Good Will Hunting

I

Most American readers know Iris Murdoch as a novelist, but she is known elsewhere--mainly in England and Europe--as a philosopher as well, a moral philosopher to be precise. She taught philosophy at Oxford for many years, and she has published several books about philosophy, most notably “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,” a lengthy presentation of her ideas that was published in 1992 and based on a series of lectures she gave in 1982. Now Allen Lane / Penguin has issued “Existentialists and Mystics,” a collection of 30 essays about literature and philosophy.

The first of the essays appeared in 1952; the final one was published in 1986. Taken together, they reveal a wide range of interests, but a single and almost obsessive concern runs through most of them and knits them together. Murdoch believes in the need for a revivification of the moral realm, which can only be accomplished by a renewal of attention to the Good: an eternal and guiding notion of moral rightness accessible through philosophy and art.

Murdoch is a self-avowed Platonist, a position that defines her relation to morality. She tells us explicitly that her ideas about the Good run directly back to Plato, who first attempted to define its nature, function and sovereignty over all other virtues. She makes it clear that she measures all other philosophers in relation to Plato and his notion of the Good, and she dismisses all those whose thought has put them at odds with Plato.

Plato believed that knowledge of the Good resided in the soul as a kind of recollection, a knowledge prior to all experience and perhaps left from past lives. Knowledge of the Good can be brought fully into consciousness only through contemplative thought: a willed seeking for the Good that illuminates all other virtues and meanings. Such seeking, in general, must be conducted in solitude, and it takes us into an inward world, a subjective world in which we encounter, surprisingly, objective essences and meanings: Ideas or Forms that Plato thought are more substantial, true, real and eternal than their pale representations or appearances in the ordinary world of experience. The Good is akin to the sun; its sovereignty in thought is absolute; to see it clearly, comprehend it fully and live according to its implicit dictates or demands is to escape the cave of human folly and error in which we are otherwise destined to live.

No doubt much of this sounds to our modern, skeptical and empirical ears like certain half-baked New Age doctrines held by their enthusiasts because of their prettiness. They are certainly out of philosophic fashion now, in a discipline dominated, at least in England and America, by analytic and language philosophers whose work reduces philosophy to an exercise in epistemology or logic. Plato’s notions appear to such thinkers as a form of mysticism much closer to religion than to rigorous philosophy. But one must also remember that ideas such as these largely dominated European thought for more than 2,000 years and led directly to the work of Kant or Hegel, whose thought remains vitally alive for us today. Moreover, Plato’s various attempts to describe the realm in which the Good can be found comprise the best description we have had of the experience of thinking: how it feels to think and where thought appears to take us. This benefit alone makes his vision of the Good--and Murdoch’s restatement of it--of genuine relevance and interest. It is a vision that does, indeed, offer us the possibility of a revivification of the moral realm, but it also, I am afraid, calls Murdoch’s method and her own thoughts into question; it proves her wanting as a philosopher, and I think for that reason it is worth looking at here.

II

One does, indeed, seem to enter in thought, in the act of thinking, a spacious realm that feels like a kind of landscape--Heidegger called it a “region”--as real as the external world. There is a dimensionality to it, a depth, that makes itself felt in physical terms as if one were, in the mind, with the mind, moving through space, passing from point to point, taking in, at different points, different vistas or views. Thought itself begins to feel aggressive, adventurous, like an act; from any particular point, you can choose to follow a seemingly infinite number of paths in different directions. Follow one out and you get to another point, where you can pause, and now you can retrace your steps or choose from a new set of infinite possibilities. The whole of it comprises a territory that seems boundless; no matter where you are, you are always at the dead center of a territory whose horizon always beckons and yet seems out of reach.

At times and in places in thought, it feels as if one had moved beyond the ordinary trappings or assumptions of culture, as if one had outstripped one’s own preoccupations, projections and ideologies, as if one had entered a clear space wherein, among the wisps and shreds of all that was left behind, something comes toward you--something partial, barely seen, still obscure: a sort of skeletal order to meaning, a sense of something, that, though in the mind, also seems to exist outside of it, outside of you, outside of ego and beyond will; and then one thinks, with surprise, perhaps these are Plato’s Forms, his Ideas, the essences of meaning that could not be described with images or words but toward which one could point, as if saying: Go see for yourself.

It is this landscape into which Plato, in his dialogues, meant to lead us. It is where thought leads us, when we begin contemplatively, reflectively, to think ourselves out past what we already “know” in search of knowledge. Unless you understand that this is where, or how, Plato said we might find the Good, and that this is where all genuine philosophy takes us, you cannot understand why Murdoch fails, or why these essays do not point us toward the Good, but instead close it off to us.

The very best philosophy is apodictic. It proceeds slowly, carefully, skeptically, via demonstration and argument, until suddenly something new comes to light. It makes its way, its case, by taking into account, as it proceeds, all of the arguments that can be martialed against it by those already at work in philosophy, those the thinker can imagine in advance. Think here of Hume, Kant or Hegel. As dense as their work is, as abstruse, we can nonetheless see in it what thought, what reason, does best. It calls itself into question; it forces itself to confront and overcome all of the complexities, the contradictions, within it. As we follow in its wake, as we track the thinker thinking, we enter with the thinker into the territories where thought leads. It is as if we walked at the thinker’s shoulder or saw through his eyes the terrain of thought unfolding. It is not quite the same as thinking solely on one’s own, but it comes close, and what matters as we read is not so much the conclusions reached, not even the great systems erected. It is, rather, the territory we enter, and how, in that territory, we see thought in formation, see it come into existence as thought, for this is often as beautiful as music and somehow even more compelling, because truth as opposed to beauty is its end.

III

The problem with Murdoch’s work is there is almost nothing of the apodictic method in her reasoning. We never see her thinking, never see her arguments emerge out of themselves, overcoming the obvious objection against them. She is what I would call an “assertionist.” She falls back always on telling us things, on asserting truths she makes no attempt to demonstrate. There is therefore no way we can enter into her reasoning; we are simply privy to an endless series of high-sounding announcements or pronouncements that have no life to them, that seem removed from life. We can sometimes follow her criticism of other philosophers, but when it comes to her own thought, to what she offers as alternative to the confusions or failures of others, she falters. She does not think her way past the perhaps insurmountable obstacles to a belief in the Good that have accumulated over hundreds of years.

Instead, she will suddenly announce to us, out of the blue, that if we can believe in God then we ought to be able to believe in the Good, or that the universal capacity for love will see us through, or that art can preserve what philosophy does not. These claims won’t wash; we’ve no idea how she arrived at them; they seem to have arisen neither through reflection nor experience; and though one can understand the desperate need for such notions, or the urge to urge them on others, none of that makes them compelling as philosophy, and they emerge as matters of faith rather than thought.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Murdoch’s attitudes toward morality and art. Plato was suspicious of the arts; he felt they misrepresented, obscured or distracted us from the Good. Poets and tragedians might weave spells of magic and delight, but the Good remained beyond their reach. It had to be seen for itself and in itself, through thought, and in this view aesthetic beauty and moral truth were altogether different things.

Murdoch disagrees with all this and contents herself with merely asserting that the Good can be revealed in art without ever explaining to us how this is so or what leads her to assert it. She falls back on a series of rhetorical devices or empty abstractions that, in fact, tell us nothing much about morality, thought, life or the Good. She writes: “Art and morals are, with certain provisos . . . one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

These are, in essence, the claims she makes repeatedly. It is true she spells them out elsewhere at more length, but they never come much clearer than they do here, and they are never properly defended or explained. One hardly knows where to begin to unpack or criticize them. Are art and morals one? Is their essence the same? If it is, is it love? Does love, in fact, mean what she says it does? Why did Kant, long ago, argue that most of us could not, in a lifetime, learn to love all others, and that this is precisely what makes a moral code necessary?

Just a few days ago, I came upon an odd passage in Goebbel’s diaries, dated May 10, 1943. He is writing about what he and the Fuhrer plan to do after the war: “We want again to devote our energies chiefly to fine arts, the theater, the films, literature and music. We want to begin to be human beings.” And here is an entry dated May 13, a few pages on: “There is therefore no recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.”

After a century of the world’s bloodiest recorded horrors, we know now that it is quite possible for cultivated people to love beauty and still do immense moral harm, and it is too late in the game, I think, for anyone to carelessly couple aesthetic and moral beauty. We know too that everywhere around us, here in America, a passion for the arts, for great art, coexists quite often with an indifference to or tolerance for great human suffering, just as it has always existed in the past. Playgoers emerging from a production of “King Lear”--Shakespeare is Murdoch’s model as a literary purveyor of the Good--are no more likely to empty their pockets for the indigent on the streets, nor to give one of their many coats to someone with none, than are audiences leaving “Hello, Dolly!” or “The Sound of Music.” If anything, great art takes us beyond the ordinary structures and strictures of morality, and one would have to make a far better case than Murdoch does for the convergence of art with morality to make us believe it.

Murdoch assures us without hesitation that art incorporates or reveals the Good in ways that move us far more than the good or generous acts of others. But is this true? Courageous black men and women in Southern American towns lifted my heart and taught me more about the Good than all of the productions of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. The same thing is true of a pair of Maryknoll sisters I knew in Ecuador, a lay Jehovah’s Witness minister I met in Colombia and several homeless men in California hobo jungles who, when I was young, shared with me what little they had. For many of us, great moral lessons and revelations come in the presence and at the hands of generous men and women, not from art. But Murdoch seems to know nothing of this, and here, as in so many other places in her work, one wishes she had relied on experience rather than theory.

From 1944 to 1946, Murdoch was an administrative officer with a United Nations relief organization in Belgium and Austria. She deals with the Holocaust in several of her novels. And yet, in these essays, with all their talk about morality and art, there is no mention of the concrete and specific evils with which the Good must deal; there is a marked absence of all referential or historical detail, and she never tries to place her meditations on the Good in a context that might put them to the test. There is something oddly donnish about her thought, something far too privileged and protected, as if it were being carried on behind the cloistered walls of Oxford in cheery seminar rooms, rather than amid the real horrors and terrors of the world.

To compel our allegiance, moral theory has to seem applicable to both human nature and the world as they are. Murdoch’s tendency to dismiss the serious thought of countless philosophers who disagree with her, implying that their work is shallow or trivial, cries out for a deepened, reliable and rigorous seriousness on her own part.

IV

Despite these criticisms, I think Murdoch is essentially correct in her attempt to place the Good, or ethical thought in general, at the very center of philosophy, as its crowning glory. Indeed, the sorry state not only of moral thought, but of contemporary ethics in general, makes her approach especially significant. The fact is that the great secular attempt, from the Enlightenment on, to find a binding ground for value that will replace the religious and metaphysical visions of the past has not proven particularly successful. In the course of the past 50 years, we have seen the replacement of ethics with ideology, and the replacement of honor or duty with a moral fog that turns ethics into little more than a system of self-justification or rationalization. Rather than counterbalancing desire with a sense of the Good, or with what Kant called duty, ethics acts now as little more than a mask for desire or an argument for appetite and inclination. Self-interest rules everywhere.

It is because of these circumstances, because of the moral confusions--I am tempted to say abyss--just below the jazzy and gossipy surface of events, that genuine reflective thought, thought that seeks an understanding of the Good, is so important now. But it remains an open question as to whether we can manage to revivify the moral realm or remind people in general--as Murdoch wants to do--that the crowning measure of a life has more to do with the Good than with fame, money, love or ideological triumph. The task is a daunting one, and I doubt that any single notion of morality can itself be an answer--not even Plato’s, and certainly not Murdoch’s. What is necessary now is a willingness on the part of many serious men and women to set aside their premature conclusions, their apparent certainties, their own senses of virtue or justification and engage in what Plato long ago suggested: 1) a genuine dialogue with others designed to open up new regions of thought, and 2) an inwardness of reflective and solitary thought that allows us to transcend what is already thought and thereby find the Good.

Do I think this is likely to occur? No. Do I think it must occur? Oh, yes. In that, I agree with Murdoch. Whether the Good is, as Plato thought, in itself eternal and always awaiting us in thought, is something, I think, we cannot know for certain. But surely the human imperative to seek it out and live according to its dictates never changes.