A Thought of Iris Murdoch, with Help from Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man is the creature that makes a picture of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. ~ Iris Murdoch.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 These thoughts of Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein have long been in my thoughts. Liberal philosophers posit that man is a possessive individual, a covetous machine. And society gets built according to that picture and people in that society come to resemble it, taking themselves as paradigms of human nature. Christianity made a picture of us as born alienated from God, born guilty sinners deserving of Hell – as babies! (Read Dante’s Inferno or Thomas Aquinas if you don’t believe me) – and low and behold evil becomes a part of our “nature” in a way it never could have for Homer.

   But what interests me most is the fact that we must make pictures of ourselves (and Being, our place in Being) because we cannot know these things as we can know commonsensical or scientifically provable facts. Wittgenstein imagined the world as the set of all facts. ‘My Latin grammar book is on my desk,’ ‘The coffee cup the boys gave me for Father’s Day is on the book,’ ‘The book is green,’ ‘The cup is black’ – etc. ad infinitum. The facts don’t mean anything per se, taken apart from the meanings some of them have in our lives, in our world. In and of itself, the death of the girl Anne Frank on a certain date in a certain place is just as much a fact as the number of hairs on my head or fingers on my hand. As facts, they are equal. If one is more significant, it is not due to its being a fact; it is due to what it means for us. And what it means for us has nothing to do with its being a fact; it has to do with the pictures of the world and ourselves, pictures that are like the light in which we see the fact, in which the fact has meaning (or not). And these pictures differ: for the accursed Nazis, the fact was no more significant than getting rid of one more pest. For anyone whose picture of the world includes the belongingness of a common humanity, the murder of a little girl full of life is an unspeakable evil. But it is not a fact that it is either, at least not in the strict sense. (Truth is deeper than facts.)

    We don’t have a view from nowhere of Being as such. If God were somehow able to mind-meld with us and reveal the absolute truth of everything, we wouldn’t have to make pictures.  We can’t get outside of pictures of the world as such and our place in it to compare them with the world as it is unperceived, undescribed, unconceptualized, uninterpreted – and just think how many there are and have been, and how much incommensurability there is between them. We can’t. And yet we can’t make sense of our lives without some picture of the whole and our place in it. We either see the world, however vaguely or implicitly – as a limited whole interpreted in some way, or with live with absurdity. No, the absurdity becomes the picture we live by.

 

. . .

 

We make pictures of ourselves, too. Strange, since you would think we have private, privileged access to our conscious thoughts and feelings, that thus we would know these even more intimately than any fact. Only I can feel my pain or anger, my pleasures and loves. But just like the facts that make up the world for Wittgenstein, our states of mind only mean anything, perhaps only arise because of the pictures of our Selves and the world that we live by. And these can be very different. We can’t directly observe our self, soul, spirit, ego, subconscious, etc. We can measure brain states but then we just have more facts in the world without significance unless we interpret them.

   A friend sent me this not too long ago.

Western philosophy typically conceptualizes the self as a stable, controlling entity, comparable to a pilot, while Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism argue that the self is an illusion, a byproduct of our thought processes.  Modern neuroscience provides evidence that aligns with the Eastern view, revealing that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality, leading to a mistaken identification with these self-narratives.  This false sense of self, which is often equated with the incessant internal dialogue, contributes significantly to human mental suffering.

There are two pictures of the self here: the so-called Western picture and the Buddhist picture. The passage asserts that science settles the matter in favor of Buddhism. So there is after all a fact of the matter? One factually true self and a slew of false or illusory pictures?

      That makes no sense at all. I have no idea how neuroscience proves anything, but assume for the sake of argument that neuroscience provides factual evidence to believe “that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality.” That we create narratives – another metaphor, substituting for pictures – is obvious. That a part of our brain is active while people try to interpret reality (everything from the birth of a child to the death of a father, one’s own history and the history of one’s people, etc.) is, well, rather obvious. That’s it’s the left hemisphere – well, interesting for neuroscientists, I guess.

   But brains don’t grieve for loved who have died, feel remorse for evil done, love another human being, leap down on the track to save a stranger, betray a friend; brains don’t try to make sense of life with religion, philosophy, science, literature, or history. People do. Brains don’t interpret reality in the literal sense.

  At most at the perceptual, preconscious level brains “interpret” – though process would be a better word. Our brains receive impulses from the senses and generate conscious images before we ever interpret anything. Our brains perhaps predispose us to conceptualize in basic ways: in time and space, with cause and effect, objects relating to objects in various ways, moving in and out of spaces in one direction or the other. But at the level of self-consciousness, brains don’t interpret, unless you want to say that Romeo didn’t really fall in love with Juliet such that he could not go on living without her was really nothing but a certain empirical, measurable biochemical reaction in the brain. Certainly things were going on in Romeo’s brain as he was falling in love with Juliet and resolving to take his life when he judged her dead. That is just to say that Romeo in not a pure spirit (an angel) or a ghost. But no one could no what the measurement of the brain event meant without knowing what love means, what it is to love someone, and all the implicit interpretations of life that make such a thing intelligible. (If Romeo’s picture or human life saw love as nothing but a biological impulse planted by evolution accompanied by an illusion, he could not have fallen in love and would not have killed himself.) The passage reduces the realm of meaning to the realm of biochemistry. That is not a scientific fact but a picture of the self, one that – in contrast to Buddhism – makes no sense at all to me.

. . .

  My own picture, such as it is, is close to that of Iris Murdoch. I agree

 

that human beings are naturally selfish seems true on the evidence, whenever and wherever we look at them, in spite of a very small number of apparent exceptions. About the quality of this selfishness modern psychology has had something to tell us. The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. The area of its vaunted freedom is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognize ourselves in this rather depressing description. – Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”

I think this is more a product of social injustice and thus unnatural human life forms than evolution. The form this ego consciousness takes in advanced capitalist societies tends to be narcissism. The idea that the self is like a thing with an unchangeable essence – an ‘identity,’ a what more than a who (I wish to have nothing to do with a person who reduces me to a man, or an American, or as “white” or any other fashionable identity) – is another particular form this narcissism takes. Be that as it may. We are capable of suspending such ego consciousness in a variety of ways: in the contemplation of great art, for example, as Schopenhauer recognized; in the doing of simple duties, as Kant recognized; when we strive for truth, strive to form our minds to something not reducible to our fantasies – even learning a language or math has this good effect; and above all in the many forms love takes – when authentic. As Murdoch wrote:

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

I call the aspect of the self that is capable of truth, of approaching truth, the mind. I call the aspect of the self capable of love the soul. For what it’s worth.

  I will end on another thought of Iris Murdoch:

 

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.