Against the
critique of Martha Nussbaum (whose work I admire greatly), I would like to
defend Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of the Good, the importance of
conceptual space for the Good in metaphysics as a space for the reality of the
experience of the absolute in morality in life. I recall Nussbaum wrote an
account of his encounter with Murdoch and finding "the Good" out of
place. Her Fragility of Goodness reduces the Platonic Good to a way to
protect the ego from the potential of love to hurt and the tragic nature of human
life. I recall her reduction of remorse to unproductive, narcissistic
self-hatred in Anger and Forgiveness. While I much appreciate Nussbaum's
work on tragedy, on literature and philosophy(Love's Knowledge), on the cognitive aspect of
emotion (Upheavals of Emotion), and her critique of Stoicism, her
rejection of this aspect of Murdoch seems like an ax to grind for her. I think,
like Feuerbach, Nietzche, and Marx on religion, she takes corruptions of the Good and
the possible dangers of such corruptions for the thing itself. I will try to
make sense of this, relying more on my memory of Nussbaum’s work than a recent close
study.
. . .
Nussbaum seem to
think that what Murdoch means by the Good is some super-ethical principle or
idealization. I share the view that for Murdoch, the Good is a placeholder-word
for a dimension of reality that is encountered in moral experience itself. When
she speaks of "the sovereignty of Good," she is trying to preserve a
space within metaphysics for experiences that many modern moral philosophies
struggle to accommodate: unselfing, repentance, reverence, moral conversion,
the painful recognition of one's own selfishness, and the sense that goodness
transcends one's desires. When I suffer from guilt over the betrayal of a
beloved person, that goes beyond being interpreted as a painful psychological
state, a socially conditioned reaction, or an springboard for producing better
future behavior. There may be some truth in these but none captures what
remorse feels like from within. Perhaps long after any practical consequences
can be repaired, I suddenly see what I did. I didn’t just violate a rule. I
caused suffering, yes, but in remorse see her as a real person whom I failed to
love properly. In that moment, remorse is contra Nussbaum not primarily about
me. A feature of genuine remorse is that it is accompanied by a loss of
self-concern. My attention is directed outward toward the reality of the other.
This is where the importance of the Good
for Murdoch can make sense. The Good is not another object among objects. It is
the transcendent standard that makes truthful vision possible. The Good is what
draws us away from fantasy and toward reality. In betrayal, fantasy was
powerful. I might tell myself things like "I had my reasons" or “She’ll
get over it” or “I could not help falling in love,” etc. Remorse begins when
those protective fantasies collapse. The beloved person suddenly appears in his
or her full reality. Murdoch draws on Weil’s language of attention.
Remorse is an act of attention. It is the painful correction of vision. Attention
is the loving, disciplined, and truthful regard for reality that seeks to see
another person, thing, or situation as it truly is, rather than as our ego
wishes it to be. Attention is the effort to see reality justly. As Weil put it:
"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty,
and ready to be penetrated by the object." This is important for Murdoch as
she sees the moral life as the continuous effort to overcome fantasy and
selfishness in order to see what is really there. The Good is an attempt to say what the world
must be like if what is revealed by attention – in this case to the beloved
person betrayed – has any real being, is not just reducible to psychological (subjective)
or social (intersubjective) conditioning structures. It is the metaphysical
horizon within which this experience of the reality of the other makes sense. If
there is no reality to moral vision beyond preference or social convention,
what exactly have I seen? Why should the collapse of my self-serving story
count as a disclosure of truth rather than simply a change in feeling? Murdoch in
her thought on metaphysics and the Good is clearing the way of modern understandings
to understand it as a disclosure of truth. Painful truth. Ironically, Nussbaum
saw the Good in Plato as a shield to protect the ego from the pain of failed
love and tragedy. For Murdoch, denying a moral reality beyond our persons,
cultures, and human natures serves the same ego-protective function.
The phenomenon I am trying to understand resembles
what Plato describes in the ascent from the cave. One sees that one's previous
understanding was distorted. The pain belongs to the process of seeing. Murdoch's account also has affinities with
Christian repentance, where repentance is not really self-condemnation so much
as a return to reality.
Here I also think of The Brothers
Karamazov. Repentance in Dostoevsky is not self-hatred. It flows from the
shock of another person who has been wrong being finally seen. Elder Zosima's
teaching that each person is somehow responsible for all is often
misunderstood. It is not a doctrine of neurotic guilt. It is an expression of
radical attention to the reality of others. Zosima does not mean that I am
causally guilty for every evil in the world. He means that no human being is
simply 'someone else's problem.' Through attention and love, I come to see that
I am implicated in a shared moral reality with others, am part of the world,
that my own failures of love have wounded the world in some way. When I hear of
a lonely old man, a neglected child, or a despairing neighbor, my ego feels
that has nothing to do with me. Zosima is trying to break that spell. He is
saying that the fully awakened soul no longer sees other people as strangers
occupying separate moral universes. It experiences a profound solidarity with
them. This has nothing to do with the neurotic who thinks everything is his
fault. The point for Zosima is that everyone matters and should matter to me. Love
rather than self-absorption. Murdoch
would recognize this as attention overcoming ego. The point is to deepen one's
perception of reality. As attention grows, the boundaries of concern widen. One
begins to see that one's life is interwoven with the lives of others. If the
Good is real, remorse becomes intelligible even when it is useless.
I find it significant that as deeply as
Nussbaum as written about philosophy and literature – and I love her work in
this area (Love’s Knowledge) – she has never really focused on Dostoevsky.
One possible explanation is that her philosophical outlook is fundamentally
Aristotelian rather than Platonic or Christian. She is thus drawn to literature
that illuminates vulnerability, emotion, practical judgment, and the fragility
of human flourishing within the conditions of finite life. Dostoevsky explores
these themes, but he does so within a moral universe shaped by sin, repentance,
grace, and encounters with an absolute Good that transcends human flourishing.
His great scenes of remorse and spiritual transformation are not justified by
their contribution to well-being or future outcomes but by their disclosure of
moral truth. In this he is closer to Murdoch, Weil, and Gaita than to Nussbaum.
Murdoch's making space for the Good – a dimension of moral reality that cannot
be reduced to worldly-naturalistic categories, even in an expansive
Aristotelian sense – provides a metaphysical framework that leaves space for
these experiences as genuine perceptions of reality. This in contrast to Nussbaum,
who always interprets them within a more this-worldly account of human
flourishing. For this reason, Dostoevsky's central concerns may lie somewhat
outside the philosophical horizon that has guided much of Nussbaum's work.
I want to press the example of betrayal
and remorse further. Assume that the beloved person is dead and thus the
betrayal can never be repaired, thus forgiveness will never be obtained, and
thus no future consequences can be altered. Does remorse still matter? I feel
that it does. True, it has no practical-utilitarian value at all. Nothing is
changed. I think it matters because it is true. My soul needs to stand in the
truth about what happened. Murdoch's Platonism leaves space for this feeling,
which I guess Nussbaum would discount as it makes no contribution to flourishing
in worldly sense. The Good is what allows us to say that seeing reality rightly
has value even when it produces no further outcome. Indeed, remorse is one of
the clearest experiences of what Murdoch means by transcendence. In ordinary
life we are constantly trying to protect the ego. Remorse is one of the rare
experiences in which the ego loses. And yet what appears is not emptiness but
reality. The beloved person stands before us, perhaps only in memory, with a
claim upon us that we must not evade. Murdoch would say that this claim is not
merely subjective. It is an encounter with the Good. Or remorse reveals that
the beloved was never merely an object of our desire or affection. He or she
possessed a reality, a dignity, a significance that exceeded our private
interests. The pain of remorse is the pain of finally acknowledging that
reality. (Again, everything I say about remorse I learned from Gaita.) Hence, the
Good is what allows us to understand why remorse can feel less like self-hatred
than like truthfulness. The experience says, in effect, that I see now what
this person truly was, and I see now what I truly did. The Good is the horizon
within which that seeing what I truly did can be understood as a form of
knowledge rather than merely a feeling.
. . .
The central claim of The Sovereignty of
Good is that morality is not primarily about choice, decision, or autonomy.
Rather, it is about attention to reality. The Good functions as a transcendent
pole that draws us beyond the ego. Murdoch's examples – the mother-in-law
learning to see her daughter-in-law justly, or the experience of beauty in
nature and art – are meant to show that moral progress often consists not in
willing differently but in seeing differently. What troubles Murdoch about much
modern philosophy, from existentialism to utilitarianism, is that it leaves us
imprisoned within the self. Even when it celebrates freedom, it often makes the
self the final court of appeal. The Good is needed because moral life contains
experiences that feel like responses to something beyond ourselves. We discover
that we are wrong; we do not simply decide to change our preferences.
This is where Murdoch differs from Nussbaum,
I think. Nussbaum is sympathetic to many of Murdoch's concerns. She agrees that
emotions are cognitive, that literature can reveal moral reality, and that
ethical life cannot be reduced to rules. She argues that human flourishing is
vulnerable to luck, tragedy, loss, and contingency. She is in many ways
recovering the Greek tragic tradition against Stoic invulnerability. I am in
full agreement. Yet Nussbaum rejects Murdoch's Platonism. Her ethical vision
remains Aristotelian: we are finite creatures living within contingent
circumstances, not pilgrims ascending toward a transcendent Good beyond being.
Nussbaum’s worldly ethics asks how human beings can flourish within the
conditions of ordinary human life. Murdoch’s other-worldly ethics asks whether
moral life points beyond ordinary human life toward a transcendent reality. Nussbaum's
ethics is worldly in the sense that the highest moral realities are found
within human life itself: friendship, love, justice, vulnerability, tragedy,
compassion, and practical wisdom. She is interested in how finite human beings
can live well despite suffering, loss, and contingency. The moral horizon
remains fundamentally human. Murdoch's ethics is other-worldly in the Platonic
sense that moral experience points beyond the self and beyond ordinary human
concerns toward the Good. Love, attention, beauty, remorse, and unselfing are
not merely parts of flourishing; they are intimations of a transcendent reality
that continually draws us beyond ourselves.
The contrast is perhaps most visible in
remorse. For Nussbaum, the question is: How does remorse contribute to repair,
understanding, or flourishing? For Murdoch, the question is: What truth about
reality is disclosed in remorse? Nussbaum looks for the highest things within
the human world; Murdoch believes the highest things appear within the human
world but are not exhausted by it. Neither rejects love, suffering, or moral
seriousness; they disagree about whether these experiences ultimately point
beyond the world or find their fulfillment within it. For me, the problem of Nussbaum's
worldliness is that is it unable to account for some of the deepest moral
phenomena, like remorse. In Anger and Forgiveness, Nussbaum is concerned
with how self-reproach can become narcissistic and unproductive. It can be like
that and probably is in many cases. Some forms of guilt are indeed forms of
ego-absorption. But Murdoch would agree with Gaita that genuine remorse is not essentially
self-hatred. It is a disclosure of reality. In remorse, one suddenly sees what
one has done to another person. The focus shifts away from the self and flourishing
in this world toward the reality of the other.
Same logic with love. Nussbaum emphasizes
the vulnerability involved in loving finite beings. Love exposes us to loss,
betrayal, grief, and tragedy. Murdoch agrees completely. But Murdoch asks a
deeper question: What makes love capable of overcoming selfishness at all? Her
answer is that love participates in something transcendent. The Good is not
merely a psychological strategy for coping with vulnerability. Love directs us
toward a reality greater than ourselves and this makes our vulnerability
meaningful. Love makes us vulnerable because it opens us to disappointment,
suffering, and loss. Yet this vulnerability is not meaningless because in
genuinely loving another person we are responding to something real and
valuable beyond our own interests. Love draws us out of the ego toward a
reality greater than ourselves. The pain of love therefore testifies not merely
to our dependence but to our participation in something objectively worthwhile.
For Murdoch, love is meaningful despite its risks because it is a response to
reality, not merely a strategy for satisfying our needs. This is why Murdoch
differs from views that treat love primarily as a source of flourishing or
psychological fulfillment. We may be wounded by love, but if love is a truthful
attention to another person, then the wound itself can reveal something of the Good.
The vulnerability is meaningful because it arises from contact with reality
rather than from illusion.
A purely psychological account may also
allow that love helps me transcend my ego. That could be accepted by almost
anyone, including many secular psychologists. Love broadens my perspective,
reduces narcissism, and makes me care about others. Murdoch thinks it is only
half the story. The deeper question is why should transcending the ego count as
wisdom rather than merely change? Why is attention to another person better
than self-absorption? Murdoch's answer is that in loving attention we are not
merely changing our mental state. We are becoming more responsive to reality. The
crucial move is from "I am less self-centered" to "I see more of
what is really there." For Murdoch, the reality of another person is
already a hint of transcendence. The other person continually exceeds my
concepts, desires, and fantasies. The beloved is not simply an object within my
private world. He or she possesses an independent reality that resists my
attempts to reduce it to my purposes. When I truly attend to another person, I
discover something that is not my creation. I encounter a reality that places a
claim upon me.
Everything we take to be real and serious
presupposes at least a vague metaphysical picture of the world. What kind of
universe must this be if such claims are real? Murdoch's answer is not that
every act of love contains a proof of God. Rather, she thinks that experiences
of truthful attention reveal a structure of reality ordered toward the Good. Psychological
transcendence means moving beyond the ego. Metaphysical transcendence means
discovering that there is something beyond the ego to which one ought to
respond. The first concerns the transformation of the self. The second concerns
the nature of reality. The way we understand the former depends on the way we
understand the latter. For Murdoch we move beyond the ego because reality
itself is richer and more significant than the ego. Thus she is never satisfied
with purely therapeutic accounts of love.
Suppose I devote myself to a dying
spouse. A this-worldly, psychological account at its best may tell me that this
love enlarges my perspective and enriches my life. Murdoch would not deny that.
But she wants to add that my love is also a response to something objectively
real and valuable in that person. The value is not merely projected by your
feelings. The beloved is not precious simply because you happen to care. My
caring is a response to a reality that deserves care. The person before me is
not merely an occasion for my self-transcendence. The person's reality
participates, however imperfectly, in the Good itself. That is the metaphysical
move. Actually, the conception of worldly vs. other-worldly I find distorting
since it all depends on how one defines and limits these terms. I am also a
this-worldly person, only that naturalistic pictures of this world, even rich
ones like Aristotle’s, obscure aspects of its reality. In loving another person
we discover not merely the limits of the self but the depth of reality. For
Murdoch, love transcends the ego not merely because it changes us
psychologically, but because it awakens us to a reality whose value is
independent of our wishes; that independent value is what she calls the Good.
. . .
This points to
what I think is the deepest disagreement. For Nussbaum, the highest realities
are largely contained within human life itself: friendship, love, political
justice, literature, practical wisdom, tragedy. The world is enough. For
Murdoch, these realities point beyond themselves. The experience of beauty,
truth, and goodness carries an intimation of transcendence. The Good is not one
value among others but the horizon that makes moral experience intelligible. Murdoch
does not claim that we possess knowledge of the Good in any straightforward
metaphysical sense. Rather, she wants a metaphysics spacious enough to
acknowledge that moral life contains experiences of transcendence, moments when
goodness appears as something objective, inexhaustible, and greater than
ourselves and our pictures of the world. Without such conceptual space,
experiences of awe before goodness, radical repentance, unconditional love,
saintliness, or moral conversion tend to be redescribed as psychological
states, evolutionary adaptations, social constructions, or coping mechanisms. Once
we begin explaining them entirely in those terms, we have explained away
precisely what was most important about them. Nussbaum, despite sharing many of
Murdoch's moral concerns, is ultimately less willing to grant those experiences
metaphysical significance. Whether that is philosophical caution or
philosophical reductionism is precisely the question that divides them.
. . .
-What does a
philosopher fear? I think a question Murdoch urged. Philosophers are also
driven by visions, images, loves, and fears. Behind every philosophy lies a
picture of reality and, often, a picture of what would be unbearable if that
reality were true.
What does Nussbaum fear? Or rather, what
philosophical dangers does Nussbaum consistently resist? I think Nussbaum fears
three things. First, she fears the denial of human vulnerability. I am in
sympathy with this. Throughout The Fragility of Goodness, she argues
against traditions that seek invulnerability through reason, metaphysics, or
spiritual transcendence. She returns repeatedly to the Greek tragedians because
they remind us that even the best human life remains exposed to fortune. The
danger she sees is that philosophies of transcendence can become evasions of
suffering. They can promise a higher realm in which loss does not really
matter. Second, Nussbaum fears the degradation of the particular person. Again
and again, whether discussing tragedy, political justice, disability, or
emotions, she insists on the irreducible reality of concrete individuals. She
fears that the singular human being standing before us may disappear into a
larger metaphysical narrative. If life in this world means little or nothing,
as Socrates argues in the Phaedo, or if the love for a particular beautiful
human being is an inferior, someone illusory for of a love that should be given
to beauty itself, as in the Symposium, the this world and real loves are
de-meaned.
Third, Nussbaum fears wishful thinking. Her
work exhibits honesty about the tragic dimension of life. Children die. The
innocent suffer. Love can be destroyed. History offers no guarantee of justice.
Etc. She seems unwilling to affirm any metaphysical doctrine merely because it
would make these realities easier to bear. In this respect she resembles the
Greeks she admires. There is something anti-consolatory about her thought.
The strange thing is that Murdoch shares
every one of these fears, which lead her in the opposite direction. She
believes transcendence helps us see suffering more clearly. Nussbaum worries it
may tempt us to look away from it. Attention to the Good is precisely what
allows us to see the individual justly.
Murdoch fears that reality will be reduced
to the ego. She fears a world in which all values become projections, all
meanings become constructions, all moral claims become preferences. She fears
what she often calls fantasy: the self-enclosed consciousness that can no
longer acknowledge anything greater than itself. Nussbaum fears illusion; Murdoch
fears reduction. Nussbaum fears that transcendence may be a dream; Murdoch
fears that skepticism may blind us to reality.
The disagreement is therefore deeper than
a dispute about Plato. It concerns what constitutes intellectual courage. For
Nussbaum, courage often means refusing comforting metaphysical assurances. For
Murdoch, courage often means admitting that goodness may be more real than our
theories can explain. This is why their disagreement is so fruitful. Neither is
defending selfishness, relativism, or cynicism. Both are trying to preserve
something precious. Nussbaum wants to preserve honesty before tragedy; Murdoch
wants to preserve openness to transcendence. My fear is whether Nussbaum's fear
of illusion may lead her to explain away experiences that seem to disclose
something real.
I still don’t
feel like I have thought this through but it is the best I can do today.
Perhaps the key to
understanding the difference between Murdoch and Nussbaum can be found in what
Gaita writes about morality as absolute, sui generis, meaning in its purer
forms one is confronted with a certain reality and one must do this or that,
regardless of any consequences. There can be differences about whether the
absolute command comes from an honor code – for many in the military it is an
absolute not to leave anyone behind – or a transcendent source. The grammar is
the same. Moral imperatives are not derived from utility, flourishing,
contracts, evolution, or social convention. They are simply there to be
acknowledged. His examples are familiar: the sacredness of a human life, the
horror of cruelty, the dignity of the severely disabled person, the meaning of
remorse, the love of a parent for a child. The crucial point is that these
realities are experienced as revelations of how things truly are.
This is where he comes close to Murdoch. With Murdoch we attend to reality and
discover the Good. For Gaita, we encounter realities whose significance is
absolute. Both are trying to preserve the thought that morality is not merely a
human construction. The difference is that Gaita is less explicitly
metaphysical. He begins with the phenomenon itself. A person sees the humanity
of a disabled child, or the evil of a concentration camp guard's actions, and
finds that no further justification seems necessary. But Murdoch goes a step
further. She wants to know what kind of reality must this be if such
experiences are not subjective or intersubjective compulsions? If they are rooted
in Being itself. Her answer is the Good. Thus Gaita's notion of the absolute
can be seen as the phenomenological side of Murdoch's metaphysics. Gaita
describes the experience of moral absoluteness; Murdoch provides a metaphysical
picture of why such experiences may disclose reality rather than merely express
feeling. But both do not reduce phenomena like remorse, love, compassion, or
human dignity to their consequences. They understand them first as forms of
acknowledgment, which is to say, as responses to realities whose significance
seems intrinsic and unconditional. The Good, for Murdoch, is what makes sense
of that absoluteness.
Thus the question of whether the dignity of a
person is important because recognizing it contributes to flourishing, or does
flourishing matter because it respects a dignity that is already there. To put
it differently, is remorse valuable because it contributes to a good human
life, or because it acknowledges a moral truth regardless of its contribution
to a good life? That is where the
disagreement becomes deepest and I hold with Murdoch and Gaita here. Gaita writes
about a mother caring for a severely disabled child or a nun tending the incurably
insane in ways that seem to transcend flourishing altogether. Such actions
often involve suffering, sacrifice, heartbreak, and no obvious gain. Yet they
seem morally deep. Their value is not exhausted by flourishing because they
participate in the Good, as Murdoch might say. Their value is absolute and sui
generis, as Gaita would put it.
Nussbaum would likely try to bring these
examples back into a richer account of human flourishing. Murdoch and Gaita
suspect that something essential is lost when one does so: namely, the sense
that morality sometimes places claims upon us that are not grounded in our
flourishing at all, but in the reality of what is before us. That, I think, is
the deepest fault line between them. It is not a disagreement about kindness,
compassion, or love. It is a disagreement about whether these realities are
ultimately grounded in human flourishing or whether flourishing itself is
answerable to something more fundamental. Nussbaum is Murdoch minus a
metaphysical horizon beyond the natural human and is Gaita minus mystery.
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