Readings: Staunchly Equivocal

At the conclusion of this post, I wrote:

“I am hopeful that Murdoch, herself being the author of some really kick-ass novels, will pull art's fat out of Plato's fire by the end of the essay.”

I have since gone on to other essays, and other books, without ever tying up that loose thread. To do so, it would seem to be sufficient to merely let Murdoch put the matter to rest with the closing paragraph of the essay in question, “The Fire and the Sun”:

Plato feared the consolations of art. He did not offer a consoling theology. His psychological realism depicted God as subjecting mankind to a judgment as relentless as that of the old Zeus, although more just. A finely meshed moral causality determines the fate of the soul. That the movement of the saving of Eros is toward an impersonal pictureless void is one of the paradoxes of a complete religion. To present the idea of God at all, even as myth, is a consolation, since it is impossible to defend this image against the prettifying attentions of art. Art will mediate and adorn, and develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his distance. We live now amid the collapse of many such structures, and as religion and metaphysics in the West withdraw from the embraces of art, we are it might seem being forced to become mystics through the lack of any imagery which could satisfy the mind. Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never go away and there is no end to their collusion with art and to the consolations which, perhaps fortunately for the human race, they can provide; and art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing for better and for worse.

Murdoch kind of fudges it in the end, don’t you think? She seems to be saying, You can have art, but be aware, at the same time, that all art is essentially an idolatry, the aesthetic consolations of which are a stumbling block to the pilgrim on the way to perfection. Art is for individuals who are willing to make compromises with Existence and to settle for second best; it is not for aspiring saints.

Art: Murdoch voted for it before she voted against it.

Readings: The Heart of the Matter

At about this time last year I was finishing up my slow, but extremely rewarding reading of Simone Weil’s two-volume Notebooks. A couple of random posts that I put up on my then brand-new blog during the time of that reading can be seen here and here. From these it can be discerned why reading the Notebooks soon branched off into readings of the Bhagavad-Gita and Plato’s Republic.

It happens that the anthology of Iris Murdoch’s writings on philosophy and literature which includes the essay “The Fire and the Sun” (about which I have recently posted below) also contains a review by Murdoch of Weil’s Notebooks. It is a short, dense piece which briefly lays out some of the recurrent themes of Weil’s thought as picked out by Murdoch in her reading. It occurred to me in reading the review that these identified insights could profitably be listed as bullet points, as I will do below. Of the Notebooks, Murdoch writes that

We are presented with a psychology whose sources are in Plato, in Eastern philosophy, and in the disciplines of Christian mysticism, and yet which bears upon contemporary problems of faith and action.

It is here that the bullet points may begin:

• The soul is composed of parts, and justice, and also faith consist in each part performing its own role;
  
• 'The baser parts of myself should love God, but not too much. It would not be God';
  
• We do not know what we are -- (the lesson of psychoanalysis);
  
• Until we become good we are at the mercy of mechanical forces, of which 'gravity' is the general image;
  
• If we give more than we find natural and easy we may hate the recipient;
  
• A sufferer communicates his suffering by ill-treating and distressing others;
  
• All beings tend to use all the power at their disposal;
  
• 'A virtuous action can degrade if there is no available energy at the same level';
  
• We make advances by resisting the mechanism: but there is no reward;
  
• Energy and imagination are on the side of the low motives;
  
• To resist gravity is to suffer the void;
  
• During our apprenticeship good appears negative and empty;
  
• We are helped by meditating on 'absurdities which project light';
  
• When we truly realise the impossibility of good we love it, as we love the mysteries of a religion;
  
• It is upon meditation and not action that progress depends;
  
• 'Action is the pointer of the balance. One must not touch the pointer, but the weights';
  
• 'People suppose that thinking does not pledge them, but it alone pledges us';
  
• It is of no avail to act above one's natural level. (Lesson of the Bhagavad-Gita.)
  

Any one of these items could launch a long discussion; in concert they compose a world-view and the basis of a spiritual existentialism that has affected me as the thought of no other “contemporary” thinker.

Reflections: Socrates as Rock Star

As a lover of art – especially the art of prose fiction – I have always been somewhat put off and confused by Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal Republic. Poetry, words, it seemed to me, were the wheels on which we might hope to be carried towards the truth. Fiction had the capability of embodying myth; myth had the capability of embodying eternal Truth. Not much of what is written rises to that level, as I well understood. But still it seemed to me that, at the very least, the poets should be exiled on a case-by-case basis, and not across the board.

Although it is a very long essay, and she is unfolding her thesis slowly and carefully, I believe that I can confidently assume from the point I’m now at, that the “fire” of Iris Murdoch’s piece “The Fire and the Sun”—that is, the lesser light in Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” – represents the upper limit of what art can achieve. She writes:

The Good (truth, reality) is absent from us and hard of access, but it is there and only the Good will satisfy. This fact is concealed by the consoling image-making ego in the guise of the artist whom every one of us to some extent is. Art with its secret claim to supreme power blurs the distinction between the presence and the absence of reality, and tries to cover up with charming imagery the harsh but inspiring truth of the distance between man and God.

She discusses this not only in terms of “poetry” in the broadest sense of the word, but also with reference to other arts, such as painting. Even philosophy itself is apparently suspect:

The strongest motive to philosophy is probably the same as the strongest motive to art; the desire to become the Demiurge and reorganize chaos in accordance with one’s own excellent plan.

Wow. I mean, I was aware that many a rock star first picked up a guitar more in the hope of one day getting "access" to most any chick that caught his fancy, than of making great music. But philosophers with ulterior motives? Who knew?

I am hopeful that Murdoch, herself being the author of some really kick-ass novels, will pull art's fat out of Plato's fire by the end of the essay.

Reflections: On the Imperfection of Existence

From the ridiculousness of my last two posts, back to the sublime of Plato. Here, through the agency of the character Timaeus, Plato contemplates the origins of the physical universe:

Timaeus: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.

Monotheists in the tradition of Abraham will note that Plato's creator—the Demiurge—is good, but is not omnipotent. Everything that he constructs, using the raw materials available to him, is good only so far as good things can be made of imperfect material. He is making beautiful, but essentially imperfect, copies, modeled on the Ideas of the Intellect or Mind Most High. So our world is neither created ex nihilo, nor is there any need of a Fall to explain the presence in our world of that which is less-than-good.

As for the situation in which we find ourselves relative to existence, Iris Murdoch notes in her essay “The Fire and the Sun” that:

Order is obviously more beautiful and good than disorder… Our participation in [this joy] must, however, be seen as modest. The contact with changeless truth brought about through insight into pure living mind can only for incarnate beings be limited and occasional, and we are likely to see more of necessary causes than of divine causes. The truth which we can grasp is something quiet, small in extent (Philebus, 52 C), and to be found only in the lived real moment of direct apprehension out of which the indirectness of mimetic art and writing and perhaps language and discursive thought itself always tends to remove us. Those who want to be saved should look at the stars and talk philosophy, not write or go to the theater.

Necessary causes that bind us to the material, to contingency—expressed by Simone Weil as that “gravity” of downward motion which impedes the upward-tending desire for grace—keeps us trapped, and moving horizontally, in a linear motion across time; time which is the created ape of eternity. Circular motion around an axis being infinitely more perfect than progress from point A to point B, the best we can hope for is to keep to the straight and narrow path on our journey—avoiding as best we can the many temptations gesturing from the shadows beneath the glittering lights of the broad way to perdition.

The conservative, then, as symbolized by circular motion, should be more perfect than the progressive. What is the cause of conservatism’s failure to partake of a larger portion of the grace offered by the beauty and the goodness of existence? Why does conservatism fail so badly in the service of love?

Reflections: The Marriage of Politics and Religion

I recall once making what I thought to be the non-controversial observation that Plato was a "religious philosopher" in a comment box discussion, only to have the jamoke with whom I was arguing tell me flat-out that I was wrong. I wish that I had had Iris Murdoch's essay on Plato, "The Fire and the Sun" on hand at the time so that I could have backed up my statement with the following excerpt:

Plato's work is...largely concerned with ways to salvation. We may speak of a (democratic) "way of justice" which, without necessarily leading to enlightenment, is open to anyone who is able to harmonize the different levels of his soul moderately well under the general guidance of reason. The characteristic desires of each level would not be eliminated, but would in fact, under rational leadership, achieve their best general satisfaction. The baser part is really happier if rationally controlled. The reasonable egoism would be accessible to the lower orders in the Republic. Plato certainly thought that few could be 'saved', but allowed that many might lead a just life at their own spiritual level.

That should settle things for the religiously minded. Any philosophy that is "largely concerned with ways to salvation" is certainly concerned with the "religious."

That said, on the same page Murdock throws out some tidbits for the intractably political, particularly those of a partisan bent. Plato, she says, taught that "most people want power not virtue and must be trained by pleasure and pain to prefer justice." That's grim enough. "Political systems make men good or bad", she adds. I agree completely. It is the role of the progressive (the good) to train the bad (the conservative) to "prefer justice" by the application of pain (confiscatory taxation). At this juncture do religion and politics form an uneasy union, allowing us to get on with the daunting task of making a better world for men at every spiritual level.

Readings: More-doch and More

Before I did my last cannonball into the cesspool that is politics, I probably left the impression to all the indifferent that I had taken my leave of Iris Murdoch. And so, at the time, I thought I had. I had read two of the three essays in the volume and had decided to take a pass on number three. Then I changed my mind and read it anyway. A flip-flop of a different magnitude. Needless to say, there are essential excerpts to be posted here. You can read them and think about them, or you can continue to scratch your ass and think about what you're going to buy next, and how you can get a better deal on yours than Jones got on his. G'head: flip a coin on it.

I am also reading this book. I saw the author on C-SPAN and decided to check it out. Anybody who didn't live through the 'sixties and would like to get a visceral feel for what they were like from the autobiography of a woman who was totally engaged in what was going down, should check it out.

Now, without further comment, Iris Murdoch, from the essay “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts” in The Sovereignty of the Good:

Asking what Good is is not like asking what Truth is or what Courage is, since in explaining the latter the idea of Good must enter in, it is that in the light of which the explanation must proceed. …Even the concept of Truth has its ambiguities and it is really only of Good that we can say ‘it is the trial of itself and needs no other touch’.
_____

The indefinability of Good is connected with the unsystematic and inexhaustible variety of the world and the pointlessness of virtue. In this respect there is a special link between the concept of Good and the ideas of Death and Chance. (One might say that Chance is really a subdivision of Death. It is certainly our most effective memento mori.) A genuine sense of mortality enables us to see virtue as the only thing of worth; and it is impossible to limit and foresee the ways in which it will be required of us.
____

We are largely mechanical creatures, the slaves of relentlessly strong selfish forces the nature of which we scarcely comprehend. At best, as decent persons, we are usually very specialized. We behave well in areas where this can be done fairly easily and let other areas of possible virtue remain undeveloped. There are perhaps in the case of every human being insuperable psychological barriers to goodness. The self is a divided thing and the whole of it cannot be redeemed any more than it can be known. And if we look outside the self what we see are scattered intimations of Good. There are few places where virtue plainly shines: great art, humble people who serve others. And can we, without improving ourselves, really see these things clearly? It is in the context of such limitations that we should picture our freedom.
_____

This attempt…[to turn the] attention away from the particular, may be the thing that helps most when difficulties seem insoluble, and especially when feelings of guilt keep attracting the gaze back towards the self. This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted.
_____

Good is the magnetic center towards which love naturally moves. False love moves to false good. False love embraces false death. When true good is loved, even impurely or by accident, the quality of love is automatically refined, and when the soul is turned towards Good the highest part of the soul is enlivened. Love is the tension between the imperfect soul and the magnetic perfection which is conceived of as lying beyond it.
_____

The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. …Simone Weil tells us that the exposure of the soul to God condemns the selfish part of it not to suffering but to death. The humble man perceives the distance between suffering and death. And although he is not by definition the good man perhaps he is the kind of man who is most likely of all to become good.

Reflections: Getting Away With Murdoch

I had intended to be done with Iris Murdoch’s essay with my previous post. I had a new topic all picked out, and had even taken a few notes in anticipation of starting to write. But as I read the final ten pages of the Murdock piece I kept coming across passages that seemed essential; passages that struck a sympathetic chord with elements of my belief system. I didn’t want to return the book to the library without preserving these. So, here they are:

It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.

Think of that one in terms of the command to love your enemy.

Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action. It is what lies behind and in between actions and prompts them that is important, and it is this area which should be purified. By the time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of attention has probably determined the nature of the act.

Think of that one in terms of the saying: The Truth shall set you free.

If the energy and violence of will, exerted on occasions of choice, seems less important than the quality of attention which determines our real attachments, how do we alter and purify that attention and make it more realistic? Is the via negativa of the will, its occasional ability to stop a bad move, the only or most considerable conscious power that we can exert?

I have never been convinced by the teaching of the Church that Quietism is wrong.

I think it is more than a verbal point to say that what should be aimed at is goodness, and not freedom or right action, although right action, and freedom in the sense of humility, are the natural products of attention to the Good.

Consider how humility, the ability to free oneself from the urge, the ego-driven compulsion, of competing to keep on top of Mr. Jones, would liberate the spirit.

Right action, together with the steady extension of the area of strict obligation, is a proper criterion of virtue.

Wrap your mind around the seeming paradox of obligation as freedom. If you are in need, and I pass you by, to what have I subordinated myself?

Reflections: The Elusive Butcher Knife of Love

In yesterday’s Quote du Jour we saw Iris Murdoch finger the ego as the enemy of the moral enterprise. Today we quote, from the same essay, her identification of the ego’s chief product, fantasy, as the antagonist of excellence in either the moral, or the artistic life:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one. Rilke said of Cézanne that he did not paint ‘I like it’, he painted ‘There it is.’

Murdoch is here again speaking in terms of Simone Weil’s concept of attention; attention as the form of prayer:

Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. With it goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavor which overcomes empirical limitations of personality.

Through attention one transcends the ego. Through attention one defeats the runaway imagination. Through attention one approaches the Real, the ‘There it is.’ A bit further on Murdoch states:

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake…

Consolation, then, is a function of the imagination; an attachment to and reliance upon the unreal.

Several days ago, as I was looking for a roll of tape in one of those catch-all drawers of which there are several in almost every human dwelling, I came across a 3x5 card, yellowed with age, upon which I had many years ago scribbled a quote by Canadian novelist, Robertson Davies. The card has been clipped to the monitor of this computer since I found it. It reads:

The business of art is not beauty. The business of art is to butcher whatever coddles the mind.

Remarkable, is it not, how this card turned up just in the nick of time, to add a layer of understanding to my reading of Murdoch’s essay?

The message, then: Truly objective art, made possible by attention, “butchers” false consolation—that coddler of daydreaming minds—and, like supernatural grace, renders the moral agent capable of love.

Ah, but if one still has God in this decadent age, that attention is known as prayer.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: The Davies quote is probably taken from The Deptford Trilogy

Readings: Quote du Jour

In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.

~ Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, "On 'God' and 'Good'"

Reflections: All That and a Place for Grace

Iris Murdoch concludes her essay “The Idea of Perfection”, on which I based a previous post, with the following sentence:

[The] sketch which I have offered, a footnote in a great and familiar philosophical tradition, must be judged by is power to connect, to illuminate, to explain, and to make new and fruitful places for reflection.

Her purpose in the essay was to refute the analytic, positivist, existentialist-behavioralist proposition that morality meets reality only in action. I think that she proves her point. But I do not want to paraphrase her argument here. Her book is in print and, if you care to, you can find it and read it for yourself. What I will do, in the spirit of her closing sentence, is provide a few excerpts containing ideas that helped me understand the plotting of her thesis, and which, in themselves, are “fruitful places for reflection”:

In suggesting that the central concept of morality is ‘the individual’ thought of as knowable by love, thought of in the light of the command, ‘Be ye therefore perfect’, I am not, in spite of the philosophical backing which I might here resort to, suggesting anything in the least esoteric. In fact this would, to the ordinary person, be a very much more familiar image than the existentialist one.
____

The argument for looking outward at Christ and not inward at Reason is that self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see nothing else. But as I say, so long as the gaze is directed upon the ideal the exact formulation will be a matter of history and tactics in a sense which is not rigidly determined by religious dogma, and understanding of the ideal will be partial in any case. Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking.
____

As Plato observes at the end of the Phaedrus, words themselves do not contain wisdom. Words said to particular individuals at particular times may occasion wisdom. Words, moreover, have both spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts. We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their contexts. (Often we cannot.)
____

The notion of privileged access to inner events has been held morally suspect because, among other things, it would separate people from ‘the ordinary world of rational argument’. But the unavoidable contextual privacy of language already does this, and except at a very simple and conventional level of communication there is no such ordinary world. This conclusion is feared and avoided by many moralists because it seems inimical to the operation of reason and because reason is construed on a scientific model.
____

It is totally misleading to speak…of ‘two cultures’, one literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status. There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, is now an important part. But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words.
____

I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
____

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices.

____

Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important : less decisive (since much of the ‘decision’ lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be ‘cultivated’. If I attend properly I will have no choice and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.
____

This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’. … This is what Simone Weil means when she says that ‘will is obedience not resolution’.
____

If we picture the agent as compelled by obedience to the reality he can see, he will not be saying ‘This is right’, i.e., ‘I choose to do this’, he will be saying ‘This is A B C D’ (normative-descriptive words), and action will follow naturally.

____

We often receive an unforeseen reward for a fumbling half-hearted act: a place for the idea of grace.

Amen to that!

Reflections: Does Action Exhaust Goodness?

Many moons ago, when I was taking a few philosophy courses as an undergraduate, I was bored by the analytic school and sent into a coma-like state by the logical positivists. I wanted to talk about Plato, or else I wanted to talk about Sartre. I still want to talk about Plato.

That said, there is a little corner in my billfold into which I tuck, scribbled on little scraps and ripped-off corners of paper, the titles and library call numbers of books that some other book, or maybe a book review, or a website, has prompted me to want to look into sometime in the hazy future. Yesterday I came across the tiny tatter bearing the title The Sovereignty of Good, by Iris Murdoch. I have no memory of why I noted that title for future reference. Nor could I give you any reason why I went up into the stacks, found the book, and checked it out two days ago. Nonetheless, consider the following excerpt and see if it doesn’t bring a new angle of consideration to the thoughts expressed in my last post. Consider especially the statement “Morality resides at the point of action.”

Does it? I didn’t think so...

From Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, “The Idea of Perfection”:

(Here, Murdoch lays out the worldview, according to theories of analytic philosophy, which she intends to refute)

[Along with others] Wittgenstein has created a void into which neo-Kantianism, existentialism, utilitarianism have made haste to enter. And notice how plausibly the arguments, their prestige enhanced from undoubted success in other fields, seem to support, indeed to impose, the image of personality which I have sketched above.* As the ‘inner life’ is hazy, largely absent, and any way ‘not part of the mechanism’**, it turns out to be logically impossible to take up an idle contemplative attitude to the good. Morality must be action since mental concepts can only be analyzed genetically. Metaphors of movement and not vision seem obviously appropriate. Morality, with the full support of logic, abhors the private. Salvation by works is a conceptual necessity. What I am doing or being is not something private and personal, but is imposed upon me in the sense of being identifiable only via public concepts and objective observers. Self-knowledge is something which shows overtly. Reasons are public reasons, rules are public rules. Reason and rule represent a sort of impersonal tyranny in relation to which however the personal will represents perfect freedom. The machinery is relentless, but until the moment of choice the agent is outside the machinery. Morality resides at the point of action. What I am ‘objectively’ is not under my control; logic and observers decide that. What I am ‘subjectively’ is a foot-loose, solitary, substanceless will. Personality dwindles to a point of pure will.
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* "This ‘man’...is the hero of almost every contemporary novel. ...He says ‘all problems meet in intention’, and he utters in relation to intention the only explicit ‘ought’ in his psychology. We ought to know what we are doing. We should aim at total knowledge of our situation and a clear conceptualization of all our possibilities. Thought and intention must be directed towards definite overt issues or else they are merely day-dream. ...Mental life is, and logically must be, a shadow of life in public. Our personal being is the movement of our overtly choosing will [which is] separated from belief so that the authority of reason, which manufactures belief, may be entire and so that responsibility for action may be entire as well. My responsibility is a function of my knowledge (which tries to be wholly impersonal) and my will (which is wholly personal). Morality is a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with other men."

** "Actions are, roughly, instances of moving things about in the public world. Nothing counts as an act unless it is a ‘bringing about of a recognizable change in the world’."