Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  There may seem to be some awkwardness in continuing to pose the question of consciousness in the context of such heterogeneous theories, but it is an awkwardness which must be maintained. Looking at a variety of other views and metaphors may help, through understanding of what seems unsatisfactory, toward a grasp of something essential. At intervals one must stand back and ask: Well, what am I worried about, what do I want, what am I after, what is supposed to be missing? Here one tries, roughly and metaphorically, to delineate an impression. There are ‘moral judgments’, which may in some ways resemble judgments in law courts, or which take place at stated times and initiate clearly visible new courses of action or the embryos of new dispositions. But there are also ways and states in which value inheres in consciousness, morality colours an outlook, light penetrates a darkness. We have senses of direction and absolute checks. There are qualities of consciousness. Perhaps a purified consciousness might be able to do the sort of thing which Husserl wanted? After all, do I not wish to connect morality with knowledge? With truth, ergo with knowledge? The Cartesian movement, in Husserl’s use and understanding of it, is not regarded as a moral movement or achievement. Is it then so simple and so easy? Descartes and Husserl appeal to consciousness and do so with certain ends in view; the consciousness of consciousness is to reveal the foundations of knowledge. (Do we all somehow believe in the possibility of such a revelation?) Descartes also says that in the pure separated (inner non-transcendent) consciousness we also discover God. We intuitively, and with certainty, know of God when with this particular movement or intensity of reflection we shift from the natural standpoint into the mind. This does not just mean that when we think about God, instead of thinking about the stove, we intuit God’s existence. Descartes means that any pure certainty includes (is internally related to) an intuition of God. God is the light of truth. Dominus illuminatio mea. We might here translate ‘God’ into absolute value, the unconditioned, the reality of good.

  Are there ‘deep structures’ in the mind, or in the soul? How is one to deny the claim, in the sense in which Thrasymachus for instance meant it, that there is nothing deep? Should philosophical approaches to the problem recognise the omnipresence of a moral sense in thinking and knowing? There is a point at which reflection, however beset, must stand firm and be prepared to go on circling round an essential point which remains obscure. As in the working of a ratchet, one must hold anything which seems like an advance, while seeking a method of producing the next movement. The contrast between the cogitatio of Husserl and that of Descartes offers a point from which to prospect. Descartes does not suggest that it is extremely difficult, though of course it implies some ability to reflect, to enact cogito ergo sum. He thinks (with the thought of his time and which unites him to Anselm) that the idea of God and the sense of God’s presence is close, or potentially close, or integrally close, to any man. A modern formulation might suggest that the idea of good, of value, of truth, is thus close. This insight combines with, is one with, the ability to examine or arrest a momentary non-transcendent experience or instant of consciousness, as part of an argument which justifies our confidence in our forms of knowledge and our conception of the world. Husserl does not maintain that the movement to, or from, his cogitatio or ‘essence’ has anything to do with value or moral insight, or with any specialised expertise except that of sustained introspection; whereas Descartes believes that by discovering God, and the light of truth, in an exercise of reflection we discover our ability to know the realities of our world. What is discovered is a sense of reality, an orientation.

  I want to consider here some criticisms of Husserl uttered by a Zen thinker, Katsuki Sekida, in his book Zen Training. Sekida quotes (p. 188) a passage in which Husserl describes the phenomenological reduction:

  ‘Only through a reduction, the same one we have already called phenomenological reduction, do I attain an absolute datum which no longer presents anything transcendent. Even if I should put in question the ego and the world and the ego’s mental life as such, still my simply “seeing” reflection on what is given in the apperception of the relevant mental process and on my ego, yields the phenomenon of this apperception ; the phenomenon, so to say, of “perception construed as my perception”. Of course, I can also make use of the natural mode of reflection here, and relate this phenomenon to my ego, postulating this ego as an empirical reality through saying again: I have this phenomenon, it is mine. Then in order to get back to the pure phenomenon, I would have to put the ego, as well as time and the world once more into question, and thereby display a pure phenomenon, the pure cogitatio .’ But while I am perceiving I can also look, by way of purely ‘seeing’, at the perception, at itself as it is there, and ignore its relation to the ego, or at least abstract from it. Then the perception which is thereby grasped and delimited in ‘seeing’ is an absolutely given pure phenomenon in the phenomenological sense, renouncing anything transcendent?’

  This ‘reduction’, providing a cognitive phenomenon which makes no statement about a transcendent world, is the crucial item in Husserl’s ‘eidetic science’. Hereby we are supposed to be able to inspect pure primal essences which are the basis of all knowledge. Wittgenstein would attack such a programme by pointing out the impossibility of contextless knowledge. Adorno regarded Husserl’s reduction as a last move of bourgeois idealism in search of a safe world accessible to universal knowledge. Sekida attacks Husserl from another angle:

  ‘Pure consciousness. Such a state of looking simultaneously both into one’s own nature and into universal nature can be attained only when consciousness is deprived of its habitual way of thinking. Working on a koan is one way of doing this. The necessary condition of consciousness that we must achieve is called pure consciousness. Pure consciousness and pure existence are fundamental concepts for the discussion of Zen from a modern point of view. The phenomenologist Husserl says that when every involvement of the ego as a person is suspended through the method of phenomenological reduction, the pure phenomenon is attained. He carries out this reduction in his head, by changing the attitude of his mind, and seems to suggest that it can be done without much difficulty. The idea of suspending every involvement of the personal ego agrees closely with our view of the need to eliminate the habitual way of consciousness. However, the methods advocated for doing this are utterly different. In zazen [the Zen discipline of sitting in meditation] we effect it not by a simple change of mental attitude, but by hard discipline of body and mind, going through absolute samadhi [state of deep meditation], in which time, space and delusive thoughts fall away. We root out the emotionally and intellectually habituated mode of consciousness, and then find that a pure state of consciousness appears. There must, therefore, be a rather considerable difference between what we call pure consciousness and the pure phenomenon of the phenomenologists. Nevertheless, there must also be some resemblance between the two.’

  (pp. 100 – 101.)

  Sekida ‘takes Husserl seriously’ in a way in which, for instance, Adorno does not and Wittgenstein would not. The idea of ‘pure consciousness’ or ‘pure cognition’ makes sense for Sekida, but not as something to be attained or used by Husserl’s, as it would seem to him naive, method. Sekida questions Husserl’s assumption that there is a pure cogitatio which can be reached by ‘setting the ego aside’ in an act of philosophical reflection available to anybody who can do philosophy. The egoistic (personal) formulation and distortion of reality reaches right down to the base of unenlightened cognition, and one cannot by a reflective move cancel it and obtain some ‘purified’ introspectible mental datum. There is no such thing, discoverable by philosophers who may be clever but not necessarily (in a moral or spiritual sense) selfless or wise, which could be set up as an eidos or essence to become part of a general profound ‘science’ of the human world. There can be no such science. Husserl’s move should here (I argue) be contrasted with that of Descartes, whose cogitatio is an ad hominem philosophical argument and not a would-be
item in a science. Zen proclaims itself as ‘not a philosophy’ and Sekida is speaking critically as a spiritual thinker and not as a counter-theorist. Nevertheless such comments, by morally religiously minded outsiders who feel they must object to philosophical descriptions or reductions, can be of value to philosophers. Much of present-day moral philosophy misses obvious and essential considerations which cannot be simply ‘left outside’. Sekida’s argument holds not only against Husserl, but against other accounts of mind and ‘placing’ of morals, by empiricists and structuralists. It is impossible to describe mind philosophically without including its moral mobility, the sense in which any situation is individualised by being pierced by moral considerations, by being given a particular moral colour or orientation. One resorts here, to obtain understanding, to metaphors. (The sharp call of an unwelcome duty seems to come from elsewhere; but it descends upon a countryside which already has its vegetation and its contours.) Consciousness au fond and ab initio must contain an element of truth-seeking through which it is also evaluated. In this sense, some cognitions are purer than others; but we cannot descend by any unitary ‘scientific’ or systematic method below the levels at which, in various ways, we test truth and reflect upon moral understanding. The parts of such process must be seen as everywhere, as something in which we are all engaged; but there is no science, or overall philosophical ‘explanation’, of ‘the whole’.

  One cannot postulate a non-transcendent pure cognition. Wittgenstein (who would never use such language) may be said to agree. Sekida however is not merely making a negative criticism of Husserl. He rejects Husserl’s concept of an eidetic science involving (philosophically motivated) cases of pure (qua non-transcendent, purely ‘in the mind’ like the cogito) cognitive experiences. The ‘resemblance’ he mentions would seem to rest simply upon the idea of a pure awareness or purified consciousness. Husserl’s ‘purity’ is that of a skilled intellectual. Sekida’s is that of an enlightened individual who has had an ‘arduous training’ aimed at overcoming his egoistic illusions. Science is (supposedly) morally neutral. Zen is a form of spiritual discipline. Here one cannot separate cognition from an idea of truth as something reached by a spiritual or moral path. This would be, in general terms, a Platonic view. The details of such a training, which could take many forms, are another matter. Many different disciplines can serve spiritual ends. Buddhism and Plato would agree about this, and also about the difficulty, at a certain point, of talking about it without falsification. Plato uses myths. Sekida, trying to explain something to outsiders, uses a terminology of overcoming the dualism between subject and object. (To be thought of as a disposable ladder, since Zen denies it is philosophy.) He quotes (p. 175) a Japanese poem, by Nansen, which is, he says, ‘a splendid description of pure cognition’. Pure cognition is also called ‘direct pointing’.

  Hearing, seeing, touching and knowing are not one and one;

  Mountains and rivers should not be viewed in the mirror.

  The frosty sky, the setting moon — at midnight;

  With whom will the serene waters of the lake reflect the shadows in the cold?

  Sekida comments:

  ‘ “Mountains and rivers should not be viewed in the mirror” means that you should not say, as the idealist does, that the external world is nothing but the projection of the subjective mirror of your mind, and that sensation cannot transcend itself to hit upon the external object. The truth is the opposite of this. In profound silence, deep in the middle of the night, the lake serenely reflects the frosty sky, the setting moon, rivers, trees and grass. The cognition occurs solemnly and exclusively between you and the objects. Cognition is accomplished through two processes: first, pure cognition; second, the recognition of pure cognition. In pure cognition there is no subjectivity and no objectivity. Think of the moment your hand touches the cup: there is only the touch. The next moment you recognise that you felt the touch. A touch is first effected just through the interaction between hand and object, and at that moment, pure cognition takes place. The next moment, the pure cognition is recognised by the reflecting action of consciousness, and recognised cognition is completed. Then there arise subjectivity and objectivity...’

  Sekida’s account (which I have touched upon only briefly) emerges from a religious background; he wishes to connect pure cognition, the disappearance of subject-object, with the disappearance of the egoistic illusions, of thick ingrained egoism, which prevents true attention to things and people. No self, no subject, observes the serene waters of the lake. Coming from a religious thinker, there is an ‘extremism’ in what Sekida is suggesting, he advocates a lengthy ascesis at the end of which some purer and better state of consciousness and being is achieved. Adorno, coming out of Marxism and out of a deep involvement with an art (music), is also concerned with quality of consciousness, and with a purification of the dialectic of subject and object by an achieved respect for the object. The place occupied in Sekida’s view by a state of spiritual enlightenment is occupied in orthodox Marxism by the Utopian notion of a really existing perfect society, and in ‘maverick Marxism’ (e.g. Adorno) by the idea of a good (perhaps unattainable) society working perpetually in the minds of properly intentioned people: a regulative idea which reaches back to Plato’s ideal city (Republic 592) and to Augustine’s, not unrelated, City of God.

  To stay with Buddhism. I have suggested that the concept of consciousness should contain the (moral) idea of truth-seeking. If this is left out at first it cannot be put in later. Some cognitions are purer, truer, than others, one cannot separate cognition from some idea of truthfulness. The purification of consciousness and cognition can take place upon many different ‘paths’, life is full of ‘learnings’ and ‘attendings’; other things being equal (for instance, if there is no evil involvement or intention), any skill teaches some virtue. Zen teachers say that Zen cannot be formulated as a philosophy. Enlightenment is achieved through a way of life which must include prolonged meditation. This process may involve the use of that characteristically Zen instrument, the koan, a paradox or contradiction which defeats imagination and conceptual thought, but which must be held in sustained attention. The, or one, purpose of this, I take it, is to break the networks not only of casual thinking and feeling, but also of accustomed intellectual thinking, to break ‘the natural standpoint’, and the natural ego: producing thereby a selfless (pure, good) consciousness. This aim is not unlike that of the monastic disciplines of any austere religious order, but its methods seem more extreme, and its end-points less visible. Of course ‘higher’ spiritual states tend to be invisible, to appear empty or pointless from lower positions. (Schopenhauer’s Nirvana.) But in Judaeo-Christian society, for instance, we think we can recognise ‘the enlightened man’, if he is out in the world, by his unusually unselfish and courageously compassionate conduct. The Zen sage, who is usually supposed to return to the world, may seem to us harder to understand, perhaps because Zen dispenses with the mass of supportive, partly aesthetic, imagery with which the idea of a selfless being is surrounded in the west. Plato’s man who returns to the Cave, already familiar to us through our ability to picture the degrees of his ascent, has more easily imaginable tasks to perform.

  Emphasis is laid by Zen, partly in its instruction through art, upon the small contingent details of ordinary life and the natural world. Buddhism teaches respect and love for all things. This concerned attention implies or effects a removal from the usual egoistic fuzz of self-protective anxiety. One may not be sure that those who observe stones and snails lovingly will also thus observe human beings, but such observation is a way, an act of respect for individuals, which is itself a virtue, and an image of virtue. The enlightened man returns to, that is discovers, the world. He begins by thinking that rivers are merely rivers and mountains are merely mountains, proceeds to the view that rivers are not rivers and mountains are not mountains, and later achieves the deep understanding that rivers are really rivers and mountains are really mountains. The Japan
ese haiku is a very short poem with a strict formal structure, which points, sometimes in a paradoxical way, at some aspect of the visible world. It indicates that outer and inner, subject and object, are one, in a way which does not lose or subjectivise the world. Zen painting also combines a skill, born of long and strict teaching, with a throw-away simplicity. In a few strokes, the pointless presence, the thereness, of the plant, the animal, the man. Zen uses art in teaching, but rejects the discursive intellectual and literary pomp and content of western art, so full of tropes and references, illusions and attachments. The ‘hardness’ of Zen art is to leave no holes or surfaces where such things could lodge and grow. The notion of achieving a pure cognitive state where the object is not disturbed by the subjective ego, but where subject and object simply exist as one is here made comprehensible through a certain experience of art and nature. (Dualism is overcome: not such an arcane idea after all.) A discipline of meditation wherein the mind is alert but emptied of self enables this form of awareness, and the disciplined practice of various skills may promote a similar unselfing, or ‘décréation’ to use Simone Weil’s vocabulary. Attend ‘without thinking about’. This is ‘good for us’ because it involves respect, because it is an exercise in cleansing the mind of selfish preoccupation, because it is an experience of what truth is like.