Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Kant’s exaltation of spontaneous creative imagination in fine art felicitously extends or amends his characterisation, earlier in the Critique of Judgment, of art generally in narrower formal terms as the production of conceptless objects, and the experience of beauty. The apprehension of beauty involves an individual imaginative synthesis, as when we attend to the shape of a shell or leaf, or apprehend a wallpaper pattern. But the grander nature of fine art involves, for artist and client, a creative imagination of a higher order capable of inventing or appreciating far more complex, more intellectual, laws, categories and modes of vision, incarnate in and not removable from the objects themselves. Our aesthetic unbotanical pleasure in a leaf or modestly simple artwork is a unique occasion, our ‘creation’ of a unique entity. But the products of genius are more intensively thought, more substantial, their rules and formation more profound. Kant’s distinction, as a guide to art criticism, is of course not easy to clarify. Some great art is extremely complicated, some exhibits a pregnant simplicity. Great art can be unsophisticated. It can also be highly traditional. (And so on.) Kant’s reflections on genius respond to the need to see art as capable of engaging with an intellectual grasp of the world. The artist reforms pre-existing ‘languages’, often of great complexity, as when a painter deeply appreciates but radically alters the tradition to which he belongs. Art theory must ‘account’ for tragedy, for poetry. ‘Poetry (which owes its origins almost entirely to genius and is least willing to be led by precepts or example) holds the first rank among the arts.’ (Book II, Analytic of the Sublime, section 53.) The poet as prophet: a Romantic view, also one which does justice to the unique high nature of poetry, as opposed to verse. Poetry is difficult to write; great poetry is almost impossible to write. Kant tells us that ‘the imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature ... By this means we get a sense of our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employment of the imagination).’ (My italics.) So, imagination can create ‘a second nature’ (a new being). This idea can go very far, farther perhaps than its author intended. If we let art out of the small corner denoted by ‘fine art’ and ‘genius’, then we may want to maintain that the world around us is constantly being modified or ‘presented’ (made or made up) by a spontaneous creative free faculty which is not that of ‘reason’ thought of as ‘beaming in’ upon purely empirical situations not otherwise evaluated. Imagination, if the concept is in question at all, can scarcely be thought of as morally neutral. When we settle down to be ‘thoroughly rational’ about a situation, we have already, reflectively or unreflectively, imagined it in a certain way. Our deepest imaginings which structure the world in which ‘moral judgments’ occur are already evaluations. Perception itself is a mode of evaluation. Any account of morality must at least set up a problem here. Kant both celebrates the imagination and fears it. He fears the degeneration of moral judgment into aesthetic judgment, and if the matter is put in this way we can also sympathise with him. There is good and bad ‘imagining’. In (Kant’s) moral judgment the faculty is to have no role at all. Here again, we can picture a proper effort to examine an imaginative picture to the point of at least seeming to exclude ‘imagination’. The concept itself is at stake. Kantian morality works with one sovereign concept, that of a harmonious obedience to universal rational law, a concept which is non-empirical, transcendental, spiritual, belonging to the ‘other world’ of reality and freedom. Exactly how rational insight works upon its phenomenal problematic data (the situations of beings who are phenomenal as well as noumenal) strictly speaking ‘cannot be said’, as reason must be supposed to be an ultimate faculty not explicable in other terms. Reason can presumably be ‘expressed’ in reasoning or reasonable talk which cannot be analysed in terms of any other concept. But the moral exercise of reason is practical and the act or choice is, as it were, silent, is morality itself, and its ‘content’ of reason (as distinct from selfish desire) cannot be assessed here below. The transcendental which ‘cannot be said’ in the Tractatus comes in a different style. Wittgenstein seems to regard ‘talk about’ moral decisions, whether ‘rational’, or ‘philosophical’ or ‘ordinary’, as in itself suspect and likely to be other than it seems. Beyond the perhaps allowable simplicity of ‘Why did you do it?’ ‘Because I promised’ lie all sorts of messy and unclarified prevarications. Moral activity ‘shows itself’ and is essentially solitary and silent. In both cases (Kant and Wittgenstein) the metaphysical picture is illuminating but likely to be felt as intolerable. We have to ‘talk’ and our talk will be largely ‘imaginative’ (we are all artists). How we see our situation is itself, already, a moral activity, and one which is, for better as well as worse, ‘made’ by linguistic process. A denial here of the exclusive role of reason need not of course lead toward moral relativism. The point is, to put it picturesquely, that the ‘transcendental barrier’ is a huge wide various band (it resembles a transformer such as the lungs in being rather like a sponge) largely penetrable by the creative activity of individuals (though of course we are culturally marked ‘children of our time’ etc.), and this creativity is the place where the concept of imagination must be placed and defined. Kant himself does not (in the Grundlegung) resist the temptation to talk about, explain and clarify, the activity of reason, in terms of the examples of ‘obviously valid’ general universal maxims which I mentioned above. Do not lie or kill yourself; develop your talents and be kind: and do so in all circumstances. Why? So as to improve society and thus serve the human race? If imposed in terms of a teleological development this advice must seem heteronomous and arbitrary. The concept of reason is flexible and ‘deep’ enough to be taken seriously in its own right as ‘the basis’ of morality. A hypothesis about the development of human society, or the function of reason in human life, cannot be so taken. Of course the idea (of teleology) expressed by Kant in the Grundlegung, and discussed by him elsewhere in his work, is visible, serviced and metamorphosed, in utilitarianism and in Marxism. Here, however, the deep and flexible, necessary and plausible, concept is in both these cases (as I shall argue later) happiness. Most acceptable, that is as such effective; Marxist moral philosophy was utilitarian, helped out at levels remote from power by an ideal of selflessness. (‘The Party serves the people.’) How flexible can a deep concept be? is a founding question of philosophy. Kant, in his precision, is careful not to demand too much of the concept of imagination. He distinguishes the empirical imagination, which spontaneously yet ‘mechanically’ prepares a sensuous manifold for subjection to the synthetic a priori and empirical concepts of the understanding, but which is not independently creative or aesthetically sensible, from the aesthetic imagination which is spontaneous and free and able to create a ‘second nature’. But are ‘fine art’ and ‘genius’ as described by Kant really such a small corner of human faculty and experience? The concept of genius itself emerges from an appreciation of the deep and omnipresent operation of imagination in human life.

  The modern self-conscious concept of ‘imagination’ as something generally rather exalted is Romantic. Shakespeare uses the word to mean the production of imagined appearances, mental images or fictions, he also connects the faculty with poets and madmen. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i, 8; 2 Henry IV, I, iii, 31.) What Hamlet ‘abhors in imagination’ is picturing the skull he holds in his hand as that of the incarnate Yorick. Imagination is often dark but capable of being sweetened. (Lear, IV, vi, 131.) For ‘the shaping spirit of imagination’ (Coleridge’s Ode to Dejection) we in England have to wait for what Coleridge learnt from Kant’s German successors. Into this morass or dark forest I do not propose to enter but will follow Virgil’s advice to Dante, non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. (Don’t let’s talk about them, just look and pass by.) The modern sense is not carried by Greek phantasia. Plato refers more than once to the unconscious non-rational creativity of poets who do n
ot know how they do it and cannot explain what they have done. That great artist had mixed feelings about such dangerous gifts. He was well aware of the lying fantasising tendency of the human mind and that it would be hard to exaggerate our capacity for egoistic fabrication. The mind is indeed besieged or crowded by selfish dream life. Plato uses the word eikasia, best translated here as ‘illusion’ or ‘fantasy’, to indicate the most benighted human state, the lowest condition in the Cave. He also uses the word phantasia in this sense. He connects egoistic fantasy and lack of moral sense with inability to reflect. Mere uninspired reproductive art (one might say, mimesis without anamnesis) would then be at the bottom of the scale: the case of the painter in Book X of the Republic who is inferior to the carpenter who at least possesses the rudiments of mathematics. One might take the Republic (597) passage about the painter as indicating art which was bad because thoughtless. Plato’s attitude to art also includes his suspicion of sophisticated literature (the tragic poets), and music which arises from or excites irrational and unworthy passions. Of course Plato did not fail to appreciate the creative power of Homer, and the tragedians and other poets, whose work he admired and (I suspect) envied. He was concerned about the results of (some) art; and is using the artist as an exemplar or metaphor. The poet as seer or madman is a dangerous figure. (Consider here Heidegger’s conjuration of the ‘prophetic’ poet, and his ideal of a ‘poeticised’ philosophy.)

  The Sophist is fundamentally concerned with how falsehood is possible, how false propositions have sense. Plato solves this problem by explaining how being and non-being do not exclude each other, but are, through language, made into a single interwoven fabric (symploké). The Tractatus concept of ‘logical space’ offers a similar answer. Structuralists too pay homage to that dialogue. The definition of ‘the sophist’ as a sophisticated liar involves an elaborate discussion of different levels of ‘fantasising’. Moral improvement, as we learn from the Republic, involves a progressive destruction of false images. Image-making or image-apprehending is always an imperfect activity, some images are higher than others, that is nearer to reality. Images should not be resting places, but pointers toward higher truth. The implication is that the highest activities of the mind, as in mathematics and mysticism, are imageless. The geometer is not talking about circles drawn in the sand nor about mental images. Plato places mathematical objects high in the scale of knowledge, though not at the summit. The Greeks were impressed and inspired by their own rapid progress in mathematics, especially geometry, and likely to see this as an exemplar of understanding. Certainly theological mythology, stories about gods, creation myths and so on, belong to the realm of image-making and are at a lower level than reality and ultimate religious truth, a view continuously held in the east, and also in western mysticism: beyond the last image we fall into the abyss of God. Plato’s own use of myth draws specific attention to the purely ancillary role of such pictures. Plato’s moral philosophy is about demythologisation. Plato in his mature years, and the author of the Seventh Letter, might agree that the mythical and metaphorical imagery of the central dialogues could be regarded, by those able to understand them, as ladders to be thrown away after use. In the multiform work itself Plato constantly mixes ethics, religion and theory of knowledge in a way which makes any summarised ‘real belief’ or ‘central doctrine’ too abstract. There is, besides, the question of the return to the Cave, the assertion of a reality at all levels which must belong to a political and social concern. Selfless persons return to the darkness, and seek to rescue the deprived or illiterate Cave dwellers. (Ideal of a good society.) In the Laws, where the earlier spiritual aspiration seems absent, political counsel is gloomy and repressive and (903D) God is playing draughts, this social concern remains, expressing itself in an amazing interest in the proper ordering of the details of ordinary life. (Tidy hair and shoes.) We cannot know what Plato, who freely uses his own versions of Orphic myths, ‘really thought’ about spiritually highest states of consciousness. It is very difficult to understand ‘what goes on’ in the souls of dedicated religious people, even when we know them face to face and they are trying to tell us. It is also difficult to imagine ways of life which are much above our own moral level as being morally demanded. They exert no magnetism and cannot be seen except in terms of senseless deprivation. There is much that cannot be expressed but can only be experienced or known after much training, as the Seventh Letter says of philosophy. In the spiritual hierarchy of the Republic, dianoia, discursive understanding as selfless wisdom, is the highest image-using condition. Noesis is an indescribable mystical state, thinkable perhaps as contemplation of the Form of the Good, a passionate stilled attention, wherein the self is no more. (This does not imply leaving the world.)

  In many of the dialogues (especially Symposium, Phaedrus) Plato speaks with intense emotion about a vision of perfection which might be granted to the soul. Christian theology would speak of the beatific vision. About this Dante tells us that the beholder has neither the knowledge nor the power to speak, since the intellect, nearing its desired object, deepens so that memory cannot retrace its steps.

  perché appressando sè al suo disire, nostro intelletto si profunda tanto, che dietro la memoria non pub ire.

  (Paradiso I 7 — 9.)

  In his Letter to Can Grande Dante mentions St Paul, z Corinthians 12. 2 — 4, concerning someone (Paul himself?) who was ‘caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’. Dante emphasises that ‘Dante’ nescit et nequit, does not know what he saw and cannot tell it because, even if he could remember it, language fails. Here the religious image also conjures up the highest inspiration of the artist who on the border-line of what can be expressed, with trembling excitement and quickening pace, reaches his goal by a path which he cannot later remember or explain. Dante speaks of Plato’s use of metaphor to express what could not be said otherwise. ‘For we see many things by the intellect for which there are no vocal signs, of which Plato gives sufficient hint in his books by having recourse to metaphors; for he saw many things by intellectual light which he could not express in direct speech.’ The last lines of the Paradiso express both the joy and the helplessness of this condition in which ultimately the soul surrenders its desire and its will to the harmonious movement of love. This is the apotheosis of the imagination where words and images fail and the concept, which implies some kind of striving or separation, comes to an end. High imagination is passionately creative. A presocratic thinker (Pherekydes) said that Zeus became Eros in order to create the world. Dante’s vision of God as love is of a perfect harmony to which the soul gives itself as to an unmoved mover. In Plato the unmoved Forms inspire the creative love of spirit which is active at a lower level. In the Sophist (265c) Plato posits a (mythical) God whose creative intelligence (phuousé dianoia) creates the world, preferring this explanatory (teleological) myth to the notion of production by nature. Compare the image of virtue as God-given, rather than taught or natural, in the Meno. Here too the realm of nature pictures the realm of morality. Plato’s mythical God is a restless imaginative creative artist, Eros, seen in the Timaeus as the Demiurge, the spirit who, looking with love toward a higher reality, creates an imperfect world as his best image of a perfection which he sees but cannot express. Virtue is dynamic and creative, a passionate attention directed toward what is good. Perhaps most graphically Plato celebrates imagination as anamnesis in the Meno, a power working at a barrier of darkness, recovering verities which we somehow know of, but have in our egoistic fantasy life ‘forgotten’. So it appears that Plato, like Kant, offers two views of the imagination. For Plato the lower level, which for Kant is necessary automatic synthesis, is seen in human terms as the production of base illusions, or perhaps simply of the ordinary unimaginative egoistic screen of our conceptualising. Plato, teaching by images and myths, also acknowledges high imagination as creative stirring spirit, attempting to express and embody what is perfectly good, but extrem
ely remote, a picture which implicitly allows a redemption of art. The spiritual life is a long disciplined destruction of false images and false goods until (in some sense which we cannot understand) the imagining mind achieves an end of images and shadows (ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem), the final demythologisation of the religious passion as expressed by mystics such as Eckhart and St John of the Cross. Kant’s more ‘democratic’ and less ecstatic morality envisages a more modest continually renewed daily achievement under the concepts of reason and duty. Creative imagination may be thought of as an aspect of the Sublime, as well as of the Beautiful (which is after all an image of the Good), and, out at the fringes of human capacity, genius exerts a force which may well be both inspiring and edifying.