March 28, 2022

In the Light of the Good Iris Murdoch's reading of the Allegory of the Cave

If you attended a philosophy introduction class or had philosophy class in school, you probably were taught about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Chances are good that you were told that Plato defends the conception of a reality beyond empirical reality that is of a higher order, eternal, and ontologically constitutive of the reality we live in.

This reading has caused a lot of refusal and mockery throughout history, for instance, but not exclusively, from the side of the Logical Empiricists. I do not believe that this conception can be coherent either, but I also do not think that this is a conception Plato defends — or, at least, I do not think we need to read him that way. In this post I want to draw on Iris Murdoch platonian metaethics and how she works with the Allegory of the Cave in order to outline a different reading of Plato.

Murdoch claims that morality is a matter of perceiving in a certain way — namely a way that reveals the moral demands in a concrete situation. However, the situation and the demands to which it gives rise are not simply given. Rather, it is necessary to see them in a certain way in order to apprehend what is good. Moral perception is perception of something as something. The mode in which we apprehend situations as constituting moral demands for us is attention, a term Murdoch adopts from Simone Weil and which she characterizes as a ‘just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’1.

To be a person is to have a certain outlook on the world that informs our actions in it. This world is not the world of science, but the human world. It is saturated with value and meaning, and there are other persons in it, to whom we relate ourselves. The medium of this ‘practical standpoint’2 are concepts, to be precise, thick concepts, or, as Murdoch calls them ‘secondary value terms’. Examples for these concepts are e.g. ‘gratitude’, ‘callousness’, ‘promise’, ‘generous’ and more. They describe states of affairs but they do so in a way that describes the evaluative status of these states of affairs. They entail an evaluative attitude solely in virtue of their description. If you know that someone behaved generously, you know you have reason to praise them.3 Because of this double character, they are capable of being the medium of moral perception.

However, this only gives us an account of how moral perception works within the respective outlook. In order to constitute a moral outlook in the first place, the agent needs to have adopted the idea that there can be, in the most general sense, a distinction between morally good and bad at all. Only then they can perceive the concrete situations as specific instantiations of this most abstract distinction. And this, I think, is were Murdoch’s reading of Plato becomes relevant. Compare the following description of the sun in the Allegory of the Cave:

It is real, it is out there, but very distant. It gives light and energy and enables us to know truth. In its light we see the things of the world in their true relationships. Looking at it itself is supremely difficult and is unlike looking at things in its light. It is a different kind of thing from what it illuminates.4

[...]

The mind which has ascended to the vision of the Good can subsequently see the concepts through which it has ascended (art, work, nature, people, ideas, institutions, situations, etc., etc.) in their true nature and in their proper relationships to each other. The good man knows whether and when art or politics is more important than family. The good man sees the way in which the virtues are related to each other.5

Murdoch expresses her agreement with G. E. Moore’s claim that ‘Good’ is an unanalyzable, irreducible, simple concept on several occasions, and I think this idea is operative here too. We cannot see the sun in the same way we can see the things on which the sun casts its light. We cannot perceive goodness, but we can perceive things that are good. We cannot say what goodness is, except that good things have this property. What we can say, however, is that a certain specific object has properties that make it good.

Likewise, we can say that an object of moral judgment partakes of the Form of the Good, insofar as the evaluative aspect of the thick description of this object expresses its goodness. Similarly, Plato’s claim that the Form of the Good is ontologically constitutive of the empirical objects simply means that we need to adopt the most abstract distinction between good and bad in order to navigate the world we inhabit, because this distinction establishes the evaluative perspective.

So, on this perspectivist-conceptualist reading of Plato, it becomes apparent that we do not have to read the Allegory of the Cave as defending the claim of a reality beyond our reality. It simply acknowledges the insight that our perception of the world is always already structured in a certain way, and it is only because of this that it can become intelligible as our world, a world of value and meaning.