It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do. There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just had his breakfast. Both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to it.

Note: Progress involves recompiling history

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Instances of the facts, as I shall boldly call them, which interest me and which seem to have been forgotten or ‘theorized away’ are the fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central concept in morals. Contemporary philosophers frequently connect consciousness with virtue, and although they constantly talk of freedom they rarely talk of love. But there must be some relation between these latter concepts, and it must be possible to do justice to both Socrates and the virtuous peasant.

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Hampshire's view is, I think, without commanding universal agreement, fairly central and typical, and it has the great merit that it states and elaborates what in many modern moral philosophers is simply taken for granted. Hampshire suggests that we should abandon the image (dear to the British empiricists) of man as a detached observer, and should rather picture him as an object moving among other objects in a continual flow of intention into action. Touch and movement, not vision, should supply our metaphors: ‘Touching, handling and the manipulation of things are misrepresented if we follow the analogy of vision.’ 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’.

Note: Real-time virtues [e]

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‘That which I do is that for which I am responsible and which is peculiarly an expression of myself. It is essential to thought that it takes its own forms and follows its own paths without my intervention, that is, without the intervention of my will. I identify myself with my will. Thought, when it is most pure, is self-directing…. Thought begins on its own path, governed by its universal rules, when the preliminary work of the will is done. No process of thought could be punctuated by acts of will, voluntary switchings of attention, and retain its status as a continuous process of thought.’ These are very important assumptions.

Note: Hampshire’s assumption that virtue is only in action?

Location 120

Hampshire now gives us in addition a picture of ‘the ideally rational man’. This person would be ‘aware of all his memories as memories…. His wishes would be attached to definite possibilities in a definite future…. He would… distinguish his present situation from unconscious memories of the past… and would find his motives for action in satisfying his instinctual needs within the objectively observed features of the situation.’ This ideal man does not exist because the palimpsest of ‘dispositions’ is too hard to penetrate: and this is just as well because ideal rationality would leave us ‘without art, without dream or imagination, without likes or dislikes unconnected with instinctual needs’. In theory, though not in practice, ‘an interminable analysis’ could lay bare the dispositional machinery and make possible a perfect prediction of conduct;

Note: On virtue and predictability. Can we be unpredictable in our art but predictable in our conduct? What if our art deviates from our conduct? Ie: if art channels the shadow and this purges the soul clean, is that good or evil?

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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. ‘Reality’ is potentially open to different observers. What is ‘inward’, what lies in between overt actions, is either impersonal thought, or ‘shadows’ of acts, or else substanceless 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. Immense care is taken to picture the will as isolated. It is isolated from belief, from reason, from feeling, and is yet the essential centre of the self. ‘I identify myself with my will.’ It 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. On this view one might say that morality is assimilated to a visit to a shop. I enter the shop in a condition of totally responsible freedom, I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select. (A Marxist critique of this conception of bourgeois capitalist morals would be apt enough. Should we want many goods in the shop or just ‘the right goods’?) Both as act and reason, shopping is public. Will does not bear upon reason, so the ‘inner life’ is not to be thought of as a moral sphere. Reason deals in neutral descriptions and aims at being the frequently mentioned ideal observer. Value terminology will be the prerogative of the will; but since will is pure choice, pure movement, and not thought or vision, will really requires only action words such as ‘good’ or ‘right’.

Note: Good tear down of viewing virtue as mechanical and commodities. It is a shortcoming to view morality only through action and will.

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The very powerful image with which we are here presented is behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian in a sense which unites these three conceptions. It is behaviourist in its connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable, it is existentialist in its elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will, and it is utilitarian in its assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts. It is also incidentally what may be called a democratic view, in that it suggests that morality is not an esoteric achievement but a natural function of any normal man. This position represents, to put it in another way, a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.

Note: Values only what is legible, what is externalized and knowable to the public. She calls it “democratic” in that it’s only what can be beheld and evaluated by others. How does this into literature? Consider if Pessoa or Thoreau had never written their journals or essays. They would have existed, but not to us. So while I am very excited to hear Murdoch’s that morality lives in the throne of perception, and maybe so that all moral effort should go towards cultivating our attention, I personally feel a responsibility to make that attention legible, and perhaps that gets into a philosophy of art, an imperative to externalize your attention in order for you and others to observe and expand on it, similar to how even though a seed maybe be perfectly self-content knowing it has the genetic future of a tree within it, it is unrealized if it doesn’t not become the forest and its fruits. [e]

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Hume was wrong to worry about the missing shade of blue, not because a man could or couldn't picture it, or that we could or couldn't be persuaded that he had, but because the inner picture is necessarily irrelevant and the possession of the concept is a public skill. What matters is whether I stop at the traffic lights, and not my colour imagery or absence of it. I identify what my senses show me by means of the public schemata which I have learned, and in no other way can this be known by me, since knowledge involves the rigidity supplied by a public test.

Note: Appeals to public schemata

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How do I learn the concept of decision? By watching someone who says ‘I have decided’ and who then acts. How else could I learn it? And with that I learn the essence of the matter. I do not ‘move on’ from a behaviouristic concept to a mental one. (Since ordinary language, which ‘misleadingly’ connects the mental with the inner, straight-forwardly connects the physical with the outer, a genetic analysis of physical concepts would not be especially revealing.) A decision does not turn out to be, when more carefully considered, an introspectible movement. The concept has no further inner structure; it is its outer structure. Take an even clearer example. How do I distinguish anger from jealousy? Certainly not by discriminating between two kinds of private mental data. Consider how I learned ‘anger’ and ‘jealousy’. What identifies the emotion is the presence not of a particular private object, but of some typical outward behaviour pattern. This will also imply, be it noted, that we can be mistaken in the names which we give to our own mental states.

Note: Argument that all inter states have words that we pick up from external events.

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Of course I can to a limited extent describe them, I can describe my imagery or mention words which ‘say’ in my head. I can also give metaphorical descriptions of my states of mind. (Ryle discusses these ‘chronicles’ and ‘histories’ of thought in Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1952). But what does this amount to? These data, vaguer and more infrequent than one might unreflectively suppose, cannot claim to be ‘the thing itself’ of which my uttered thoughts are the report. Note that I offer my descriptions in ordinary public words whose meaning is subject to ordinary public rules. Inner words ‘mean’ in the same way as outer words; and I can only ‘know’ my imagery because I know the public things which it is ‘of’. Public concepts are in this obvious sense sovereign over private objects; I can only ‘identify’ the inner, even for my own benefit, via my knowledge of the outer. But in any case there is no check upon the accuracy of such descriptions, and as Wittgenstein says, ‘What is this ceremony for?’ Who, except possibly empirical psychologists, is interested in alleged reports of what is purely inward?

Note: On the challenge of documenting and conveying non-ordinary states of consciousness. We are presented with novelty and then tasked with combining and transfiguring words to convey things outside the realm of public knowledge. To do this is to actually coincide with language, to contribute to the public sphere, because it then creates other public words for others to understand their inner. Of course though these public words can than colonize and shape the inner world (DMT elves) [e]

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That I decided to do X will be true if I said sincerely that I was going to and did it, even if nothing introspectible occurred at all. And equally something introspectible might occur, but if the outward context is entirely lacking the something cannot be called a decision. As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it is not part of the mechanism’.

Note: Metaphor: what good is the non-connected wheel?

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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 analysed 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.

Note: Reminds me of how entrepreneurship and agency and business in general necessarily always weighs though back to the tangible effect it has on the market. It is a scientific enterprise.

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For purposes of the rest of this discussion it will be useful to have an example before us: some object which we can all more or less see, and to which we can from time to time refer. All sorts of different things would do for this example, and I was at first tempted to

Note: Explicit about using a microcosm/metaphor. Speaks to the formalities of philosophy. Can make a joke out of this. 50 words of buffer and orientation. [e] then a whole digression on the unpicked example, followed by “here is the example.”

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Thus much for M's first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters. If we take D to be now absent or dead this can make it clear that the change is not in D's behaviour but in M's mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. And as I say, ex hypothesi, M's outward behaviour, beautiful from the start, in no way alters. I used above words such as ‘just’ and ‘intelligent’ which implied a favourable value judgment on M's activity: and I want in fact to imagine a case where one would feel approval of M's change of view. But of course in real life, and this is of interest, it might be very hard to decide whether what M was doing was proper or not, and opinions might differ. M might be moved by various motives: a sense of justice, attempted love for D, love for her son, or simply reluctance to think of him as unfortunate or mistaken. Some people might say ‘she deludes herself’ while others would say she was moved by love or justice. I am picturing a case where I would find the latter description appropriate.

Note: Does the cause of change matter? Selfish vs loving reasons of transformation

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we have infallible or superior knowledge of our mental states. We can be mistaken about what we think and feel: that is not in dispute, and indeed it is a strength of the behaviourist analysis that it so neatly accommodates this fact. What is at stake is something different, something about activity in a sense which does not mean privileged activity.

Note: Supports next point

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The analysis makes no sense of M as continually active, as making progress, or of her inner acts as belonging to her or forming part of a continuous fabric of being: it is precisely critical of metaphors such as ‘fabric of being’.

Note: An illegible thought can alter being, creating a whole chain of events which may not be deterministically tie back to a simplified thought:action pair

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What M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly. Notice the rather different image of freedom which this at once suggests. Freedom is not the sudden jumping of the isolated will in and out of an impersonal logical complex, it is a function of the progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly. M's activity is essentially something progressive, something infinitely perfectible. So far from claiming for it a sort of infallibility, this new picture has built in the notion of a necessary fallibility. M is engaged in an endless task. As soon as we begin to use words such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’ in characterizing M, we introduce into our whole conceptual picture of her situation the idea of progress, that is the idea of perfection: and it is just the presence of this idea which demands an analysis of mental concepts which is different from the genetic one.

Note: To see lovingly as the moral act

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This is a moral question; and what is at stake here is the liberation of morality, and of philosophy as a study of human nature, from the domination of science: or rather from the domination of inexact ideas of science which haunt philosophers and other thinkers. Because of the lack until fairly recently of any clear distinction between science and philosophy this issue has never presented itself so vividly before. Philosophy in the past has played the game of science partly because it thought it was science.

Note: Is this a limited view of science? Or is she critiquing mechanical science? Ie: can there be an organic science to the inner nuances of attention and love? Can anything escape crude taxonomies?

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M confronted with D has an endless task. Moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because ‘within’, as it were, a given concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing. To speak here of an inevitable imperfection, or of an ideal limit of love or knowledge which always recedes, may be taken as a reference to our ‘fallen’ human condition, but this need be given no special dogmatic sense. Since we are neither angels nor animals but human individuals, our dealings with each other have this aspect; and this may be regarded as an empirical fact or, by those who favour such terminology, as a synthetic a priori truth.

Note: On the inability to sustain without active attention

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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.) Uses of words by persons grouped round a common object is a central and vital human activity. The art critic can help us if we are in the presence of the same object and if we know something about his scheme of concepts. Both contexts are relevant to our ability to move towards ‘seeing more’, towards ‘seeing what he sees’.

Note: Are essays universalized context?

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Progress in understanding of a scheme of concepts often takes place as we listen to normative-descriptive talk in the presence of a common object.

Note: Patterns over an essay

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A smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instrument of corruption. It is especially characteristic of normative words, both desirable and undesirable, to belong to sets or patterns without an appreciation of which they cannot be understood. If a critic tells us that a picture has ‘functional colour’ or ‘significant form’ we need to know not only the picture but also something about his general theory in order to understand the remark. Similarly, if M says D is ‘common’, although the term does not belong to a technical vocabulary, this use of it can only be fully understood if we know not only D but M.

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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril. It is totally misleading to speak, for instance, of ‘two cultures’, one literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status.

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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. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist: and if there is a ‘Shakespeare of science’ his name is Aristotle.

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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.

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I want now to go on to argue that the view I am suggesting offers a more satisfactory account of human freedom than does the existentialist view. I have classified together as existentialist both philosophers such as Sartre who claim the title, and philosophers such as Hampshire, Hare, Ayer, who do not. Characteristic of both is the identification of the true person with the empty choosing will, and the corresponding emphasis upon the idea of movement rather than vision. This emphasis will go with the antinaturalistic bias of existentialism. There is no point in talking of ‘moral seeing’ since there is nothing morally to see. There is no moral vision. There is only the ordinary world which is seen with ordinary vision, and there is the will that moves within it. What may be called the Kantian wing and the Surrealist wing of existentialism may be distinguished by the degree of their interest in reasons for action, which diminishes to nothing at the Surrealist end.

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If we are so strangely separate from the world at moments of choice are we really choosing at all, are we right indeed to identify ourselves with this giddy empty will? (Hampshire: ‘I identify myself with my will.’) In a reaction of thought which is never far from the minds of more extreme existentialists (Dostoevsky for instance), one may turn here towards determinism, towards fatalism, towards regarding freedom as a complete illusion. When I deliberate the die is already cast. Forces within me which are dark to me have already made the decision. This view is if anything less attractive and less realistic than the other one. Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism? Can we not give a more balanced and illuminating account of the matter? I suggest we can if we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking, of which I was speaking above. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.

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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 offin between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial.

Note: A case for ethical momentary attention, because future decisions stem from it [e]. Also fuses free will, and my general notion of how your current life and mindset are accumulated from your past decisions.

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Of course psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world, complete with systematic vocabulary. (M seeing D as pert-common-juvenile, etc.) Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion.

Note: Attention to break frames of logic and abstraction; which are unknowingly installed, or exist past their usefulness. Attention is seeing beyond abstraction and into the real nature of things, finding new realities which can make better abstractions.

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Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that personality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will: and in so far as this conviction is wrong the condition partakes of illusion. It is obviously, in practice, a delicate moral problem to decide how far the will can coerce the formed personality (move in a world it cannot see) without merely occasioning disaster. The concept of Angst should of course be carefully distinguished from its ancestor, Kant's Achtung, in which dismay at the frailty of the will is combined with an inspiring awareness of the reality which the will is drawn by (despair at the sensuous will, joy in the rational will). The loss of that awareness, or that faith, produces Angst, which is properly a condition of sober alarm. Those who are, or attempt to be, exhilarated by Angst, that is by the mere impotence of the will and its lack of connection with the personality, are, as I have suggested above, in danger of falling into fatalism or sheer irresponsibility.

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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 choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at. This is in a way the reverse of Hampshire's picture, where our efforts are supposed to be directed to increasing our freedom by conceptualizing as many different possibilities of action as possible: having as many goods as possible in the shop. The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. 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’.

Note: Shifting decisions away from the moment of choice, and upstream to the development of a virtual engine (character) that makes choose automatic. They already are automatic in some sense. We don’t have leverage in outthinking a moment, but we can shape ourselves today with habits so our future self can properly react.

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Will continually influences belief; for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality. This is what Simone Weil means when she says that ‘will is obedience not resolution’. As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection. Man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a personal will. He is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the direction and focus of his vision.

Note: Will power not as momentary bold decisions, but continuous bold attention

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I said that any artist would appreciate the notion of ill as obedience to reality, an obedience which ideally teaches a position where there is no choice. One of the great merits of the moral psychology which I am proposing is that it does not contrast art and morals, but shows them to be two aspects of a single struggle. The existentialist-behaviourist view could give no satisfactory account of art: it was seen as a quasi-play activity, gratuitous, ‘for its own sake’ (the familiar Kantian-Bloomsbury slogan), a sort of by-product of our failure to be entirely rational. Such a view of art is of course intolerable. In one of those important movements of return from philosophical theory to simple things which we are certain of, we must come back to what we know about great art and about the moral insight which it contains and the moral achievement which it represents. Goodness and beauty are not to be contrasted, but are largely part of the same structure. Plato, who tells us that beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love immediately by nature, treats the beautiful as an introductory section of the good. So that aesthetic situations are not so much analogies of morals as cases of morals. Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature: something which is easy to name but very hard to achieve.

Note: The artist as directed attention as profession; less about works and than how the process shapes them.

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To do philosophy is to explore one's own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth. It seems to me that there is a void in present-day moral philosophy. Areas peripheral to philosophy expand (psychology, political and social theory) or collapse (religion) without philosophy being able in the one case to encounter, and in the other case to rescue, the values involved. A working philosophical psychology is needed which can at least attempt to connect modern psychological terminology with a terminology concerned with virtue. We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx, and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Note: Love captured in religion and psychology more than philosophy

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I shall argue that existentialism is not, and cannot by tinkering be made, the philosophy we need. Although it is indeed the heir of the past, it is (it seems to me) an unrealistic and over-optimistic doctrine and the purveyor of certain false values. This is more obviously true of flimsier creeds, such as ‘humanism’, with which people might now attempt to fill the philosophical void.

Note: 1) what’s her take on humanism? 2) too much attention on existentialists

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Wittgenstein claimed that he brought the Cartesian era in philosophy to an end. Moral philosophy of an existentialist type is still Cartesian and egocentric. Briefly put, our picture of ourselves has become too grand, we have isolated, and identified ourselves with, an unrealistic conception of will, we have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves, and we have no adequate conception of original sin. Kierkegaard rightly observed that ‘an ethic which ignores sin is an altogether useless science’, although he also added, ‘but if it recognizes sin it is eo ipso beyond its sphere’. Kant believed in Reason and Hegel believed in History, and for both this was a form of a belief in an external reality. Modern thinkers who believe in neither, but who remain within the tradition, are left with a denuded self whose only virtues are freedom, or at best sincerity, or, in the case of the British philosophers, an everyday reasonableness. Philosophy, on its other fronts, has been busy dismantling the old substantial picture of the ‘self’, and ethics has not proved able to rethink this concept for moral purposes. The moral agent then is pictured as an isolated principle of will, or burrowing pinpoint of consciousness, inside, or beside, a lump of being which has been handed over to other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology. On the one hand a Luciferian philosophy of adventures of the will, and on the other natural science. Moral philosophy, and indeed morals, are thus undefended against an irresponsible and undirected self-assertion which goes easily hand in hand with some brand of pseudo-scientific determinism. An unexamined sense of the strength of the machine is combined with an illusion of leaping out of it. The younger Sartre, and many British moral philosophers, represent this last dry distilment of Kant's views of the world. The study of motivation is surrendered to empirical science: will takes the place of the complex of motives and also of the complex of virtues.

Note: Moral philosophy has become self-obsessed; tie into cultural currents of individuality [e] … relate to own evolution: easy to reject the collective in pursuit of hyper-individuality, and to some degree, it is your obligation to steer yourself, but never become cynical or instrumental; always attentive and loving

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Contempt for the ordinary human condition, together with a conviction of personal salvation, saves the writer from real pessimism.

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When I speak in this context of modern psychology I mean primarily the work of Freud. I am not a ‘Freudian’ and the truth of this or that particular view of Freud does not here concern me, but it seems clear that Freud made an important discovery about the human mind and that he remains still the greatest scientist in the field which he opened. One may say that what he presents us with is a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man. If we take the general outline of this picture seriously, and at the same time wish to do moral philosophy, we shall have to revise the current conceptions of will and motive very considerably. What seems to me, for these purposes, true and important in Freudian theory is as follows. Freud takes a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature. He sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings. Of course Freud is saying these things in the context of a scientific therapy which aims not at making people good but at making them workable. If a moral philosopher says such things he must justify them not with scientific arguments but with arguments appropriate to philosophy; and in fact if he does say such things he will not be saying anything very new, since partially similar views have been expressed before in philosophy, as far back as Plato. It is important to look at Freud and his successors because they can give us more information about a mechanism the general nature of which we may discern without the help of science; and also because the ignoring of psychology may be a source of confusion.

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The problem is to accommodate inside moral philosophy, and suggest methods of dealing with the fact that so much of human conduct is moved by mechanical energy of an egocentric kind. In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego. Moral philosophy is properly, and in the past has sometimes been, the discussion of this ego and of the techniques (if any) for its defeat. In this respect moral philosophy has shared some aims with religion.

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What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better? Can we make ourselves morally better? These are questions the philosopher should try to answer. We realize on reflection that we know little about good men. There are men in history who are traditionally thought of as having been good (Christ, Socrates, certain saints), but if we try to contemplate these men we find that the information about them is scanty and vague, and that, their great moments apart, it is the simplicity and directness of their diction which chiefly colours our conception of them as good. And if we consider contemporary candidates for goodness, if we know of any, we are likely to find them obscure or else on closer inspection full of frailty. Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people—inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families—but these cases are also the least illuminating.

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Sartre tells us that when we deliberate the die is already cast, and Oxford philosophy has developed no serious theory of motivation. The agent's freedom, indeed his moral quality, resides in his choices, and yet we are not told what prepares him for the choices. Sartre can admit, with bravado, that we choose out of some sort of pre-existent condition, which he also confusingly calls a choice, and Richard Hare holds that the identification of mental data, such as ‘intentions’, is philosophically difficult and we had better say that a man is morally the set of his actual choices. That visible motives do not necessitate acts is taken by Sartre as a cue for asserting an irresponsible freedom as an obscure postulate; that motives do not readily yield to ‘introspection’ is taken by many British philosophers as an excuse for forgetting them and talking about ‘reasons’ instead.

Note: Sarte says morality is in the choice. Murdoch says morality is in attention, because this creates the person that will then act and make choices. It assumes a correlation, however, between inner attention and outer acting. Could there not be a twisted man with demonic thoughts, who regardless of his terrible nature, acts perfectly and selflessly? What about evil thoughts from good men?

Location 814

The existentialist picture of choice, whether it be surrealist or rational, seems unrealistic, over-optimistic, romantic, because it ignores what appears at least to be a sort of continuous background with a life of its own; and it is surely in the tissue of that life that the secrets of good and evil are to be found. Here neither the inspiring ideas of freedom, sincerity and fiats of will, nor the plain wholesome concept of a rational discernment of duty, seem complex enough to do justice to what we really are. What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between the moments of choice.

Note: This seems aligned with my octality framework. By understanding and tuning your system you can act differently. But it’s not a monolithic thing; you might be attuned in a private context, but then at a cocktail party all the wiring goes haywire … and it’s worth noting the different types of attention: mystic, magic, mythic, metric, etc. Love (agape) might be the shared element between each, which is maybe only achieved from kairos (exiting chronos and all systematic abstractions); yet understand the 128 patterns within attention (geez), is how you actually and precisely know where you are/aren’t morally attuned. We might finer language for attention. [e] edit: maybe this “obscure” system of energy actually has a taxonomy to it.

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one of the main problems of moral philosophy might be formulated thus: are there any techniques for the purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish, in such a way that when moments of choice arrive we shall be sure of acting rightly? We shall also have to ask whether, if there are such techniques, they should be simply described, in quasi-psychological terms, perhaps in psychological terms, or whether they can be spoken of in a more systematic philosophical way. I have already suggested that a pessimistic view which claims that goodness is the almost impossible countering of a powerful egocentric mechanism already exists in traditional philosophy and in theology. The technique which Plato thought appropriate to this situation I shall discuss later. Much closer and more familiar to us are the techniques of religion, of which the most widely practised is prayer. What becomes of such a technique in a world without God, and can it be transformed to supply at least part of the answer to our central

Note: Philosophical terminology to express and ancient and forgotten practice; or put another way, a meta-awareness of religion in non-denominational and philosophical terms? I wonder if that “full-stack of religion” comes into here. Of course there is “philosophy of religion” as a branch, but who is in it, has anyone synthesized, and has anyone proposed some socio-political scheme to attempt to slowly nudge religion back into relevance in the 21st century?

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I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention; and I shall go on to suggest that moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these characteristics. I shall consider them one by one, although to a large extent they interpenetrate and overlap. Let us take first the notion of an object of attention. The religious believer, especially if his God is conceived of as a person, is in the fortunate position of being able to focus his thought upon something which is a source of energy. Such focusing, with such results, is natural to human beings. Consider being in love. Consider too the attempt to check being in love, and the need in such a case of another object to attend to. Where strong emotions of sexual love, or of hatred, resentment, or jealousy are concerned, ‘pure will’ can usually achieve little. It is small use telling oneself ‘Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just.’ What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. Notice the metaphors of orientation and of looking. The neo-Kantian existentialist ‘will’ is a principle of pure movement. But how ill this describes what it is like for us to alter. Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing. The metaphor of orientation may indeed also cover moments when recognizable ‘efforts of will’ are made, but explicit efforts of will are only a part of the whole situation. That God, attended to, is a powerful source of (often good) energy is a psychological fact. It is also a psychological fact, and one of importance in moral philosophy, that we can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which are valuable: virtuous people, great art, perhaps (I will discuss this later) the idea of goodness itself. Human beings are naturally ‘attached’ and when an attachment seems painful or bad it is most readily displaced…

Note: An object of focus, better than trying to will something; an alignment of energy.

Location 843

notion that value should be in some sense unitary, or even that there should be a single supreme value concept, may seem, if one surrenders the idea of God, far from obvious. Why should there not be many different kinds of independent moral values? Why should all be one here? The madhouses of the world are filled with people who are convinced that all is one. It might be said that ‘all is one’ is a dangerous falsehood at any level except the highest; and can that be discerned at all? That a…

Note: Did God emerge as a personified Platonic unity? I believe in the power of a single unifier, evident in focusing on a single prayer—“kairon theoro, agapeen spepro”—but I do think there are specialized virtues and maps beneath it. My current model, still early has 128 parts (which are broken into tetrads of excess, deficiency, regulation, and transcendence, over 8 different poles which each are duality pairs that covers the left/brain divide over different scales of relating to time). I realize this sentence is word salad. It is hard to convey 3D conceptual architectures in prose. But the point is that it’s possible for each of those 128 parts night ladder up into a unifying whole. Through seeing the parts and isolating, we can better understand sub-virtues that may be holding us back from embodying the mega-virtue. [e]

Location 861

It is true that the intellect naturally seeks unity; and in the sciences, for instance, the assumption of unity…

Note: Unity is only possible through paradox.

Location 868

We might, however, set out from an ordinary language situation by reflecting upon the virtues. The concepts of the virtues, and the familiar words which name them, are important since they help to make certain potentially nebulous areas of experience more open to inspection. If we reflect upon the nature of the virtues we are constantly led to consider their relation to each other. The idea of an ‘order’ of virtues suggests itself, although it might of course be difficult to state this in any systematic form. For instance, if we reflect upon courage and ask why we think it to be a virtue, what kind of courage is the highest, what distinguishes courage from rashness, ferocity, self-assertion, and so on, we are bound, in our explanation, to use the names of other virtues. The best kind of courage (that which would make a man act unselfishly in a concentration camp) is steadfast, calm, temperate, intelligent, loving…. This may not in fact be exactly the right description, but it is the right sort of description. Whether there is a single supreme principle in the united world of the virtues, and whether the name of that principle is love, is something which I shall discuss below. All I suggest here is that reflection rightly tends to unify the moral world, and that increasing moral sophistication reveals increasing unity. What is it like to be just? We come to understand this as we come to understand the relationship between justice and the other virtues. Such a reflection requires and generates a rich and diversified…

Note: On using language to map the sub-components of “the good” (love)? and what is the hierarchy?

Location 872

have spoken of an ‘object of attention’ and of an unavoidable sense of ‘unity’. Let us now go on to consider, thirdly, the much more difficult idea of ‘transcendence’. All that has been said so far could be said without benefit of metaphysics. But now it may be asked: are you speaking of a transcendent authority or of a psychological device? It seems to me that the idea of the transcendent, in some form or other, belongs to morality: but it is not easy to interpret. As with so many of these large elusive ideas, it readily takes on forms which are false ones. There is a false transcendence, as there is a false unity, which is generated by modern empiricism: a…

Note: An object, a unity, transcendence. Or; focus at a point in the hierarchy in order to evolve.

Location 886

It is difficult to be exact here. One might start from the assertion that morality, goodness, is a form of realism. The idea of a really good man living in a private dream world seems unacceptable. Of course a good man may be infinitely eccentric, but he must know certain things about his surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims. 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.’

Note: Surprised by this. Might fantasy not be a form of personal value cultivation and attention (love) that shapes how a person acts in real situation? Consider Jung or Pessoa. Although maybe she’s using the word “fantasy” in a different sense here? It feels anti-imagination, and so maybe it’s good to continue reading Poetics of Space alongside this.

Location 895

One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals, or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else, a natural object, a person in need. We can see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world.

Note: Seems to prefer a type of artistic realism, where I think ego is inevitably a part of art. Of course there are tasteless ways to do that, I just don’t think she has a good absolute characterization here.

Location 901

What is truly beautiful is ‘inaccessible’ and cannot be possessed or destroyed. The statue is broken, the flower fades, the experience ceases, but something has not suffered from decay and mortality. Almost anything that consoles us is a fake, and it is not easy to prevent this idea from degenerating into a vague Shelleyan mysticism. In the case of the idea of a transcendent personal God the degeneration of the idea seems scarcely avoidable: theologians are busy at their desks at this very moment trying to undo the results of this degeneration. In the case of beauty, whether in art or in nature, the sense of separateness from the temporal process is connected perhaps with concepts of perfection of form and ‘authority’ which are not easy to transfer into the field of morals. Here I am not sure if this is an analogy or an instance. It is as if we can see beauty itself in a way in which we cannot see goodness itself. (Plato says this at Phaedrus 250e.) I can experience the transcendence of the beautiful, but (I think) not the transcendence of the good. Beautiful things contain beauty in a way in which good acts do not exactly contain good, because beauty is partly a matter of the senses. So if we speak of good as transcendent we are speaking of something rather more complicated and which cannot be experienced, even when we see the unselfish man in the concentration camp. One might be tempted to use the word ‘faith’ here if it could be purged of its religious associations. ‘What is truly good is incorruptible and indestructible.’ ‘Goodness is not in this world.’ These sound like highly metaphysical statements.

Location 907

Are we not certain that there is a ‘true direction’ towards better conduct, that goodness ‘really matters’, and does not that certainty about a standard suggest an idea of permanence which cannot be reduced to psychological or any other set of empirical terms?

Location 921

It may seem curious to wonder whether the idea of perfection (as opposed to the idea of merit or improvement) is really an important one, and what sort of role it can play. Well, is it important to measure and compare things and know just how good they are? In any field which interests or concerns us I think we would say yes. A deep understanding of any field of human activity (painting, for instance) involves an increasing revelation of degrees of excellence and often a revelation of there being in fact little that is very good and nothing that is perfect. Increasing understanding of human conduct operates in a similar way. We come to perceive scales, distances, standards, and may incline to see as less than excellent what previously we were prepared to ‘let by’. (This need not of course hinder the operation of the virtue of tolerance: tolerance can be, indeed ought to be, clear-sighted.) The idea of perfection works thus within a field of study, producing an increasing sense of direction. To say this is not perhaps to say anything very startling; and a reductionist might argue that an increasingly refined ability to compare need not imply anything beyond itself. The idea of perfection might be, as it were, empty.

Note: On perfectionism [e]

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Some psychologists warn us that if our standards are too high we shall become neurotic. It seems to me that the idea of love arises necessarily in this context. The idea of perfection moves, and possibly changes, us (as artist, worker, agent) because it inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy. One cannot feel unmixed love for a mediocre moral standard any more than one can for the work of a mediocre artist. The idea of perfection is also a natural producer of order.

Location 943

One may of course try to ‘incarnate’ the idea of perfection by saying to oneself ‘I want to write like Shakespeare’ or ‘I want to paint like Piero’. But of course one knows that Shakespeare and Piero, though almost gods, are not gods, and that one has got to do the thing oneself alone and differently, and that beyond the details of craft and criticism there is only the magnetic non-representable idea of the good which remains not ‘empty’ so much as mysterious. And thus too in the sphere of human conduct.

Location 952

Art presents the most comprehensible examples of the almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy and also of the effort to resist this and the vision of reality which comes with success. Success in fact is rare. Almost all art is a form of fantasy-consolation and few artists achieve the vision of the real. The talent of the artist can be readily, and is naturally, employed to produce a picture whose purpose is the consolation and aggrandizement of its author and the projection of his personal obsessions and wishes. To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic’. The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only (for all its difficulties) the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real. Of course great artists are ‘personalities’ and have special styles; even Shakespeare occasionally, though very occasionally, reveals a personal obsession. But the greatest art is ‘impersonal’ because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all. Of course, too, artists are pattern-makers. The claims of form and the question of ‘how much form’ to elicit constitutes one of the chief problems of art. But it is when form is used to isolate, to explore, to display something which is true that we are most highly moved and enlightened. Plato says (Republic, VII, 532) that the technai have the power to lead the best part of the soul to the view of what is most excellent in reality. This well describes the role of great art as an educator and revealer. Consider what we learn from contemplating the characters of Shakespeare or Tolstoy or the paintings of Velasquez or Titian. What is learnt here is something about the real quality of human nature, when it is envisaged, in the artist's just and compassionate vision, with a clarity which does not belong to the self-centred rush of ordinary life.

Location 976

The more the separateness and differentness of other people is realized, and the fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one's own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing. That it is realism which makes great art great remains too as a kind of proof.

Note: Realism as emotional resonance

Location 1005