Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The element of metaphor is unavoidable in philosophy, especially in moral philosophy; it is simply more or less evident. Some theories of will, for instance, may avoid speaking of leaps, but constantly use metaphors of movement. All right, but in order to move one must see, one must survey the scene, and the ability to see justly is also connected with changes in what is desired. Failure to understand how thought constantly works in moral living supports a popular misrepresentation of Plato as an ‘intellectualist’ philosopher who (in the ordinary sense) put the highest value on intellectual skill, and (in the metaphysical sense) thought that nothing was real except objectified abstract ideas lodged somewhere in heaven. Metaphysics is full of metaphors whose force is often half concealed. The Platonic myths are an explicit resort to metaphor as a mode of explanation. Plato continually pictures education as moral progress and indicates the kind of relation which exists between moral goodness and a desire for just and true understanding. Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires. What happened to the slave in the Meno, did he undergo some permanent spiritual change as a result of being prompted to solve the geometrical problem? That rather blood-chilling yet also so poetical scene poses a problem or hitch which must also accompany a Platonic ethical view. This is one of the points where we want to switch our attention to Kant as a helpful corrective, as we instinctively want to defend Kant’s ‘duty’ against the sneers of Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. Kant thought that every man possessed through Practical Reason the entire potential for moral goodness, though he also thought (to adopt the words of Julian of Norwich) that sin was behovely, that failure was likely, given the strength of base egoistic desires. In effect, Kant’s moral view is optimistic and democratic. Plato’s is pessimistic and aristocratic, in the sense that he offers a vision of what is highest, but also of the distance which separates us from it. Kant’s view is horizontal, Plato’s is vertical. Kant’s man plods along a level road, alternately failing and succeeding, continually nagged by conscience. We easily identify with this individual. Plato has no similar figure. When goodness is so difficult there seems less point in saying that every man is potentially good, though the Cave myth may imply it. Both these views (Kantian and Platonic) can be seen as realistic and philosophically instructive. Yet one may also want to regard (I discuss this later) the idea of duty as indestructible, and want to examine more closely the intractable density of individual fates. The connection made by Plato of knowledge (truthfulness) and learning with goodness provides a deep intelligible conception of moral change, but detailed questions need to be asked about how exactly this comes about. Plato tells us in the Meno that virtue cannot be taught, neither is it natural, it comes by divine gift (Meno 100B). This does not of course mean accidentally or without effort. Help from God or the unconscious mind must normally be thought of as arriving in a context of attending and trying. Leaving aside the problem-solving slave, upon whom perhaps in that in many ways so terrible civilisation no light could fall, let us return to the case of the craftsmen at the end of the Republic who benefit from the ‘most gracious assistance’ (602D) of measuring, numbering and weighing. The carpenter, for instance (at 597B), who makes the non-ideal bed, imitating the ideal bed ‘made by God’, in industriously pursuing his craft may gain access to mathematical ideas. We can imagine here, conjuring up the virtuous apprentice, how such industry could ‘do him good’. The Greeks were amazed and impressed by their progress in geometry, and Plato takes mathematics as a case of a high, though not highest, knowledge. It may also be seen as an image of, or standing for, any strict intellectual discipline, such as learning a foreign language. Learning is moral progress because it is an asceticism, it diminishes our egoism and enlarges our conception of truth, it provides deeper, subtler and wiser visions of the world. What should be taught in schools: to attend and get things right. Creative power requires these abilities. Intellectual and craft studies initiate new qualities of consciousness, minutiae of perception, ability to observe, they alter our desires, our instinctive movements of desire and aversion. To attend is to care, to learn to desire to learn. One may of course learn bad habits as well as good, and that too is a matter of quality of consciousness. I am speaking now of evident aspects of education and teaching, where the ‘intellectual’ connects with the ‘moral’; and where apparently 'neutral’ words naturally take on a glow of value. The concepts ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are at issue. Structuralism, which professes no morality, puts both these concepts, in the sense attached to them in these considerations, in question. The ambiguity and difficulty of both appears in the case of the carpenter whom Plato summons up expressly to contrast with the painter (597B-C) whose relationship to the bed remains at a level of unreflective immediacy. Plato subsequently (607B) refers to the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Without entering here into Plato’s precise objections (political, psychological, moral) to art (painting, music, theatre), we may readily understand his conception of art generally as relaxing the moral and intellectual faculties, and weakening the grasp upon what is true and real. We (today) see all about us vast commercial and pseudo-intellectual proliferations of inane and corrupting rubbish which usurp the name of art. Yet in just this context we are led to claim our knowledge and experience of good art as something moral. It is not just delight, it is refinement and revelation. Kant recognised this when he spoke of genius, and Schopenhauer allowed a contemplation of art as inducing, at least a temporary, state of selflessness. Any artist, or thinker, or craftsman knows of crucial moments when an aggregate of reflection and skill must now be pressed a little harder so as to achieve some significantly better result. If that now is missed, passed over in vagueness and lassitude, the collected power is dissipated and the result is less good, as the thinker moves in a relaxed or lazy manner from ‘it’s too soon to try’ to 'it’s too late to try – this stuff is finished anyway’. This is a place for the notion of an effort of will. There is a good description (a discussion between two scientists) of situations of this sort in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle. Ideas work in the mind of the slave and the carpenter. This working is something which we can experience, of which we can be conscious in present moments. Ideas break the narrow self-obsessed limits of the mind. The enjoyment and study of good art is enlarging and enlightening in this way. We may add to this that as mathematics ‘stands for’ any high intellectual discipline, we may, without breaking faith with Plato, suggest that the carpenter ‘stands for’ any careful attentive self-forgetting work or craft, including housework, and all kinds of nameless 'unskilled’ fixings or cleanings or arrangings which may be done well or badly; so deeply may we read the doctrine of Ideas into our situation. (See George Herbert’s poem: ‘Teach me my God and King, In all things Thee to see...’)

  Meno 86BC:

  ‘And if the truth of all things that are is always in our soul, then the soul must be immortal, so you should take courage and whatever you do not happen to know, that is to remember, at present, you must endeavour to discover and recollect ... I cannot swear to everything I have said in this argument – but one thing I am ready to fight for in word and deed, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we do not know, than if we think we cannot discover it and have no duty to seek it.’

  Plato here indicates that part of what he says is to be taken as an instructive metaphor. See the similar indication at Republic 592B. I want to quote again from Stanley Rosen’s book The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry, the chapter on 'Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’.

  ‘The most general way to state the error of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato is by observing that Plato recognises the difference between Being and beings, between the light and what is uncovered or illuminated. For this reason, Plato sought to avoid a speech which would temporalise, objectify, or rationalise Being itself. [Rosen here refers us to Phaedrus 229cff.] The o
penness of Being, as prior to distinctions of beings, particular speeches, kinds of measuring, and the subject-object relationship is the unstated luminosity within which the dialogues are themselves visible. The dialogues become intelligible only when we perceive this unstated luminosity which is directly present as the silence of Plato. The spoken voice of the dialogues occurs always within the Cave (if not always in the language of the Cave). We may emerge from this Cave at any instant that we hear the silent accompanying voice of Plato. In my opinion Heidegger goes wrong because he is not sufficiently attentive to the silence of Plato. Still more specifically, he never confronts the significance of Socratic irony or the dramatic form of the dialogues.’

  The errors attributed here to Heidegger are shared by many other critics of Plato.

  Plato poses almost all the traditional problems of western philosophy and combines them with insights of eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophy was and is intimately connected with religion. In this respect, as well as others, it is, as I suggested earlier, the Platonic view of the cosmos which speaks to our age. Help, ‘mediation’, can come from understanding a religion without a personal God. Plato of course did not believe in a personal God or gods, and Kant, in ways which are hard to ‘track’, certainly distances and veils, even negates, the Christian God. Yet both these thinkers are religious, bind religion-morality into the deepest structure of their consciousness, and have influenced Christian theology. The present opposition to religion is at its most dangerous when it argues that the age of Platonic-Kantian western philosophy is now over. The rejection by Nietzsche of both Plato and the Christian tradition represents (symbolises) the effacing of a concept of the divine with which we have travelled a long way through many transformation scenes. Nietzsche was well aware of the enormity of this removal. In The Gay Science (Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, La Gaia Scienza) III 125 a madman cries out in the market place, ‘Where has God gone? ... We have killed him ... How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?’ Later he says, ‘I have come too early.’ Many of Nietzsche’s beautiful and exuberant writings express an extraordinary joy, and a sense of what is holy. Zarathustra, with his loved and loving animals, is a saintly as well as a frightening prophet. Nietzsche revered Schopenhauer. (See essay ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations).) Schopenhauer’s man, Nietzsche tells us, ‘voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth’. He quotes as Schopenhauer’s the view that a happy life is impossible, and man’s highest aspiration is to a heroic life. He sees Schopenhauer as a last metaphysician (a place assigned to Heidegger by Derrida). Schopenhauer is however, among the confusions and inconsistencies of his system, an old-fashioned religious writer teaching Christian and Buddhist values of gentleness and compassion, and a selfless humility leading to a mystical goal. He does not idolise heroism. Nietzsche rejects traditional metaphysics ('Christianity is Platonism for the people’) with its built-in distinction between phenomenal and noumenal (which can harbour God etc.), and in this respect he may even be called an empiricist. ‘Eternal recurrence’ implies a rejection of the noumenal as an 'elsewhere’ – everything is the finite contingent jumble of items wherein certain patterns must inevitably recur. (This could also suggest the mysterious significant fullness of every moment.) Absent from Nietzsche’s picture is the conception of ordinary virtue. His idea of traditional metaphysics is God by other means, and reality located as elsewhere. He and many others have thus misunderstood Platonism. In fact Plato (more than any other philosopher) ‘saves’ metaphysics by showing how the noumenal and the phenomenal exist inside each human life. There is nowhere else, it is all here. Nietzsche’s own ‘metaphysic’ is a kind of heroic historicism, envisaging a development of the race toward a higher general form of human being, and so of human society, since this change of being can clearly be the property only of a few. This evolution is to be a 'transvaluation of all values’, involving a destruction of 'herdinganimal morality’, democracy (‘the autonomous herd’), the religion of ‘mutual sympathy’ with its ‘compassion for all that feels and suffers’, and of soft effeminate sentiments ‘under the spell of which Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism’. Man must learn to see the future of humanity as 'his will’. (Beyond Good and Evil 202-3.) The hubris and sheer hatred expressed in these pages is remarkable. Something of the same tone is to be found in Heidegger’s ‘heroic’ contempt for Alltäglichkeit (everydayness). A degraded version of the transvaluation was enacted in Hitler’s Germany. (Nietzsche’s sister was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler.)

  Religion is traditionally about, or is, the change of being attendant upon our deepest and highest concern with morality. How, and whether, we are to distinguish between religion and morality I shall discuss later. Of course, while they are still visible, religious icons are available to all, whatever their beliefs, and innumerable things can serve as icons. The Cave is a religious myth suggesting, what is also accessible to any careful not necessarily philosophical reflection, that there are discernible levels and qualities of awareness or experience (we need this terminology), which cannot be reduced to acquaintance with neutral factual propositions or analysed in terms of dispositions to act. Of course there are neutral scientific or scholarly or legal disciplines and procedures and states of mind, and these, often to be thought of as ideal limits, are essential and without them we would indeed ‘perish and go to ruin’. But they represent one aspect only of the idea of truth, and occupy a smaller area than is sometimes suggested by those who conjure up a vast world of facts in contrast to a small specialised activity of evaluating. Beside the idea of truth as some sort of mechanical accuracy (science is not really like this anyhow) or obvious, and of course necessary, daily reportage (the cat is on the mat), we need a larger idea which can contain, turning toward the individual, ideas of ‘truthfulness’ and ‘wisdom’. This is very obvious, but philosophy is partly a matter of finding appropriate places in which to say the obvious. Plato makes a place for ‘metaphorical moral thinking’ when he says in the Cave myth that a higher moral level appears to us first, at our own lower level, as an image, reflection or shadow. Our understanding of a higher morality than that which comes easily to us tends to be intuitive and pictorial, we live all the time in semi-pictorial modes of awareness. In fact there are many kinds of reasons why we have private inexplicable unclarified states of consciousness, including picturesque awarenesses of modes of moral (including intellectual and aesthetic) procedures. Sometimes (rightly or wrongly) we judge it better to trust our feeling or intuition, not to examine or analyse too carefully. Theology (east and west) often suggests to us that we can know God only by analogy, in myths, in pictures, through metaphors, in a glass darkly. To speak of Nirvana as nothingness, as the bringing-to-nothingness of our fallen nature, is to use an image. But we need not refer ourselves only to such grand topics in order to become aware that we think about value in a mixture of rational discourse and metaphor. The imagery moreover may be difficult to expose. The novelist may offer hard-edged clarified versions, as in Maggie’s image of her dilemma in The Golden Bowl. But the images which we use in moral thinking and in other kinds of cognitive reflection may be elusive, allusive, and highly personal.

  Tailpiece on Schopenhauer:

  ‘Every work has its origin in a happy thought, and the latter gives the joy of conception; the birth however, the carrying out, is in my own case at least, not without pain; for then I stand before my own soul, like an inexorable judge before a prisoner lying on the rack, and make it answer until there is nothing else to ask. Almost all the errors and unutterable follies of which doctrines and philosophies are so full seem to me to spring from a lack of this probity. The truth was not found, not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again instead some preconceived opinion or other, or at least not to wound some favourite idea, and with this aim in view
subterfuges had to be employed against both other people and the thinker himself. It is the courage of making a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’ Oedipus who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our hearts the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to enquire further; and we give way to her, and that is the reason why philosophy stands where it does.’

  (His letter to Goethe, II November 1815.)

  Quoted by Ferenczi (First Contributions to Psycho-analysis, p. 253), who says: 'The deep and compressed wisdom of these remarks deserves to be discussed and to be compared with the results of psychoanalysis.’ Also (quoted by Hollingdale in his book, Nietzsche, pp. 44 & 51): Nietzsche read The World as Will and Idea in Leipzig in 1865: 'I threw myself onto the sofa with the newly-won treasure and began to let that energetic and gloomy genius operate upon me ... Here I saw a mirror in which I beheld the world, life and my own nature in a terrifying grandeur ... here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, Hell and Heaven.’

  7

  Derrida and Structuralism

  The origins of structuralism (post-structuralism, deconstruction, modernism, post-modernism) are to be found in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss) and in linguistics (Saussure), but (as it has affected the second half of the twentieth century) the doctrine is mainly the property or creation of Jacques Derrida, and its influence and effects are to be understood through his ideas. It has been widely dispersed (often in simplified and cruder versions) among literary critics, and to a lesser extent among historians and sociologists. It does not seem in general to be using philosophical arguments. Derrida, who calls Heidegger the last metaphysician, is declaring the end of philosophy as we know it and the beginning of a new thinking. Heidegger also believed that he was doing just this. Structuralist discourse can sound like science. (I heard an adherent, when asked to explain it, compare it to physics as something which could not be expounded to the laity.) It also seems like metaphysics, in its use of metaphorical structures and equations set up, as it were, by decree: that is, a new-style 'metaphysics’, not in the argumentative tradition of Plato and Aristotle. Again, as in the case of Heidegger and Nietzsche, there is hostility to Plato, friendship with the presocratics. As a doctrine it might be called Linguistic Idealism, Linguistic Monism, or Linguistic Determinism, since it presents a picture of the individual as submerged in language, rather than as an autonomous user of language. Much structuralist argument (or decree) appeals to plausibly reinforced or dramatised half-truths or truisms: such as our realisation that of course we are influenced by innumerable forces which are beyond our control and of which we are unconscious and so should come to see as illusions many aspects of our being in which we have had naive belief. This particular contention is indeed not new, but is used by Derrida more persuasively in an atmosphere engendered by recent science. The period between the formation of Wittgenstein’s later ideas in the thirties and forties and the emergence of structuralism in the fifties and sixties was one in which the techniques of science (computers, data bases, artificial intelligence) began with remarkable speed to enter the lives and awareness of ordinary people. One measure of this might be that earlier in the century we could not have conceived of the total disappearance of books. (And Wittgenstein was certain that we could not fly to the moon.) Kierkegaard said that philosophy is like sewing, you must knot the thread. A fundamental starting point is required. This view, not shared by all philosophers, may or may not be a good one. An idea which sheds much light may also effectively obliterate other ideas. Movement of philosophical thought is slow, it takes a long time to work out a deep insight. Cogito ergo sum (certainly a fundamental and revolutionary starting point) has only lately been attacked and discarded. This ‘move’ represents indeed one of the most important elements in recent philosophy. However, the thinkers who have rejected Descartes have done so in ways which significantly differ. It may be said of Sartre that he was one of the last Cartesians (though he 'officially’ denied being one). ‘The cogito’ was finally rejected because it set up as ultimate the problem of how the mind’ related to the real world, how inner could ever reach outer. This is now seen (variously) as a pseudo-problem. Religious existentialism (Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel), explaining or studying the individual in a moral light, dissolved the problem in man’s fundamental original relationship to God (a new individual in a new relationship). In fact, Descartes also dissolved his own problem in that way (as I discuss later) but without removing or undermining the much more obvious and famous primal declaration. Sartre never (in L’Etre et le Néant) really parts company with this declaration, his ‘hero’, être-pour-soi, living constantly with the problem of how to relate to the alien être-en-soi.