78 theory
morality, good morality, cannot always be rigorous and transparent, and a
thinker who has seen that something like the notion of an indeterminate con-
cept that I just described applies also to the highest type of moral awareness
is Iris Murdoch, even if she does not cite Kant or use his terminology. (Thus,
in her philosophical masterpiece,The Sovereignty of Good, she writes, “Moral
tasks are characteristically endless not only because ‘within,’ as it were, a given
concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look
our concepts themselves are changing....We do notsimply, through being
rational and knowing ordinary language words, ‘know’ the meaning of all nec-
essary moral words. We may have to learn the meaning; and since we are
human historical individuals the movement of understanding is onward into
increasing privacy, in the direction of the ideal limit, and not backwards to-
wards a genesis in the ruling of an impersonal public language.”^16 )
Beyond both aesthetics, in the sense of the open-ended appreciation and
discussion of works of art, and morality, in the sense of Murdoch’s “loving
attention,” to the whole complexity of human beings and human moral life, it
should be obvious, I think, that religious experiences are both guided by and
spontaneously give rise to indeterminate concepts in a way analogous to the
ways in which aesthetic and moral experiences do. And if we see religious,
aesthetic, and moral experiences in this way, as I have been urging we should,
we will avoid Hume’s mistake of trying to analyze them as a chemist analyzes
a compound, analyze them into so much of this factor (“ideas and impres-
sions”), so much of that factor (“passions”), and so much of this other factor
(“beliefs”). In the deepest human experiences, ways of perceiving things that
are inseparable from those experiences but nonetheless conceptual, at least in
the way indeterminate concepts are conceptual, fuse so intimately that you
cannot tell where one begins and the other ends, to mimic William James’s
words quoted earlier.
Although the phenomenological school of philosophy which began with
Husserl inherited and extended the Kantian insights I have been describing,
the most influential twentieth-century phenomenologist, Heidegger, had a con-
temptuous attitude toward science, which, for him, was merely an aspect of
technological civilization (which he regarded as intrinsically evil). In Heideg-
ger’s writing, everything I have been saying about the depth of religious ex-
perience (including the experiences of “being” and of being “thrown” into the
world and of finding a destiny that is one’s “ownmost,” which are Heidegger’s
versions of or substitutes for religious experience), as well as of artistic expe-
rience (especially experience of poetry), and even of our everyday experiences
with artifacts is recognized and phenomenologically interpreted; but science is
denigrated.
But by default, if we do not examine the impact of science on our ways of
experiencing the world in a more sympathetic spirit than Heidegger was ca-
pable of, we are likely to fall back into the empiricist picture of science as