demand or urge that we become truthful and compassionate and wise, it is the love of that demand. Kant’s impersonal call of duty inspires respect, awe, fear, but not love. Plato’s Forms are separate and unresponsive, but they are essentially objects of love. (Symposium, Phaedrus.) Eros, the high translated form of sexual energy, a daemon not a god, is our guide into the realm of spirit. The Timaeus Demiurge, a high but not highest being, is also Eros.
I have been talking about the ambiguous conspiracy between art and religion, and about the idea or illusion of the limited whole, discussing these matters in relation to great and familiar images such as those offered to us by Plato and by Shakespeare. The problem about philosophy, and about life, is how to relate large impressive illuminating general conceptions to the mundane (‘messing about’) details of ordinary personal private existence. But can we still use these great images, can they go on helping us? How do the generalisations of philosophers connect with what I am doing in my day-to-day and moment-to-moment pilgrimage, how can metaphysics be a guide to morals? (‘Is it really as grim as all that?’ No, because ordinary simple compassion exists all over the place, and whether or not we are aware of ‘the highest’ we may be well employed in loving our neighbour.) Levels and modes of understanding are (somehow) levels and modes of existence. My general being coexists with my particular being. We are faced with these difficulties in our apprehensions of art and religion. Fiction writers have, instinctively or reflectively, to solve the problem of this coexistence when they portray characters in books, and we the readers appreciate and judge their solution, and exercise many different kinds of insight in doing so. The creation and appreciation of a novel is a complex highly diversified operation. This process of relating and fusing takes place largely instinctively when we attend to a work of art. This attention will of course include the ready use, or else the critical questioning, of familiar conventions. In ordinary life we are continually and instinctively relating dissimilar elements and only sometimes becoming acutely conscious of these numerous operations when (for instance) an intuitive understanding of a particular case conflicts with a general principle or a religious picture. The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused. Most people pay attention to some art. Some, still many, people receive a religious upbringing and know religion from earliest childhood. The ease with which children acquire and retain religious concepts may be taken as proof that we are all naturally religious or that we are all naturally superstitious. The roots of religious ideas and images so acquired go deep. However, the process of relating them to ordinary life may be seen as analogous to the processes by which we understand art objects or (should they come our way) philosophical conceptions. These three areas overlap in confusing, often unnerving, ways. How do we thus put ourselves together? Well, perfectly easily, we are doing it all the time. But how is it done, how? When this question really checks us we may be inspired to become artists or philosophers.
6
Consciousness and Thought — I
In order to talk about consciousness or self-being, the ‘medium’ in which all these amazing things are taking place, it is necessary first to consider the philosophical concept, or concepts, of the self. ‘Self’ can impede a consideration of ‘consciousness’ by which it ought to be enriched. How do the concepts ‘self’, ‘experience’, ‘consciousness’ relate? Should philosophy recognise these concepts at all? ‘The self’ sounds like the name of something, soul, ego, psyche, essential person. Self, thing, person, story and work of art are wholes which can function as analogies of each other. ‘Self’ is a concept which does not trouble us as ordinary peo
ple. We get along with being a self without difficulty, though if we reflect it may seem a remarkable achievement. Ordinary usage recognises a (morally) higher and lower self evidenced by higher and lower thoughts and actions. Philosophically, should ‘self’ be taken as an initial problem, or simply assumed or postulated as a carrier of experience or consciousness, or should we take something else, society or language or genes, as fundamental? Is the self part of the world, or should it be seen as constructing the world? Descartes pictures a solitary mind having certain knowledge only of its immediate apprehensions, from which (helped by belief in God) it is able to find itself in a world grasped as ‘external’ and real. Hume’s self, also, like that of Descartes, taken as primary, is strictly a bundle of perceptions, but endowed with innate awareness of association and order. Habits of imagination enable the construction, out of atomic data, of our ordinary experienced world, including causality, space, time and morals. Kant, turning the problem round (the ‘Copernican Revolution’) started from evident truths of empirical experience and science and deduced a complex knower or metaphysical subject who must exist as their counterpart. The object both requires and guarantees the subject. Plato and Platonists, closer in many respects to common-sense and to modern formulations of these problems, do not start from a solitary subject, but from a general conception of persons active in a diverse world. Plato’s imagery pictures levels and qualities of intellectual and moral consciousness, consciousness as a value-bearing continuum. His metaphysic has no historical dimension, and (in a sense) no system. There is a way (a possible pilgrim’s progress), but individuals have to learn how to use it. Hegel also presents the conception of ascending levels of consciousness (Bewuβtsein). This is not however an ascent accessible to free idiosyncratic persons, but represents a single rationally ordered totality within which all activity of mind takes place, Geist (mind, spirit) moving inevitably toward greater coherence (excellence) and thus toward total coherence and pure intelligibility. Kierkegaard saw this great system as a deterministic machine obliterating the concept of the solitary responsible moral person. Plato’s mythical ‘as if’ lacks the quasi-scientific magisterial quality of the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel. After Hegel ‘consciousness’ was used (magisterially) by Marx as a socio-political concept. But the word has retained its vague ordinary-language meaning as an awareness of self as continuous being.
