Seeming

 

Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and that seeming is a worthwhile topic for philosophical investigation. Consciousness could almost be defined by way of seeming: it is a center, a hub, of seeming. What it is like to be x is how things seem to x, and where there is seeming there must be consciousness. Sentience is seeming. Oddly, our vocabulary for it is quite limited: in addition to “seems” we have “appear” and how things “strike” us, but not much else. Synonyms are thin on the ground, despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon (is this a sign of poor comprehension?). What exactly is seeming? It might be thought to be a species of belief, perhaps the tentative kind: if it seems to you that p, then you (tentatively) believe that p. While there is certainly a correlation between seeming and believing, it would be wrong to define the former by the latter, since it is possible to disbelieve what seems to you to be the case (or to be neutral about it). If you have reason to believe you have been hallucinating recently, you may distrust your senses and reject the appearances they offer to your faculty of judgment. Seeming may be something like an invitation to belief, but you can decline the invitation. Nor is belief sufficient for seeming: I believe the Sun is 93 million miles away, but it doesn’t seem to me that way. Seeming looks like a sui generis state of mind, not to be assimilated to belief. It is also shared by different sense modalities and indeed by other modes of knowing: both sight and hearing (etc.) provide us with occasions of seeming, so the nature of seeming cannot be defined in terms of specific types of experience. What we can say is that all knowledge depends on episodes of seeming: we can’t know things without things seeming a certain way to us. Seeming plays a vital epistemological role. What we believe depends ultimately (sometimes directly) on how things seem to us. So it would be good to know what seeming is, how it is to be analyzed. When it seems to me that p what kind of mental state am I in?

            The answer might seem straightforward (note how frequently we use the word): I am in a subjective state that has representational content (intentionality, reference). In short, seeming is experience. But that can’t be right as stated, because mental images fit that specification: they are subjective states with representational content, but they are not states in which the world seems to be a certain way. Mental images are not hallucinations and do not present themselves as such. I am not tempted to believe what they represent; they don’t function as evidence for me. Here we might reach for the concept of the sense datum: a seeming is a sense datum, a constituent of perceptual consciousness. This suggestion encounters a problem with non-sensory seeming, unless we enlarge the concept of a sense; but there is a subtler problem, namely that the sense datum, as traditionally conceived, is too weak to add up to real seeming. The intuitive idea is that a sense datum is an intrinsic state of consciousness that transparently presents itself to the knowing subject—not very different from a pain or tickle (“My visual field is yellowish”). But why should that add up to a way the world seems? The sense datum is conceived as a floating element of consciousness—a quale in modern terminology—but where is the idea of how things seem in that conception?  Couldn’t such an entity be present in consciousness and not strike the subject as pointing to how things external to him actually are? The sense datum is too neutral, too isolated within itself, too uncommitted. It is too much like an image or idea or concept: it doesn’t carry within it the element of world-directed commitment. It just hangs there. You can see what I am driving at by consulting the dictionary: the OED gives an admirably concise and abstract definition of “seem”—“give the impression of being”. We could choose to build this into the notion of a sense datum, but the traditional notion is not so understood. There are two aspects to the definition: being and impression. Seeming is the appearance of being—existence, reality, externality. It isn’t a neutral quality of consciousness: it points outwards; it has (purported) objectivity. This is more than mere intentionality, since that is compatible with the fictional or subjective status of the intentional object. But in the case of seeming we have apparent reality. When visual experience makes it seem to you that there is red cup in front of you it makes that state of affairs seem real—objectively real, really there. The concept of seeming is connected to the concepts of fact and truth; indeed, it is up to its neck in the idea of an objective, shared, external reality. All seeming is existential seeming (unless explicitly about fictional entities). The senses make the external world real to consciousness (whether or not it really is). If it seems to you that p, then it seems to you that it is true that p (factual, part of being). Seeming is ontologically committed. It isn’t ontologically neutral like traditional sense data or physical stimuli impinging on the sense organs. You need not believe what it purports to reveal, but it certainly has strong opinions (as it were). Seeming is a realist: it affirms the transcendent. The second element is the concept of impression: in seeming you have the impression of reality; you are affected that way. The seeming makes a certain impact on you. Not necessarily a belief, but some sort of mental effect (the word “impress” can mean “make a mark or design on (an object) using a stamp or seal”: OED). You have, as we say, the distinct impression that things out there are thus and so—really thus and so. You may be cut to the quick by this impression, or elated by it, or sublimely indifferent to it. How things seem concerns the self: it is the self that is impressed by the (apparent) encounter with being. But this fact—the fact of having the impression that p—fits none of the standard mental categories, being neither belief nor sensation. It is sui generis and rather puzzling, despite its familiarity. Seeming is neither assent nor feeling, but somehow something in between. It concerns reality and is clear in its commitments, but it isn’t a type of belief—though it functions as an invitation to belief. We might say it belongs to its own mental faculty, alongside the faculties of belief formation, imagination, emotion, etc. It provides input to other faculties but isn’t a special case of them.[1] It demonstrates the variety of the mental (and the dangers of that overarching concept). The seeming faculty is in the business of providing impressions of being (though it can fail in its mission), which we must evaluate in order to arrive at beliefs. These impressions are useful and sometimes impressive (waterfalls, mountains, whales) and no doubt serve a biological purpose. But they are rather mysterious, being neither fish nor fowl. It is hard even to talk about them: we are left with the bare claim that the mind is capable of entertaining impressions of reality that don’t ascend to the level of belief (but do go beyond mere subjective items).

            We can now define “seems”, notwithstanding its puzzling status. It seems to an organism that p if and only if the organism has an experience in which it has the impression that p. More briefly, seeming is having an experience-based impression of being. Here we leave “impression” as undefined (the dictionary is no help); it must be taken as primitive. All we can say is that it is not a case of belief (or disposition to belief). Such states, however, are the basis of all knowledge. Hamlet’s famous line “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems’” encapsulates a good deal about seeming: its relation to being and its puzzling status. The traditional philosopher would put “is” after “I know not” (skepticism etc.), assuming that how things seem can be known; but Hamlet seems (!) to be saying that he doesn’t know anything about seeming. What is this strange seeming, this curious hybrid, this committed agnostic? I understand “To be or not to be”, but what are we to make of “To seem or not to seem”? I know not that, Horatio. Poor Hamlet, he doesn’t even know how things seem, let alone what really happened to his father or the nature of the afterlife! Our ordinary language also seems to be in some doubt on the matter: there are verb and adjective forms of “seem” (“seems” and “seeming”), but there is no noun form, as if English is reluctant to engage in the ontology of seeming. I have spoken in noun form of “a seeming” and “seemings”, as if there are such things, but that is not regular English. English, like Hamlet, knows not “seemings” or “a seeming”. Yet seeming seems real (I have the strong impression that seeming has being)—there are seemings of seemings. But they are puzzling conceptually; perhaps this is why they are seldom discussed, or assimilated to something else. We need a philosophy of seeming (not of physical sensory inputs or amorphous “sense data”); in particular, we need a better understanding of the notion of “impression”. Perhaps seemings are supervenient on other mental phenomena such as experiences of one kind or another, but we should be wary of any attempt to reduce them to such a basis. Do experiences cause seemings? Is it because of experiences that things seem a certain way, even though seemings strictly transcend experiences as such? Or are the things we call “experiences” really compounds of seeming and some more primitive sensory material? And how do experiences make an impression on the subject, whatever that effect is exactly? Hume spoke of impressions and ideas, recognizing that the senses do more than just parade ideas before our minds, but he said nothing to explain what an impression is, i.e. what it is an impression of and what it is an impression to. We are constantly having impressions of this or that, but what this operation amounts to remains obscure. Metaphorically, it is something like an imprinting (a type of denting), but that tells us little of any theoretical use. All knowledge therefore rests on something we don’t understand.[2]

 

[1] Someone might try saying that seemings are the beliefs of the perceptual modules, potentially in competition with the beliefs of the central system, as in cases of visual illusion (see Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind). But that is an anthropomorphic picture of the perceptual systems: nothing in you believes that the lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are unequal (assuming you know the illusion). The seemings of the senses are completely non-doxastic. It is merely as if your visual system believes what it delivers. Belief is really the icing on the cake not fundamental epistemological reality.

[2] If we say all knowledge rests on observation, we tacitly bring in the idea of seeming: an observation is a mental act in which something seems to be the case. That is, observations are precisely conscious states that embed an impression of being: the observer is affected by reality in a certain way and he seems to himself to be so affected. We can’t avoid admitting seeming into the epistemological picture in favor of something (seemingly) less obscure. Seeming is inescapable.

 

 

Rationalist Empiricism

 

Classical empiricism maintains two main theses: all concepts are acquired by experience and are not innate; and all knowledge is based on experience. Classical rationalism by contrast maintains that some or all concepts are innate and not derived from experience; and some knowledge at least is not based on experience. These are independent propositions: it would be possible to hold that all concepts are innate and that all knowledge is based on experience. That is, one could be a rationalist about the acquisition of concepts (including the content of experience) and an empiricist about the basis of factual or propositional knowledge. Everything about the way we perceive and understand the world could be innate, but still we only know truths about it by means of perception.[1] This position—rationalist empiricism—avoids the traditional empiricist claim that our means of representing the world is derived by abstraction from sense experience, but it accepts that all justification is experiential. How we see things comes from within the mind, but knowledge of facts requires commerce with the world outside the mind (except when it is knowledge of the mind). The constituents of thought (knowledge, perception) are innately given, but all factual knowledge results from some sort of experience of reality: nativism about concepts, empiricism about knowledge. Alternatively put, ideas are innate but beliefs are acquired by experience. This is in many ways an attractive position given the difficulties of the empiricist theory of concept acquisition, i.e. abstractionism, and given the obscurity of rationalist accounts of knowledge.[2] It allows us to have a uniform theory of knowledge that possesses a fair degree of intelligibility while avoiding the problems inherent in the idea that concepts can be derived from objects by some sort of imprinting or copying procedure. The rationalists were right about one thing; the empiricists were right about another. Yet the position is seldom if ever occupied: instead we get a rigid divide between pure experience theories and pure reason theories. The rationalist will accept that some knowledge is based on experience, but the knowledge that isn’t so based is conceived as radically different from empirical knowledge. Wouldn’t it be better if we could develop a more unified picture of human knowledge without such a sharp dichotomy? So we should look with favor on the project of articulating a rationalist empiricism that has a more workable theory of concept acquisition and a more seamless picture of knowledge, thus combining the best elements of both traditions.

            But that project faces a formidable challenge: how can knowledge that is traditionally deemed a priori be assimilated to empirical knowledge? How can mathematics, say, be based on experience? The senses alone cannot deliver mathematical knowledge; for that we need a faculty traditionally labeled “Reason”. One approach to this problem for a general empiricism is to claim that human knowledge forms a seamless whole that collectively faces the test of experience. We adopt a holism of human knowledge and then claim that mathematics is justified by its place in the totality of knowledge as it confronts experience (see Quine). The advantage of this approach is that we can apply an intelligible framework for understanding all knowledge (the senses operating in intelligible ways) and at the same time deliver a uniform picture of all knowledge (we don’t have to postulate two completely different ways of knowing). Such a picture could be combined with nativism about the building blocks of knowledge to produce a streamlined and appealing theory of the whole of human knowledge: so we get the best of both worlds, rationalist and empiricist. But the holistic doctrine is hard to accept, and the account of the actual epistemology of mathematical knowledge quite implausible. Couldn’t we find a way of thinking that achieves the same end but without the implausible claims? Can’t we broaden the notion of experience so as to include mathematical (and other) knowledge—why must it be restricted to sense experience, and indeed to bodily sense experience? The old empiricists held that the five human senses are the sole origin of knowledge, with vision preeminent, but why insist on that limitation? Certainly we would want to include other possible senses, and why restrict ourselves to these? For one thing, we need to make room for introspective knowledge—knowledge by reflection, as the empiricists put it. Here it is natural to invoke the idea of an inner sense: I can sense my own mental states and come to know about them. I thus come to know about them by experience (in one sense of “experience”)—not by logical deduction or revelation or sacred texts. I can receive data about my own mind: information, evidence. It seems to me that I am in pain and so I form the belief that I am in pain. The OED gives three definitions of “experience”: “practical contact with and observation of facts or events”, “knowledge or skill gained over time”, and “an event or activity that leaves a lasting impression”. Each of these can fit the case of introspective knowledge: I can be practically aware of my mental state, can gain knowledge of it over time, and it can leave a lasting impression on me. We don’t need to limit the notion of experience to the particular types of experience characteristic of the five bodily senses. Nor is the notion of a sense so limited: that is just empiricist dogma. So we already extend the concept of experience beyond the five senses, along with allied concepts. What about the concept of mystical experience, or experiences of cosmic despair, or experiences of the oneness of nature?

            How should we view the mental faculties involved in producing so-called a priori knowledge? There are four cases to consider: knowledge of meaning, logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, and ethical knowledge. I propose assigning these to separate mental faculties: they are not homogeneous and deserve to have their own specific module. Then our question is whether they can be seen as lying on a continuum with other types of knowledge; in particular, can they be said to involve types of experience? I think they can: we have semantic experiences, logical experiences, mathematical experiences, and ethical experiences. That is, our consciousness can be affected in specific ways according to the relevant subject matter: there is something it is like to think about these things. When we acquire these types of knowledge our consciousness plays a role—we have a kind of basic awareness of the properties and facts in question. I am aware of what my words mean; I feel the compulsion of a logical deduction; I notice mathematical relations; I have a sudden sensation that such and such would be very wrong. Of course, these states of consciousness are elusive and hard to put into words, but it is undeniable that consciousness reflects the subject matter we are thinking about. We learn about these things over time by attention and practice, so that the knowledge comes more easily to us; and we do it without divine assistance or by recourse to supposed authorities. The individual using his or her natural faculties can come to have knowledge of the kinds in question—a key tenet of the empiricist philosophy. So why not say we have such knowledge “by experience” (notmeaning by the kind of experience proper to the five senses of the body)? We just need a more relaxed and inclusive notion of experience—one that is not at all alien to common sense. Then we can formulate a more liberal form of empiricism that includes types of knowledge usually labeled a priori. Knowledge arises from the individual’s natural faculties operating without divine assistance or deference to supposed authorities: so we know these things by “personal experience” not by external means (custom, the church, our parents, God’s messages inscribed on the soul). Our own consciousness is the source of all our knowledge—whether employed about the physical world or about more “abstract” matters. We have experience of many things and thereby come to know about them, not all of it connected to the five senses.[3]

            There is a kind of epistemological spectrum at work here. Suppose we think of touch as the most basic and tangible way of knowing things: things actually come into contact with our body in a mechanical manner (mechanism applies to knowledge by means of touch). Then we might rank taste and smell as the next senses on the continuum, since they too involve actual contact with the sense organs. Hearing comes next with sound waves in the air impinging on the tympanic membrane etc. Sight is a further step away from the paradigm of touch, being a distance sense (the idea of photons hitting the retina is far removed from the idea of observable bodily contact and is not part of the ordinary concept of vision). The next step brings us to introspection, in which the idea of physical contact starts to look misguided (at this point some people start to speak of the a priori). Not so far away from this we reach knowledge of meaning, which strikes us as a form of introspective knowledge, since meaning is a psychological fact of some sort. Closely following this we get to logical knowledge, which flows from knowledge of meaning, logical consequence being a type of meaning relation. Then we have a bit of a leap to mathematical knowledge: now we seem to be speaking of a realm of objects bearing properties about which we have information, but which make no contact with our body at all. Finally, we reach ethical knowledge: here we lose any analogy to the case of touch, and mechanism has been thoroughly defenestrated. There isn’t a sharp dichotomy, more a series of similarities and differences. In all cases we have some type of experience proper to the subject matter in question—some condition of individual consciousness—and knowledge springs from this basis. So empiricism applies to all cases—relaxed non-bodily empiricism. It is true that mechanism runs out of steam half way up the ladder, thus leaving us bereft of a theoretical structure that seems to render things intelligible to us; but mechanism is a doctrine long ago abandoned in physics and shouldn’t shape the way we do epistemology. Is it a tacit mechanism that lies behind our tendency to favor old-fashioned empiricism? All knowledge, we think, must spring from mechanically intelligible causes, and the bodily senses, particularly touch, conform to this model (or seem to). But once we abandon that ideal we can allow that all knowledge belongs on a continuum: it is all based on experience in the broad sense.[4] Thus empiricism turns out to be true of all knowledge no matter how “abstract” or “a priori”. In fact no knowledge is a priori in the sense of being independent of all experience—though it can be independent of the experiences of the five senses (but so what?). Knowledge is a priori only relative to a type of experience; in this sense knowledge obtained by vision, say, is a priori relative the experiences delivered by the other four senses. We have a mathematical sense that produces mathematical experiences, and that sense is a priori relative to the other senses: it doesn’t depend on them. That is, we have conscious data in all cases that lead to knowledge—sense-data if you like (if we accept that we have a mathematical sense and a moral sense). The main dogma of old-style empiricism is the doctrine that only the five bodily senses deserve to be called senses. But a sense is just a faculty for receiving and processing information—for generating knowledge. So it is possible to be as rationalist as you like about mathematical and moral knowledge and still be an empiricist about them. Someone who thinks that we literally see numbers (but not with our physical eyes) is a firm rationalist but at the same time a staunch empiricist (he believes that mathematical knowledge springs from the unaided individual consciousness). He thinks we need more than just mathematical concepts in order to have propositional mathematical knowledge—we need to do the kind of seeing he has in mind—so he thinks that experience is necessary to knowing mathematical facts. His view is that mathematical concepts are innate but we also need mathematical experience in order to obtain actual mathematical knowledge—so he is a rationalist empiricist about mathematics. And he does not appear to contradict himself. Similarly an ethicist can hold that moral perception is necessary for moral knowledge, not just a stock of innate moral concepts; so she is in effect an ethical rationalist empiricist (we don’t get our moral beliefs from religion or tradition but from our own inner consciousness). She might indeed stress the importance of moral experience, so affirming her commitment to moral empiricism (it’s not all a matter of logical deduction in the style of Kant). Innate endowment gives you the building blocks; experience enables you to form these into actual knowledge. So it might reasonably be maintained: the result is a mixture of rationalist and empiricist tenets, suitably modified and extended. A nice result is that there isn’t the kind of sharp dichotomy envisaged by traditional epistemology: all knowledge is experience-based, but the experiences are of different types. Plato’s slave boy in the Meno learned Pythagoras’s theorem by experience (guided by Socrates), i.e. by applying his mind about geometrical concepts; he didn’t know this theorem before encountering Socrates that day—though he did already possess the necessary concepts. He is not essentially different from someone coming to know that it’s raining: such a person knows this fact by experience but all the concepts he employs are innately based (as we are supposing). We thus obtain a pleasingly uniform account of knowledge that builds in the best insights of rationalism and empiricism. The empiricist can be right that no knowledge of facts is strictly speaking innate, since some kind of eliciting episode of conscious experience is needed; yet the rationalist can also be right that all knowledge depends on a stock of innate concepts not put there by experience. Babies don’t actually have explicit mathematical and ethical knowledge, i.e. true justified beliefs in these things, but they do have the conceptual resources to have such knowledge once suitable experience comes their way. Both sides win: knowledge is always a mixture of the innate (rationalism) and the experiential (empiricism). All propositional knowledge is dependent on experience, but no concept is so based.[5]

 

[1] We don’t have to say that every complex concept is innate qua complex concept; we can hold that all primitiveconcepts are innate. We can thus allow for post-natal concept combination. It will still be true that all concepts are composed wholly of innate concepts—none is acquired by any process of abstraction from sense experience.

[2] I discuss the difficulties with empiricist accounts of concept possession and the mysteries of rationalism in Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within (2015).

[3] We might also list a modal sense and an aesthetic sense. It seems to us that some things are necessary and some contingent, and it seems that some objects are beautiful and some are not. We accordingly form beliefs about the modal and the aesthetic based on these appearances. Neither of these senses can be assimilated to the five bodily senses. Note that we don’t just de novo form beliefs and possess knowledge in these cases (as in others); we also experience presentations—ways things seem, appear, strike us. This is part of what makes it natural to talk of a sense: there is a way things seem and a belief based on this. Thus the concept of a sense has a wider application than traditional empiricists have supposed (it need not be causal, for example). Consider also the proprioceptive sense and the temporal sense: neither of these is quite like the Big Five and yet they are senses in good standing.    

[4] In the case of knowledge of language, i.e. grammar and syntax, we might hold that the framework of categories and rules of combination is innate but that we only form propositional knowledge of language by being exposed to linguistic data in the course of our upbringing. We are not, on this view, born knowing that such and such a string is grammatical, but we are born with a mastery of the concepts and principles that enter into such judgments. (The case of knowledge of grammar may not be typical of other types of knowledge traditionally considered in epistemology, and requires a separate discussion.) 

[5] If we ask who was basically in the right in the traditional debates about rationalism and empiricism, I would say the rationalists. The type of empiricism I defend here is quite far removed from anything the old empiricists had in mind: they were dedicated to the five bodily senses and insistent on the sensory origins of concepts. The “empiricism” I defend is really thoroughly rationalist in spirit (though not in letter!). But it does provide a way to unify all propositional knowledge conceptually: all such knowledge is true experientially justified belief.

 

 

Art and Morality

 

Morality itself has nothing to do with art, but art is the primary means of expressing morality.[1] This conundrum doesn’t apply to other subjects: physics has nothing to do with art, but it doesn’t recruit art as its primary mode of expression. We don’t learn physics by studying or enjoying art, but we do learn morality by means of art: why? What is it about morality and art that brings them together? I mean “art” in a broad sense: literature, poetry, plays, film, pictorial art, music, anecdotal tales, and stories of personal drama. We are exposed to these forms from an early age and they saturate our moral sensibilities. It would be hard to preserve our moral attitudes if all these art forms were subtracted from our lives. Morality lends itself to artistic expression and communication even though it is not strictly an art form—any more than physics is (or any other science, or system of laws, or practical endeavor). Plato thought morality should steer clear of art, knowing full well that in fact art and morality are deeply enmeshed in our lives. Why should morality appropriate art as its chief weapon—why does this come so naturally to us? What is it about morality that invites artistic expression? If we came across people who made no such association, what would we think—are they missing a vital connection? Morality certainly can be expressed non-artistically, as in a system of laws or a work of philosophical ethics, so why does it rely so heavily on art? Just think of Western art and Christian ethics: where would the latter be without the former? And consider the contribution of the novel to morality as we have it today. The arts are clearly a powerful vehicle of moral education (despite what some aesthetes have maintained). Even the humble pop song is full of moral material.

            You might say that morality is all about emotion (unlike physics) and so is art. But (a) psychology is also about emotion but doesn’t seek out artistic expression, and (b) morality is not all about emotion (unless you are a diehard emotivist)—just consider Kantian ethics. Nor is all art dedicated to emotion. Is it because art is concerned with the specific and particular? Again, that is neither necessary nor sufficient (and is not really true): some moral knowledge concerns abstract universal principles, and being about the particular is not sufficient for being part of morality. Nor is art always about the particular. Is it that art is concerned with beauty and beauty leads the soul to the good (to put it Platonically)? This may sound on the right track, but the beauty of art is not confined to its moral dimension and not all of morality is aptly compared to the beautiful (what about boring everyday duties?). What about the idea that art and morality have the property of narrativity in common? But not all art with moral content is narrative in form (pictures, music), and morality is not really a narrative structure intrinsically, though it can be expressed in narrative form. Might it be that ethics is basically fiction and so is art? If you think there is no such thing as moral truth and that morality is a cultural construct, you might be tempted by this idea, but it is stretching the concept of fiction beyond reasonable limits and clearly depends on a contestable claim about morality. And in what sense are pictorial art and music “fictional”? Can we get anywhere with the concept of unity? Is it that art works have a unity that corresponds to the unity of the good? The trouble with this is that it is too vague: lots of things have unity without locking onto art as a main vehicle of expression (one might say embodiment). What kindof unity? Is the unity of the moral (“the Form of the Good”) anything like the unity of a poem or novel or painting? Does art make morality more concrete and imaginatively accessible? That sounds intuitively correct, but many things are abstract and hard to grasp without inviting art to express them—physics, mathematics, and philosophy. We are not finding any property of morality that particularly joins it with art—something that only art can do, and do well. How exactly does art aid our apprehension of the right and good? What does it add (or possibly take away: see below)? What makes it an appropriate means for representing the realm of good and evil?

            That last word provides a clue: when we think of morality we think about right and wrong—evil as well as good. This will involve us in contemplating the horrors of the world: suffering, cruelty, death, disease, misery, despair, etc. None of this is easy to bear; indeed, it might be said that we never contemplate these things in their complete reality—or if we do it is through half-closed eyes. The moral world is an unbearable world. Yet we live in it—we have to respond to it. Children dying of starvation in foreign lands, the unjustly imprisoned, the murder of innocents, animal cruelty—the stuff of the nightly news. We are aware of all this, dimly and reluctantly, and of our own complicity in it. But we shield ourselves from this awareness: we keep it at a safe distance. In addition, morality is a demanding mistress: she is constantly rebuking us for our weakness, cowardice, selfishness, and so on. We are highly ambivalent when it comes to morality; we don’t unequivocally love the good (it doesn’t love us as much as we would like). Morality is a problem for us not a soothing presence (as is God). So we avert our eyes from moral reality while being forced to confront it. This does not sit well with us: the human psyche (soul) is not cut out for morality—not up to its demands. The world is too horrible and we are too weak and selfish. We thus live in a state of cognitive dissonance when it comes to morality; there is a distinct lack of psychological harmony in our dealings with right and wrong, good and evil. Morally, we are a mess. We need protection from morality, some sort of filter or reducer. Plato said the good is like the sun in not being easy to stare at: we need to view it under suitable viewing conditions when its glare is not so overpowering. At full strength our faculties can’t cope with it, so we wait for clouds or sundown to mask its natural brilliance. By analogy, we need a way of apprehending morality that removes or masks its more disagreeable aspects—its resistance to unfiltered contemplation. What better way to do this than by clothing it in aesthetic robes? Then we can gaze at it in a form acceptable to us. We can gaze at picturesof the sun, and we can gaze at pictures of the good (i.e. the whole moral sphere). Art provides that picture: a way of seeing the world in all its horror without having to endure the full impact of that horror. Paintings can be beautiful (even of a crucifixion), novels amusing and gripping, music enlivening, poetry exquisite, movies entertaining—even when the subject matter is excruciating. The art form renders the unbearable bearable. It also deflects us from the grim task of doing what is right (where is the fun in that?). Art makes morality humanly acceptable: it embeds the moral in the aesthetic. It makes being a moral being a little bit easier. It is the equivalent of wearing dark glasses when you stare at an eclipse. True, it is a sign of weakness, of cowardice even, but at least you get to see the eclipse. Analogously, without the filter of art we would avert our gaze from morality altogether—because it is just too much to bear. As they say, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Art shields us from the reality of good and evil (the former too demanding, the latter too upsetting), but at least it allows us to open our minds to it. If you give a creature a moral sense, you had better give it a means of coping with that sense. Other animals have neither art nor morality, but we have both—and there is a reason we have both, viz. one allows us to live with the other. God gave us art so that we could face up to morality, at least fitfully. At the most primitive level storytelling is our way of dealing with the rigors of moral knowledge: at least we can creatively report the horror we just witnessed. Suppose a primitive man, recently endowed with a moral sense, witnesses the violent death of a beautiful animal: he feels the animal’s pain and fear and is suitably affected. He comes back to camp and makes a drawing of it or tells the story around the campfire: he has transposed the moral into the artistic, rendering it easier to bear. Looked at this way, art evolved from the need to soothe the moral sense—to render its deliverances bearable.[2] It’s either that or studiously avoid the horrors of the world, or develop a moral callousness that has its own difficulties. Art is the solution to the awful burden of moral consciousness, which has a dual nature: the reproachful character of morality, and the reality of suffering and death. It is the human mind trying to manage its awareness of right and wrong, good and evil. Sure, it’s a kind of cheat, but it beats the alternative, viz. a refusal to engage with morality at all. Art is better than callous nihilism. We don’t have this kind of problem with physics and other subjects: here we can gaze at the subject matter with nary a twinge of guilt or distress—we have no need of art to cope with knowledge of the physical world. But knowledge of the moral world is a very different proposition: in this case the knowledge carries inbuilt sources of disquiet and distress, requiring some coping mechanism. If we didn’t have art to fall back on, we would be faced with a choice between amoral indifference and moral despair—rejecting morality or being crushed by it. We could refuse to look at the sun or we could blind ourselves by looking too intently, or we can put on the dark glasses. Art gives us the kind of moral knowledge we can bear: not too intimate, not too searing, not too real. Could any human soul survive full awareness of the suffering that happens every day on planet earth? Instead we read Shakespeare or Tolstoy, or listen to music, or take in a movie. Art gives us a transformed awareness of morality, one that caters to our moral limitations. Sometimes it brings us uncomfortably close to moral reality as it really exists (as in King Lear) and artistic form only just renders it bearable; but mostly the reality is kept at a safe distance. In the case of bad sentimental art the blinders are fully on and nothing of moral reality seeps through, only an untruthful depiction of human (and animal) life. The best art lets moral truth shine through but with enough artifice to avoid total repugnance (War and Peace is a good example, or Madame Bovary): tremendous suffering but shaped by the devices of the artist.[3] Thus we can read a beautiful book about horrifying events; and the same can be said of other artistic forms (Guernica is the obvious example in the case of painting). Perhaps poetry is the purest form of this, because it deals with disturbing subjects in the most condensed and explicit artistic form—though music might claim to arouse the moral emotions from the most morally attenuated material (morality from sheer sound). If we include comedy as an art form, then too we can say that the joke presents morality in a form that makes us laugh: we laugh at what would otherwise make us cry.[4] All of this is immensely problematic and teetering on the brink of moral degradation, but if I am right this is the price we pay for engaging with morality at all. We really aren’t equipped to deal with morality (beyond its most elementary forms[5]), but we find in art a possible approach to it that we can tolerate. Compare a fine picture of the crucifixion with a detailed point-by-point description of crucifying a man (or seeing it actually done), or reading Flaubert’s account of Emma Bovary’s death with actually witnessing it. Morality has nothing intrinsically to do with art, but we can see how it might need art to become humanly feasible. The conundrum becomes intelligible. Moral consciousness is more easily borne when suffused with aesthetic consciousness.[6]

 

[1] This essay arose from reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). She talks a lot about the relation between morality and art. My own interest in the topic goes back to Ethics, Evil and Fiction (1997).

[2] This is not to say that art might not serve other functions too. Something as complex and multi-faceted as art might have evolved for several reasons. Perhaps it was repurposed at some point in order to help with the fallout from our moral sense, having first served some more mundane function (say, indicating the whereabouts of food or predators).

[3] Homer’s Iliad is an interesting case: the violence and bloodshed is so extreme and relentless that the real world of war seems to enter the artwork in naked form. Perhaps we have progressed morally beyond Homer’s world to such a degree that we need more art to cover the awful reality. The same might said of the Old Testament, which can only shock modern sensibilities. In the case of a work like Lolita a tremendous amount of artistic effort has to go into clothing and distancing the moral vileness on display: here art is called on to perform miracles.     

[4] Tragedy is the most difficult form to pull off because it comes perilously close to reality (no one would want to read a factual account of a murder like Othello’s murder of Desdemona). Perhaps this is why tragedies are often placed in an exotic context so that we don’t read them as reports of actual happenings: we can keep them safely at the level of fantasy. Perhaps too this explains the double use of “tragedy” to refer to a fictional work and a real-life event: the distinction becomes blurred.  

[5] Much of moral philosophy deals with such elementary cases (repaying debts, keeping promises, etc.). There is nothing wrong with dwelling on this mundane material, but we miss a lot in moral psychology unless we widen our vision to include more serious matters. Then we see how morality challenges and grieves us, and how we struggle with it. Being a moral being hurts (or ought to).

[6] The question of why humans evolved such a fraught faculty remains unanswered: why do we have a form of consciousness (cognition, emotion) that requires this kind of massaging? It seems like a kind of cosmic sadism (wonderful though it undoubtedly is). Animals are blissfully free of it. We have been colonized by the aesthetic-ethical complex.