by Iris Murdoch
We may look back from here to Anselm’s Proofs and to the distinction between them which has interested modern philosophers. Credo ut intellegam, I believe so that I may understand, represents a faith born out of experience of the relations between truth and good; or, if one wants to extend the picture, out of experience of the internal relations between truth and good and cognition and freedom, and (we may add) beauty. The great artist makes beauty out of necessity (contingency) as the divine cause persuades the necessary cause in the Timaeus. The beauty of the world as an image of obedience. The extension of the equation goes beyond Anselm, but in his spirit. As soon as we remove the concept of God the two Proofs co-operate with each other. The second Proof, in terms of necessary existence, proves the (necessary) non-existence of God, thereby, and with its co-operation, leaving the way open for the first Proof, in terms of the idea of perfection, to ‘prove’ or indicate the real, in a unique mode, existence of good. No existing thing could be what we have meant by God. Any existing God would be less than God. An existent God would be an idol or a demon. (This is near to Kant’s thinking.) God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured. That is, it is real as an Idea, and is also incarnate in knowledge and work and love. This is the true idea of incarnation, and is not something obscure. We experience both the reality of perfection and its distance away, and this leads us to place our idea of it outside the world of existent being as something of a different unique and special sort. Such experience of the reality of good is not like an arbitrary and assertive resort to our own will; it is a discovery of something independent of us, where that independence is essential. If we read these images aright they are not only enlightening and profound but amount to a statement of a belief which most people unreflectively hold. Non-philosophical people do not think that they invent good. They may invent their own activities, but good is somewhere else as an independent judge of these. Good is also something clearly seen and indubitably discovered in our ordinary unmysterious experience of transcendence, the progressive illuminating and inspiring discovery of other, the positive experience of truth, which comes to us all the time in a weak form and comes to most of us sometimes in a strong form (in art or love or work or looking at nature) and which remains with us as a standard or vision, an orientation, a proof of what is possible and a vista of what might be. I see here no need for a dramatic voluntarist ‘way’ to be pressed upon us by theologians. The ordinary way is the way. It is not in that sense theology, and the ‘mysticism’ involved is an accessible experience. The ‘proof’ may be said to resemble the Cartesian cogito in that it is an intuitive movement which we may prompt ourselves to make, a proof by morality and by love, not by logic. As an explicitly reflective insight this is something which we might summon to our aid in times of moral difficulty, as when believers might pray especially ardently to God. But our general awareness of good, or goodness, is with us unreflectively all the time, as a sense of God’s presence, or at least existence, used to be to all sorts of believers. The proof concerns the unique nature of moral perfection, as contrasted with the relative means-to-an-end (hypothetical) ‘perfection’ of existing things. We easily distinguish moral from functional uses of ‘good’, in Kantian terms we recognise categorical imperatives. Kant is right to draw attention to our experience of the recognition of duty, though he also places reason beyond experience. A picture of humanity must portray its fallen nature. We must keep constantly in view the distance between good and evil, and the potential extremity of evil. We are ineluctably imperfect, goodness is not a continuously active organic part of our purposes and wishes. However good a life is, it includes moral failure. Is this an empirical hypothesis or a tautology or a synthetic a priori proposition? Never mind, let it be in this context a metaphysical conjecture. It is certainly ubiquitously suggested by experience and true enough to exhibit as fundamental our sense of the purely good as essentially beyond us. Great saints and avatars may, in this age too and onward, live with us as mysteries, as mythical mystical exemplars and saviours. The truth, the light, which they bestow ‘floats free’ from contingent detail and is not at the mercy of history. When, in ordinary life, we are rescued or changed by a meeting with a very good person, we do not assume that he is sinless. With or without avatars, we are perpetually reminded of our natural selfishness and led to see our thoughts and acts as under a judgment which is not a natural part of ourselves. Can we think away the idea of ‘the moral’, the idea of the authority of good, from human life?
St Paul, Romans 4. 17: ‘God, who quickeneth the dead and calleth the things that are not as though they were’. Karl Barth comments: ‘Faith beholds life and existence where the man of the world sees nothing but death and non-existence; and contrariwise it sees death and non-existence where he beholds full-blooded life ... The living must die in order that the dead may be made alive. The things which are must be seen as though they were not in order that the things which are not may be called as though they were ... A similar faith appears on the borderland of the philosophy of Plato, of the art of Grünewald and Dostoevsky, and of the religion of Luther.’ Here we find the name of Plato in interesting company. And Schopenhauer’s man who has practised dying gives up the existence we know and gets nothing in exchange, because our existence is, by contrast with his gain, nothing. In reflecting upon these sayings we may see too how close to religion certain parts of philosophy can come; Plato and the presocratics would not have made any sharp distinction between philosophy and religious reflection. Nor do thinkers in India make such a distinction now. Plato’s work is full of images and myths at which we must work to see what they mean in terms of everyday morals. Plato is not a remote abstract or purely ‘intellectualist’ thinker. He is very close to our own religious and moral tradition, being indeed one of its founders. The mythology of religion does not necessarily vanish but finds a new and different place as religion is newly understood. As A. N. Wilson says, at the end of his splendidly critical book, ‘Jesus has survived’. (Jesus, p. 253.)
In thinking about the work of great metaphysicians one has to seek a balance between ‘faithfulness to the text’ and a tendency to invent one’s own metaphysician. If one is too ‘faithful’ one may merely reproduce unassimilated ideas which remain remote and dead; if one is too ‘inventive’ one may lose the original and present one’s own thoughts instead of the great thoughts to which one should have attended more carefully. This is of course a dilemma which belongs to any sort of interpretation. Structuralism, which tends to emphasise inventiveness at the expense of faithfulness, is also interested in this matter. Theorising about such difficulties can become an end in itself. Such theorising may be another way of losing the original. Methods of interpretation in various fields are all the time under scrutiny by individual thinkers, and sometimes, as in biblical criticism, it is worth while making a large general issue of the matter. Theological discussions of this kind form a background of contemporary problems concerning the ‘demythologisation’ of religion. In my own case I am aware of the danger of inventing my own Plato and extracting a particular pattern from his many-patterned text to reassure myself that, as I see it, good is really good and real is really real. I have been wanting to use Plato’s images as a sort of Ontological Proof of the necessity of Good, or rather, since Plato himself has already done this, to put his argument into a modern context as a background to moral philosophy, as a bridge between morals and religion, and as relevant to our new disturbed understanding of religious truth.
Plato departed from the monistic presocratic view of a self-relating moral-natural cosmos, the cosmos in short as ‘God’: that is, roughly, Logos (intelligibility) is Zeus, and Zeus (not an Olympian god) is the One. I have not in these pages attempted any general account of the great presocratics who ‘began it all’ and differed considerably among themselves. Modern physics, and philosophical views which derive from it or refer to it, may seem ‘close’ to these cos
mic conceptions. Plato by contrast places, and explicitly places, the Absolute outside the existing cosmos, but not in the supernatural sense familiar in traditional Christianity. Christianity now, faced with the withdrawal of belief from the supernatural, may be tempted by various forms of the ‘cosmic answer’ of which Jung’s view is one. Religion as a sort of science. I attach, as I have been arguing, great importance to the concept of a transcendent good as an idea (properly interpreted) essential to both morality and religion. How do you mean essential? Do you mean it is empirically found to be so or are you recommending it? This is the ‘beginning’ to which such enquiries are frequently returned, except that it is not the beginning. The beginning is hard to find. Perhaps here the beginning is the circular nature of metaphysical argument itself, whereby the arguer combines an appeal to ordinary observation with an appeal to moral attitude. The process involves connecting together different considerations and pictures so that they give each other mutual support. Thus, for instance, there appears to be an internal relation between truth and goodness and knowledge. I have argued in this sense from cases of art and skill and ordinary work and ordinary moral discernment, where we establish truth and reality by an insight which is an exercise of virtue. Perhaps that is the beginning, which is also our deepest closest ordinary experience.
Paul Tillich describes theology as a response to ‘the totality of man’s creative self-interpretation in a particular period’. We need a theology which can continue without God. Why not call such a reflection a form of moral philosophy? All right, so long as it treats of those matters of ‘ultimate concern’, our experience of the unconditioned and our continued sense of what is holy. Tillich refers us to Psalm 139. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend into heaven thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following very kind persons who helped and encouraged the production of this book: Carmen Callil and Ed Victor who patiently nursed it into print, Jane Turner who scanned every page and made valuable suggestions, Anthony Turner as scholarly copy-editor, and Cecily Hatchitt who gallantly typed and retyped the seemingly endless text.
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material as follows:
Victor Gollancz Ltd for extracts from Language, Truth and Logic, 1936, by A. J. Ayer; HarperCollins Publishers, New York, U.S.A., for extracts from The Eclipse of God, 1953, by Martin Buber; SCM Press for extracts from Radicals and the Future of the Church, 1989, and Taking Leave of God, 1980, by Don Cupitt; Faber & Faber Ltd. for an extract from Selected Essays, 1932, by T. S. Eliot; the Hogarth Press, London, and W. W. Norton Inc., New York, for extracts from The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953-74, translated and edited by James Strachey; Insel Verlag, Frankfurt-on-Main, and Macmillan London Ltd for extracts from Selected Letters, 1946, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by R. F. C. Hull; Weatherhill Publishers, New York, for extracts from Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, 1976, by Katsuki Sekida, edited by A. V. Grimstone; the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, for extracts from Systematic Theology, 1968, by Paul Tillich; Routledge for extracts from Notebooks, 1956, by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills; Basil Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, for extracts from works by Ludwig Wittgenstein: Culture and Value, amended edition 1980, edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman; Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs, 1978, edited by Cyril Barrett; Notebooks 1914-1916, 1961, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition 1958, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe; Philosophical Remarks, 1975, edited by Rush Rhees; and also for the following works: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann, 1967, edited by B. F. McGuinness; Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982, by Saul Kripke; Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, 1979, recorded by Friedrich Waismann and edited by B. F. McGuinness; the Brynmill Press, Gringley-on-the-Hill, Doncaster, for extracts from Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, 1979, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by A. C. Miles, revised by Rush Rhees; Routledge for extracts from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, in two editions: C. K. Ogden’s translation of 1922 and D. F. Pears’ and B. F. McGuinness’s translation of 1961.
Index
A la recherche du temps perdu
Abbott, T. K.
Abraham
Acropolis Museum, the
The Acting Person
Adorno, Theodor
Aeneid
Aeon (time)
Aeschylus
Against Epistemology
Agamemnon
Alcibiades
Alien Wisdom
All’s Well That Ends Well
Ambassadors, The
The Ancients and the Moderns
Anderson, Perry
Anima Mundi (World Soul)
Anselm, St
The Answer to Job
Antigone
Antony and Cleopatra
Appearance and Reality
Aquinas, Thomas
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
Arnold, Matthew
Ashbery, John
Auden, W. H.
Augustine, St
Auschwitz
Austin, J. L.
Ayer, A. J.
Baillie, J. B.
Barth, Karl
Barthes, Roland
The Basis of Morality
Beckett, Samuel
Beethoven
Benjamin, Walter
Bentham, Jeremy
Berkeley, George
Bettelheim, Bruno
Beyond Good and Evil
Bhagavad-gita, the
Biographia Literaria
Blake, William
Bleak House
Blue Book, The
Boehme, Jacob
Bonnard, Pierre
Boswell, James
Bradley, F. H.
Brahma
Brave New World
Brecht, Bertholt
Breton, André
Bricks for Babel
The Brothers Karamazov
Browning, Robert
Brugger, Bill
Buber, Martin
Bukovsky, Vladimir
Bunyan, John
Burnyeat, Miles
Cahiers
Canetti, Elias
Capra, Fritjof
The Categorical Imperative
Caterus
Celan, Paul
Cézanne
Chemins de la liberté, Les
China
China,: the Impact of the Cultural Revolution
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Collected Papers (Freud)
Collingwood, R. G.
Components of the National Culture
The Concept of the Mind
Confessions
Conrad, Joseph
Constant, Benjamin
Cook Wilson
Corneille, Pierre
Cornford, F. M.
Cowan, Marianna
Cranmer, Archbishop Thomas
‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’
Crime and Punishment
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
Critique of Judgement, ;
Critique of Practical Reason
Critique of Pure Reason
Critique de la raison dialectique
Cultural Revolution, Chinese
Culture and Value
Cupitt, Don
Cymbeline
Dalai Lama, the
Dante
De Civitate Dei
D’Entreves
De la grammatologie
De Quincey, Thomas
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, Rene
&
nbsp; Der Spiegel
Dialogues on Natural Religion
Dickens, Charles
Dodds, E. R.
Donne, John
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Early Greek Thinking
Eckhart, Meister
The Eclipse of God
L’ecriture et la différence
Einstein, Albert
Eliot, T. S.
Engel, Morris
Engelmann, Paul
Engels, Friedrich
English Prose Style
Ens Realissimum
Epicurus
Epistle to The Romans (a commentary)
Essay on Philosophical Method, An
Essential Frankfurt School Reader, The
Ethical Studies
L’Etre et le néant
Eumenides
L’Existentialisme est un humanisme
Fear and Trembling
Ferenczi, Sandor
Feuerbach, Ludwig
Ficker, Ludwig
Fielding, Henry
La Fin de la Nuit
Findlay, J. N.
First Circle, The
First Contributions to Psycho-analysis
