Diabolical liberty
RENFORD BAMBROUGH
The Devil himself was the first existentialist. By his fall he denied his own knowledge of good and evil, and elevated the un- conquerable will into an autonomous creator of value. When he calls upon evil to be his good, he is setting the snare that tempts Sartre to condemn man at every instant to invent man; to deny that man has a nature in order to deny that there is a good for man.
Iris Murdoch thinks that Heidegger may be Lucifer in person, but she recognises that existentialism has a Kantian as well as a sur- realist wing, and that both wings are pinioned to the same fallen angel:
'How recognisable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason ... He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age re- quires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.'
Here lies the main message of Miss Murdoch's persuasive book*, in which the Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1967, which gives the book its title, is supported and elaborated by two earlier essays, The Idea of Perfection and On `God' and 'Good'. Recent moral philosophy has-been governed by a shaky coalition in which, for all their prominent differences, Sartre and Hare, Ayer and Hampshire, and at least one of the many Wittgensteins, have made common cause with less respectable limbs of Lucifer. From their initial dogma (a premise thinly disguised as the conclusion of an argument) they have the consistency to draw, and then lack the common sense to reject, the damag- ing consequences that show its unac- ceptability to any philosopher who is determined to be serious about art, literature, morality, politics, religion, or about philosophy itself.
At least since the time of her 1956 article on Vision and Choice in Morality Miss Murdoch has been an eloquent front bench spokesman for the loyal opposition—loyal, that is, to the sovereignty of the good, and to the ordinary recognition of ordinary men and women that some things are right and others wrong, some things good and others bad, independently of being seen, thought, believed or said to be bad, good, wrong, or right, or of being chosen, chased, com- * The Sovereignty of God Iris Murdoch (Routledge and Kegan Paul 28s) mended, commanded, graded, intended or otherwise labelled, tagged, tipped or touted by any human agent.
The leaders of the coalition, who talk much of the 'autonomy of ethics', are not thinking of this kind of independence. What they mean by autonomy is the authenticity of response by which I guarantee to myself that my moral choice and moral judgment are my choice and my judgment, and they believe that this freedom is compromised if my choice and judgment are governed or guided by evidence and argument. The operations of the unconquerable will, if they are to be fully voluntary, must also, it is thought, be wholly arbitrary, so that at the limit I can show my independence only by a gratuitous response to my own situation and to the acts and choices of others.
Some of the consequences of this picture are independently so fashionable that they serve to commend the dogma to a confused generation, and that many will see Miss Murdoch's patient re-affirmations of forgot- ten platitudes as paradoxical if not perverse. She will not accept that sincerity, authen- ticity, integrity is the chief or the only virtue; that I cannot be under an obligation that I have not by act of will incurred with open eyes; that morality is a shop with a stock of inexhaustible variety and controlled prices: 'I enter the shop in a condition of totally responsible freedom, I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select. (A Marxist critique of this con- ception of bourgeois capitalist morals would be apt enough. Should we want many goods in the shop or just "the right goods"? Both as act and reason, shopping is public. Will does not bear upon reason, so "the inner life" is not to be thought of as a moral sphere.'
In her polemic against this 'happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnised by Freud' Miss Murdoch achieves a clarity and dignity of utterance to which she has not always risen in her earlier work either in philosophy or in fiction. Some of the book's main virtues are those of the artist, which are all too seldom allied to those of the philosopher. In urging the claims of contemplation and vision to be prized as highly as action and energy, she displays a powerful energy in pursuit of her vision. What she says of bad art and bad morals is true also of bad philosophy : that it is all fantasy and self- assertion. Miss Murdoch writes good philosophy here because, to adapt a phrase that she quotes from Rilke about Cdzanne, she does not write 'I like it' or even 'I dislike it,' she writes 'There it is.'
Though she believes that art is more im- portant than philosophy for human salva- Lion, and that literature is most important of all, she is drawn back to Plato, who at least tried to believe the opposite, because she shares with him a first-hand understanding and experience of the kinship between philosophy and literature, and also because she rightly sees him as her ally against the works of Lucifer.
The Leslie Stephen lecture restates some of the themes of the earlier essays in the form of an exposition of Plato's conception of the Form of the Good. Some of the details of the interpretation of the dialogues are questionable, but the lecture as a whole is a valuable transposition into a more accessible idiom of some of the central Platonic insights: the unity of the virtues; the inescapable involvement of the moral virtues in artistic creation and in philosophical, scientific and religious inquiry. Above all Plato is invoked as an eloquent witness to what Miss Murdoch thinks we all ought to mean by the autonomy of the good, what she calls its 'for-nothingness'. Ezra Pound's answer to the question 'What use is poetry?' was 'What use are all those flowers in the public parks?' W. H. Auden has spoken of the conceit of the social worker: 'We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.' Nothing can be good for anything unless something is good without being good for anything. Those who speak of the pointlessness of poetry or philosophy, as well as those who speak of the gratuitousness of action and choice, should remember there is more than one way of being pointless: `The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self- contained aimlessness of the universe. Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognise, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form. This form often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy pat- terns of the phantasy, whereas there is noth- ing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the recognisable and familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.'
Miss Murdoch is thinking of some equally familiar rat-runs when she remarks that everyday conversation is not necessarily a morally neutral activity, and that a smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instru- ment of corruption. The same dangers beset all who write on what used to be called the moral sciences, and in disputes about the objectivity of values both sides may need Hume's warning that 'there is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than in philosophical debates to endeavour to refute any hypothesis by a pre- text of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality'. The defenders of freedom against reason have played on our fears of tyranny and inquisition. Some of their opponents have wantonly prophesied an- archy and the abyss. The heart's reasons are so raucous that it is time to listen to a thinker whose head is in the right place. Any- body who believes or has tried to resist any of the fashionable fantasies from which Miss Murdoch seeks to free us has much to learn from a work in which she practises as well as preaches realism, justice and compassion,
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