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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.
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.
We would like to know what, as moral agents, we have got to do because of logic, what we have got to do because of human nature, and what we can choose to do.
Moore believed that good was a supersensible reality, that it was a mysterious quality, unrepresentable and indefinable, that it was an object of knowledge and (implicitly) that to be able to see it was in some sense to have it. He thought of the good upon the analogy of the beautiful; and he was, in spite of himself, a ‘naturalist’ in that he took goodness to be a real constituent of the world.
Good is indefinable because judgments of value depend upon the will and choice of the individual.
The image whereby to understand morality, it is argued, is not the image of vision but the image of movement. Goodness and beauty are not analogous but sharply contrasting ideas.
Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the will.
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.
What is ‘real’ is potentially open to different observers. The inner or mental world is inevitably parasitic upon the outer world, it has ‘a parasitic and shadowy nature’.
‘Thought cannot be thought, as opposed to day-dreaming or musing, unless it is directed towards a conclusion, whether in action or in judgement.’
These quotations are from Thought and Action, the later part of Chapter Two.
Modern ethics analyses ‘good’, the empty action word which is the correlate of the isolated will, and tends to ignore other value terms. Our hero aims at being a ‘realist’ and regards sincerity as the fundamental and perhaps the only virtue.
Briefly, the argument against the cogitatio is that (a) such an entity cannot form part of the structure of a public concept, (b) such an entity cannot be introspectively discovered. That is, (a) it's no use, (b) it isn't there.
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.
Wittgenstein in the Untersuchungen sums the situation up as follows: ‘If we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of “object and name”, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.’
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.
It will be true of all these that I cannot show them to other people. 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.
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?’
Here I start wondering about memory and feeling emotion. Ernaux in Simple Passion is obsessively in love with someone - where is that stored? In those few moments she identifies where he is not on her mind, how is his image and the emotional weight assigned to him stored?
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.
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.
Hampshire says that ‘anything which is to count as a definite reality must be open to several observers’. But can this quasi-scientific notion of individuation through unspecified observers really be applied to a case like this? Here there is an activity but no observers; and if one were to introduce the idea of potential observers the question of their competence would still arise.
M's activity is hard to characterize not because it is hazy but precisely because it is moral. And with this, as I shall shortly try to explain, we are coming near to the centre of the difficulty.
The active ‘reassessing’ and ‘redefining’ which is a main characteristic of live personality often suggests and demands a checking procedure which is a function of an individual history. Repentance may mean something different to an individual at different times in his life, and what it fully means is a part of this life and cannot be understood except in context.
Science can instruct morality at certain points and can change its direction, but it cannot contain morality, nor ergo moral philosophy.
Love is knowledge of the individual.
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.
We ordinarily conceive of and apprehend goodness in terms of virtues which belong to a continuous fabric of being. And it is just the historical, individual, nature of the virtues as actually exemplified which makes it difficult to learn goodness from another person. It is all very well to say that ‘to copy a right action is to act rightly’ (Hampshire, Logic and Appreciation), but what is the form which I am supposed to copy? It is a truism of recent philosophy that this operation of discerning the form is fairly easy, that rationality in this simple sense is a going concern.
A smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instrument of corruption.
philosophy is often a matter of finding a suitable context in which to say the obvious.
But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. 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. I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an
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Says the novelist...
But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. 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. I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an
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Simone Weil
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.
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.
I would like on the whole to use the word ‘attention’ as a good word and use some more general term like ‘looking’ as the neutral word. 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.
goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one's eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would however be far from my intention to demote or dispense with the term ‘good’: but rather to restore to it the dignity and authority which it possessed before Moore appeared on the scene.
This surely is the place where the concept of good lives. ‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’. These words are closely connected. And here we retrieve the deep sense of the indefinability of good, which has been given a trivial sense in recent philosophy.
Good is indefinable not for the reasons offered by Moore's successors, but because of the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality.
The picture offered by, e.g., Hampshire is of course not neutral either, as he admits in parenthesis. (Thought and Action, Chapter Two.) ‘A decision has to be made between two conceptions of personality…. It may be that in a society in which a man's theoretical opinions and religious beliefs were held to be supremely important, a man's beliefs would be considered as much part of his responsibility as his behaviour to other men.’
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
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.
A moral philosophy should be inhabited.
Moore, although he himself held a curious metaphysic of ‘moral facts’, set the tone when he told us that we must carefully distinguish the question ‘What things are good?’ from the question ‘What does “good” mean?’ The answer to the latter question concerned the will. Good was indefinable (naturalism was a fallacy) because any offered good could be scrutinized by any individual by a ‘stepping back’ movement.
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
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It is significant that the idea of goodness (and of virtue) has been largely superseded in Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness, supported perhaps by some conception of sincerity.
We have learned from Freud to picture ‘the mechanism’ as something highly individual and personal, which is at the same time very powerful and not easily understood by its owner.
