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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 145-163 A Vision of Ethics: Introduction At issue within normative ethics has been the continued fascination with explaining human activity in terms of causation. This task, like the task of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language, has been to isolate universal principles and link them up with particular human phenomena in the hopes of isolating something called "ethics." These universal principles have been variously interpreted as: the ideas within the mind of God, the expressions of the Absolute working itself out in history, the "laws" integral within nature, the categorical imperative leading dutifully towards an aesthetic encounter with the noumenal, or whatever. This pre-occupation with the structuring logic that stands behind normative ethics has sent philosophers of modernity searching for nominalist links to "the other world." It was within this vein of thinking that ethics became equated with the moralising tendencies of "modern" conservative societies: to be "moral" was to be "rational." This link between morality and rationality greatly diminished the possibilities for ethics once the post-structuralist critique of foundationalism was fully underway. Iris Murdoch resists ethics as a first-order philosophical language forming the logical skeleton onto which we hang our everyday experiences. Instead, Murdoch sees the role of ethics as "descriptive": as offering up new "literary" descriptions which will help contour new moral concepts that are better equipped to handle the moral ambiguity that characterises our everyday lives. In short, we don't live our lives within the realm of first-order logic. The task of ethics is not to rehash philosophical "facts" until one feels comfortable enough to generate something that might pass for "value": it is still difficult to lift an "ought" out of an "is." Ethics will not be advanced through further argumentation, and through further appeals to measured rhetoric that continually falls back on the safety of "reason." Philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition is still largely defined by its method of [end page 145] argumentation and this implying continued appeals to the rigours of rationality: the carefully ordered structuration of words with intent to persuade. This is the work that philosophy does. In contrast, Iris Murdoch moves towards the more natural metaphor of vision as a possible rubric through which ethics may be understood. Murdoch affirms the inexhaustible magnitude of the world and it is literature, in terms of parable, story and metaphor, which is best able to engage the moral ambiguity of our lives with fresh vision. It is this kind of "lived" ambiguity that has resisted the various systems which have passed for ethics that literature now seems ready to articulate through the medium of the novel. Although the novel is open to the critique of being overtly "heroic," especially in its Existentialist configuration, Murdoch's point is that only the delicate texture of literature enables descriptions of the deep inner psychological monologues that take place before the moment of ethics can be enacted. Murdoch argues that the complexities of the inner life must first take place, as intentional deliberation, before such blatant decisions can be taken in the public realm. Following this, a critique of existential voluntarism, exemplified in thinkers like Sartre, will take place through an appeal to the metaphor of "vision" as a way of uniting the two worlds of "private intention" and "public action." It will be argued that "vision," like the ethical life, is something that is ongoing and continuous. As well, "vision" occupies different perspectives leading to the question of moral ambiguity, an ambiguity that literature, and not philosophy, is better able to give expression. Within this moral ambiguity, literature is able to articulate the literary moment as an ethical mode of expression. On this account, I want to think of literature as more closely akin to something like "language," "life" or "world." The literary moment, the moment of reading in the novel, is the aesthetic moment that opens the novel up to more closely resembles the every day world we occupy with others. It is the "being-with," the "mitsein" within the novel that delivers us over to the fundamental confusion that seems to plague our primary dealings with others. Philosophy has not been able to plunge beneath this moral confusion with any satisfaction. Literature has never attempted, at least from the perspective of the novel, to write a "totality,"[1] and this is where a discussion of vision becomes relevant. The novel has always been able to live with the abiding ambiguity that comes with the perspective of vision. A novel is only about one story and has never attempted to take in all narratives within its grasp — that has always been the work that philosophy does: subsuming alterity into sameness. Literature lives with alterity and rather than conquer it, seeks only to describe it. Murdoch thinks the novel [end page 146] functions in developing "rich and fertile conceptual schemes which help us to reflect upon and understand the nature of moral progress and moral failure and the reasons for the divergence of one moral temperament from another."[2] Within this process of description, the literary moment, as a moment of ethics, emerges in psychological proximity to the reader. Iris Murdoch appreciates how the novel is able to venture into the deep psychological landscapes that make up the solitary dialogues of the self. In particular, although she resists the heroic tendencies of the insular self, Murdoch esteems the Existentialist novel as a medium that is able to explore the dialectical tensions that can so quickly complicate human relationships. This discussion will provide two literary examples of how the dialectic of private intention precedes the ethical and political moment of the decision. We now turn our attention to Murdoch's explication of the philosophical domains that help foreground and comprise the Existentialist "decision." The Existentialist Decision: An Omnipotent Will? Iris Murdoch advances the claim that much of early twentieth-century moral psychology and philosophy of mind fused together to form a conception of modern "man." This confused image resulted in a schizophrenic fragmentation of the self into two bifurcated halves: a detached view of reason, and an isolated, omnipotent will. Proceeding on this account, the world was conceived in terms of an indeterminate barrage of particularities that only the mind apprehended in neutral descriptions as "facts." The "will" ruptured into this world of neutrality and through "action" created "value." "Reason" reflects the non-moral inner life of "fact" that cannot be known apart from public action. The isolated will, in its insular fashion, chooses to break into the neutral world of facts and construct value and meaning. This reality breech, where value is fabricated out of the indiscriminate bits of reality, condemns reason to the private life of philosophical contemplation. This fact/value dichotomy of modernity leads to an ensuing tension: reason only apprehends neutral descriptions (facts) that cannot be translated into moral descriptions (values). The will constructs value out of the factual realm but only in isolated contexts, such that one's conclusions never have the universal traction that should accompany any given value statement. Iris Murdoch has rightly described this as a powerful image in which three strands of modernity converge. This image is behaviourist, existentialist and utilitarian: [end page 147] It is behaviourist in its connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable, it is existentialist in its elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will, and it is utilitarian in its assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts.[3] Murdoch narrows her focus in on this image of the "inner life" as a point of departure for teasing out the tensions and limitations of this positivist image of modern "man." The mental concept initially developed by Descartes, has enjoyed abundant explanatory power under the guise of a self-reflexive certitude that only modern foundationalism could deliver. The "inner thought" was seen to possess a private knowledge that had the quality of an explicit certitude. This way of conceiving the modern concept was largely abandoned because it could not inform "objective" activity outside the thinking subject: it was the Cartesian alienation between self and world. Existentialism quickly expedited the private concept into the public sphere where ratification could take place within the material criteria of the decision: I identify what my senses show me by means of the public schemata, which I have learned, and in no other way can this be known to me, since knowledge involves the rigidity supplied by a public test.[4] The public concept stands alone. It is not the representation of some other inner reality. All concepts, definitions and qualifications are chattel of the public sphere. The public nature of the concept is best illustrated in the instance of the "decision." Existentialism resists the notion that the action of decision is an outer representation of an inner reflection. There is no further inner structure that lies behind the "decision." It is its outer structure. "A decision does not turn out to be, when more carefully considered, an introspectible movement."[5] The inner quality of all private deliberation is denuded of meaning. The moral agent of Existentialism only apprehends observable behavioural patterns embedded within the public arena where morality plays itself out indiscriminately. We have no access to the private turmoil that may go on within an individual's interiority prior to any public enactment The private deliberation of the interior life cannot deliver the outward context that is required to qualify something as a decision. Only that which is actualised can be quantified. A Positivist understanding of the inner concept has made the contemplative life almost an impossibility reducing it to the domains of will, fact and action. [end page 148] Iris Murdoch critiques the existentialist move of Sartre in privileging an "omnipotent" will. Murdoch resists Existentialism's reduction of everything to "decision" and suggests instead a subjectivity that has the continuous on-going texture of the metaphor of "vision." Murdoch wants to overcome the Existentialist's view that places unmerited favour upon "will" and "action." This voluntarist emphasis valorises the individual within the public domain — the world of ordinary facts — creating and constructing value systems through heightened moments of the will. On the Existentialists' account, it is the decision to act that actualises oneself in the public sphere. This configuration of decision and action privileges an unbridled will that attends to a certain utility within the public margin. This approach prohibits the taking up of a contemplative attitude towards an introspective subjectivity. For the Existentialist, "self-knowledge is something which shows overtly," and is seen only once it is too late.[6] "Morality resides at the point of action," at the brink of haste.[7] The self becomes a reduction to a point of singularity — to a point of pure will. For Murdoch, subjectivity (and the ethics and politics which issue from it) is not the isolated breech of the will breaking free in a moment of "self-authentication." It is in its shortsightedness that Existentialism has neglected a discussion of "vision." Vision is a natural metaphor guarding against the abrupt utilitarianism of the decision. Vision clears a space for a consideration of "intention" as the on-going struggle of interiority — as an action that can only be performed privately — preceding the overt moment of ethics. Murdoch elucidates this mediation between the private and the public: But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.... But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices.[8] For Murdoch, this becomes something of a moral ideal: a kind of necessity toward the Other. It is an activity not always observed taking place sometimes quietly, sometimes more overtly, but always within the caverns of the inner life where deep struggles of moral ambiguity occur. This notion of vision, "of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a [end page 149] thing, a situation," engages the will in an act of sustained attention, rather than unimpeded freedom.[9] For Iris Murdoch, the moral life is apprehending that which is embodied "in a continuous fabric of being."[10] A Vision of Ethics: Private or Public Gaze? Murdoch sees the inner life as one possible way ahead in limiting the overt life of action that the Existentialists' saw as the way out of a moralising and patronising nineteenth-century encoding of ethics. Murdoch does not view the inner life as a kind of private psychological introspection open only to the verification of an insulated subjectivity. Rather, she sees the inner life as "personal vision which may find expression overtly or inwardly."[11] Thinkers like Richard Rorty might condemn someone like Murdoch as a "private ironist." Anytime Rorty sees the word "personal" he immediately thinks of something that is automatically excluded from the public realm. Now although Murdoch's vision is a personal gaze, the thing to notice is that it is a gaze upon the inexhaustible magnitude of the world. It is not a privatising vision that isolates and alienates the Other. It is a public gaze that is personal, but that is drawn out to join in the very interesting pathos of the world. Although ethics begins in personal vision, it is a vision of the Other. The main difference between this view and the view of the Existentialists or Richard Rorty's is that Murdoch wants to supplement the choice of Existentialism (or pragmatism) with the complexity of "private intention." She wants to think private intention in terms of vision in order to avoid critiques that might come against a conception of contemplative subjectivity. For Murdoch, vision is the metaphor that links the private and the public. The Existentialist would like to "safely leave aside not only the inner monologue and its like, but also the overt manifestations of personal attitudes, speculations, or visions of life," in favour of acts, choices, choice-guiding rhetoric and arguments: all the gearish tools of "action" and "decision."[12] The Existentialist sees the world as a value-free domain of brute facts. Value is added to the world through the super-imposition of an overly empowered will making decisions ex nihilo. This is a barren view of the world, but one which explains, if only for Existentialism, why different people differ in their moral dexterity and in their moral descriptions: it is a matter of choice. Murdoch's view of vision enframes "world" in a completely different fashion and thinks "moral differences look less like difference of choice, given the same facts, and more like differences of vision... we differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds."[13] This is an important point, one that cultural critics like Terry Eagleton have articulated in terms of "ideology."[14] [end page 150] Critics like Murdoch and Eagleton describe the phenomena of ideologies and worldviews bumping up against each other in the many areas of life. "Ideology" is the fore grounding of an individual that is heavily contoured by the language game in which the individual is enmeshed. Murdoch's point is that ideology functions as a personal gaze upon the world so that our vision outward acts as a hermeneutic filter allowing us to see things in a certain light. To my mind, the adequacy of this explanation functions in accounting for moral diversity. Murdoch's moral vision, as an ideological fore grounding, gives an account of just how exactly someone might come to the sort of decision that an Existentialist might value. However, the mistake of conventional ethics was to explain moral diversity in terms of an appeal to universalisation. Moral diversity was conceived as a difference in "understanding," and ethical deviance was thought in terms of the moral subject possessing a substandard rationality. This view, of course, rests on the assumption that there is something like a pre-linguistic form of universal human reason that exists in each subject in pristine fashion. Following this, moral failure is seen as the inability of the subject to rationally assent to the moral ideal of the "common good." Murdoch's view, in contrast, takes on the full critique of the linguistic turn and recognises that "vision" is neither a universal homogeneity, nor something within our power of choice.[15] Murdoch thinks that there is a high level of intentional complexity forming the matrix and backdrop out from which our choices issue. Rather than letting details blind and paralyse us from enacting a moral decision, we should develop moral attitudes which keep us closely attending to the unique and unending particularity of the world: I have in mind moral attitudes which emphasise the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals and situations 'taped,' the connection of knowledge with love and of spiritual insight with apprehension of the unique.[16] The picture Murdoch is painting for us is one of enchantment. Enchantment is mobilised through the moral attitude of love. Murdoch goes to great lengths to emphasise the synthesis of love and knowledge. Knowledge on its own becomes the kind of understanding that turns others into objects of our own understanding — or lack of. Love softens the rigid edginess of rationality, contouring it into a kind of "body knowledge." Only love, and not knowledge on its own, could patiently endure the endlessness of the task of understanding. Love also joins [end page 151] spiritual insight (which for Murdoch is the ongoing task of the gaze of private intention) and the apprehension of the unique (which is the patient attending to the material particularities of the world). This kind of embodied posture towards "world" is what I want to think of as "enchantment": a patient attending to particularity that, unlike knowledge, does not seek to subsume everything within a totalising grasp. In short, knowledge, as a kind of edgy rationality, accentuates the fact/value dichotomy as a self-aware fissure rendering it just another brand of foundationalism. In resisting this, Murdoch's thinking refuses a further "factual" reality, which stands behind the "value" we place on the world. For her, the just and loving gaze overcoming false fractures between fact and value helps enframe "world" for the ethical subject in a holistic manner.[17] On this view, other competing philosophical conceptions of the world, such as Naturalism or Existentialism, should not be seen as fallacious but only as differing visions for the ethical life. The difficult task, which we shall take up later, is to try to see situations and people as they might see themselves thereby increasing understanding and resolution of difficult moral situations: this is the task that only love can do. One might imagine a world in which this idea of "enchantment," as it is mobilised through the moral attitude of loving vision, might be warmly received in philosophy departments on both sides of the Atlantic. However, we are not so fortunate. Murdoch argues that it is literature that is able to remain with the moral ambiguity of differing visions, and not philosophy. We will now turn our attention to Murdoch's articulation of the difference between literature and philosophy. This section will explore the tunnel vision that has characterised modern Anglo-American philosophy and suggest the privileging of the literary moment over philosophy as a superior mode of ethical expression. Literature and Philosophy: The Difference a Difference Can Make Ever since Plato banished the artists there has been a growing chasm between philosophy, on the one hand, and literature as an art on the other. Since then, literature has generalised philosophy as always having to demonstrate "truth" to soothe the anxieties of a niggling scepticism that threatens the manifestation of being. Philosophy has generalised literature as the empty rhetoric of an elite trying to generate the moment of aesthetics in the hopes of authoring personal meaning. Some, like Iris Murdoch, have felt it necessary to overcome the alienation between the two, ironically finding a common starting point: both are truth tellers. Within this tension, Murdoch explores the variance [end page 152] between what philosophy does and what literature does. Murdoch's critique is intriguing: "Literature is various and very large, whereas philosophy is very small."[18] Plato was afraid of the artist within himself. He was a political theorist who, "was afraid of the irrational emotional power of the arts, their power to tell attractive lies of subversive truths."[19] This is the secret that Plato knew, the power of poetry, and the magnetising influence of the artist. This is the private thing that Plato was trying to subvert in others, and him. But the private will not be subverted. It will emerge in the realm of the public, not as a tool of the public, but as the revealer of truth. The Artist is private because his duty remains with Art as a truth-telling. The Artist is not the citizen, who has a direct, public duty to serve society. The true Artist never serves society. When art subverts itself to the service of society it becomes a means to an always lesser end. This was the folly of Marxist Art. It is a tool of power, a means of utility to social ends. It is not art borne from a love of art. The Artist may only indirectly serve society, and this insofar as she is the revealer of truth. Art is that private thing, devoted to itself for its own sake, which emerges in the public realm as a disclosure of truth.[20] This is what Heidegger meant when he said only the poets can save us. Ironically, philosophy emerged out of art and poetry and has been defining itself over against everything else ever since: Philosophy does make progress by defining itself as not being something else. In Plato's time it separated itself from literature, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from natural science, in the 20th century from psychology.[21] Because of the alienating nature of philosophy, it has narrowed its method and focus to valorise rationality as an epistemological singularity. But if one is to embrace the totality of the human experience, the programme of philosophy seems limited. It is in this stream of thought that Murdoch says, "Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing."[22] We are all nostalgic humanists who are continually fascinated with words: So in a way as word-users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breathe literature, we are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interesting forms out of experience which perhaps originally seemed dull or incoherent.[23] [end page 153] Literature takes everything within its fold. Language is the vehicle for literature to exist and find traction within the world. Literature is the art of turning mundane happenings into continued lived experience. Literature is not an object of knowing; it is a way of being, a way of gaining access to the world. Philosophy resists this. The philosophic task is in manufacturing huge edifices of knowledge, and constructing intellectual infrastructures, "involving a lot of complicated imagery."[24] Philosophy resists the "personal" and when it does touch upon these edges it codifies them into systems of ethics. Murdoch holds that philosophy is a counter-natural dialogue of narrow distinctions that is left behind as soon as philosophers leave their studies; they default back into their habitual assumptions. The same may hold true for modern literary Critics and Structuralists who are more fascinated with formalism and theories of justification than they are with the deeper things of life and literature. In their hands, literature is just a vehicle for philosophy to travel in. But literature must resist any philosophic theory that would bully it. Literature, like life itself, is a more robust phenomenon than cannot be reduced to any one point of singularity: The unconscious mind is not a philosopher. For better and worse art goes deeper than philosophy.... There is always something moral which goes down further than the ideas, the structures of good literary works are to do with erotic mysteries and deep dark struggles between good and evil.[25] Literary fiction, if it explores the elaborate relationships between people in all of their complexity, will not be able to deny the moral dimension that emerges in such interesting and personal ways through lived experience. Philosophers may know the truth but you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie. Perhaps there is no method, no single philosophic structure or approach that will ever deliver a final version of the truth. Perhaps there are only versions of the truth embodied in deeply meaningful ways. Perhaps a more confused method is in order, a method that takes in many ways and many approaches: We have so many kinds of relation to a work of art. A literary work is an extremely heterogeneous object which demands an open-minded heterogeneous response.... critics are better off without any close-knit systematic background theory, scientific or philosophical. A good critic is a relaxed polymath.[26] [end page 154] The approach of the relaxed polymath is more keenly aware of the matrix of complexities that web together forming the barrage of experiences that make up life and the literature that exemplifies it. Murdoch proposes a different approach to reality that stands against the structuralists' denuding of literature, art, language and ultimately the self as nothing more than systematic constructs. Theory and philosophy, according to Murdoch, will eventually bow to literature: Any theory which cuts people off from the great literature of the past deprives them of a historical and moral education and also of a great deal of pleasure.... I know who are great writers in the past and I will not surrender them to a theory but rather consider the theory in their light.[27] We do not engage reality at the level of reduced, quantified theory. Science has tried to artificially exegete value out of life and language and relegate it to its own moral enclave. Murdoch opposes this. Language by its very texture conveys value. We are always in language and "this is one reason why we are almost always morally active."[28] Life, literature and language are value-laden: Literature is connected with the way we live. Some philosophers tell us that the self is discontinuous and some writers explore this idea, but the writing (and the philosophy) takes places in a world where we have good reasons for assuming the self to be continuous.[29] Literature is the level at which we interface with this reality. It is connected with the way we live. The self is where we apprehend consciousness in continuous lived experience. Literature, as an embodied reality, features highly intricate complexities. This webbed network of experiences firmly embeds the "self" in the linguistic texture of literature. Conceived in these terms, literature is not thought as an abstract, disconnected, rational certitude. Rather, it is a lived and realised virtue embedded within felt human existence. The Novel: The Ethical Possibilities for Literature Fittingly then, it is literature in general, and the novel in specific, which is able to sufficiently articulate the moment of moral ambiguity. This is because "vision" always takes a perspective and the beauty of the novel is that, although it is only telling one story, it is able to move the reader through a series of changing vantages. The novel not only gives us know-[end page 155]ledge of the different panorama of events, but also allows the reader entry into the manifold melange of human pathos: the novel syncratises love and knowledge into a formidable whirring of fictive human experience. An example of this can be found in Murdoch's analysis of Simon de Beauvoir's novel L'Invitee in her 1950 BBC radio broadcast entitled "The Existentialist Hero."[30] The story line is thick with human intention and illustrates, strikingly, how moral ambiguity may emerge with an acute brilliance within the climate of the novel. Pierre and Francoise, both thoroughly rational lovers, is a mature couple of the theatre world. They are thirty years of age and pride themselves on being open and frank in their discussions with their colleagues and themselves. Through happenstance, they make acquaintance with a highly "ir-rational" woman named Xaviere, aged twenty. Unwittingly, Pierre develops a serious infatuation with Xaviere — who responds in like manner. Francoise, unable to find a "rational" solution to Pierre's infidelity, enters into a love affair with a younger man, Gerbert. Xaviere has regarded Francoise as a woman past her prime, swallowed up in bitterness and envy and views Francoise's liaison with Gerbert, in whom she herself has an interest, as an action ripe with jealousy and vengeance. Although Pierre does not intend it, both he and Xaviere form a romantic coalition against Francoise, who can no longer rationally access Pierre in open frank dialogue. For Francoise, and perhaps for Pierre as well, rationality is no longer enough to sustain their failing relationship. In a seemingly unexpected finale, the highly rational Francoise kills Xaviere in a supreme act of retribution. What ensues can only be described as the tangle of different visions inherent in moral ambiguity. What Francoise saw as a simple and sincere liaison with Gerbert, Xaviere saw as a spiteful act of vengeance. With insult added to injury, Francoise, no longer able to negotiate strong feelings towards Xaviere, in one grim act, kills her and with her (or so she thinks) Xavier's unjustified conception of herself. Murdoch questions: "Why? Because she could not endure the fact that Xaviere's conception of her (Francoise) was both completely unjust and completely inaccessible."[31] This is the ineffable mystery that will always remain within ethics as a moral ambiguity: we are almost never able to surmise other's conceptions of ourselves, nor, as much as we would want, control these conceptions whatever we may want to do. This leads us, inevitably, to the central confusion that attends moral ambiguity: what is the meaning of any one action? Is it what we see, what others see or indeed, what we think others see? Why is it we feel responsibility for how other people view us — especially when we feel their views unjustified? No matter the case "the final act of violence... does not solve Francoise's problem. Xaviere herself [end page 156] may cease, but nothing can now blot out her judgment of Francoise. Only Xaviere herself could have done that."[32] This is the main frustration within ethics, which, for the most part, are not the life or death decisions that we read about in the world of medicine. Rather, ethics is the continual negotiation of complicated interests among competing parties. In short, ethics is a dwelling in mundaneness with others in the day-to-day flux and flow of human relationships, and it is this, which Iris Murdoch has so brilliantly exposed in this one literary instance. One of the greatest challenges in getting on with others is to see ourselves as they might see us, and in turn, to see others as they might see themselves. Notice how the task at hand is not to see ourselves and others as we/they really are, for this would imply a conception of the world that is closer to the Existentialist view of reality: a wastescape of neutral data to which we add value, arte-factum — art-maker. Art is not so much made as discovered. Nevertheless, we cannot get at whom we really are because our conceptions of others and ourselves are always governed by personal visions of the world. The best we can hope for is to moderate our vision in order to accommodate other perspectives, after all, it is a vision of the world and not just a lonely, contorted private gaze upon the inside of ourselves. This also approximates a view of language that I think is commensurable with Murdoch's thinking on vision. Although language is a powerful contouring force upon the development of our subjectivity and the thing that inducts us into the linguistic play of our localised language games, there is a sense in which we can perform a semi-turn upon our language and modify it to become more inclusive. Now this should not be viewed as a full rebellion against the background that first gave us the ability to rebel: we cannot turn our language on its head without the inevitability of toppling ourselves over. My claim, simply stated, is that we have the ability to introduce new language into the continuing linguistic matrix that helps make up who we are. If this holds for language, then it also holds for Murdoch's view of "vision." We can incorporate the introduction of new visions into our own vision. It is here that I think the notion of Hans Georg Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" is helpful for our thinking on the adjudication of competing personal visions of the world. Ethics: A Fusion of Horizons? I will suggest that the day-to-day business of getting on with others, what is called ethics, is nothing other than hermeneutics. It is an encounter with the Other that, at least in degree, results in a fusion of horizons. Ethics presupposes encounters with other people, cultures, worldviews, or whatever. The proper business of ethics, at least in our day-to-day [end page 157] dealings, is not to "decide" right or wrong, but rather to dialogically engage new and exotic horizons with a posture of hermeneutic openness. Ethics, on this view, is "understanding" (what Murdoch is calling for) and this is what can effectively be called the hermeneutics of trust. There are some very interesting lines of symmetry between Murdoch's notion of "vision" and Gadamer's notion of hermeneutic "understanding." We remember with Murdoch that vision, like the ethical life, is always on going. Similarly, Gadamer thinks the process of hermeneutic understanding as a "process of fusion [that] is continually going on," and that it is "always combining into something of living value."[33] My aim here is to employ Gadamerian hermeneutics in the service of Murdoch's notion of ethics in order to adjudicate between competing human visions like the ones we encountered in the example of Beauvoir's novel. I want to take the question "what is the meaning of any one action" and expose it to a hermeneutics of trust. If vision is like language and if we are trying to expand our vision to include other's visions, then the first thing that needs to be realised is that we are always "in" hermeneutics. Our vision is continually bumping up against other's visions entailing the endlessness of the task of understanding. This process is first mobilised by what Murdoch calls the moral attitude of love, and by what Gadamer is describing as hermeneutical openness: The voice that speaks to us...whether text, work, trace — itself poses a question and places our meaning in openness. In order to answer the question put to us, we the interrogated must ourselves begin to ask questions.[34] Once we are open to being put into question we are then able to question and initiate the dialogical encounter with the other which will lead us further in understanding their personal vision of the world. This hints at the inextricable link between questioning and understanding. "The close relation between questioning and understanding is what gives the hermeneutic experience its true dimension."[35] The dialectic of questioning and understanding functions as the grand underpinning for the hermeneutic dimension of the "fusion of horizons." But there must be a balance that governs this "fusion of horizons." "This is the reason why understanding is always more than merely re-creating someone else's meaning."[36] As an instance of this, a fusion of horizons would not demand that Francoise hermeneutically reduce her personal vision (that her affair with Gerbert was not sincere after all and was really just malicious payback) to that of Xaviere's, nor the opposite. However, it does require [end page 158] one to place their personal vision in question long enough to be vulnerable to someone else's perspective thereby avoiding any grand misconceptions that lead to the needless breakdowns that are so common in our everyday relationships. The extreme literary case of this is Francoise's murder of Xaviere. If we could open ourselves up to the possibility of another's horizon for only a moment, then we would readily see that we have probably mis-interpreted not only their private intention, but their conception of us as well. This is why ethics needs to be dialogical. An example of how private intention is open to mis-interpretation is given again in Murdoch's essay The Idea of Perfection. Murdoch develops a hypothetical ethical scenario describing a mother-in-law's private contempt for her daughter-in-law who behaves inappropriately and is untimely in her mannerisms; in her thinking her son has married beneath himself. Murdoch explores different possibilities within this narrative that begin to tease out the tension between private intention and public behaviour. The account finds the mother-in-law thinking badly toward the unsuspecting daughter-in-law, but with no apparent change in outward behaviour. Is it enough that the mother-in-law's outward behaviour remains constant even while her inward life is a jostle of misplaced intentions? What ethical weight do private intentions bring to bear upon such a situation? Picture yet another formulation of this story: after much internal struggle, the mother-in-law has a change of heart and subsequently modifies her private intention to coincide with her public behaviour towards her daughter-in-law. Although Existentialism maintains that ethics only materialise after a decision is taken (and public behaviour publicly modified), the moral relevance of private intention is what precedes any moral decision and is ultimately what frames our personal vision of the world. The mother-in-law, no matter her behaviour, can only see her daughter-in-law through the eyes of private intention. Private intention is the reality that unravels the significance of measuring moral ingress into the world solely in terms of public action. The Existentialist objection proves threadbare: if the daughter-in-law had known the inner thoughts of her mother-in-law, the ethical fall-out between them would have had immediate consequences — both would have changed their public behaviour toward one another at once. Intention is heavily weighted with the ethical. With these two literary examples in mind — both Beauvoir's and Murdoch's — some provisional observations can be made. Taking the question "what is the meaning of any one action?" and juxtaposing it along side the dialectic coincidence of "question-understanding," we come closer to the performative work that hermeneutics must enact within ethics. The [end page 159] great travail within ethics is the realisation that our view of any one situation is not the final word. Any situation on its own does not exist "per se" for this would be the view that ethics could exist as a self-subsistent fact. Rather, the true being of an ethical situation surfaces in linguistic disclosure as soon as all parties involved enter the dialogical tension of "questioning-understanding." It is when this kind of hermeneutic diad takes place that ethical subjects are able to discover what the truer meaning of any one action could be. Very often, the ethical significance of an action is decided after all parties involved engage in the give and take of linguistic negotiation. To some, this might come off as strikingly relativistic, but this is precisely what we do when we operate within the category of "memory." Any action in the past can have continually updated meanings assigned to it as the ethical subject receives new information. We change our minds about an issue in question once we know what the other party involved truly thought or truly was intending. It is in such a vein of thinking that a statement like "ethics is hermeneutics" has meaning. The continual on-going task of ethics is to work with others in order to assign meaning to specific moral enactments. Thus, the meaning of any one action will probably hover in between either of the two or more personal visions: this is the fusion of horizons. But this kind of linguistic disclosure does not only take place between ethical subjects, it also occurs between reader and novel — ethics as the literary moment of hermeneutic disclosure. Conclusion: Literary Ethics and the Parabolic Moment of Reading The notion of ethics being the moment of literary disclosure concerns the dynamic between reader and novel when, as subject and object, both phenomenologically collapse into the onto-epistemic moment of reading. This is what Murdoch earlier meant by her conception of the function of literature within ethics — its power of description: Certain parables or stories undoubtedly owe their power to the fact that they incarnate a moral truth which is paradoxical, infinitely suggestive and open to continual reinterpretation... such stories provide, precisely through their concreteness and consequent ambiguity, sources of moral inspiration which highly specific rules could not give.[37] This ability to incarnate a paradoxical moral truth — infinite suggestive ambiguity matrixed with the persuasion of descriptive concreteness — involves the reader in a literary force from which moral inspiration can spring. This moral inspiration may result in the possibility for self-reflexivity [end page 160] leading to a subsequently changed moral posture towards the world. Because literature, lush in native detail, is able to approximate life in all of its lived ambiguity, the reader is able to enter into the phenomenological space that the novel opens up and come alongside of — parable — the character who is enmeshed within the warp and woof of moral confusion. I would like to close with the phenomenological possibilities of the word "parable" and anchor this notion of ethics as the moment of literary disclosure within it. Initially, a parable can be thought of as a narrative of imagined events which offer a moral or spiritual insight. Further still, the idea of parable can take on the full weight of the "medieval allegory" where the Latin parabola invokes the conception of "comparison." However, to access the complete phenomenological significance of this word, we must venture still further, back into the Greek origins of the term, parabole. The Greek notion of parabole invokes the conception of a "placing side by side"; the smooth symmetry of one thing under phenomenological gravity finally collapsing into its mirrored counterpart such that, when synthesis is complete, only an emergent whole remains. It is within the density of this metaphor that I would like to come to think about the phenomena of "reader" collapsing into "novel" in a moment of existential elation. This coalescence is what leads to moral insight in the moment of reading. Staying within this stream of distinctions, I would like to think of literature, not as something English departments do, but something more philosophically decisive, something philosophy departments should be doing. It is more sensuous. It is something that more closely approximates life, language, or world. It is parabole. It is the aesthetic possibility within ethics that creates the conditions for a self-reflexivity that precedes moral enactment and then enters dialogical tension where meaning can be assessed and assigned to actions. Philosophy only does one thing: it prescribes highly specific rules. Literature, done properly, can remain with the vision of an on-going lived ambiguity, which may function as a possible site where reader and novel may syncratise into a parabolic fusion of horizons. [1]. However, in one sense the Romantic movement tried to write the final novel that would function as a totality but ultimately failed and produced the Romantic genre of the "fragment" instead. [end page 161] [2]. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics. New York: Penguin Books, 1999: 336. This chapter was originally published in Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1970 and was based upon the Ballard Matthews lecture delivered at the University College of North Wales in 1962. All references and pagination are to the 1999 penguin collection of essays, lectures and radio broadcasts which span Murdoch's academic career. [3]. Iris Murdoch, The Idea of Perfection, 305. [4]. Ibid., 307. [5]. Ibid., 309. [6]. Ibid., 311. [7]. Ibid. [8]. Ibid., 329. [9]. Ibid., 331. [10]. Ibid., 323. [11]. Murdoch, Vision and Choice in Morality, 78. First published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society entitled "Dreams and Self-Knowledge," 1956: 30. [12]. Murdoch, Vision, 79. [13]. Ibid., 82. [14]. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. [15]. Murdoch, Vision, 84. [16]. Ibid., 87. [17]. Ibid., 95. [18]. Iris Murdoch, Literature and Philosophy, 6. First broadcast as an interview with Bryan Magee on British television, 28 October 1977 and later published in Magee's Men of Ideas, 1978. [19]. Ibid., 13. [20]. "Art is that private thing" should be demarcated over against Murdoch's discussion of the radical privatisation of art such as pornography or 'fantasy' which keeps us in our closed small personal worlds. Great art is liberating because it deals with that which will eventually emerge in the public realm. [21]. Murdoch, Lit and Phil, 13. [end page 162] [22]. Ibid., 4. [23]. Ibid., 6-7. This is not to accuse Murdoch of the utilitarianism that is embedded within classical humanism-the using of words toward empty rhetoric or political manipulation through eloquence. Murdoch's humanism is more concerned with a fascination with words, and an enchantment with the text for its own sake. [24]. Ibid., 7. [25]. Ibid., 21. [26]. Ibid., 24. [27]. Ibid., 25. [28]. Ibid., 27. [29]. Ibid., 29. [30]. The Existentialist Hero was the second of three programs on "Existentialism" broadcast in March of 1950 on BBC radio. [31]. Murdoch, Existentialist Hero, 108. [32]. Ibid., 109. [33]. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1997: 306. [34]. Ibid., 374. [35]. Ibid., 374. [36]. Ibid., 375. [37]. Murdoch, Vision, 91.
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