Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The structuralist argument requires an assumption that, given that language is not anchored to the world by old logocentric one — one correspondences, it cannot be anchored at all. Any sophisticated reflection on language can suggest to us that it consists of various internally related systems of discrimination, that words cohere together in groups, that the group modifies the meaning of its members. Development of language and vocabulary is systematic discrimination of conceptual groupings, and observation of this process reveals the incompletely determined and shifting nature of verbal concepts. Using language is indeed not like discovering the once-for-all name of a predetermined eternally existing entity whose name this is. Translation between natural languages, or between variant areas in one’s own language, is difficult because one language-system may generate words, concepts, which the other lacks. We may introduce a concept (chic for instance) by borrowing a word, or by modifying the meaning of existing words. ‘Smart’ gains something from having chic as a neighbour. A language which has no word for (concept of) mauve or purple, has a different concept of blue from a language which has. (And so on and so on.) Language-using is a continuous generation and modification of conceptual groupings and sub-systems. Structuralism presses its advantage here by suggesting that since meaning can be seen to depend on systematic relationships of pieces, we cannot say that any word has a determinate meaning, since its meaning is to be understood by a relation to the (postulated) whole of language. Common-sense here says, Wait a moment, we can see lots of little systems, but we can’t see any big general one, and anyway, words surely have definite meanings when we apply them in particular contexts. If this were not so we couldn’t distinguish true from false. To make a picture of the structuralist hypothesis we may observe how Saussure’s distinction between langue, language postulated as a system complete at any given moment, and parole, the ordinary and various uses of actual human speech, has been taken over into a form of neo-Hegelian idealism. Saussure’s abstract heuristic distinction is intended to assist our thinking about language by allowing us to consider it as if it were a whole motionless non-historical non-local sign-system, and to separate such thinking from other kinds of scientific, sociological, psychological, etc. study of language. How helpful this hypothetical image is to our reflections about language, and whether there could be or is a viable science of Saussurian semiology, is open to discussion. The langue-parole distinction, properly a tool of linguistic specialists, has been popularised in structuralist argument as in some way establishing a general removal of language from ‘the world’, and thereby also the removal, as otiose, of ‘the world’. What language ‘does’ is then explained partly in terms of its evident aesthetic fictional self-referential ‘play’, and partly in terms of its even more evident existence as preformed ‘codes’, the useful blunted shorthand of everyday life, a linguistic (and thereby fundamental) form of Hume’s ‘habits and customs’. Here the idea of the Freudian unconscious is also put into service. All human activity, except that of exceptional and original persons, is based on networks of uncriticised assumptions and deep unconscious drives and patterns.

  Here we return to archi-écriture as the metaphysical basis of our entire ‘human reality’, thought of as writing, not as speech, since speech is uttered in present moments by individual local historical incarnate speakers. We have been (we are told) profoundly mistaken in assuming that speech is in some profound sense prior to writing and represents a more direct and unambiguous communication. We must allow ourselves to be influenced by reflection upon languages of science, ‘natural language’ is not the only language of the planet, the language of physics, for instance, may be, if we really think about it, felt to be more fundamental. Our ordinary ‘consciousness’ of a separately existent external world of extra-linguistic entities is shown, in this light, to be an illusion. There are no ‘in-themselves’ signifieds sitting about awaiting our attention, there are only mutually related signifiers. Indeed nothing ‘really’ (deeply) exists except a sea or play of language of whose profound or sole reality ‘we’ may be more or less aware as we follow unconscious codes or join in the lively playful creative movements of the linguistic totality which transcends us. Of course there is much novelty, scholarship, brilliance, to be seen in the structuralist compound. What is objectionable is the damage done to other modes of thinking and to literature by the presentation of this fanciful metaphysic as a fundamental system. Philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, have different procedures and methods of verification. It is only when the idea of truth as relation to separate reality is removed that they can seem in this odd hallucinatory light to be similar. With the idea of truth the idea of value also vanishes. Here the deep affinity, the holding hands under the table, between structuralism and Marxism becomes intelligible. Not to explain the world but to change it, not to seek painstakingly to establish a disconnected variety of alleged facts about the past, not to attempt an impossible bits-and-pieces illusory truthfulness, but to stir the imagination to a unified grasp of what is ‘really significant’, what is ‘relevant’. Marxists also attacked bourgeois morality, religion, and the concept of the individual.

  Well, what about truth? What about morality and responsibility and individuals? And what about ordinary consciousness and experience and presence and uses of language in contingent situations? One feels here, live and kicking in the tired modern soul, burdened by all sorts of abstract and scientific theorising, the indignation of Kierkegaard against Hegel. Something is lost, the existing incarnate individual with his real particular life of thoughts and perceptions and moral living. This naive reaction needs to be philosophically justified, and it is a merit of structuralism to indicate to us, with so much energy and so much learning, that the concept of the individual which we have inherited from centuries of thinkers cannot any longer be taken for granted but must be defended. The plausibility of structuralist theory relies, as I have suggested, upon an interwoven assemblage of generalised half-truths, often inspired by proper reactions and arguments against old false philosophical assumptions. Of course language is relational and systematic, it depends on public rules not only on individual utterance, works of art are not simply what their authors ‘mean by them’, religious myths cannot be taken literally, we may have ‘unconscious motives’, history is not a photograph of the past, we can only explain things in terms which are accessible and significant now, languages of science reveal a form of reality quite unlike ‘ordinary experience’, and so on. These doctrinal attitudes are part of our new consciousness as inhabitants of this planet in this time, part of a new recognition of our limitations and difficulties, deep and various discernments which separate us from past thinkers now seen as naive or mistaken. Moreover, and however, these large insights so curtly listed above are not definite discoveries established once and for all, they are the initiations of numbers of different arguments and modes of reflection. They belong to different disciplines and universes of discourse and are not easily related to one another. It is improbable that they can all be linked up into a philosophical theory; particularly one which uses the linkage to deny so many common-sense and traditional conceptions concerning persons, morality and truth. It is no doubt characteristic of metaphysical systems, and can as I have said be one of their uses, to fly in the face of common-sense. What is ‘common-sensical’, the ‘natural standpoint’, changes and should change in response to just such challenges. Meanwhile, and also rightly, other non-philosophical thinkers, scientists, scholars, artists, continue their separate activities without worrying about whether or not time is unreal or language refers to the world. I have been describing structuralism as a (sort of) ‘metaphysic’ because it is the best way of indicating what we are confronted with. However it is not really philosophy. It is certainly not science in any ordinary sense. The basic tenets fail to be intelligible in a way similar to that in which the tenets of old-fashioned, or new-fashioned, determinism fail to be intelligible; and structuralism is in effect
a new-fashioned determinism. As a philosophical theory, as contrasted with a theological view or an assumption of popular science or an emotional intuition about fate, determinism fails because it is unstateable. However far we impinge (for instance for legal or moral purposes) upon the area of free will we cannot philosophically exhibit a situation in which, instead of shifting, it vanishes. The phenomena of rationality and morality are involved in the very attempt to banish them. The ‘problem of free will’ is not something to strain at, as if it could be suddenly solved by a proof that there is such a thing; it should rather fade or dissolve when it is seen that ‘determinism’ is not an intelligible theory. What is important is the methods by which, and extent to which, the conception of free will is (sometimes rightly, as in law courts) modified or limited in particular areas; and also the deep motives and purposes of those who profess or invoke determinist theories. Theories which endeavour to show that all evaluation (ascription of value) is subjective, relative, historically determined, psychologically determined, often do so in aid of other differently described or covert value systems, whether political or aesthetic. Structuralist theory certainly implies values such as scholarship, intelligent talent, originality, gifted insight. These may (officially) be thought of and understood as similar to Sartre’s ‘sincerity’ and Heidegger’s ‘authenticity’ and ‘heroism’, or else in terms of an omnipresent aestheticism. The theory of archi-écriture, in effect a linguistic determinism, may also be looked at in another way. Modern ‘determinism’ is not mechanical or mechanistic in style, and the science it refers to has advanced since the time of Engels; it is inspired more by presocratic philosophy and modern physics, evoking a view of reality as a system of energy or complex integrated sea of micro-events of which human beings are phenomenal parts or aspects whose sense of individuality and freedom is necessarily illusory. To say that discoveries about protons or DNA ‘prove’ that free will is an illusion is a philosophical rather than a scientific claim. As a claim of any kind it can only exist as a kind of intuition, which may be scientific or religious, or as a metaphysical fiat. It would then be close to the embryonic religious-scientific-philosophical theories held by the presocratics, or to a modern popular ‘Taoism’ to which these can be related. Scientists sometimes show affection for determinist theories, but this is a professional hermeneutic instinct which significantly lives in certain areas of work, and cannot be extended from there to undermine or radically reinterpret the diversity of human existence as lived by individual scientists and philosophers just as by the rest of us.

  So literary critics are to set themselves the difficult task of discussing traditional literature in terms of non-evaluative structures or codes discovered inside as ‘keys’. This approach excludes the most important and interesting critical movement when the moral sense of the critic seeks out and considers the moral sense of the writer. Of course moral judgments are not the whole of criticism, but they are a vital part of it, as they are of the reader’s interest and enjoyment. The writer’s own morality, displayed in the novel, is a major item. People argue about whether D. H. Lawrence was unjust to Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and how far this affects our judgment of the work; or about whether the hero of Henry James’s Ambassadors was a righteous man or a self-deceiving fool. Such arguments are certainly interesting and may even be deep! An author’s sentimental over-valuing of the hero with whom he identifies is a familiar fault. Structuralist (deconstructionist) criticism does not see literature as a window opened upon an imagined world which is both like and unlike the ‘real’ world, but which relates to it intimately. Literature is rather to be seen as a network of meanings esteemed for its liveliness, originality, ability to disturb (as ‘saints’ are now supposed to disturb, rather than to edify), and judged in terms of a psychological-sociological analysis which also seeks out factors not consciously intended by the writer. Such analysis may of course be a part of any criticism, but not necessarily or largely. A close study of the ‘texture’ of a literary work is or may be a part of criticism, but the critic has to decide its importance in relation to numerous other points of interest and evaluation. The writer, then, is required by deconstructionists to ‘deploy’ language, using it to construct a meaningful text, out of which the reader or critic constructs his own meanings. This may be regarded as a truism (I understand and imagine what I am able to understand and imagine); or it may be thought of as a scientific or metaphysical programme. As ‘scientist’, the literary critic is then treated as a specialist, a thinker far more relevantly equipped and experienced, of course than the reader, but also than the often naive or prejudiced writer. So, ultimately, the work of criticism is the real work of art. The ‘soul’ of the work lies not in portrayals of life or lively description or profound understanding of moral dilemmas (etc. etc.) but in some vitality or present relevance of meaning-structure as discerned and presented to us by the expert critic. The past is, on this view, and not just in a truistic or tautological sense, what we can make of it in the present, which is to say that in a way there is no past. The true text is what it means, what it can do, now. Ordinary historical interest in the past appears here as merely antiquarian. The past must earn its right to exist by being made to work for the present, that is, to be ‘significant’ in or for it. Here again, one is moving from a truism (it is often very difficult to establish or imagine what happened in the past) to a quasi-philosophical or metaphysical ruling. Literature written to please structuralist critics tends to be involuted and obscure because the objective is to use, play with, the language in a stirring, suggestive, puzzling, exciting manner. Traditional tale-telling or moral reflection or simple-minded referential uses of language are to be avoided. Literature must therefore be full of novelties, and obstacles and obscurities, aspiring to the condition of (a certain kind of) rhetoric or arcane poetry. This is a tendency which leads us away, not only from the ‘old’ novel, but also from the ordinary lucid expository prose which is so essential to philosophy and to other humane disciplines. Structuralist critics and novelists are to attempt ingeniously to exclude everyday moral judgment from their ‘texts’. The word ‘text’, as a technical term, conveniently allows the critic to bracket himself with the imaginative writer. The novel and the criticism of it are both ‘texts’, the latter being potentially the true one. Ultimately the work of criticism is the real work of art. Of course the exclusion of morality and ordinary considerations about what is true and real is in practice difficult. A clever writer like Alain Robbe-Grillet seems to attempt it, while producing, for instance in Les Gommes, a fine novel which is only a little damaged by its determination to be a puzzle picture.

  To be noted. George Steiner writes in his enlightening book Real Presences: ‘We have seen that the commentary, the translation, the formal transformation, or even the polemic parody of the source-text can surpass the original. Their brilliance can come to replace or to bury it. We have seen that modern relativism is right when it insists on the fluidity of the lines which separate the vitality of the primary from that of the secondary. Yet neither truth alters the profound difference between the status of being of the independent and the dependent forms. The primary text – the poem, picture, piece of music – is a phenomenon of freedom. It can be or it cannot be. The hermeneutic-critical response, the executive enactment via performance, via vision and reading, are the clauses dependent on that freedom. Even at the highest point of recreative or subversive virtuosity, their genesis is that of dependence. Their licence may indeed be boundless (the post-structuralist and deconstructive game-theories and play have shown this); but their freedom is strictly a secondary one.’

  (p. 151.)

  Of course art changes, and changes mysteriously, in its intimate unspoken relation with the Zeitgeist. Many artists find they cannot do traditional things and must do new things, and this is proper to the continued life of art. But this change, this interweaving of old and new, is subtle and various, and each artist must find his own
way. When does a tradition cease, and when does it alter? New things are often seen to be traditional. The critic should not think of himself as a kind of scientist in a superior position able to offer some final overall analysis. Of course, sometimes led on by critics, sometimes by instinct, artists may thus bully each other, as in an art school where it is simply ‘not done’ to represent the human figure. An attractive esoteric theory, incomprehensible to laymen, may be felt to be more lively and amusing than the vaguer, less easily stated objectives of traditional critics, such as to enjoy literature and understand literature and history, help others to share this enjoyment and understanding, to read a great many different kinds of books, and in general to be a polymath with a sophisticated liberal-minded judgment and a refined sense of value. Esoteric new theories also, of course, tend to appeal to students, since they simplify the scenery and can obviate scholarship and the effort of independent discovery and thinking. It is not always realised that the study of literature is something difficult. As an academic subject the study of literature in one’s own language has often been said to be a ‘soft option’. This is a very misleading view. A good teacher of literature (and a good literary critic) not only understands poetry (which not many people do) and other literary forms, but is a historian, a linguist, a connoisseur of other arts, and a sophisticated student of human nature. He is in the best sense a jack of all trades. He should of course have ‘read everything’. The notion that a study of English literature was ‘too easy’ led the authorities at Oxford University, when they at last reluctantly allowed it to be a university subject, to build in a compulsory study of Anglo-Saxon to stiffen it up a bit. The belief that literature is an easy subject may lead academics to defend themselves by becoming specialists who know everything about one period, or indeed one writer, and nothing about anything else. It may also, the case in point, lead them to embrace an obscure and difficult theory which looks like a science, which other people do not understand, and which provides the consoling feeling of having a special private expertise, and so being just as good as a physicist or a biologist. Paradoxically, the motives, or ideals, of structuralism have as their nemesis or accompaniment the wish to establish oneself as a member of an elite. This is a form of a familiar and enduring style of thought, Gnosticism, knowledge as power. Here the search for truth becomes a search for magic formulae and the seeker desires to become a privileged initiate of a secret cult, a sorcerer or pharmakeus. This development may be understandable. Fear of mass production, of materialism, of commercialism, of vulgarity, of technology, of television, produces a wish for a new purified esoteric art. Everything, it seems, is demeaned by being public, becoming part of what Theodor Adorno called ‘the culture industry’. Such a vista may lead some writers to seek refuge in deliberate mystification.