Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Kant’s ‘consciousness’ is not Cartesian or Hegelian, nor is it the ordinary (regional or local, to use Derrida’s words) concept which I want to try to characterise. Kant’s phenomenal consciousness (if we exclude the small ‘dangerous’ concessions just mentioned) is strictly the correlate of formulated true or false factual judgments about states of affairs, like ‘what is the case’ in the Tractatus, what could be set out in empirical propositions. Kant did not ‘highlight’ consciousness; in taking it thus for granted he penetrated it with other concepts. He did not think in terms of a densely coloured personally (or historically) owned stream of consciousness. Hegel made the concept primary, he put it on the map in the sense in which it is in sociology and Marxism: social consciousness, class consciousness, the structure of consciousness, consciousness as a product of society and history. He also set it up as a very general psychological concept (as in for instance ‘the unhappy consciousness’), in which sense it was also used by Kierkegaard and influenced Freud. Hegel turned Kant’s static categories, and his magnetic Reason, into a lively dynamic network of modes of being. In doing this he also turned towards Plato, to Plato’s dialectic as stages of an argument and to the Platonic conception of a moral cognition magnetically attracted toward a higher stage of understanding. The Hegelian dialectic is soaked in value. This is in itself an attractive feature when we contrast it with philosophies which are hygienically ignorant of value or put it in as a footnote; on the other hand it constitutes in effect an ambiguous and dangerous charm which it shares with its offspring Marxism. Hegel joins fact to value, but thereby ultimately kills value and loses the individual. Value is, in the totality, overcome. Plato’s Forms, as objects of moral desire, and principles of understanding, are to be thought of as active creative sources of energy in the world, but are mythically pictured as separate and transcendent; they cannot be relativised by being absorbed into (historical or psychological) transformations of existence. At a superficial level history fashions morals, at a deep level morals resist history. Plato’s constant and explicit use of myth also separates him from Hegel, whose would-be homogeneous metaphysic can be seen as a sort of science, historical, or social, or psychological. The double nature of the Forms, being both immanent and transcendent, makes difficulties (as discussed in the Parmenides) for them in their logical role (as everyday universals), but in their moral role presents a comprehensible image, and indeed, as a concept of ‘the divine’, a familiar one. What is ideal is active in the imperfect life, and yet is also, and necessarily, separate from it. This separateness is connected with the possibility of freedom and spiritual movement and change in the life of the individual. This continuous activity is experienced and lives and thrives, for good or ill, in the richly textured matrix of our moment-to-moment consciousness.

  I quote from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind:

  ‘Observational psychology, which in the first instance states what observation finds regarding the general forms brought to its notice in the active consciousness, discovers all sorts of faculties, inclinations and passions; and since, while narrating what this collection contains, the remembrance of the unity of self-consciousness is not to be suppressed, observational psychology is bound to get the length at least of wonderment that such a lot and such a miscellany of things can happen to be somehow alongside of one another in the mind as in a kind of bag, more especially when they are seen to be not lifeless inert things, but restless active processes. In telling over these various faculties observation keeps to the universal aspect: the unity of these multifarious capacities is the opposite aspect to this universality, is the actual concrete individuality. To take up again thus the different concrete individualities, and to describe how one man has more inclination for this, the other for that, how one has more intelligence than the other — all this is, however, something much more uninteresting than even to reckon up the species of insects, mosses and so on. For these latter give observation the right to take them thus individually and disconnectedly (begrifflos), because they belong essentially to the sphere of fortuitous detailed particulars. To take conscious individuality on the other hand, as a particular phenomenal entity, and treat it in so wooden a fashion, is self-contradictory, because the essential element of individuality lies in the universal element of mind. Since however the process of apprehending it causes it at the same time to pass into the form of universality, to apprehend it is to find its law, and seems in this way to have a rational purpose in view and a necessary function to fulfil. The moments constituting the content of the law are on the one hand individuality itself, on the other its universal inorganic nature, viz. the given circumstances, situations, habits, customs, religion, and so forth; from these the determinate individuality is to be understood and comprehended. They contain something specific, determinate as well as universal, and are at the same time something lying at hand, which furnishes material for observation and on the other side expresses itself in the form of individuality.’

  (‘Observation of Self-consciousness’, c. V, A, 3b;

  trans. J. B. Baillie, rev. edn. 1931, p. 332.)

  Hegel aims to produce an entirely comprehensive and scientific system; he emphasises the scientific nature of the enterprise and the sense in which science must involve the progressive disappearance of individuals. (See the preface to the Phenomenology.) His thought is at the same time ‘psychological’ in a modern sense. He is both a product of the Enlightenment and its most subtle enemy. His dialectic, the questioning of every position and the transcendence of position and question by a more unified view which in turn is questioned, is the form taken by the logical, rational, progressive development of Spirit in the course of which at each stage what is separate and individual is later seen to be part of a larger more intelligible whole. Among the wholes thus generated existing states and societies hold high, Hegel sometimes thought uniquely privileged, places. However, in spite of empirically inspired references and diversions, which are not among the least charms of the book, this is ontology, it is about the nature of rational thought, and thereby about being in its profound philosophical sense, a complete account of everything. In the section quoted, early in the Phenomenology, Hegel describes how mental contents, classified here in (technical) terms of faculties, inclinations, passions, can be listed by ‘observational psychology’ as a ‘miscellany of things’ happening to be ‘sometimes alongside one another in the mind as in a kind of bag’. These entities have a unity which derives from their being roughly similar in kind; on the other hand they can now be seen as a disconnected (begrifflos, conceptless) collection of ‘restless active processes’ demanding a further intelligibility. This is one way of proceeding in a description of the mind, and commits the thinker to a route which excludes other routes. Doubts and alternatives must be overcome. This bold confident establishing of direction is an aspect of the necessity to which Hegel submits, or which he blithely chooses, on his way to a total explanation or edifice. (Thinking is being, as Parmenides once said.) To select a method (in this case a particular psychological terminology) is already to invoke a certain kind of universality or understanding. Contemplation of what now seems a merely random list of psychological items induces a (logical, ontological, spiritual) demand for a more highly integrated concept of unity. The picture of the ‘bag’ is transcended by the idea of the human individual, a new kind of universality whose law or rational formation is made up in a different conceptual terminology of habits, customs and moral and religious outlook. The, by contrast random, contents are to be understood in the light of the essential unity of the individual mind which involves both the individual’s ability to think and the nature of what he thinks about. The mind cannot be understood at the ragbag level without a further consideration of its surroundings; ‘to apprehend it is to find its law’ or rationale. ‘The moments constituting the content of the law are on the one hand individuality itself, on the other universal inorganic nature, viz. the given circumstances, situations, habits, cust
oms, religion and so forth: from these the determinate individuality is to be understood and comprehended.’ This movement of progressive ‘destruction’ of individuals, moving from individual to universal and, at a higher rational level, back to individual, is (it is argued) the inevitable necessary pattern of all thought and (ipso facto) being. Hegel explains later how the more fully self-conscious individual, whose consciousness has ‘cast away all opposition’ and starts anew from itself, who has integrated his ragbag personality and ‘knows himself’ in both general (universal) and personal (particular) terms, an und für sich, is found, or finds himself, to be incomplete and unreal until realised and individualised in the larger whole of the society, which is itself a larger individual. (c. V.) (This discussion is entirely concerned with the Phenomenology, Hegel’s best-known and most influential work.)

  For both Plato and Hegel the need and desire to understand (to understand everything) presents a conception of what is real at a series of progressively higher levels. Hegel’s Geist (better translated as ‘spirit’ rather than as ‘mind’) is like Plato’s Forms (Ideas) which generate both logical-epistemological understanding (as universals) and (as desired by Eros) spiritual understanding and moral motive. The Phenomenology is a tale of developing aspiring mind moving from the apparent to the real, and may be read as logic, or science, or an allegory of the nature of thought, or human history, or the intellectual or spiritual pilgrimage of an individual person. It can be used in many ways (as it was by Marx). Hegel must count himself a Platonic thinker, and his image of progress must remind us of Plato’s Cave. However Hegel’s omnivorous dialectic is unlike Plato’s dialectic. Hegel’s Reason proceeds by a continuous discarding of possibilities; doubts, ambiguities, alternatives, ramblings of any kind are officially not permitted and cannot be left ‘lying about’. Seen in this way, the process seems not an increasingly widening, increasingly well-lighted all-embracing prospect, but rather an entry into some dark narrowing almost mechanical confinement. (Allegory of a Marxist state.) What is contingent, sui generis, incompatible, mysterious, has been ground up by the machine; but great things, love, religion, happiness, even art (of which Hegel has many interesting things to say) demand, not logic, but freedom. Plato is not systematic in the Hegelian sense. (After all he was inventing the whole of western philosophy.) His dialectic is the open-ended to-and-fro, sometimes inconclusive, movement of serious argument, wherein his art gives life to opposing positions. He tells us when he is using a myth (metaphor). He changes his mind, he expresses doubts. His Forms are separate and distant. In Hegel’s account things may be distant but nothing is separate, and in spite of the contrasts or changes of consciousness, often so stirring and interesting, offered by the theses and antitheses, the inevitable process itself is what is real, the end is contained in the way, there is a continuum to the Absolute.

  Such a continuum is deliberately broken by Plato and Kant. Hegel objected to Kant’s limitation of our capacity for knowledge and goodness. That our position is limited and agnostic is for Kant an essential idea, to be connected with the nature of moral freedom and religious faith. A plausible metaphysical account of our situation and nature must be radically dualistic. Hegel’s authoritative monism, which presents the absolutely rational and complete as the only real being of which all lesser individuals are intelligible parts or moments, joins fact to value in a way which not only ‘loses’ the individual person but ultimately devalues value. It is now (generally) taken for granted, in a variety of forms, that the individual is, in a sense and partly, a function or creation of his society and historical situation. In Hegelian argument, the society is ‘more real’ than the individual; and Hegel was at one time inclined to believe (as perhaps Heidegger, mutatis mutandis, at one time was) that the ideal and complete society could be incarnate in an actual empirically existing state. Plato never thought of society as perfectible, the ideal state exists only ‘in heaven’ (Republic 592). The myth of Eros, and the Trinity myth in the Timaeus, represent the spiritually inspired but irrevocably limited situation of human individuals. The dialogues are full of confused truth-seekers. Nor did Plato see the individual person as loved and guided by omnipotent divine power, or as an absorbable piece or moment in some super-human process. He regarded (as Kant did) a kind of ignorance, weakness and agnosticism, as natural to our mode of being. This admission has a political as well as an ethical importance. Plato’s realistic discussions of politics in the dialogues show how far he is from being a Utopian thinker. Of course awareness of human weakness and fallibility provides no general excuse, and puts no specific limit upon our attempts to become perfect! The myth of the Cave envisages possible emergence into the sunlight. But this emergence is something to be achieved, if at all, by individuals. (Noesis, beyond images, holiness, the mystical.) It is not, as in Hegel, a final totality in which all entities are ultimately (logically) fused. We, inside the cave, are intuitively aware of many things whose presence and proximity we may ‘feel’, but which we cannot, or cannot yet, fully explain or inspect. Our sense of the presence of a vast extra-linguistic reality may be said (in the spirit of the myth) to be one such thing, as is our sense of history and of unrealised moral possibilities. This is also a place for Kant’s painful Achtung and experience of the Sublime. Our incomplete and ‘fallen’ state, and our bitter awareness of it, the theme of the Old and New Testaments, is independently portrayed in Plato and the biblical tradition. There is no evidence of mutual influence in classical times. ‘Nothing so far has disproved the contention that the classical Greeks did not even know the name of the Jews. In short, as far as we know, the Greeks lived happily in their classical age without recognising the existence of the Jews.’ (A. D. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, p. 78.) Both traditions are primarily concerned with the density and reality of the historically existing individual and his ‘states of mind’. Hegel provides his successors and our world of thought with a powerful image of spiritual intellectual energy as a perpetual potential movement of liberation. (The orderly yet swarming impression of the Phenomenology may even remind one of the interrelated proliferation of gods on a Hindu temple.) However his metaphysical hubris also made his vast edifice into a prison. Hegel’s ultimate monistic Absolute also engendered Utopian Marxism and doctrines which call in the structures of science to suggest that the individual person ‘does not really exist’ but is essentially a function of processes which transcend him.

  Philosophy and theology, for all their persistent mutual hostilities, have always maintained relations and, contrary to some appearances, still do. Pope John Paul II, in his book The Acting Person, takes note of A. J. Ayer, whom he accuses of holding ‘the metaphysical belief that values have no real existence (evaluative nihilism)’ and ‘the epistemological belief that values are not an object of cognition (acognitivism)’. Metaphysics is a theological thought-source, a place where theological ideas can, often surreptitiously, undergo changes which suit them to the temper of new times. The process whereby Christianity goes on keeping itself believable still persists upon the border of philosophical thought. Heidegger may be called a theological metaphysician. Hegel endowed Marxism with both its Platonic and its biblical aspects. We transcend ourselves, we strive to move out of ourselves, by dialectical revolutionary change, into a lost unity. The Hegelian dialectic can be treated as an ultimate picture of being, a fundamental form of explanation, a description of thinking consciousness, and has charm as psychological imagery, even at a popular level. Kierkegaard uses the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis in his most general account of moral progress from the aesthetic, through the moral, to the religious. Sartre takes the dialectic of Master and Slave from the Phenomenology as a fundamental psychological and moral truth, an image of our damned and captive state. Kierkegaard ‘saves’ his individual from his analysis by asserting the subjective inwardness of each person, held in private relationship with God. God, who preserves the individual, is absent from Hegel, and also from Sartre who pictures salvation from deper
sonalising bondage as a condition of free but empty solitude. Sartre is damned with Hegel but saved with Kant, only without God. (At any rate he thought at one moment that existentialism was humanism.) Early Marxism combined the idea of salvation by self-transcendence with the individualistic realism of Benthamite utilitarianism. Popular Marxism tended to reduce to a level of mechanical generality the idea that we apprehend ‘being’ through the discovery of law as dialectical materialism. We may compare here the structuralist critic’s understanding of a work of literature through the discovery of its ‘code’, and the further claim that the text as explained by the critic is the work itself. The humane Marxism of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse) represents a (after 1989, the) breaking-up of the Marxist tradition. Marxism itself was ‘saved’ by a return toward realism, common-sense, and the claims of the individual; but thereby also continued the process of its own disintegration. Kant’s strict distinction of fact from value, for all its misleading rigidity and unfortunate consequences, kept moral law out of the way of scientific law and endowed it with the free enlivening power of the spirit. Hegel’s manner of joining fact and value threatens the latter with a scientific relativism whereby we become spectators of, and units in, a whole which we cannot understand or influence. Our best (clearest) consciousness is then an awareness of ourselves as ancillary, relative, and not wholly real. This is the metaphysical nemesis which neo-Marxist thought, moving beyond ‘the role of the individual in history’, struggled perhaps vainly to avoid; and which may be said to be a nemesis of technological civilisation as a whole. Structuralist thought, in this respect Hegelian in style, engages prophetically with the problem, and as expressed with picturesque brilliance by Derrida, and more crudely by his literary disciples, is able to view this valueless bookless future with a kind of apocalyptic glee. Of course, like some Marxist thinkers, because individualism is endemic and spirit cannot be quenched, structuralist prophets do not believe that the prophecies really apply to them. The neo-Hegelian gloom has to be contradicted from within. This generates the semi-secret elitist doctrine that although the average person is composed of ‘codes’, there are some free clever ones who can invent language. This may be seen as a secularised up-to-date version of Kant’s view of the exceptional role of genius. Of course great poets remake the language and great artists break rules. Heidegger regarded poets as privileged mouthpieces of spirit. But if poets ever stop being ‘unacknowledged legislators’ and become (accompanied by ideological friends) acknowledged ones, poetry itself will be the first victim. In any case this has really little to do with the worship of art. It is the old idea of the priestly caste as an initiated few in its unattractive and dangerous modern dress.