Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The structuralist view cannot be called a ‘coherence theory of truth’ in any traditional philosophical sense, although it makes ingenious use of the idea of coherence. Hegelian and Bradleian coherence theories point, as does Kant’s ‘Kingdom of Ends’, toward some sort of moral ideal situation where adjustment and development of partial truths emerge into an ideal harmony which alone is entirely true. Scholarship, science, art, everyday life, involve searching for coherence (‘making sense of things’) and dealing suitably with the innumerable contingent elements which impede, divert, or inspire the search. This is an abstract description of what we are doing all the time. The metaphysical deification of truth in coherence theories derives its plausibility from the recognisable moral effort demanded by the continued search for coherence. Because of the endlessly contingent nature of our existence this quest can never reach a ‘totalised’ conclusion. The conscientious historian (to take an example which can serve as an image for other cases) goes on trying to make sense of heterogeneous data, to understand and illuminate the separate pieces by classifying them, placing them, at a proper moment and not prematurely, into groups and systems. He continually notes, draws attention to and returns to, the recalcitrant incoherent pieces which refuse to fit in. These may be the pieces which will alter his method of assembly, refute one of his theories, inspire him to invent a more truthful way of looking. This is like what we all do when reflecting on a moral problem, and indeed intuitively in all our thinking. These important incoherent contingent stumbling blocks are of course loved by artists, both as sources of inspiration in the process of creation and as deliberately alien items in finished works. The piece which is ‘nothing to do with’ the story or pattern may. perform various functions, such as being a reminder that there is another world outside the work of art. This device should be used judiciously. Art which is nothing but such reminders ceases to be art. Art is a cunning mixture of coherence and incoherence, necessary and contingent, systematic and absurd. Ordinary-life truth-seeking, a certain level of which is essential for survival, is a swift instinctive testing of innumerable kinds of coherence against innumerable kinds of extra-linguistic data. The (essential) idea of ‘correspondence’ is in place, not as a rival theory of truth, but as representing the fundamental fact and feel of the constant comparison and contrast of language with a non-linguistic world, with a reality not yet organised for present needs and purposes. Of course we are constantly conceptualising what confronts us, ‘making’ it into meaning, into language. But what we encounter remains free, ambiguous, endlessly contingent, and there. In our meeting with it we ‘create’ truth and falsehood. This local and regional and individual ‘organisation’ is the stuff of our continuous local and regional and individual conscious being. Use of ordinary verbal language, even in a fragmentary manner, composes of course only a part of our thinking and consciousness. We can use non-verbal, such as musical, mathematical, scientific, technological, systematic languages. We can also be said to think or use concepts in all sorts of perceptual and ‘feeling’ states where no systematic language is present; indeed (probably) most conscious states are of this kind. This will include the ‘field of perceptions’ which Schopenhauer accused Kant of ignoring. The boundaries of what may be called ‘conscious awareness’ or ‘consciousness’ are hazy, and some of these outer areas are more easily suggested by novelists and poets than analytically described by philosophers; but should nevertheless be recognised, and talked about somehow, by the latter. Empirical observations and tautologies will here, as in other difficult regions, lie close together. If we want to call any conceptualising awareness, that is any conscious awareness, a kind of language, we may also want to say that language depends on some kind of coherence. So a coherence theory of truth need not be only about systematic languages, and any piece of coherence may be thought of as a little system which postulates a larger one. What makes metaphysical (‘totalising’) coherence theories unacceptable is the way in which they in effect ‘disappear’ what is individual and contingent by equating reality with integration in system, and degrees of reality with degrees of integration, and by implying that ‘ultimately’ or ‘really’ there is only one system. Hegel’s philosophy as expressed in the Phenomenology of Mind implies this; though it also contradicts itself by so evidently not being that system, by exercising and suggesting so many various modes of thought and truth-seeking, and by sending the fascinated reader’s reflections flying away in all sorts of directions. Of course a metaphysical system is not supposed to be a literal report of how things are, it must be judged as a big complicated heuristic image. But however much we may learn from, or be inspired to think by, such a system we must also be prepared to take it as a whole seriously enough to judge it in relation to our own experience of living in the world which it professes to explain. McTaggart says time is unreal, Moore says he has had his breakfast. Perhaps Moore had not ‘really tried’ to understand McTaggart, and clearly Dr Johnson, when he refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone, had not ‘really tried’ to understand Berkeley, but these ‘accusations’ are pertinent and must be dealt with. Kant’s system, unlike that of Hegel, recognises our unavoidable encounter with what is contingent and alien, and the persistently incomplete nature of our moral and theoretical aspirations. Metaphysical systems have consequences. Those who think that the individual has reality only through the system do not only sit in studies, they sit in places of political power. Political systems break against individuals, but may also break individuals, which it is easier to do now than in the days of Hobbes.

  Structuralism, seen in this larger context as siding with the system against the individual, may be called ‘linguistic idealism’ or ‘linguistic monism’. Derrida says that Heidegger is the last metaphysician, but structuralism does look like another not uninteresting, not uninfluential metaphysic. It claims a break with traditional philosophy, and is certainly unlike philosophy in that it is short of philosophical arguments and of the kind of extended careful lucid explanatory talk and use of relevant examples which good philosophy, however systematic, includes and consists of. But it has a rhetorical power which depends on an impressive image or set of images, ‘language’ as fundamental system, written not spoken, a totality to be enjoyed without external verification, etc.; and may, like other metaphysics, be treated as a kind of pragmatism or aesthetic guide. It looks more like traditional metaphysics than like science. Here the old idea of a total coherence is used to inspire a way of life which excludes the value of individually establishable truths or truth-seeking, the ‘regional’ and ‘local’ activities of our present consciousnesses, and in effect excludes value in favour of ‘play’. As such it may be welcomed by clever people who are, perhaps understandably as they survey the present world, fed up with ‘all the old solutions’. Here too there is a convergence, paradoxical at first sight, with Marxism. That distinctly Utopian theory relied upon a weave of internally related specialised terminology only rather roughly and in very general terms seeming to describe the world, but used with skilled and urgent intent to change it. In practice Marxist theory has been constantly modified by ordinary moral motives including utilitarian ones and by being forced to attend to locally establishable truths of various ordinary kinds relying on reference to a non-theorised world. It was inspired by, and certainly professed, moral ideals. Structuralism poses as a neutral quasi-scientific theory. Marxism was a theory of history which used historical evidence established by traditional methods to support its world-view. An aspect of structuralism is to regard history as fabulation, and ‘the past’ as a meaning-construct belonging to the present. It is, and admittedly, rhetoric versus reason. Of course we cannot see the past, so we must be thought of as inventing it. This fake choice blots out the conception of seeking carefully for some truthful conception of the past. Marxism and (Derrida’s) structuralism can join forces however in their rejection of God and religion and their hostility to ‘bourgeois’ views and values, seen as solidifying a view of the wor
ld which new revolutionary forces must now destroy. Happily, since I wrote the above, the Zeitgeist, assisted by very many courageous individuals, has discredited and is demolishing Marxism. One of the first things which liberated people want to know is the truth about their past.

  Structuralists, like their predecessors the surrealists, aim at shocking and frightening us. They draw attention to changes, technological changes for instance, by which indeed we ought to be shocked and frightened. A decent society will, by innumerable pressures from its free and various components, be forced to struggle with such matters as part of its natural moral development. Art changes, class changes, religion changes, technology changes. A live, free, decent society changes. What perhaps we should, however, in our great technological era and on our smaller and more vulnerable planet, be afraid of might be described as a sort of plausible amoralistic determinism, something which lies at a deeper level than that of our soluble social problems. I shall return to structuralism as determinism shortly, what I want to indicate at this point is something less (one should say even less) tangible, a kind of instinctual debased Taoism, arising in a period of exceptional scientific and technological progress and popular scientific knowledge, a relaxed acceptance as ultimate of a deep impersonal world-rhythm which overcomes the awkward dichotomies between good and evil and one individual and another. A sort of neo-Taoism is also part of a popular metaphysic of our time. In his book The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra suggests similarities between presocratic and Taoist views of the cosmos, and those of modern physics.

  ‘The final apprehension of the unity of all things ... is reached – so the mystics tell us – in a state of consciousness where one’s individuality dissolves into an undifferentiated oneness, where the world of the senses is transcended and the notion of “things” is left behind ... Modern physics ... cannot go that far in the experience of the unity of all things. But it has made a great step toward the world view of the Eastern mystics in atomic theory. Quantum physics has abolished the notion of fundamentally separated objects, has introduced the concept of the participator to replace that of the observer, and may even find it necessary to include the human consciousness in its description of the world.’

  (Chapter 10.)

  Structuralism is deeply motivated by an appreciation of languages of science and technology, which seem to undermine our ordinary language and its ‘naive’ truth values. Such scientific languages can also be seen as more genuinely universal (for instance international). They are written not spoken. Speech is regional, local, full of accidents. Archi-écriture is also to be thought of (postulated) as ‘written’ not spoken, and as, in the scientific sense of deep, deep. This is the ‘écriture’ celebrated by Derrida in his chapter-heading, la fin du livre, et le commencement de l’écriture (the end of books, and the beginning of writing). ‘Taoism’ is of course a very general name for a vast region of religious and metaphysical theory and social practice. I am speaking of it now as a view referred to in recent western books about oriental religion, and as an idea, connected with moderation and harmony and the coexistence of opposites, which seems to have some kinship with the moods and theories of this age. One can readily see how multiform and ambiguous such an idea is. Opposites, or alleged opposites, good and evil, or Yin and Yang, can be thought of as enemies, or as demanding an achievable harmony. There is a half-truth here also. Why not peace instead of war? Compromise is rational. Love your darkness. Integrate your personality. Why become neurotic by attempting to reach impossible moral goals? There may be a place for saying such things; but it does not follow (the leap from particularised common-sense to metaphysics) that good and evil are false abstractions from a better and more real harmony. All sorts of separate neutral, or ordinary, or innocent, or proper things can be seized upon as evidences or motives for a general theory suited to our time, and claimed as fundamental: popular physics, space travel, sexual liberation, the decline of dogmatic religion. The Taoist concepts as used by Jung are also effectively normative; old abstract God-supported good and evil are to be ‘overcome’ in the interest of a deeper understanding of reality, a spiritual harmony which makes a better (more integrated, less confused, therefore happier) person. Structuralism is supposed to be morally neutral, its transcendental deduction to resemble, mutatis mutandis, that of Husserl, its primal writing to suggest physics rather than the hand of God. One may however presume that a certain proud ‘authenticity’ is to be achieved by those who are no longer duped by outmoded ideas. In effect structuralism is anti-religious, the idea of ‘God’ being connected with old ‘logocentric’ ideas of divinely established pre-linguistic meanings. It is also non-moral, since it erases the idea of truthfulness and the common-sense idea of freedom which goes with it, while offering no morally higher sense in which we abandon one truth in order to find another, or abandon God in favour of a differently conceived moral and spiritual mode of understanding.