Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. - Iris Murdoch
This quote doesn't come from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. I heard it on the Australian podcast The Philosopher's Zone. I love this podcast - you can trawl through the archives and they have excellent episodes on all the great philosophers. The hosts are really good and the tone is both intellectual and convivial. Anyway, how serendipitous or synchronistic that this week's episode was on Murdoch. (They had done a previous episode on her last summer.) The most recent discussion focuses on the Philosophy by Postcard project (the website is worth looking at - they have comments from a hundred philosophers explaining why Murdoch is important to them) run by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, who are writing a book on Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgely. The quarter were at Oxford together during the Second World War and have all explored ethics in fascinating, profound and influential ways. I've been reading all of them (with varied success) this summer.
Anyway, this quote got me thinking as after The Philosopher's Zone I listened to a podcast interview with the philosopher Keith Frankish who specialises in thinking about consciousness. This article on Aeon explains his view. It is challenging and I fluctuate in and out of 'understanding' what he is saying but I think I get a key concept. This is a quote from the article: 'Our minds represent objects as decked out with illusory qualitative properties that highlight their significance for us.' So, we see (hear, feel) things according to how they matter to us. Redness matters as it's about ripeness, for example. What we see (hear, feel) is represented 'as' it is significant.
Let's take a leap from what he claims is based in empirical neuroscience to a kind of ethical, pseudo-philosophical claim: the world is represented in mind according to what matters to us. Perception. The moral sense. The more detailed, expansive, nuanced, considered our mattering map, the more moral contours and ethical landmarks appear in the world as we experience it.
We can well imagine this by extrapolising: an art critic or an artist, who understands chiaroscuro and brushstrokes, composition and palette, will 'see' more in a painting than the novice. The novice may well be moved and impressed, may see beauty and form, but the expert will have all that and more. It's interesting to consider if the expert flips, as it were, between a conception of whole to a consideration of parts and back. If the one mars or enhances the other. Perhaps there's an effect similar to the rabbit-duck illusion? There, the claim is that it's not possible to see both simultaneously. One concept or the other rules.
This doesn't quite tie in with the Murdoch quote above. On that, it does seem to suggest a lot. The way we can limit ourselves, 'I've never been very academic/artistic/sporty' or create ourselves 'I'm a doer/go-getter/survivor.' And what if you have no picture? In a political sense, maybe the Rousseau/Hobbes dichotomy plays a role in this: 'We're all good until society corrupts us' versus 'We are all out for ourselves.'
How we 'see' things - others, society, ourselves - matters. It affects our mood, our behaviour and our moral orientation. If we see it as irredeemable, we do not strive for change. If we see it as the best of all possible worlds, we have to be Stoics, I suppose, and again, change seems impossible. We have to see the good and the bad and focus on the better.
To see clearly, Murdoch claims, involves unselfing - stripping back the veils of our egos and desires; our prejudices, snobberies and fears. If we do not take on the work of seeking truth - through studying, through art, through nature or through religion (which she viewed not as reliant on a personal god but on a concept of the good as an eternal, perfect, metaphysical form, akin to Plato's conception) - then we are bound to perceive only ourselves, rather than reality. We also have to be guided by love. She likes the Platonic Eros as a creative force that is closer to the metaphysical good, but not identical with it. It is that magnetism toward love that leads us be true-seeing and to the good.
Partly due to her appreciation for Plato, who uses myths and metaphors to explain abstract concepts and partly, I imagine, as a writer, she likes to use images and her metaphysics is encapsulated, it seems, in this image of love leading to goodness and truth. For her, seeing truly inclines one to goodness; and love for others (people, nature, art), not the self, enables one to see truly. It's a revolutionary conception of virtue ethics bound to a metaphysics.
But her morals isn't a single-theory concept. She believes that axioms (say, rights and legal/moral concepts that stress justice, liberty and equality) are important in the political world; so too utilitarianism as a means for evaluating social morality; duties (in a Kantian sense) are valuable as guides; but Eros, in the sense outlined above, is where the ordinary 'roughly moral' social being can a genuinely 'good' person.
There is a fourth dimension, the Void. The bleakness, depression and despair caused by great suffering. She specifically does not claim that intense suffering is guaranteed to orient one to good, nor that virtue is some silver lining of suffering. There is not 'moral value' in suffering, but, as it does seem to be an inevitability in life, she appears to feel that it can't go without mention.
Her analysis is interesting. The Void may offer a pertinent reminder of mortality and finitude, which can focus attention on loving what one has. It may show us, as with Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's novella, the worthlessness of our existing desires, prejudices and so on. It may demand patient waiting to sit it out - a grand and bleak version of the patient waiting for inspiration that artists can undergo, when they attend to what they do not yet know that they know. This is the path to insight or true imagination, a creative energy that ennobles and redeems and is related to Eros.
She suggests that during The Void, attending to the duties can help us navigate the way through. But she warns not to distract ourselves with the platitudinous, the false consolations. It is a resort to 'untruth' to console ourselves with egoic fantasies (she differentiates fantasy - egoic - from imagination) of bouncing back or of taking revenge. It is better to pay concentrated attention (loving care) to The Void than to such second-rate distractions.
In one passage she addresses whether this is a selfish act and if the awareness of suffering should not, instead, lead us to appreciate the magnitude of injustice and deprivation in the world and thus to a pure utilitarian striving for the good of all. I don't think she utterly dismisses this, but I do think that she still feels that the individual matters. The 'soul' of the self matters. I think that she would feel that such heroic action comes best from a 'loving' source than from one simply responding to an algorithm of grief.
Toward the end of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is this line:
Our emotions and desires are as good as their objects and are constantly being modified in relation to their objects. What is good purifies the desire that seeks it, the good beloved ennobles the lover.
It matters what you see, how you see it - and what, as a result, you seek.
Murdoch claims that the just and selfless person sees a different world from that seen by the callous, careless, inattentive person. The new reality of the world - seen with love and justice rather than blurred or veiled by the ego - then imposes its clear moral demands on the subject.
In her view, the gravity of the moral life shifts from the traditionally weighted notion of the moment of choice, the decision and the action, to the whole of the person's life - over the course of which she has cleared away the egoic veils. For such a person, there is no 'choice' - seeing truthfully makes right action the only course. This may be a state of perfection that only an angel, or at least a saint, could attain. But the task is in the everyday, the every perception, rather than in heavy moments of choice.
One can see here a sympathy with the Kantian view of the Categorical Imperative as guided by Reason, so that right action is the 'rational' thing to do (that which if done by all would be good - universalisability). The difference is that for Murdoch value is not separate from fact, but embedded in reality by virtue of seeing truthfully and sensing love guiding one toward the good.
This is explained clearly in the second podcast I linked to above, if another (clearer!) version of her thesis would help to pin it down.
Personally, I feel that this enriched conception of morality, supported by duties and axioms, is a more naturalistic and more appealing way to consider how to live a good life than a purely rule-based conception of ethics.
It also ties in with my experience of the theatre: the more I go, the more I know, the deeper my experience - both emotionally and intellectually.
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