by Iris Murdoch
‘In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning and establishes the being of a God or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible, but is however of the last consequence.’
(Treatise of Human Nature III i I.)
In spite of these words Hume himself in effect elides morality with the ‘soft’ concepts of habit and custom. Philosophy is constantly making persuasive connections and eclipsing radical differences. A deep divide may impoverish both sides. One concept may quietly swallow another and obliterate a whole region of thought. (As structuralist argument obliterates the conception of extra-linguistic reality.)
The dull gluey jumbled unfree (and so determined, only Sartre does not stress this) nature of the inner life, as described in L’Etre et le Néant and most graphically in La Nausée, is taken as an image of, and then as a case of, mauvaise foi, bad faith, failure to reflect, spiritless acceptance of habits, conventions and bourgeois values. Our mind is required to run with instant unnoticed speed along this persuasive line of juxtaposed ideas. Deep instinctive metaphors are at work. If we introspect we fail to find clarity, we discover only dark inert sticky senseless material, something which contrasts with the clean clear light agile movement of externally manifested decisive thought and action. What is pure and strong and free (être-pour-soi) emerges as it were automatically beyond and above what is dull, jumbled and senseless (être-en-soi). Thought moves bodiless and unimpeded above this morass, it makes choices and carries values. People who cannot think, who fail to think, who choose not to think, are pictured as being sunk in a dark muddled consciousness, composed of feelings and associations and fragmentary awareness. Such people live by unreflective conventions, they are afraid of action and change and free creative thinking. Genuine authentic truthful thought rises, shaking itself free, above this swampy consciousness into a new heightened clarified consciousness, able to look about, look ahead, act and prove itself in action. The Marxist concept of ‘praxis’, carried on by Sartre into his later Critique, is in place here. Adorno was condemned by fellow Marxists as a useless dreamer, not positively at work (praxis) upon the battlefront of the Revolution. Structuralist thinking contains an aestheticised version of this concept, only the ordinary people (the new ‘proletariat’) are now inert (like the old dull bourgeoisie) and the ‘battlefront’ is the linguistic front line, the playground of creative poeticised writers and thinkers. We can see at this point how existentialism as well as Marxism has favoured (opened a way for) the emergence of structuralism, whose popular and more deeply worked version now replaces that of existentialism. The emotionally stirring and (to many) attractive contrast made by Sartre is Kantian in style, but Kant’s contrast between the causally determined self and the free self is frankly metaphysical, in a sense to which Sartre is not committed. His position is apparently more ‘realistic’ (phenomenological, psychological). One might say he is bringing out the difficulties in Kant’s view. Both Wittgenstein and Sartre seem at times to dismiss our confused inner reflections, or flow of consciousness, as irrelevant to the outward procedures of human life. Sartre might agree with Wittgenstein’s ‘An inner process stands in need of outer criteria.’ (Investigations 580.) But by this Sartre would mean something moralistic, at least ‘authentic’, while Wittgenstein is saying something ‘logical’. That is, Sartre is contrasting dreamy conventional (bourgeois) musing with courageous free unillusioned activity (praxis); whereas Wittgenstein is rejecting the ‘inner’ in so far as we may, in attributing roles to it, make philosophical mistakes. In fact, a closer look at Wittgenstein’s dictum may lead us to attribute to it after all a sort of moral role. ‘Do not try to analyse your own inner experience’ (Investigations II xi, p. 204) may be seen also as a suggestion that one should not attach too much significance to (probably egoistic and senseless) inner chat! Silence becomes the inner as well as the outer person. As often in philosophy a growth of mutually supporting metaphors may seem to add up to a position which has been argued for. Thus something important may, by a bold distinction, be persuasively obscured. It is one thing to present sound anti-Cartesian critical arguments about sense data, momentary inner certainties, or the role of memory images in remembering; it is quite another to sweep aside as irrelevant a whole area of our private reflections, which we may regard as the very substance of our soul and being, as somehow unreal, otiose, without relevant quality or value. Wittgenstein occasionally protests that this is not what he is doing. He refers to introspectibilia, but rather as items, awkward misleading inner events, not as a part of some intelligible continuous flow. He is (like Derrida) thoroughly uneasy with the concept of ‘experience’. He goes straight to language (language-games and communal forms of life). Immediate followers of Wittgenstein, including Gilbert Ryle, translated his admittedly obscure reflections into a form of behaviourism: only the ‘outer’ is real. (I discuss these Wittgensteinian matters at more length later on.) The, in effect, elimination of many of our ordinary conceptions of ourselves, and of the quality and texture of our awareness, by structuralist thinkers, is similar to that of Wittgenstein in going ‘straight to language’, but proceeds in a more polemical manner which certainly does not ‘leave things as they are’. Structuralism has replaced existentialism as a popular ‘philosophy of our time’, but its doctrine, when assimilated, cuts deeper. The eclipse of (popular) existentialism is itself an interesting phenomenon. The idea of that brave individualistic, rather irresponsible, freedom attracted many non-philosophers after the war with Hitler, it seemed to be something which everyone could understand. Perhaps the prospect, or burden, of so much undefined freedom became, as many post-war hopes dwindled, less attractive and less realistic. People began to feel that, after all, they were in the grip of uncontrollable and mysterious forces, political, economic, scientific, cosmic, and that they had better become more relaxed and resigned. Structuralism with its particular anti-individualistic determinism (language speaks the man) and its aesthetic elitism (the artist as metaphysician, as specialised language-master, concept-master, and prophet) may be more calming to the nerves of those who regard it as a kind of science, and more flattering to those who feel themselves to be capable of such an exclusive creative freedom. The structuralist distinction between fact and value allows fewer people access to the latter. Structuralism (deconstruction) also, as a political, literary and metaphysical force, seems more disturbingly revolutionary, it flies the flag of a new era. Sartre seems tamely (or safely) traditional by contrast; and Derrida names Heidegger as ending the philosophical period which the Greeks began. So, certain philosophical dichotomies make the ‘self’, or ‘consciousness’, problem invisible. Both Sartre and Derrida were of course influenced by Heidegger, adopting from him his ‘heroic’ distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic life, and (in the case of Derrida) his desire to poeticise the language of philosophy.
Phenomenology in the style of Husserl uses the concept of consciousness. Husserl was prepared to look into the mind, and to set up a considerable amount of machinery to explain what he saw. He took as fundamental the ‘intentional’ nature of consciousness, consciousness as being always consciousness of something. He believed that it was possible by a special kind of introspection to isolate contents of consciousness and to study their transcendental (logical, category-bearing) structure. Husserlian phenomenology, divided up into various streams, has been made use of by moral philosophers, including Pope John Paul II. Husserl’s transcendental philosophy is Kantian, but his method, and his confidence, is also Cartesian, and in that respect alien to later philosophy in the Wittgensteinian and structuralist lines. The changing character of phenomenology and its mediation into structuralism may be traced in the career of Merleau-Ponty.
Husserl was a Kantian, not a Hegelian, his transcendental machinery was static and ‘pure’, not subject to historical development or prophetic concern with ‘new consciousness’. He may be regarded as a ‘bridge’ figure; his theory has enlivened thinkers who have rejected it. As transcendental logic his conceptual forms or categories are too abstract and rigid to deal with anything like an introspectible mind; and as psychological intuition his method lacks the precision of either science or philosophy. Phenomenological analysis risks an inconclusive division, falling apart into either abstract logical structuring or uninhibited descriptions which may seem to belong to empirical psychology or even to the art of the novelist. One of Wittgenstein’s aims was to remove philosophy from the vicinity of science, particularly of psychological science. Successors of Husserl have not been so particular. Sartre attempted to integrate psychoanalysis with existentialist philosophy, and structuralists have, with much greater ambition and refinement, ‘taken over’ sociology, anthropology and psychoanalysis (Lacan) into a philosophy of language. The sheer learning and energy exhibited in this take-over by its more brilliant exponents can make such theorising at its best and even for an alien critic very interesting. One can appreciate the temptation (not after all resisted by philosophers in the past, and deified by Hegel) to take over all new knowledge and organise it into a pattern of what is deepest. The metaphysic of Freud, for instance, now so familiar, might be put forward (by some), refined and altered perhaps, as a structure fundamental to the mind, beyond and beneath which one cannot go.
Popular structuralism at large in the field of literature exhibits the attack in a cruder form, dismantling (‘deconstructing’) the substantial individual being of works of art, of fictional characters and of their authors, in technical quasi-scientific terminology into theoretical patterns which are actually to take the place of what has been thus removed. We see here, as in a parable or mirror, how ‘scientific’ theory and technology may take the place of human beings. We, who still in spite of everything live in a Greek light, have yet to see how far science and its satellite theories can actually alter our human world. Intelligent tyrants reflect on this; and Marxism, for all its utilitarian virtues, carried this hypothesis, unclarified and semi-conscious, within itself. Could it before long begin to seem naive to believe in the value and being of individual consciousness, even in that one which is oneself ? The denial of any philosophical role to ‘experience’ or ‘mental contents’ has left no place for a consideration of consciousness. ‘Value’ is placed outside philosophy or else is accommodated on the edge by some smaller technical structure, such as a form of behaviourism based on will and rules. A wholesale entry of ‘human science’ into philosophy swallows up and digests value. The heroic aestheticism of Heidegger and Derrida quietly effaces any close view of moral lives as lived by ordinary individuals. Motivation is indeed important in philosophy and at certain times philosophers lack motive, lack Eros, to pursue certain problems, perhaps because a dominating picture, even though sensed as incomplete, suits the general drive of their theory. It may seem that we have the philosophies which the age requires: a scientific linguistically minded age, wherein religion too is thrust aside. Does not such an age need and want a clarified determinism, combined perhaps with some sensible behaviouristic doctrine of non-universal reason, or a neo-Marxist philosophy of action, plus various utilitarian idealisms (ecology, human rights) — rather than theories of virtue and spirituality and quality of consciousness? As one might say, if so many other explanatory metaphysical pictures are available why strive for this, admittedly difficult, one? Heidegger, it is true, (in Sein und Zeit) takes his stand ‘in the middle of experience’, a place avoided by other philosophers. Existentialists professed to do something of the sort but without much success. Perhaps in his attempt to explain what it is to be a here and now experiencing person, (early) Heidegger is the only true existentialist. His Dasein, being-there, self-being, makes its first appearance as an individual. The views of later Heidegger are another matter.
‘I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say “I know what you are thinking”, and wrong to say “I know what I am thinking”. (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)’ Philosophical Investigations II xi, p. 222. This asymmetry, pursued by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, expresses one aspect of present philosophical difficulties about the concept of the ‘self’. I can test, and so be sure of, what others are thinking. I can, it may be argued, only thus test myself by regarding myself as another person (watching what I do etc.). Have I really decided? Wait and see! The seat of certainty, perhaps more generally of truth, has, it seems, been removed from its privileged central position. The whole thing, our grasp of our existence, has been revealed as working in a more complex, an indirect, a different, way. One does not have to be a philosopher to be assailed by such problems. On the one hand we, including the philosopher outside his study, believe with complete undoubting confidence in the real existence of the things (the ‘external world’) round about us; and (it may seem) with a similar confidence in our own existence, the authority of our own minds, the indubitable immediacy and continuity of our conscious self. Do we know what ‘self’ means? Well, yes, of course we do — don’t we? ‘Thing’ and ‘self’ guarantee each other philosophically and also psychologically. All right, the philosophical ‘metaphysical subject’ may not be just like us, but objects must surely have subjects. We continue to enjoy art objects which unify our sensibility. Our surroundings continue and we continue with them. On the other hand, we know we make all sorts of mistakes, we fear death, we fear dissolution; anything which fragments consciousness, such as an inability to remember or to fit appearances together, produces fear, the prompt suspicion that the ego is not the one all-powerful unity and unifier which it feels itself to be. The cogito argument of Descartes is not just one simple attractive intuition (the test we can all give to ourselves): it takes a secret route through moral and religious ‘certainties’ from which we now feel more detached. A specialised fear of recent origin appears as a loss of confidence in language, a recognition of a fragmentation of language and a failure of linguistic ability. Does grammar matter? Does spelling matter? Why should we teach children all those old rules? Why should we believe in some general ‘correct’ language? Any dialect or patois is just as efficacious and often more expressive. Clips from radio or TV speech from even a few years ago can seem odd, affected, ‘funny’. Philosophers used to appeal confidently to ‘ordinary language’; but is there really such a thing? (At a dinner in Oxford in the nineteen fifties Professor Quine proposed a toast ‘to ordinary language’. A philosopher present wondered at the time whether, in twenty or thirty years, we should find this toast equally significant and aptly amusing!) Is not the language which seemed so solid and continuous now falling apart into all sorts of specialised or local usages? Perhaps one can discern a general division into scientific languages, physics, computer language, Artificial Intelligence, Freudianism, structuralism, as contrasted with broken-down fragmented weakened modes of discourse, emotive, unreflective, inexact, bearers of inarticulate emotion and idées reçues. Versions of this alarming distinction are repeated by, sometimes gleeful, prophets, by whom, perhaps, we ought to be more alarmed. Those who accept this ‘new realism’, with distaste but with resignation, may lack energy to defend or re-examine the old idea of the self, the truth-seeking individual person, as a moral and spiritual centre. Structuralists and Marxist-structuralists and some empiricist philosophers see here the end of the old (Greek, Cartesian, bourgeois, etc.) metaphysical era as also the end of the God era. The Christian God supports, by his attention, the reality of the solitary individual, of whom Christ is the guarantor, ideal image or alter ego. Modern totalitarian tyrants, rightly from their point of view, have wanted to destroy religion entirely. Religious observance is a hiding place. Think what it did for Poland in the second half of the twentieth century. Art too has traditionally been,
for artist and client, a space opened for individuals; and when we are frightened by prophecies we may be reassured by the substantial being of works of art. Critics who dismiss the nineteenth-century novel and even sneer at Shakespeare do not yet abandon Mozart. Schopenhauer was right to treat music as a special case. The art object, which is a kind of ‘thing’, is also a kind of ‘soul’. The imagery of art and of religion, the persisting idea, whether personified or not, of an absolute good or moral ground, provide fortifying reflections, pictures, analogies of an active unified self. We are still surrounded by sources of energy which may maintain our ‘self-confidence’. Our intuition helps out what is fragmentary to produce an idea of unity and in this mirror we see ourselves. It is in the critique of elements of illusion in this process that something essential may be lost.
Modern philosophy rejects old metaphysical unities, neo-Kantian moralists allow that rational beings may disagree, multiplicity must often be preferred to unity. Yet where the central problem of human consciousness is concerned the alleged ‘disappearance’ of the old substantial self has not led to any new philosophical enlightenment, or clear indication concerning how we are to discuss in a more realistic way a demythologised and (apparently) disunited self. Metaphysical ideas persist of more deprived but still unitary selflets, leading a minimal yet dignified sort of existence as principles of will or sincerity or non-universal rationality. It is possible that such philosophical notions are closer than they used to be to ordinary lay self-understanding, I mean that people are really less inclined to think of themselves as souls and persons. A glorified ‘falsely completed’ image of conscious being has been set aside, together with abandoned theories of art and morals, and with the Cartesian idea that immediate consciousness is the foundation of conceptual knowledge. The old concept of the self as a unified active consciousness, living between appearance and reality (the traditional field of the novel), is being dislodged by psychoanalytical psychologists and ‘literary’ deconstruction. We now see in modern neo-Hegelian thinking fact actually becoming value, as quasi-scientific technical modes of discourse (psychoanalysis, anthropology, semiology, grammatology, etc.) are treated as ultimate truths, and contrasted with a conceptually vague ‘ordinary language’ composed of conventional assumptions and illusions, and which if solemnly uttered by some non-technical thinker is inevitably in bad faith.
