Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Page 4

  What becomes now of the dignity and innocence of the work of art? The ideal unity, the image of virtue, which we imagine that we experience is seen to be an illusory unity. Or rather the unity which we intuit (our completion of the circle) is not what we think it is. Art (on such a view of it) is not the imaginative creation of unified public objects or limited wholes for edifying contemplation, with mystical analogies; it is the egotistically motivated production of maimed pseudo-objects which are licences for the private concluding processes of personal fantasy. Sex here provides the image and the substance of the concluding (unifying) process and its satisfactory finality as it moves from fore-pleasure to end-pleasure. Kant’s definition of art in terms of ‘purposiveness without purpose’ is here provided with a secret purpose. The sense of power and energy which the contemplation of the pseudo-unified pseudo-object inspires in us is then easily explained. We can understand too our peculiar delight in the ambiguous condensed symbolism of poetry and painting, concerning which recent criticism has often taken pleasure in vindicating Freud’s theory of the hidden bribe. Freud more than once labels himself as a Platonist. ‘Anyone who looks down with contempt upon psycho-analysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato.’ (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, vol. VII, preface to the fourth edition, 134.) Freud takes the idea of the sexual drive as a unitary principle of explanation; and, with simplifications, the ‘modern consciousness’ has followed him. At any rate ‘explanation by sex’ tends to have for us a kind of intuitive obviousness, as if we perfectly knew what sex was. Certain forms of sexual activity come to be thought of as essential (without which life would be impoverished), natural, human and fundamental, functioning thereby as fates and excuses. Freud is of course supposed to be talking about health rather than goodness. Psychoanalysis is to break down false self-pictures only in so far as these impair the efficiency of the ego. This allows a place for necessary structures of illusions, harmless or beneficial illusions, and of course innumerable totally undiscovered and undiscoverable illusions. The psyche ‘is and ought to be’ a strong closely textured web of subjective dreams, which, if it functions well, don’t touch. Do we not all need what John Cowper Powys calls ‘life illusions’? This could be a moral point of view or certainly part of one.

  The familiar conception of ‘analysis’ conveys a misleading idea of a minute scientific scrutiny of the human mind: an area in which it is difficult, except at a superficial level, to distinguish illusion from truth, and certainly difficult to do so without the introduction of moral concepts. One cannot explain ‘mind’ in terms of a single system or meaningfully use the idea of a series which leads toward a perfect analysis. Whether Freud should be seen primarily as a ‘humanist’ or as a ‘man of science’ has been continually debated. The English translations, it is argued, consistently mislead by their preference of ‘clean’ scientific terminology (sometimes invented for the purpose) to Freud’s use of ordinary language with its numerous associations. (See Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul.) In particular the translation of Seele and Psyche as ‘mind’ rather than ‘soul’ seems to lose a humane, even a religious, dimension. Freud’s doctrines, which have been turned (especially in America) toward pure science, have also more recently been explored (especially in France) for more metaphysical directives. Popular Freudianism has certainly attached value to a general idea of ‘mental health’, sometimes even with the implication that the unanalysed life is a sort of lie. Is not the healthy successful human being realistic and thus truthful? How can the concept of self-knowledge not now be touched by science? Freud’s scepticism about art exemplifies his influence as a modern metaphysician. Suspect the false unity and analyse it. The therapist takes as a goal the new redeemed unity of the integrated personality. But the metaphysician has released conceptual forces which, at different levels, are more persistently iconoclastic. A sort of ‘demythologisation’ has been with us as a reductionist form of ‘explanation by sex’. The deeper influence of (among others) Freud, as seen in structuralism, concerns the nature of causal explanation, indeed of explanation in general. A problem (which I consider later), for Freud and those whom he inspires, is whether such analyses can be devoid of radical value judgments.

  Freud’s obliteration of religion has a theological intensity and confidence: for him, its only discussable future is that of an illusion. Freud, who says that his ‘libido’ coincides exactly with Plato’s Eros, does not, so far as I know, discuss Plato’s anamnesis, the ancestor, as one would imagine, of the Freudian concept of the unconscious, as well as of Jung’s archetypal folk memory. The concept of anamnesis appears in Plato’s Meno in the context of asking whether virtue is natural or whether it is something that can be taught, and answering that it is neither, but comes by ‘divine dispensation’ or ‘grace’. (99E.) This does not of course mean that virtue is a matter of luck, but that it comes as the reward of a sort of morally disciplined attention. This is a darkness which is unlike Jung’s mythological historicism or Freud’s glimpses of infantile sexuality. It is also in inimical contrast to the massing ‘dead memories’ of the computer world. Anamnesis, spiritual memory, belongs to the individual who ‘remembers’ pure Forms of goodness and beauty with which he was familiar ‘face to face’ (not ‘in a glass darkly’) in another existence. These journeys of the soul, as described in the Phaedrus and in the tale of reincarnation at the end of the Republic, are of course mythical ideas, similar to the concept of Nirvana in Buddhism. The Seventh Letter offers the same instruction in ordinary language; the problem about writing is a problem about ‘live remembrance’: not the dead written text prompting second-hand reactions, but the deep called-up truth of the individual mind. Plato and Kant are close at this point. The solitary private moral agent must be his own authority, continually doing it all, over and over, for himself. This is moral philosophy, not science, and its message is hostile to the generalising tendencies of science and the conceptions and temptations of power with which science is associated. I think Freud was aware of these paradoxes. He had, we are told, some hesitation about adopting as an epigraph the magnificent Virgilian outcry, the words of Juno at Aeneid VII 312, Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (‘If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall move the infernal regions’): words which have a peculiarly apt ambiguity in a psychoanalytical context. Who are the ‘higher powers’, and what kind of attempt at moving them is to be given up in favour of enlisting demons? And are the latter Nemesis or Eumenides? Freud as the speaker (and how could he have resisted purloining such a speech) may have heard with mixed feelings the accents of the all-powerful scientist.

  Plato portrays Eros (Symposium 202f.) as an ambiguous spirit, a daemon not a god, child of Poverty and Ingenuity, magician, alchemist, shabby, homeless, without shoes, dwelling between ignorance and wisdom, in love with beauty, aspiring to good, but potentially destructive. Eros is sexual energy as spiritual energy. Freud’s libido is also a concept of the energy of the Seele or Psyche which can make or mar the life of the individual. Our life-problem is one of the transformation of energy. Here too there is a contrast between the Platonic religious concept and its quasi-scientific modern version. Energy is indeed a versatile and popular concept, as we see it in physics and in some philosophical thought. Ambiguous ‘energy’ can be the virtuous impulse of the individual, the enlightened influx, the reward of spiritual attention, or it may be seen as the fundamental cosmic energy (ultimate particles, or ‘history’ or archi-écriture) which dissolves both things and persons into some more basic reality. Herein we see re-enacted the quarrel between Plato and the presocratics. In the Republic the persistent questioning of Socrates by the young men is primarily concerned with the salvation of the individual. What is justice? How are we to become virtuous? Plato uses this concept of energy to explain the nature of moral change. (As in Freud, ‘cure’ lies in redeployment of energy.) He essentially acco
mpanies the image of energy (magnetic attraction) by that of light and vision. The sun gives warmth and vital force, and also the light by which to see. We must transform base egoistic energy and vision (low Eros) into high spiritual energy and vision (high Eros). Metaphors of movement to express the nature of the moral will are sometimes in philosophy contrasted polemically with metaphors of vision, the latter being stigmatised as static rather than dynamic. Marxism and existentialism, and theology in descent from Kierkegaard, use the image of a leap. Some modern views of freedom, aware perhaps of an anti-personal deterministic use of the idea of fundamental energy, emphasise discontinuity. Kant is an ancestor of the idea that the mind switches or springs into morality and liberty: the sudden call of duty. Plato’s more realistic concept of moral spiritual desire avoids both positions. We look at Christ (or Buddha or the Form of the Good) and are magnetically attracted: a tendency of which Kant expresses disapproval in the Grundlegung. The moral life in the Platonic understanding of it is a slow shift of attachments wherein looking (concentrating, attending, attentive discipline) is a source of divine (purified) energy. This is a progressive redemption of desire: and sexual attachment in the ordinary sense can be one possible starting point for the overcoming of egoism. The movement is not, by an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom, but patiently and continuously a change of one’s whole being in all its contingent detail, through a world of appearance toward a world of reality. The importance Plato attaches to studying, whether in intellectual work or craft, is an instance and image of virtuous truth-seeking activity; and here, in Plato’s system, though not by Plato, art too can be saved. (If he who makes the bed or the shield can thereby make himself a just man, why cannot he who decorates them?) There are innumerable points at which we have to detach ourselves, to change our orientation, to redirect our desire and refresh and purify our energy, to keep on looking in the right direction: to attend upon the grace that comes through faith.

  2

  Fact and Value

  A misleading though attractive distinction is made by many thinkers between fact and (moral) value. Roughly, the purpose of the distinction (as it is used by Kant and Wittgenstein for instance) is to segregate value in order to keep it pure and untainted, not derived from or mixed with empirical facts. This move however, in time and as interpreted, may in effect result in a diminished, even perfunctory, account of morality, leading (with the increasing prestige of science) to a marginalisation of ‘the ethical’. (Big world of facts, little peripheral area of value.) This originally well-intentioned segregation then ignores an obvious and important aspect of human existence, the way in which almost all our concepts and activities involve evaluation. A post-Kantian theory of morals: survey all the facts, then use your reason. But, in the majority of cases, a survey of the facts will itself involve moral discrimination. Innumerable forms of evaluation haunt our simplest decisions. The defence of value is not an attack on ‘ordinary facts’. The concept of ‘fact’ is complex. The moral point is that ‘facts’ are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being. To say all this is not in any way to deny either science, empiricism or common-sense. The proposition that ‘the cat is on the mat’ is true, indicates a fact, if the cat is on the mat. A proper separation of fact and value, as a defence of morality, lies in the contention that moral value cannot be derived from fact. That is, our activity of moral discrimination cannot be explained as merely one natural instinct among others, or our ‘good’ identified with pleasure, or a will to live, or what the government says (etc.). The possession of a moral sense is uniquely human; morality is, in the human world, something unique, special, sui generis, ‘as if it came to us from elsewhere’. It is an intimation of ‘something higher’. The demand that we be virtuous. It is ‘inescapable and fundamental’. The interpretation of such phrases, including less fancy versions of the same intuition, has been, and should be, a main activity of moral philosophers.

  ‘The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background ... If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it ... For it is equally possible to take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows.’

  (Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914 — 1916, 7, 8, 9 October 1916.)

  Wittgenstein was twenty-seven when he wrote these words which are preliminary notes for the last part of the Tractatus. There are significant differences between the two texts. This passage, three consecutive entries over three days, is a complete miniature metaphysical picture, making use of the potent idea of the work of art, or object of contemplative vision, as a limited whole. A ‘world’ is a limited whole. Morality, according to the later part of the Tractatus and this part of the Notebooks, is fundamentally an attitude of acceptance of the world of facts which is viewed as a whole, as something independent of my will. I quote again from the Notebooks, 8.7.16.

  ‘The world is given me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there ... That is why we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will. However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: the world, which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.’

  This view, which appears in a more epigrammatic form in the Tractatus, is to be connected with Wittgenstein’s reading of Schopenhauer, by whom he was impressed when he was young. The shadow of Kant may indeed have fallen upon him through Schopenhauer. Tractatus Wittgenstein, like Kant, has two ‘subjects’, one which is locked on to the world of fact, and one which is totally independent of that world. Wittgenstein speaks of two godheads. ‘I am my world’ in two senses. I am the world of fact in the sense that I, the extensionless subject of experience, coincide exactly with my world of factual and significant apprehension. Wittgenstein’s world of fact owns nothing beyond, the subject who experiences it fits it exactly; the notion of his ‘seeing beyond’ can make no sense. This impossibility is established (by Wittgenstein) in the nature of logic and language; in the Tractatus facts, states of affairs, are projected in propositions intelligibly organised by logic. They just are so projected, we cannot in the nature of the case see how, for this would be to see beyond the transcendental barrier. (What is transcendent is beyond human experience, what is transcendental is not derived from human experience, but is a condition of it.) There is no other access to facts. Thus, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein dismisses any general problem of a transcendent ‘factual’ world, or of the ability of language to refer to the world. Language just does refer to the world. This disposes by fiat of many of the questions raised by structuralism, and also of course of Cartesian anxieties about how the mind reaches the world. He similarly recognises no problem of the freedom of the will. ‘The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot
be known now.’ (Tractatus 5. 1362. Tractatus quotes are from the C. K. Ogden translation, unless otherwise stated.)