Getting the measure of Murdoch's Good

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2020-03-01
Journal	European Journal of Philosophy
Authors	Clare Mac Cumhaill
Institutions	Durham University
Citations	7

Abstract

“It is the traditional inspiration of the philosopher, but also his traditional vice, to believe that all is one” Murdoch ‘On ‘God’ and ‘Good” In the first essay in The Sovereignty of Good, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, Murdoch deploys a bit of an arcane idiom that is easy to pass over without much hesitation. With only a few exceptions, the passage in which it appears, close to the start of the part of the essay that sees Murdoch develop her positive proposal, has drawn little critical assessment.11 Some exceptions are McBay Merritt (2017, p. 9) and Bagnoli (2012, p. 222). I will use the abbreviations (IP) for ‘The Idea of Perfection’; (GG) for ‘On “God” and ‘Good”; (SGC) for ‘The Sovereignty of the Good over Other Concepts’. MGM stands for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and E&M for Existentialists and Mystics (1999). Murdoch’s alternative ‘soul-picture’ is pitched against a neo-Kantian existentialist, behaviourist position (whose ethics and politics are utilitarian and “democratic” p. 9) which she sees as fuelled by a genetic—and, for her, faulty—analysis of concepts: Concepts are understood to have a structure that is public, the grasp of which is a skill; ordinary words for concepts are learned from observation of some ‘typical outward behavior pattern’; in the case of moral concepts, ‘to copy a right action is to act rightly’. This latter is the view of Stuart Hampshire to whom Sovereignty is dedicated; but, she writes, while ‘this is all very well to say’, the question still arises: ‘What is the form that I am supposed to copy?‘22 Bob Stern notes in email correspondence that Kant expresses the same worry about moral exemplars in the Groundwork 4:408-409—could it be that Murdoch is thinking here of Kant? (p. 30). She finds she wants to attack this ‘heavily fortified’ (p. 16) position: ‘I am not content’ (p. 16). Her alternative will be sketched out, although incompletely, in the rest of the paper. For now, a partial summary: Concepts have a complicated structure, a grasp of which is private and necessarily fallible. There is no skill a public display of which is a criterion of concept possession. Instead, concepts shift and alter—“we have a different image of courage at forty from that which we had at twenty” (p. 29). Words may mislead here; “words are often stable while concepts alter” (p. 29). Concepts deepen. They acquire structure over time, their interrelations shift and ramify but always in ways that are personal. This is because concepts that historical individuals have—and express in thought and action—only acquire structure in the context of the progressing life of a person (p. 26); the full extent of what courage is for me and means to me will depend on the historical individual I am and the life I have led. But unlike the existentialist Kantian ego, which appears only at crucial moments of choice, quick as the flash of needle,33 See ‘On God and Good’ (1970, p. 53) the progress of the life of a person, someone with a ‘live personality’, involves more than outward behaviour. It involves inner, private conscious reflective activity. It involves the continuous reassessment of past events, relationships and individuals. And, as concepts deepen, it involves redescription (p. 26)—what looked courageous at twenty may seem foolhardy at forty. Such reassessment and the redescription that it involves is moral work; it is an attempt to see and understand things clearly. It is not a skill that can be exercised at isolated moments but an endless task, one that is regulated by the eponymous ideal limit—the idea of perfection. For instance, a perfected idea of courage would be a full understanding of what ‘courage’ is, its relation to other the virtues and to human life, an understanding that is unattainable, try as the historical individual imperfectly may. This activity is not parasitic on the outside. It is serious. You have to do it for yourself, if not by yourself. None of what I am saying here is particularly new: similar things have been said by philosophers from Plato onward; and appear as commonplaces of the Christian ethic, whose centre is an individual. To come nearer home in the Platonic tradition, the present dispute is reminiscent of the old arguments about abstract and concrete universals. My view might be put by saying: moral terms must be treated as concrete universals. And if someone at this point were to say, well, why stop at moral concepts, why not claim that all universals are concrete, I would reply, why not indeed? Why not consider red as an ideal end-point, as a concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love? (p. 29) In this paper, I hardly talk about love, something that is so central to Murdoch’s alternative ‘soul-picture.’ Instead, I say something about her easy-to-miss appeal to the concrete universal, a notion now almost banished from contemporary discussion For there is reason to think that Murdoch’s conception of the concrete universal is inflected more by British Idealism than by Hegel directly, although this inflection is not explicit (“I am not, in spite of the philosophical backing which I might here resort to, suggesting anything in the least esoteric”, p. 30)—and this difference is philosophically significant. But, as I show, it is also inflected by Wittgenstein in ways I try to illustrate in the middle part of the paper. Following Murdoch’s tendency, method even, I draw an analogy. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Standard Metre in the Philosophical Investigations helps us to get the measure of what Murdoch is up to with her talk of ‘concrete universality’ and ultimately too of the Good, more a concern of the other two papers that make up Sovereignty: ‘On ‘God’ and ‘Good”, and ‘The Sovereignty of the Good over Other Concepts’ as well her of 1992 masterpiece Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. I then introduce a hopefully not terminal problem for my exegesis and so for the analogy: Murdoch is not wholly sympathetic to all aspects of Wittgenstein’s programme. In the last part of the paper, I offer a way around this problem by picking up a different Wittgensteinean strand. This could have been lifted from Murdoch’s own work, but instead I appeal to Chapter 13 of The Problem of Metaphysics by Donald MacKinnon, Murdoch’s tutor while an undergraduate at Oxford (and later Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge). This work originated in Gifford Lectures delivered in 1965 and 1966 and was published in 1974. Murdoch’s Archive at Kingston University contains her copy with its characteristic notes, handwritten on spare intervals of blank page. Her Gifford Lectures, later Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM), were delivered in 1982 and published 10 years later. MacKinnon is not cited, but his ‘problem’ of metaphysics echoes hers, and hers his—‘The Idea of Perfection’ was first published in 1964 and perhaps he read it. No scholarly work has been done on MacKinnon and Murdoch’s intellectual relationship, and I can only hint at overlaps here, a strategy that is justified I think by the content of my argument and by the passage above, around which the whole paper spins.44 In November 1982, Murdoch records in her journal that she has received the kind of letter she had been hoping for after her Gifford Lecture: it records the impact her lectures had had on the Gifford audience as only matched by two other lecturers, one of whom was Donald MacKinnon. I thank Dayna Miller, archivist at the Murdoch Archives in Kingston, for help with this reference. Three questions immediately arise on reading the passage above. Which ‘old arguments’? How ‘near to home’? Why moral terms? Start with the first. Murdoch is referring to the problem of individuality, although this might not at once be clear from its textual setting (I will return to this issue in Section 4 when I pick up her reference to the “Christian” ethic). This problem concerns what makes something individual an individual, a unified entity distinct from other individuals. Two distinct roses could instantiate all the same properties—both might be red, have variegated petals, the ‘same’ damask scent and so on; they might be qualitatively identical in all respects. What makes them distinct over and above the properties they instantiate? Two classes of solution have been proposed: non-qualitative and qualitative. The notion of a trope belongs to the latter class, as does bundle theory (roughly, what matters is the way the properties are bundled together). Among non-qualitative solutions are appeal to a bare substratum or to space; what they qualify or where they are is what makes two otherwise qualitatively identical individuals numerically distinct. Invoking a mysterious haecceity is a further option. When we say: ‘This rose is red,’ the copula ‘is’ implies that subject and predicate agree with one another. But, of course, the rose, being something concrete, is not merely red; on the contrary, it also has a scent, a definite form, and all manner of other features, which are not contained within the predicate ‘red’. On the other hand, the predicate, being something abstractly universal, does not belong merely to this subject. For there are other flowers, too, and other objects altogether that are also red (Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, Section 172 Addition, 1991, p. 250)55 Quoted in Stern (2007, p.128), fn 38. [E]ach human being though infinitely unique is so precisely because [he or she is a human being] and each individual is such an individual primarily because it is an animal: if this is true, then it would be impossible to say what such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed, no matter how richly endowed the individual might be with other predicates, if, that is, this foundation can equally be called a predicate like any other’. (Hegel, Science of Logic, 1969 pp. 36-37)66 Quoted in Stern (2007, p.128), fn 40. Substance predicates are special then. They are concrete. They are not just a way an individual may be (red) but what the individual is (rose). They can support statements of natural law (‘a rose is a perennial flowering plant’) and normative statements (‘a wolf that does not disperse from its natal pack is defective’). They can be exemplified in individuals that have different properties. A contemporary development of this view can be found in the work of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson, although they do not (so far as I know) deploy the exotic idiom of the concrete.77 For discussion, see Stern (2016). See also Saunders (2019). But, however exotic now, this notion remained a live, if flagging, concern ‘nearer to home’ even up until 1930s, when Murdoch went up to Oxford. And this proximity to home is theoretically significant, at least where Murdoch exegesis is concerned. This is because, as Stern (2007) argues—and here my exposition is indebted to his—the British Idealist conception of the concrete universal, while Hegelian, is not Hegel’s. By [both] being red-haired […] two men are related really, and their relation is not merely external…’But I am a red-haired man’, I shall hear, ‘and I know what I am, and I am not altered in fact when I am compared with another man, and therefore the relation falls outside.’ But no finite individual, I reply, can possibly know what he is, and the idea that all his reality falls within his knowledge is even ridiculous…But, as he really is, to know perfectly his own nature would be, with that nature, to pass in knowledge endlessly beyond himself. For example, a red-haired man who knew himself utterly would and must, starting from within, go on to know everyone else who has red hair, and he would not know himself until he knew them…Nothing in the whole and in the end can be external, and everything less than the Universe is an abstraction from the whole, an abstraction more or less empty, and the more empty the less self-dependent. Relations and qualities are abstractions, and depend for their being always on a whole, a whole which they inadequately express, and which remains always less or more in the background. (Bradley 1908, pp. 580-581)99 Also quoted in Stern (2007, p.124). I say a little about the distinction between internal and external relations as far as Murdoch’s epistemology goes in closing, although I say nothing at all about the fragile status of individuals in Bradley’s whole, which tends to monism.1010 I thank Bob Stern for pointing out this fragility which is plainly relevant to an adequate development of the position I sketch in this paper but that I do not treat here. For now, I will make a distinction that Stern borrows from Bosanquet and that is, I think, a handy gloss.1111 See Bosanquet (1912). I picture it below (again leaving aside all consideration of the ontology of the relations represented). The British Idealists conceived of the concrete universal as ‘the universal in the form of a world’ rather than in the form of a class. Where the universal has the form of a world (Figures 1 and 2), individuals exemplifying it are interrelated and mutually interdependent.1212 See Stern (2007, p.122). Hegel’s Reason proceeds by a continuous discarding of possibilities; doubts, ambiguities, alternatives, ramblings of any kind are officially not permitted and cannot be left ‘lying around’. Seen in this way, the process seems not an increasingly widening, increasingly well-lighted all-embracing prospect, but rather an entry into some dark narrowing almost mechanical confinement…. (MGM, p. 227)1313 It might be wondered whether Murdoch is reading Hegel through Bradley here—a matter for scholars of all three. Morality is an endless process and therefore a self-contradiction; and being such it does not remain standing by itself, but feels the impulse to transcend its existing reality. It is a self-contradiction in this way: it demands for what cannot be. (1962, p. 312) Scholarly work is needed to unearth these connections and echoes in full. In particular, we might draw on her journal writings as well as her 1992 comments on Bradley and wonder. How did Murdoch read Hegel and Bradley? Did she read the former through the latter? Given Bradley’s tendency towards monism, what dimensions of his scheme might have survived the caution sounded in her epigraph (she herself notes that she is monist by temperament [GG, p. 50]—perhaps the epigraph is also a reminder to herself)? Finally, suppose Murdoch did prefer Bradley to Hegel (as the present paper assumes), would she have been justified in doing so? As all these questions overrun any capacity I presently have to answer them (and until Murdoch’s Bradley lectures turn up),1515 All of this paper is deeply indebted to correspondence with Bob Stern over the course of 2 years—including detailed comments and reflection on the present piece. I return only to Murdoch’s rhetorical “why not indeed?” Murdoch wants, but does not argue for, the thought that all terms might be treated as concrete universals, including colour terms. I think it does not take much imagination to how the grasp of red be and by detailed conscious reflection on and to red in the an she in the The belongs to and and But what is for the concept (she is deeply complicated and an with all the and and and in of all in all and in things and much more The as an individual object to be infinitely learned and his or her own grasp of it as infinitely But is an abstract universal for I some relevant to the thought that Murdoch’s concrete universal is in the form of an all-embracing world in the form of a but these are for another This is the when Murdoch is first to Wittgenstein’s of the Philosophical Investigations are to her by In she records reading it in a letter to a is like nothing on or to And she helps with aspects of the which appears in has of that his and of (and particularly of may have for Wittgenstein’s later See It is to whether Murdoch’s of Bradley might not have her of also on Hegel’s is a question then to what extent of particularly in has And with that in we can although this moral The on is of course of the turn that but the is words the same (and this may mislead the concepts words express, when by a historical individual, over the course of a life and acquire But on this concepts are concept that an use of a expresses on an is a of the This understanding of concepts and words as of concepts that are with the of behaviourist in where words outward But it also from an to understood as an or that can into (p. 29). is ordinary for what words increasingly as an individual life It may seem to whether the idea of (as to the idea of or is really an and what of it can is it to measure and things to know just how they In any which or concerns us I think we would say A understanding of any of human activity for involves an of of and often a of there being in fact little that is very and nothing that is understanding of human in a similar come to and may to see as less than what we were to The idea of within a of an of […] The idea of is also a natural of In its we come to see that which is really than And this can must without the idea in any In it is in its nature that we cannot get it This is the of the of the p. the idea of and the Good are here. has the of being The idea of us in the of the idea I say more about the relation between the idea of and the Good (as I understand For now, Murdoch’s at that ‘to copy a right action is to act rightly’. There to be here by Murdoch’s I to know which action is right is an which human makes if not is the form that I am supposed to I to know what course I take at a context problem which is by of and and by And are at once when an concept is by a of concepts as private concrete universals, where a historical individual, not a Kantian to copy that which they with as For instance, suppose ‘I want to like To Murdoch’s way of that is all very well to cannot be in question the of and there is only the idea of the which remains not so much as And too in the of human has to do the and (p. the point is that one cannot be what is, a There is one of which one can say that it is a that it is not one and that is the Standard Metre in But this is, of course, not to any to but only to its in the of with a Section p. of the problem which is Wittgenstein is, of course, that this as a of and so we to it. this as it may it may not is the is one a course, its might in could make the more by that one is to be the of at it then a that is one at who that everything one a is might ‘This is the of a By is one at a But there seems to me no reason so to even for a man who the of For this not to the of what he called the but to the reference. […] There is a which he wants to it out by an that there is a of that else might out the same reference by another But in any even though he this to the reference of his of a he can still say, if had been to this at then at would not have been one for two here, at least so far as Wittgenstein exegesis he Wittgenstein’s point the in the of with a But he also makes an about the of the notion of when to There is something about the person who in to the question are their on their and ‘This Why so? On the one hand, they seem to have a notion of as something that can be of without appeal to a that is in with some other they seem to suppose that their is the of the they something which has a On the other hand, they that is a are to have only in relation to other with that they can be a that The of the present case then is that the subject is his or herself as his or her own but this cannot a in the of which involves of other It is that has an conception of in that we use a to a at which we as the Standard It is a that the Standard Metre is a although it only had that could have another But what the of the above case is that we cannot just This is because the Standard Metre only has in the context of that have a of up other these and must be And other with these and and them and make them But the same is of the concept On this the concept has no life of these there is no notion that of empty can be said to as a And the conception is crucial for I return to For now, I sketch the I have in being a I is only form a class. They are all individuals that are of the universal understood universal is not a way individuals could be a that other things It is what they This does not say anything about the special of the Standard as a in the class. But here, we could all individuals are Some are and these individuals so about the of and so as the the On the Wittgensteinean in the is not on individual things could be one way or or on classes of things but on the of life in which things and which come to the form of a In the case of the Standard there are of life that are in of it and that can go on because of it. there is, in this an between the of and up and so on that make up the which the Standard Metre is, there is an between the in the up the and the and her On this other where they are related to the Standard and have a not because they form a but because they are interrelated through the of life that the Standard Metre and the in which they and make Murdoch that it is to measure and things to know just how they But unlike the of something that can be at least by one who in the form of life where such a is it is often not to if something is form am I supposed to cannot be But here, of can us in some of and of Murdoch the same time, that these and with the progress of a have a different image of courage at than I had at But the that and who that not to be conceived to form a they do not For Bob a Wittgensteinean would use the notion of the idea of The concept of a might be treated as a concrete universal as all its concrete cannot be to a of and although they all in some It is that the does not up so with this alternative as it might be thought that a not for being a is to the in The way I pitched the with the is, On a which is (and here, the conception is, I think, to be it is that different are individual as they are of the universal, which is concrete. But my was to rather a conception of a universal in the form of a read through a Wittgensteinean the idea of a is treated as what and makes a of and the and virtues and moral concepts with On this while there is no between a an the in a and an at not being for a because of a tendency to events, and are A different way of this same thought is to consider what of human life would with the of the concept of a It is hardly What a is, to, on this is not to a of whose might the I come to see them as related as my idea of courage And I come to see that

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12540

References

2012 - Iris Murdoch, philosopher
1912 - The principle of individuality and value
1962 - Ethical studies
1908 - Appearance and reality
2012 - Iris Murdoch, philosopher
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1991 - Encyclopaedia logic: Part I of the encyclopaedia of philosophical sciences
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