Iris Murdoch's "Inhabited Philosophy"

 

From Sarah Bakewell

 Montaigne was as concrete as they come. His philosophy was his life. Where he touched on moral or metaphysical questions in his great compendium the Essais, it was to explore how they arose in his everyday routine or his private reading. If he was a philosopher at all, he said, he was only an “unpremeditated and accidental philosopher”, one who wrote whatever passed through his mind at each moment and occasionally happened to cross paths with the great thinkers of the past. His interest was in the existence of one man: himself. Yet this opened up a perspective on human existence in general, for “each man bears the entire form of the human condition”. Even if human beings varied in character – as they did, enormously – they remained united precisely by this shared fact of variability. To study one soul in its oddity was to study everyone in their normality.

Thus, Montaigne ranged through the wildest shores of human experience while staying firmly at home: he wrote about his readings of classical Sceptics and Epicureans, about ethics and theology and politics, but also about his neighbours, his cat and dog, his sexual adventures, his meetings with kings and politicians, his near brushes with death, his painful kidney-stones, his periods of contentment or grief or fear or exhilaration, his mistakes and his moments of vanity or stupidity. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter,” he said. “You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.”

Montaigne’s mixture of the personal and the universal was utterly original, but the idea that moral philosophy should be tied up with any individual life at all came from classical tradition. Many Greek and Roman philosophers made it their business to create techniques for good living – a wisdom so practical that we could almost compare it to modern “self-help”. Only later did the majority of philosophers come to see their job as cultivating professional expertise, formulating universally valid laws, and building a self-consistent edifice of thought. Montaigne made no such claims, especially not to consistency. It was, after all, himself he was writing about, and he was always changing, so why try to force his ideas into an artificially rigid form?

A few later philosophers kept the “techniques for living well” tradition going. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that the only true test of a moral philosophy was whether you could live by it. Alas, he provides a rather poor example of this himself. Suffering from serious mental and physical illnesses, Nietzsche found no comfortable position in the world, and could not even take a train journey without succumbing to overwhelming anxieties and failings of nerve. Does this mean his philosophy was no good for life, and that it failed his own test? I believe not, for I don’t think Nietzsche’s “test” is the sort you simply pass or fail. I prefer to think of it as a variant on Montaigne’s term “essay”, a word he coined from the French essayer, “to try”. This is a kind of testing too, but of the kind that is more like a sample, a taste, or a dipping of the toe into strange waters. Nietzsche’s test is a way of living by philosophy, in such a way that you push it, squeeze it into different shapes, and see what comes out of it.

An even better definition of the philosophical life-test comes from Iris Murdoch. In her Sovereignty of Good, she wrote that any moral philosophy must be inhabited. What counts is not so much whether it passes an exam, as what kinds of occupancy it can support. Is anyone at home in this philosophy? Does it have flesh and bones, or rather joints and floorboards? If you knock, does anyone come to the door?

Both Montaigne and Murdoch were speaking of moral philosophy, but I think this idea of inhabitability can be applied to philosophical disciplines of all kinds. In the early twentieth century, continental phenomenologists picked up on the Montaignesque notion that you can learn something important by closely studying one’s everyday experience of life – “practical objects of every sort: streets with street lights, dwellings, furniture, works of art, books, tools, and so forth”, as the technique’s creator Edmund Husserl put it. His disciple Martin Heidegger based a significant part of his philosophy on the experience of using a hammer, while Jean-Paul Sartre would write at length about watching a waiter in a Parisian cafe.