Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  The implications of structuralism with its threat to accepted conceptions of truth, value, individual, impels us (felicitously) to argue in new ways for what we take to be fundamental and have perhaps too much, both as philosophers and laymen, taken for granted. But are we perhaps being too strict, too solemn, failing to understand Derrida’s rhetoric, his uses of ‘play’ and ‘game’? Surely playing with language can suggest new meanings, open new views, and thus in its own way suggest new truths? The philosophical form, here, of a suitable argument is not easy to determine. Much contemporary analytical philosophy does not bother to engage with what is regarded as the ‘absurdities’ of structuralism. Empiricist accounts of mental activity, which (rightly) avoid descent into psychological hypothesis and also (wrongly in my view) shun moral philosophy, can seem very abstract when checked by a glance at the curious messy phenomena of our actual experience. The problems of how to describe this, how to settle down and look at it, are philosophical problems which seem here to be left over. Of course something systematic must be said, and empiricists may reply that they leave the great variety of detailed and ‘realistic’ picturings of streams of consciousness and so on to novelists, or to scientists. This stuff however should be approached by philosophers if we are not to leave the field to deterministic theories (such as historical materialism or linguistic monism) or to be content with a neo-psychologism which avoids any deep discussion and involvement of ethics. Philosophy is moral philosophy as Kant and Plato thought. We must check philosophical theories against what we know of human nature (and hold on to that phrase too) and feed philosophy with our ordinary (non-theorised, non-jargonised) views of it. Language is meaningful, ergo useful, it performs its essential task, through its ability to be truthful; and its truthfulness is a function of the struggle of individuals creatively to adjust language to contingent conditions outside it. All right, Captain Cook’s ship (we are told) did not frighten the natives because they could not conceptualise it, that is see it. Possibly we are surrounded by extra-galactic visitors (or angels) to whom we are similarly blind. But the limits of my language which are the limits of my world fade away on every side into areas of fighting for concepts, for understanding, for expression, for control, of which the search for the mot juste may serve as an image. Everyone, every moral being, that is every human being, is involved in this fight, it is not reserved for philosophers, artists and scientists. Language must not be separated from individual consciousness and treated as (for the many) a handy impersonal network and (for the few) an adventure playground. Language, consciousness and world are bound together, the (essential) aspiration of language to truth is an aspect of consciousness as a work of evaluation.

  8

  Consciousness and Thought — II

  ‘The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening ... The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us ... Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.’

  (Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Conclusion.)

  Pater’s well-known celebration of ‘experience’ should interest, at least amuse, anyone who wishes to rescue this concept, though rescuers are likely to amend it in various ways. It asserts the fundamental reality of the individual in a style not unlike that of G. E. Moore, but without the philosophical surround. We should live in the present, have visual and olfactory (and no doubt auditory) pleasures, look at landscapes and at the faces of our friends and enjoy works of art. The mood is aesthetic, hedonistic and self-centred, likely to be unpleasing to brisker and more altruistic critics who would cherish the fruits of experience and look warily upon passion. On the other hand we can switch to a different way of thinking by recalling Simone Weil’s wish that she could ‘perceive without reverie’. And ‘Attention: not to think about.’ Should we not in any case endeavour to see (visual metaphor) and attend to what surrounds and concerns us, because it is there and is interesting, beautiful, strange, worth experiencing, and because it demands (and needs) our attention, rather than living in a vague haze of private anxiety and fantasy? This requirement could be stated in quasi-aesthetic terms close to those of Pater, or in terms of healthy human function or ‘mental hygiene’ (practical yoga or car-factory Zen), or of course in moral terms: one must see what is happening, what is there, in order to be able to see what ought to be done, one should see the faces of strangers as well as of friends. Alert vivid experience, living in the present, can be celebrated as the higher hedonism, or as moral or spiritual ‘attention’. Religion speaks of a continual sense of God’s presence. The reflective critic who wishes to ‘moralise’ Pater’s hard gem-like flame is likely also to object to his dismissal of habit. Habit is essential, both practically and morally. Habits can dull us and blind us, but we need useful habits and ought to develop virtuous habits. Habits save time which might be enjoyed or made good use of. In this context Pater’s perpetual ‘ecstasy’ (to use Keynes’s term concerning Moore) seems not only egoistic but absurd. We cannot distinguish so easily between the fruit of experience and experience itself. The Kantian language of ‘principle’ and ‘duty’ with its requirement of impersonal classification leads us away from Pater. We do not however (as I argue later) have to choose between ‘attention’ and ‘duty’, we live with both. Pater’s memorable flame is worth mentioning as an evocation of the present, the moment-to-moment consciousness which philosophers tend to be embarrassed by, to neglect, or to analyse away.

  As I have been suggesting, the concept of experience or consciousness has been passed over because philosophical styles have not offered a suitable mode of description and because philosophers have lacked motives to attempt description, for instance in cases where a Kantian positive conception of moral will, separate from and interrupting the stream of experience, deprives ordinary awareness and ‘mere feelings’ of value, interest, and function. Such dismissal of the ‘inner life’ may appear in ordinary admonitions: Never mind your emotions, just do what’s right. The concept was
also denied to moral philosophy, and to philosophy of mind in general, when a rejection of the Cartesian view of consciousness seemed to make any other treatment of personal experience seem impossible. How impossible we may see from Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind, and from some understandings of Wittgenstein. Hegelian and Marxist ‘consciousness’ moreover is not the property of existing individuals living in present moments; it belongs to history or society or Geist, and can only be ascribed generally to groups or classes dwelling in phases. The states of mind so finely analysed in the Phenomenology of Mind are of very general application, suitable for metamorphosis into Kierkegaard’s edifying pictures of various recognisable human moods.

  Some philosophers have made use of the idea of immediate ‘contents of consciousness’ with a confidence which suggests that they feel they can detect and identify such things, at any rate when they are thinking philosophically. Hume spoke of the philosopher’s vision as fading when he left the study; at any rate in their studies he and Berkeley felt able to assume that there were atomic mental contents, impressions, ideas, which could be thought of as basic constituents of reality. More recent phenomenalists (such as Russell and Ayer) have postulated ‘sense data’ which may or may not be said to be strictly introspectible. This line of empiricist thought makes use of an intuitive sense of one’s ability to isolate and ‘look at’ fragmentary mental contents (shades of blue, red patches) which are thus immediately knowable in a sense in which public material objects are not. Can anyone do it, that is isolate and inspect immediate contents of consciousness? If only philosophers can why should we regard these as primal parts of everyone’s awareness ? How can the private experience carry over its certainty into the public world? Hume was not concerned with either the effortful establishing of, or the escape from, the ‘cogito situation’. He is close to Kant in a sense in which Descartes is not. He uses an implicit transcendental argument; we just evidently are able to fuse our impressions together into generally shared experience. These private data must be assumed if we are to have a philosophical explanation, and if we look hard enough we can satisfy ourselves that they exist. Hume’s ‘habits’ act as transcendental forms. Post-Hegelian Husserlian phenomenology may be seen by contrast as a more Cartesian form of transcendental empiricism, resting its argument upon the effortful intensity of the Cartesian vision. Post-Wittgensteinian discussion of these problems has, in the course of attacking the errors involved in their formulations, tended to remove ideas of ‘consciousness’ and of ‘presence’ from the philosophical scene.

  Can I have clear intuitive knowledge of something ‘owned’ by me, something which is indubitably present to me? Can I ‘see’ such a thing, can I be said to know it, can this certainty be extended to a public world? Berkeley answered the last question by picturing God as an external guarantor of ‘objective’ knowledge, a universal perceiver who, through the framework of his own perception, organises and defines the steady and reliable patterns of our experience. This can be seen as a mechanical or childish version of Descartes’ solution which is also his Ontological Proof (and which as such I shall discuss later). We cease to doubt the reliability of our experience (Descartes argues) because in grasping our own existence as perceiver and thinker we are able ipso facto to grasp the existence of God, both as something in itself clear and distinct, and as guaranteeing the criterion of clearness and distinctness as a test of truth; thereafter we can assume that, on the whole, the world is as it seems, we cannot be entirely misled by a malin génie, and even a confused impression can be clearly thought of as such. In a secular equivalent of this proof we may say that what we intuitively grasp is the idea of truth itself. We might think here of the way a child learns the concept, and of ways in which it can be positively taught. Plato’s stages of enlightenment are developments in the understanding of truth, which are also developments in our confidence in our own inner life of thought and judgment and in our real existence as individual persons capable of truth.

  The idea of a Cartesian, or Humian, datum as an epistemological starting point has been unsettled or attacked, from Kant onward. Nothing momentary can be an item of knowledge, we must look elsewhere for the structures of veridical awareness. Neither the Cartesian argument, nor the philosophies which have taken its place, afford or affect to need any laboriously realistic account of consciousness, which appears in the first case as clear pinpoints of attention devoid of transcendent claims and in the second case as shadowy shifting irrelevant stuff, peripheral to the public conceptual structures upon which knowing-activity depends. Possibly Hume’s ramshackle and unsatisfactory idea of consciousness as a continuum of units, fused by association and habit and containing certain morally tinged items such as feelings of approval, most resembles a childish picture of what we feel like! The Cartesian era may have ended, but as often happens when a general philosophical viewpoint loses its charm, something is lost. Descartes did not have to introduce value as an external element into a world (mind) primarily or fundamentally devoid of it, or to scramble a few value-conscious items into a ‘factual’ account of our knowledge of material objects. Awareness of God is seen (by Descartes) as fundamental to any spark of mind, or to put it in secular terms, all awareness includes value as the (versatile) agility to distinguish true from false. (Compare the role of truth-seeking in Plato’s system.) The alert truth-seeking cogito uncovers the moral potentiality of consciousness.

  Kant was upset by Hume’s arguments, he was not prepared to rest scientific knowledge upon a psychology of association of ideas, or to derive our conceptions of space and time from experiences of succession which presupposed these conceptions. Kant’s picture of the ideality of space and time (in tune with modern physics as well as with Schopenhauer’s oriental religiosity), together with his conception of fundamental categories of understanding under the inspiration of Reason, allowed no sense to the idea of discrete units of experience. Our experience was already composed, it was ‘screened’. The understood, experienced world was a product of conjoined forms of organisation (a priori and empirical concepts), and morality too was not something felt but the actualisation of rational systems in the sphere of human action. Kant calls our material factual world ‘phenomenal’, an appearance, the work done by our faculties upon a hidden datum. But it is not an illusion which relates to a reality which we can or ought to be able to discover. Plato (and Platonists and eastern religious thinkers) would hold ordinary awareness to be a state of illusion, but would allow and advocate a gradual change of consciousness whereby the veil of appearance was penetrated by moral-intellectual cognition. Kant’s phenomenal world is devoid of value, self-contained and absolute (like the factual world of the Tractatus); the command of duty enters from beyond. Moral agency consists in the switch to the activity of the moral (rational and real) will, somehow effective in the causally regulated phenomenal world. Kant distinguishes between the love that is (merely) felt and the love that is practised. Strictly, for him, there is no such thing as ‘moral experience’, or moral consciousness as a ‘morally coloured’ awareness. But can we really imagine morality without an intimate relation with consciousness as perceptions, feelings, streams of reflection? These problems about morality, knowledge, and the ‘inner life’ are of course very old. St Augustine, who joined Plato to the mystic Christ of St Paul and the God of the Psalms, had much to say on the subject. Augustine derived from Plato and Plotinus, and made Christian, the idea of the soul as a huge dark reservoir of potential power in which truth and light must be ceaselessly, momently, sought. We are changed by love and pursuit of what we only partly see and understand. This activity is our awareness of our world. My point here is that a metaphysical (e.g. Kantian) picture can make impossible, apparently otiose, a philosophical attempt at a realistic (in the sense in which Augustine’s is realistic) representation of human consciousness. Consideration, in a philosophical context, of the kind of experience described by Augustine in the Confessions may help to clarify the sense of ‘inner’ in �
��inner life’. But in Kant’s rejection of moral sensibility we may detect signs of a softening grace. Through the peripheral concepts of the sublime and Respect for the Law, which lead back into the phenomenal self, Kant allows a sort of immediate phenomenal consciousness of morality, a ‘self-feeling’ or praiseworthy symptom which may of course be morally dangerous if it degenerates into a pleasurable end-in-itself; as when, for instance, Respect for the Law (when we feel both pious awe and selfish fear when confronting a moral demand) relaxes into self-indulgent feelings of guilt, which may become a substitute for action. This is a not unfamiliar situation. Kant also endows imagination with a certain independent creativity, as in its conceptless play in the creation of art, and acknowledges the existence of genius as a creative principle. The partly illusory authority of the work of art gives a form to experience. These are intrusions of value into phenomenal awareness.