by Iris Murdoch
This, Malcolm says, is a self-contradictory position. Hartshorne, in his book Man’s Vision of God, phrases the self-contradictory argument thus. ‘If the necessary being happens to exist, that is as mere contingent fact it exists, then it exists not as contingent fact but as necessary truth. From this no subject emerges which it is possible to posit or not to posit.’ Hartshorne says, ‘We should, instead, say “If the phrase ‘necessary being’ has meaning, then what it means exists necessarily and if it exists necessarily then a fortiori it exists”.’ If we define God as not just existing but as necessarily existing, then we cannot frame a proposition which admits the possibility of his non-existence. This puts God in a different position from the triangle whose possible existence can be denied without contradiction. Malcolm (similarly) says that Kant’s assertion that we can ‘reject the subject’ in the case of God, as in the case of the triangle, neglects an important difference. ‘God exists necessarily’ must be taken to be an a priori truth, it cannot logically be an empirical one. ‘A triangle has three angles’ is also an a priori truth; but one which can be hypothetically stated as: if a triangle exists (and it is possible that none does) it has three angles. Whereas the statement about God cannot be set up in this form without contradiction. Kant’s criticism of the Proof is (Malcolm) ’self-contradictory, because it accepts both of two incompatible propositions’. The idea of necessary existence, uniquely God’s property, cannot be dealt with by pointing out that in other cases (triangles or islands) existence is not a predicate. Kant’s argument would only hold against an unclarified or misunderstood version of the Proof, not unlike Anselm’s first statement of it, which fails to insist upon the difference between contingent and necessary existence. God’s relation to the cosmos is ex hypothesi unique. A contingent God would be a demon and not God. The God in question, that is God (alone) does not and cannot exist contingently. This may be seen in Hartshorne and in Malcolm, and indeed in Anselm, as an important clarification of the concept of God. But what follows?
This new attention to the Proof, especially Malcolm’s article, aroused a certain amount of amused attention among analytical philosophers, many of whom were not interested in God but in the technicalities of the argument. At this point we can hear Schopenhauer saying how right he was to call it a charming joke. A restated hypothetical argument says that if the concept of God is meaningful (not self-contradictory) God must necessarily exist. Hartshorne puts this emphatically by saying that ‘where impossibility and mere unactualised possibility are both excluded there remains nothing but actuality if the idea has any meaning at all’. Malcolm summarises the argument as: God (as we understand him) cannot have come into existence, so if he does not exist his existence is impossible, and if he exists his existence is necessary. So if the concept is meaningful, if it is not self-contradictory, God exists. This seems to make the problem, in no trivial way, one of meaning. What is to count as ‘any meaning at all’? Is the concept in intellectu? Gaunilo, a pious monk, said that he did not know the reality of God, nor could he conjecture it from any other reality. Anselm replied by quoting Paul. And as Barth points out, Paul’s argument is Platonic. Malcolm’s move brings out the ambiguity of ‘meaning’ which has, let us say, a strong filled sense, and a weak vague sense. Of course the word ‘God’ means something, sentences containing it are usually not nonsense, the concept has a history open to believers and unbelievers. (Compare ‘Do you really understand what “goodness” means?’) Malcolm and Hartshorne have made a point against Kant; but if the argument is to proceed and to establish anything like what was originally promised it is clearly in need of extra help. Such help might come from a strengthening and filling of the meaning of ‘God’, or to put it in ‘demythologised’ language, of the idea of an unconditional structure, through a philosophically refined appeal to moral and religious experience. Recent philosophers have resorted to this appeal, as Anselm did when he used Paul’s words about how we can apprehend the invisible through the visible.
The ordinary unbeliever or Fool who robustly declares that there is no God does not of course trouble his head about whether or not he is asserting contingent non-existence. The sophisticated unbeliever might counter any attempt to argue necessary existence out of a strong sense of the word, by saying that ‘God’ is simply the proper name of a pseudo-entity in Judaeo-Christian superstition, effective perhaps as representing an emotive illusion in a localised language of private faith. J. N. Findlay (in Mind No. 226, April 1948, pre-Malcolm) used the machinery of the Ontological Proof to establish not the necessity, but the impossibility, of God’s existence. His argument contains two complementary strands. If the question of necessity is to be raised then it is clear on both Kantian and modern views of this matter that there can be no such thing as necessary existence:
‘Those who believe in necessary truths which are not merely tautological think that such truths merely connect the possible instances of various characteristics with each other: they do not expect such truths to tell them whether there will be instances of any characteristics. This is the outcome of the whole medieval and Kantian criticism of the Ontological Proof. And on a yet more modern view of the matter, necessity in propositions merely reflects our use of words, the arbitrary conventions of our language. On such a view the Divine Existence could only be a necessary matter if we had made up our minds to speak theistically whatever the empirical circumstances might turn out to be.’
‘The religious frame of mind ... desires the Divine Existence both to have that inescapable character which can, on Kantian or modern views, only be found where truth reflects a connection of characteristics as an arbitrary convention, and also the character of “making a real difference” which is only possible where truth does not have this merely hypothetical or linguistic basis ... If God is to satisfy religious claims and needs, He must be a being in every way inescapable, one whose existence and possession of certain excellences we cannot possibly think away. And the views in question make it self-evidently absurd (if they do not make it ungrammatical) to speak of such a Being and attribute existence to Him.’
So in fact, Findlay concludes, Anselm’s Proof entails, not that God must exist, but that he cannot exist. ‘It was an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof, for on that day he laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.’ On Findlay’s appeal to modern logic, Kant might be said to be intuitively right (as many people no doubt would feel) since ‘necessity’ could have no sense in the context. And from the nature of the concept itself no appeal to experience could make any ‘strong’ meaning strong enough. Here the believer may feel that Findlay’s general reference to ‘empirical circumstances’ is too casual. How far may these, for purposes of the argument, be said to exist independently of how the world is seen and understood? Findlay’s conclusion that what the concept of God demands is impossible need however, Findlay goes on to explain, cause no grief to the believer since it discredits the idolatry of ‘merely existent’ things, and brings out clearly, what many religious people actually understand, that any adequate religious object is necessarily non-existent. The concept can then remain, in some new sense, unique. This view of Findlay’s of course fits well into arguments for the ‘necessity’, however understood, of the demythologisation of religion. Imprudently, as sturdy atheists might think, it opens the way toward a special sense of necessity, that of non-existence, in a demythologised religion, or to a renewed belief in something which is present ‘whatever the empirical circumstances may be’. So Findlay’s argument in effect, rather than following Kant and demolishing the Proof, brings out its deep meaning, which may be put thus. Morality is not one empirical phenomenon among others. Morality and demythologised religion are concerned with what is absolute, with unconditioned structure, with what cannot be ‘thought away’ out of human life, what Plato expressed in the concept of the Form of the Good, and Kant in the Categorical Impe
rative. What is in question here is something unique, of which the traditional idea of God was an image or metaphor and to which it has certainly been an effective pointer. Ordinary people, whether religious or not, mainly still believe that certain values are ‘absolute’ and in this sense unique. (See The Ontological Argument, ed. A. Plantinga, which usefully indicates various views of the Proof.)
Norman Malcolm replies to Findlay by appealing to a Wittgensteinian line of thought which may be entitled the ‘Lebensform and language-game argument’, an argument from forms of life and universes of discourse. Malcolm’s formal argument, although bearing in a negative critical sense against Kant, certainly seems in need of some more positive expansion if it is to be interesting to any inquisitive and open-minded Fool. Kant may have been wrong to assimilate God to a triangle, but is not the argument which is thus rescued still an empty one with merely grammatical merits? Kant’s intuition may seem right, that idealising something will not make it exist. Malcolm challenges Findlay’s assumption that necessity resides only inside sign-systems and uses of words and cannot belong to the real world. As he puts it, ‘the view that logical necessity merely reflects the use of words cannot possibly have the implication that every existential proposition must be contingent.’ That view requires us to look at the use of words and not manufacture a priori theses about it. Perhaps if we look we shall see that God is a special case after all. ‘In the Ninetieth Psalm it is said, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.”’ ‘Here is expressed,’ Malcolm says, ‘the idea of the necessary existence and eternity of God, an idea that is essential to the Jewish and Christian religions.’ ‘In those complex systems of thought, those “language-games”, God has the status of a necessary being. Who can doubt that? Here we must say with Wittgenstein, “This language-game is played!”.‘ Malcolm is quoting Philosophical Investigations 654. Wittgenstein uses the terms ‘Lebensform’ and ‘language-game’ to draw our attention to the localised character of language and the ways in which meaning is determined by communal assent. (I discussed these concepts of Wittgenstein earlier.) In the quest for the meaning of the Ontological Proof the Lebensformen, or ‘language-game’, contextual argument is, in my view, a wrong turning. It ushers in the ‘soft’ idea, already at large in both theology and ethics, that there is something called ‘religious language’ which is ‘expressive’ not ‘descriptive’. This path favours structuralism, existentialism, and a renewed life for emotive theories of ethics. Religion is thereby put in a corner, as one possible mode of proceeding. In what one might, in the spirit of Schopenhauer, call the ‘game’ played here by philosophers, one might wonder whether to start with the ‘logical’ argument and then invoke the argument from experience, showing first that the concept of God is not self-contradictory and then that it is full of meaning; or should one start with its meaning, in the hope that it will then be unnecessary to save it from being found to be self-contradictory? Malcolm quotes the Ninetieth Psalm. This escape from the ubiquitous strictness of ‘logic’, from the postulated unique and absolute nature of God (or Good) into the easier world of language-games and local meanings, is a perilous excursion, not a solution. The truth about ‘the unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality’, which is contained in the logical argument, should not be abandoned in favour of the notion that if belief in God is ‘efficacious’ and some people use ‘religious language’ that is all the ‘meaning’ that is required.
Malcolm also uses a sort of transcendental argument. God necessarily cannot have come into existence, so if he does not exist his existence is impossible, if he exists it is necessary. God’s existence is either impossible or necessary. It can only be impossible if it is self-contradictory or logically absurd. If this is not so he necessarily exists. And ‘there is no more of a presumption that it [the concept of God] is self-contradictory than is the concept of seeing a material thing. Both concepts have a place in the thinking and the lives of human beings.’ Malcolm’s use of the Ninetieth Psalm may suggest that any local use of language, by people in church for instance, can offer a kind of ‘local necessity’. Is the comparison with the material object more promising? There is an assertion about what we can and what we cannot ‘think away’ from human life which is in some form essentially contained in the Proof. God may not resemble triangles or islands, but what about objects and causes? Here the strict idea of being self-contradictory or necessary blends into some softer notion which involves imagination as well as logic. (Does logical necessity reign on other planets?) The material object example does not help much. We can imagine human life without objects. A minimalising series (without causes? Without coherence?) simply leads on to without humans. (All right, our planet ceases, as no doubt it will — we may or may not imagine God observing its demise.) A more relevant question might be: what about human life without values, without morals, without good and evil? The goodness of God is sometimes lost to view in logical discussions of the Proof. It is the argument from experience which reminds us that the necessity of God is internally connected with his goodness, that is with morality. At this point the meaning of ‘value’ (goodness, virtue, good and bad, etc.) is at risk, and the defender of the Proof (whether as proving God or Good) must stiffen the defences against ordinary cheerful cynics and against some linguistic philosophers and metaphysical thinkers who want to remove the concept of moral value from their picture. Another ‘soft’ deviation at this point could lead toward a vague cosmic sense of God as fate. The proper insistence that God cannot have come into existence and is not a particular could summon up the conception of a sort of cosmic presocratic deity who overwhelms us simply by being everything. Heidegger’s ‘Being’ may be seen as first of all resembling the traditional Judaeo-Christian God, and becoming later more like a wanton (game-playing) cosmic force. In Sein und Zeit, Dasein (human being) retires in order to make a space where Being can be. This sounds like Eckhart. But what about love? Heidegger does not use that terminology. Perhaps the ability of Dasein to encounter (invite) Being is really heroic, at least aesthetic, and not an image of some kind of virtue. There is a shadow in Sein und Zeit which grows darker later. Heidegger’s concept is vulnerable to the fate which ultimately befalls it, when Being is no longer the invited guest of Dasein but a (considerably personified) mysterious arbitrary dispenser of fate for whom the human world is a plaything.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus expresses in its end section a moral or religious view which owes much to Schopenhauer and resembles a kind of stoicism or amor fati. However he also, in various disconnected observations, for instance in Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), talked in a vaguer and more unsystematic way about religion and even God, sketching both logical arguments and appeals to experience.
‘A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is to give their “belief” an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could “convince someone that God exists” by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such and such a way. Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the “existence of this being”, but e.g. sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts — life can force this concept upon us. So perhaps it is similar to the concept of an “object”’
(ρp. 85 – 6.)
Similar, that is, in the respect of being overwhelmingly suggested by experience. When Wittgenstein says that life can ‘force’ the concept of God upon us, he seems to be using a sense of the word less strict, certainly less general, t
han the sense in which the concepts of material object or cause are forced upon us. He is presumably not just referring to the empirical fact that people are instinctively led to console themselves by addressing God. Yet again, who can say, when a man prays, whether this is ‘mere superstition’ or ‘something casual’ or ‘the real thing’? What Wittgenstein certainly expresses is a very general and intuitive view to the effect that suffering ‘deepens’ our lives and drives us toward some sense of an absolute.
Norman Malcolm, concerned to establish that the concept of God has meaning, carries his argument further in order to establish a ‘strong’ sense of ‘God’ by asking us to reflect on what human life is like, or really like. Malcolm’s remark that the concept of God, like the concept of an object, has ‘a place in the thinking and the lives of human beings’, is followed by a more explicit and personal experiential argument about the kind of place which ‘God’ might occupy. The Lebensformen ‘rescue’ of the concept of God, may be said to involve a very general argument from experience – if ‘the game is played’ we can observe the circumstances in which it is played – which may profitably be made more explicit. ‘Even if one allows that Anselm’s phrase may be free of self-contradiction, one wants to know how it can have meaning for anyone. Why is it that human beings have even formed the concept of an infinite being, a being a greater than which cannot be conceived? ... I am sure that there cannot be a deep understanding of that concept without an understanding of the phenomena of human life that gave rise to it.’ Malcolm’s way of putting the matter here may seem to say no more than that ‘God’ is a concept which we have, at times, motives, such as those mentioned by Wittgenstein, to frame or attend to. In terms of some even tentative sympathy with the argument that if ‘God’ is meaningful God exists, we might prefer to say that God is a (necessary) being of whom we are implicitly conscious and of whom we learn explicitly through experience. The whole argument is delicately poised at this point. If it is said that we can be ignorant or oblivious of God, some will say that this proves that he does not exist, while others will say that we are ‘really’ not ignorant and oblivious: the same problem is encountered concerning knowledge of Good (moral sense, conscience). Are we ‘really’ ever completely unaware-of our duty? As an example of one of the phenomena which lead us to frame the perhaps illusory concept, or discover the necessary being, of God, Malcolm instances an overwhelming feeling of guilt, ‘a guilt “a greater than which cannot be conceived” ’, for which is required an equally measureless power to forgive. ‘Out of such a storm in the soul, I am suggesting, there arises the conception of a forgiving mercy that is limitless, beyond all measure. This is one important feature of the Jewish and Christian conception of God.’ He goes on to quote Kierkegaard to this effect: ‘There is only one proof of the truth of Christianity, and that quite rightly is from the emotions, when the dread of sin and a heavy conscience torture a man into crossing the narrow line between despair bordering on madness, and Christendom.’ (Journals, trans. A. Dru, 926.) (These are strong words. Only one proof?) Thus Malcolm and Kierkegaard agree with Wittgenstein in mentioning suffering as likely to force the concept of God upon us. Perhaps only one experience (or type of experience) might suffice to suggest a meaning and to enable an individual to administer the whole Proof to himself. I am forced, in a situation which strips me of consolation and compels deep thought, to think in this way and the fact that I am thinking in this way proves that that which I am thinking points to a reality. Descartes wraps up the Ontological Proof in one package with cogito ergo sum, but without demanding any special or extreme state of mind. The existentialist line of thought, in the style of Kierkegaard, and mutatis mutandis of Sartre, and of some modern theologians, not only suggests that spiritual understanding emerges especially in extremis, but also implies that people who lead quiet orderly lives are less spiritual than those who are errant and tormented. And may it not be said that per contra great guilt arouses a great desire for forgiveness and with it the illusion that it must be available. The view of salvation by extremes is consoling, much in evidence in fiction. (Also see Sartre’s Saint Genet, or Mauriac’s Thérèse.) Extreme sin deserves extreme grace. Malcolm’s case may strike us as rather specialised. Wittgenstein too spoke of various sorts of sufferings. But if there is any sort of proof from experience via meaning, should not the relevant phenomena be, not esoteric, but of great generality? What sort of experience can provide a strong enough meaning? If the meaning of ‘God’ can be learnt from experience might we not expect the lesson to be everywhere visible? In an obvious sense there are religious ‘worlds’, groups or communities with shared words and feelings; but in another sense all the world must be ‘religious’. Malcolm goes on:
