The Sovereignty of Good

by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays, Classics, Religion, Theory, Audiobook

105 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warning: contains major spoilers for the film Paterson

This is the second of Iris Murdoch's philosophical works that I've read in the last month. It is not quite as good as The Fire and the Sun, written a bit later, but I still liked it very much. I can see why people are currently reevaluating her as a philosopher and taking her work there more seriously. She examines the same core themes in both books: what does it mean to be a good person, what is the nature of art, does art help us to become good people.

Murdoch's answers to these questions are quite simple. We do not ultimately know what it means to be a good person, but it is not anything mysterious. It's about the obvious moral challenges you see all around you: being unselfish, loving the people who are close to you, seeing the world as it is rather than as you wish it were. Needless to say, all of these things are very difficult to do, but that shouldn't stop you from trying. In general, she takes the commonsense position, unfashionable with many philosophers, that what you think and feel are as important as what you do. Maybe the thinking and feeling have no immediate effect; but it changes the kind of person you are, and when the moment comes to act it will determine what you end up doing. With regard to art, and in particular with regard to literature, she unambiguously says that it's a good thing. Indeed, in an age where religion has largely become debased, she argues that reading literature is now the only spiritual exercise that many people have access to. By learning to tell the difference between good, truthful literature and bad, lying literature, moving towards the former and away from the latter, you will gradually refine your sensibilities and become a better person.

People who spend a lot of time hanging out on Goodreads may find this just a little too comforting. It is also, of course, impossible to forget that Murdoch spent a large part of her life writing novels, and is more or less obliged to defend that as a praiseworthy activity. But if you're doubtful, Jim Jarmusch's wonderful new film Paterson could almost have been made to support Murdoch's line of reasoning. Paterson seems, on the surface, to be an unexceptional and even boring person. He gets up at 6.10 every morning, eats a bowl of cereal, and goes off to do his job driving a bus. He arrives home in the evening, has dinner with Laura, his girlfriend, and then takes the dog for a walk. He drinks a beer at the local bar and comes home again. But Paterson's life is rich and exciting. He is a poet; all the time, as he walks to work or drives his bus, he is composing poems in his mind. He writes things down in a little notebook when he has a spare moment. No one except Laura knows about his poetry.

Paterson, we come to realize, is a good man. Near the end, an incident happens which gives him a severe moral test. Laura is happy and excited; her project to bake cupcakes and sell them at the market has been a success and she's made several hundred dollars. She impulsively tells Paterson that she's taking them out for dinner and a movie. They have a pleasant romantic evening. But when they come home, there's a horrible surprise. Disappointed by not getting his evening walk, the dog has gone crazy and shredded Paterson's precious notebook. He has no copy, despite the fact that Laura has begged him several times to make one.

Most people, seeing a year of their life destroyed like this, would instinctively have lashed out at whoever was closest. If Laura hadn't changed their usual routine, the dog wouldn't have done it. But Paterson, despite his anguished face, says nothing. He in no way tries to give Laura even a small part of the blame; he just says that he forgot to put the notebook in its usual place. It's only when you think about it afterwards that you realize how remarkable his actions are: not what he does, but what he doesn't do. You understand why this beautiful girl loves him.

Maybe there's something to Murdoch's ideas.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little essay can be read as a “How to See” manual. It shows what it would take to really learn to bring all that we are in our acts of seeing, so that we can engage the whole of what we are in relating to the whole of the situations that we find ourselves in. Such acts of seeing are the closest that we can come to completion and reconciliation.

Murdoch's basic thesis is that the moral life begins with the act of seeing, where seeing is understood as a loving attention to reality that frees the self from its prisonhouse of illusion. Learning to see is a lifelong endeavour that transforms the self and that progressively reconciles her to the world. Vision, thus understood as a total act of our being, straddles the aesthetic, moral, and religious dimensions of our experience. It is an intrinsically moral struggle to grasp things in the light of their highest possible perfectibility, rather than as they figure in the dimmer light of our instrumental goals. The vision that increases the reality and value of the thing seen through an act of loving engagement is truest, in the moral sense. It is this vision that enables us to act in order to release the capacity for growth in all things encountered. This is what it means to speak of moral truth, or of a proper way of estimating the value of things.

Overall, Murdoch persuasively argues that the moral sphere reveals a concept of reason, of truth, and of reality that the scientific sphere will forever fail to completely absorb:

“It is totally misleading to speak, for instance, of ‘two cultures’, one literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, is now an important part.”

In her view, moral philosophy is a more accurate guide to this culture because it considers the human being not as an abstraction, as an object of theoretical study. Rather, moral philosophy considers agents in their totality and “cover(s) the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world.” The idea of value is a regulative principle of all reasoning, not some epiphenomenal sideshow, as naturalistic ontology makes it out to be. She contends that coming to terms with the singular nature of value concepts can revolutionize our whole understanding of mind, reason, meaning, knowledge, and human nature. Value concepts, as a priori Kantian ideal limits, aren't susceptible to the kind of "genetic" analysis that she sees as the only option for naturalistic analyses. Looking at the structure of moral psychology compels us to carve out a distinctive ontology of the human being-in-the-world:

"If a scientifically minded empiricism is not to swallow up the study of ethics completely, philosophers must try to invent a new terminology which shows how our natural psychology can be altered by (normative) conceptions which lie beyond its range."

As Murdoch sees it, modern moral philosophy - whether Kantian, existentialist, or consequentialist - lacks the explanatory resources required to make sense of moral experience in anything but its most superficial and extrinsic characteristics. Modern moral philosophy focuses exclusively on the extrinsic dimensions of acts. The act is, on this view, abstracted from the live continuum of interchanges in which it serves as a link between beings.

"But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is just a mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a -task- to come to see the world as it is. A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality. We act rightly 'when the time comes' not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachment and with the kind of energy and discernment which we have available. And to this the whole activity of our consciousness is relevant."

Thus, contrary to standard approaches in modern ethics, we should be exploring the intrinsic dimensions of acts, namely, the quality of relation that they establish between beings. It makes a difference if, on the surface, I treat you impeccably, while inwardly I see you merely as you figure in my instrumental scheme: that is, as a mere object that helps me reach my goals. The goal of ethics is right relation with being that relates the whole of what I am to the whole of being. Modern moral philosophy fails to account for that qualitative difference, and thereby fails to engage with the proper goal of ethics.

The subject matter of ethics then is, in her view, not proper action, but just vision, since it is the quality of our vision that determines whether our actions tend in the right direction, towards an increase of being. We know that we are acting against our better selves when instead we decrease things around us. Extrinsically-focused moral theories, which operate with an emaciated picture of the person as detached will, a substanceless principle of pure unmotivated movement, just miss this qualitative heart of moral experience.

Her surprising conclusion is that learning to see is learning to shed the self. It is learning to die as self in order to uncover a reality greater than self. This is in stark contrast with Whitmanesque, post-Romantic understandings that glorify the individual as the core engine of aesthetic perception and of ethical action. "The idea of life as self-enclosed and purposeless ... is the natural product of the advance of science." However, ethics, in Murdoch's view, started to go off track earlier, with the Kantian deification of the transcendental ego:

"The chief characteristic of this phase of philosophy can be briefly stated: Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god."

Instead, Murdoch, like ancient and medieval philosophers, sees the individual rather as a stumbling block in ethics, aesthetics, and the spiritual life generally. This is I suspect where many contemporary readers might have difficulty following her: "we discover value in our ability to forget self, to be realistic, to perceive justly." That means that learning to see is learning to love by finding something more real, more valuable, than one's own self. This is why learning to see is so difficult, and why we usually are usually content to wrap ourselves in a numbing, self-inebriating cocoon of illusions:

“(S)uppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.”

Aesthetic experience, in fact, is in her view "the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into ... the good life, since it -is- the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real." Thus,

“One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else, a natural object, a person in need. We can see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world.”

In this way, Murdoch's concept of "moral vision" affirms a unity between aesthetics, ethics, and rationality where most see only division. In this unity might be the seeds for a reunification of our understanding of human nature currently splintered into many specialist disciplines.

The idea of the transcendent is a standard that reason brings with it into the world. Moreover, she thinks we can give content to this idea without metaphysics, religion, or mysticism:

“Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

I wonder if she is right. In any case, if naturalism is true, she had better be right, because it seems to me that there is no other way to ground the content of ethics outside the self on a naturalist view. Naturalism implies either value nihilism, or else value solipsism. There is always much wishful thinking in trying to extend values from their ego-centric basis on a standard naturalist view. She does her best to fight the notion that values are subjective projections, and that they are instead grounded in the realization of being, as they were on a pre-modern view.

Ethics must, it seems to me, be grounded in a metaphysics that makes sense of how we can say that beings can act as bearers of the values that we discern in them. We cannot act without relating to beings as values. Pre-modern philosophy, which recognized an essential harmony between theoretical and evaluative reason, had no problem in accounting for our experience of value. It did so, however, at the cost of anthropomorphizing the universe by projecting human values onto nature.

Murdoch's little essay reminds us of the features of the thing to be explained - namely, the singular way that value experience relates us to being in an act of vision - in a way that will either annoy many modern naturalistically-minded people, or else be ignored as irrelevant and intellectually backwards. She is right to say, however, that art, morality, and religion represent that tight little knot – the irreducible center of our human world, so refractory to naturalist explanations - and that in that knot lie the seeds for a profound rethinking of our relation to nature.

One can profitably read this glorious little essay as a preface to Charles Taylor's "Sources of the Self." One can see Taylor's huge debt to Murdoch in the first portion of that great book. In fact, Taylor twists himself into knots trying to figure out just why it is so hard for our modern naturalistic paradigm to account for the moral dimension that Murdoch urges us to recognize and to preserve undimmed.

[Ipsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the most beautiful, if somewhat shaky, attacks on the cult of personality/self and the neo-Kantian fetishism of the empty, masculine will i've read. highly recommend it to Simone Weil simps and decreation obsessed degenerates like myself. also if you're a Levinas fan and have wet-dreams about the Other, this one's for you.

there's nothing i hate more than reading up on moral philosophy or ethics. so, it really goes to the credit of Murdoch that i was as affected as i was. what could her novels be like? i finally feel an urge to find out.

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it” (88).

This volume is a collection of three philosophical papers by Iris Murdoch in which she lays the foundation for her concept of “moral vision,” a cultivated way of looking at the world without filtering it through the self. A significant part of the problem, as Murdoch sees it, is our attention to “will” as a lens through which we see reality in light of our desires and as a world of potential defined in terms of our motivated, utilitarian outlooks. If you have read The Sea, The Sea you will instantly recognize a dramatization of this affliction in the main character, Charles Arrowby. This kind of intentional way of seeing the world is not apprehension but is instead an imposition of the self on the world through which we make the world ready to hand for us. There are all kinds of moral implications that follow from this, not the least of which is the failure to appreciate others as agents in their own rights and struggling toward their own ends.

The antidote to a “will” based view on the world is to cultivate “attention,” which Murdoch likens to a “loving gaze” on the world in which we seek the perfect that is imperfectly reflected to us in the world. For some, the focal point of “attention” is God (as it was to Simone Weil from whom Murdoch borrows the concept). For Murdoch it will be art. It is through attention that we bracket off all of the biased, situated, self-centered, and motivated ways of seeing a person or idea or thing and try to comprehend a reflection of the thing in itself, what it is without being articulated in a web of motives and desires.

One of the ways that we cultivate this gaze is through art, which when done well gives a glimpse of the ideal, visible around the edges and that comes into greater (but still imperfect) focus through skilled iteration done with humility and honesty. I like the idea of thinking about this practice as a kind of craft/art that one cultivates, a “techne” as Murdoch borrows from Plato; although, I am less certain of how one approaches the perfect without the focus provided by intent. Perhaps this, too, is part of the honesty of the craft, which is the continual recognition and bracketing of will-full interpretations of the real.

The third essay in the book, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts” reads like the most complete articulation of Murdoch’s ideas. And anyone interested in Murdoch’s moral outlook, which she often explores through her characters will find the essay enlightening.

[Marc Lamot]

I hard a hard time with this essay-book. This is clearly for the philosophically educated, and therefore a bit out of my league. Especially the first essay (of three) was very dense, and for me almost impossible to follow. The second I read in its entirety, and there too close attention is needed, but I managed. Murdoch focuses on moral philosophy and examines what could be the source of 'good' and 'doing good'. A small reference to Simone Weil made it immediately clear to me that she is not averse to some Neo-Platonism, and that bothered me a bit. Her critique of existentialism and humanism is very sharp, but I understand it: those two movements simply ignore the question of the source of good. Not that Murdoch automatically moves on a transcendent-religious level, but through the detour of art (and 'the beautiful') she manages to make it clear that reality has at least a dimension that transcends the individual human being. Maybe, though, posing the question of what is the source of Good, is not a relevant one, because automatically pointing outwards. The least you can say is that Murdoch is thought-provoking!

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

You read Simone Weil, you don’t necessarily agree with everything she says, she maybe takes things to the extreme, but you read Weil, you are open to what she says, and lo and behold, you, you little Grinch you, feel your heart grow three sizes! (… at least for a time until you go back to your doom scrolling or go out into the city again). Where to go next? Maybe one of the two greatest Simone Weil disciples(/simps/fangirls), Iris Murdoch or later Camus?

Clearly, I chose Murdoch… who wouldn’t be easily seduced by a short 112 page book of philosophy? But don’t let that fool you, it is a dense work (or, at times while reading it, I was left to ask, Is it me? Am I perhaps the dense one? [The answer is most definitely, yes]).

Murdoch picks up Weil’s fallen torch of warmth and love and brings it forth into the second half of the 20th century. It is a time of existential and nihilistic chill, individualism and free will reign over each of our private islands of isolation (this all sounds a bit like clichéd masculism, no?). Murdoch says screw all of this, we must learn to be in the world with other people, to find what is good and beautiful, and most importantly, to see and love. And here we see how the Weilian seed of attention has sprouted up in Murdoch’s own philosophy—Murdoch tells us we must learn to see the world as it is, and not just what we think it is or what delusional fantasies we want to see (in other words, don’t be a Charles Arrowby, although that’s still maybe too low of a bar). We must disentangle ourselves from the self and open ourselves towards the Good (Murdoch does leave this simple yet complicated idea of ‘Good’ fairly vague). Being good and finding the Good is a process, one that we may spend our entire lives on, but we try. And we have the beauty found in nature and art to help us on that endeavor.

4.5*

[Jon Stout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iris Murdoch’s best known work on philosophy consists of three lectures that she delivered in 1964, 1967 and 1969. While each essay stands on its own, the three essays develop a common theme, which is a defense of Plato’s concept of the Good. Her approach is not to endorse Plato’s theory of forms in an unqualified way, but rather to argue, along with Plato, that good is something real in the world, rather than being merely an emotion or a choice.

She starts out by outlining what she regards as the prevailing contemporary view of a moral agent, which she calls the behaviorist-existentialist-utilitarian view. This holds that a person’s inner life can only be defined in terms of external behavior, that it is largely determined by our biological drives and our personal histories, that in the context of these determinants we make turn-on-a-dime choices that can be anything, and that our choices are evaluated by the public results. Murdoch criticizes this view by trying to restore an account of one’s interior (mental, emotional) processing as central to moral decision making.

Murdoch uses the example of a woman who has a rather judgmental attitude towards her daughter-in-law. Realizing that her attitude may be biased, and is neither helpful nor fair, she tries to attain a more realistic attitude, by understanding her daughter-in-law as she is, just as a scientist tries to reach truth by understanding reality as it is. This is an example of a moral act, a reaching toward the good, which does not necessarily have behavioral consequences (the daughter-in-law might be living abroad or might be dead), but which represents a development for the good in the woman’s life.

Murdoch’s analysis presents moral action not as an erratic break in a causal chain, but as a process in which one puts aside biases and other sources of error in order to reach a more honest or realistic, conclusion. She likens the process to a scientist’s being faithful to the data, or to an artist’s trying to be true to what he is portraying. She says that the guiding metaphor for moral action should be “movement” rather than “vision.” Good is not a quality that one can “see” in the world, but rather a way to “move” forward.

Murdoch’s conception is not easy to grasp. She herself says, “what I have been offering here is not and does not pretend to be a ‘neutral logical analysis’ of what moral agents or moral terms are like.” Rather, “the image which I am offering should be thought of as a general metaphysical background to morals and not as a formula….” What is clearest is how she connects moral choice to freedom: “the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business that goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments.” Attaining the good is a matter of working toward a clear understanding of reality and of individual circumstances, and then of being obedient or faithful to that insight. Murdoch describes her view as an “inconclusive non-dogmatic naturalism,” suggesting a kind of Taoism, doing what comes naturally while trying to be as clear-sighted as possible.

What I have written pertains to the first essay alone, but gives a good sampling of Murdoch’s thought. Appropriately for an accomplished novelist, Murdoch has created a rich description of moral life, with quotable asides in every paragraph. I read through her book three times in order to write this review, and I expect that I will go back to her work again for the sake of my own personal growth.

[Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume collects The Idea of Perfection, On "God" and "Good", and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.

In these papers Murdoch undertakes, among more minor aesthetic tasks, to draw up and criticize a particular view of the human personality, tracing it back through its philosophical and scientific forebears and forth again to its contemporary form. Thereafter she takes for the proponent of this view, and as antagonist of her own picture, one painted by Stuart Hampshire that she believes has the human being as a naked will unchained from the world around it. By further exegesis she comes to picture this view as a union between particular accompaniments of existentialism and behaviourism.

Out of fashion with the trends of the analytic philosophy of her own time, Murdoch proceeds to offer moral criticism of these pictures, takes as pretheoretical certain intuitive notions and makes instrumental her now familiar parable of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The conclusion from these undertakings is that the "inner life" is important to moral action.

Following these critical tasks is a delineation of some central concepts in Murdoch's own moral philosophy. The substance of this is found particularly in the latter two essays, where the author's debt to Simone Weil becomes apparent (appropriating the concept of attention for her own moral psychology) and the influence of Plato crystallized.

The philosophy of Iris Murdoch has been dug at over the years and some have been quick to claim that there is nothing living here; however, in the course of reading her it appears, at least, that there is more growing here than a cursory glance of the soil can suffice to show. She has her admirers, too (most famously the contemporary philosopher, John McDowell), but only recently have we seen anything like a substantial literature growing up around her key concepts and her overall moral vision. Long may it continue and flourish.

[Bryan Kibbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this collection of three essays to be deeply meaningful, provocative, thoughtful, and inspiring, especially as a student training in moral philosophy. I have no doubt that Murdoch's ideas have been, are, and will be considered controversial and contested, but there is a quality of her writing that makes you sit down, nonetheless, and listen with a certain earnestness to hear what she will say next. This owes, I think, to the candidness of her writing, the breadth of her knowledge, the conviction evident in what she is writing, and the attention to an important but under explored topic, namely moral perception. Usefully, Murdoch situates her rich discussion of moral perception inside of a larger conversation about the ways in which moral philosophy should and should not be done. Even if you disagree with Murdoch's conclusions, reading her is, I think, an important exercise in developing a clearer vision of the practice of philosophy. But don't let my gravitational orientation to all things philosophy deter any non-philosophers from reading this collection, there is much that will be of interest here to theologians, artists, and all those interested in questions about the good life.

[booklady]

Excellent recommendation for the book in Father Barron's clip on God and Morality.

[Jordan B Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short collection of lectures, but very enlightening. A good critique of many trends in early twentieth century philosophy and a reappropriation of Plato.

[Lander Demonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Liefde is de algemene naam voor de kwaliteit van gehechtheid, en ze is in staat tot oneindige vernedering, en ze is de bron van onze grootste vergissingen; maar wanneer ze zelfs maar gedeeltelijk verfijnd is, vormt ze de energie en de passie van de ziel in haar zoektocht naar het Goede, de kracht die ons verbindt met het Goede en die ons verbindt met de wereld via het Goede. Haar bestaan is het onmiskenbare teken dat we spirituele wezens zijn, aangetrokken door wat voortreffelijk is en geschapen voor het Goede. Het is een weerspiegeling van de warmte en het licht van de zon."

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has puzzled some readers who have argued that the author either fails to elaborate an argument for her position or does so in such an obscure manner as to make impossible to evaluate her claims. This is unfortunate but not surprising given the novelty of the author's claims - novel at least in terms of the dominant strands of analytic moral philosophy (and existentialism) to which she was responding.

But Murdoch's argument is perfectly straightforward; she has offered an extended argument for the indispensability of a particular Platonic account of the notion of good. Kant argues somewhere that formal concepts ought only to be introduced insofar as they are necessary to conceptualize some object. In these term's the author argues that a Platonic notion of good is required to appreciate a wide range of phenomena that are linked because they fall under this concept.

This text can be seen as a response to Hare's claims concerning the priority of the prescriptive sense of good. According to Hare, saying that some x is good is to say that x somehow figures within an imperative prescribing some action. For example, to say that this is a good car, is to say that persons suitably situated who want a car, ought to choose this car.

For Murdoch, Hare's prescriptivist understanding of good is hopelessly inept to conceptualize the phenomena relevant to a proper understanding of goodness. Good things might require all sorts of actions but to say that something is good is to appreciate its value as something worthy of love. It is also a matter of recognizing that one must become perfect or at least better than one is at any given point in time to fully appreciate the value of that which is good. Because of this good can never be cashed out in purely prescriptive terms. Not because good is a purely descriptive notion, but rather because goodness outstrips any given appreciation of the set of actions required by the goodness in question. In this sense good is indefinable; not because it is empty but because of its fullness.

Murdoch reminds us that ethics may often be mundane but that it ought to drag us from our cave in effort to offer a passing glimpse of a more noble form of life.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

You think you like philosophy until you try reading it. Good grief. Murdoch does well to stay out of the heady academic weeds while delivering valuable insights on God, Goodness, Art, and Love.

Quotes:
- “The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of 'necessity'. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like 'obedience'.” (p. 40)
- “Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one's weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self.” (p. 93)
-“I think there is a place both inside and outside religion for a sort of contemplation of the Good, not just by dedicated experts but by ordinary people: an attention which is not just the planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue. This attempt, which is a turning of attention away from the particular, may be the thing that helps most when difficulties seem insoluble, and especially when feelings of guilt keep attracting the gaze back towards the self. This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted.” (p. 101-102)

[Richard S · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's something specially boring about English philosophers, they are very wordy and unclear and despite the occasional nugget of wisdom, one imagines sitting in a room with them and not understanding a word they are saying. It's not like, or maybe it is like, you need to have read and understood a thousand philosophers before them, but when you read the great philosophers, they are generally comprehensible, and sometimes entertaining.

I "sort of" got her points, but I'm not entirely sure I did, she seems to believe in the good, was anti-nihilist and anti existentialist. She had nice things to say about literature. A lot of the book was about the philosophy of mind and perception. When you understand philosophers, it's sometimes like you feel cobwebs being removed from your brain. Here I felt like I was staring into a cobweb. I don't understand. Maybe I'm stupid, but rather maybe I should read all of Nietzsche again.

[João Vaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sovereignty of Good is a collection of three essays about moral philosophy centered around the concept of Good. In them, Murdoch debunks the dominant schools of thought on the normative aspect of morality: what is right or wrong and what we ought to do. The three schools being (1) behaviorism, (2) utilitarianism, and (3) existentialism.

Some context is in order. Behaviorists emphasize scientific scrutiny and claim that behavior is learned through the interaction with the external world, as opposed to internal mechanisms, like thought. Utilitarians advocate actions that promote happiness/well-being and they emphasize outcomes as the criterion for moral judgment, not intentions. Existentialists stress individual existence, freedom, and choice; they argue that we are born as a blank slate, colored through unique experiences, and that our individual development happens through deliberate acts of will.

Now that that is out the way, in this book, what Murdoch does is to provide a critique to the way these theories explain moral behavior. Her contention is that morality can be informed by one’s inner life, whereas, according to said theories, we form the concept of a good deed, or a moral act, based on our external experiences alone: utilitarians say that what matters is void of intentions and that only public acts matter; existentialists maintain that morality is informed by our physical experiences; behaviorists join the mix since only observable acts can show proof of morality at work. Not much space for the voices within, is there?

Well, Murdoch gives them ample room. To justify that moral activity can be separated from external expression, she describes the case of a mother (M) who despises her daughter-in-law (D), but who always behaves nicely toward her, although secretly, in her mind, she believes her son could have done better. Because M feels like she is being unfair, slowly and by giving just attention to D, she starts to see her in a different light. According to the accepted paradigm, M has always been a good person, since she’d always behaved affectionately toward D. But given her change in mental state, one cannot but agree that she engaged in moral activity by trying to be me more accommodating of D. Using this description as a running example, Murdoch fundamentally rejects that the reality of morality excludes that which is unobservable. I say she makes a compelling argument against using observability as the sole criterion of reality.

But, my absolute favorite part was when she applies her concept of morality to the idea of freedom. This is where her confrontation with existentialists reached its climax. Existentialism, and most other contemporary theories, places freedom at the moment of choice, immediately before a person decides to act in the public world. To Murdoch, there’s more to freedom than what meets the eye (literally). Freedom is the deliberate act of paying attention to reality. Both observable and unobservable reality (our thoughts, our motives, our concept of self). Freedom is the act of trying to see the world clearly, in both its corporeal and immaterial manifestations. To achieve that, we use the concept of Good to make sense of reality, to illuminate it, and to act upon it to produce an inward change for the better. This is where it becomes interesting. Murdoch argues that this perfect ideal of Good exists independently of man. Good as the inherent value that illuminates thought toward moral improvement. This idea is in direct opposition to existentialists, like Sartre, Camus, or Saramago, who believe that existence precedes essence. That is, that individuals, informed by their environment and through existence and consciousness, create their own values and identities. Although I (self-evidently) agree with Murdoch, this was perhaps where she was least persuasive, since it wasn’t clear to me how she isolated the existence of something so immutable and structural as Good from, yes, God.

Overall, really interesting. The writing was a bit hard to follow in the beginning (she clearly had her peers as target audience, rather than laymen, like myself), but you quickly get over her verbosity to get to the Good stuff.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch sketches her neo-Platonic account of the moral life in contrast with the thin moral philosophy of the British empiricists and authenticity-obsessed European existentialism. In the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection,” Murdoch takes aim at what she claims is the dominant behaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian portrait of the self that she finds implausible for empirical, philosophical, and moral reasons (9). That is to say, Murdoch objects to the behaviorist notion that the only real type of action is publicly observable, the existentialist idea that the self is insubstantial and located entirely in an omnipotent and solitary will, and the utilitarian notion that morality is concerned exclusively with public acts (8-9). Positively stated, Murdoch claims that the moral life is not merely external, but internal, and that the non-observable action that takes place within our minds—in how we view the world and what we choose to pay attention to—is a crucial aspect of morality. In the post-metaphysical, empiricist philosophical milieu Murdoch operated in at Oxford, this kind of view was (and is) controversial. Philosophers had exerted immense intellectual labor to debunk an essentialist view of human selfhood from which human action flowed in an inward to outward direction, and while Murdoch was sympathetic to many of their conclusions, she considered their theories of action ill-suited to morality.

Murdoch strives to show the problem with an exclusively volitional account of human selfhood coupled with an externalist view of action with the famous example of M and D. In brief, M, a mother, is rather contemptuous of her son’s new wife, D, but in all observable respects treats her kindly, such that no one would know except M of her disdain for D. Over time, and due to sustained attention toward D, M’s vision of D alters—M realizes that she failed to see D for who she really is, and D’s once-contemptible qualities become virtues in the eyes of M. In this example, which in its mundanity is entirely relatable, M’s external behavior remains the same, while her internal attitude toward D evolves over time, a shift which is noticeable to M alone. Murdoch tries to understand this shift from the existentialist-behaviorist perspective she criticizes. On this view, because it identifies volition entirely with external actions and denies the possibility of inner action, M cannot have made a real private decision when she deliberately reflected on her attitude toward D; because, on this view, there is only outward activity, there is only outward moral activity, and inward activity is “merely the shadow of this cast back into the mind” (21). Murdoch finds this account extremely implausible: M, in this example, has been morally active, which “is what we want to say and to be philosophically permitted to say” (19). When it comes to moral activity, at least, we need to be able to make sense of inner moral action, and if this is a real possibility, then the will cannot be entirely associated with observable outward behavior; it needs to be connected with our inner lives.

In contrast to the behaviorist-existentialist portrait of human selfhood, Murdoch offers a more complex account of human subjectivity that stresses its historical, moral, and non-reducible internal aspects. On this account, the moral life is not characterized by particularized instances of radical freedom in which one must choose how to act, one way or another; rather, morality is a question of orientation and attention, which provide the backdrop to and motivation for moral action. Freedom, for Murdoch, therefore has less to do with the ability to have done otherwise in any specific instance, and more to do with how one chooses to see the world and what one pays attention to. “I can only choose within the world I can see,” Murdoch explains, “in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is the result of . . . moral effort” (35-6). Elsewhere, she writes that “freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action. It is what lies behind and in between actions and prompts them that is important, and it is this area which should be purified” (65). Whereas Kant understands freedom as manifest in discrete actions prompted by the will determined by the moral law, Murdoch understands freedom as continuously operative in the temporally distended attempt to see an object clearly, for what it really is. While both Kant and Murdoch insist that freedom is central to the moral life, it is not, as Kant would have it, “switched on and off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices,” but rather the work of a lifetime (36).

For Murdoch, just as freedom in attention provides the backdrop for volitional moral action in discrete instances, it also liberates us from states of illusion, the most potent of which concern our self-centered fantasies. In fact, clearly influenced by Plato, Murdoch claims that freedom from fantasy attained by sustained attention is the ultimate task of the moral life. Murdoch was not a Christian, but, with the help of Freud, whom she says “presents us with . . . a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man,” effectively naturalizes the Fall in her description of untutored human nature (50). That is, Murdoch thinks that we are naturally and inexorably self-centered, a conclusion which seems to her “true on the [empirical] evidence, whenever and wherever we look at [humans], in spite of a very small number of apparent exceptions” (76). We humans relentless look after ourselves; we love to daydream; we are reluctant to face unpleasant realities; our love is typically an assertion and expression of ourselves rather than other-oriented; we constantly seek consolation; and our consciousness of the world is like “a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie” meant to protect our psyches from pain (77). Consequently, “the fat, relentless ego” is the enemy of the moral life, which consists in an endless effort to pierce the self-preoccupied and illusory veil with which we have concealed the world (51). To be moral, we need to look beyond ourselves and our concerns toward an external object of contemplation or attention. While Murdoch certainly seeks to defend the validity of internal moral action, the solution to “the fat, relentless ego” cannot on her view lie within ourselves.

In many respects, Murdoch understands the problem of morality in traditional Christian terms, and her solution to this problem likewise echoes the traditional Christian response. Whereas, in Christianity, the external locus of contemplation needed to be liberated from sinfulness is God, for Murdoch, the external object of attention needed to be freed from selfishness is the Good, which she explicitly models after the Christian Neoplatonic conception of God. On the one hand, Murdoch concurs with G. E. Moore that the Good is undefinable, not because, as Moore insists, it is a simple property we intuit in a variety of intrinsically valuable entities, but because the Good participates in “the infinite elusive character of reality” and hence always lies beyond our capacity to know it (41, 61). On the other hand, unlike Moore, Murdoch thinks there is more to be said about the Good: like God, the Good is one, perfect, transcendent, non-representable, and a necessarily real object of attention (54). It is “the focus of attention when an intent to be virtuous coexists (as it perhaps always does) with some unclarity of vision.” It is that which, when we contemplate it, reveals to us individuals as they really are (68). It refers to “a perfection which is perhaps never exemplified in the world we know . . . and which carries with it the ideas of hierarchy and transcendence,” while at the same time is embodied in knowable particulars in the world. Finally, it is an ideal toward which we strive, but which, because of human nature, we can never fully attain (90-1). In short, like Plato, Murdoch thinks that the Good, while real, nevertheless transcends knowable reality, which it in turn illuminates in the radiance of truth. Contemplation of the Good therefore pulls us up and out of the cave of self-centered fantasies and helps us to see others and ourselves more truly. If Murdoch were to propose a moral mantra, it would be to “look out, not in, to know the truth.” From this orientation away from ourselves toward what transcends our petty illusions, moral action necessarily flows.

While all this seems rather abstract, Murdoch, like the Christian Neoplatonists, understands that the moral life is ultimately a practical affair and explores several techniques to help us orient ourselves toward the transcendent reality of the Good. Murdoch first takes a cue from Christianity to query whether prayer, which she conceives as “simply an attention to God which is a form of love,” can be translated into a non-theistic philosophical practice. Admittedly, she leaves this question open—there is no model here for philosophical prayer—but concedes that “it does seem that prayer can actually induce a better quality of consciousness” and can stimulate moral action “which would not otherwise be available” (81).

Murdoch has much more to say about the Platonic notion that love of beauty in both nature and art is a vehicle toward contemplation of the Good. Nature, she explains, allows us to “clear our minds of selfish care”: one sees a kestrel, and suddenly one’s own concerns are set aside to behold such a splendid creature (82). “A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me . . . forced,” Murdoch writes. We take selfless pleasure “in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.” But Murdoch is especially fond of art. Great art, she insists, is “a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness” (83). Because, unlike nature, it is a human product, it reveals more about the human condition, in both representational and non-representational ways; the pointlessness of art is for Murdoch especially instructive in this sense, since excellent art is both absolutely pointless yet supremely important, just like moral virtue. Murdoch even calls art a “sacrament,” by which she means (I think) that beautiful art communicates its beauty to us: when we come to love beauty in art, we in some sense participate in the Good (83).

Finally, Murdoch proposes that the intellectual disciplines can help orient us toward the Good. “Intellectual disciplines are moral disciplines,” she asserts, insofar as they typically presuppose virtues like justice, accuracy, truthfulness, humility, the ability to sustain clear vision, and even passion without sentiment or self (87-8). She offers as an example the attempt to learn Russian, which necessitates respect toward an authoritative structure that transcends oneself, sustained attention, love, and honesty about what one does not know. In sum, Murdoch concludes that the enjoyment of art and nature and the pursuit of intellectual disciplines help us to “unself,” to view the world with clarity and justice, and to love the truth, each of which helps us to perceive and orient ourselves toward the Good.

The Sovereignty of Good presents an attractive version of the moral life, one that bucks several trends in contemporary philosophy and rehabilitates a seductive Platonism. Whether its claims can survive sustained philosophical criticism is another question. While one cannot assess Murdoch’s views fairly without her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, it suffices to say that in The Sovereignty of Good, she does not systematically defend her metaethical position so much as sketch its basic outline. To be sure, she does not simply represent Platonism—the Good for Murdoch is not a form, but embodied in particular individuals (she is closer to Aristotle on this score); Murdoch stresses the importance of literature as a means of orientation toward the Good, whereas Plato famously expels the poets from Callipolis; and Murdoch’s conception of the human self is more complex (i.e. Freudian) than Plato’s, to cite just a few differences. At the same time, she does not, as far as I can tell, justify her conception of the Good so much as offer it as a potentially credible alternative to the thin moral existentialism she criticizes. In short, more must be said about the Good as a transcendent reality in our post-metaphysical and postmodern era. Still, Murdoch’s critique of the behaviorist-existential model of human selfhood hits the mark, and her emphasis on the moral importance of attention appropriately corrects for an exclusively volitional, neo-Kantian portrait of the moral subject.

[Rasmus Tillander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filosofi-kirjailijan viisaita pohdintoja Hyvyyden luonteesta.

Iris Murdoch on todella kiehtova hahmo. Siitä asti kuin luin erinomaisen Kellon on filosofia sisälläni kutkuttanut tutustua myös Murdochin akateemiseen puoleen. The Sovereignty of Good on siis moraalifilosofina kunnostautuneen Murdochin tunnetuin teos ja se koostuu kolmesta luennosta, jotka hän piti pitkin 1960-lukua.

Luennot ovat intohimoinen puolustus hyvän käsitteelle filosofiassa. Kiinnostavaa tässä onkin juuri se kuinka vahvasti Murdoch asettuu eksistentialismia vastaan (ja toki vähemmän kiinnostavasti myös mm. Ayerin emotivismia vastaan). Murdochille hyvä on jotain todellista, osa maailmaa, eikä vain nimi jonka annamme suhteellisen sattumanvaraisille valinnoillemme.

Murdochin mukaan hyvyys samaistuu monella tapaa Jumalaan (johon Murdoch ei siis ainakaan klassisessa mielessä itse usko). Mikäli uskotaan hyvyyteen ja hyveellisyyteen on niin sanottu ontologinen argumentti hyvyydestä tällaiselle ihmiselle pätevä. Hyvyys taas antaa itsestään merkkejä esimerkiksi taiteen kauneudessa. Taide on Murdochille ehkä se keskeisin inhimillinen pyrintö, koska hyvä taide voi aidosti erottaa meidän itsekkäästä, liki perisynnin tahraamasta, itsestämme ja näyttää meille maailman kuten se on. Huolimatta tästä itsekkyyden taakasti erinomaisuus (excellence) vetää kuitenkin ihmisiä puoleensa. Useasti siteerattu Jeesuksen ohje "Olkaa siis täydelliset" on kaikessa kammottavuudessaan kutsuva. Hyvyys on täydellisyyttä: eräänlainen magneetti, joka vetää meitä puoleensa - tai aurinko jota on vaikea katsoa suoraan.

Olipas freesiä lukea jotain tällaista filosofiaa. Murdoch on kyllä tässä, kuten myös roomaaneissaan jotenkin säihkyvän viisas. Vaikka en ihan platonilaiseksi hyve-eetikoksi tämän lukemisen jälkeen varmaan alakkaan niin olihan tämä vakuuttavaa luettavaa.

[Diewertje · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessante visie op religie, kunst, ego, liefde, goedheid en hun onderlinge samenhang. Als filosofie alweer even geleden is vergt het een zekere inspanning om dit te lezen. Hier en daar veronderstelt het wel wat voorkennis van bepaalde concepten. Fijne intellectuele oefening wel :)

[Marina the Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t follow a single sentence. It didn’t make sense to me. Had to drop it. Sorry, Iris.

[Micah Rojo · Rating 5 out of 5]

brb gonna go look at some art and contemplate the good.

i’m still riding with foucault tho, in case any of yall were worried. she didn’t wholly convince me

[Keelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sensational. A reading of this will be complemented nicely with a reading of Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingess; although I will say that Murdoch is even more impressive.

[Peter Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of stuff I loved in here on freedom, attention, the self, virtue; other things I found less compelling. Though I usually find the attempts to do "religion without God" very silly (and found it silly here too), Murdoch's discussion was helpful in a way such discussion usually aren't

[$zymon ✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my type of philosophy book ://

[Thomas B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book by asking for seminal texts on the concept of "good" or "goodness" after/while reading The Human Condition. I described my current beliefs and my problems with Arendt's formulation of goodness (which she has little to say on in The Human Condition), and was told that my beliefs would probably line up the most with Murdoch's text.

I think that is right. For only 120 pages, or perhaps less, I took a long time to get through this. I made highlights on most pages, sometimes whole pages, breaking only to circumvent the kindle/goodreads long highlight rule, so I could come back later and get them all. (Yes, this is a very, very, rare Kindle read for me, because I knew I'd be doing a lot of highlighting and didn't want to transpose the whole book).

I know for sure that I will write at least three articles interacting with these ideas, because I already have them sketched or mostly formed in my head. Themes of determination, virtue, fear, and goodness as love. I find this all very compelling.

I am so interested in the idea of a secular prayer, a non-religious, only quasi-metaphysical 'prayer-activity' or contemplation. Murdoch addresses this as not the quasi-religious meditation that we see elsewhere, but as something else.

"Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love."

Later:

"However, in spite of what Kant was so much afraid of I think there is a place both inside and outside religion for a sort of contemplation of the Good, not just by dedicated experts but by ordinary people: an attention which is not just the planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue. This attempt, which is a turning of attention away from the particular, may be the thing that helps most when difficulties seem insoluble, and especially when feelings of guilt keep attracting the gaze back towards the self. This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted."

(bold emphasis mine)

I love this. Murdoch earlier describes love as attention and knowledge. I also like that "planning of particular good actions" to Murdoch does not invalidate their goodness. I like the frailty that Murdoch gives to this practice, this contemplation. I think the reality of humans is that while we are, or can be, resilient, we are frail and easily and oft broken. Life seems to be to be a progression of breakings and reassemblings, hoping that we can keep ourselves together throughout. Hoping that we do not seem to others too broken for love.

I think how we choose to reassemble ourselves after the breakings matters. I think it is, too, difficult and easily corrupted. It is hard not to close oneself off and embrace the cold. Murdoch contemplates love throughout and importantly in the conclusion. I am contemplating her framing of it and her connection of it to goodness, and it is too early for me to write anything about this. But, broadly, I admire her framing. It rings true to me right now.

"We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central."

I really appreciated this text. I will certainly return to this, probably again and again. I can feel these ideas bouncing around my head, and even in the unpleasant places, it is nice to feel them.

[Harooon · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Iris Murdoch published The Sovereignty of Good, she no longer believed in moral philosophy. Since the time of Kant and Hegel, beliefs about reason and history had undermined the common-sense view of what she called “the substantial self.” Aspects of our behaviour—psychological, social, religious—were no longer discussed as a whole. They were cordoned off from one another, made amenable to logical or scientific inquiry, and then handed over to new intellectual disciplines: psychology, theology, sociology, economics, and so on.

Then, in the decades following English philosophy’s “linguistic turn”, ideas of goodness, virtue, sin, and evil were thrown out. Morality was steadily emptied of its metaphysical conceits. Systems of ethics were contrived to take its place. Murdoch found the result such a dead-end that, after publishing The Sovereignty of Good, she subsequently left the academy to spend the next few decades writing novels instead.

This book brings together three essays written over a decade, while Murdoch was still a tutor at Oxford University. The first essay, The Idea of Perfection (TIoP), is a direct rebuke to a book by one of her colleagues, Stuart Hampshire. That makes it less accessible than the other two essays, On God and Good (OGaG) and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (TSoG), where she finally begins to develop her own ideas.

Thus, The Sovereignty of Good begins in medias res. Stripped of the old religious concepts, philosophy was left with the task of developing a new, secular vocabulary of morality. But it was on shaky grounds. Philosophers could no longer make assumptions about social roles or psychological states-of-mind. Nor could they appeal to our culturally-bound virtues and vices. Only the will remained as the supreme moral directive.

Philosophers saw the will as that part of us which thrusts towards particular ends in explicit moments of choice. They looked for the substance of morality in these “outward movements”: actions, decisions, obligations, and other publicly observable events: “Our personal being is the movement of our overtly choosing will. . . morality is a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with other men.” (TIoP 24) A good person tames his will by the application of reason and directs it towards good actions or outcomes; moral behaviour follows from a rational will the same way a conclusion is logically implied from its premises.

These philosophers were mistaken, says Murdoch. The will cannot simply escape its physical strictures. What we consistently think and feel will, over time, condition our behaviour. If we always do that which is most convenient for us, we never develop a sense of how our actions affect others, nor the patience for anything demanding more effort than a moment’s choice. And when we brood about the wrongs done to us, or fixate upon the small hypocrisies of other people, we are naturally inclined to fasten onto their most insignificant offences, lashing out at them for our own satisfaction.

But if we attend to the real existence of other people and their needs, then, when the time comes, often without quite knowing how, we become capable of great acts of love or bravery:

... if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structure so value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. (TIoP 57)

Outward movement morality was never clear about the path between will and action. It did not account for how one’s psychological make-up might influence his behaviour. Murdoch, taking inspiration from Freud, fills in the gap with her idea of the “substantial self”. It is more accurate, she thinks, to view myself as an “egocentric” system of “quasi-mechanical energy.” All the contingencies of my life—the “residue” of my “personal history”—accrue in a psyche, a complex solution of jealousies, guilts, joys, compulsions, angers, and satisfactions. It is precisely this volatile mixture which, in the moment of decision, tends to force my hand.

The Oxonians rejected the psyche. They found it too vague and shadowy to be philosophically rigorous. We cannot, for example, take our emotions apart and inspect them, as we might a mechanical clock. And emotions often lead us to do things which are wrong: we can be instinctively cruel to people we view as unworthy losers (e.g. bullying); when we are angry, we might say or do things that hurt others far out of proportion to whatever caused the anger.

However unclear the psyche’s operation, it still influences our moral behaviour: “. . .choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the [psyche] in between the moments of choice.” (TIoP 53) That is just something we have to live with. It is not as though Murdoch is asking us to choose feels over reals. Both sides of the equation are important. The will and the psyche must both accept the idea of goodness on their own terms; philosophy can help by reconciling the two.

On seeing Freud’s name invoked, a sceptical reader may turn up his nose. Aren’t his theories of mind thoroughly discredited by now? I don’t think it matters either way. It is better to read Murdoch’s discussion of the psyche as painting a picture in broad strokes. She is not giving a literal explanation of how the brain works. It is suggestive, a way of framing the situation to help us obtain insight in any moral dialectic. This becomes clearer in light of Murdoch’s ideas on metaphor.

Metaphor is essential to morality because our moral vocabulary is highly idiosyncratic. It is not given to us in a rigorous language of scientific precision. We develop and discover it through highly personal observations of broadly manifested concepts: truth, justice, greed, etc. We need metaphor to speak about these things. We do it so often we sometimes forget about it: anger is “hot”, a kind-hearted person “warm”; we “boil over” with rage, while turning a shoulder on a friend in need is “acting cold”. Maybe we could describe the same range of cowardices and courages in more objective language, but metaphor already says so much in so few words.

During the linguistic turn, some philosophers thought we could do away with metaphor outright. Much philosophical progress in the 20th century was of this kind. It peeled away the extinct idioms that had fossilised into our language. But purging all of the historically and religiously loaded words did not free us from every unjustified belief. It only delivered us into a new set of axioms which were all the more misleading for their proclaimed neutrality. Philosophers must embrace the metaphor, says Murdoch. They must clarify—perhaps discard—those which already exist, and come up with new ones to help us see what it means to be a good person.

The metaphors we turn to often reflect the times in which we live. A generation of Oxonians, having fought in the trenches, carried something of the machine-gun and the howitzer over into their preferred metaphors of movement and action; moral behaviour is a dynamic sally by a courageous will into a dangerously unstable vortex; good is he who, having deduced the rational ends of destiny, deigns to inscribe them into our world.

Murdoch’s metaphors are almost the opposite. In place of movement and action, we are invited to see and contemplate. The only motivation we need to be moral is reality itself. Goodness is the light in which reality is seen. Once we personally experience virtue—however imperfectly—we are drawn to imitate or attain it. Goodness is not just a word we affix to events after the fact. It is a real if somewhat ethereal quality that haunts the world around us.

Seeing things as they really are is not always easy. When we open our eyes, we often see what we want to see, not what is actually there: “Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-occupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.” (TSoG 82) An example of this might be when you meet a new person. Everyone knows you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; we do it nonetheless. Without even thinking, our ego makes up something which becomes our idea of that person. Subsequent interactions are coloured by the first impression. Our ego veils what the other person is really like. So it goes with everything.

To pierce the veil we must attend to the world behind it, an idea Murdoch adjusts from Simone Weil. Man is “. . . a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the direction and focus of his vision" (TIoP 61). With each conscious decision in his waking hours, he may slowly vest some of his energies into comprehending reality. He might redirect his thoughts, rearrange his habits, vow new resolutions, or pursue certain activities.

Some activities are worthy because they help us to progressively comprehend reality. Examples include scientific investigation, the honing of a craft, the learning of a language, caring for a child or elder, or the appreciation of nature or art. In the honest pursuit of these things, we concede our mastery over the world to more keenly observe it. Where we might once have walked through a forest, not able to distinguish any of the sounds around us, we slowly begin to hear birds, to name them by their songs, to identify the meaning of each call: this bird is happy, that one is scared. We are led away from ourselves towards qualities and standards that exist apart from us in things which our ego cannot “take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.” (TSoG 87)

Let’s zoom in on nature or art. When we experience beauty, in whatever form, we are a brief witness to something that is indestructible and incorruptible, but which nonetheless coheres in a perishable medium. I am reminded here of Sonnet 18:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can live and eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Though Shakespeare’s poem is just words on a page (pixels on a screen, even), though a painting is just oil and pigment on canvas, though our lover is already sagging at the hips and the mother’s caring eyes are ringed with tiredness, to experience their beauty is to witness the resounding goodness shining through each. When this happens, our ordinary vision of the world is disrupted. The edges of the psyche blur into, and are absorbed by, something far greater than itself. Murdoch describes this when she writes about the kestrel:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. (TSoG 82)

Murdoch winds up the last essay with some ruminations on goodness, via a discussion of Plato. In Book VI of The Republic, Socrates admits to Glaucon that he cannot give a definition of goodness. The best he can do is describe it by comparison to the sun: though we cannot look directly at the sun, we can see things in its light, and in turn see the sun’s reflection in them.

This is all frustratingly vague. What is goodness? The answer is nothing special. Goodness is when you hide Jews from the Nazis. Goodness is when a bird chirps in the sunshine. Goodness is when you play with a baby. Goodness is when you hang out with your friend to cheer him up. Goodness is when you put the shopping trolley back where it’s supposed to go. Philosophy is, as Murdoch says, often about finding the right context in which to say the blindingly obvious.

Murdoch does, in an off-handed way, pull a kind of philosopher’s definition out of her back-pocket when she writes: “The background to morals is properly some sort of mysticism, if by this is meant a non-dogmatic essentially un-formulated faith in the reality of the Good, occasionally connected with experience.” (TSoG 72) There is maybe nothing we can say about what is essentially good. We just have to experience it by attending to reality. Morality is not some fact to be learned by rote. It is an intrinsically personal thing each person must internalise for themself.

This kind of philosophical position can be hard to defend. By admitting that goodness will always elude us, you are not allowing yourself to say much about it. That granted, I find Murdoch’s writing a little too subtle. Her arguments sometimes delve too far into the history of philosophy, and have to lean on her fluency to survive, and while her ideas are substantial, they form an imposingly complected mass which tends to obscure the rather simple points being made. This abstract approach to discussing goodness was no doubt meant for her peers at Oxford; those of us at Goodreads might have liked some more concrete examples. I say: more kestrels, less Kant. Perhaps that’s why Murdoch ended up writing fiction.

However many words are spilled about the matter, goodness ends up being something we just have to experience. It is inherently personal and infinitely varied, connected, as it is, with “the unsystematic and inexhaustible variety of the world. . .” (TSoG 96) Learning to recognise it is an idiosyncratic and incremental process, one we never quite complete; yet once we acknowledge goodness as a distant ideal, we may begin the journey. Recognising its light as it shines throughout reality, we begin to look upon things with a deeper appreciation for what they are, moving towards that “distant transcedent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue.” (TSoG 99)

[David Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series of three essays related to the concept of the Good I often found illuminating and brilliant but I find her atheistic rejection of telos and purposiveness in the world alongside her full-throated affirmation of hierarchies of excellence, truth and virtue seemingly discordant and perhaps ultimately unsustainable logically.

I find she offers a lot on moral philosophy and art and explains how both the good man and the truly excellent artist exhibit devotions to truth, beauty and goodness that somewhat run parallel. She gets a lot right, it seems to me, so that it is distressing to find her dismissing Christ and God as metaphysical dogma and speaking only of a vague, undefinable Good, with space for mysticism.

She is an ally in challenging scientism's over-weaning epistemological claims. I thought because much of her thought runs in traditional lines about virtue and goodness that she might be an aid in "education for the sublime," but then I discovered she seems only to mention the sublime in relation to Kant and she dismisses Kant's idea of the sublime. Instead of a rootedness in the transcendent one fines a big conceptual Stop sign against the sublime. I am not sure about this point but she even seems to award the whole concept of the sublime to Kant. (This suggests to me I need to genealogically trace the concept of the sublime).

There seems to be some incoherence to her view, like she was grounded in a Christian ethic but adopted atheistic views which are super-imposed on this structure.

In the last essay, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts", she rejects the cross of Christ when she writes, "I would sum this up by saying that romanticism tended to transform the idea of death into the idea of suffering. To do this is of course an age-old human temptation. Few ideas invented by humanity have more power to console than the idea of purgatory. To buy back evil by suffering, in the embrace of good: what could be more satisfying, or as a romantic might say, more thrilling? Indeed the central image of Christianity lends itself to just this illegitimate transformation. The Imitatio Christi in the later work of Kierkegaard is a distinguished instance of romantic self-indulgence on this theme, though it may seem unkind to say this of a great and most endearing writer who really did suffer for telling his society some truths." (p. 80). She seems to hold that the cross of Christ is a man-made symbol that leads to emotional fallacy. Of course, she also denies the historical dimension to the story of Christ. She would call it a failure in devotion to the real. She takes the cross of Christ, which transformed a Roman symbol of domination into the ultimate real-symbol of self-emptying sacrifice and salvation for mankind, as a kind of symbol of conversion of one's own suffering for evil as "buying back evil" in the embrace of good, but in Christianity it is not man's suffering but the willing suffering of the Good itself through which we are washed and cleansed of our sin and our guilt. (Also, is Kierkegaard the only Christian she has met?)

In the first essay, "The Idea of Perfection," she stressed the importance of adding the historical element to moral philosophy to allow for progress in virtue. Yet she repeatedly asserts the universe is aimless and without purpose. She stresses throughout her essays the value of great art being in its bringing us closer to the real and the true, and how this is achieved only through a very difficult self-mastery. When she talks of the virtues in this way, I find it compelling. But then she tops the whole project off by saying it is aimless and purposeless, and suggesting that we are self-contained and make our own meaning. Yet striving for the objective and the real and for putting aside self-indulgent fantasies is enjoined as if it had a purpose and suggesting in the end that we are merely creating our own meaning undermines her stress on the outward objectivity of the good and the striving to clear the path to the really real which is something we attend to, pay attention to, and receive in what looks like obedience, not something we make. Is this like a Soviet system, where beneath all the high rhetoric, the human motivation and summons to what is enjoined is undermined in reality? Is Murdoch's ultimately putting a capstone on what she cherishes the most, hoping to find humanity's beating heart in excellent art but denying doctrinally that it can truly mean anything in itself because it is part and parcel with the aimlessness and meaninglessness of the universe?

I am really rather partial to her observations about literature and art. I would also say that her philosophy and observations about morality have aspects which I finding bracing with their promise of improvement through application. I contrast her views on art with her lover Michael Oakeshott's and find them to have more promise but to be vexed by apparent self-contradiction.

Despite meeting the facile criteria of being a woman, Murdoch's thought runs counter to Woke theology in that she robustly enjoins the striving for excellence. She would have no patience for Woke eschewal of "natural hierarchies of competence", to use a phrase from Jordan Peterson. "One cannot feel unmixed love for a mediocre moral standard any more than one can for the work of a mediocre artist" (pg. 60). "The true artist is obedient to a conception of perfection to which his work is constantly related and re-related in what seems an external manner (pg. 61). Woke and DEI theology, in contrast, rejects individual striving for excellence, for arete, and instead enjoins striving for equity by judging people according to group identity and exerting downward pressure on individual's who strive for excellence when it upsets the desired leveling.

"Success in fact is rare. Almost all art is a form of fantasy-consolation and few artists achieve the vision of the real" (pg. 63). Such a lofty view of the aims of art and the consequent judgment it makes on most art is disparate with the Woke view which would seemingly require a participation trophy for everyone, and an indiscriminate "I like", adjusted according to an intersectional hierarchy's judgment based on group affiliation.

Wokeism lives or dies according to the fortunes of the triumph of the therapeutic. It depends on affirmation of an inner identity quarantined from objective reality, even the objective reality of one's own body. When John Money coined the term "gender identity", he did so in the context of his trivialization of the sexual specificity of human bodies. What is left as a consequence of this split-being strategy is an impregnable psychic field and, since there is no objective measure of gender identity allowed in or outside of the mind, all that is allowed of commentary about it is a "Like" button. The suspension of judgment of the therapist has become the basis for identity formation. In contrast to this, Murdoch commends the objective, or rather, ontological striving and recognizes a strong propensity in people to delude themselves with substitutes for the really real. Truly great art, as well as truly great morality, are rare and depend on an exceptional pursuit of the truth by the individual. Compare and contrast for example the poetry of Robert Frost or Gwendolyn Brooks with the mediocrity of the poetry of Amanda Gorman, which is exalted by politicized, Woke intersectionality for its slogans rather than for being truly great art.

"The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one. Rilke said of Cezanne that he did not paint 'I like it', but painted 'There it is.' This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else, a natural object, a person in need. We can see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world" (pg. 58). Though written before the advent of Facebook or "gender-affirming care", Rilke's distinction here between "I like it" and "There it is" illuminates the vapidity of modern thought that allows for no critical measure of ontological reality. Critical theory which lies behind Wokeism "problematizes" the foundation of the artist's search for and aspiration to truth. In that sense it is ironically named, since it undermines the critical faculty. It rejects the artist's search for truth in effect by a run away hermeneutic of suspicion which becomes the de facto, establishment view so that any attempt to measure the artists' art by its relation to the truth is hopelessly complicated by pettifoggery and doctrinaire suspicion.

One thing I note, though I don't want to put words into Murdoch's mouth, is that her understanding of the nature of art and goodness in relation to the truth, besides nourishing an ethic of vigor, provides an implied critique of masturbatory fantasy and pornography. Self-indulgence in consolatory fantasy undermines one's orientation toward and search for the truth. The exceptionally virtuous person and the exceptional artist are distinguished by an uncompromising, self-sacrificing pursuit of the truth.

Incidentally, her elevation of the pursuit of truth in art contrasts with her lover Michael Oakeshott's view of poetry in particular. Oakeshott tries to map out a place and definition of poetry meant in part to protect it from the over-weaning epistemology of scientism, but he ends up with a narrow definition of art for art's sake that rejects this notion of the great artist as being one who through their art approaches closer and closer to true reality.

Because Woke identity depends on an inner solipsism, it does not incorporate this notion of the greatness of the artist who empties the self in order to see. "I would suggest that the authority of the Good seems to us something necessary because the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self" (pg. 64).

Wokeness is noticeably garish and ugly in its manifestations. "Beauty is that which attracts this particular sort of unselfish attention" (pg.64). Wokeism's principles require cultivation of an immunity to beauty's summons, because beauty summons us out of ourselves. As the philosopher George Parkin Grant wrote, "This disjunction of beauty and truth is the very heart of what has made technological civilization." This disjunction remains in Wokeism. Beauty is not deemed that which draws us out of ourselves. Nothing and no one must be allowed to draw us out of our online identities and away from our screens and social media, no matter how beautiful. The therapeutic has triumphed; it must not be confronted with objective and ontological reality.

[Brandon Rees · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel that there is something deeply true about the connections which Murdoch points to between Beauty and Good. That being drawn out of framing existence around oneself is akin to starting on the path towards virtue. The ability to see beauty in the world, and moreover, the choice to make this the focal point of our attention is indeed something that can bring us into contact with the idea of perfection. But not in a narcissistic, anthropocentric way, but to relate to perfection with the very real sense of one's own finitude. Nature, does of course bring this out as she highlights, when you are perhaps looking upon the scene of a vast mountain range or lake and expansive tundra or whatever it may be you are filled with a sense of wonder for what is outside of the psychic energies which we come to identify with so adhesively.
Yet I do also wonder if perhaps a metropolis might have this too? I must admit that faced with the scene of a sprawling concrete jungle I am filled with dismay and perhaps what is man's nostalgic desire to return to nature. I often find a vulgarity in all the bright colours designed to arouse and attract for commercial interests. I sometimes curse at finding empty bottles in streams or lobbed into hedges. Reflecting on this though, I think perhaps it could also be the remnants of a Romantic ideology that we find shame in having covered the natural beauty with utilitarian artificial structures. I have no doubt however, that there could exist a man who found incredible beauty in just that - the world which we have created for ourselves and layered over the old world as it were. I suppose it just goes back to the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This has given me need to reflect upon how I relate to Beauty and the idea of perfection.
I agree profoundly with her analysis of Plato's cave, identifying the fire and the self. I think that this way of viewing it has remarkable explanatory power. That she would have foreseen our current age where the false enlightenment is to deeply know one's self. Self-help books are selling like hot cakes, auto-biographies etc. We have this idea of being true to oneself or being one's authentic self, which nobody can philosophically make much sense of. In buddhism and no doubt other cultures the self is not seen as the psychic energies contained within one's mental experience and the sensations contained within my skin. Instead they see that the self as being interconnected with everything that enters and flows through our awareness. Plato talks about this in the Republic, that culture creates people and people create cultures. (I think the Republic is essential reading before addressing this text as with much of philosophy).
That we do not truly confront death but merely pretend to and as such cannot escape this entrenchment within the self. To face one's own death and to truly acknowledge one's own finitude, how can one achieve this and not be humbled? This idea echoes Heidegger and I am not quite sure why Murdoch is so critical of his work, I found that his Being and Time complimented her work rather nicely; perhaps it is because of his circling back round to authentic living despite his enthusiasm towards embracing one's own death. I think that this echoes what I have discovered elsewhere, that human spirituality properly understood is the recognition of one's own mortality and within that, the desire to connect to something greater than oneself. Which is why I am surprised at here critical view of rationality. I believe she may be thinking more of rationality as a computational existence, which there is much evidence to show is in fact impossible for humans. I much prefer J. Vervaeke's idea of the rational as coming from man's drive to be in contact with reality.
Finally I enjoyed her reflection on Love and how this has the power to bring man out of his vanity. 'However I think that Good and Love should not be identified, and not only because human love is usually self-assertive'. This part gave me much pause for thought as she says 'usually' it suggests that love of course can be completely selfless. This is easy for me to imagine with such love as philia and even more so with agape but when it comes to Eros which is to my understanding a more consumptive form of love -that in which the self becomes attached to some object - it is difficult to imagine how this could not to some extent always be at least partially self-assertive. Hence, in so far as romantic love shares in eros and for it to be a healthy romance it would seem this is often the case, it is difficult to imagine this kind of love without a self-assertive factor. To this extent if one finds themselves drawn to seeking moral perfection to chasing the Good, is it necessary for them to abandon this form of love? One is reminded that to pursue enlightenment the Buddha left his wife and child, that Jesus claimed to love all with Agape and many who have followed their ways saw fit to forgo marriage and partnership. Yet Socrates is different, Socrates claimed to know Eros well. This is a mystery of Love which I hoped to see explored more by Murdoch -who proponents bringing Love into centre play in Ethics, so I just can't bring myself to give her that final star!

[libremilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[The arts] show us the absolute pointlessness of virtue while exhibiting its supreme importance; the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue. The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and a form of art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe. Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form."

I read this side by side with bell hooks's All About Love, and I could not have chosen a better pairing. Murdoch's excellent treatise on both The Good and Love—two concepts consistently avoided in post-Kantian philosophy—serves as an excellent challenge to contemporary (and not so contemporary) conceptions of love as a sentimental experience.

I'm writing this out rather hastily, so you must forgive any oversights. I've devoted most of my review to Murdoch's conceptions of love and freedom, rather than her assessment of the Good/God Platonic ideal.

Murdoch starts out with asserting that there is no such thing as the private. Internal thoughts and meditations are not one's own and cannot be contained in some imaginary "private sphere." Thoughts and ideas and opinions formed by oneself cannot be formed without some knowledge of the public. Engagement with the world outside oneself—I'd argue, language, as well (which is merely an extension of the public)—is necessary for forming thoughts, and our thought lives are not self-contained within ourselves. They are never our own (I'm reminded of Mark Twain's assertion that "there is no original thought").

If our thought lives are not self-contained, it would follow that our very identities are dependent upon those around us. Upon the public. Upon our perceptions of reality in which the public is based. And this is where Murdoch's assessments of art and loving are so poignant.

By loving beautiful art we are made more virtuous. Observing art selflessly and with the acknowledgement that it exists objectively outside oneself is what loving art is. Unable to comprehend the objective, the viewer acknowledges the piece (be it of any medium) in their own way and loves it for itself. And that is Murdoch's conception of love, even beyond the adoration of art.

To love is to devote attention. To love is to recognize the other for themselves and to relinquish one's own designs for the other. To love is to relinquish control. To love is to persist in attention. To dwell with the other in patience.

Whether one observes art or another human being, love is perceiving and acknowledging, the devotion of attention, the persistence of awareness, the absence of possession, the recognition of the other as that: other than oneself. Outside.

Murdoch goes on to critique a self-oriented facet of liberalism in its conception of freedom as the highest possible good and goal of civilization. She instead takes a definition of freedom that positions the self as secondary and the other as primary. Hers is a freedom that is oriented to the welfare of others, the recognition of others, the apprehension of others as they are.

It's why I'm less a liberal and more a post-liberal, because freedom cannot be the highest end. It must serve. For what are we free? Liberalism claims freedom is the highest good, but when it is so widely misinterpreted (as allowing oneself whatever one wishes), how can one claim freedom as the highest good when that freedom is not oriented toward anything? She writes that the commonly understood notion of freedom is merely "a name for the self-assertive movements of deluded selfish will which because of our ignorance we take to be something autonomous." Murdoch's conception of freedom is oriented toward the good of the other.

She writes, "Freedom is, I think, a mixed concept.... The true half of it is simply a name of an aspect of virtue concerned especially with the clarification of vision and the domination of selfish impulse." Freedom is domination of the self. It is mastery of the self. It is the selfless apprehension of the other as other. Recognizing the other for who they are, not for who we wish them to be. That is freedom. That is love. That is the practice of the Good, and the worship of God.

[Ashjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was introduced to this book by John Vervaeke's brilliant lecture series 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis'. It is a short yet remarkably erudite book that deserves to be returned to time and again for its wealth of ideas. In my view, the fact that such a judgement can be made about the book as a whole is poetically appropriate since the very first page of the book emphasizes philosophy's task to keep returning to the 'beginning'. This deepening movement exists side by side with philosophy's conventionally understood role of the construction of elaborate systems of thought. I've found the book to be a work that invites the reader to fully participate in its ideas. It's definitely not an easy read. Despite going over it twice, I was still a bit hesitant to write a review as I felt like I've yet to truly grasp and appreciate some of its more finer points. However, I will mention some key takeaways. *Spoilers Ahead*

Murdoch analyzes the current state of moral psychology which is modelled upon a combination of scientific naturalism and existentialism in which the moral agent is seen as only existing in moments of decision/action which are publicly observable. This view represents a behaviorist, utilitarian and so called objective vision of morality in which the interiority of the moral agent is either ignored completely or reduced to the point of irrelevance. Under this view, what matters are public utterances and acts whose meanings are clear cut and determined by how they are used and interpreted in the social context. The hazy, indefinite world of the inner contents of consciousness is set aside to focus on an objective, atomized and definite world of facts. Similarly, the moral agent is seen to only exist in acts of free choice upon a menu of clearly specified options/intentions that are presented to the agent via a process of rational deliberation. Murdoch, taking her que from Platonism challenges these notions which she sees as illegitimate extensions of a certain idea of Wittgenstein which he himself did not draw out into the moral domain. She makes the argument that 'attention', in a sense which closely resembles its use by Simone Weil, is properly a moral act. Its not that the agent is absent in between flashes of decision/action observable in the public world, but that the moral act involves a selfless and attentive orientation towards reality in a contemplative attitude best characterized by the metaphor of vision. This reminded me a lot of Iain McGilchrist's emphasis on Attention in his magnum opus 'The Matter With Things'. Also, the type of moral framework Iris criticizes makes a lot of sense under McGilchrist's Hemispheric Hypothesis, under which the way of apprehension of the Left Hemisphere with its drive to limit, define, demarcate, capture and control reality at the expense of the more holistic, global, richer yet indefinite insights of the Right Hemisphere is a tendency that is responsible for the current debilitated state of western civilization.

Grounding morality in 'Attention' allows for a number of interesting implications. For instance, as opposed to the romanticist view in which the role of the ego complex in determining behavior is shunned in favor of the existentialist notion of a radically self defined, untethered and independent freedom, Murdoch offers a more nuanced view. The age old notion of humanity as being fallen and in a state of sinful self indulgence is acknowledged and given its proper due by relating it with the reality of the selfish ego complex. Instead of relying on supreme feats of willpower that fly in the face of reality/naturalism and our sinful nature, Murdoch emphasizes a developmental view of moral agency in which agency is redeemed by a proper orientation towards The Good through attention and the expectation of grace that follows. Murdoch brings in the Platonic concept of Love/Eros directed towards The Idea of the Good which cannot be defined or pinned down and yet represents a transcendent moral standard. She reminds us of Plato's allegory of the Cave in which the Idea of The Good is likened to the Sun which cannot be apprehended directly but which must be presupposed when making any normative judgement at all. Iris reframes the ideas of prayer, transcendence and morality in a more secular perspective by grounding them in an agents aspiration towards virtue and a proper relation to reality. Instead of the moral agent creating new values independently of the world via self assertion, values are seen more as discoveries that come about through a striving towards a standard of perfection and a reverent obedience to the truth as it reveals itself.

Furthermore, another idea that I found interesting was the view that instead of making false idols out of isolated virtues whose relationships with the other virtues are not seen as relevant, the meanings of the virtues themselves progressively undergo transformation for the moral subject who, through participating in them, comes to view them in right relation within the hierarchy of virtues. This reminded me of Jordan Peterson's lecture on the symbolic meaning of the Tower of Babel in which an isolated virtue is arbitrarily asserted as the top of the value hierarchy whose unchallenged authority quickly makes the entire structure tyrannical. This is partly due to an uncritical adoption of a fixed idea of that particular virtue which admits of no developmental redefinition. This hearkens to the platonic idea of Truth as Aletheia in which reality progressively discloses itself, a notion which is naturally grounded in Attention. According to Murdoch, instead of the virtues being pre defined and given to the subject from without via their effective meanings in the social discourse, the meaning of a particular virtue is progressively made clearer to the subject through a developmental process, although in a way that is different from a postmodern interpretation where meaning is completely arbitrary and relative. Its a view that balances the need for an objective standard of virtue with the acknowledgement of the relative/subjective character of moral realization.

The idea of knowing via participation connected well with John Vervaeke's emphasis on the need for an emancipation from the 'tyranny of propositions'. The idea that moral realization is not simply a matter of accepting the right propositions and forming the 'proper beliefs'. In a sense, the reality of a virtue cannot be completely understood unless one dives into them and incorporates them into daily practise. Under this process not only is the agent himself transformed but the very meanings of the virtues themselves mature. Looking at the agent as an unchanging disinterested observer rationally deliberating over the 'right propositions' seems to be a limited approach that does not do justice to the complexity of moral development. One cannot rationally calculate away without immersing oneself in the process. Otherwise one risks falling into performative contradiction.

One of her most interesting insights/admissions was the acceptance of the psychological fact that the practise of prayer does have a recognizable potency. She views prayer not as a series of 'petitions' or requests but as a loving attention towards God/idea of unity/transcendence which allows the agent to focus away from the selfish ego and gain a psychological energy that allows one "to be good and courageous even in a concentration camp". Despite being a professed atheist, atleast in the sense of non belief in a personal God, she still recognized "God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non representable and necessarily real object of attention" (Her own words). Iris recognizes that despite the modern tendency to secularise, something very much like prayer (loving attention towards transcendence) is essential for moral development. Her ideas seem very much like those of Martin Buber and Allama Iqbal. For Iqbal, the rational observer of nature who pays loving attention to the works of nature and seeks to understand their underlying unity is also engaged in the practise of prayer.

The book is deep and far richer than an initial reading reveals, and I would keep coming back to it to perfect my understanding and mine it for insights and connections.