Heart and Mind

The Varieties of Moral Experience

Mary Midgley, Mary Midgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134408061
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

With a new introduction by the author. It is a book of superb spirit and style, more entertaining than a work of philosophy has any right to be.' – Times Literary Supplement. Throughout our lives we are making moral choices. Some decisions simply direct our everyday comings and goings; others affect our individual destinies. How do we make those choices? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from, and how can we make more informed decisions? In clear, entertaining prose Mary Midgley takes us to the heart of the matter: the human experience that is central to all decision-making. First published: 1983.

1

THE HUMAN HEART AND OTHER ORGANS

1 THE FUNCTION OF THE HEART

If we talk of hearts today, we usually do it only in two rather restricted contexts; the romantic or the medical. A heart is either the focus of a love-affair, or the seat of a disease. These two matters seem widely separated, not connected except externally and by chance. But a much wider use of the word is possible, and deserves examination. When Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking, moans because she cannot clean the smell of blood off her hands, her watchful Doctor says:

What a sigh is there! The heart is sore charged.

and her waiting-woman replies:

I would not have such a heart in my bosom for all the dignity of the whole body.

(Macbeth, Act V, scene i)

These people are talking in a perfectly natural way, but one which has become a trifle awkward for us now, partly through sentimental misuse of words like ‘heart’, partly because of certain changes in the pattern of our thoughts. What they are speaking of is the core or centre of someone's being, the essential person, himself as he is in himself and (primarily) to himself. By comparison, both the romantic and the medical aspects of his life are partial and dependent. On the one hand, love affairs do not depend only on certain special feelings, but on the whole character. On the other, someone who has to have a heart operation needs a surgeon whose heart is in his work, a stout-hearted one, who in unexpected difficulties will take heart rather than lose it, one whose heart will not easily sink or fail him. A medical student who, at heart, has never really cared for his work, would never become this kind of surgeon whatever his brains. The surgeon too, on his side, needs a stout-hearted patient, not a faint-hearted one—a patient who will put his heart into the business of recovery.

In this wide and still natural way of speaking, the hearts of both doctor and patient form an essential part of the business. Of course one of them may be heartless in a narrower sense—callous, selfish, unsympathetic. But to be that, to have any distinct character, he still needs this structured core to his being. It is where his priorities are formed. It is the organized set of central feelings by which he is habitually moved. Hearts may be narrow and hard, cold and flinty, but they are still a crucial element in people's activities.

How then does this centre relate to the mind or brain? Here too we can choose between a wider and a narrower use. We certainly can contrast the mind or brain sharply with the heart, as I did just now in speaking of the medical student. He may have a first-class mind—meaning that he always passes exams well— without any necessary consequences about his heart or character. But that is not the only way to think of the matter, nor the most natural one. When Macbeth says:

O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife

this is not at all the same thing as complaining about bugs in a computer program. And again:

Macbeth	Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor	Therein the patient must minister to himself.
Macbeth	Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it.

(Act V, scene iii)

The mind which is diseased is not the intellect, it is something quite close to what we still call the heart. The heart is the centre of concern, the mind is the centre of purpose or attention, and these cannot be dissociated. This does not prevent the mind from being the seat of thought, because thought in general is not just information-handling or abstract calculation, such as computers do, but is the process of developing and articulating our perceptions and feelings, This is still true even if we confine the term to serious, ‘directed’ thought, ignoring more casual musings:

But men at whiles are sober,

And think, by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

(A. E. Housman, Last Poems, x)

Thought is not primarily the sort of thing which is tested in exams. It is the whole organized business of living—seen from the inside.

All this matters because many things on the current intellectual scene tend to make us disconnect feeling from thought, by narrowing our notions of both, and so to make human life as a whole unintelligible. We are inclined to use words like ‘heart’ and ‘feeling’ to describe just a few selected sentiments which are somewhat detached from the practical business of living— notably romantic, compassionate and tender sentiments—as if non-romantic actions did not involve any feeling. But this cannot be right. Mean or vindictive action flows from and implies mean and vindictive feeling, and does so just as much when it is considered as when it is impulsive. In general, too, ordinary prudent action flows from prudent feeling, though this is something to which we are so well accustomed that we take it for granted. It may seem like pure habit—until a sudden threat startles us into consciousness of the motive.

We are in fact so constituted that we cannot act at all if feeling really fails. When it does fail, as in cases of extreme apathy and depression, people stop acting; they can die in consequence. We do not live essentially by calculation, interrupted occasionally by an alien force called feeling. Our thought (including calculation) is the more or less coherent form into which our perceptions and feelings constantly organize themselves. And the compromise between various, conflicting, strong and constant feelings expresses itself in our heart or character.

Of course I am not denying that there can be discrepancies and conflicts between thought and feeling, or between feeling and action. There can. (They provide some of our most serious problems, which is why we have quite a good vocabulary for talking about them.) But they have to be exceptional. In general, feelings, to be effective, must take shape as thoughts, and thoughts, to be effective, must be powered by suitable feelings. Speculative thought is no exception; it depends on the powerful feelings of interest and curiosity. When we speak of a thought as conflicting with a feeling, both thoughts and feelings are really present on both sides; the distinction is just one of emphasis.

For instance, if a normally prudent housewife, overcome (as we say) by an impulse, blues everything on a wild investment, at least two thoughts and also two feelings are involved. Her habitual, steady desire for security was borne down by the detailed, but misleading, calculations which her intellect so vigorously produced. She did not operate with her normal degree of organization, but she still operated as one person, not two. Disentangling the intellectual from the emotional aspects of this whole is performing a piece of abstraction, one which needs enormously more care than theorizers usually give it.

2 THE DIVORCE BETWEEN FEELING AND REASON

Why, now, does all this matter? The unity of the human personality which I am stressing seems obvious. As I have said, however, it badly needs to be plugged today because of a whole web of theoretical habits which tend to obscure it and make it inexpressible. In this book, my main business will be with the strands of this web spun by British moral philosophy, which from the eighteenth century on has occupied itself with a dispute about whether morality is a matter of reason or feeling, ignoring the obvious fact that it is both. Its question has been, in Hume's words:

concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense.

(Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section I)

This dilemma is false. The metaphor of foundation is disastrous; a building can only sit on one foundation, so it looks as if we have to make a drastic choice. But we don't. Morality, like every other aspect of human activity, has both its emotional and its intellectual side, and the connection between them can't be just an external one, like that between stones brought together for a building. It is an organic one, like that between the shape and size of an insect.

This barren dispute sprang up in the first place as part of a wider controversy, which was only less barren because it was more quickly recognized as being merely a question of emphasis—the dispute between rationalism and empiricism in the theory of knowledge. Does knowledge—people asked— depend on reasoning or on experience? Very plainly the answer must be—yes, on both, but in different ways, and the next move must be to go on and investigate these different sorts of dependence.

Since Kant's day, this has been fairly well understood as far as theoretical knowledge is concerned. In moral philosophy, however, empiricists have been a lot slower to see that they could not treat the issue as a football match which, by vigorous cheering, they might one day hope to win. Hume's question only makes sense if it is treated as one about emphasis. It must be dealt with by accepting both elements as inseparable, and going on to a patient analysis of the parts they play in the whole.

Inevitably, these are hasty remarks on large subjects. In this book, I cannot say much about the theory of knowledge, though to avoid misunderstanding, I had better point out at once that I am not waving a lone flag in rejecting extreme, dogmatic empiricism as no more sane and workable than extreme, dogmatic rationalism. The impossibility of defending it has been argued by many good philosophers who are certainly the direct heirs of the empiricist tradition in its central enterprises of realism, common sense, and respect for the complexity of experience. ¹

Hume's attempt to show experience as a simple receiving of bare raw material unsullied by thought—as a succession of separate perceptions and feelings, disconnected and occurring at random, will not work. He was right to explore these wilder shores of empiricist metaphysic, but the upshot of his journey must be accepted. Experience is not like this, and cannot be so represented. Humean empiricism is bankrupt in the Philosophy of science, and that is something which it cannot afford to be.²

It is also terribly mean and impoverished in the Philosophy of Mind. Hume himself was alarmed about this, when he realized that the self which he was treating as the only solid reality had dissolved into a loose succession of disconnected events—a ‘bundle of perceptions’ with no string round the bundle.³ But he saw no remedy, and this impoverishment has persisted, in the form of a strange, indeed paradoxical unwillingness in empiricist philosophers to recognize the ordered complexity of our actual experience.

Since empiricism simply is an insistence that experience holds the key to all our problems, one might expect it to lead people to want to map experience itself in some detail, and not to be surprised if it turned out to be complex. And it has indeed taken some of its best practitioners like this—notably Locke, Butler and William James. Hume himself sometimes shared their interest, and phenomenology has been the heir of his efforts that way. At other times however, he viewed the inner life with dour suspicion, determined to make this confusing area conform with his demand for simplicity, and above all not to make use of any concept, however obvious, innocent and necessary, which might turn out to provide material for an immortal soul. Twentieth-century behaviourism is one heir of this timid and unrealistic tradition. I shall be mentioning others.

In general, the unity of human life is the central theme of the essays in this book, and though my remarks about it here are somewhat brief and dogmatic I shall try to show in them more fully how I understand it and how I want to vindicate it against false antitheses forced upon it by theory—unreal choices, resulting, I suggest, chiefly from controversial bad habits.

3 THE DIVORCE BETWEEN NATURE AND WILL

I begin then, deliberately, with a rather simple paper, ‘Freedom and Heredity’, dealing with the most troublesome and clamorous current form of this old dispute between feeling and reason—namely, the war at present proclaimed as arising between human nature and the free human will. We are called upon to choose between these concepts, to decide whether we are free beings, or members of the species Homo sapiens, with an inherited mental and emotional constitution. But are tomatoes fruit or vegetables? Does a house need shape or size? The two things imply each other. A being which had no natural constitution could not be free; the word freedom would make no sense applied to it. Such a creature would have nothing which it needed to be free to do. And the natural constitution which man actually has is no obstacle to his making free choices, since in fact it is so formed that it commits him to choosing.

There is no football match to be won here. There are two imperfectly understood half-truths, both of which in practice we recognize, and which we must somehow fit together. This is certainly hard, because our ideas of freedom and of nature have been developed in different contexts and are not shaped to fit each other. As has long been recognized, very careful logical plumbing is needed to understand free will, and people who want to do it will always have to think hard. But the present controversy does not only flow from this general, long-standing difficulty about free will and causal necessity. It arises because the notion of the will has been fantastically narrowed and isolated, since Nietzsche, in a melodramatic attempt to expand human freedom into omnipotence.

For Kant, the will meant practical reason. It was a name for the whole person, considered as a responsible chooser. Nietzsche, distrusting thought, exalted it as simply the courage to pursue one's own desires. The existentialists, seeing that desires are part of nature, and anxious to free the individual from entrapment in anything natural, separated it off from desire as well, and exalted it still further as the seat of pure choice. But choice in this isolation becomes so pure as to be quite meaningless. And although existentialist jargon is no longer specially fashionable, this is still the only way of thinking open to those who want to divorce the essential self from human nature. That self becomes a mere vacuous abstract force without direction.

What is missing is the background map of the whole self, within which both the natural desires and the shaping will which develops to organize them can find a context. As I remarked when discussing hearts, certain areas within this whole are brightly lit by current thought and intellectually familiar, but the brighter this light is, the darker and more mysterious we find the gaps between. A sharp beam is focused on the body as the object of medical science. This, however, makes it even harder to peer into the surrounding gloom, even at those neighbouring areas of the mind which (as Macbeth saw) must often be understood for the treatment of disease itself.

Elsewhere a different and weaker light (probably pink) vaguely illuminates the feelings, or certain selected feelings. But this is not supposed to be a very complex or important area. And elsewhere again, there looms in the darkness, uncertainly lit in green from yet another direction, a further item called the will. How are these bits and pieces to be connected? The human being who is the object of various sciences seems to bear no relation to the one who feels, or to the subject making decisions, yet he must operate as a whole. We cannot choose between these items; we need a map which contains them all.

Of course the roots of these difficulties are not new. People's understanding of themselves has always been fragmentary. Probably it always must be so, probably it would always be subject to the paradoxes which Pope noticed in the Essay on Man:

—Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great,
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a god or beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err …
Created half to rise, and half to fall,
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest and riddle of the world:

(Essay on Man, Epistle 2, 3–18)

What is new in this century, however, is the contribution of academic specialization to the splitting process. Mind and body, scepticism and stoicism, god and beast, are now topics belonging to different disciplines. Each is supposed to be discussed in its own appropriate terms, and any area so far neglected is suspect; since there is no proper way of discussing it, it tends to look like unsuitable ground for academic consideration altogether. Within each discipline, there is a further tendency to keep narrowing the territory; to be suspicious of outlying areas and concentrate only on things which can be made to look perfectly clear and complete. In any given subject this leads to feuds between rival factions, each claiming to have the right centre. The only remedy for this fragmentation is to stand back and take a wider view of the key concepts as parts of a whole.

In ‘Creation and Originality’ I begin this process boldly with the most awkward and mysterious case, the will. Those who consider our nature as something mean, limited and mechanical are of course reluctant to allow it any part in the honourable function of creativity. They follow Nietzsche in crediting the unassisted will with the creation both of moral values and of art. But when did mere will-power, decisiveness and determination ever make an artist, or indeed a real moral reformer? Talents are gifts. It is not a deprivation, or an infringement of freedom, that each of us must live as the person he is, with the brain and central nervous system that he has, instead of shopping around for one that would suit him better. (What him?) Not even God can invent himself from scratch.

The fear of determinism arises largely from people's habit of treating all causes as enemies rather than friends, deprivations rather than gifts. Gifts are enabling causes; it is hard to see how we would manage without them. Actually, this non-religious rejection of physical causes in the name of freedom requires a far narrower, more bloodless and ascetic view of the self than does any religion. For Christianity, the true self is indeed the soul, but the body is a necessary and suitable expression for it; the resurrection of the body will ensure that whole people, not just ghosts, inhabit Heaven. For Buddhism too, the soul must find a body to fit it. But those who want to say that heredity does not shape a human personality at all seem to take that personality as something sexless and abstract, a mere standard will which happens to have got shut up in a particular body. What are our talents then?

In this paper, accordingly, I suggest that we must treat Creation and Originality, not as supernatural interventions, but as aspects of our whole imaginative capacity, and therefore of our whole nature. There is no danger in admitting their genetic sources. We need not isolate them as pure products of the parthenogenetic will. In the next paper, ‘G. E. Moore on the Ideal’ I discuss an equally mysterious, and related, attempt to isolate the power of moral judgement from the rest of our nature.

4 THE FRAGMENTING OF THE MORAL PERSONALITY

It was Moore who ruled that moral judgements could not be supported by reasoning, that all argument about them was vitiated by a ‘naturalistic fallacy’. His aim in doing this was actually to clear the way for an aesthetic morality, which he thought would be self-evident once the bad arguments in support of other values were cleared away. This enterprise seems interesting, but it was the other which caught on. This was the point when moral philosophers began to make it a matter of professional pride to ignore all direct discussion of their subject. The autonomy of morals must, they declared, mean its complete conceptual isolation.

Before this time, philosophers had normally started their enquiries from the mass of hard day-to-day thinking that already exists on moral issues. Even when (like the British idealists) th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
• FOREWORD
• 1  The Human Heart and Other Organs
• 2  Freedom and Heredity
• 3  Creation and Originality
• 4  G. E. Moore on the Ideal
• 5  Trying Out One's New Sword
• 6  The Objection to Systematic Humbug
• 7  Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word?
• 8  The Game Game
• 9  The Notion of Instinct
• NOTES
• INDEX