Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Seeing as’ is everywhere and is the stuff of metaphors. Metaphors are not rhetorical speech-aids occasionally resorted to. They are fundamental modes of understanding. We are exceedingly used to imagery and are continually employing it. I use the words ‘metaphor’ and ‘image’ in the wide sense where one form indicates another and where it may be very easy or very difficult to translate into a non-figurative mode. ‘We are all one happy family down at Headquarters’ is easy to ‘translate’. Descriptions of complex states of mind may be more difficult. Here a long intricate image (such as Maggie’s pagoda in The Golden Bowl) may have a clear non-figurative sense whereas to say (in despair) that the world is ‘black’ or ‘smells foul’ may seem more like an ultimate statement. Often we do not notice metaphors. (‘High’ and ‘low’ for instance.) Plato said, using a metaphor, that higher spiritual conceptions appear as images or shadows at lower levels. Often we cannot get beyond the image or intimation. How do we, how can we, ‘picture’ the good man? Here traditional taken-for-granted icons come to us, helpfully or not: Christ as the good man. How carefully do we scrutinise what we ‘see’? The picture of Christ may enlighten and inspire us, or enable us to stop thinking. Sometimes we are not sure whether something is an image or not. ‘Stealing isn’t exactly wrong, it’s bad form.’ The Second Commandment tells us not to make ‘any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth’. (Exodus 20. 4.) Kant said this was the most sublime commandment of Judaic law. It is a caution against idolatry and against anthropomorphism. What is true is ‘beyond’. The prisoners in Plato’s Cave wrongly took the images and shadows of things to be the things themselves. But whether or not it be taken literally the command is a hard saying. Islamic art, which accepts the prohibition, shows how hard it is and also how ingenious art is. The Taj Mahal, which is written all over with the most exquisite (non-human, non-animal) natural forms, is itself an image. We may have to be content with images. Exceptional persons, such as mystics or ‘Dante’ in Dante’s story, who ‘see God’ cannot express what they saw. Nor can Plato’s pilgrim describe the Sun.

  We may think of a person as an image of God or of the soul, or attempt to find in ‘nothingness’, a negation of speech and picture, an ‘image’ of the spiritual life. There are images wherein, rightly or wrongly, we rest, and others which are promptings to work. Religious myths are metaphors which come in many kinds. Rituals are images, often simple (washing, eating) often complex (‘doing’ the Stations of the Cross). The attention of the devotee is part of the rite. Here the inner needs the outer because, being incarnate, we need places and times, expressive gestures which release psychic energy and bring healing, making spaces and occasions for spiritual activity or events. Plato connects imagery with the work of Eros, the magnetism which draws us out of the Cave. The shadows puzzle the mind, suggest something beyond, give us the motive to move and to change. The Forms fill our minds with images, they are beyond imagery and yet they ‘inform’ the soul with their magnetic figures. Schopenhauer sees the Forms (Ideas) as thus working in the mind also through the vast extension of the imagery of art. Freud, who invented a modern concept of psychic energy, acknowledges his debt to Eros. He is also (surely) indebted to anamnesis. The ‘unconscious mind’ is a deep abode of ambiguous images. Freud’s treatment of these may be narrowed by his lack of consideration of the deeply moral nature of soul activity. This omission may be deemed essential to a scientific account. But if we regret the omission we may be led to doubt the scientific claim. In practice psychoanalytical therapy, as treatment of human individuals with histories, cannot avoid being involved in moral judgment, in moral reflection and insight in the widest sense. This moral aspect of their work is now recognised in the claim of some practitioners that all analysis is lay analysis. It is the soul that is being treated. The notion that the soul can, in its travail, become the analysand of an authoritative science contributes to an atmosphere wherein people resolutely ignore moral and religious aspects of their experience. It has become unfashionable, even among theologians and moralists, to refer to such experience. Newspapers and magazines and television, though also full of evident nonsense, create a sense of ‘fact’, of a complete documentary presentation of our surroundings. We are amused and entertained by popular science. This simplified neon-lighted atmosphere is inimical to an apprehension of the whole world as spiritually alive and significant. Absence of ritual from ordinary life also starves the imagination; institutions, schools, universities, even churches abandon it. But when we say that ‘religion is disappearing’ part of what is disappearing is both the occurrence of certain experiences, and also of our tendency to notice them and, instinctively or reflectively, to lend them moral or religious meaning. A lack of Eros.

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  Imagination

  Kant (in the Critique of Pure Reason) establishes imagination as a mediator between sense perception and concepts, something between sense and thought. Knowledge of the phenomenal world, empirical knowledge, is made possible by the imagination as a power of spontaneous synthesis operating at the transcendental barrier of consciousness. It serves the conceptual understanding by providing ‘schemata’ which enable the mind to grasp, or ‘body forth’, empirical objects. Kant here connects imagination essentially with the conception of an object. It spontaneously joins or fuses space and time (forms of intuition, perception) and the categories (conceptual forms of the greatest generality) so as to make an empty pattern or schematic form of ‘an empirical object in general’. It also, at a less fundamental level, provides (in ways which may be available to conscious awareness) sensuously bodied schemata of classes of empirical objects. Imagination is a spontaneous intuitive capacity to put together what is presented to us so as to form a coherent spatio-temporal experience which is intellectually ordered and sensuously based. We may give ourselves rough examples of this essential activity by considering what happens when we try to interpret an imperfectly visible or totally unfamiliar object. If we can make no sense of it we may not be able to see it, as in the case of the natives and Captain Cook’s ship. Kant then gives to imagination a large part in our original ability to grasp any object. It is designed to solve many problems for him. Exactly how this transcendental function of imagination makes the phenomenal world available has been much discussed and disputed, and Kant himself appears to give different accounts. Is it misleading simply to read the conscious activity back into the unconscious (transcendental) activity? Can we intelligibly speak of a primal conception of an object? Is the schema to be thought of as a sort of image or a sort of method of assembly? Is Kant’s account ‘psychological’, or ‘phenomenalist’?

  Hume pictures imagination in terms of laws of association, but gives to it the transcendental function of providing those ‘habits and customs without which human nature would perish and go to ruin’. Our objects, our causal links, our sense of space and time, all our apprehensions of an objective world, are based upon strong (very strong) imaginative associations, which by operating upon somehow-given discrete data save us from chaos. The idea of the proximity of chaos is profoundly present to both Hume and Kant. Hume’s sensible unambitious moral philosophy and his liberal traditionalist political philosophy also depend upon the same idea of the important bonding role of habit, and the imagination as the spontaneous vital force which constructs and preserves it. Kant saw that this would not do. It was impossible, for instance, to see space and time as derived from (spatio-temporal) experience of sequence. Kant’s metaphysical ‘reply’ to Hume opens an enormous and various vista with which we are still living. Hume’s world is much the same throughout. Kant saw that space-and-time was a ‘special case’, to be seen as a ‘form of intuition’; so was morality, to be seen as a unique operation of reason.

  Imagination is said to be ‘spontaneous’, thus to be distinguished from other more ‘automatic’ mental functions. (Imagination is ‘lively’.) Its unconscious or
transcendental ‘spontaneity’ is perhaps to be conceived figuratively upon analogy. We can attempt to give sense to the idea, as we extend and modify the conception of a barrier or network (or set of ‘schemata’), in terms of empirical concepts, and (now also) of language as a, to some extent consciously manipulable, experiential threshold. Imagination provides essential fusion, also gratuitous creation. At one end of the scale is the unconscious activity necessary to experience a world, at the other the free inventive power of exceptional minds. This may be seen as a scale of degrees of freedom, where, of course, not everything that is spontaneous is free. (Digestion is spontaneous.) The moral law is also described as spontaneous and free. The exercise of reason, ideally automatic, is seen and experienced ‘here below’ as a creative force of freedom acting against irrational barriers. There is, ideally, no limit to our ability to conform to rational laws. For Kant, morality is fundamentally based on reason, not upon imagination. We would ordinarily say that rational judgment must involve, for instance, an ability to imagine various situations. In a strict Kantian view of the concept this might be seen as a dangerous activity. Imagination must here (with Kant) be, to reverse Hume’s picture, the ‘slave’ of reason. Imagination is a mixed matter, in its basic transcendental use it ‘knows’ both mind and senses. It is an intelligent sensibility, it can feel about in the dark and move both sides of barriers. One might almost say that ‘imagination’ is the name of the transcendental problem, or is used as a convenient blanket to cover it up. Kant had to invent the idea. At least, one might add, it stirs thought to advance in the right direction. In any case it is too double-sided a concept, too much like a kind of feeling, to be allowed (by Kant) near to the essence of morality. Equally, the mixed emotion of respect (Achtung) for the moral law, the joy at being free to be righteous mixed with the pain of frustrated desire, is not a cause or basis but a symptom of moral judgment, a result or accompaniment of it. The related feeling of the Kantian ‘sublime’, the defeat of imagination and reason, ‘the feeling of our powerlessness to reach an Idea that is law for us’, is not in itself either aesthetic or moral; but combined with a return to the independent strength of the free rational self, is an enlivening signal of our mixed nature. (Our moral powers are invigorated.) We may connect imagination with these ‘border-line feelings’, which can be recognised as present in our enjoyment of art. Beauty symbolises morality because the free imagination in its co-operation with the orderly rule-giving understanding, when in contemplation it creates and sustains beautiful objects, is like the free activity of the moral will in obedience to laws of reason, when we ‘construct’ a moral problem and its solution. Imagination is thus separated from morality, but is given a high function in art, especially where art reaches the level of genius: mind endeavours to extend the limits of thought by thinking both sides of the limit. The idea of such an exceptional and godlike power might be felt to be inappropriate in a strict account of morality. As moral agents we are not called upon to be original geniuses but to be good persons.

  In the Critique of Judgement Kant, cautiously at first, exhibits the powers of the aesthetic imagination, which at its purest might be said to play a sort of spiritual role; and here one is certainly in ‘danger’ of giving imagination a prime moral function. The imagination is an exercise of freedom. We look at clouds and stoves, we construct pictures in our minds. In our experience of beauty in art or nature imagination is free to discern conceptless forms, it plays or frolics with the understanding without being governed by empirical concepts. It is out at the edge of things. The experience of beauty is often ineffable, the creation of art inexplicable. Kant would have little patience with a moral agent who could say nothing rational to justify his choice, but merely referred to a feeling. Morality had better not think it is out on the edge of things, it might become contaminated by aesthetic religiosity. Religion is not about a picturesque imagined ‘beyond’. Kant aims to separate morality not only from art but from (traditional supernatural heteronomous) religion, and (in effect) reconstruct religion from the moral side. (Many thinkers want to do this now.) Morality concerns what an ordinary man may be expected to be able to do and what in Kant’s extended metaphysical picture he can do. The imagination, in its free play, is a more independently speculative faculty, and may be so because what it does, in its discernment of the beautiful, in a sense does not matter. The good is compulsory, the beautiful is not. The beautiful is to be understood partly by contrast with the sublime, which is not an aesthetic experience but a quasi-moral one. Beauty suggests (some degree of) form, we speak of works of art and nature (trees, pictures) as beautiful. The sublime is an experience of formlessness and limitlessness, combined with a thought of, or desire for, limit (conceptualisation). Kant expresses the distinction by saying that beauty ‘presents an indeterminate concept of the understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of reason’. (Critique o Judgement, Book II, Analytic of the Sublime, section 13.) We have an intellectual experience of sublimity (the mathematical sublime) when we consider mathematical or scientific concepts of a magnitude which exceeds the grasp of sense. (An emotion inspired by modern physics.) We have a more sensuous experience (the dynamical sublime) when we contemplate formless endless works of nature, waterfalls, mountains, starry heavens. In nature we find both sublimity and beauty. We are thrilled by its vastness and its sheer chaotic confusion (the sublime is partly a fear of contingency), we are also pleased by leaves and flowers. (Kant evidently liked flowers, especially tulips.) This pleasure resembles our pleasure in a work of art.

  Sublimity is an experience, not a virtuous act, it is an encouraging sign pointing to the power of reason. It is a (high) spiritual experience, not a (lower) aesthetic experience, it is a (thrilling, frightening) apprehension of reason confronting contingency, devoid of the mediating, shaping, soothing power of the object-making imagination. It is a purer experience. (Compare, in Plato, the edifying effect of mathematical study, the demoralising effect of art.) ‘The sublime’ shows us human destiny as a dangerous solitary task, it is a proof that each man gives to himself as he summons up the rational force in his own bosom. The imagination works with the understanding to find or make forms. It is a play of the mind whereby forms may be discerned by an intuitive sensus communis. Kant expresses the peculiarity of aesthetic experience as a sense of ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ or ‘finality without end’. There is definite form, suggestive of a forming will, but what is seen as beautiful is devoid of purpose and not classifiable under empirical concepts. It is a formal entity which is gratuitous, ‘for nothing’, and we delight in it as such. This strict and illuminating definition is of course not necessarily easy to apply to the vast area of our experiences of beauty, wherein all kinds of ‘extraneous’ knowledge seems to play an indissoluble part. To take an example, although botanical studies are distinct from aesthetic pleasures, it may be difficult to dissociate our delight in a tree from our perception of what kind of tree it is! In general ‘something beautiful’ is an experienced sensuous entity which is like an empirical object, but is not an empirical object, since it is not classified under general empirical concepts. It is in a characteristic way sui generis. Strictly, to class it as a beech tree is to leave the realm of the aesthetic. The general idea of an object offered by the understanding inspires the co-operation of the imagination in creating a sensuous something (some sensuous presence is essential) which is held together in the delighted mind.

  We can recognise the idea of ‘switching’ from ordinary awareness to aesthetic contemplation. The synthetic power of imagination works here in a special way to produce the unique (purposeless, unclassifiable) beautiful object. God (nature) however creates trees and flowers, to which we respond in acts of (aesthetic) attention. We see nature as beautiful. Human beings create works of art, and questions of merit complicate the matter. ‘Ordinary’ imagination produces ‘ordinary’ art, ‘superior’ imagination produces ‘superior’ art, or ‘fine art’. To this superior power,
at its highest, Kant gives the name of genius. (Critique of Judgement, Book II, Analytic of the Sublime, section 46.) Genius, or high inspiration, is a spontaneous imaginative power which enables the artist to create new unique original forms. ‘Fine art is the art of genius. Genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art.’ Empirical knowledge and moral judgment depend upon rules given by the understanding and the reason respectively. The art object too must accord with rules, that is have form, but here, in the creation of good art, the rules are not general rules, but rules invented in and for the making of the individual object itself. The object asserts and establishes its own method of verification. We demand truth from art, and great works of art refine and extend our conception and grasp of truth. Genius invents its own ‘rules’ or modes, and good art as it moves towards this level may be partly judged in terms of this ability. Bad or mediocre art is clearly seen to be obeying ‘general rules’ or familiar formulae. (How to write a successful thriller, etc.) We may compare here the place given to genius in structuralist theory, where the original creative artist, philosopher, scientist, as inventor of language and meaning, is exempt from the general conventional preformed linguistic rules or codes whereby ‘language speaks the man’. Structuralism, sometimes offered as ‘scientific’, is in its general tendency an aesthetic system of value. Kant’s ‘genius’ is a spontaneous faculty which its owner cannot explain, and whose products offer no general rules for imitators. There is ‘complete opposition between genius and the spirit of imitation’. The imagination produces something unique which has the form of ‘an object in general’, some sort of object. What sort? This sort. A work of art is essentially and definitely limited. (A view challenged in our later times.) In art the imagination operates freely according to its own laws to produce beauty, which in this way symbolises morality; that is the reason operating freely according to a general notion of law (rational harmony) to produce practical judgments in particular cases. The ability of the imagination to invent, out of the chaos of the ordinary world, the unique order of the art object, must be distinguished from the higher, and requisite, discernment of rational universal principles of action amid the contingent confusion of practical activity. Geniuses are not necessarily good. Beauty is only an image of morals, it is not about action in the world, and the imagination which cannot state its laws is a lower faculty, the partner of the understanding not of the reason.