The Evangelical Atheists

It may be worth noting right at the start that the name I suggested for this little talk was “The Evangelical Atheists.” [Someone]changed the title in your Newsletter to “The Cost of Tolerance.” He thought the latter title was more likely to draw an audience than the former. All in all, I think it is probably a better title, but Dawkins and Harris and Dennett would probably be offended by the change of title. They are not ashamed of their stance; they do, indeed, want to proselytize; they think it is important, even crucial, that supernaturalism be abandoned, and that so-called religious ethics be replaced by a genuine ethic. Along with Christopher Hitchens, they believe that organized religion is one of the gravest dangers facing the world today, and that liberals and moderates in their insistence on tolerance for all faiths are actually playing into the hands of religious fundamentalists all over the world. Their claim is that the cost of tolerance is high indeed, so high that we can no longer afford it.

I want to talk about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and his later book, Letter to a Christian Nation, and Christopher Hitchens’ god is Not Great:How Religion Spoils Everything. What I am hoping is that my little overview will get you to read just the first chapters of each of these books. If you do that, I think you will quickly see that the derogatory press they have gotten is not deserved; I think you will find that you want to read beyond the first chapters of all or most of them, and that you will realize the dangers they warn us of are real. Perhaps we need to re-examine our religious pluralism and the belief that somehow all faiths can somehow be reconciled.

It was actually a comment made by someone in this congregation when I was here last year that instigated my examination of these atheistic thinkers. I had quoted with approval the opening lines of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metahphysics, “Why is there anything at all, why not far more nothing?” This, he insists, is a mystery, but not one that is to be solved, but rather simply to be lived. He hastens to add that Christians flee the mystery; they think they have answered the question, but it is not answerable. It is more like a Zen koan, something we are to ponder; we are faced with the mystery of existence, and the task is to remain in the mystery, open to the mystery, not to flee into some tidy and safe explanation. In that address last year, I also mentioned my admiration for Richard Dawkins’ early work, The Selfish Gene, and the person from this congregation claimed (both during the service and in a conversation with me afterwards) that Dawkins, like Christianity and other world religions, thinks modern science has solved the mystery. I did not remember Dawkins in that way, and hence began my perusal of the new atheists. While I came to understand this person’s objection better as I read Dawkins, and I, too, detected a kind of arrogance in Dawkins and Dennett that I do not like, I think that they are not guilty of supposing the mystery has been answered. It seems to me that both Dawkins and Dennett think that the more we come to know about the universe, the more wonderful and awe-inspiring it seems.

Dawkins, in particular, insists that he is not attacking what he calls Einsteinian religion, but only supernaturalism and supernatural gods. Indeed, he names his first chapter “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer”, and begins it with this quote from Einstein: “I don’t try too imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.” Hitchens in his first chapter remarks, “We [atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe…” and he continues, “If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or ‘end of days’ story….. Now at last you can be properly humble in the face of your maker, which turns out not to be a ‘who,’ but a process of mutation with rather more random elements than our vanity might wish. This is more than enough mystery and marvel for any mammal to be getting along with: the most educated person in the world now has to admit…..that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

Yes, it is true that all of these thinkers believe that the supernaturalist ‘explanations’ of the universe are silly and simplistic and unreasonable, and they think that scientific hypotheses about cosmology and biology are much, much better, much closer to the truth. And yes, they think that we would be foolish not to accept the hypothesis that animals and plants on the earth have evolved over immense periods of time, but they do not think that science has all the answers or that the fundamental mysteries have been solved. Indeed, they are quite willing to talk about spirituality and spiritual values, but they think that spirituality need not be (and should not be) confused with religion, and especially not with supernatural beings or events. Again quoting Einstein with admiration, Dawkins includes in his first chapter this remark of Einstein: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Dawkins insists that many scientists who seem to be religious, who accentuate the complexity of the universe, turn out not to be religious when you study what they say more carefully. {Incidentally, I have found this to be true as well. A good example of this is Paul Davies’ book, God and the New Physics, which has nothing at all do with god or gods.} At any rate, it is supernaturalism in all its forms that Dawkins decries, not the sort of humility in the face of complexity that one finds in Einstein, or, I think, in many of you. If that is the only sense in which you are religious, he has no quarrel with you. He does, however, think it a mistake for Einstein or anyone else to name this complexity, this mystery, god—both because it is misleading, and because it plays into the hands of supernaturalists. I think he is right about this. I recall after I first began to read extensively in biology and astronomy, I still called myself a theist, and when pressed would say that god was a whirling ball of energy. I understand my attempt to express my fascination with the incredible work being done in astronomy, the larger and larger universe it was disclosing to me, but I think my friends who urged me to stop ‘lying’ to people, misleading them by calling myself a theist, were right in their admonition. God-talk has a long history and the word ‘god’ a meaning that I cannot simply discard, stipulating in its place some meaning more respectable and more in line with scientific discovery. It is not simply misleading to play so fast and loose with the language, it is more dangerous than that. It constitutes a form of collusion.

So, among other things, what these evangelical atheists are claiming is that the scientific story about the universe is much better, more full of wonder, more complex and breathtaking than any of the rather simple and silly creation myths of the great religions, and that it is not simply a denial of common sense, but something far more dangerous (even sinister) to give any sort of allegiance to such stories. Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way,’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardy tapped by the conventional faiths.”

Dawkins concludes his remarks on Sagan: “All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration… As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.”

Hitchens is, if anything, even more adamant in insisting that the scientific story about the universe is more awe-inspiring and more worthy of respect than any simplistic religious myth, and that our awe in the face of existence ought to increase with our understanding of science rather than decrease. He takes issue with Dawkins and Dennett for allowing themselves to be identified with the ‘brights,’ a group of atheistic, anti-supernaturalists who, Hitchens thinks, give anti-religionists a bad name (due to its arrogance, and the implication that religious people are dim). But his attack is less about religion’s insult to science than on the moral consequences of what he calls the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Indeed, in all of the books I will talk about today, while they may begin with a rejection of supernaturalism on scientific grounds, it is the moral consequences of religious belief that they are most frightened of and most eager to combat. {Impressive to me that scientists are talking about morality—something that for many years seemed, if not taboo, at least very much out of style.}

So, while these atheists are concerned with leading us away from religious myth and towards a more mature, more complex, more in line with reason explanation typified by modern science, and while they do think science has been given short shrift, usually by people who understand almost nothing of its story, their biggest concern is with the immorality perpetuated by religion, while these same religions claim to be the very seat of morality. I think it is this attack on religious immorality in their books that has really set people on edge, partly because the world we live in is so dangerous, so hate-filled, and often enough we want to avert our faces from what is happening in the larger world. At any rate, we do not want to stoke the fires of hatred. Thus, that these thinkers seem to be advocating intolerance is shocking, when we know that tolerance is such an important virtue, such an essential component of any decent ethic. However, these men, Hitchens and Harris in particular, force us to look hard at what is happening and of how, if we really pay attention to religious texts, really attempt to understand what it would mean to take them literally, live by them literally, we would see that murder and mayhem are the natural consequences of the Abrahamic religions, rather than the product of a few mistaken fanatics who are acting against the scriptures. Although I will not do it here, all of these atheists, especially Hitchens, provide quote after quote of the price of apostasy. A careful reading of the scriptures makes it clear that religious moderates, along with those who call themselves agnostics or atheists, are all in the same boat when it comes to their eternal fate, and the duty of the fundamentalists is to root them out and kill them. You folks, many of whom may be casualties of some fundamentalist religion or another, come together in fellowship attempting to preserve from religion what seems good to you while avoiding the intolerance and brutality of fundamentalism. But seen from inside religious fundamentalism, you are dangerous, perhaps even more dangerous than the apostate, and what you see as enlightenment, they will see as poison. Thus, your tolerance will have a price.

Let me quote a few more passages from these books, mostly to give you some feeling for their moral objections to religion as well as to suggest where they think we should go from here.

Hitchens: “There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that is ultimately grounded in wish-thinking.” And he continues, “We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better towards each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” And he concludes, “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted… As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.” {I have admit that Hitchens is adamant to the point of being brutal in his assessment of religion. Still, if you read him, I think you will see why.}

If Hawkins and Dennett are aiming primarily at supernaturalist religions and religious fundamentalists, Sam Harris is critical of a far wider group. Beginning with quotes from Deuteronomy in the Old Testament and passages from the Koran on just how those from other religions (and those who believe in other gods) are to treated, i.e., exterminated, he begins to explain how and why he thinks religious moderates are aiding and abetting what they see as simply extremists.
“Our situation is this: most of the people in the world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions—according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: ‘respect’ for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

And he continues, “Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner or our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated…. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs---antithetical to our survival.”

I must confess, perhaps because of my political leanings, to be one of those who thinks that it must be economics that is behind horrible and desperate terrorist acts. Hitchens and Harrris point out how many terrorists are neither poor nor uneducated. Both have obviously read the sacred scriptures of the main religions, carefully and many times. When they make claims about what those scriptures say about dealing with infidels, they back up their claims immediately with lengthy and very explicit quotes. Indeed, they urge all of us to really read the scriptures of religions other than our own, both to see how their claims to absolute truth are as adamant as ours, and to see that their ‘arguments’ are every bit as bad (though no worse) than those of our favorite religion. Thus, for both of these men, to be a moderate Mormon, Catholic, Jew is simply to support Mormonism, Catholicism, Judaism. As I used to say to my students, especially those at the House of Studies (a Catholic lay organization that prepares young men who are considering the priesthood), if you wear the collar, no matter how often you insist that you don’t believe that only Catholics are saved, that abortion is always and everywhere wrong, that women are best seen as the handmaidens of men, the collar announces quite a different set of beliefs, and it speaks louder than the individual voice. And while claiming to be a theist does not mean necessarily that you think infidels will go to hell or that only belief in your god can save you, the scriptures will say otherwise, and even your tepid allegiance to the name, Mormon, Christian, Muslim makes you complicit in the acts done in the name of religious faith.

What I see as the unifier of these quite different thinkers (besides their championing of science over superstition, rational discourse over revelation) is their insistence that morality is separate from religion, and, indeed, that religious models of morality are dangerous and false. The moderates who have stayed within their religions have not become more moderate because of the religion and its sacred texts, but for moral reasons not in the religion but (in important ways) opposed to it. As one of my teachers used to insist (though he was, himself, a Mormon), religious beliefs must be tried in the crucible of morality, not the other way around. Genuine morality will require one to rethink and to reject much of the so-called moral teachings of their religion. In Harris’ words, “Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors. If we would speak of the baseness of our natures, our willingness to live, kill, and die on account of propositions for which we have no evidence should be among the first topics of discussion.” It is moral enlightenment and social progress that has reformed religion and religious practices where and when they have been reformed, not the other way around. So, why stay within the fold, why try to reform from within, when the core cause of the immoral practices is the religion itself and its claim to be the one and only Truth?

Dennett, the philosopher, quotes with approval the anonymous but provocative statement: “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” But the questioning must start, faith claims must be scrutinized; religious beliefs are not merely personal; they have dire moral and political consequences. Thus, they must, like all of our beliefs, be scrutinized—put to the test of reason and evidence. I admire the philosophical writings of Augustine and Aquinas, but they concluded (as Harris points out) that heretics should be tortured or killed outright. “Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.” It was not lack of knowledge of scripture that led these great men to advocate such atrocities, but instead their intimate knowledge of and adherence to these texts. As Harris concludes, “Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality.”

Let me close by mentioning one bright note in all of this. Fifty years ago, many (even most) philosophers and scientists would not even talk about morality, and certainly did not think that either science or deep thought had much to tell us about morality. Instead, many of them considered moral utterances to be simply emotive, non-cognitive, simply expressions of taste. Whether overtly or not, these positivists provided arguments for the ethical relativists, for the view that nothing is really right or wrong and that all moral judgments are simply statements of cultural preference. Slavery, infanticide, clitoridectomy, none of these practices is really wrong, but simply approved of by one culture and time and place, and disapproved by another. I find none of that offhand relativism in any of these writers. Clearly when women and children are violated, raped, murdered, mutilated, these acts are wrong. While Harris and Dawkins may believe that morality has not yet been scrutinized scientifically, and the origins of morality not fully explained, they think it is both obvious and true that torture and rape and murder are wrong, and that the origins of morality, itself, both can and need to be studied and understood. They dare to use moral criticism of belief systems, even to criticize science for its failure to take moral concerns as real and as theirs. I was not offended by any of these books. I was shocked and horrified at what they reported and documented, afraid for our future from the implications of what they had to say. But it is not these writers who are the enemy. They are voices of reason and of morality, and at the very least we should give them a serious read.

In his preface, Dawkins insists: “You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages.” And, indeed, he thinks we all ought to strive for just such a stance. He is quite content to be a proselyte, and a proselytizer.

Iris Murdoch: Moral Philosophy and the Novel

While writing an essay on the use of the novel in teaching philosophy, I began to reread some Iris Murdoch novels as well as her philosophical essays. The more I read, the more I wanted to write specifically about Murdoch. Her novels, while thoroughly entertaining and superbly crafted, are always deeply serious and uplifting; uplifting both in the sense that one feels somehow instructed and improved through reading them, and in that one feels more hopeful about human beings and about the future. She escapes the easy roads of cynicism and pessimism (which I find in so many otherwise excellent novelists), but not by sentimentalizing or romanticizing the human condition. Murdoch is convinced that one task of the artist (and especially the novelist) is to disclose the human condition in its current historical configuration--to bring lived-life out of concealment.

I want to say in this essay just why I think Murdoch is such an important ethical theorist and philosopher. Since I mean this for an audience sufficiently broad that I cannot presuppose an intimate knowledge of either Murdoch’s essays or her novels, I will attempt a brief overview that will at the same time indicate some of why I think she is such an important writer. In order to present and discuss her ethical theory, I will also have to present her general worldview and her aesthetic theory.

Murdoch believes that there is a real world out there! In these days of rampant relativism in which not only truth and moral rightness are depicted as hopelessly relative, but when some even take ‘the real world’ to be simply a construction of ours (so that attempts to arrive at the truth are seen as anachronistic drivel), Murdoch’s ‘realism’ deserves attention. Although a good and sympathetic critic of both existentialism and current analytic philosophy, Murdoch often refers back to Plato at crucial moments in the development of both her epistemology and her ethics. For her, there is a real world, objective and quite apart from us, and the task of both the philosopher and the artist is to reveal that world to us. (It is also the task of the chemist/biologist/psychologist/etc.) However, the real world (or things-as-they-are-in-themselves, or Being, or, if you prefer, simply the That) eludes us because of the sort of beings that we are. We are selfish, and not only in a way that makes us more-or-less morally blind, but in a way that makes us more-or-less blind to the objective world as a whole. We are fascinated with the world-out-there, but in such a way that our fascination blinds us to much of what is really there, for our fascination is overwhelmingly I-centered. Much of what we call thinking or studying or doing art is really a kind of daydreaming--telling ourselves I-centered stories about what is going on. “It is a task to see the world as it is.” {The Sovereignty of Good, p. 91; hence forward referred to simply as TSG}

Murdoch claims that we are selfish beings (naturally but not necessarily) and we attempt to see the world through blinders that are both selfish and culturally determined. Furthermore, there is no human-independent purpose for human existence; the world is not teleological (no matter how much we wish it were). Her stress on the purposelessness of human existence is similar to that of the existentialist philosophers, although she is critical of other major themes in existentialism, especially Sartrean value-theory. “I assume that human beings are naturally selfish and that human life has no external point or telos.” {TSG, p. 78} One consequence of this non-teleological view is a belief in the reality of death. One of many anxieties that cause us to create a falsifying veil partially concealing the world from us is our fear of death, one of many ways in which concerns for self prevent us from seeing things as they are. Unlike many of the existentialists (and I am thinking especially of early Sartre and Camus), Murdoch does not confuse lack of a telos with meaninglessness or nihilism; human beings have purposes and meanings, it is the universe that does not. “There are properly many patterns and purposes within life, but there is no general and as it were externally guaranteed pattern or purpose of the kind for which philosophers and theologians used to search. We are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance.” {TSG, p. 79}

Murdoch does not argue for either the claim that human beings are selfish or that human existence is non-teleological. These she calls assumptions or assertions, but not ones that are simply the products of “the despair of our own age”; rather they are products of “the advance of science over a long period.” Adding to our anxiety over death is the chancy nature of human life. ‘Chance’ not here being used as a synonym for contra-causal, but as a way of insisting on the non-teleological nature of our lives. Randomness (again, in the sense of non-purpose) is a real feature of human existence: our best intentions may be thwarted by a fall on the ice; we are not ‘meant’ to die, but neither are we ‘meant’ to live. “.....the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self.”

Often when one encounters such insistence on non-teleology (which gets called purposelessness), the view projected seems to be bleak and dreary and pessimistic. Not so for Murdoch! For while death and randomness are real, so is good. Here, Murdoch parts company with (most) existentialists. She was one of the first analytic philosophers who was sympathetic to Sartre (and to existentialism generally), but she also pointed out very clearly the hopeless relativism involved in the Sartrean claim that value is literally created by choice. {See her excellent early work on Sartre, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist} While she does not take up specifically Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” which, I think, requires him to locate value in the choosing subject rather than in objective features of the world, it is obvious that Murdoch believes that right acts are right (though she prefers to talk of ‘good’ rather than ‘right’) because of the way the world is, not because of any state of mind of the agent. “The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality.” {TSG, p. 90}

Let me now attempt an outline of Murdoch’s ethical theory; one needs to remember, however, that for Murdoch the attempt to spell out a theory of good is always incomplete (because, agreeing with G.E. Moore, good is simple and unanalyzable), and philosophical (discursive) essay is not sufficient for doing ethical theory even in its necessarily incomplete form. Art, especially the novel, is necessary (not merely convenient or a short-cut) for doing ethics. (More of these two points later. She spells both out very clearly in TSG.)

Murdoch is convinced that both existentialism and contemporary analytic philosophy err in seeing goodness (ethics) as essentially a function of will. It is not choice or ‘freedom’ that makes human beings moral beings; nor is goodness tied up in any necessary way with “the examined life” (and here, she is taking on Plato’s claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living”). Contrary to Plato’s claim that the worth of a life must be connected to self-examination, most of Murdoch’s examples of good human beings are relatively ‘simple’ and not particularly self-reflective people. The key to morality is attention to others, as opposed to (the natural) gaze that returns to the self. Note here that this gaze towards self is not always what we ordinarily mean by being selfish. Guilt can return the gaze to the self, as can rage or resentment or even grief. Murdoch loves to present her readers with characters who are otherwise good (or could be), but who are blinded by guilt, rage, fear, resentment, lust, etc. and who build up habits engendered by the particular blindness. Both good (attention) and bad (inattention) become habitual, and habits are hard to break or to incrementally build.

Murdoch approaches this rather difficult and complex subject of attention through an analogy with art. The (good) artist learns by degrees to attend to her/his subject, and to attend in such a way that self is lost, is absorbed into the focused attention. (The good biologist likewise must attend away from self and towards the object of study.) The artist, qua artist, is attempting to disclose or reveal her subject, and this requires incredible attention away from self. But this is no easy task, for “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.” {TSG, p. 84} “Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.” {TSG, p. 86}

The not-self attention characteristic of good art is attained not through heroic acts of will, and likewise the good act is not achieved through such moments of free-will, but, rather, through a slow process of learning to attend to others, which is learning to really look. The good act arises naturally out of that incremental and preparatory attention, not from any sudden decision to act against inclination (as philosophers seem to suggest). “A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality.” {TSG, p. 91} In one of her rare disagreements with Plato (who was suspicious of art as honeyed words that seduce and entertain instead of revealing), Murdoch insists that the task of the good artist is not simply to create beauty or to entertain, but to reveal truth; it is not simply “...a diversion or a side-issue. It is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen.” {TSG, p. 88} The moral philosopher and the moral person are, therefore, looking for a particular sort of truth, one that requires attention away from self and towards (the real needs of) others.

Murdoch insists that both existentialists and analytic philosophers have focused too much on will and freedom, rather than on careful attention to the way the world is (specifically the way other people are rather than on how they appear to us in terms of our own goals and projects). “The area of its [the psyche’s] vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self.” {TSG, pps. 78-9} So morality is much more a function of truth (of how the world and others really are) than it is a matter of will, and it requires attention rather than heroism.

Again, contra existentialism and positivistic theories of value, good is not merely subjective and certainly is not brought into existence via the individual’s choice. “The ordinary person does not, unless corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates values by his choices.” {TSG, p. 97} Rather, “...value concepts are....patently tied on to the world, they are stretched as it were between the truth-seeking mind and the world, they are not moving about on their own as adjuncts of the personal will.” {TSG, p. 90} If I may enlarge on this slightly, good is not a function of will or consciousness, but of what human beings really are. Human beings bleed; they are mortal; they require sustenance in order to live; they fear death and enslavement and the heel of the oppressor. Morality is objective rather than subjective because it depends on what is the case, on what human beings really are, not on what we believe to be the case or what we choose to value. (And I don’t mean to restrict this to our moral/immoral behavior to humans. It is because cats feel pain that it is morally wrong, not good, to torture them. And even if we see cats as devils, our so seeing them will not magically make our torture of them good. Just as our seeing black people, or women, or Jews as somehow not human does not make them not human. Morality is determined by what beings are, not what we believe them to be.)

Let me sum this up by taking a quote from Murdoch (somewhat out of context): “My work is a progressive revelation of something that exists independent of me.” {TSG, p. 89} Murdoch understands that it is no accident that Sartre (despite his promises) never produced an ethic; morality is tied up necessarily with what we are as human beings (our essence), and in denying that we are essentially anything (but rather freedoms creating ourselves), Sartre undercuts the very possibility of an objective, non-relative ethic.

It would be easy to misconstrue Murdoch’s assessment of art and her disagreement with Plato from reading just what I have said so far. Certainly, she is not claiming that art by and large is revealing. Indeed, “A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of the consumer’s consciousness.” {TSG, p. 85} Her emphasis is on what art ought to be, and clearly what she intends her art to be. Murdoch would agree that Plato is right in supposing that most consumers of art are seeking diversion through fantasy, and that most (so-called) artists are pandering to that taste. Speaking of Sartre with admiration (in spite of her disagreements with his value-theory), Murdoch says: “A driving force in all of his writing is his serious desire to change the life of the reader.” {SRR, p. ix} The task is to bring the receiver of art closer to an apprehension of how things really are, and “....anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.” {TSG, p. 84} The artist reveals what is in order to change the life, the actions, of the receiver.

It should be clear that I admire Murdoch for her belief in truth, for her conviction that the artist (and the philosopher) has an obligation to seek and attempt to reveal truth, and for her conviction that morality is in some very real sense objective--that value is not created by choice nor merely an expression of approval or interest, but rather a function of how things really are and not simply our view (or opinion) of how things are. I also happen to agree with her that it is egocentrism that leads us to deny death; we seem quite agreed that grasshoppers and deer and flowers really die. But instead of seeing and reveling in the fact that we are a part of that great chain of being and that living beings die (that being a part of their natures), we want to insist that human beings (especially I) somehow escape this universal condition of living things. I also believe that she is right to stress the non-teleological nature of human existence. For even if there were some such telos, it is certainly hidden from us (though there are innumerable, and mutually exclusive, claimants to the throne), and we must live our lives as if it is we humans who have purposes and goals and not some grand human-independent telos. Like Marx, Murdoch believes that human history is not in the hands of some god or gods, but (at least to some extent) in human hands.

I agree with Murdoch’s worldview and with her severe injunction to the artist-philosopher. But why pick her out among artists. Why stress her novels and essays? In line with many central nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers (Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Dewey, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) Murdoch insists that human beings are historical creatures; that we are beings who live in time. And yet with all of this emphasis on historicity, much philosophical essay retains its abstract and essentially timeless, history-less tone. Heidegger lists being-in-time as one of the existentialia of dasein (one of the universal and necessary features of what it is to be human), and yet Being and Time is in most ways as abstract and oblivious to history as is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Murdoch is convinced that if one wants finally to describe the human condition, one must (at least sometimes) describe lived-life. Likewise, if one wants to characterize morality and moral dilemmas, one must locate them in the context of human beings living and relating with one another. There is a place for abstract ethical theory (discursive essay), but it cannot be complete or totally convincing or transformative. Both to be truthful about what constitutes morality and to instruct and transform humans, one must turn to art, and especially to the novel.

Murdoch obviously admires Wittgenstein and analytic philosophers who carry on a tradition he began. She, too, thinks that philosophy has a descriptive task (although not even description is purely analytic and neutral, and when it pretends to be, it simply suppresses value judgments). In order really to describe the human condition, one must include the richness and context of lived-life. Furthermore, only a part of the human condition is concerned with reasons and arguments. Only a part of truth is revealed discursively (as Murdoch believes the artist has always, at least implicitly, known). “The novelist proper is, in his way, a sort of phenomenologist. He has always implicitly understood, what the philosopher has grasped less clearly, that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once for all. The novelist has had his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do or must be presumed to do. He has as a natural gift that blessed freedom from rationalism which the academic thinker achieves, if at all, by a precarious discipline. He has always been, what the very latest philosophers claim to be, a describer rather than an explainer; and in consequence he has often anticipated the philosopher’s discoveries....The novel is a picture of, and a comment on, the human condition, a typical product of the era to which belong also the writings of Nietzsche, the psychology of Freud, and the philosophy of Sartre. It is also a type of writing which is more important, in the sense of being more influential, than any of the last mentioned.” (emphasis mine)

Murdoch is important because she selfconsciously uses the novel to do philosophy. Partly, of course, because she realizes that she will reach a much wider audience. (How many people would have heard of Murdoch simply as an Oxford teacher and philosopher and writer of philosophical essay?) But also because she realizes the limitation of essay. Novels can describe the human condition in a way that essay cannot. When it comes to doing moral philosophy, this is even more clearly the case. The artist is comfortable with metaphor in a way that the philosopher is not; the philosopher views metaphor as a failure to be clear and precise; s/he uses metaphor (if ever) as a kind of last-gasp attempt. Certainly, most philosophers see the story (for example) as inferior to discursive essay. Murdoch views metaphor as essential rather than make-shift. Preparing the way to discuss Plato’s cave metaphor as a way of elucidating ‘good’, Murdoch says: “Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision. Philosophy is general, and moral philosophy in particular, has in the past often concerned itself with what it took to be our most important images, clarifying existing ones and developing new ones....However, it seems to me impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts themselves without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be analyzed into non-metaphorical components without loss of substance.” {TSG, p. 77}

Murdoch agrees with Moore that ‘good’ is unanalyzable (not simply in natural terms, but in any terms at all). Good can be talked about and displayed; metaphors and stories are the vehicles for doing so. We will not be able to sum up human excellence or good in this huge and chancy world (in which we are most often blinded by self), but the artist can point us towards it. We can be shown why guilt cannot lead to good, for guilt (we can be shown) returns the gaze to the self (see The Good Apprentice); we can be shown that intelligence, even brilliance, is neither necessary nor sufficient to goodness. The philosopher in The Philosopher’s Pupil is full of specialized knowledge (even about ethical theory), but so self-absorbed that he is literally unable to focus on anyone around him (even those whom he ‘loves’ and ‘cares about’). A simple servant in the same tale is quite obviously good, and not because of what she knows about ethical theory, or even because of self-examination, but because she has learned (via cultivation of habits) to really see those around her, to attend to them without filtering their needs and concerns through her own.

I do not intend here to go through each novel analyzing how Murdoch’s story about the good emerges. Such a task, besides presupposing the reader’s knowledge of the novels (or giving way much more of them than I care to for those who have yet to read them) would be counter to Murdoch’s aims. The novel achieves its purpose (if at all) as it stands, as a description of lived human lives replete with moral dilemmas. “The great artists reveal the detail of the world.” {TSG, p. 96} The context, as much as attention to moral principles, provides the clues to the right response. Is abortion right? The abstract answer (even with careful essay to back it up) will not be complete or sufficient, but once we see the context provided in The Italian Girl, we are helped along, pointed in the right direction. We see how the characters systematically fail to see the young girl’s condition, see her real needs, because they are blinded by the views of her that they want to have, the views of her that are distorted by the veil of their own cares and concerns. Is love essential to morality? In novel after novel Murdoch entertains us with ludicrous and laughable ‘love’ triangles (see especially The Sacred and Profane Love Machine), as she points out just how and why what gets called romantic love is not love at all. While love-as-attention is essential to morality, most of what passes for love is simple selfishness that does not see the loved one at all. (And if it does not see the loved as s/he is, then it is not really love.) “...human love is normally too profoundly possessive and also too ‘mechanical’ to be a place of vision.” {TSG, p. 75}

What we call falling in love is very real, and those of us who reject even the possibility may be in for a shock. It could happen to us suddenly and without much regard for those with whom we are already involved. Denying that it could happen tends to make us much more vulnerable if/when it does. Murdoch is convinced that we can recognize the power of what we call falling in love, of being suddenly smitten, without acting on it. Indeed, we may be more able not to act (impulsively and irresponsibly) on this sort of ‘love’ if we see it both for what it is and for what it is not. No one is better than Murdoch at exposing the frivolity as well as the destructiveness of sexual/romantic pursuits, but always the disclosure of humans at their most petty and selfish has a point beyond cynical amusement, for we are being simultaneously ‘instructed’ on power we have (via the cultivation of habits and of attention) to set aside lust/love in favor of seeing and responding to others. Murdoch delightfully attacks the myth that we must follow our genitals (calling it our heart) rather than our minds and (not-self) attending. “The love that brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking.” {TSG, p. 91}

Because human beings “are far more complicated and enigmatic and ambiguous than languages or mathematical concepts, and selfishness operates in a much more devious and frenzied manner in our relations to them,” we must approach moral philosophy obliquely. People must be taught how to keep their attention fixed on real situations rather than on returning surreptitiously to self. We must see lived-life portraits of the humble person so that we may see that humility “...is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement,....it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.” {TSG, p. 95} The novel can show us how goodness “is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience,” and that freedom “...is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self.” Of course we can simply say all of these things, but descriptions of real lives allow these truths to shine forth and be absorbed.

Perhaps I am not a better person for having read Iris Murdoch, but if I am not, it is no fault of hers. I sense as I read her that parts of myself are coming out of concealment, that I am being made fun of with an intent to improve (and with a gentle reminder that I am not alone). I read her essays before I read her novels, but only the second after-novel-reading seemed really to strike home, and then returning again (from essays) to her novels, I was struck with the illumination the novels bring to her theory. I am sure she would say that is as it should be. Murdoch insists that “The only thing which is of real importance is the ability to see it all clearly and respond to it justly which is inseparable from virtue.” I admire her unremitting allegiance to truth and moral instruction and her ability to do so in a manner that is unpretentious and genuinely entertaining. Her husband and life-partner, John Bailey, says that Iris is the most humble person he has ever known. I’m sure he is using that word in the sense that she uses it, not as a peculiar habit of self-effacement, but as selfless respect for reality, and as one of the most difficult and central of all the virtues.