There's a debate in ethics about whether morality is 'real'. Are values embedded in the world or are they imposed by minds? To me, the answer seems self-evident. Facts are facts and values are values and never the twain shall meet. Well, not quite that, but I don't get how atoms, fields, waves or strings can be building blocks of values.
I have looked at this before - suggesting some naturalistic values here and considering Max Weber's view of the disenchantment of the world here.
Then we ask if they can be seen as objective. Now here it gets more interesting. Consider the rules of a game. Within that game, the rules are objective facts. Then think of humans. We are social animals. Within our societies, certainly, codes have objective values entailed in them. (This reminds me of the virtues of the good Athenian and practices in Alasdair MacIntyre's work.) It's good to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, for example. Actually, that one might have objective value throughout humanity.
In a discussion on Meaning of Life TV, Daniel Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci suggested that values are in a sense embedded in facts in the manifest image (as opposed to the scientific image - check out this post for the distinction.) I liked this. It fits my intuitions. You may recall a previous post in which I suggested that every sensation, sight, sound, thought is accompanied by or coloured with a little emotional charge. Our impression of the world is not neutral. We do not experience mind-independent reality.
So what about the art? Well, various moral philosophers have also looked at aesthetics because that, like ethics, is a realm of values rather than facts. It's interesting to consider how the fields align.
For many thinkers, the idea of the Good and the Beautiful appear to be naturally connected if not overlapping. As a popular expression of this, consider John Keats in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn':
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Iris Murdoch explores all this in great and complex detail in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Now, I started this book about a year ago and got to 17% of the way through (according to my Kindle). I realised that I had understood less than 17% of that 17% and gave up. But, in a bid to save money, I decided that having read more ethics in the intervening period, I'd try again. I'm now 24% through, having started again from the beginning, and I think I understand about 72%. So that's a considerable improvement.
One point she makes is that the work of art gives us a sense of wholeness, or perhaps, almost wholeness - it is open to the world and to us, so it is not an entirely closed artefact. But that this consoling sense of unity allows us to feel we have a vision of truth. It is a descendant of Plato's Ideal Forms - though Plato saw the art object as doubly distanced from the Ideal. So, there's an Ideal of the chair and the carpenter, with skill and craft, makes a version - then the artist twice removes it from the Ideal by then painting it. This is not to Murdoch's taste - she seems the art object instead as a more perfect form of the real, in that it is given precedence by being made present away from the complexity and mess of the rest of the world.
The artist is in a way putting before us the value that's embedded in the facticity of the manifest image. This is how art comes to relate to ethics. It's a way of drawing out the value element of the world as we experience it, showing us more clearly, shining light on, the matteringness of things, people, events.
At least, I think that's what she's saying.
Now, when I said art gives an image of wholeness, that should not suggest that art gives the answers. A second-rate novel, in which the good people flourish and the bad people are punished, is not a vision of wholeness - because wholeness incorporates complexity and contingency. Great art shows that rather than hiding it. Otherwise we have sentimental art or kitsch. For this reason, the ambiguity of tragedy is granted a special place. And modern novels that try to remove values - like jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea - can be, she suggests - and I agree, very dull.
Indeed, to see the manifest image without any values - those little positive and negative tags* - seems like it, this real nihilism, would be the very pit of depression, a prelude to death, if not sure evidence of the death of the self. We talk now about a 'crisis of meaning' but as there's no shortage of complaining, shouting, attacking and defending, it seems that what is being experienced is not this loss of values so much as an inability to read them. As though we'd lost the grammar or the vocabulary, or both. We know there are things we like and don't like, but we can't structure them into a framework. The lost teleology of religion has left us with a bucketload of feelings about things that we can't make sense of. At least if you want to make money or become the most famous reality TV star you have a structure. Or a Marxist could imagine a revolution.
I'm thinking now of those boxes children have with holes for the different shapes? The nihilist has no box, no shapes. Christianity, Islam, Marxism, environmentalism, even free market economics might give you a box. But most of us have these shapes but spend much of life thinking, 'Where's the damn box? And which of these shapes matter for the box that we might want to possess?'
Art can give us the feeling, as we contemplate it, that, yes, these shapes fit in this box. It's consoling and life enhancing - but it can't give us the box for our whole lives. Just show us what shapes and boxes are meant to do. That at least is a start.
Perhaps this is why art gives me that feeling of wonder - as do other experiences. Indeed, it seems to me that this is the meta-value of wonder. A reminder of what it feels like to value and how that works.
Writing that makes me consider now that wonder and art take us back into being, into a place or form of existence, where we are not cognitively cut off from the essential correlation between facts and values. In being, the box and the shapes are just there - we don't need to make sense of them, they have a given relevance, very different from in our divorced state of distractedness in normal life.
Which, in turn, suggests a rather trite solution: being gives us that framework that we lack. And that is kind of what Heidegger said - that we open our eyes and the world and truth are revealed in the light. Perhaps the problem comes in the next stage, when we put it into language... when maybe our vocabularies have become too... small? Meaning-diluted? Ambiguous? We lose something between signifier and signified... The world has significance by virtue of one being in it. He wrote a lot about aesthetics and I will not pretend to understand any of it, but I will imagine that those artists he reveres - with most of whom I am not familiar - show an ability to make manifest organically a world of being rich with significance.
That is what I find in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins - which I wrote about here and here. Martin Hagglund suggests that value is pregnant in the world when we fully embrace our finitude - as I have discussed here. And Mary Midgley, who was at Oxford with Murdoch**, finds value in looking outward, in a kind of Heideggerian sense, with curiosity and social affection. In Beast and Man, Midgley quotes Murdoch with an example of this redemptive loss of self that aligns with a discovery of value:
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.****
Murdoch states specifically that focusing attention outward negates the 'fantasy' of the self and leads us to the 'good':
What counteracts the system [of self-centered fantasy] is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love. In the case of art and nature such attention is immediately rewarded by the enjoyment of beauty. In the case of morality, though there are sometimes rewards, the idea of a reward is out of place. Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action [...] The same virtues, in the end the same virtue (love), are required, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person.*****
It seems clear that she has investigated Heidegger - and she does discuss his work in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She though sees a clear foundation for morality in this coalescence of mind and matter: love.
NOTES
*Come to think of it, maybe this is what David Hume was getting at when he talked of reason being the slave of the passions. He believed that pure reason was amoral. Think of a psychopath, who may well be able to work things out brilliantly, but doesn't care about anyone or anything; in a different way, an autistic savant may have a preternatural grasp of mathematical logic, for example, but no ability to read people. So for Hume, the passions (emotions, instincts, intuitions - in my terms 'the positive and negative tags') confer the values, and from them one can develop an ethical system. And this, too, perhaps, leads to my concerns with utilitarianism, which, though based in the value of happiness, is radically rational.
**The four women women - and I think Mary Warnock, too - went up to Oxford in the early stages of the Second World War. Gradually, the men - apart from those unfit for service and conscientious objectors - were called away. In that environment there was less of a mood of winning arguments to win arguments and more of a searching for truth collective spirit, In addition, as the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, the trend of philosophy that was current in those days (which divorced value from facts and I think was focused on language***) seemed to the women to be highly inappropriate and irrelevant. Midgley recounts an occasion when they met and discussed how they would turn attention to what was actually happening in the world and how to explore good and evil rather than grammar and epistemology. This was a key influencer in the return to a serious consideration of ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, was inspired by either Foot or Anscombe... or both. Once again we see how history is relevant in the development of thought.
***I know: a note on a note: Wittgenstein was big at the time - tutored them all, I think. And from Murdoch's book I get the impression that he felt that language is all we have - we make our concepts and thus our reality out of language... Or in language... And what is outside that realm (value, meaning, ethics) is that of which we cannot speak. Not that he did not have an ethical view; it was just ineffable. Which is not hugely helpful. However, in her discussion of the Murdoch passage quoted above, I seem to recall that Midgley feels that such experiences have a particular quality that cannot be translated into words.
****Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge Classics, 2001.
*****Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge Classics, 2001.
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