Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  With these questions in mind I return to the problems about ‘grace’ and moral change which I was discussing just now. The ‘redemption’ of the (purely) aesthetic, its absorption into the moral and religious, is going on all the time. There are moral illuminations or pictures which remain vividly in the memory, playing a protective or guiding role: moral refuges, perpetual starting points, the sort of thing St Paul was talking about at Philippians 4.8. A Christian may think here of Christ upon the cross. But at a simpler level the story of his birth, complete with shepherds, kings, angels, the ox and the ass, may be a good thing to have in one’s life. Buddhists speak of 'taking refuge’. Such points or places of spiritual power may be indicated by a tradition, suggested by work or subjects of study, emerge from personal crises or relationships, be gradually established or come suddenly: through familiarity with a good person or a sacred text, a sense of renewal in a particular place, a sudden vision in art or nature, joy experienced as pure, witnessing a virtuous action, a patient suffering, an absence of resentment, humble service, persistent heroism, innumerable things in family life and so on and so on. We are turning here to an inexhaustible and familiar field of human resources. Every individual has a collection of such things which might be indicated by various names and images. I have already used some: refuges, lights, visions, deep sources, pure sources, protections, strongholds, footholds, icons, starting points, sacraments, pearls of great price. Our moral consciousness is full of such imagery, kinaesthetic, visual, literary, traditional, verbal and non-verbal, and is full too of images of darkness, of stumbling, falling, sinking, drowning.

  Considerations, such as those rehearsed above, about moral change make sense of the notion of our being always ‘in the presence of God’, being at every moment mobile between good and bad and attracted in both directions. This is a religious picture which belongs where morality and religion spontaneously blend. All my argument assumes that religion is not only a particular dogma or mode cf faith and worship, but can exist, and indeed exists, undogmatically as for instance in Buddhism, and potentially everywhere, forming a deep part of morality. Especially now, when we are better able to understand the nature of myth, religious concepts should come home to morals, or let us say be welcomed in the whole area of morality. Liberal political thinking (properly) draws a line between those activities which are the concern of the state and those which are the private concern of the individual. The border of this line is, in democratic societies, much disputed, while its necessity is not. In this context it is sometimes confusingly assumed that morality is public and religion is private. (An alternative view was put by Lord Melbourne who said that religion was all very well provided it did not interfere with one’s private life.) Any such distinction between religion and morals, whether offered to protect the one or the other, tends to be somewhat general and unrealistic. It may be said that political thinking has to be in a certain sense ‘unrealistic’. Hume said that something could be 'true in politics which was false in fact’, and instanced the useful assumption that, politically, every man should be deemed a knave. (Essay ‘On the Independence of Parliament’.) Such, and innumerable, rough assumptions and distinctions belong in the necessarily clumsy and often axiomatic mechanics of running a nation-state; in the course of which the ‘province’ of organised religion is constantly up for debate. In this hurly-burly, religion and morality are equally likely to be ‘told off’ at intervals for being too public or too private. What may be called the ‘soul’ of the state, its morale, is (in liberal political terms) a surrounding atmosphere which is essential to the mechanism but not part of it. This is a way of speaking of the status of the individual. I shall shortly discuss these matters in more detail under the heading of 'Politics’. My point here is that familiar distinctions between morality and religion are often artificial or merely (in particular situations) useful.

  The idea of reverence is common to what are usually thought of as religious and moral attitudes, connected with art, love, respect for persons and for nature, extending into religious conceptions of the sacred or the holy. The concept is enlivened by our awareness of how it can degenerate, into idolatry, superstition, magic, a preference of what is exciting and charming to what is good. Reverence for life and being, for otherness, is something which can be taught or suggested very early. ‘Don’t kill the poor spider, put him out in the garden.’ Even a use of 'him’ or ‘her’ instead of ‘it’ may help. Formal religious education in schools tends to disappear, with no positive substitute. Now, if there is any teaching about religion it is likely (except in religiously based schools) to be in a historical or factual mode, and not many teachers are eager to undertake any form of (serious moralistic) ‘religious instruction’. The reason for this may be said to be obvious; but children with disparate (or no) religious backgrounds can be taught morality with reference to very general religious images. Formal religion provided ritual and imagery, presenting it as something ordinary and usual. What happens every day is important, images can affect the quality of our thoughts and wishes. The damage done to inner life, to aloneness and quietness, through the imposition of banal or pornographic or violent images by television, is a considerable wound. Teach meditation in schools. Some understanding of, and taste for, exercises in detachment and quietness, the sense of another level, and another place, a larger space, might thus be acquired for life. Simply sitting quietly and calmly can be doing something good; subduing unkind or frenzied thoughts certainly is. Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world.

  The concept of 'imagination’ has led towards a discussion of ‘pure things’ or ‘holy images’, omnipresent sacraments, rituals, forms of words (as in familiar prayers), and so on. Seeking such refuge or invoking such protection is a human instinct. Religion is always menaced by magic, and yet faith can redeem and transform magic. A Tibetan story: a mother asks her son, a merchant setting off for the city, to bring her back a religious relic. He forgets her request until he is nearly home again. He picks up a dog’s tooth by the roadside and tells the old lady it is a relic of a saint. She places it in her chapel where it is venerated. It begins miraculously to glow with light. This story, which may be seen as a version of the Ontological Proof, is itself a religious image or icon: importance of stories in religion. The great religions are full of illuminations and transferable images of this kind. We understand by an instinctive grasp how one thing figures another. In this way, and in our most familiar and immediate experiences, we are always deep in art. We understand the imagery of novelists, their descriptions of mental states, because it is sufficiently close to our own ‘working images’. Anyone who has studied a subject over a length of time, for instance a foreign language, knows how, when initial difficulties are over and rules have been learnt and internalised, the mind gains a new facility and speeds like lightning to make syntheses and generate forms. Sprachgefühl: we grasp general patterns of cognate formulations, instinctively compare and contrast structures in our own language, and so on. Such studies are an image of our understanding of the world, how structures and patterns become spontaneously active in the mind, breaking down more elementary and cruder forms. Imagery of many kinds is at work, there are pictorial and kinaesthetic elements in our mastery of language. Understanding poetry in a foreign tongue exercises these mental muscles. Reflection upon language can help us to understand the edifying power and special status which Plato attributed to mathematics. Mathematical objects as non-empirical individuals may be compared with grammatical forms, the vision of which can joyfully excite the mind. A certain level of structure in any study may be accorded an analogous position, from which indeed we can see how any serious learning is a moral-spiritual activity. Plato, whose words at times must echo those of the real life enquiring Socrates, shows his thoughts, his doubts, his hypot
heses, his passionately held beliefs and convictions, in a stream of progressive reflection in the context of which the meaning of his myths is clear. ‘Scientific explanations’ of traditional myths are dealt with at Phaedrus 2.2.9. The conversation is taking place near the spot where, it is said, Boreas carried off Oreithyia. Phaedrus says, but do you really believe that? Socrates says, well, some clever fellow might explain it away as a gust of wind knocking her off a rock, but then he would have to invent similar explanations for centaurs and chimeras and so on. I prefer not to waste time on such matters, but to accept the usual beliefs and turn my attention to investigating what I am myself. Wittgenstein adopts a somewhat similar attitude when seeing off Frazer’s Golden Bough.

  Our attention to the images of art can provide a point where the distinction of subject and object vanishes in an intuitive understanding. This understanding may be ‘lodged’ in something particular. The particular, which is saved, held in attention, given being, found to be significant, is not of course meant in any Hegelian sense, where the dialectic casts a light on something taken to be solitary and then destroys it in a higher synthesis. (It eats it.) The particular, which is of course in various ways connected, but also solitary, is thought of here in an empirical-philosophical sense, in an argument appealing in ordinary language to familiar matters. The particular, as art shows us with an exemplary clarity, is not to be left behind, falling out of being, dusty and forgotten, lost in the dark; it must be allowed to glow with light. There is an ordinary mystical discipline which relies upon such insights. Parts of works of art, with and without the intention of the artists, readily acquire, for their clients, a significance which is ‘beyond themselves’: the man taking off his shirt in Piero della Francesca’s baptism, an intensely blue hat in a picture by Bonnard, a line of poetry, or (noted by Proust) Vermeer’s yellow wall or Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’. Art exhibits, what is less clear elsewhere, the mystery of the synthesis of different levels of cognition, how complexly integrated these levels are, and how therein the ‘brute particular’ is transcended and retained (known). A case of saving the phenomena. Here we may grasp the ideas of ‘transcendence’ and 'pure cognition’. This sort of experience and thinking also more clearly exhibits the ubiquitous manner in which one kind of insight or vision, as well as being itself, can image another. The particular can figure the human individual and his rights; and we may say that non-human particulars have rights too. In a sense, everything about us asks for our attention. The aesthetic can image the moral as well as fusing with it. Kant said that beauty was an analogon of good, Plato said it was the nearest clue. The world of nature and of ordinary artefacts is full of potential points of light, of worlds within the world (like Wittgenstein’s stove). Schopenhauer explains his Ideas by reference to such experiences. ‘The transition ... from the common knowledge of particular things to the knowledge of the Idea takes place suddenly; for knowledge breaks free from the service of the will, by the subject ceasing to be merely individual, and thus becoming the will-less subject of knowledge which ... rests in fixed contemplation of the object presented to it, out of its connection with all others, and rises into it.’ (WWI, Book III, section 34.) He uses the word ‘contemplation’; but considering the frequency and ordinariness of such events it is better to speak simply of moments of awareness or heightened cognitive consciousness, wherein too the division between subject and object dissolves. (Compare Heidegger’s 'letting be’, derived from Eckhart.) In these not unusual situations moral changes may be thought of as taking place, these are ordinary cases of our ability to do what St Paul suggests. We can experience a 'transcendence’ at any time in our relations with our surroundings. Particulars are not just potential barriers to thought, as in Plato’s picture of the retarded painter and the liberated carpenter. Plato’s attachment to mathematics may have contributed to his suspicion of the aesthetic. My examples have suggested good kinds of change. In opposite situations the particular, if it attracts attention, may be degraded, brutalised, not respected, absorbed into private fantasy and fetishistic magic. There are conditions of despair and misery, particularly when hatred and resentment colour these, when particular things become malevolent enemies on whom we want to revenge ourselves. (Smashing plates in a rage, Xerxes thrashing the Hellespont, punishment of things in Plato, Laws 873B.) We experience absolute contingency as something horrible or menacingly senseless: as described in Sartre’s La Nausée, or suggested by Kafka. This sort of literary effect can have the intensity of a kind of fallen or debased sacrament, as for instance in Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) where the father kills his son, who has somehow become a large beetle, by throwing apples at him. Of course we are now safe inside art, but such art is effective because we see through it the real horrors which lurk in life. This can also be seen as a kind of inverted Sublime. Kant’s sublime is an experience of moral exaltation, mixed with fear, which we feel (for instance) when gazing at shapeless rocks down which chaotic waters run; and to pursue the idea, we could also experience either a debased or a true Sublime when surveying some humble extremely contingent scene in the kitchen, a burnt saucepan or massive broken crockery accident. Kant suggests a movement of proud withdrawal into a fortress of unconquered rationality as our high reaction to the vast rubble of the world. I would describe this (good) experience on analogy with others I have instanced as a comparatively selfless (unselfing) inspiration drawn from the wild forces of nature or from contingency in other less romantic forms. We may note that art can deal with both the high and the low experience, turning the latter into a kind of exhilarating though fearful surrealism: like the flying apples in Kafka’s story. And in life too the absurd contingent, not the waterfall but the broken crockery, may produce a surge of cosmic misery and hatred, or may make us smile and turn the occasion into a sort of rueful aesthetic pleasure: as when we say, unseriously, this is too much, this really is the end!

  I have been talking about the way in which our moral experience shares in the peculiar density of art, and in its imaginative cognitive activity. The term ‘moral experience’, comprehensible I trust in this context, is not in general use, whereas the term 'religious experience’ is, or was. As used in arguments about religion, ‘religious experience’ now tends to mean intense personal impressions rather than supernatural visions. Also mentioned in such arguments are interchanges with nature, profound feelings in solitary places, when listening to music, and so on. I say 'such arguments’, but perhaps arguments for religion from religious experience are taking place less often. Psychology has suggested to us the ambiguity of this kind of ‘evidence’, and philosophers and philosophical theologians tend to regard it as obviously peripheral. Perhaps too in a materialistic, scientific, technological, television-dominated atmosphere, people do not have it, or do not recognise it. The similarity of religious experience and moral experience, or the ubiquitous moral nature of experience, brings (demythologised) religion closer to us. Perhaps we already have a religious consciousness, not always named as such! Or, we might say that ‘religious’ concepts have always been part and parcel of morality, but because of some of the specialised claims of the former have not been so recognised by moral philosophers. Such a view would be, in a Buddhist or Hindu context, childishly obvious. To pick up the thread of the argument, all religions make use of our ability to express and experience spiritual and moral aspiration by taking particular contingent things as symbolic of, or signals toward, a reality thought of as more or less veiled from us by our own egoism. This is a characteristic working of imagination, to break through the veil, a natural way of experiencing the interconnectedness of things, their beauty and strangeness, their liveliness in and to our consciousness as ‘ours’, and yet also as independent witnesses to reality. The bread and wine represent, or are, the body and blood of Christ. Theologians have taken sides on this matter. But ordinary worshippers, even sophisticated ones, have, I should imagine, taken things more in their stride. 'But isn’t that condoning su
perstitions or at least a kind of insincere double-think?’ There are superstitions, some harmless, some not. But those who take the bread and wine without caring about the dogma are doing something which we do blamelessly all the time, taking one thing as figuring another and passing swiftly on toward what is important and real; and mutatis mutandis in the rituals of other religions. Rituals and ritual objects, sacraments, icons of all kinds, make use of this faculty. Of course there is superstition and obsession, fetishism, paranoia, nausée and ordinary familiar states when the world is senseless or filled with images of resentment, fear and magic. There are despairs which can only take refuge in magic and wherein ideas of good and evil are undreamt-of luxuries. But magic is a characteristic nemesis of religion as it is of art; although art also redeems magic, as religion too can transform it. Great art purifies magic. (Prospero’s problems, dangerous ground.) In some Protestant worship the absence of images, the plain wooden cross upon the unadorned altar, is a potent image.