Review of The Sovereignty of the Good

 

              There are some books that pack a mighty punch in the most minute of packages. The Sovereignty of the Good by Iris Murdoch is one such book. There is no fat in this book – it is pure, lean muscle and by the time one is finished reading it, the mind will have made some serious gains. Running a mere 101 pages of fairly large type and small margins, this book took so much effort to understand on my part and was so full of pearls of wisdom that it nearly beggars belief. Upon reading, one must deliberate on almost every single sentence – nothing is wasted, and the prerequisite depth of knowledge required to understand it is staggering. I will definitely have to revisit this classic of moral philosophy in later years when I am older and wiser, but I will still give my inadequate impression of it – just take it with a grain of salt. There are two ways, in my opinion, in which books can be considered great. They can either bring something to your attention of which you were never aware and cause newfound light to dawn in your mind and awaken your soul to new and beautiful realities. Another way involves taking what is only a vague, obscure intuition that is almost half-remembered in the haze of a dreamy fog and focus that incoherent beam of insight into an indelible impression with laser like focus. A lot of that depends on the quality of the ideas present, the skill of the author, and the contours of the state in life the reader is currently in. For whatever reason, at this moment for me, this book functioned in the latter manner. I have read similar things elsewhere (Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life), but this little book sharpened my focus, entrenched the hold of these ideas in my mind, and fleshed them out in ways I did not consider possible – it was a treasure to read and I highly recommend it to those interested in moral philosophy. This book was brought to my attention by the esteemed, if cantankerous philosophical theologian and scholar of religious studies, David Bentley Hart. I was serendipitously surprised to find that one of my friends was currently reading it on the encouragement from another, independent source and so I immediately dived in—it was well worth it.

              The Sovereignty of the Good is a collection of three essays on moral philosophy from a Platonic perspective. It strikes a fairly irenic tone, but it wouldn’t be unfair to say the author is somewhat polemical towards the existentialist, behaviorist, and utilitarian viewpoints on the matter. There are a few threads that unify the tapestry of the text into a coherent whole. The first is a focus on vision as a more accurate metaphor for the moral life rather than movement and touch – contemplation is more fundamental than action. The second is a robust defense of the classical definition of freedom as the ability to flourish as the kind of being one is rather than the more insipid view of freedom as based on the mere ability to choose otherwise (libertarian free will). Lastly, the author argues in support of virtue ethics and the relevant place of art and intellectual disciplines in seeking to become better moral agents. There are two main questions that moral philosophy must tackle. The first involves the fleshing out of a realistic anthropology which entails that philosophy of mind is also entangled here. How can we know how to be better creatures unless we understand what kind of creatures we are? The second question is how precisely to become a better ethical agent. These are the questions she attempts to answer in what I would deem a very satisfactory manner, although I do not agree with her in all the details.

              I must say that I really enjoyed how she opened her first essay, The Idea of Perfection, with a joke. There are always two poles in philosophy: one is needed to make sure it seeks ever new heights, but another to make sure it doesn’t get too far off the ground. “McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just had his breakfast” (1). After this funny little quip, she wastes no time in moving to the meat of the matter. She states some of her premises that she bases the essays on. Goodness is a supersensible reality that is mysterious, unrepresentable, and indefinable because it is unsystematic and inexhaustible. We can know more or less where the sun is, but it is hard to imagine what it would look like (68). It is also impossible to define the Good without having recourse to the very term “good.” Goodness is connected to beauty and it is an object of knowledge such that to see it is to have it in some sense. On this view then, progress in the moral life is a function of ever clearer vision of the Good. She proceeds to examine the assumptions and arguments of the opposition: the existentialists. They do not believe in real, objective moral facts since they are “anti-naturalists” – but this flies in the face of common-sense intuition. Their anthropology is bankrupt since they identify the person wholly with the empty choosing will. This is because they see the will as central to the self since action, to them, is more important than contemplation. The will must be isolated from reason, belief, and emotion so that the responsibility for our actions can be entire. This mistaken view of human nature leads to an unrealistic picture of free will. They believe freedom is only free if we have the ability to choose otherwise than we did (notice the lack of connection to this choice being reasonable). To existentialists, freedom is only a matter of clear intention – they attach no importance to what that attention is directed towards. As the Kantians would say we are not free unless we are free even with respect to the “reasons” why we choose. The will is a purely extrinsic movement from intention to action that is wholly separate from reason. I’m not sure if that is better or worse than the surrealists who suppose that there just are no reasons for why we choose anything – utter moral nihilism. The ultimate freedom for an existentialist would be one in which we had manifold, even infinite amounts of things to choose from – which is the lie of absolutely unfettered capitalism.

              The reason they think this is not only due to the series of errors I just catalogued, but also due to a misinterpretation of a common experience. Some choices we have to make are so extremely difficult and agonizing that when we do choose, it seems like the moment of choice is empty and random and it legitimately could’ve gone either way. Logically, this could expand to cover every single choice and so at the extreme end you get total fatalists in the existential crowd who think freedom is entirely an illusion and we are predestined to fate. Iris Murdoch proceeds with a more balanced and realistic account between both total indeterminism and total determinism. Freedom is not a prerequisite for morality – it IS a moral concept itself. Goodness can never be separate from knowledge. Here is her definition of freedom: “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” (23). When you see things more clearly, you are more just and loving and vice versa. In regard to the aforementioned dilemmas that make it seem like we choose randomly, she gives the correct interpretation:

“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 off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial” (36).

Explicit liberty of choice in much less decisive on this view since much of these explicit decisions are made long before by the quality and quantity of attention we have given to various things leading up to that decision.

              This is much more realistic. If I’m taking a college class, I cannot just refrain from studying all semester and then will myself to do well on the final. My grade is determined based on the how much continual and constant effort I devote to the material. My ability to do well on the test cannot be merely reduced to the moments I am doing the test—the decision on how well I do was made long before due to the clarity and focus of my vision. This is exactly why moral change is slow. We constantly redefine terms, reassess our situation, and struggle – we take some backward steps and some forward one at different moments.  As C.S. Lewis said, he never knew how hard it was to be a good man until he actually tried. We can’t suddenly change ourselves because we can’t suddenly alter what we see, what we desire, and what compels us. This leads to a much different ideal situation than that of the infinite choice model of the existentialist. The ultimate freedom for a Platonist is that of having no choice, which sounds paradoxical, but an example will show it is, in fact, not so. If a loved one of yours was dying and you were in a perfect position to help them and would lose nothing by doing so and would lose much by not saving them, then you really only have one choice – a mother will do anything for her children—it isn’t possible for it to be otherwise. As the Christian Platonist St. Augustine said, the second highest freedom is posse non peccare— to be able to not sin. The highest freedom, however, is non posse peccare—to be unable to sin (On Correction and Grace, Chapter 33). She ends by saying that, of course, purity of heart isn’t more important than action – just more fundamental. The inner can’t do without the outer, but if we are bundles of frenetic activity, we can’t be sure that the activity isn’t a mask over our egocentricity. It is important to concretely help people and not just give them your thoughts, prayers, and well wishes. But it is also important to make sure you are actually caring about them as other subjects and aren’t just a workaholic getting burnt out trying to outrun your demons.

              The second essay, On “God” and “Good”, was by far my clear favorite among the three. She begins by stating that love should be more central to moral philosophy than any other virtue. The problem with the existentialist view is that their supreme virtues tend to be sincerity and libertarian freedom. It matters a whole lot what you are sincere about though. A sincere Nazi is not virtuous. Once again this is due to their anthropology which holds the human being to be an isolated principle of pure will inside a lump of flesh. This leads directly to the enshrinement of undirected self-assertion and fatalism. Another problem with their picture is that it is unambitious and prizes mediocrity since they eschew talk of both original sin and love. This is why many of them are not only against religion in general, but specifically virulently anti-Christian. They believe that Christ’s command that we be perfect (Mt 5:48) inspires neurosis – what kind of a savior would lay such an impossible burden on us? To this she says that no one was ever inspired by mediocrity. The view that goodness is nigh impossible, and sin is nearly inescapable happens to not only be true but, as such, when viewed properly helps us greatly in our quest as moral agents. I can quote any number of kitschy sayings in support of this. “Best to shoot for the stars. If you fail, at least you’ll hit the moon, etc.” The closest that modernity gets to a doctrine of original sin is found in Sigmund Freud, but even then, it is too bizarre and focused on aberrant sexuality. For most of the Church and the ancient Christian tradition as a whole, this focus is misplaced. The influential 4^th century desert monk Evagrius says that sins of desire like gluttony, lust, and greed are some the easiest and first to be conquered and are nothing compared to the horrendous “trials of the intellect” like vainglory, anger, acedia, pride, etc. Evagrius, Freud, and most luminaries from the various religious traditions of the world did, however, share the view that the real enemy is the fat, relentless, and self-assertive ego. There isn’t sufficient space to delve into all the many different ways in which original sin has been interpreted in Christianity and other religions. It is enough to know that there are manifold varieties of this doctrine and that there are consequences to this.

              One of the reasons that we know that goodness is nearly unattainable is because info about great people is typically scant and vague (Socrates, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, etc.) This is precisely because pure goodness is so rare and hard to picture. The best depiction of “a positively beautiful man” in literature that I can think of, aside from Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, is Prince Myshkin from The Idiot by Dostoevsky. The author was very worried he was going to fail because he knew depicting a perfectly righteous man is almost impossible. On the other hand, goodness is often seen in the most simple and inarticulate people like the poverty-stricken, selfless mothers of large families. In fact, a few characteristics good people have shared is living simple lives and having direct, unflowery speech. This is why Christianity has always upheld the idea of virtuous peasants – we know more about virtue than we can clearly understand (a view Plato shared). I’ve talked a lot about the mistaken view of human nature that existentialists hold. So, what is the more accurate view, according to Iris Murdoch?

“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 moments of choice” (53).

I think this definition is exactly correct – the rigid lines drawn by existentialists separating the will from reason need to be made more fluid and ambiguous since reality, as experienced by us, is ambiguous itself. “Pure will” is nearly powerless in the face of strong emotions like anger, resentment, jealousy, and sexual love. Just try it. Try to will yourself to love or not love someone or to stop being angry – it’s just not possible. As the ever-shrewd Evagrius says, “It is possible to not act in anger, but it is impossible not to burn.”

The way you stop resenting someone or fall in love with someone isn’t due to a feat of willpower – it is due to reorienting your gaze and focusing your attention on things that slowly and gradually change and mold you over time to where you intend to go.

“Our ability to act well ‘when the time comes’ depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects of attention. ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’” (55)

 Now we can see the wisdom of the Catholic Church teaching its communicants to avoid the “near occasions of sin”, rather than try to conquer the temptation head on. Now that we know that our moral character is derived from what we pay attention to – are there any more specific techniques that will make sure that we can do the right thing when big decisions confront us? In fact, there are – but none of them are easy or quick – the only way to better yourself is to take the long, hard, and narrow road (Mt 7:13-14). The first technique was already discussed – believe (because it’s true) that goodness is damned near impossible – this will thwart your ego, which loves to gloat about conquering its enemies. The most profound and effective techniques are traditionally religious – liturgy, sacraments, and prayer—that’s why they’ve endured for so long. Prayer is not merely petition – in fact, in my (Eastern Orthodox) tradition, that is seen as the lowest form of prayer that, although it never gets entirely abandoned, gets transcended by other forms. Higher than this is thanksgiving, and doxology (praise) higher still. The highest is silent prayer of the heart where people like the 16^th century mystic St. John of the Cross urge us to “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God” (Maxims on Love, 9). All the medical literature supports this as well as the attestation of centuries of spiritual authorities. People who pray, meditate, and worship in a community of like-minded people are less likely to experience depression and anxiety-related disorders and generally have healthier habits than those who don’t, like less smoking, drug use, and alcohol consumption. Neuroscientific studies have shown that spiritual practice actually has a physical effect as well—thickens the neocortex, which is very important in decision making. The reason why these techniques work becomes obvious –the attention is entirely focused on the most perfect thing there is – the Good itself.

              Along with pursuing things proactively, there are also many things to avoid. Murdoch holds that the chief enemy of moral excellence is personal fantasy – we should always confront reality head-on and not seek false, but comforting consolation. Fantasy (focus on the self, or empirical ego) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass as easily as it can from seeing another person (68). This fantasy locks us in a binding system of self-centered darkness and this is what the existentialists mistakenly take to be the will. A subset of this enemy is sado-masochism – an exaggerated and dangerous form of spiritual delusion. It entails a heavy focus on guilt, suffering, and punishment that masquerades as purification, but leads you to focus on yourself more, and less on others while at the same time causing you to think you are being virtuous – not a good combo. Philosophy is preparation for death, not for suffering (Phaedo 64a). The way to avoid these things is to attempt to see things clearly and love is the virtue that helps us do this. The intellect naturally seeks unity and reflection does support the idea that moral reality is one. All of the virtues boil down to just one – love. It is as Evagrius said – all evil reduces to selfishness and all good is ultimately reducible to love of others. Murdoch also defines love as the ability to direct attention outward away from the self. This ties into freedom, which she defines in this essay as the liberation of the soul from the hindrance of fantasy so that our capacity to love can flourish (65).

“Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action. It is what lies behind and in between actions and prompts them that is important, and it is this area which should be purified. By the time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of attention has probably determined the nature of the act.” (65)

Morality is not simply a matter of the actions you take; these actions just show what you are attached to – we need to purify all those in-between moments, every detail matters. The Buddhist imagery of treating the moral life like a garden that needs constant care comes to mind – virtue is a habit that must be constantly maintained. You will never arrive at a destination. Moral tasks are endless because we are finite beings pursuing the Good which is infinite; we can always be more perfect. St. Gregory of Nyssa agreed when he envisioned life as a continual epektasis (stretching out) towards the Good. The more you see of it, the more you love it and the more you want it, and so thirst for it that much more, ad infinitum.

              The third essay, The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts, was my least favorite, probably because her actual position was more confusing to me – although that could just be due to my own ignorance and prejudice – it was still an excellent read. She begins by instilling in the reader of the importance of metaphor – it isn’t just a nice decoration or useful model – it is impossible to discuss certain things without using them and moral philosophy, she contends, is one of those areas. At the time she wrote this, apparently most moral philosophers didn’t like metaphor since they aimed for neutrality and metaphors often carry a moral, so they avoided them. I agree with her that neutrality is an illusion – you are always picking a side. Part of why this last essay fell flatter for me is due to my disagreement with her two fundamental assumptions that she just asserts and does not defend. She even recognizes that if “either of these is denied, what follows will be less convincing” (76). I deny both. Her first assumption is that humans are naturally selfish and the second is that there is no telos or purpose to human life because there is no God – we are simply here (77).

This last premise she weakly attempts to defend by saying that modern science confirms it – but earlier she said that art and ethics should guide and check science (74). This is all very strange – because most Platonists whether pagan, Christian, Muslim, or Jewish have always seen the telos of human life as union with the Good (theosis). As St. Athanasius put it “God became man, so that man might become God.” It isn’t clear why she rejects this since it makes so much sense especially coming from a Platonic metaphysics. What I did find are two reasons that I think fall apart under scrutiny. The first is that she thinks that God, for religious people, just like History for Hegel, Reason for Kant, and Power for Nietzsche are idols of the Good rather than the Good itself. I guess she doesn’t agree with the identification of the Good with God. In fact, she writes in the 2^nd essay that there is no plausible proof for the existence of God – even the one she holds most in esteem, the ontological argument of St. Anselm, she takes to be merely an assertion (61). She says that “Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead” (78). Apparently, Kant showed the limitations of speculative reason that took the wind out of the sails of the traditional proofs for God’s existence. I’ve never read Kant, so she may be right, but I will say I am thoroughly convinced by those proofs. Five Proofs of the Existence of God by the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser makes an airtight case, in my opinion. For a more ancient proof one need look no further than the Platonic dialogue Parmenides, which was the subject of my most recent blog post. It is also strange that she upholds Kant since she also speaks vociferously against him throughout the book. On the very page where she upholds his critique of pure reason, she says “Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer” (78). Unless she was a Satanist, that doesn’t seem to be a good thing – so I’m thoroughly confused about her position here – especially since she thinks the problem with Milton’s Lucifer is that he encapsulates the faulty view of libertarian free will she seeks to demolish.

The second reason has to do with a bizarre fixation on death that she seems to have. She mentions the dialogue Phaedo several times to support the idea that philosophy is preparation for death. What is very odd about that is that she seems to have forgotten an extremely important detail. At the end of Phaedo when Socrates was halfway through the process of dying, he uttered his last words, “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget” (118a). Asclepius was the god of healing and a rooster was typically offered to him as thanksgiving for healing an ailment. Socrates saw death as a healing process – birth into a new, better, and more glorious form of life, just like Christians do. She does not agree with this – she sees it an illegitimate transformation of evil to good by suffering bordering on romantic self-indulgence. She also says the central image of Christianity is a taming and a beautifying of death rendering it a cult of pseudo-death and pseudo-transience (80). She even connects Goodness with the acceptance of the utter finality, pointlessness, and randomness of death. Again, I am thoroughly confused because this seems indistinguishable from the nihilism she was elsewhere so brazenly contending against in the other essays. It also ignores all the threads holding Platonic metaphysics together – the spiritual and unseen is immortal and more fundamental than the material and the fact that beauty is connected to truth.

I think this must be due to lack of imagination. She repeats many times that our ego doesn’t like to face unpleasant realities and so it invents fantasies to protect itself and the moral life is about seeing reality more clearly, so we shouldn’t do that. I agree, but that doesn’t mean that something is false just because it sounds good. Wishful thinking and hope are not identical – the first is a false illusion, the second is based on truth. I agree with David Bentley Hart that it is a depressing and absurd thought to reconcile oneself to the endless, random, and pitiless cycle of life death as morally beautiful and realistic (Doors of the Sea, Part I, Ch. 3). My concern has less to do with proving her wrong – I don’t have the space here—but with showing that it seems to ignore and contradict what she says elsewhere as well as the metaphysical underpinnings of her system. That’s also why the first premise makes no sense to me either. I think the crux of the problem there is the definition of “natural.” I would say that we are naturally good, but since the cosmos is fallen, sin is in the air and extremely hard to avoid. Which is what I found so odd, since she also supported a robust doctrine of original sin and commended Christianity on having such impossibly high standards for moral conduct. She also upholds the value of religion and religious practices that help to purify the mind as better than anything the secular world can offer, and she doesn’t even seem to seek any secular alternative (81). I am forced to conclude that this essay must have been written at a much different time and her mind had changed, because it jars with so much that she wrote elsewhere. I find her thoroughly confusing and obscure on this issue.

Besides these religious practices she elaborates on two other techniques that are available to keep our attention focused on the Good. Both deal with beauty – the first with the beauty in nature, and the second in great art and intellectual disciplines. When we slow down and are able to intuit the sheer givenness of the world, we are brought to a state of great delight – our concerns melt away instantly. We are able to forget ourselves by noticing the completely alien, pointless, and independent existence of animals, stones, and trees – they no longer seem so familiar anymore. She gives an example of how precisely this works to make you a better person. Say you are sitting in your room, staring out the window, furious and ruminating on how someone upset you at work that day when suddenly a beautiful bird flies into view. You are able to forget your own selfish concerns for a moment and focus on something other than you, and that is how she defined love – attention directed away from the self towards the other. Even if you go back to thinking about yourself, once this type of experience occurs, it usually doesn’t have as powerful a hold on your mind as it did before.

Many people think art is just some irrational and pointless diversion, but she claims that the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue and an education in morality and as such is the most important of all human activities (84). It shows us that supersensible reality is, well, real. It also makes hazy thinking clearer and urges us to surrender to legitimate authority. Good art is characterized by bravery, honesty, patience, and humility and inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is full of minute attention to random, seemingly pointless details brought together with a cohesive sense of unity and form that delights us since we are often too selfishly preoccupied in daily life to notice such details. Bad art, on the other hand, is characterized by a lack of realism, easy and predictable patterns of selfish daydreaming and fantasy. Good art allows us to steadily contemplate the truth of the human condition and it unites clear vision with compassion. It teaches us that nothing in life is valuable except the attempt to be virtuous.

Intellectual disciplines lead us to virtue since they require us to be honest, humble, and selfless in order to truly learn. A student learning something difficult must submit himself in obedience to a structure outside of his control, whether that be a language, a coding system, physical laws, mathematical axioms, etc. Patience and courage are developed because the task is hard, and the goal is far off—they build discipline within us. At the very least, you are spending less time thinking about yourself and engaging in vices. She sees all this in all types of art and intellectual disciplines but believes there is a hierarchy – “For both the collective and the individual salvation of the human race, art is doubtless more important than philosophy, and literature the most important of all” (74). As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I vaguely intuited some connection between art, philosophy, math, etc. and ethics – but she crystallizes that understanding here. The reason why just looking out at nature, consuming art, and studying intellectual disciplines are all also moral disciplines is because they help us “unself” ourselves to see things more objectively and allow us to focus on the independent existence of subjects who have as much right to exist as us.

The truth is that there is a transcendent unity to things – art and morality are “two aspects of a single struggle” (39-40). That’s why ancient men, like Plato, could see math as simultaneously a subject in its own right but also nearly worshipped it as divine because they didn’t have the artificial divisions and categories that we make too often today. Overconfidence in systematizing things is foolhardy since those divisions often don’t represent anything in reality. Plato gives the example of young Socrates (not the same as the iconic Socrates) dividing all people into either Greeks or barbarians to illustrate the dangers of being overconfident in our ability to see whether or not the classifications we make do justice to reality (Statesman 262). The problem, besides the obvious one of calling people barbarians, is that neither the Greeks nor the barbarians are classes that match reality. Is a modern-day Greek person really at all similar to one from 2000 years ago? Is one from one side of the country that similar to one from the other side? What about financial status? The problem is worse for the “barbarians” – this covers a massive amount of people of all different places, languages, religions, etc. The same goes for the sciences – for practical reasons we separate chemistry from physics and biology, etc. but truly, reality is one and we just do this for convenience – such barriers don’t actually exist. So, it isn’t wrong necessarily to use these divisions – but it is wise to remember that at the end of the day, monism rings true – nature abhors a dualism. This was a superb book and I eagerly recommend it. I will probably have to revisit it once I am more familiar with modern philosophy.