Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Of course Kant in his Pietist puritanical childhood grew up with Christ and God. He continued to live with the Bible. His relation to religion has a kind of immobility, perhaps an expression of the unhistorical statuesque aspect of the Enlightenment. However he speaks passionately from the heart and desires to convince, even to save. Kant is best known, and most influential and important, as the author of the Critique of Pure Reason; his thoughts about morality have been of less interest to philosophers, his concept of duty often regarded (as by Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein) as a narrow mandatory account of the moral life. His thoughts about God were more likely to interest theologians. His late book, with its ramblings into detail and its attempted common touch, may be seen as one possible example of a demythologising programme. He establishes firmly the main tenet of an agnostic or demythologising position when he says that if we could see God we would be puppets. This perception is also contained in the Ontological Proof. He is stern about (that great resource of all mankind) prayer, which (he says) thought of as an inner formal service to God, is a superstitious illusion, fetishism, mere statement of wishes. However the spirit of prayer as a disposition to act as though in the service of God, should be present with us ‘without ceasing’. ‘Without ceasing’ is good, but ‘disposition to act’ not so good. Here we see the painful incongruities of Kant’s position. Kant reveres the moral law, he surrounds it with emotion (respect, sublime) but the purity of his doctrine must beware of the ‘inner life’. The word ‘practical’ which defends him, may also damn him. Taking a more merciful and modern view, surely prayer (or something like it) is as essential as duty; and is indeed a vital mediating concept, enabling the liberating discovery of the divine in one’s own soul. (The church is open for prayer and meditation.) Anyway, who can judge another person’s prayer? It may be said of Kant, that for a man who does not (strictly) believe in God, God’s name is (especially in later life) embarrassingly often upon his lips. (Many people are in this situation today.) Kant makes use of God. Well, are we to buy an ‘as though’ or ‘as if’ religion? Plato’s ‘as ifs’ occur in contexts where it is plain that we are being taught by a story. There is a final reluctance to lose the name of deity. (The One was in a similar dilemma.) Kant is still so close to Christianity that theistic terminology is a natural, perhaps the only clear, mode of explanation. He loves Christ, and speaks of holiness, seen at times as not only an aspect of virtue, but almost as something superior to it (its aura perhaps). His puritanical protestantism favours simplicity and clarity, and shuns the darkness of ritual and ‘mysticism’ whose magical charms tempt us away from reason and duty and truth. After all, Kant was fighting for reason and, like Descartes, got into trouble for doing so. His central concept of truth is continuously at work, quietly supported by his belief in science. Religion is rejected today on the simple charge that ‘it isn’t true’. Those who reject God but want to keep religion are compelled to discover another conception of truth. Kant stands awkwardly beside the old machinery toward which his deep religious passion constantly returns. His numerous quotations from the Bible express his unquenched faith. Pray without ceasing.

  Postscript. De Quincey. The Last Days of Immanuel Kant. ‘The moment that Kant had taken his seat and unfolded his napkin, he opened the business of the hour with a particular formula — “Now then, gentlemen!” The words are nothing, but the tone and air with which he uttered them proclaimed, in a way which nobody could mistake, relaxation from the toils of the morning and determinate abandonment of himself to social enjoyment. The table was hospitably spread; a sufficient choice of dishes there was to meet a variety of tastes; and the decanters of wine were placed, not on a distant sideboard, or under the odious control of a servant ... but anacreontically on the table, and at the elbow of every guest.’

  Kant is chided by those who believe that myth and ritual feed the heart and the understanding, and that religion should be thought of as fundamentally mystical. Von Hügel in The Mystical Element in Religion (volume II, p. 260) quotes the following from Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (pp. 162-3):

  “‘The delusion that we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by means of a religious worship, is religious superstition; and the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed intercourse with God is religious fanaticism ... Such a feeling of the immediate presence of the Supreme Being and such a discrimination between this feeling and every other, even moral, feeling, would imply a capacity for intuition which is without any corresponding organ in human nature ... If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or to prevent all religious delusion, it must – over and above its statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely dispense — contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.”’

  Upon this passage of Kant von Hügel comments: ‘It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first sight, solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to be refuted by the actual practice and experience of specifically religious souls, but how explicitly it is being discredited by precisely the more delicately perceptive, the more truly detached and comprehensive, students and philosophers of religion of the present day — heirs, let us not forget in justice to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the historical sense, and of the history and psychology of religion.’

  Von Hügel proceeds to quote or mention learned thinkers who agree with him and disagree with Kant. Troeltsch for instance says that

  “‘Kant’s theory of knowledge is throughout dependent upon the state of contemporary psychology, so also is his theory of religious knowledge dependent upon the psychology of religion predominant in his day. Locke, Leibniz, Pascal had already recognised the essentially practical character of all religion; and since their psychology was unable to conceive the “practical” otherwise than as the moral, it had looked upon Religion as Morality furnished forth with its metaphysical concomitants. As soon as this psychology had become the very backbone of his concept of Religion, Morality gained an entirely one-sided predominance over Kant’s mind — considerably, indeed, beyond his own personal feelings and perceptions.”’

  For he remains deeply penetrated by ‘the conceptions of Regeneration and Redemption; the idea of divine Grace and Wisdom, which accepts the totality of the soul’s good disposition in lieu of that soul’s ever defective single good works; the belief in a Providence which strengthens the Good throughout the world against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the Supersensible’, and ‘all these’ conceptions ‘are more than simply moral, they are specifically religious thoughts’. Von Hügel (p. 274) tells us that

  ‘we can perceive the difference between the two forces [religion and morality] most clearly in our Lord’s life and teaching — say the Sermon on the Mount; in the intolerableness of every exegesis which attempts to reduce the ultimate meaning and worth of this world-renewing religious document to what it has of literal applicability in the field of morality proper. Schopenhauer expressed a profound intuition in the words: “It would be a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime Founder of the Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to us as the model of all virtue, to have been the most reasonable of men and that his maxims contained but the best instruction toward an entirely reasonable life.” The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but seems to be teaching moral rules and motives as appropriate to this visible world of ours, upon presenting them in the setting of a fuller deeper world than that immediately required as the field of action and as the justification of ordinary morality.’

  These attempts to distinguish between morality (as a code of action) and religion (as deep spiritual sensibility) may now sound somewhat old-fashioned. But such reflections remain relevant and their ponderings may at least provide some useful alternative to philosophical attempts to discuss morali
ty in terms of conflicts between (for instance) relativists, consequentialists, absolutists, etc. In such contexts religion is usually ignored, being regarded as something personal, perhaps aesthetic, a more colourful way of looking at morals, or the last repository of a genuine belief in absolutes. The place of Christianity among the great religions is unique because of the historical and theological position of Christ. The other two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, are differently placed, partly because of a stricter avoidance of picturesque anthropomorphism and image-making. The figure of Jesus mediates God into humanity and thus into a semblance of empirical being which is difficult to remove from believers’ minds without removing the whole substance of belief. It is true that in the Psalms God appears as a Person with whom one can converse. But in general, where the Old Testament is concerned, a distinction between a mythical tribal deity and a nameless spirit can more readily be made. The way is thus more open for a changing view of ‘God’. Buddhism and Hinduism, even more ‘picturesque’ than Christianity, have always provided a variety of paths whereby their ‘gods’ can be seen as images of a higher reality.

  A distinction between intellect and will, reason and faith, also expressible as the distinction between fact and value, has appeared in recent theology as an instrument of demythologisation. We must develop a new mode of speech to clarify the special nature of what is religious. Ian Ramsey published (in 1957) a book called Religious Language, the first chapter of which was entitled ‘What kind of situations are religious?’ Ramsey wrote under the aegis of plain ordinary-language empiricist philosophy. “‘Did the Resurrection occur?” has not the same logic as “Did the empty tomb occur?” if for no other reason than that the second can be asserted while the first is denied, and the second might even be, and by some has been, denied while the first has been asserted.’ (p. 127.) Ramsey’s views were ‘bold’, as were those of John Robinson (Honest to God), but do not amount to a programme for a totally new religious outlook. A more ruthlessly radical position is occupied by Don Cupitt. His book Taking Leave of God (published 1980) takes its title from Eckhart (Sermon, Quis audit me?): ‘Man’s last and highest parting occurs when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of God.‘ Cupitt tells us, ‘In the Old Testament it was God who appeared to be posturing dramatically, and the believer hid in a cleft of the rock, kept his head down, remained very still and hoped that the divine storm would soon blow itself out. Today God keeps still — and I jump.’ (p. 93.) A striking picture with its image of movement, not vision, putting us in mind of Kierkegaard’s ‘leap’, and the ‘silence of the Transcendent’. Cupitt, like many others, reminds us that mankind is just emerging from its mythological childhood. Religion must come to terms with autonomy. The traditional self was a given substance, the modern self is more like a self-defining relation, ‘generating its own knowledge and its own destiny of becoming a fully-achieved, conscious and autonomous spiritual subject’. Hegel and Feuerbach envisaged the attainment by man of divine attributes. In the traditional Christian story, our first parents, seeking their attributes, were punished by alienation from God; but (felix culpa) ‘eventually redeemed man attains a higher dignity than fallen man’. Alienation leads on to a higher unity. ‘God is the future of man.’ The aporia of the new believer is illuminated (in Cupitt’s account) by a distinction between ‘voluntarism’ (will, value) and ‘descriptivism’ (intellect, fact). Cupitt uses the term ‘expressive’ to characterise ‘religious language’. Modern man cannot accept the old religious story as, literally, descriptive. Nor can he retain the myths as being ‘somehow’ vehicles of truth. Cupitt says that ‘mythical truth is also split in two by the fact-value fork. The descriptive element in mythic truth, when separated out, proves to be false, and the value element we preserve (in so far as it is intrinsically valuable) not because it is in the myth but for its own sake.’ Is the Resurrection a fact? It does not matter. Paul did not have our modern conception of fact. Let us ask of the risen Christ not whether he rose, but whether he can save. ‘If Christianity were to lose the power of salvation it would not be true any more.’ This parting of the ways between descriptivism and voluntarism is also expressed by Cupitt in terms of ‘the mythological way’ or ‘the monotheistic way’, and the affirmative way, or the negative way in spirituality.

  ‘The negative way attempts to do justice to God’s transcendence but at the price of making God unknowable. Religious language then perforce becomes expressive, not descriptive, and the relation to God has to be enacted in spirituality because it can in no way be articulated in knowledge. A high and orthodox emphasis on the divine transcendence forces me in the end to a non-cognitive or (as people say) “subjectivist” philosophy of religion. The “higher” God is the more inward God is, and the less we know of him the more he makes us grow spiritually. Alternatively, the affirmative way sees the world as full of images of God and hierarchies pointing to God, but insofar as it moves from the world to God by some sort of extrapolation it can only arrive at an idol and not the true God.’

  (p. 51.)

  Elsewhere Cupitt says that he wishes to reverse the traditional order,

  ‘putting spirituality first and God second, somewhat as the Buddha put the Dharma above the gods. That is, on our account, the religious imperative that commands us to become free spirit is perceived as an autonomously authoritative principle which has to be freely and autonomously adopted and self-imposed. We choose to be religious because it is better so to be. We must strive with all our might to become spirit, and what God is appears in the striving to answer this call. God is, quite simply, what the religious requirement comes to mean to us as we respond to it. A religion is a cluster of spiritual values.’