Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse 9781472543660, 9781623564834

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The return of a word requires the recovery of its object for us. Stanley Cavell

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Acknowledgements This book is the (main) outcome of a research project funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. I am extremely grateful for this support. I am most thankful to Haaris Naqvi and Ally Jane Grossan at Bloomsbury for their support, and for seeing this book through to publication. I would also like to express my sincere and humble gratitude to James Conant, Johan Gustafsson, Martin Gustafsson, Nora Hämäläinen, Lars Hertzberg, Ingeborg Löfgren, Erik Jansson, Carly Lane, Kate Larson, Tove Österman, Sharon Rider, David Robjant, Pär Segerdahl and Sören Stenlund for discussions concerning the difficulties I discuss here and for commenting upon earlier versions of chapters in this book. I would also like to express my gratitude to all the participants and the ‘Seminar of Philosophy of Language and Culture’ at the Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, and the ‘Research Seminar’ at the Department of Philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, for fruitful conversations, helpful comments, criticism and friendship. Thank you all. My warmest note of gratitude goes to Nora, for assisting me, supporting me, challenging me, criticizing me, cheering for me, for always being a conversationdriven thinker and for being the centre of my life and our beautiful family.

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The return of a word requires the recovery of its object for us. Stanley Cavell

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Introduction

Words are worn and torn, and so turned (differently). At times they are torn and worn out. But since words are turned – changed but not necessarily exchanged since words may look the same while their concepts change – it is oftentimes hard to come to see that one may fail to be in command of one’s own language. The philosophical significances of our belonging in language, of our failure to attain community or of the grounds for the philosophical aspiration to escape it are themes for which it is hard, very hard, to attain a clear sense. Suppose, for example, that it is true that every statement we make, every judgement we pass and every course of action we take are conducted against a backdrop that guides us but remains (as backdrops usually are) far from the centre of our attention – how should we go about making such a backdrop and its significance visible to us? And suppose, in addition, that many of our philosophical problems depend on a misguided understanding of the weight and sense of our own words – not in the sense that we are uneducated about them, but in the sense that we do not really know when they are not carrying the weight we think they do, that we want them to – then how are we to proceed philosophically in coming to clarity? If it is possible that we fail to make sense and fail to notice when (and why) we do so, then how can certainty about our own uses of words be attained and clarity achieved? These two suppositions, or philosophical challenges, unite in the thought that we are not, or might at times not be, at home in our own language. We do not understand our own language. How can a loss of a language which is mine come about, and how can one’s lost language be found (re-gained, re-conquered, re-claimed)? I take these two challenges to be real, and this book is a struggle to make their reality visible and to suggest how to proceed in entangling the cluster of philosophical problems they give rise to. In a sense, both can be seen as variations of the well-known problem, or fact, that in philosophy, reason is under reason’s investigation. Could it be that we are now living in a time when much (but not all) philosophy has forgotten its self-reflective nature? My primary discussion partner in this book is Iris Murdoch. I have found in her work a response to the above-mentioned difficulties that I take to be both instructive and challenging. Also, I have found myself to be diverging from many, if not most, other contemporary Murdoch scholars on several focal points. I see Murdoch as a fellow philosopher who consistently struggled with this difficulty that we seem to have lost the sense of our own language and who also held the view that this loss of language has happened more or less unbeknown to us. It is almost as if Murdoch describes us as living in a strange form of collective illusion of sense. Exactly how we are to cash out

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the sense of this lost sense is one of the most difficult challenges that I have struggled to meet in this book. At one level, this is a book about Iris Murdoch and her view on the relation between philosophy and literature. But it has never been my intention to write a book of interest to Murdoch scholars only, even though I do think that the book is a ‘contribution’ to the growing pile of Murdoch literature. The work presented here is (and is not) exegetical in this sense: The pages of this book have been filled with ink, turned and added together by my desire to come to terms with a cluster of philosophical problems about how the surrounding, or background, of our language can come into view, how it happens that we can come to lose the sense of our own words, why that happens when we seem to need them the most and of how literature can (and cannot) assist us in a strive to make clear when language is coming apart and where philosophy begins; which means to say that I am driven by a sense that literature can ‘assist us,’ as it were, in these struggles (which is not to say that I think that singular clear senses of the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ can be attained so as to enable a definitive answer to the question about the relationship about them). These two forms of human endeavours to gain self-understanding can, and should, be challenging to each other. My reading, and making references to, and offering possible revisions to, Murdoch’s philosophy and the reception of it are not external activities in this project of gaining clarity about the loss of sense and the struggle to reclaim it, the sense of our words. There are many different views about how philosophy and literature relate to each other in Murdoch’s authorship, but most of them share one common assumption: the question concerning the relation between philosophy and literature in Murdoch’s authorship is to be answered by means of showing that Murdoch does or does not express her philosophy in her novels. On its exegetical level, this book challenges this assumption. The difficulties that I am here approaching are hard to attain a clear sense of, particularly because it often is hard to notice that one’s language is idling. So, given that I want to show that Murdoch’s claim that ‘we have suffered a general loss of concepts’1 is absolutely central to her work, and that one misunderstands her novels, her philosophy and the relationship between the two genres, if one does not take the difficulty of a loss of language into account, I need to begin with a presentation of what one might call the received view of the relationship between Murdoch the novelist and Murdoch the philosopher, and of the problems this view inhabits. Thus, the first chapter is to a very large extent an illustration of what Murdoch’s philosophy looks like and of how that is supposed to relate to her novels if we work under the assumptions that (i) the sense of the terms she talks about is clear to us and that she presents a more or less coherent account (or ‘theory’) that builds on these concepts; and (ii) that since the sense of these concepts is not really up for grabs, there is really no struggle to see what they mean when they appear, voiced by particular

1

Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 290.

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Introduction

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people in particular situations, in some of her novels. These are two assumptions that I will go on to contest. What drives my work here is the thought that a loss of concepts is something that permeates our culture and is not something that can be reduced to a loss of a certain set of words that we can do without. The words are still here and we need them in order to attain self-understanding; but we no longer command them, carry their sense (which is a way of saying that their concepts are lost). I also think that it is pivotal to notice that if this is our problem, we cannot move further by means of creating a new vocabulary, and I am convinced that I am in complete agreement with Murdoch on this issue. Thus, even though she says, for example, that ‘we need a new vocabulary of attention’2 we will go wrong if we think that Murdoch herself has forged sensible concepts for us with which to build such a vocabulary or that she employed literature in order to promulgate her new little language. I open this investigation in Chapter 1 by means of presenting three lists. The first illustrates what one might call the received view of how philosophy and literature relate to each other in Murdoch’s authorship. I will not go into detail of the accounts of all the Murdoch interpreters that I mention there. I merely mean to illustrate, as clearly as possible, how unanimously the choir seems to sing. The general tendency is to say that philosophy and literature are, in Murdoch’s authorship, intimately intertwined and that her philosophy is present in her novels. The second list is an assemblage of Murdoch’s own words in which she repeatedly and consistently claims that it would be a serious mistake to think that her philosophy is expressed in her novels. My third list also consists of Murdoch’s words, but the sounds of the words in this list seem to be in some kind of opposition to the senses coming out of the second list. For here, we find the Murdoch who consistently and repeatedly argues that art, and especially literature, is a path to philosophical clarity. As these three lists are placed side by side, it becomes clear that they do not seem to go well together. The first list seemingly contradicts the second, but goes well with the third. But the second list appears hard to be combined with either the first or the third. One can thus easily see how the philosophical reception of Murdoch has been guided by a sense that we need to find a way to make my second and third lists go together or show that one of the ‘two Murdochs’ is wrong (about herself) or, alternatively, not entirely honest (about her own production). The second phase of the first chapter is conducted by means of a study of Martha Nussbaum’s influential reading of one of Murdoch’s novels: The Black Prince. I take her reading to be instructive here because on the one hand, it highlights features of the novel that (seemingly) follow Murdoch’s philosophical ‘views’ from start to finish, and, on the other, contains a story about how to keep one’s balance between Murdoch the novelist and Murdoch the philosopher. Even though Nussbaum strives to be ‘true to’ Murdoch’s own statements about her writings, she nevertheless falls back into the position according to which Murdoch’s novels are to be seen as rather

2

Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 293.

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straightforward expressions of Murdoch’s philosophy. So something has gone wrong in the balancing act. Nussbaum’s reading of The Black Prince serves to introduce the commonly shared idea that literature is philosophically relevant only to the extent that it expresses (or exemplifies, or illustrates) an already achieved philosophical position – even though Nussbaum has rather strongly and successfully argued that literature does, or could do, more to or for philosophy than that. An underlying thought here, which is rarely seen or discussed, is the sense that what Murdoch’s philosophy is and what it amounts to is something that we can grasp rather easily and encapsulate in an account or a theory. So the first chapter is meant to bring into view what that novel looks like if this is our starting point and to show how that relationship between philosophy and literature is formed, takes shape, under the pressure of these assumptions. Under this particular pressure, the version of Murdoch’s philosophy that comes out in her novels does not really look that attractive, and so one tendency is to criticize her purported philosophical views because of that. Another tendency is to say that Murdoch uses her novels to ‘test’ or even challenge her own philosophy. A third tendency is to say that her novels ‘show’ something about her philosophy that is only attainable by means of writing novels. I think all these versions are problematic. For example, no one seems to think that Murdoch’s philosophy might be hard to understand. One can also see a tendency to think that Murdoch enacted her philosophical thoughts in the novels simply because there are references to other philosophers whom she admires (Plato, Wittgenstein, Weil, etc.) in them. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, what these philosophers say are also taken to be knowledge easily attained and further transmitted. What ‘the philosophical’ is, is not treated as an open question. If a philosopher’s ‘account’ is ‘in the novel’, then the novel ‘is philosophical.’ Chapter 1 aims to make clear that what appears to be a paradoxical clash between my second and my third list is only apparent. If ‘paradoxes’ enter in this chapter, it is not within Murdoch’s philosophy but in the responses to her work of these kinds:

a. She said it, but didn’t mean it. b. She thought that ‘this’ cannot be said in philosophy, but only ‘shown’ in literature. c. She held both A (in philosophy) and not-A (in her literature). If we think that literature is a tool with which an author aims to express a specific something – be it unattainable for philosophical presentation (whatever that is) or not – then this specific something has a content which proceeds and is independent of the literary form. The attempt to say that literature is required in order for a philosophical idea (or view) to be fully expressed seems, contrary to what is intended, to reduce literature to being a particular kind of vehicle for an already achieved idea. This means that the question about literature qua literature, as a form of philosophical expression in its own right, is yet to be approached. Chapter 2 begins with an elaboration of Murdoch’s view of art and love. I argue here that one thing that has gone wrong in many readings of Murdoch’s authorship as a whole stems from the assumption that Murdoch’s philosophical views are not hard to understand and appropriate. The words that move Murdoch’s philosophy forward

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Introduction

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(such as love, vision, perfection and good) are words that we misunderstand if we think of them in terms of comprehensiveness. Murdoch has given us so many reasons not to think of these terms as concepts that we can grasp once and then be done with. Unfortunately, things are even more complicated than that. I mean to suggest that the central concepts of Murdoch’s ‘account’ or ‘theory’ are concepts that have lost their meaning. Not altogether, but the sense they have in our time and culture is not the sense that Murdoch wants to reawaken. There is, thus, a sense in which we do not know the language Murdoch wants to teach us, but neither does Murdoch – not fully anyway. One might say that her project is not to teach us a couple of mystic ideas that she herself doesn’t fully understand, but to make clear to us that we are not in command of our language now, and that the fact that these parts of our language are lost on us means that we have disabled our possibilities of self-reflection and so selfunderstanding. A return to Kant is necessary here, if we are to unpack some of Murdoch’s most well-known claims about art. Although I have my reservations concerning Murdoch’s understanding of Kant, I think that the sum of what she gets right and her criticism of Kant brings into view a rather rich concept of artwork as something that is autonomous, stands (or falls) on its own, while it at the same time is a realistic picture of our reality. This enables me to attain a clearer view of how philosophy ‘comes into her novels’ which we require in order to move us from a view of Murdoch’s philosophy as something entirely clear that is expressed in her novels, to the recognition of the fact that Murdoch’s thinking includes, and indeed depends upon, concepts that are out of touch with our world, our form of life. One version of the idea that Murdoch’s novels are enactments of her philosophy draws on Murdoch’s claim that ‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.’3 This formulation may lead one into supposing that Murdoch the philosopher criticized philosophical theories that she thought to be mistaken, and provided her own alternative to them. Murdoch the novelist then, in some kind of third phase, went on to ‘create pictures’ that she wanted us to come to resemble. But just because Murdoch claimed that ‘[m]an is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture’ there is no need to assume that Murdoch tried to make pictures by means of writing novels. Rather than making pictures, I think of Murdoch the novelist as someone taking pictures, recording us as it were. When Murdoch wrote novels, she was making pictures only in the banal sense of being their creator. (We are, after all, talking about fiction.) But her realistic spirit was to record what our world really looks like. She is, like Shakespeare, holding up a mirror to the world.4 3

4

Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 75. Iris Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 12. See also William Shakespeare, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, second edition, eds. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), Act 3, Scene 2, p. 699.

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Language Lost and Found

She does not show us what she thinks the world ought to be like (as if her Platonism actually was an idealistic utopianism). She is telling us what the world is like – trying to make visible how hollow certain philosophical wordings (that she does believe in) sound, as long as these words are accompanied with a faulty picture of the human and a decline to see just how intimately our language and our form of life are intertwined. That we have lost our language does not mean that we have forgotten a set of words (say a Platonic vocabulary with Eros as its prime mover). ‘A language lost’ raises questions about an absent world or a form of life no longer lived, and in particular, it forces us to ask if we really are in command of our concepts. The shift from making to taking pictures also radically shifts the content (and so our understanding) of Murdoch’s novels. Instead of seeing, as for example Nussbaum does, an argument for a rather unattractive other-worldly Platonism, we see a picturing of the contemporary man who is utterly unable to carry the weight of, and so understand, the philosophical sentences he utters. I am also convinced that my reading here – including the shift from making to taking – makes Murdoch much more comprehensible and coherent. The idea that Murdoch’s authorship as a whole is paradoxical disintegrates on us. Her realism becomes plausible. This in turn brings me to my retracing of the influence of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Murdoch’s thinking. The guiding line of thought I employ in these sections is the analogy between a book and a mirror. It is argued that a reflection of oneself that shows something that was (in a certain sense) already known and familiar – but neglected, forgotten, repressed or disregarded – can come to be of immense importance in the struggle to attain philosophical clarity. A main point to extrapolate from my use of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein here is that it is hard, very hard, to recognize that one’s language is, as Wittgenstein said, ‘idling.’ Illusory sense may be more common and harder to detect than is commonly assumed. These reflections help me attain a richer sense of Murdoch’s problem of a ‘general loss of concepts.’ A key concept for my reading of Murdoch concerning the question of how one simultaneously, and without contradiction, can think that philosophy and literature are entirely different operations and that art and morals have the same essence or that literature is one of our ‘most educational’ activities, is one that she adopts from Kierkegaard: that of indirect communication. Now, this idea of Kierkegaard’s is only helpful once we remove some of the most fundamental – though surprisingly widespread – misunderstandings of it: ‘indirect communication’ is not, in my view, simply a rhetoric strategy where an author says one thing but means something completely different; ‘indirect communication’ is not a theory of language according to which our language is divided into two categories (e.g. one being literal statements about facts, the other metaphorical ‘hints’ about more difficult matters such as religion and ethics); and ‘indirect communication’ is not something we employ since there are things we cannot say because they are out of reach for ordinary (or philosophical) language. In brief: ‘indirect communication’ is not called for because the world is split into two halves (or ‘spheres’) – one empirical and factual and the other ethical and mystical. Rather, a text communicates indirectly (in the relevant sense) when it shows something decisive about its reader and demands something of her. A text that communicates indirectly is at

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Introduction

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bottom a mirror – a presentation of something familiar that may jolt us (or fail to do so) out of a particular form of illusion. But it provides us with no particular form of positive information that is unavailable by means of other forms of representation. A mirror does not put forward any doctrines of its own. My understanding of the idea of an indirect communication is heavily influenced by the work of James Conant. Even though there is much more to be said about how Kierkegaard is to be understood, my main aim here has been to develop a sense of indirect communication that will help us understand how Murdoch’s novels ‘work’ in relation to her (or rather apart from) philosophy. Chapter 2 closes with a discussion about how I have understood Murdoch in relation to Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. This discussion is prompted by the fact that I think of Murdoch as standing closer to these two thinkers than has commonly been assumed. This is partly due to the fact that Murdoch has voiced rather critical remarks about both of them. I think that Murdoch’s criticisms often are off the mark. Murdoch’s (mis-) readings are instructive because her complaints against Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard also show us how we should not understand her. She is worried that both of them tend to push questions of morality, value and inner life out of the realm of philosophy, indeed out of this world. This worry of hers is not insignificant, for it helps us see that Murdoch did not think that the reintroduction of concepts such as ‘transcendence’ and ‘the good’ as something beyond and indefinable, pushes her thought out of reach for philosophy or into another realm. Chapter 3 is a more direct discussion of Murdoch’s claim that we have suffered a general loss of concepts and that Murdoch strives to find a way to understand morality ‘in a philosophical sense which I feel can’t be done without the reintroduction of certain concepts which in the recent past have been regarded as metaphysical in some sense which made them impossible.’5 The (lost) concept that guides me into my reading of Murdoch here is ‘human being.’ By means of a consideration of the picture of the human that, according to Murdoch, guides us today, we get an entrance to the intricate web of difficult concepts and themes that Murdoch tries to bring to life: love, attention, transcendence and perfection. These concepts cannot be understood, I argue, without a clear sense of where philosophical theorization has turned its back on reality. So there is a conflict here between how we picture these concepts (especially in philosophy) and how they function in our everyday life. To put it boldly: Murdoch’s notion of ‘love,’ her perfectionism and the idea of the good as a ‘good for nothing’ (only possible to ‘define’ negatively) is ordinary language philosophy. Her goal is, as she argues, a form of anamnesis, a mirroring of things that ‘we did not know we knew.’6 Murdoch should not be seen as introducing concepts, but rather, as a philosopher who (like Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard) wants to make clear how theorization and intellectualization, albeit

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Christopher Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 99. Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 12.

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understandable and ‘called for,’ run the risk of distorting our conception of our reality exactly in those moments when it pictures itself to have framed it theoretically. Moral life in language may now seem infinitely complex. Perhaps it is. One thing that is clear is that we have a too narrow conception of morality if we restrict ourselves to discussions concerning moral actions and judgements. What we should do, Murdoch suggests, follows from what we see. But this seeing is not mere observing. Rather, ‘vision’ means something like ‘the way we see things’ or ‘the point of view of our form of life.’ This is interconnected with Murdoch’s view of language. She holds that words cannot be disconnected from how we lead our lives. For example, a word such as ‘good’ means different things in a religious form of life than it does in a secular one. ‘Words may mislead us here since words are often stable while concepts alter; we have a different image of courage at forty from that which we had at twenty.’7 (Compare: ‘I worked up the courage to ask her to the prom.’ ‘I have learned to be courageous enough to appear frightened.’) This does not mean that communication between a forty year old and a boy in his twenties is not possible, but that concepts are elastic even though they are shared, that we continue to learn our language all our lives, that it is possible that misunderstanding may occur even though we share the same language and that we may not be aware of how our concepts have turned as our lives have turned. This also gives us a deepened understanding of what a ‘general loss of concepts’ might mean. For the problem is not that we have lost a set of words, or that certain uses of our words have fallen out of fashion. No, it is more a question of the fact that our lives alter, but we fail to see that the concepts we live by change with that, so we may end up failing to mean what we want our words to mean. We want the words to mean this or that, but the way we lead our lives makes an authentic employment of our concepts impossible. This leads me to Murdoch’s ‘perfectionism.’ For our problems are not merely historical in nature (say, a result of our world being secular, whereas our language still has Christian roots), but they are also a matter of us leading a form of life that makes the sense we want our concepts to have impossible. Thus, the understanding of Murdoch’s perfectionism (which is tied to her desire to be able to speak about the good as something beyond, yet real, as well as her attempt to reintroduce the theme of transcendence) developed here emphasizes the struggle we need to engage in, in order to carry the sense of our words which must be seen as a struggle to lead a certain form of life. This understanding also makes Murdoch’s idea that we need a new concept of original sin plausible. It is not a quest for a new God, but a way of making clear how a human being can fail to be true to herself. (Clearly, this pushes moral philosophy beyond, or rather beneath, the level of calculated actions and well-argued judgements.) At this point, I make connections between Murdoch’s and Stanley Cavell’s varieties of ‘perfectionism.’ I have found some very significant similarities between them, and Cavell’s work can help us see more clearly what kind of work the recovery of a

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Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 322.

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Introduction

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lost language may require and how it connects to questions of form. For instance, I discuss one of the films Cavell has written about, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story,8 aiming to make clear how the sense of one’s words cannot be disconnected from the life one leads. A crucial aspect of my argument from the film is that different uses of similar (or nearly identical) sentences voiced by different characters mean very different things. The acknowledgement of these differences can make it evident that I am not in command of my words, that I am not in agreement with myself and that the recovery of my words requires a change of oneself. This discussion also helps to make Murdoch’s talk about inwardness much more comprehensible. It ceases to be a question of subjective (in an epistemological sense) will, or a private matter, and becomes more a question about a search for a form of life in which one is true to one’s words (and words are, after all, shared). I also show how Murdoch’s classical example of M and D – which often is understood to be a mere counter-example to behaviouristic philosophy – has a very Kierkegaardian undertone to it, which also helps to illustrate the relationship between perfectionism and the recovery of our words. Building on the thoughts developed in Chapters 2 and 3, I describe what The Black Prince may be said to convey if it is no longer pictured as a presentation of Murdoch’s philosophy in literary clothing. A novel like The Black Prince can now be seen, not as a Neoplatonic manifesto, but as a Kierkegaardian ‘mirror.’ As soon as one starts thinking about Kierkegaard when reading, one will notice his presence almost everywhere in the book. In fact, I take his presence to be so overwhelming that it is utterly bewildering that no one (to my knowledge at least) has even tried to read the novel in that light. Kierkegaard permeates the structure of the book with its layers of pseudonymity, the many voices of reflection and its continual pauses with reflections about the form of presentation that it itself employs. Kierkegaard’s presence can also be seen substantially and thematically in the topics under ‘discussion’: marriage, the relationship between the teacher and the student, the difficulty of love, inwardness and the question concerning the form of presentation that inwardness may seem to require. In my reading, The Black Prince is a picture of a human being (Bradley Pearson) who is struggling to carry the weight of words such as love and inwardness, but there is something in his way of living that stands in the way for him seeing clearly. In that sense, Bradley does not express Murdoch’s ‘Platonism’ but its inversion. Bradley lives in an illusion of sense and he is utterly unable to see that he fails to carry the sense of his words. This is, as I see it, what Murdoch’s novel portrays. It is not an argument or a simple propagation of her philosophy. It is a mirror of our times. Now it is up to us to relate to it. The deeper philosophical significance of the novel is that it portrays the inability of the contemporary human being to bring the concepts that Murdoch’s philosophy gravitates around clearly into view. The mere recognition of this is a philosophical insight in its own right, but it is not a view she puts forward as a hypothesis. Bradley’s philosophical significance lies not in the fact that he reiterates Murdoch, but in the fact that he has no clue about what it would mean to carry the weight of these words.

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The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor (Warner Brothers, 1940).

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Language Lost and Found

Murdoch at one point says that in a novel ‘one sees the moral problem in a real context.’9 I don’t think we should take that to mean that this makes the moral problem (or the context) out of philosophy’s reach. There is nothing in principle about ‘seen in a real context’ that makes the ‘literary presentation’ necessary. After all ‘real contexts’ exist elsewhere too; in reality for example. So, why not ‘in philosophy’? According to Murdoch there’s ‘a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just eaten his breakfast.’10 Many interpreters, Nussbaum is one of them, seem to take a passage such as this one to indicate that Murdoch is for systematical theory construction in ethics and against what has been called ‘anti-theory’.11 I don’t think this passage presents this kind of either/or-dilemma. Murdoch is not carving out two separate ways of doing philosophy here, as I understand her. I want to say that what Murdoch captures here are two movements of thought that tend to characterize the philosophical activity. These are not two traditions at war, but the movement of a typically philosophical line of thinking. When I find myself lost in our world, philosophy calls upon me to act and think. The words that everyone around us seems to employ without worry or hesitation are lost on me; they no longer seem to carry their weight for me. So I start to think. I theorize . . . But the only way that true peace of mind can be conquered is to make myself able to see that I share my world with those others whose words I had just repudiated. Philosophy, as Murdoch conceives it, consists of this play – between particularity and essence, between the real and the ideal, the philosophical and the ordinary. To think of these as two traditions is not to see how one feeds the other. We are not encouraged to choose, but we are instructed to see that the emergence of a philosophical problem often has its root in a pressing feeling that a mapping of theoretical ideality is necessary and the only way out is often a regained and reclaimed community. Philosophical clarity can only be attained if I bring myself to a position in which I am able to carry the sense of my words again. (A ‘return to the ordinary’ may thus be something very difficult to achieve.) In coming to understand how this ‘two-way movement’ comes about, what it does and how to deal with it, we need to understand just what spurs philosophy, and in particular what spurs philosophy of the kind that is haunted by a loss of language. In search for further clarity here, I turn (in Chapter 5) to a discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elisabeth Costello and Cora Diamond’s discussion thereof. There are several (pedagogical and philosophical) reasons for this excursus. First, Murdoch’s idea of ‘vision’ as something that precedes or underlies or shapes the world which we see is not easily open to argument. Arguments seem to belong at the level of motivation for choice or reasons for holding the beliefs on which we

9

10 11

Jean-Lois Chevalier, editor, ‘Closing Debate, Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 90. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 1. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, ‘Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?,’ Journal of Ethics, 3: (1999).

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Introduction

11

pass judgements. But arguments seem to depend upon agreed-upon criteria, a shared world. If our visions differ, is there any room for arguments? Diamond has written extensively (and insightfully) about these matters. Second, many of the problems under discussion in Diamond’s work overlap with the problems and difficulties that my reading of Murdoch explores. More specifically, Diamond’s reading of Coetzee brings into view the thought that our life in language tends to be distorted when it is turned into a philosophical problem. There seems to be a divergence between a ‘difficulty of reality’ and a ‘difficulty of philosophy.’ Diamond also suggests that literature may be better equipped to capture a difficulty of reality than philosophy is. I see in Murdoch a similar line of thought. Understanding these kinds of divergences is a path to coming to clarity about the question of whether there is something that literature can do that philosophy cannot. Third, Coetzee’s novel connects with my reading of The Black Prince in at least this way: both are pictures of a human being who fails to carry the sense of his or her words. Bradley of The Black Prince lives in an illusion of sense, not knowing that his words are void. Elisabeth Costello leads a tormenting life because she cannot carry the sense of our words, and she knows it. So one might say that the problem of recovering our concepts is deepened with Coetzee’s work, for it shows that ‘mere awareness’ of the problem does not solve it. Elisabeth Costello does not want to regain community. Her ‘repudiation of the ordinary’ is intentional. Fourth, one of the claims of this book is that the philosophical significance of literature cannot be reduced to the presence of philosophy (philosophical sentences, propositions, theories and views) in novels. Neither can it be reduced to a kind of illustration of how a philosophy may look if it is, as it were, brought to life. Literature may do these things, and it may be philosophically helpful. But this is not news. I aim to show that literature can do more philosophical work than this, that it, for example, can do philosophical investigations, exploring our lives in language, on its own. If the true significance of literature for philosophy is to be attained, we must come to see that literature can challenge philosophy (and not merely illustrate or exemplify it). Both The Black Prince and Elisabeth Costello have a lot of ‘philosophy’ in them, and they have both been interpreted as expressions of that philosophy. But in both cases, I think that we can learn more from them if we move beyond the fact that there are philosophical sentences in them (which is not to say that these sentences are irrelevant). It is furthermore argued that the distinction that Diamond makes between ‘the difficulty of reality’ and ‘the difficulty of philosophy’ is a distinction that must, at the end of the day, be given up. The distinction itself functions to make clear how certain kinds of philosophical problems arise, but it does not mark two different ‘spheres of reason’ – one argumentative, the other literary. To use a familiar metaphor, the distinction is best seen as a ladder to be thrown away. It is argued that a difficulty of reality already is a difficulty of philosophy and that the distinction only functions in order to make clear how the philosopher’s subjects often are misunderstood due to a deflected sense of our lives in language. The concluding discussion contains my response to the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language.

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12

Language Lost and Found

The picture that emerges here (informed by my reading of Murdoch, Diamond and Cavell) offers, on the one hand, a deeper understanding of how philosophical problems arise due to a philosophical urge to rise above (Cavell would say repudiate) our shared language and that these difficulties arise in philosophy more or less naturally since the interplay between linguistic change and differences in and developments of our forms of life make them hard to see. Literature mirrors our lives in language, but the return of our words requires the return of a way of living. Mirrors need, at the end of the day, to be smashed. In a sense, this is where we must end. For to the extent that there’s ‘a view’ of the relationship between philosophy and literature coming out of this book, it is this: literature is (often) philosophically significant precisely because and to the extent that it is not philosophy (as we know it). The core of that idea is that philosophy runs deep in us, and if literature is going to have any true effect, it will never be by means of confirmations of ‘the philosophy.’ I think that we, with Murdoch, should ‘stay with the “old quarrel”.’12 Cavell is right on target when he notes that the question about ‘what achieves philosophical conviction must at all times be on our mind.’13 When a philosopher turns to literature for guidance, exemplification or illustration (or a strange desire to make the unutterable ‘seen’), she is engaged in a project in which, as far as I can see, philosophy is not really challenged by literature. I would rather say that literature is most significant for philosophy if that order is reversed: literature can, sometimes, challenge philosophy if the order of ‘agency’ is reversed. One might say, with Murdoch, that literature is only accidentally philosophical in the sense that it challenges our philosophical conceptions and presuppositions the most when it shows us something about ourselves, our language, our culture, that we had not considered, seen or pondered. Literature tends to be less powerful, philosophically speaking, when it is intentionally philosophical or when a philosopher turns to literature in order to illustrate an already attained philosophical point; only that the word ‘accidental’ may be taken to suggest that the importance of literature is merely haphazard, a stroke of luck, in no sense ‘intentional’ – which clearly is not the case. For we should not assume that authors lack seriousness or that literature’s ambition is to be disconnected from the troubles we are in. Literature should be allowed to challenge us – reach us, charge us, when we (philosophers) are feeling secure. The philosophical significance of literature is certainly not its capacity to illustrate or exemplify philosophy; its strength is that it is the other of philosophy: a contrast fluid. Of course, there is philosophy ‘in’ it, in all literature. But then again, philosophy is everywhere – even though it is the hallmark of the contemporary academic philosopher to deny that and to defend his area of ‘specialization.’ Put differently: my aim is not to first establish a particular sense of what ‘Philosophy’ (in general) is and give a parallel definition of ‘Literature,’ and then go on to see if they are related or not. I do not wish to define these activities or rule out other forms of 12 13

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 2002 [1992]), 283. James Conant, ‘An Interview with Stanley Cavell,’ in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, eds. Fleming and Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 59.

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Introduction

13

philosophical or literary endeavours. Rather, I want to ask where and why a call for literature may come into a particular philosophical labour, and I want to show some of the things that literature can do that are philosophically relevant. There is a sense in which I feel inclined to say that in philosophy, literature is not allowed to speak for itself if it is, as it were, in the service of philosophy. But can literature ‘speak for itself,’ and what would it mean to say that it does (if it can)? Perhaps the best we can do is to try to be aware of the fact that when a philosophically inclined mind approaches literature, it might not be an entirely innocent approach. If one’s desire to approach literature was called upon by philosophy, from philosophy, it should not come as a surprise that whatever it was in philosophy that evoked that desire will remain important when so-called literary texts are being read (if they, in fact, are being read). I do not want to claim that literature has some miraculous ability to speak of things that interest philosophy but that philosophy for some reason or other is unable to speak of. On the other hand, if literature brings nothing to philosophy that philosophy cannot do by itself, well then why turn to it? There is something double about my view here: I do want to say that there is something in literature, about it perhaps, that makes it a much-needed conversation partner for contemporary philosophy. But I also want to say that there is nothing in literary language that is, as it were, out of reach for contemporary philosophy (which is not to say that there is something philosophy, as we know it, is ‘unable’ – the scare quotes here are necessary – to speak of). This is so because literature and (good) philosophy both speak the same language: ours. I will make no ontological claims, saying that there are things – objects, values, dreams, horrors, desires, particles, fibres, etc. – that are out of reach for the human being in one mode of writing, but accessible to her in another. I do not mean to suggest that everything can be simply stated in a clear and precise propositional form. But, in principle, if literature can say it, so can philosophy – and the difficulty is to come to see why we, or ‘it,’ resist doing so. I do not think that we can settle this quarrel with a new (presumably more precise . . .) theory of language or a new intricate theory of the nature of literature or literary language. To try to prove either that literature is philosophy or that literature is not philosophy are two empty struggles. But this does not mean that we should leave the quarrel to die. Another way to say this is to say that the question with which Cavell ends The Claim of Reason – ‘Can philosophy become poetry and still know itself?’14 – is a question that will remain, and must remain, open (or else, it is an emblem of the death of two giants). Most authors of literature, no less than philosophical writers, want us to see something important about ourselves and our world. Just because philosophy has developed into an academic profession, it does not follow that it can claim any exclusive rights concerning the difficulties it examines. Literature can present pictures of our world that are so stark and accurate that we may be forced to challenge or call into 14

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, new edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

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Language Lost and Found

question some of our underlying philosophical assumptions, beliefs and convictions: ‘This is what our world actually looks like, and there is no room for these features of reality in my philosophy.’ Why should we not take the challenges that these pictures bring into consideration? ‘There are more things under heaven and earth, Horatio/than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’15 Yes. But we do not know what our love for Sophia may bring. ‘We cannot see the future, but must fear it intelligently.’16 I am balancing a slack rope, I know.

15 16

Shakespeare, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ Act 1, Scene 5, p. 690. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 211.

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1

Apparent Paradoxes Murdoch versus Murdoch and the Idea of Expressing the Inexpressible

1.1 The received view and its complications ‘Iris Murdoch, philosopher and novelist.’ Drawing upon the fact of her ‘dual competence,’ this description – one of the most common ways of introducing her work – marks a division between two discourses and it more or less inevitably forces us to ask questions about the relationship between her two ‘careers.’ In this chapter, I will first present what I take to be the most common approach to this issue, aiming to show that there is something confused in how it normally is approached. In anticipation of what is to be argued, one might say that I will show that the set-up of the debate – centring on the question ‘Is Murdoch’s philosophy expressed in her novels or not?’ – is leading us astray already from the start. At a rather superficial level, the question about the relationship between her two professions arises naturally. Murdoch was both a philosopher and a novelist, so it is no wonder that one might start to think about how her two professions are related. After all, ‘philosopher’ and ‘novelist’ are two professions that have certain histories. The quarrel between ‘them’ – pretending that the terms themselves have not changed a great deal – was ‘ancient’ already to Plato.1 And there is something about these disciplines that make quarrelling possible. We do not, for example, become anxious to sort out the connections between the professions of a woman who is both, say, a plumber and a football coach. There is a sense in which philosophy and literature seem to be playing on the same field, but on opposing teams. That is to say, something is evidently wrong to think that philosophy and literature are simply different since one of them is ‘cognitive’ and the other one ‘mere aesthetics’. Furthermore, one needs to be fairly uneducated about philosophy (and Murdoch’s philosophy) in order not to see that there are connections here. Oftentimes, one gets the feeling that Murdoch’s fictional characters are quoting their creator. This makes it evident that there are some connections to spell out – at least, the presence of discourse on philosophy invites question about the relation between those wordings and 1

Plato, ‘The Republic,’ in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, associate editor D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1997), 607B. See also Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 12.

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Language Lost and Found

Murdoch’s own. I will argue that the fact that we can find a few of Murdoch’s wordings from some of her philosophical work resonated in the words uttered, or thoughts expressed, by one of her fictional characters, is not a reason to assume that she uses literature as a means to express her philosophy. Indeed, one can see the fact of the persistence with which philosophers approach Murdoch from this particular angle (according to which her fictional characters are imaginative spokesmen for her philosophy) as an expression of the philosophical climate in contemporary (mainly so-called ‘analytic’) philosophy. Much philosophy has become rather technical sub-genres with only minimal contact to the outside world. It has also become much more intellectualistic, academic and, dare I say, frightened. (Are we contemporary academic philosophers not too occupied trying to say the right words in the right places at the right time? And does not the level of specification at which we work often rule out a broader cultural dialogue?) Writing about Murdoch in a cultural climate in which education and research are to be tied to rather specific ideas about the usefulness of philosophy (in particular) and the university in general, and in which the idea of literature (and the arts) oftentimes is reduced to being a specific form of ‘entertainment,’ is hard. I see Murdoch as a thinker working in rebellion against these trends. That things actually were better when she wrote than it is now is a poor source of relief. The question ‘Is Murdoch’s philosophy expressed in her novels or not?’ is not dependent upon this intellectual climate, but I do think that the climate feeds the sense of need to approach her authorship in that light. It is likely that the significance of a particular piece of literature to philosophy today will depend on its contribution to ongoing discussions in philosophy in a fairly direct way. Literature, so it is often argued, is good for philosophy if it exemplifies, illustrates or expresses a philosophy. Others, who claim to have a more ‘radical’ view of the philosophical value of literature, will say that literature is good for philosophy because it manages to do something that philosophy (as we have come to know it, not as what it was) is unable to do. Literature is – like thinking in general is in our cultural climate – supposed to be instrumental. The value of the ‘instrument’ called ‘literature’ is often, in this debate, supposed to depend on its power to supplement philosophy. If there is a common notion among nearly all Murdoch scholars, it is that the readings of her novels are guided by a conception about what her philosophy is (about) and it is assumed that she tries to express that in one way or another in her novels. But even though it is inevitable that we think our way through Murdoch’s philosophy, and go on to think about it as we approach her novels, we should not think that Murdoch’s philosophy is one that we can easily summon and see as expressed in her novels. One of my central reasons for saying so, is that I think that some parts of Murdoch’s philosophy are not of the kind that can be easily summarized into a ‘position’ – which has commonly been assumed – but contains, rather, a call for a new kind of seeing, an interrogation and a call for a self-examination of how we manage to carry the weight of our words (if indeed we do). I mean to suggest that what oftentimes is taken to be her positive contributions to philosophy should rather be seen as a form of negative or destructive philosophy, aiming to make us aware that the sense that we do think we find in her words may be idling, and that the sense of a future where this is no longer

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Apparent Paradoxes

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so, was not in plain view for Murdoch either. This is one reason why I think that there is something confused in thinking that we can understand Murdoch’s novels if we see how ‘her philosophy’ is enacted in her novels. Let me begin with a list of quotes, expressing what I take to be the received view of how philosophy and literature relate to each other in Iris Murdoch’s authorship:2 First List [I]t is often difficult and sometimes impossible to know in her work where literature ends and philosophy begins or where philosophy ends and art begins. (David Tracy)3 Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy but they are philosophy which casts doubt on all philosophy, including her own. (Alasdair MacIntyre)4 [H]er work in moral philosophy . . . clearly informs her fiction. (David J. Gordon)5 As a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is centrally engaged with the question of the self and the moral dimensions of every attempt to “picture” human beings. Both her fiction and her philosophy constitute a sustained argument against reductionistic accounts of human life that omit the “valuing” aspect of subjectivity and consciousness. (Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker)6 In the professional life, in the compendious oeuvre of Iris Murdoch, philosophy and literature have been strictly inseparable. (George Steiner)7 It is frequently suggested, both in Murdoch’s philosophical works and in her novels, that sexual desire and the bodily component in love are sins in the Dantean sense, that is, sources of egoistic self-delusion and self-immersion that persistently come between us and the reality of those we love . . . . It is difficult to investigate this issue within Murdoch’s philosophical works themselves . . . . What I propose to do here, then, is to turn to two of Murdoch’s novels in which the relationship between sexual love and truth is a central theme: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and The Black Prince. (Martha Nussbaum)8 2

3

4 5

6

7

8

A note of caution: lists are rarely exhaustive: Here, the three lists I am employing in this chapter serve only as pointers. Thus, the persons behind these words are more subtle in their views than what a list can convey, and these lists are merely meant to point out tendencies that are in need of further discussion. David Tracy, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Many Faces of Platonism,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 69. Alasdair MacIntyre quoted in Tracy ‘Iris Murdoch and the Many Faces of Platonism’, 69. David J. Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 1. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, ‘Introduction,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), xii. George Steiner, ‘Foreword,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), x. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37.

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Language Lost and Found [Iris Murdoch] is as much present as a moral being in her philosophical essays as she is in her novels. (Cora Diamond)9

Clearly, there is a strong tendency among Murdoch’s readers to portray her philosophical and her literary writings as intertwined. This alleged connection has often functioned as a methodological device, allowing Murdoch’s interpreters to move back and forth between her novels and her philosophical texts, lending support from the one to the other. It has also been considered possible to locate flaws in Murdoch’s philosophy by claiming that her literature (in some sense) does not walk hand in hand with her philosophy. But why should it be assumed that the literary and the philosophical productions from one author lend support or opposition to each other? That there are some connections between Murdoch’s writings in the two ‘genres’ seems to me obvious, but what those connections are and consist of is, in my view, yet to be settled. To merely say that they are ‘intertwined,’ or that the one kind of writing ‘informs’ the other, is not enough. Let us, as a contrast, collect another list of quotations concerning the relation between philosophy and literature in Murdoch’s authorship, this time voiced by Dame Iris herself: Second List Literature is (mostly) “works of art”. Works of philosophy are quite different things. Very occasionally a work of philosophy may also be a work of art . . . .10 I see no “general role” of philosophy in literature. People talk about Tolstoy’s “philosophy” but that is really a façon de parler. . . . Of course writers are influenced by the ideas of their time and may be interested in philosophical change, but the amount of philosophy they succeed in expressing is likely to be small. I think that as soon as philosophy gets into a work of literature it becomes a plaything of the writer, and rightly so. There is no strictness about ideas and argument, the rules are different and truth is differently conveyed.11 In general I am reluctant to say that the deep structure of any good literary work could be a philosophical one. I think this is not just a verbal point. The unconscious mind is not a philosopher. For better or worse art goes deeper than philosophy.12 [Philosophy and literature] are quite different operations. I think it’s very dangerous if a novelist attempts to express a philosophy or definite theory in a novel.13 I don’t think philosophy influences my work as a novelist.14 9 10 11 12 13 14

Cora Diamond, ‘Murdoch the Explorer,’ in Philosophical Topics, 38(1): (2010), 55. Iris Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 5. Ibid., 18f. Ibid., 21. S. B. Sagare, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ Modern Fiction Studies, 47(3): (2001), 697. Michael O. Bellamy, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 46.

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Apparent Paradoxes

19

It would not be hard to make this list longer. But, I think that this list is long enough as it stands to establish that there is something that is not entirely right in the received view of how philosophy and literature relate to each another in Murdoch’s authorship. There appears to be an obvious conflict between how Murdoch thought of her own productions and how they have been appropriated by scholars informed by them, which needs to be resolved. The next question is, of course, why so many thinkers and serious readers have failed to take (sufficient) notice of this conflict? In order to begin to answer that question – a question to be further elaborated and dwelled upon below – let me present a final list of quotations; again an assemblage of Murdoch’s own words: Third List Art and morals are, with certain provisos . . . one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.15 Art then is not a diversion or a side issue; it is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen. Art gives us a clear sense to many ideas which seem more puzzling when we meet with them elsewhere, and it is a clue to what happens elsewhere.16 Art, and by “art” from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.17 These arts, especially literature and painting, show us the peculiar sense in which the concept of virtue is tied on to the human condition.18 The details of our world deserve our respectful and loving attention, as artists have always known. There is an attentive patient delay of judgement, a kind of humble agnosticism, which lets the object be.19

Given the contents of this third list, it now seems obvious that art (and, in fact, especially literature) has an extraordinary importance in conveying, or communicating, or in arguing for (or against), or representing – what one decides to be the best formulation here matters – some of the most central themes in Murdoch’s philosophy; for example, 15

16 17 18 19

Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 215. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 85. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 84. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 377.

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Language Lost and Found

the importance of love and sex for moral vision, the recognition of the other, for knowledge and for her realistic conception of truth. No wonder, then, that scholars have been inclined to think of Murdoch’s novels as philosophically significant. But, in reading these three lists together, we are now confronted with a situation which can be adequately described as confused – almost paradoxical. First, we have a multitude of scholars who seem to feel that it is necessary to stress that Murdoch’s philosophical and literary writings, in some sense, go hand in hand – that the literary works of Murdoch’s are philosophical works to some extent.20 The second list voices Murdoch’s warnings against any attempt to fuse her two forms of writing. In fact, it seems as though Murdoch even suggests that any reader of her work who does not differentiate the philosophical from the literary has eo ipso misunderstood her (her novels and her philosophy). Whatever her novels express, it is not a philosophy and most certainly not her philosophy. That there is a conflict between the first list and the second is obvious. The third list, however, presents Murdoch the writer and Murdoch the philosopher as being engaged in the same activity in both genres, at least to some extent. Hence, one might almost begin to feel that Murdoch was confused – or, at least not entirely honest – about the relationship between her pursuits in the two genres. To complicate the matter further, the third list also presents a view according to which some of Murdoch’s most central philosophical thoughts are best expressed, or communicated, or represented – which description is here the best one? – in art (and good literature is also mentioned here as one of the arts best suited for this particular purpose). Indeed, Murdoch even seems to declare that art and morals have the same essence. Now, as these three lists of quotations are placed beside each other, it sounds almost as if there are ‘two Murdochs.’ Not that there is Murdoch the novelist and Murdoch the philosopher, but that there is a ‘Literature-is-philosophy-Murdoch’ and a ‘Literatureis-not-philosophy-Murdoch.’ One of my aims in this book is to show that there is only one Iris Murdoch – and that this ‘one’ Murdoch stays, as she said, ‘with the old quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry.21 I will try to show that the sense of paradox that may come out of the confrontation between the Murdoch who declares that art and philosophy have the same essence and the Murdoch who continuously insists that philosophy in literature is, in general, a bad and dangerous idea, is an illusory paradox. The difficulty of this project is thus to show how one can simultaneously and consistently hold the contents of my second and third lists together – that is, that one might very well hold philosophy and literature to be distinctly different operations even though they have the same essence, or that literature may harbour a promise of philosophical clarity 20

21

That her philosophical production is literary significant, or that the ‘literary’ aspects of her philosophical texts is intertwined with the philosophical content, seems to be a non-question to most of Murdoch’s interpreters. One exception which discusses the ‘literariness’ of her philosophical texts, and that literariness’ importance for the philosophical content, is Stephen Mulhall’s ‘Constructing a Hall of Reflection: Perfectionist Edification in Iris Murdoch’s “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals”,’ Philosophy, 72(280): (1997). Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 283.

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that at times may outshine the prospects of contemporary academic philosophy, without contradiction. The crucial point here is that there need not be ‘a philosophy’ in a novel for it to be philosophical. I also think that Murdoch can help us see that on many occasions, literature (and the narrative novel in particular) is philosophically significant precisely because it is not philosophy (as we know it). When Murdoch claims to ‘stay with the old quarrel,’ I take that to mean that something significant would be lost is this conflict was resolved. That is, there is something highly important in the conflict itself, and I also aim to show that the uncertainty that this conflict harbours is an uncertainty that Murdoch thinks to be important, maybe even necessary, for serious philosophical reflection. One thing that we should learn from Murdoch is that both philosophy and literature are open-ended practices. That literature comes in indefinitely varying forms is not news and few would take that to be a threatening fact about the ‘genre,’ but that the concept of philosophy may be (equally?) open to variation is a far more challenging claim. But I want (at least) to argue that the question about what carries philosophical conviction and conversion – in themselves philosophical questions – should remain open, and that a philosophy that delimits itself too narrowly is a poorer kind of philosophy than one less certain about where philosophy ends, or about where philosophy takes place. This is, I take it, one of the core points of daring to remain in the quarrel – which is not to say that philosophy is literature, or vice versa. This means that it would be foolish to deny that there are any connections between her philosophical and literary texts. This means that some of the statements I listed in my first list are just fine if explicated properly whereas others will turn out to be off target. I aim to show that any attempt to spell out what that connection is, and how her novels can be seen as carrying philosophical weight, will fail if her distinctness in urging us not to confuse them is not taken seriously – literally even. That is, if one reads her novels as being on par with her philosophical texts, or expressions, or illustrations or exemplifications of philosophical doctrines, theories, views, one runs the risk of stripping them from their specialness, their uniqueness; hence removing, or disregarding, what makes them relevant pictures of the world to reflect upon. Thus, I believe that something highly significant would be lost if the literature – that we are encouraged to keep separated from the philosophical texts, norms of discourse and argumentative order – is identified as being ‘philosophy.’ Murdoch the novelist is not a philosophical ventriloquist. I do not thereby wish to ascribe a narrow or superficial view of the relationship between philosophy and literature to Murdoch, according to which philosophy is clear, argumentative and a discipline which searches for truth in a serious way; a view according to which literature just becomes something that is mere play, or something that in a very vague and loose sense can, as it were, ‘widen our sensibilities’ or ‘provide a new perspective.’ That is, what is needed is an understanding of why and how Murdoch so strongly emphasizes a distinction between philosophy and literature, without reducing her literary writings to a philosophical side dish or as something ‘out of reach’ for philosophical reflection. In order to show that, I will begin by turning to one influential reading of Murdoch’s authorship that tries to keep the contents of all three lists in mind,

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yet still fails (so I will argue) to really and fully acknowledge the sense in which a conflation between Murdoch the novelist and Murdoch the philosopher amounts to a distortion of both ‘Murdochs.’

1.2 Approaching The Black Prince Martha Nussbaum’s influence on the discussion of the relationship between philosophy and literature is probably unmatched in contemporary analytic philosophy. With the works Love’s Knowledge and The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum brought together NeoAristotelianism with a call for a more sensitive form of writing and openness towards literary forms of writing in philosophy.22 One of Nussbaum’s strengths that made her work formative of the discussion that followed, is her view that literature brings more, or something else, to philosophy than mere illustration and exemplification of philosophical ideas. (The idea that literature may provide illustrative examples to philosophy is probably not denied by anyone.) In particular, Nussbaum argued that literature is useful for moral philosophy since it has an ability to show human moral life in its uniqueness and particularity in a manner that, she argues, philosophy cannot do. Furthermore, Nussbaum thinks that reading literature is a better way to find an answer to the question ‘How should one live?’ than reading moral theories. The general idea is that literature, by being open to particularity and the ‘muddle’ of human existence, shows us something about the human condition that abstract and theoretical rules or principles cannot do. What this is supposed to achieve is a widening of our perception; our sensibilities in general and sympathetic understanding in particular. Also, literature is deliberately emotional whereas philosophy tends to evade emotionally charged responses and expressions, and these evasive manoeuvres result in a distortion of our moral reality. Literature can make us ‘finely aware and richly responsible,’ Nussbaum claims in the paper by the same name in words borrowed from Henry James; at least, literature may present pictures of such forms of life that are, and are to be considered as, exemplary for us.23 So Nussbaum’s turn to literature builds, theoretically, on two ideas: one is that there are aspects of human moral life that, somehow and for some reason, are ‘out of reach’ for philosophical writing. The other is that we get better instructions about how to lead a good life from literature than from philosophy. ‘[P]oetic works,’ Nussbaum argued, are ‘indispensable to an Aristotelian ethical project, even independently of our specific ethical questions,’24 and here she clearly aims to move beyond the thought that literature may function as exemplifications and/or illustrations of philosophical thoughts. Elsewhere, she has claimed that ‘There is a distinctive moral

22

23

24

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). See Martha Nussbaum, ‘ “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible”: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature,’ The Journal of Philosophy, 82(10): (1985). Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 15.

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conception . . . that requires, for its adequate and complete investigation and statement, forms and structures such as those that we find in . . . novels.’25 The sense of the idea that philosophy ‘requires’ a literary form is hard to cash out and a reading of Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch can bring into view aspects of that line of thinking that are problematic. In particular, I take Nussbaum to be writing much more from an inside perspective of contemporary analytic moral philosophy than Murdoch did. (And the ‘outside’ of Murdoch’s position was not merely a consequence of the fact that for a long period of time, her primary occupation was that of a novelist, but also because her philosophy contains more radical challenges to contemporary academic philosophy than Nussbaum’s does.) Nussbaum’s paper ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’ constitutes, in my view, a good example of a reading dependent upon a resistance – but not necessarily an unwillingness – to take into account the fact that Murdoch did not want to fuse her philosophical and her literary work. In fact, as indicated in the Nussbaum quotation in my first list, Nussbaum’s reading depends entirely on her leaping back and forth between thoughts expressed by Murdoch in her philosophical papers and thoughts expressed in her novels. It requires that some of the statements made in Murdoch’s novels by her fictional characters, as well as her characters’ actions, say, their failure to love and their ‘confused’ sexual behaviour, are to be taken as literal expression of Iris Murdoch’s own head and thought. That is, Nussbaum clearly exemplifies the thought that the philosophical significance of Murdoch’s novels is tied to them expressing, or giving voice to, her philosophy. What is interesting here, and what makes Nussbaum’s interpretation of Murdoch’s philosophy in relation to her novels so instructive, is that Nussbaum has a rather clear view of the difficulties involved, and that she really strives to take ‘the literariness’ into account. As her reading of Murdoch developed, the problem of the two Murdoch’s is made explicit, and she addresses it directly in her paper ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”: Love and Vision in Murdoch’s The Black Prince.’26 There, she clearly states that Murdoch’s novels ‘should not be seen as tracts or theoretical arguments for a position, . . . for this would make them, perhaps, accomplices to our manifold attempts to flee the real, to obscure our sight with generalities.’27 On this point, Nussbaum is, so it seems to me, exactly right. It turns out that this insight is one easily lost. Nussbaum acknowledges that Murdoch also holds that ‘the novel is itself an ethical form,’ and she takes this to mean that we are invited to ‘look for connections’ between her novels and ‘more overtly meditative texts.’28 ‘Looking for connections’ might seem innocent enough, but it is my 25 26

27 28

Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 26. Martha Nussbaum, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”: Love and Vision in Murdoch’s The Black Prince,’ in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays, ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). This paper overlaps, to a fairly large degree the paper ‘Love and Vision’ but it is more subtle and expresses a deeper sense of the difficulties involved in trying to extrapolate the philosophical thrust of Murdoch’s novels. This paper was first published in Poetics Today, 25(4): (2004). Nussbaum, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ 137. Ibid.

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impression that the connections that Nussbaum finds sound way too much like ‘tracts or theoretical arguments for a position.’ Nussbaum is thus exemplary because she is methodologically aware, trying to keep her balance between the two extremes, and yet, she ends up turning Murdoch’s novels into arguments, into philosophy. This displays how difficult this task is. I will argue that even though there are many affinities to be found between Nussbaum and Murdoch when it comes to the idea that literature has philosophical importance, there is one crucial difference between them; a difference that is not recognized by Nussbaum which means that she fails to see where their paths depart. Nussbaum’s reading is still anchored in the belief that Murdoch the novelist portrays aspects of the importance of erotic love for knowledge. Even though she attempts not to, Nussbaum reads the novel as an illustration of an already existing philosophical ‘view’ and what Murdoch’s philosophical view is, is already settled when she approaches the novel. This qualifies the sense of the idea that literature does ‘more, or something different, than mere illustration and exemplification’ that I mentioned above. For as it now turns out, Murdoch’s novels are supposed to be philosophically relevant because there are parts of her philosophy of love that are, as it were, out of reach for a strictly philosophical presentation and treatment. So the philosophical value of the novel lies, supposedly, in its ‘ability’ to say something about love that philosophy cannot say, something that Murdoch had thought through but been unable to express philosophically. Nussbaum’s approach to the novel, her way of balancing the slack rope between my second and my third list, is this: Murdoch’s philosophy is already in place when she writes her novels but it contains parts that can only be expressed in literature. Hence we must find the relevant connections between the two genres, if we are to understand her philosophy as a whole. Nussbaum begins her paper ‘Love and Vision’ by calling attention to aspects of Plato’s view love and sexuality as it is expressed in the Phaedrus. Plato’s extraordinary description . . . is, we have no doubt, a description of a certain type of erotic love, a love in which the body’s response to the sight of a beautiful body is linked in mysterious ways with a deeper yearning for the soul that inhabits a body, and a vision of the Good that this soul appears to offer. This passage has been important for Iris Murdoch in quite a few of her writings, both fictional and philosophical. It has a central place in the argument of The Fire and the Sun, receives frequent discussion in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and underlies the plot and action of The Black Prince, as well as several other of her novels.29

Now, I do not wish to combat her claim that the relevant discussion about erotic love from the Phaedrus is frequently discussed by Murdoch. Nor will I claim that it does not underlie the plot of The Black Prince – in some sense one might say that it does. The question is how it does that, and how much of what is being said and enacted

29

Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 30f.

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in the novel should be ascribed to Murdoch. That the same themes are ‘in play’ in ‘both fictional and philosophical’ writings does not mean that they say the same thing. Indeed, that the same sentences recur in ‘both fictional and philosophical’ writings does not necessarily mean that the same sentences mean the same thing. (I will return to that.) That ‘Platonic conceptions’ are being discussed in the novel, does not necessarily mean that Iris Murdoch thereby wrote the novel in order to propagate her own ‘Platonism.’ The Black Prince, as the book is entitled on the cover (a cover which also carries Iris Murdoch’s name), is actually a fairly complicated text in its structure.30 There is a book within the book that is called ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’, but the author of that book is not Iris Murdoch but the main character of the novel as a whole: Bradley Pearson.31 Bradley’s story is framed by two forewords – one by Bradley himself and one by the book’s editor P. Loxias32 – and no less than six ‘Postscripts’ commenting on the main story (i.e. Bradley’s book ‘The Black Prince’); one by Bradley, one by Loxias the editor and four by the ‘dramatis personae.’ It is thus evident that there are several layers of voices in the book (and should we not say, or at least suspect, that Murdoch is distancing herself from at least some of the thoughts expressed in the novel by means of this strategy). ‘The Black Prince’ (the book within the book) is Bradley’s story about his own participation in a recent series of events. Bradley is a (failed) writer, suffering from a writers’ block – a block that ended, one might say, with the writing of that book (his ‘The Black Prince’). Bradley starts writing again when imprisoned for a murder that he did not commit (at least, that’s what he says). Bradley’s book is in turn divided into three parts (or stages on his life’s way?), here neatly summarized by Michael Weston: ‘The first shows us his life before his love for Julian, climaxing with the realization of his love for her. The second details the course of that love over a few days culminating in their escape to a cottage, “Patara”, by the sea. The third shows us their discovery by the father, Arnold, Julian’s disappearance, and the murder of Arnold by his wife for which Bradley is arrested and charged.’33 These three stages of Bradley’s life can thus be further described as a progression. This is merely the frame of the story and most details are left out. Weston’s reading is instructive since he, like Nussbaum, successfully manages to describe the novel using a vocabulary that constantly reminds us of Murdoch’s philosophical work. The possibility of such a rendition of the work easily leads us into thinking that there really is no point at all in separating ‘Murdoch the philosopher’ from ‘Murdoch the novelist.’ Let us follow Weston’s rendition of this text for a while, since it makes a good job in retelling the novel using a highly ‘Murdochian’ vocabulary. 30

31

32 33

Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince, with an introduction by Candia McWilliam (London: Vintage, 2006 [1973]). I will return to the question of the relationship between Bradley Pearson and Iris Murdoch and the notion of authorship in Chapter 4 below. For the sake of clarity I will refer to the book within the book as authored by Bradley Pearson. ‘Loxias’ is another name for ‘Apollo.’ Michael Weston, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 78.

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Weston can help us see the sensible in approaching Murdoch’s novels as expressions of her philosophy. In the first part of the novel, Bradley’s writing, well his life in its entirety, is blocked by his failure as an artist. He is sort of self-absorbed and he is having difficulties to really see and pay attention to the way the world really is. Other people appear as figures whose individuality Bradley is unable to tend to lovingly. His sole ambition is to be(come) a good writer, and other people and the rest of the world are mere obstacles for him. Or, as Weston puts it: ‘All other aspects of his life are subordinated to this goal of artistic perfection. He fails to see other people as individuals, seeing them only in terms of their relation to his own ordered existence. . . . He is shown to us as identifying the good with his goal . . . .’34 After falling in love with Julian (Arnold Baffin’s daughter) – a love that hits him while discussing Hamlet with her – he sees the world in a radically different light and Weston claims that ‘Embracing physicality and the disorder of everyday life, his love appears to transform his vision. He has, through apparently losing the obsession with imposing the form of a willed order into his life, come into contact with reality. He is, he believes, released from his self. His love for Julian is not desire but a simple gratitude for her existence.’35 As this love story develops they run off to Patara, the cottage by the sea.36 This relationship is evidently not without problems. For starters, she is the child of Bradley’s earlier protégé (now a source of envy and of disappointment to Bradley since he considers him a sell-out). She is almost 40 years younger. She has known him, literally, all her life but she is now his ‘disciple’ – their contact was initiated since she wanted him to teach her to be a good writer (and not a sell-out like dad). As it turns out, Bradley can only get sexually aroused by Julian when she is dressed (up?) as Hamlet. Their first sexual encounter is also rather violent, bordering rape, and, notably, Hamlet plays a vital role for the fulfilment of sexual intercourse. Obviously, one need not be Freud (who, by the way is dismissed by Bradley) to see that ‘He doesn’t love Julian, he doesn’t see her as she really is . . .’37 but because she reminds him of the, in Bradley’s opinion, greatest literary artist of all times (i.e. Shakespeare). His interest in Julian is still instrumental – an instrument employed so that he should reach the ‘external’ goal to be a good writer. Things are further complicated by the fact that Julian’s mother – and thus Bradley’s former protégé Arnold’s wife – earlier on has declared her love for Bradley, and Bradley was uncertain about how he felt for her.38 This latter worry plays a part in the events that follow. For Rachel kills her husband Arnold (at least if we are to trust Bradley’s words) and Bradley helps her clean up and leaves – by accident or by mistake? – his finger prints on the murder weapon. He gets sentenced to prison for life, but Rachel makes no effort to confess the deed herself. This is where the third part of Bradley’s life is, as it were, actualized. In prison for life, he 34 35 36

37 38

Ibid. Ibid., 79. ‘Patara’ was a city in ancient Lycia (what is now Turkey) which was famous, among other things, for a temple built to honour Apollo. Weston, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good, 80. Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 142. (Cf. Nussbaum, ‘ ‘‘Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ 136).

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starts to write. ‘Through this transformation of his artistic drive, he is now able to write. His desire for art, blocked by appearing as directed to a determined object . . . which is to be produced through his controlling will, is released into worship of the good. The self of the artist is sacrificed.’39 Thus, Bradley writes the book within the book, ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’ – edited by Loxias, framed by two forewords and six postscripts, and with, in its sole appearance, Iris Murdoch’s name on the jacket – as a story about his ‘progress from self-absorption to self-sacrifice.’40 Weston is able to conclude: ‘All this, one might say, is familiar to us from Murdoch’s philosophical writings.’41 In a similar vein, Nussbaum contends that ‘Bradley persuasively, and in a very Murdochian way, argues that not love but egoistic anxiety is the root of all vices.’42 Bradley ‘argues’ Murdoch’s case? It is true that anyone familiar with Murdoch’s philosophical writings will find it rather difficult not to see any connections between her philosophy and this novel, especially given Weston’s rendition of it. But this reading comes at a price. Weston pays literally no attention to the structure and form of the book as a whole. For example, the fact that Bradley Pearson (and not Iris Murdoch) is the ‘author’ of the main text is of no significance. Similarly, that Bradley’s version of the events he retells is seriously questioned by the ‘dramatis personae’ does not lead Weston to think that Murdoch might want us to be cautions not to take Bradley at his words. For Weston, the mere fact that we can picture this novel’s main story as one of progression – from the selfabsorbed to the attentive and loving gaze of the productive artist – makes it ‘clear’ that this is what Murdoch wanted us to see. The Black Prince thus functions as a more or less unproblematic expression of Murdoch’s philosophy and the fact that it is a literary work of art turns out to be a fairly unimportant detail. Weston’s interpretative line here is, so it seems to me, based on Nussbaum’s reading of The Black Prince; it is just a bit more pedagogically ordered. As I remarked above, Nussbaum has been formative of the strand in contemporary analytic moral philosophy in which the importance of literature for philosophy and the limitations of ‘ordinary’ argumentative philosophy are highlighted and discussed. But Nussbaum sometimes tends to downplay her own insights and her reading of The Black Prince constitutes, in my view, such a moment. Even though she claims that novels are more ‘open-ended’ than regular philosophical examples43 – since the example is designed for a pre-given purpose – she sometimes seems to reduce novels to philosophical exemplifications and/or illustrations, contrary to her own intentions. Nussbaum approaches Murdoch’s authorship by means of drawing a contrast between a ‘Platonic’ and a ‘Dantean’ conception of erotic love. According to Nussbaum, in the Platonic conception of erotic love, sexual love serves the function of motivating the soul to stir towards the good, it is a lifelong source of vision and it helps us 39 40 41 42 43

Weston, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good, 80. Ibid. Ibid., 78. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 44. See, for example, Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 47.

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recognize the other’s individuality and his or her ‘qualitative specificity.’44 The ‘Dantean’ conception of sexual love, on the other hand, presents a much grimmer picture. Sex is sin. Sex blocks our possibility to see the good, it creates an ‘egoistic fog’ around the person and thus makes the vision of the good much harder to attain, it is at best a ‘stage’ on one’s way to a clearer perception of the other or of the good, and ‘the veil of sexual desire’ makes the apprehension of the other next to impossible.45 Nussbaum’s rendition of the two conceptions of sexual love presents a rather harsh contrast: According to the Platonic conception, the love that moves the individual towards recognition of the other and towards a clear vision of the good is sexual. According to Nussbaum’s ‘Dantean’ conception, love is, in its truest form, ‘a passion from which sexual love has been entirely purged away.’46 Nussbaum argues that Murdoch seems to dither between these two conceptions, even though she is a self-proclaimed ‘Platonist’ and since she frequently discusses and refers to Plato’s Phaedrus from which the four Platonic theses that Nussbaum talks about have been extrapolated, she should, Nussbaum contends, reject the Dantean conception altogether and solidly endorse the Platonic. But, Nussbaum argues, ‘Murdoch, more than any other contemporary ethical thinker, has made us vividly aware of the many stratagems by which the ego wraps itself in a cozy self-serving fog that prevents egress to the reality of the other. Her catalog of sins, in fact, closely resembles Dante’s.’47 Interestingly, she again makes use of Murdoch’s literary production in order to vindicate her reading: ‘It is frequently suggested, both in Murdoch’s philosophical works and in her novels, that sexual desire are sins in the Dantean sense, that is, sources of egoistic self-delusion and self-immersion that persistently come between us and the reality of those we love.’48 Thus, Nussbaum contends that Murdoch can only be said to claim, with Plato in the Phaedrus, that the beauty of the body plays a special motivational role in the search for the reality of the other and in vision of the good, but she cannot approvingly countersign Plato’s emphasis on sexual excitement as a necessary part in the search for truth. But what is the problem here? Is the problem that Murdoch is inconsistent or is it merely that she was not as Platonic as she (at times) claimed to be? This proclaimed inconsistency is only the beginning, or opening, of Nussbaum’s worry. According to Nussbaum, this issue is important since the philosophical weight that is ascribed (or denied) to erotic love by a philosopher, says something highly important about that philosopher’s view of the nature of the human being. The crux is, Nussbaum argues, that ‘It is difficult to investigate this issue within Murdoch’s philosophical works themselves.’ For although they do contain many statements that bear both on Murdoch’s relation to the Phaedrus and on her view of the self-gratifying ego – and some statements, as we shall see later, that usefully suggests a way of relating them – I know of no

44 45 46 47 48

Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 31ff. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 37.

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passage in which the two views of the sexual is confronted head-on. What I propose to do here, then, is to turn to two of Murdoch’s novels in which the relationship between sexual love and truth is a central theme: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and The Black Prince. Despite the evident problem of finding Murdoch among her characters, I shall claim that we can find in these novels insights about love that may be justly called ‘Murdochian’. I shall argue that The Sacred and Profane Love Machine appears first to support the Dantean reading of Murdoch, but ultimately does not do so, since there are crucial elements in the portrayal of love that are more Platonic than Dantean. A reading of The Black Prince further supports the view that Murdoch is actually closer to Plato than to Dante, though she complicates Plato’s analysis with a very Dantean account of the “fog” created by envy and anxiety.49

Notice here, to begin with, two things: First, the fact there is no known passage in Murdoch’s philosophical work that discusses Nussbaum’s two views of sexual love, does not seem to lead Nussbaum into a questioning of whether the question of the ‘two views of sexual love’ actually was a question for Murdoch – as if she thought that there are two distinct kinds of love, good love and bad love. We do not need to settle this issue here, but it is worth noting that Nussbaum seems to be entirely certain that her understanding of Plato, of Dante and of the concept of sin, is shared by Murdoch. That Murdoch might have a different understanding of these philosophers and concepts is not an option that Nussbaum explores. Secondly, Nussbaum explicitly states that her point can only be made if Murdoch’s novels are interpreted as expressing a ‘Murdochian view.’ It is by means of this intentional conflation of the literary and the philosophical that Nussbaum attempts to show that Murdoch, at the end of the day, is more Platonic than Dantean, but that she stands for a revised Platonism with some Dantean traits. It is this Platonism that Nussbaum then will go on to claim to be problematic since it ‘sets her in an ambivalent relationship to the sight of the human, that her intense love of the good militates against a loving embrace of the living particular in its everyday nonsymbolic realness.’50 The complaint will then be that Murdoch’s revised Platonism includes a disdainful attitude to the everyday man, that ‘there is bound to be much that is unsatisfying in a mere human being.’51 Thus, in approaching the theme of erotic love, Nussbaum means to show, not only that Murdoch might not be as ‘Platonic’ as she claims to be, but that her adherence to a Platonic doctrine of the good, as something beyond (man), as it were, leads her to a hold a view of love that ‘may contain too little room for the real-life human being.’52 This is what gives rise to Murdoch’s alleged disdain for the sexual real life human being. Platonism is, in Nussbaum’s view, hostile to life and an attempt to flee the everyday, the ordinary and the real. 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 37f. Ibid., 47. Ibid. Ibid., 38.

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Nussbaum recognizes that her reading requires that she is allowed to read Murdoch into the novel(s). She admits, however, that there is an ‘evident problem of finding Murdoch among her characters.’53 Nevertheless, she is convinced that in these novels there are ‘insights about love that may justly be called Murdochian.’54 Notice that this claim does not merely say that there are thoughts about love that resembles thoughts about love that Murdoch has discussed elsewhere. That would hardly enable any serious criticism of Murdoch’s philosophy. In order for Nussbaum’s ‘intertwinementreading’ to succeed, it must also include a claim that Murdoch is just as responsible for the views and deeds of her fictional characters, as she is for the words she actually claims responsibility for. There are three aspects of this way of approaching Murdoch’s authorship that I find troublesome. First, Nussbaum’s approach requires that ‘Murdoch’s philosophy’ is something that is rather easily summarized since she claims that her novels are supposed to express and substantiate the reasonability of that. That is, there is something which is a ‘Murdochian insight’ that these novels express. Obviously, I do not mean to suggest that Murdoch’s philosophical insights cannot be explicated and scrutinized. But I am hesitant towards the idea that they easily can be summarized, forming a specific position or stance (even if we stick to the explicitly philosophical texts), and I am opposed to the idea that this position is best, or maybe even only, explicated by means of fictional writing. Not only does this view go against Murdoch’s repetitively stressed warnings against fusing her two forms of writings and her equally recurring claim that it is always a bad idea to try to express one’s philosophy by means of literary writing. It also runs the risk of blurring and/or mystifying what Murdoch’s philosophical insights are. I mean, if there is a specific ‘Murdochian insight,’ and if it only can be adequately expressed by means of fiction, then we have two further difficulties. One is that the Murdochian insight itself becomes overly obscure and its communication nearly paradoxical. On the one hand, we need to know what ‘it’ is in order to be able to communicate it. On the other hand, we cannot know ‘it’ on beforehand since it requires a literary form in order to be communicated at all. The other difficulty that we are left with is that we now seem to be in need of explaining what it is with literature, (literary language use and literary imagination) that enables it, gives it its extraordinary power, to communicate an incommunicable content. Second, Nussbaum’s reading is entirely dependent upon the possibility of leaping back and forth between Murdoch’s literary and philosophical texts. As we have seen, this is how Nussbaum manages to conclude that Murdoch does not embrace the ‘real and particular’ human being (the human being that Nussbaum interestingly describes as ‘flawed’55). The explication of the faults inherent in the Platonic view of sexual love with its Dantean traits (or residues) that Nussbaum ascribes to Murdoch, and

53 54 55

Ibid., 37. Ibid. Nussbaum claims that ‘while both [Plato and Murdoch] appear to validate sexual love as a central source of value in human life, neither actually does so in a way that fully accepts the flawed idiosyncratic, lumpy, surprising human individual.’ Ibid., 38.

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its proclaimed disdain for the real everyday human being, depends on Nussbaum’s crisscrossing between philosophical texts and the novels she discusses. Third, Nussbaum must be able to localize Murdoch’s voice among her fictional characters. Her claim is not only that there is a specific Murdochian ‘atmosphere’ in her novels, but that ‘we can find in these novels insights about love that may justly be called Murdochian.’56 Since her understanding of Murdoch’s novels is grounded in the belief that they are meant to speak in favour of, argue for, Murdoch’s philosophical views, Nussbaum needs to be able to pinpoint the expression of Murdoch’s philosophy in the novels. One might say that these three points taken together entail the rather surprising claim that I do not think Nussbaum really takes Murdoch’s novels to be philosophically significant on their own, in themselves. Murdoch’s novels are not artworks of philosophical significance, but pieces of literature that have philosophical relevance only to the extent that they express, illustrate or articulate ‘a philosophy’ or a set of ‘insights.’ But now it seems as if Nussbaum holds a fairly traditional conception of the philosophical thrust of literature: literature is philosophically significant if it is in the service of philosophy. I am fully aware of the fact that I am attributing, or on the verge of attributing, a stance to Nussbaum that she does not want to take. But I do think that Nussbaum’s position is less radical that she at times makes it appear to be. This does not mean that Nussbaum’s view is faulty or that her own use of literature in philosophy is inherently misguided. But I think that what I take to be a misreading of Murdoch’s novels and philosophy, are due to a projection of Nussbaum’s: she seems to think that Murdoch’s novels are philosophically significant in the same sense as she has found other novels (particularly James’s) to be. In order to attain clarity here, we need to further absorb Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch, and I will begin with Nussbaum’s attempt to localize ‘Murdoch’s voice’ in The Black Prince.

1.3 Localizing Murdoch That I have employed a Murdochian vocabulary in my encapsulation of The Black Prince is now (hopefully) helpful. Nussbaum begins her rendition of the book by arguing that this passage from Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals serves well to introduce the main theme of what she takes to be ‘Murdoch’s most self-consciously Platonic love story.’57 Love, as the fruit of overflow of spirit. Plato’s vision may seem far away from the mess of ordinary loving, but they shed light, we can understand. Falling in love is for many people their most intense experience, bringing with it a quasi-religious 56 57

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 43.

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Language Lost and Found certainty, and most disturbing because it shifts the centre of the world from ourself to another place. A love relationship can occasion extreme, selfishness and possessive violence, the attempt to dominate that other place so that it be no longer separate; or it can prompt a process of unselfing wherein the lover learns to see, and cherish and respect, what is not himself. There are many aspects to this teaching; for instance, letting the loved one go with good grace, knowing when and how to give up, when to express love by silence or by clearing off. This negative heroism may be very enlightening, aided by the palpable satisfaction of having behaved well when one desired to behave otherwise!58

Nussbaum’s immediate comment to this passage is: ‘So much may be said of Bradley’s own love story.’59 Nussbaum (like Weston after her) takes it to be obvious that Bradley’s story is an exemplification of what the spiritual journey of unselfing by means of love (from self-absorbed to attentive to the other, from near-sightedness to rich in vision) is and is supposed to be. But is this connection between the passage from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and the words and deeds of Bradley that solid? Is Bradley’s life adequately summarized in Murdoch’s comments on Plato’s vision of love? Or, vice versa, is Murdoch’s vision of love adequately expressed in Bradley’s life? And if we suppose that it is, how and in what sense should that affect our understanding of Murdoch’s position? Nussbaum takes it to be ‘evident that Bradley is freed from egoistic self-preoccupation, to the extent which he is, thanks only to the intensity of his desire, not in spite of it. . . . [W]e understand well that love has brought him to a virtuous action extreme in its consequences. . . . It is also thanks to love that he becomes a real artist.’60 Nussbaum raises some doubts about ‘the Platonism of Bradley’s love’ noticing, for example, that Julian says to Bradley that even though he says that he loves her, ‘you aren’t interested in me in the least.’61 Nussbaum also notes that to the extent that they have sex, it is in a ‘dark and impersonal’ way – but she takes that to mean that ‘Murdoch is echoing Plato’s own reservations about complete intercourse.’62 What is striking about Nussbaum’s reading here is that she seems to be certain that Bradley really loved Julian. She also takes it to be evident that the form love takes in the novel, is the form that Murdoch supposedly ‘advocates.’ What is questioned in The Black Prince is ‘The Platonism of Bradley’s love.’ That he loves her is not a question at all. I however have my doubts about Bradley’s love, and I also want to ask who it is that is to be the judge here? Who has the authority to say that he loved or did not love? Is it really evident that Murdoch tried to ‘exemplify’ her rendition of the Platonic vision of love here? Or, is it possible that Murdoch left it to the reader to think about what we talk about when we talk about love?

58 59 60 61 62

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 16f. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 44. Ibid., 45. Pearson, ‘The Black Prince.’ 266. Cf. Nussbaum, ‘ ‘‘Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ 136. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 44.

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In order to raise some further doubts about the authenticity of Bradley’s love, let me quote a longer section, from which the recently quoted words of Julian’s were taken: Julian after a moment said, “You don’t seem to know me at all. Are you sure it is me you love?” “All right, I daresay I can trust your discretion. But I must now ask you to release me from this unkind and unseemly inquisition.” Julian said, after another short pause, “So you’re going away tomorrow? Where to?” “Abroad.” “And what am I supposed to do? Just lock this evening away and forget about it?” “Yes.” “You think that’s possible?” “You know perfectly well what I mean.” “I see. And how long will it take you to get over this, as you put it, unfortunate infatuation?” “I did not use the word ‘infatuation’ ”. “Suppose I say, you just want to go to bed with me?” “Suppose you say it.” “You mean you don’t care what I think?” “Not now.” “Because you’ve spoilt all the fantasy fun of your love by bringing it to the real world?” I got up and got well away from her this time, walking quickly. I saw her as in a vision, her red and blue silk tulip dress spread by her legs, striding like a Spartan maid, her shining blue feet twinkling, arms held out. And now again she had cut me off and we had stopped beside a lorry loaded with white boxes. A unique but unidentified smell, carrying awful associations, entered my mind like a swarm of bees. I leaned against the tail board of the lorry and groaned. “Bradley, may I touch you?” “No. Please go away. If you pity me at all, go away.” “Bradley, you’ve upset me and you must let me talk this out, I want to understand myself too, you don’t conceive –” “I know this must nauseate you.” “You say you aren’t thinking about me. Indeed you aren’t.” “What’s that bloody smell? What’s in those boxes?” “Strawberries.” “Strawberries!” The smell of youthful illusion and feverish transient joy. “You say you love me, but you aren’t interested in me in the least.” “Nope. Now good-bye. Please.” “You evidently don’t think that I might return your affection.”

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Language Lost and Found “Nope. What?” “That I might return your affection.” “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’re being childish.”63

How much of a novel does one need to quote in order to show that the work as a whole resonates a general sense of misunderstanding? To my ears it is obvious that Bradley is not in attunement with himself and his feelings; that he really does not know what he talks about when he talks about love. It is at least clear that these words, the dialogue just quoted, give us no reason to assume that Bradley really loves Julian. I do not think that this is a question about ‘interpretation.’ Neither is it a question about uncovering a hidden symbolism or of literalizing ‘metaphors.’ There is in a sense nothing to decode here. That Bradley is not listening, does not want to be touched (physically or in his heart) is right there on the surface, and so it becomes a question for me to answer how one could have failed to see this, or take it seriously, for just that which it is. In fact, Nussbaum recognizes this as well (how could one not?) but the fact of Bradley’s inability to really see Julian and the fact that they have sex in ‘a dark an impersonal way,’ is, surprisingly, not taken to mean that Bradley does not really love her or that their sexual relationship is dysfunctional because Bradley does not really love her and that he is torn by that knowledge at some, though not necessarily conscious, level. Rather, it is taken to mean that there is something confused with Murdoch’s philosophy about love and sex. So the question is: why should the reading of the book not take what the book says as having a currency of its own, why is the ‘surface’ of the book – that which it evidently says – not ‘deep’ enough? I think that one reason here, one that seems to have guided Nussbaum (and many other readers of this and other novels of Murdoch’s) is precisely the expectation that ‘Murdoch, philosopher and novelist,’ must have had the ambition to bring ‘her philosophy’ to life. It is the expectation that a philosopher who, like Murdoch, proclaims that art ‘is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen,’64 of some sort of necessity must have had the ambition to illustrate her moral philosophy – to make sure that it is seen. One could take these last sentences to be read as a form of explication of Nussbaum’s own view that there is a particular form of philosophy (some philosophy at least, hers in particular) that require literature in order to be fully expressed and articulated. One fairly unproblematic version of this thought is that some philosophical forms of understanding are so intimately connected with emotions and the complexity of human relations that we need to show these, put them on display, if we are to grasp the philosophical thoughts that are meant to capture and be guided by them. We might also ask if Nussbaum seems to have taken that idea as a model for how art and morals connect in Murdoch’s authorship as well? Perhaps Nussbaum’s reading feeds on a misunderstanding of the affinities between hers and Murdoch’s views of the

63 64

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 265f. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 85.

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philosophical significance of literature, in their respective understandings of Plato and of the role and sense of perfectionism in philosophy? Another reason why the shallowness of Bradley’s ‘love’ is hidden from view is the fact that the novel as a whole so clearly seems to follow the same ‘logic,’ or structure, as Murdoch’s philosophy. Nussbaum’s and Weston’s readings are certainly not far-fetched from that perspective. It is, after all, a book about an artist who fails to see the world rightly, is egoistic, but falls in love and then seems to ‘grow.’ But given that the main line of the book in its entirety can be seen as a progression of the man named ‘Bradley,’ that is, given that it is possible to see that he was egoistic, then became infatuated and ended up sacrificing himself and started to write, does not necessarily mean that Murdoch wrote this story in order to portray, maybe even represent, her own philosophy. Is it, for example, inconceivable that Murdoch wrote a book about a man who failed to love? And, if this is possible, why should we not then think that Murdoch was quite happy in displaying the hardness and difficulty of loving? In Nussbaum’s view, it is ‘evident that [Bradley] is freed from egoistic selfpreoccupation.’65 He is, after all, relieved from his writers-block. This means for Nussbaum that Bradley exemplifies Murdoch’s ‘theory’ that love is what makes a man see the good. But does not this mean then, that to the extent that Bradley’s ‘progression’ from an orderly man to an imprisoned one really is a ‘success story’ it is in that he finally realized that ‘external goal’ to be able to write again? The failure to really love and a freedom lost was the price of it. He did manage to write a book, but to the cost of hurting his friends and ending his life in jail. Would we call this progression? And suppose that we hesitate to call this progression, would this ‘reading’ be so far away from Murdoch’s philosophy that it is inconceivable that she, Iris Murdoch, could have portrayed that kind of failure? Nussbaum has localized Murdoch in Bradley’s voice. He is, as it were, the puppet that Murdoch employs as if she was a ventriloquist.66 Recognizing that Bradley’s story is challenged in the Postscripts, Nussbaum also needs to show how these challenges are off target. But the Platonism of Murdoch’s “Celebration” of the erotic has the last word. For in the postscripts at the end of the novel Julian herself, grown older but hardly wiser, expresses the negative Dantean view: true vision is “very very cold.” “Erotic love never inspires art. Or only bad art.” “Love is concerned with possession and vindication of self. Art with neither. To mix up art with Eros, however black, is the most subtle and corrupting mistake an artist can make.” (p. 410.) Love, she argues, is inherently narcissistic, antithetical therefore to the outward-reaching truth-directed vision of good art. This view of the world and of Bradley is, however, repudiated, first of all, since the self-conscious arty prose of Julian Belling rings false, gives us the sense of a stunted personality and imagination. More important,

65 66

Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 45. Perhaps it is worth noting that puppets often are in deep disagreements with their ‘masters.’

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Language Lost and Found it is repudiated by Apollo himself who makes fun of her “very literary piece,” and asserts that erotic love can open the lover’s eyes to the truth.67

Again, one need not reach beneath any kind of surface of the text to note that, first, the ‘Celebration’ that Nussbaum refers to as Murdoch’s is not Murdoch’s celebration but Bradley’s. It is there, in black on white, that the author of ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’ is Bradley Pearson. Julian’s expression of disappointment with love (what Nussbaum call’s Julian’s ‘view of the world and of Bradley Pearson’) is certainly well motivated if her relation with Bradley is the only experience of love that she has to reflect upon. Bradley’s views are furthermore taken to be ‘repudiated’ by the fact that Julian’s text ‘rings false’ and by the fact that Apollo (Loxias) – the God of the light and the sun, of truth and love, and the patron of poetry and art – ‘makes fun of ’ her ‘very literary piece’ and claims that, contrary to what Julian thinks, ‘love can open the lover’s eyes to the truth.’68 I am not entirely sure in what sense it is true to say that Julian’s text ‘rings false.’ It is true to say that some of the things she says has a bitter undertone to them (how could they not have?) and that some of her ‘conclusions’ seem rushed or too dependent upon one failed relationship. In that sense, her text does ring falsely. But should we say that her words thereby are not really meant by Julian – that she does not mean what she says? Does her text ring falsely in that way too? I don’t think so. Bradley’s story is not only questioned by Julian. All four postscripts challenge Bradley’s version of the story. But Nussbaum is able to fend these off on the basis that ‘Bradley’s claims for truth and the value of erotic vision are claims that Murdoch makes in her own voice, with similar allusion to Plato, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.’69 She also notes that a similar view is proclaimed in the novel The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine, ‘not in the thought of any particular character, but, so to speak, in the author’s own voice.’70 I assume that the ‘author’s voice’ here referred to is supposed to mean ‘Iris Murdoch’s own voice.’ But that something is expressed by a narrator within a novel can hardly function as proof that these words are the author’s own opinion, for The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine is still a piece of literature, is it not? Nussbaum takes these ‘facts’ to support her view that the Platonism of Pearson/ Murdoch ‘has the last word.’ The obviously twisted form of love Pearson has for Julian, and the general contention presented in four of the postscripts, are set aside on the basis of the fact that Bradley utters sentences that resemble sentences that Murdoch has employed in her philosophical writings. As Bradley looks back on his life in his Postscript, he utters, Nussbaum contends, ‘a very Platonic and also a very Murdochian theory of vice and illumination that seems a pretty good explanation of what happens to him.’71 So, ‘to the reader of the entire novel,’ Nussbaum contends, Bradley is the 67 68 69 70 71

Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 45f. Ibid., 46. Nussbaum, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ 145. Ibid. (Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine (London: Penguin, 1976 [1974]). Nussbaum, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ 146.

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one closest to Plato (and hence also to Murdoch), and the ‘four postscript writers . . . emerge as Dantean sinners.’72 At this point, Nussbaum extends her comparative analysis, extending it from Plato and Dante to Proust. Pearson’s ‘love’ evidently includes a failure to see Julian and he seems to be focused on his self-fulfilment as an artist rather than on Julian. ‘Through erotic love, again, [Bradley] becomes capable of real art.’73 Nussbaum thereby contends that this is what the novel as a whole, ultimately, propagates. ‘We do acknowledge that eros has opened his eyes; but the fruit of that initial experience, the fruit that is really valuable, is the work of art before us, and the vision that it contains. . . . What this means, too, is that it is the artwork, or the artist as creator of the artwork, who possesses moral virtue and the capacity to see another truly that is the essence of Murdochian virtue.’74 And this is the reason why Nussbaum thinks that Murdoch propagates a Platonism, with Dantean traits, leading to a Proustian conclusion according to which ‘works of art are otherworldly exemplars of virtue, for they show a clarity of vision to which in real life, distracted by jealousy and anxiety, we never attain.’75 The point of The Black Prince is thus, in Nussbaum’s rendition of it, to show a love that cannot be stated, cannot be communicated;76 and this kind of ineffable love thus serves to show us that art (and not other forms of communication) is the Murdochian virtue! ‘I believe that there is reason,’ Nussbaum claims, ‘to see in The Black Prince, the Proustian view that the main point of the particular loved one is to be served up in the work of art. Given that the work, and not ordinary life, contains the vision of truth, what else could Bradley say?’ What else, indeed? Given that the life and times of Bradley Pearson can be seen as picturing man as sexually confused and not open to ‘real people,’ Nussbaum takes this as a warrant for her view that Platonism – and hence also Murdoch’s philosophy – is too obsessed with that which is beyond the human; that the kind of thinking that carries and revolves around an idea of the ‘good itself,’ fails to see and acknowledge the real world and the real human being. Plato’s generous and splendid conception has great problems as an account of human love. In loving the image of the divine good in a person, there is a sense in which we love a human particular in spite of itself. The dedication to a god may be, as it is in the Phaedrus, a profound part of what an individual really is; but still, it is only a part. Individuals are lumpy, comical, surprising. As agents they do not fly off straight to the good but do and say many things both mundane and absurd. Nor is their qualitative specificity limited to what the Platonic lover sees and cherishes. It includes, as well, many flaws, faults, and lapses, many inexplicable ungeneralizable bits of manner and tone of voice and gesture and history. It includes, above all, the surprising fact of having a particular body that shows not only traces of the soul but is the sheer fact of itself.77 72 73 74 75 76 77

Ibid. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 135f. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 46.

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And so, given that Nussbaum holds that ‘Plato is not at all fond of these features of human love and thinks of love as uplifting only to the extent that it sets its sight elsewhere,’ she also feels entitled to suspect that Murdoch too has ‘an ambivalent relationship to the real human.’78 Nussbaum reads Murdoch’s novel as expressing a certain form of Platonism, and because of that ‘there is bound to be much that is unsatisfying in a mere human being’79 in Murdoch’s philosophy of erotic love. This is the reason why Nussbaum feels entitled to express a very personal worry. Nussbaum takes Murdoch’s commitment to the idea that ‘What is needed . . . is a new orientation of our desires, a re-education of our instinctive feelings,’80 as a reason for why Murdoch in the fiction has a disdainful attitude to those of her fictional characters ‘who do not re-educate their instincts.’81 Thus, when Nussbaum reads Murdoch’s novels, she is overcome by a feeling ‘that Murdoch does not altogether like me, that she would have me be quite other than I am.’82 What kind of argument is this? We are thrown back and forth between fictional characters and Murdoch’s philosophical texts, between different variations of ‘Platonic’ themes in literature and Murdoch’s personal taste for a particular human being: Martha Nussbaum.

1.4 A fatty pâté and a plateful of cherries: On Nussbaum (on literature) Nussbaum has probably done more than any other contemporary thinker can claim to have achieved when it comes to bringing the field of literature into contemporary academic discussions in Anglo-American analytic moral philosophy. Nussbaum challenged the predominant tradition of ethical reflection in the Anglo-American philosophy by questioning the conviction that ‘the ethical text should, in the process of inquiry, converse with the intellect alone.’83 This is, in itself, an enormous achievement.84

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Ibid., 47. Ibid. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 503. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 49. Ibid. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 15. It should be noted that analytic moral philosophy has undergone many changes since Nussbaum started arguing this, and that some of her claims may thus seem somewhat obsolete. Even though analytic philosophy now is much more diverse and that there are a great number of philosophers who work in a ‘Nussbaumian’ spirit, it would be wrong to say that Nussbaum’s opponents are all defeated. Mainstream analytic moral philosophy is still the main stream, even though there are other currents as well. For a good overview of the turn to literature in contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophy, see Nora Hämäläinen, A Literary Turn: Rethinking the Roles of Generalization and Theory in Anglo-American Moral Philosophy, diss. (Helsinki: Philosophical Studies from the University of Helsinki 28, 2009).

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In a similar vein, Maria Antonaccio has pointed out that there exists a divide between those who think that literature is valuable, necessary even, in moral thinking, and those who think that all kinds of ‘figurative’ and ‘metaphorical’ language can and should be excluded from serious philosophical thinking. The latter is linked to a view of ethics as ‘centered on obligation and universal principles’ whereas the former – more literature friendly – is ‘centered on virtue and moral particularism.’85 Given this description, it is easy to see that Murdoch and Nussbaum seem to be on the same side, as it were. Both claim that there is no language that is completely neutral. Both think that moral thinking is about much more than ‘obligations and universal principles.’ Both focus on the particular and they are not afraid of using words such as ‘duty’ and ‘character.’ And, clearly, neither one of them wants to say that the form that the philosophical expression takes is independent of, or does not affect the content of, the philosophical thought. But the question is if this is not an overly simplistic picture: there are those who think literature and figurative uses of language are valuable, perhaps even necessary, for philosophical thinking; and there are those who do not think so. I do not think that Murdoch’s thought can be so easily framed so as to fit in either of these camps. Nussbaum links this view of the neutrality of language to Plato’s philosophy in a manner alien to Murdoch’s rendition of it. In Nussbaum’s view, Plato is the origin of the thought that ‘ethical learning must proceed by separating the intellect from our merely human parts.’86 Furthermore, and astonishingly, Nussbaum also wants to ascribe this Platonic view of the possibility of an ethical examination that proceeds from and through a completely neutral language to Iris Murdoch: ‘It is often assumed that this fact about tragic poetry in particular, literary texts in general, makes these texts inappropriate for use inside serious ethical inquiry. Even Iris Murdoch, one of the few contemporary Anglo-American philosophers who was also a distinguished literary writer, claims that the philosophical style, the style that seeks truth and understanding rather than mere entertainment, will be pure of non-intellectual appeals.’87 And then she goes on to quote this passage from Murdoch, which is supposed to support her reading: Of course philosophers vary and some are more “literary” than others, but I am tempted to say that there is an ideal philosophical style which has a special unambiguous plainness and hardness about it, an austere unselfish candid style. A philosopher must try to explain exactly what he means and avoid rhetoric and idle decoration. Of course this need not exclude wit and occasional interludes; but when the philosopher is as it were in the front line in relation with his problem I think he speaks with a certain cold clear recognizable voice.88 85

86 87 88

Maria Antonaccio, ‘The Consolations of Literature,’ The Journal of Religion, 80(4): (2000a), 615. This paper also forms a chapter in Antonaccio’s A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 15f. Ibid., 16. (My emphasis). Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 4f. (Cf. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 16).

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Nussbaum’s uses this passage as an argument for her claim that Murdoch assumes that there is a ‘philosophical style that is content-neutral, suitable for the fair investigation of all alternative conceptions.’89 As Nussbaum understands this, Murdoch is hereby expressing the idea that there are two ‘styles’ of thought – almost as if there were two languages: one cold, neutral, reasonable, and ‘pure of appeals to emotion and sense,’90 and another, I guess we must call it, ‘emotional.’ Now, I am very hesitant towards Nussbaum’s explication of Murdoch’s wordings here. First of all, it is obviously not Murdoch’s view that there is a neutral and philosophical ‘style’ which is ‘suitable for the fair investigation of all alternative conceptions.’ Given that Murdoch is highly critical of modern moral philosophy, especially its assumption that morality consist of two ‘things’ (one of evaluating the facts, and the other to choose freely how to act upon these facts), she is also critical of the very idea that all moral issues could be settled – expressed even – in a ‘neutral’ language. Indeed, if anything, she is suspicious of the very idea of a neutral language in any and all fields, at all times: ‘ “But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly.’91 The longer passage from the ‘Philosophy and Literature’ interview that Nussbaum refers to does not warrant the claim that Murdoch believes in the idea of a neutral language suitable for serious ethical research and that there is a philosophical style that is ‘pure of non-intellectual appeals.’92 Instead, this passage gives us pointers about how to think about Murdoch’s writings (especially the kind of writing of hers that does not communicate directly – a thought I will return to in detail below). What she is saying is that when we address a problem ‘head-on,’ we do (as we should) try our best not to hide anything, to speak as clearly as possible. There simply is no time or room for lingering about. When a philosopher is ‘in the front line in relation to his problem,’93 when he addresses the problem head-on, she is saying what she has to say as clearly as possible, and she will, and should, take responsibility for her wordings. This does not necessarily mean – and this is, I assume, the point that Nussbaum (and many others) have failed to see – that every part of moral inquiry and of moral thinking can be approached ‘head-on.’ I believe that the same moral thought or, at least, the same ‘areas’ of moral thinking can and should be possible to approach from different angles depending upon what we want to achieve. Nussbaum seems to say that there is only one approach that is correct – and given that she rightly recognizes that Murdoch thinks that we can discuss certain areas of moral philosophy ‘directly’ she falsely assumes that Murdoch thereby claims that all ‘serious’ ethical enquiry can be formulated in a neutral language. It would be more correct to say that, in Murdoch’s view, no moral inquiry can be formulated in a neutral language since language is not neutral. One can be just as hostile as Nussbaum is to the view that ethics can be adequately summoned in a theory, and still hold that there are different ways of communicating about moral matters.

89 90 91 92 93

Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 16. Ibid. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 495. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 16. Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 5.

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That is, I think that it is all too easy to go from the thought: Ethical thinking cannot be fully captured systematically in abstract theories

via the observation that, Literature is in many cases better suited for ethical reflection than stilted theories

to the conclusion that, Literature is unique and is the privileged access to the ethical world of the human being.

That is, I believe that it is rather easy to inflate the thought that ‘theoretical forms of language are inherently unable to capture certain salient features of moral experience (especially human difference and the reality of individuals), whereas literary forms of language can.’94 Now, it is a bit unclear to me if we can say that Nussbaum would subscribe to the conclusion of this deduction, since she later has argued for the necessity of philosophical theorizing. But this much is at least clear: the observation about the limitations of theoretical forms of language does not alone warrant the Nussbaumian conclusion that there is a special something that can only be approached by means of novels. That requires some additional arguments: Our cognitive activity, as we explore the ethical conception embodied in the text, centrally involves emotional response. We discover what we think about these events partly by noticing how we feel; our investigation of our moral geography is a major part of our search for self-knowledge. (And even this puts matters too intellectualistically: for we shall be arguing that emotional response can sometimes be not just a means to practical knowledge, but a constituent part of the best sort of recognition or knowledge in one’s practical situation.)95

Antonaccio has made some highly useful observations about this view of Nussbaum’s. Antonaccio aims to contest the Nussbaumian claim that ‘the novel allows us to identify with characters unlike ourselves or permit us to regard our own lives and conduct from a changed perspective . . . . The claim is that by engaging our moral sensibility and judgment, the act of reading itself is “exemplary for conduct”.’96 One way to formulate what has gone wrong here is to say, with Antonaccio, that ‘[T]he danger of this assumption is that the pleasure of reading, along with the sense that we ourselves are “characters in a story,” may convince us that we have already arrived at our moral 94 95 96

Antonaccio, ‘The Consolations of Literature,’ 620. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 15f. (My emphasis). Antonaccio, ‘The Consolations of Literature,’ 623. The formulation ‘exemplary for conduct’ is Nussbaum’s. See Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 48.

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destination.’97 I think that Antonaccio is right in thinking that this is a problem which is in play in Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch. Nussbaum enters Murdoch’s novels, one might say, with a preconceived idea of what the correct moral philosophy is, and with a view about what is wrong with Murdoch’s (Platonism). It is these preconceived ideas that make Nussbaum feel ‘that Murdoch does not altogether like me, that she would have me be quite other than I am.’98 Put otherwise, Nussbaum works under the assumption that she already has understood Murdoch as a thinker, and her reading of the novels does not challenge that understanding. For Nussbaum, it is clear that a Murdochian ‘perfectionism’ should be seen as a struggle to actually reach a perfected state of being and that it is clear to Nussbaum (and Murdoch) what it would mean to do so. There really are no questions about what Murdoch’s view of ‘love and sin’ is. The question Nussbaum brings to the novels is merely whether they lend further support to that ‘Murdochian view’ or not. One of the great mistakes here is the thought that Murdoch’s philosophical voice is one which is easy to hear, understand and appropriate. Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch (and perhaps of literature in general) feeds on the idea that when we get to literature, philosophy is already done. She takes the concepts in play in the novel to be unproblematic – they mean what they mean – and so there is not much room left for the idea that the novel itself investigates these concepts. One might say that it looks as if Nussbaum has projected the structure of the arguments she has developed in relation to other authors – most notably Henry James – onto Murdoch’s authorship. In Nussbaum’s view (although not necessarily explicitly stated and at times probably unwarily accepted) the novel is philosophically significant only insofar as it portrays a philosophy, a moral knowledge, that is, contrary to her own sayings, clearly comprehended on beforehand. This ‘knowledge’ is what the novel expresses, and if we manage to identify ourselves with the author’s moral knowledge as it is expressed in the novel, then we might learn something. If not, the novel is probably not especially edifying. As Antonaccio puts it: ‘The reading of novels is thus claimed to be “exemplary for conduct,” since the novels teach us virtues required to be “finely aware and richly responsible,” rather than relying on rules and abstract principles in our approach to the moral life.’99 Nussbaum’s view is founded on the claim that ‘Moral knowledge, [Henry] James suggests, is not simply intellectual grasp of propositions; it is not even simply intellectual grasp of particular facts; it is perception. It is seeing a complex, concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what is there, with imagination and feeling.’100 Here, Nussbaum, Murdoch and Henry James are in complete agreement. But there are good reasons for being suspicious when Nussbaum claims that the power of ‘the art of fiction’ lies in its ability to ‘create a relationship between the book and the reader and to make the reader, for the duration of that relationship, into a certain sort of friend.’101 As Antonaccio notes: ‘This seems to put the readers of novels at the 97

Antonaccio, ‘The Consolation of Literature,’ 623. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 49. 99 Antonaccio, ‘The Consolation of Literature,’ 632f. (Antonaccio here refers to Nussbaum’s ‘ “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible”,’ in Love’s Knowledge, 148–67). 100 Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 152. 101 Ibid., 230. See also 236. 98

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mercy of the quality of the novelist’s moral attention, since this is what defines the parameter of the implied or “projected” morality of the text.’102 Put differently: novels are philosophical expressions to the extent that they express the authors’ philosophical intentions, their philosophical ‘content’ was clearly thought out by that author, and the form of the novel is employed (merely) because it is held that literature but not philosophy can communicate this content. There are reasons for being cautious here. For example, what should we say about novels that presents characters that we find it hard to ‘be friends’ with? Is it reasonable to say that novels that present truly horrific men are not philosophically significant? Nussbaum cannot mean that. But the idea of ‘becoming friends’ does seem to suggest that literature does not enter philosophy as a form of challenge to it, and literature does not seem to be a reason for philosophical self-examination or reorientation. Literature does not, as it were, ‘come to’ Nussbaum, she goes to it – and it becomes, or is reduced to, something of an illustration of a philosophy already attained. Nussbaum does not want to say this, but this is where her trail of thought, if strictly thought through, leads us. When literature enters the scene, philosophy is already complete. It seems to me that it is this view that guides Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch. Nussbaum is convinced that ‘the whole moral content of the work expresses the artist’s sense of life’103 and ‘sense of life’ means something like ‘the author’s philosophy.’ The problem she has with Murdoch’s novels is that she does not like what she takes to be this author’s (Murdoch’s) sense of life (philosophy). Convinced that Murdoch’s Platonic perfectionism contains a proclamation that we all should be perfect, she suspects that Murdoch ‘would have me be quite other than I am.’104 Platonism, as she encounters it in the life and deeds of Bradley Pearson, is hostile to life. Murdoch’s perfectionism suggests (to Nussbaum) that a person who does not strive to attain perfection is morally blameworthy. These are the two views that Nussbaum has diagnosed as the artist’s, and so Murdoch’s, sense of life. That is, she thinks that it is Iris Murdoch’s voice that permeates The Black Prince (as well as The Sacred and Profane Love Machine), and she cannot countersign the moral outlook that she finds in them. Should we suspect that Nussbaum was already convinced about her own moral vision when she started reading Murdoch’s novel? One can hardly blame Nussbaum for failing to become intimate friends with characters such as Bradley Pearson, but one may question her claim that this is something we should strive to attain. The matter is, as it were, too personal. In ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ Nussbaum describes a lunch meeting she had with Murdoch in her home. More than once I had a Julian-like thought: “You don’t really see me” – especially when, being a great lover of food, I found myself offered only two items, neither of which I could eat – a very fatty pâté, which I hate, and a plateful of cherries, to which I have an allergy. (In desperation, I ate some cherries and was sick for the 102

Antonaccio, ‘The Consolation of Literature,’ 639. Nussbaum, Loves Knowledge, 163. 104 Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 49. 103

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Language Lost and Found rest of the day.) No cognizance was taken of these facts, and I was too embarrassed and in awe to ask whether there might be anything else in the house. She fixed me with her eyes and went on, eating pâté absentmindedly with her fingers. Above all, I cannot forget those eyes and the way they attended to something of immense importance that was, as I say, not exactly outside of me, and that was perhaps more real than me, but that was not precisely me either.105

Now, I wouldn’t call upon this personal reflection of Nussbaum’s if I didn’t feel that her description of her encounter with Murdoch displays something important. Nussbaum puts this recollection to work – not to, as it were, spice up an academic paper, but, as she says, ‘to connect these vague anxieties about the novel, very tentatively, to my personal experience of Iris Murdoch’106 – in order to ‘establish,’ or, at least, to place further evidence on her interpretation of her novel(s) which portrays Murdoch’s (philosophical) thinking as, if not otherworldly then, at least, somewhat hostile to life, to the body and to the imperfections of the ordinary (sexual) man. It may seem strange to say, as I do, that Nussbaum refrains from taking Murdoch’s words and the words of her fictional characters at face value. After all, Murdoch does say that ‘art and morals have the same essence’ and that their shared essence is ‘love.’107 Murdoch does say that the arts ‘and especially literature’ is a study of this path to the truth. Bradley says he loves Julian. Bradley’s struggles do amount to a loss of the self, and he is reborn as an artist. How can this not be to take Murdoch’s words at face value? And if it is not, then what is? One may say that Murdoch’s philosophy and the things that Pearson says, as well as the structure the moral development and of the novel, go too nicely together. It is too easy to make connections. But Nussbaum does not seem to take Murdoch or her fictional characters at their words in this sense: she treats Bradley Pearson’s words as statements, as assertions, made to express, or bring to life, a philosophical thesis. One can see how this is tempting since Pearson from time to time nearly can be said to be quoting Murdoch. But is he, really, making assertions? To think of Pearson’s wordings as assertions is, so it seems to me, to downplay the fact that they are his wordings. That is, they are said by him, at specific moments, for specific reasons having (or failing to have) a point in his life. All words come from somewhere and it is merely in a practical sense that the sentences Nussbaum rely on come from Murdoch. (She ‘created’ him, but that does not mean that his words are not his.) If we link Pearson’s wordings to Murdoch, we are muffling them, silencing him. They are not allowed to resonate, be sounded out, tested and measured in relation to the weight and force they have or fail to have in Bradley Pearson’s life. So one might say that Nussbaum – one of the leading propagandists of the value of literature for philosophy in our time – does not take Bradley Pearson’s words at face value in this sense: Nussbaum pretends that Murdoch’s novels are not literature. 105

Nussbaum, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”,’ 152. Ibid., 151. 107 Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215. 106

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1.5 The commonplaceness of the approach I have only gone through one reading of one novel here, and it is clear that there are many interesting readings that could have been studied in detail. But I take Nussbaum’s reading to be exemplary in the sense that it well illustrates the dominant view of how to approach these matters. First, she recognizes the difficulties involved in reading Murdoch. We need to take into account that Murdoch, on the one hand, held philosophy and literature to be ‘different operations’ and that she did not want to present her philosophy in her novels. On the other hand, we need also to understand how that view goes together with her claim that art and morals have the same essence, that art is a ‘truth-seeking activity.’ But even though Nussbaum is aware of the difficulties involved she still sees Murdoch’s Platonism enacted in the novel(s), and since she takes the life and times of Bradley Pearson to illustrate Murdoch’s ‘Platonism’ – which she understands as the view that seeing the world, and particularly seeing one’s other in a moral relationship, is something that we do ‘rightly’ if we do it lovingly – it becomes a relevant question for Nussbaum to ask questions like ‘Is Bradley Pearson “exemplary for conduct”?’ or ‘Does Bradley Pearson’s kind of love really make us see the other, or is it, being a Platonism, too “otherworldly”?’ Literature is, in Nussbaum’s story, something that Murdoch ‘turns to,’ as it were, because the right kind of love cannot be expressed in normal philosophical discourse. Nussbaum’s view includes the assumption that there is something that literature can do that is out of reach for philosophy. As I have indicated, I suspect that Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch is, as it were, ‘influenced’ by Nussbaum’s way of reading Henry James ‘philosophically.’ In her reading of James, she could rely quite heavily on James’s own statements about his philosophical intentions, and they do fit well with a great deal of Nussbaum’s NeoAristotelianism. Whether or not that kind of Aritstotelianism requires literature to be expressed is a question I must set aside here. But I am doubtful about how well this methodological transposition (from James to Murdoch) works. In order to show that Nussbaum’s way to approach Murdoch’s novels and their relation to her philosophy is far from uncommon, I will, before closing this chapter, present a cannonry of literary critics and philosophers who all make similar methodological assumptions: We figure out what Murdoch’s philosophy is and we figure out what she thought about art and ‘the novel,’ and then we try to make them go together, or look for contradictions, by means of looking at how her philosophy surfaces in her novels. For example, the tendency to fuse Murdoch’s philosophical and literary writings runs through George Steiner’s guiding ‘Foreword’ to Existentialists and Mystics. He claims that ‘In the professional life, in the compendious oeuvre of Iris Murdoch, philosophy and literature have been strictly inseparable.’108 Not only can Murdoch’s philosophy be discerned in her novels, but the essays of Existentialists and Mystics ‘point not only to a prodigal philosophic content, but to Murdoch the novelist.’109 To say

108 109

Steiner, ‘Foreword,’ x. Ibid.

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that Murdoch’s philosophical and literary texts are ‘inseparable’ is to suggest that they also communicate, argue or function in similar ways, and it is to thoroughly downplay the fact that Murdoch was extremely careful not to confuse the two (literature and philosophy). One of the most recent, and perhaps clearest, contributions to this chorus is Miles Leeson’s Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist.110 Leeson explicitly goes against all Murdoch’s warnings and criticizes interpreters who take them seriously. He starts off from Graham Martin’s claim that ‘Murdoch comes to literature as a philosopher; her own novels reflect her philosophical interest and her general statements about the novel connect it, not with literary tradition, but with the history of philosophy.’111 The general idea is that Murdoch is a ‘philosophical novelist’ and that her novels are bluntly to be seen as philosophy. They are literature, sure, but their value is to be judged in terms of how well they express her philosophy. Leeson is, of course, aware that he approaches the novel in exactly the way Murdoch warns us not to. Thus, he needs to find a way to warrant that kind of reading. His idea is, simply, that Murdoch is not to be trusted when she states that philosophy and literature are different operations and that she does not think that her philosophy influences her work as a novelist. Leeson thus argues that it is a mistake to take Murdoch ‘at face value’ when she distances herself from the epithet ‘philosophical novelist’ or when she rather starkly and repeatedly claims that we should not fuse her work in the two fields.112 He also goes to great length in trying to show that Murdoch was consistently contradicting herself in interviews when she on the one hand denied that she expressed her philosophy in her novels (my second list) and still claimed that art (and especially literature) was a truth-seeking activity (my third list).113 Leeson’s reading of Murdoch as a ‘philosophical novelist’ thus depends on the assumption that Murdoch’s constantly repeated warnings were not seriously meant and they should not be taken at face value (which I guess we should understand to mean that Murdoch did not mean it, or that she meant something else than what she repetitively stressed). Alternatively, Murdoch was confused – ignorant to the ‘fact’ that she actually was writing philosophical novels, even though she tried very hard not to.114 Leeson is not, however, as extreme as one might think. There are a great number of literary critics and philosophers (though not as many) who simply take Murdoch’s novels to be straightforwardly philosophical expressions. David J. Gordon describes her fiction as ‘conceptually bold’ because philosophy is so clearly integrated in her novels. ‘From Plato she has resourcefully assimilated the idea that images are illusions,

110

Miles Leeson, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). Graham Martin, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Symbolist Novel,’ The British Journal of Aesthetics, 5: (1965), 297. (Also quoted in Leeson, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist, 1). 112 Leeson, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist, 16. 113 Ibid. 114 Leeson finds further support for this kind of ‘reading’ in Guy Backus’s Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher, the Philosopher as Novelist (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986) and Peter Wolfe’s The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels (Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1966). 111

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from Wittgenstein the idea that ultimate truth lies in silence, and from Simone Weil the idea that the ego must be stripped even of the consolation of suffering.’115 Gordon does not only claim that novels are expressions of her philosophy, but he also seems to think that Murdoch’s philosophy can be summoned as a collection of three ‘positions’: Plato’s, Wittgenstein’s and Weil’s. Sharon Kaehele and Howard German make clear that the attempts to fuse literature and philosophy are ‘seldom successful.’ But, there is one exception: ‘one modern philosopher-novelist, Iris Murdoch, has succeeded in creating genuine fictional worlds which are enriched but not dominated by her philosophical interests.’116 They notice for example that Murdoch, following Simone Weil, claims (in her philosophical texts), that ‘we need a new vocabulary of attention.’117 This is, they argue, the point of The Bell: it ‘gives us’ this vocabulary.118 Leeson presents the reception of Murdoch’s novels as guided by Conradi’s wellknown work on Murdoch. In Leeson’s view, Conradi (who tries to take Murdoch ‘at face value’) fails to understand Murdoch’s novels because he does not see just how much philosophy there is in them. I want to suggest that maybe Conradi and Leeson are not as far apart as Leeson thinks. It is certainly true that Conradi is much more careful when it comes to the ‘face value’ of Murdoch’s words. But both Conradi and Leeson agree on what is at stake: if Murdoch’s novels contain or express Murdoch’s philosophy, then she is a philosophical novelist. They both claim to have fully grasped what ‘Murdoch’s philosophy’ supposedly designates – the sense and range of the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ are determined, and it is also assumed that these particular demarcations were clear to Murdoch too. Furthermore, Conradi is almost as comfortable in leaping back and forth between the fiction and the novels as Leeson is. For example, Conradi describes Murdoch’s imagination as ‘dualist.’ He means to say that Murdoch continuously worked with binary oppositions, playing out the saint and the artist, the real and the apparent, love and effectuation, against each other. Interestingly, what he sees is that Murdoch’s philosophical themes have their counterparts in specific novels: ‘ “The Sublime and the Good,” The Nice and the Good, existentialist and mystic, neurotic and conventional, The Fire and the Sun, Nuns and Soldiers.’119 Murdoch’s ‘Platonism’ is everywhere enacted: ‘many novels turn on the paradox of two worlds, one ordinary, one spiritual, and two heroes, one contemplative, one active.’120 It is also instructive to observe just how easily Conradi moves between Murdoch’s philosophical papers and her novels. Formulations such as ‘She wrote in

115

David J. Gordon, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing,’ Twentieth Century Literature, 36(2): (1990), 115. 116 Sharon Kaehele and Howard German, ‘The Discovery of Reality in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell,’ MLA, 82(7): (1967), 554. 117 Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 293. See also ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 327. 118 Kaehele and German, ‘The Discovery of Reality in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell,’ 563. 119 Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 210. See also Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000b), 22. 120 Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, 210.

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The Black Prince that . . .’121 are not uncommon. For Conradi, Murdoch’s novels are not exactly plain expressions of her philosophy, but her philosophy is there and is ‘tested’ against its opposing reality. There’s the ‘Platonic man’ (which Murdoch liked) and the ‘real man’ which Murdoch thought could do better. Conradi takes this battle to be played out in her novels. Elisabeth Dipple has argued along similar lines. In her philosophy Murdoch advocated Platonism. In her novels this picture is complicated by the presence of comic, hedonistic, humorous men – ‘real’ men.122 Conradi, and following him Dipple and Antonaccio, find it important to keep the philosophical production apart from the literary for two main reasons. The first is that Murdoch says so. The other is more complex. They all three share the idea that the conflation of the two spheres runs the risk of diminishing them both. I think that they are exactly right in thinking that we distort Murdoch’s philosophy if we think of it as expressed (in any simple way) in her novels. They also want to stress that it is important to retain a sense of a novelist’s ‘artistic freedom.’123 It is clear that Murdoch’s sense of ‘artistic freedom’ must be taken into account. We must also consider what she thinks about the concept of the ‘artwork’ (for novels are, for her, first and foremost that). We do run the risk of distorting her philosophy if we simply think that it is being straightforwardly expressed in her novels. (So there is a lot I agree with here.) The way these points are brought to life in their readings of Murdoch’s novels, and in their discussions of the relationship between philosophy and literature, still does not seem to me right. For what the ‘artistic freedom’ and the ‘not mere illustrations’ boil down to, in their respective accounts, gives the impression that Murdoch is expressing her philosophy in her novels, only not wholeheartedly. Rather, the philosophy is enacted in order to be tested and perhaps even contradicted. Murdoch’s novels thus become her own little laboratory. No matter how otherworldly and confused ‘Platonism’ appears in her novels, it is still her philosophy. Her novels constitute the place where, in Conradi’s words, ‘philosophers attack their own faults.’124

121

Peter J. Conradi, ‘Laughing at Something Tragic: Murdoch as Anti-Moralist,’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, eds. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 60. See also Peter J. Conradi, ‘Oedipus, Peter Pan and Negative Capability: On Writing Iris Murdoch’s Life,’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Sabina Lovibond’s Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) can be seen as a work in a similar spirit. It ‘draws,’ she says ‘upon both the Philosophy and the fiction of Iris Murdoch (two genres which she herself, incidentally, regarded as radically distinct)’. Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, vii. See also Nora Hämäläinen’s review of Lovibond’s work in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, for a more detailed description and criticism of Lovibond’s conflation of Murdoch’s philosophical and literary texts. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27746-iris-murdoch-genderand-philosophy/. 122 Elisabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982), 46. 123 Antonaccio claims for example that ‘Murdoch’s philosophical thought has an integrity and importance of its own that deserves a systematic . . . treatment on its own terms’ and notes that Murdoch consistently ‘defended the autonomy of art and the artist from the obligation to serve any explicit social, moral, or political cause.’ Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, 18f. 124 Conradi, ‘Oedipus, Peter Pan and Negative Capability: On Writing Iris Murdoch’s Life,’ 193.

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Thus, even though one notices that it is wrong to say that Murdoch’s philosophy is exemplified in her novels, Conradi, Dipple and Antonaccio, all end up expressing a Nussbaum-like reading: Murdoch’s Platonism is ‘otherworldly’ and it is tested against ‘real men’ in her novels, if not approvingly portrayed. This particular line of thought is also expressed by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner who describe Murdoch as ‘a working moral philosopher and practising novelist whose fiction tests and contests the moral stances to which she commits herself in her philosophical essays (despite the fact that she said repeatedly that she did not want philosophy to intrude her fictional writing).’125 Again, Murdoch’s philosophy is there, it is just that it is not seriously meant, but tested and even contested: ‘her novels do not function as mere illustrations of her moral philosophy but as meditations on, and counterpoints to, the positions she puts forward there.’126 Rowe and Horner are right in suggesting that Murdoch’s novels do not function as ‘mere illustrations of her moral philosophy’ (whatever that would be?), but they nevertheless are convinced that her philosophy is ‘expressed’ in the novels. How else could they be ‘tested,’ indeed (and surprisingly) contested in the novels? A slightly more modest reading, that still follows the same line of thought, can be found in Heather Widdows’ interpretation. [Murdoch’s] novels, as her philosophy, reveal her perennial preoccupation with goodness and what makes people good and evil, as well as exploring the nature of religion in a secular world. Yet, Murdoch declares that she is not a philosophical novelist, in the sense that she does not wish to make a philosophical point, but rather, philosophy is revealed in her novels simply because that is her expertise. . . . Murdoch’s novels at best provide a tangential exploration of her philosophical ideas and although at times they help to provide examples of how Murdoch envisages the good featuring in the reality of individual lives, they also present a very different, even conflicting, picture to that of her philosophy.127

To say that Murdoch’s novels and her philosophy are preoccupied with similar problems is, so it seems to me, innocent enough. But when Widdows goes on to say that the novels explore Murdoch’s philosophy, exemplify how Murdoch thought a good life ought to be led, and claims (like Conradi and Rowe and Horner) that her novels present a ‘conflicting picture’ to her philosophy, literature is again reduced to a form of philosophical experimentation. Tony Milligan also seems to think of Murdoch’s novels as a space where Murdoch tests her philosophical ideas. Milligan notices that ‘Iris Murdoch’s novels are not intended to convey any single definite philosophical message,’ but then goes on to

125

Rowe and Horner, ‘Introduction: Art, Morals, and “The Discovery of Reality”,’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, eds. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1. 126 Ibid. 127 Heather Widdows, The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), 7.

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claim that ‘it is arguable that sometimes this is just what they do. She may be classified as a philosophical novelist, but not in the same sense as Sartre, Camus or Simone de Beauvoir.’128 His idea is that Murdoch’s philosophical views of chance and contingency are central to her moral philosophy – and it is clear that these are important notions to Murdoch – and that Murdoch’s view of them are often ‘more successfully’ discussed in the novels than in the ‘philosophical text.’129 A somewhat different take on these issues can be found in Bran Nicol’s approach. Nicol notes that the ‘common critical procedure in examining Murdoch’s writing has been to measure her novels against her philosophy, to consider (for example) whether the behaviour of her characters and the events depicted in her plots exemplify or compromise her ethical principles.’130 He takes this approach to be ‘understandable’ because of ‘the similarity between the scenarios repeatedly presented in her novels and the issues dealt with in her non-fiction.’131 Nicol wants to ‘turn this relationship around,’ but not by means of asking whether or not we are right in the assumption that her philosophy is expressed in her novels, but by arguing that ‘her key philosophical concerns might usefully be regarded as fundamentally literary problems.’132 The ‘sameness’ is thus not in question. What is in question is whether the (similar) themes are best characterized as ‘philosophical’ or ‘literary’ problems, but what Murdoch has to say about whatever we may call these problem, is the same in both ‘genres.’ What unites these slightly disparate voices into a unanimous choir is first, the idea that our understanding of Murdoch’s novel depends on how we answer the question ‘Is Murdoch’s philosophy expressed in her novels or not?,’ and second (and perhaps even more importantly) on a shared sense that what Murdoch’s philosophy is, is a question that is already answered (and if not, not hard to attain a clear sense of). If we understand her philosophy, we understand her novels.133 (Nicol’s alternative is ‘If we understand her novels, we understand her philosophy.’) No one seems to think that Murdoch’s philosophy might be hard to understand. One can also see a tendency to think that we see Murdoch’s thought enacted in the novels because there are references to other philosophers whom she admires, Plato, Wittgenstein, Weil, etc. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, what these philosophers say are also taken to be knowledge easily attained and further transmitted. What ‘the philosophical’ is, is not treated as an open question. If a philosopher’s ‘account’ is ‘in the novel’ then the novel ‘is philosophical.’ But the level at which this agreement can be seen does not necessarily yield likeness in interpretation of the novels. What the novel then ‘says’ is depending on what one takes Murdoch’s philosophy to be, and how one understands the supposed presence of that philosophical ‘view’ in the novels. Thus, The Black Prince turns out to be about very different things, depending on what one takes ‘Murdoch’s philosophy’ to designate. 128

Tony Milligan, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Mortal Asymmetry,’ Philosophical Investigations, 30(2): (2007), 156. Ibid. 130 Bran Nicol, ‘The Curse of The Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative,’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 100. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid. 133 This view was first and perhaps most clearly developed by Wolfe in A Disciplined Heart. 129

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If one holds the view that the presence of ‘philosophical sentences’ – that is, the fact that a character utters a sentence that resembles something Murdoch says in her philosophy – is evidence enough for the claim that Murdoch thereby expresses her philosophy, then one might either come to think, as Conradi does, that ‘Her novel The Black Prince (1973) is in part a Neoplatonic manifesto.’134 And if one thinks that the philosophy expressed in those sentences does not really look all too convincing, then one might come to the conclusion that her novels contradict or question or test her philosophy. Rowe and Horner, and Conradi at times, express this view. Bran Nicol actually comes close to reading The Black Prince in that light. Nicol thinks of The Black Prince as a ‘postmodernist novel’ since it has a ‘paratextual structure’ and ‘never allows its reader to forget that storytelling is not an “innocent act”.’135 Nicol knows that Murdoch is a self-proclaimed realist, even though it is a bit unclear what that term means to him. This makes it hard for him to see how one can be a ‘realist’ and still believe what The Black Prince, according to Nicol, shows: that ‘Narrative is selective and partial.’136 Since philosophical expression and literary form do not seem to go hand in hand, Nicol ‘concludes’ that ‘the experimentalism of The Black Prince implicitly deconstructs Murdoch’s favoured mode, realism.’137 If one, in a Nussbaumian fashion, takes the fact that Bradley Pearson’s story can be seen as a progression to be a clear enough marker that Murdoch wanted to portray that, then one might feel inclined to ask with (Nussbaum and) Gillian Dooley: ‘How can a narrator such as Bradley Pearson, who is patently misguided throughout much of the book’s action, convince us that at the time of writing he has attained true wisdom from his ordeals?’138 If one is as convinced as Gordon is, that (a) Wittgenstein’s position is that ‘the ultimate truth lies in silence’; (b) that this ‘position’ was wholeheartedly and without any alterations adopted by Murdoch; and (c) that Murdoch’s novels are ‘informed by her philosophy,’ then this may seem as a good description of The Black Prince: Murdoch is quite of her age in skeptically associating absolute truth with silence, and frankly accepting the paradoxical goal of a language-destroying language, a myth-destroying myth. Among the novels the strenuously sententious The Black Prince best clarifies the nature of this paradox. On the one hand, the protagonist lover/artist (love and art being the only psychological means of transcendence), has been inspired to achieve “the only truth that matters,” the only truth in fact that is possible. On the other hand, his mentor, Loxias/Apollo, has taught him “the 134

Peter Conradi, ‘Editor’s Preface,’ i in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), xxiv, in the footnote marked ‘*’. 135 Bran Nicol, ‘Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel,’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, eds. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 22. 136 Ibid., 22f. 137 Ibid. 138 Gillian Dooley, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Use of First-person Narrative in The Black Prince,’ English Studies, 2: (2004), 134.

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Language Lost and Found absolute spiritual necessity of silence,” so that this “rough magic” of art, however inspired, can but “hover upon the brink of silence and but teach ‘an ineffable understanding beyond words’. ”139

Scott H. Moore also flirts with the ineffable but in a more modest way. He notes that ‘Murdoch claimed that her fiction-writing and her philosophy-writing were entirely different endeavours,’ but he also claims, in the same breath, that ‘Her readers, of course, know better.’140 His general thesis is that ‘Murdoch believes that fiction can show what philosophy can only say.’141 The say/show distinction is nearly always problematic. It may, of course, be taken to mean something completely unproblematic, for example, that it may be impossible to fully describe a painting over the phone so I might want you to see it for yourself. Also, we may think of it in terms of the kind of knowing that requires something else than mere instruction (I give you a piece of information and then you know it). Think about activities such as riding a bike. I may instruct you about how one does it (‘Don’t look down on your feet, but keep your eyes latched onto something far away!’), but the riding of the bike is still an activity for you to learn to master for yourself. I can’t do it for you and you don’t know it before you have mastered it yourself. (In this respect, philosophy – the activity and not the assemblage of what purports to be ‘the doctrines of the philosophers’ – clearly is very much like riding a bike; which is to say that we philosophers should not worry too much about inventing the wheel again but a great deal about what it means to keep one’s balance . . .) But then again, the distinction between saying and showing itself does not say very much. We should also note that the say/show distinction in Scott H. Moore’s version of it, is not the distinction often aligned to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – which is frequently taken to mean that Wittgenstein argued for the necessity and value of an ineffable, mystic, ‘quiet’ truth – since philosophy, in Moore’s version, can say that which literature ‘shows.’ So Scott H. Moore’s view is here closer to the claim that no one can ride a bike for you, than he is to the claim that literature can show something that philosophy cannot say. On the other far end, we find austere forms of ineffability, which claims to, literally, move us beyond the realm of sense. This is, I take it, what Gordon’s ‘Wittgensteinian’ silence, which he ascribes to Murdoch, is meant to ‘designate.’ I guess that Nussbaum’s ‘Platonic’ sense of love that she ascribes to Murdoch is meant to be unspeakable to a slightly lesser degree . . . Scott H. Moore’s position is, as it were, on the verge of expressing ‘it.’ (Slightly less silent, but not yet a whisper). I am doubtful to what extent the distinction between saying and showing will give us what we want. In a sense, one might say that Scott H. Moore is interesting because he does not need the distinction. I want to say that that Scott H. Moore points to parts

139

Gordon, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing,’ 117f. Scott H. Moore, ‘Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers: What they Say and What They Show,’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, eds. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 101. 141 Ibid. 140

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of philosophy that cannot be taught. But ‘cannot be taught’ does not translate to ‘cannot be said.’ The merit of that Scott H. Moore’s view is that he may lead us to appreciate the importance of thoughts that ‘cannot be taught,’ but that has nothing to do with the say/ show distinction in more pregnant versions of it where it pertains to gesture beyond the limits of language or even to be crossing the bounds of sense. As the first reason why we should be suspicious of the say/show distinction one can note that if ‘it’ cannot be said in philosophy (wherever that is!), then how could it possibly be shown in literature (wherever that is. . .)? For does not literature, like philosophy, dwell in, feed on and investigate our language too? And so the problem is: how can a piece of language – be it a philosophical text or a literary one – carry enough sense so as to show something that cannot be said? And if it cannot show anything without saying it, there’s not much sense to the distinction. Furthermore, in all versions of it that reach beyond the platitudinous sense, the distinction seems to require an end to language and an idea (clear enough) of what lies ‘beyond’ it. These are two thoughts that I take to be empty. And, so, I will argue that although it may nudge us in the right direction, the distinction saying/showing must, at the end of the day, be overcome.

1.6 Preparatory summary: The appearance of paradox The dialectic of this chapter is meant to bring into view that many readings of Murdoch’s authorship go wrong because they assume that the difficulty regarding Murdoch’s two careers can be unravelled by means of responding to the question ‘Is Murdoch’s philosophy expressed in her novels or not?’ If we assume that it is, then we seem to end up with a form of enactment of ideas which seem to remain close to her philosophy on several critical points, and they also appear to be depending upon a picture of the human and of love and knowledge that is hard to accept (and indeed hard to square with other parts of Murdoch’s philosophy). But if we assume that the novels don’t express her philosophy, then it becomes more or less impossible to have anything to say about her novels, since they talk a great deal about philosophical themes and figures close to Murdoch’s heart. Nussbaum’s way of approaching and explicating Murdoch is, indeed, exemplary. Not only in the sense that she is one of the most read advocates of ‘the literary turn’ and thus formative of that ‘tradition’ (and thus an entrance into Murdoch’s world for many); and not only because she so clearly represents the stance taken by interpreters that muffle Murdoch’s warnings not to fuse her participations in different fields of discourse. But she also represents a common, and in my view extremely problematic, position according to which literature is something we turn to because there is something that philosophy (as we know it) cannot do. The necessity of literature is linked to a proclaimed ability to show something that philosophy cannot say (and definitely not show). Philosophy is not merely running out of arguments, it is running out of words, it is proclaimed to be dumbstruck at its most crucial moment, confined

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to remain silent about something, some ‘thing,’ that resists philosophical wording. Our world is (again) carved up in two halves: there’s the space of philosophical thought and reason arguments and facts, and there’s ‘the other,’ the world of – what? Emotions? The unreasonable? The mystical? All varieties of ‘the ineffable’ appear to me troublesome. I am pushing it, I know, but it seems to me that the insistence on a particular field of inquiry that philosophy is unable to grasp, but which literature somehow manages to display, on the one hand, resurrects the ideas it was trying to slay, and, on the other, re-establishes the need to explain the difference between two radically opposed forms of language (the philosophical and the literary). Thus, the struggle to bring literature onto philosophy’s table seem to betray its own purpose if ordained in this way. Show the devil to the door, and he crawls back through a window behind your back. At first, I employed three lists which, taken together, may suggest that Murdoch’s stance is a paradoxical one. My lists and my description of the commonplaceness of this approach are meant to bring into view how this sense of paradoxicality has been something that nearly every Murdoch interpreter has strived to respond to – by ignoring it, by emphasizing the second list but not the third or the third but not the second, or by trying to, like Nussbaum, balance the slack rope between them. I think Nussbaum’s approach has the right aspirations, even though it at the end of the day fails to walk the distance. One might say that Nussbaum – and indeed most Murdoch-interpreters that I have mentioned in this chapter – seem to lean towards a more Sartrean picture of the philosophical significance of literature (than Murdoch does). This may appear an uncharitable reading. But I take it that the core of the Sartrean way of thinking about the philosophical significance of literature – as it is presented in his classical essay ‘What is Literature?’ – builds on the idea that literature is fit (more fit or apt than philosophy) for conveying ideas.142 And so, any reading of Murdoch’s novels which takes her novels to mean whatever Murdoch wanted to convey ‘philosophically’ with them, is running the risk of ending up in a Sartrean picture with its strong and consistent emphasis on the meaning of the work as something that needs to be drawn back to ‘what the subject means to convey.’ This means that literature, or the novel form, is reduced to a tool with which the author means to convey something (rather) specific. There is a sense in which Nussbaum’s readings of Henry James’s work clearly follows this pattern, which is shown, at least, in her many references to what James said that he intended to convey. This is not to deny the value and greatness of Nussbaum’s readings of James, for in the case of James, Nussbaum can rely quite heavily on what the author wanted to convey. But in the case of Murdoch, this line of thinking about literature requires that one, as it were, sides with the second or the third list that I presented at the beginning of this chapter. That is, either Murdoch wanted to convey her philosophy regardless of what she said, or she did not mean what she said when she urged us to not let her two forms of writing mix.

142

See Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? Translated by Bernard Frechtman, with an introduction by David Caute (Methuen, 1967 [1948]).

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I want to show that the paradoxicality between my second and my third list is only apparent. If ‘paradoxes’ enter in this chapter, it is not within Murdoch’s philosophy but in the responses to her work of this kind: She said it, but didn’t mean it. She thought that ‘this’ cannot be said in philosophy, but only ‘shown’ in literature. She held both A (in philosophy) and not-A (in her literature). If we do think that literature is a tool with which an author aims to express a specific something – be it unattainable for philosophical presentation (whatever that is?) or not – then this specific something has a content which proceeds and is independent of the literary form. The attempt to say that literature is required in order for a philosophical idea (or view) to be fully expressed, seems, contrary to what is intended, to reduce literature to being a particular form of vehicle for an already achieved idea. This means that the question about literature qua literature as a form of philosophical expression in its own right has yet to be approached. It may be argued that I am entirely unfair when I say that the question about what a philosophical expression is has yet to enter the discussion concerning Murdoch’s work. Indeed, one might even think that this is exactly what has been under discussion. But I do think that the question has escaped the debate in this sense: to ask the question ‘Are Murdoch’s novels to be seen as philosophical expressions, her philosophical expressions, or not?’ is to avoid facing the question of what a philosophical expression is. The mere fact that her fictional characters talk about Plato, or Wittgenstein, or seem to quote Murdoch herself, is taken as evidence that there are philosophical expressions in the texts. But the fact that these words appear in a piece of literature is thereby left aside and the question about what this piece of literature might do philosophically in its own right – that the philosophical sayings that occur in a novel belong to it (and not Murdoch), and that the sayings should be measured against the novel as a whole and not against Murdoch’s philosophy – is a path forward still unexplored.

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2

How to Make a Mirror The Book as a Mirror and the Idea of an Indirect Communication

2.1 Murdoch on art and literature and love The picture of Murdoch’s philosophy that has emerged in Chapter 1 is formed by the assumption that her philosophy is easily framed and often ‘placed’ in her literature. The supposition is that Murdoch uses different devises (literature, philosophy, literary criticism, cultural criticism, theatre and what not) in order to simply convey her positive contributions in whatever form suits that contribution the best. This is symptomatic of the instrumental view of philosophy (and the humanities in general). Philosophical works, theories and criticisms are approached as if they are always meant to be constructive (and not ‘merely’ destructive), and so we tend to think, that philosophy should always follow this simple chart: Problem ›››› Solution or, Question ›››› Answer

It is furthermore supposed that ‘philosophical expressions’ – in whatever form they take – are to be placed on the solution-side. Even though I am highly critical of Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch, I do think that one can rather easily see how one could come to think that this is a good way to approach Murdoch. After all, Nussbaum’s reading of The Black Prince clearly touches upon some of the most central themes of Murdoch’s philosophy, and she has a fairly large amount of textual evidence – both from Murdoch’s fiction and from her philosophical texts – that supports her reading and the connections that she makes. Love, perfection, knowledge and art – these themes are central to Murdoch. And, it is true that the story about Bradley Pearson’s ‘progression’ appears to go hand in hand with Murdoch’s thoughts about how love changes one’s vision and makes one see the world rightly. I do not think that Murdoch’s philosophical voice is easy to understand – even though she has hardly ever written a single ‘difficult’ sentence. Nussbaum, like so

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many others, presents Murdoch’s ‘account’ (if we are to refrain from the use of the word ‘theory’) of this or that, and then goes on to ‘make connections’ between the ‘account’ and the novels. ‘The Philosophy’ is always already in place. Strikingly, this also means that Murdoch’s literature only becomes relevant to philosophy as a means of presentation (of the already existing account) and there are basically no traces left of the idea of literature as a form of philosophical investigation in its own right. It would be less misleading, though not entirely true, to say that Murdoch has no account. Accounts are summaries of philosophical labour but do not represent the labour. It may even be a mistake to think that they capture the essential core of it. Of course, if one summarizes Murdoch’s reflections, the work she has achieved, it will almost by necessity come out as a coherent ‘account.’ This is what introductory books about the history of philosophy or about specific philosophers do. Even high quality (and I do mean high quality) readings of specific philosophers do this. But it must not be forgotten that what we get in such accounts are pictures of what they said. Only rarely do we get a sense of why they said it. That is, the question with which they struggled is placed in the background. This is true of most (but certainly not all) really original philosophical works too. When we sit down to write, we tell the world what our ‘results’ are, what we have ended up thinking. But an answer without a question is not the full story. So if you don’t see the question, you cannot possibly understand the answer in a satisfactory way either. Indeed, I am almost inclined to go so far as to say that even if the question that you see is the question that led to the philosophical expression of an ‘answer,’ but it is not yours – not shared by you, something that you honestly are not troubled by – then you cannot understand the answer. I know that this may sound strange to some, but I am not alone in thinking so.1 I would even go so far as to claim that even if we add a cultural or academic context and display clearly the alternative accounts that Murdoch was contesting – say, existentialist and utilitarian accounts of morality and freedom – we still have not attained a response to the question as to why her words came out as they did. If we, for example, look at Maria Antonaccio’s reading of Murdoch – informative and helpful in many ways – and how she contextualizes Murdoch’s philosophy, we do get true descriptions that help us on the way, but we get only a partial answer to the question of why Murdoch said what she said, why she felt compelled to respond. One can see why one might want to say, as Antonaccio does in Picturing the Human, that ‘The majority of Murdoch’s philosophical treatises were written as a critical response to the philosophies dominant in the 1950s at the beginning of her career – namely the Anglo-American linguistic philosophy and philosophy of mind (represented by the work of R. M. Hare, Stuart Hampshire, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others), and the existentialism of JeanPaul Sartre.’2 But this description reduces Murdoch’s philosophical labour to a mere inlay in an academic debate. Furthermore, and more importantly, it reduces Murdoch’s philosophy to ‘treatises,’ as if they were nothing more than hypothetical alternatives 1

2

I have, for example, at least Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Kant and Nietzsche on my side here. Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, 17.

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to other theories put forward by her ‘contemporaries.’ In my view, Murdoch’s demand on philosophical clarity is much more austere than that. Thus, although Antonaccio’s reading of Murdoch’s philosophy is careful and often well argued, it is afflicted by the presupposition that what we can learn from Murdoch is to be reached by means of sorting out what her ‘account’ was (and how it differs from other accounts) in relation to a specific ‘field’ – more or less clearly defined – called ‘ethics’ or ‘moral philosophy.’ My counter suggestion is not only that Murdoch has no account (or, at least that we distort her philosophy if we reduce it to one position among others in a specific debate), but also that Murdoch did not think there was a specific ‘field’ called ‘ethics’ – at least not if we look at it as being something more than the institutionalized framings of ‘it’ that we see in the academies.3 I do not think we can understand her sayings fully if we merely attain a view of ‘what’ Murdoch said. If we add to that, the how of what she said it (or argued in favour of it in detail), we get a better picture, but not a full one. If we add a description of what theories and views Murdoch reacted against we get a more nuanced picture, but we are still not in a position to claim to have reached an understanding. The sense of ‘why’ that we need to attain a clear sense of, needs to be taken down to the most concrete, to where we get a sense of what drove Murdoch to these reactions. There is a sense in which we need to get personal. Not in the Nussbaum-sense that we should strive to come to share the author’s emotionally charged sense of life, but in the sense that we need to take ourselves to a position from which we can share her worries (or at least come to see what it would mean to share her worries). On this note, Murdoch wrote that ‘It is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’4 So the sense of the question ‘why?’ that we need to conquer is the sense of Murdoch’s fears, or at least a sense of that there is something real to be afraid of here. This, we won’t get by thinking that there is a view that was Murdoch’s, according to which love steers us towards knowledge of the world and towards the good, and that this view is her alternative to other theories about knowledge and morality. All this is, at some level, true, but it is anaemic. A sentence such as ‘love is what steers us towards knowledge of the world and the good’, sounds way too much like a hypothesis (to be backed up by arguments and then measured against other alternatives in academic contexts) to be able to yield an adequate understanding of Murdoch’s position. As I will try to show, there is a sense in which this is exactly not what Murdoch aspired to do. Her view is in a sense much more radical than that: that which we have seen described as an otherworldly form of Platonism, as well as the seemingly bold claim that love is the path to knowledge of the world and one’s other, is already everyone’s view. So in that sense, Murdoch is not offering an alternative view, but trying to uncover a shared – ordinary if you wish – sense that we tend to have forgotten when philosophizing, or, as she says, a sense that has been ‘theorized away.’5 I am aware 3

4

5

For an extensive argument in this direction, see Diamond, ‘Murdoch the Explorer,’ and Cora Diamond, ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,’ in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 359. Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 299.

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that this claim of mine, that Murdoch wants us to acknowledge the sense of a moral vocabulary that we already share, is bound to sound preposterous to many. How can a Neoplatonic use of words like ‘the good’ and ‘the absolute’ already be everyone’s view? Is not that kind of Platonism (‘otherworldly’ or not) precisely that which is not only unfashionable but also impossible to ‘believe in’ today? First of all, Murdoch explicitly states that the idea of the absolute ‘should not be seen as a dangerous possibly heteronymous property of religion (or a kind of transcendent “thing”) but as something innate in morality . . . .’6 She claims to be laying bare something that is already here but not seen – obscured from view. Furthermore, Murdoch claims to be striving to take us ‘home’ by means of making clear to us that a notion of the good as something absolute – as ‘a distant moral goal’ or ‘a condition of perfection glimpsed but never reached’7 – is part of our world, of our consciousness. (And by ‘consciousness’ Murdoch means: ‘where we live.’8) The picture of a return to home that the acknowledgement of the good as something absolute is supposed to bring about, pictures us (to the extent that we are living in the same world as Murdoch did) as being away, as somehow in a self-elicited exile. We are failing to see what is – what actually is – our view. We are not who we think we are. This is indeed a difficult matter, and the full sense of these claims will develop slowly throughout the rest of this book; but as we go along it is necessary to keep in mind that Murdoch’s Platonic conception of the good is not an otherworldly transcendent ‘thing,’ and that she wants to reawaken something in our language which is, as it were, dangerously dormant. But since it is not the kind of thinking we, today, normally turn to in our attempts at self-examination; it is also hard to see. It is as if it’s there, but we don’t know why to look for it, or how. This is, indeed, one of the main reasons why Murdoch thinks that literature is philosophically significant. ‘ It [literature] shows us the world and much pleasure in art is a pleasure of recognition of what we vaguely knew was there but never saw before. Art is mimesis and good art is, to use another Platonic term, anamnesis, “memory” of what we did not know we knew. Art “holds up a mirror to nature”.’9 The sense of Murdoch’s concepts needs to be (re-)conquered. We cannot understand them ‘straight off,’ as it were. One might perhaps say that the biggest mistake that we can see in Nussbaum’s reading (and indeed in many similar forms of Murdoch-commentaries) is the thought that we can easily understand Murdoch’s philosophical sentences, and then go out in the world (or move into a novel) in order to evaluate them. One reason why Murdoch’s philosophy resists such enclosing is that most of her central concepts (e.g. ‘love’ and ‘good’) are not easily framed. Murdoch never falls for the temptation to, as it were, use definitions for the sake of simplicity – if a concept requires constant renegotiation, a true account of it will resist definitions aiming to be exhaustive. One cannot learn ‘Murdoch’s vocabulary’ and then be done 6 7 8 9

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 304. Ibid. Ibid. Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 12. (Italics added).

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with it. She claims that these concepts are elastic, and so she writes elastically, and we must read her in that way too. Love, and so seeing and moral growth, are not ‘projects’ with clear ends. We cannot simply learn what love (and so seeing and moral growth) is and then apply that knowledge to whatever our moral concerns happen to be. This means that the mere expressions of sentences such as ‘love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’10 are not to be thought of as on a par with other sentences that you may learn, and once you have understood them, be able to command, such as ‘ “Bachelors are unmarried men” is an analytic statement’ or ‘ The tallest building in Chicago is The Willis (formerly known as the Sears) Tower.’ There are further complications here. For given that Murdoch also wants to stress that the senses of the terms that her ‘account’ revolves around are lost, need to be reawakened, it follows that they are, as it were, ‘away’, not in play in our culture. This means, in turn, that if Murdoch is not free from the faults that surround her, there is a sense in which we must say that Murdoch herself does not know the language she wants us teach us. This may seem contradictory in more than one respect. On the one hand, she claims that we need to reawaken a sense of the concepts that her view requires, since we (Murdoch included) do not know these concepts any longer. So how can she know that we need these concepts if we (Murdoch included) no longer are in command of them? Furthermore, if the senses of these concepts are lost on us, how can one simultaneously claim that this way of thinking is, at some level, already how we ordinarily think, if we have not had our conceptions distorted by overly abstract theorizing (philosophy)? The only way that we can make sense of Murdoch here, is to say that the sense is not ‘completely’ lost. We may call these concepts slumbering, or forgotten or repressed. They cannot be dead, awaiting the miracle of resurrection. The aspects of the concepts she wants to reawaken are in some sense already in play, but we fail to see them, especially when we theorize about ourselves, when we try to philosophize, and so we obscure or repress the routes to the form of self-understanding we call philosophical clarity. Her project is not to teach us a couple of mystic ideas she herself doesn’t fully understand, but to make clear to us that we are not in command of our language now, and that the fact that these regions of our language are lost on us, means that we have disabled our possibilities of self-reflection and so self-understanding. Thus, one might say that we need to attain a sense of why Murdoch was afraid of the fact – if it is a fact – that what really is everyone’s view is something that we have forgotten or repressed, is something we are no longer in true command of. We must also see that the command of words – we leading them – is not a question that we can settle, as it were, externally or ‘objectively.’ It cannot be disconnected from larger questions about how concepts are inflected in a particular form of life – what place, weight and thrust we give them and allow them to have in our lives. We now need to get a better grip on two related difficulties.

10

Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215.

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First, what does it mean to say that we have lost our language and that we need, as Murdoch says, ‘a new vocabulary of attention’?11 It is pivotal to realize that the idea of a loss of language cannot be disconnected from the problem of illusion of sense, not only to avoid the above mentioned threats of contradiction, but also so that we realize why Murdoch’s problems cannot be that we are lacking the adequate words which would entail that our problems could be solved by means of the introduction of new ones. The problem is that we (Murdoch included) do not understand our language. There are several related ways in which arguments about a loss of concepts may be formed. One is to root the claim about a loss in an historical way and claim that since the world has changed to such a large degree – for example by means of secularization – our concepts are dead and should, rather unsentimentally be replaced. This line of reasoning can be seen as expressed, in variation of course, in thinkers such as Elisabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty. A second way to understand a loss of concepts is to say that it is only when we philosophize that conceptual loss occurs. Such a view has, with some justification, been attributed to Wittgenstein. What I will try to show is that Murdoch’s view does not easily fall under either of these characterizations. For Murdoch, conceptual loss is, as it were, both historical and a result of a philosophical movement away from our shared language, and this loss comes about partly because our pictures of ourselves stand in conflict or does not really frame what our lives in language actually look like. Conceptual loss, in Murdochian terms, can thus be seen as a blindness for the reality of our concepts, and this blindness often (but not always) comes about because we are so familiar with our words that we fail to see that, with cultural and historical changes along life’s way, their concepts change. Thus, self-understanding is blocked. Her response to this general loss of concepts should thus not be seen as a rather unsentimental replacement of old (and dead) concepts, and neither should we see her as suggesting a new language for us to speak. Rather, hers is a struggle to reclaim our concepts, to make us understand them better in their new shape; a ‘newness’ that is not unrelated to historical and cultural changes. (This line of thought is one that I will return to frequently, develop and elaborate on, throughout the remainder of this book.) Secondly, we need to understand how art can be at once ‘the most educational of all human activities’12 and not ‘didactic or educational.’13 I mean to show that Murdoch is not contradicting herself here. In order to see how these seemingly opposing ‘Murdochs’ can coexist in and be carried by one single sane being, let us begin to unpack some of the statements she has made about art and literature and how they relate to the concepts that seem to make her philosophy tick. One of the most frequently employed formulations on this issue is the passage that Rowe and Horner use as a motto for their introduction to Iris Murdoch and Morality (which I also put to work in compiling my third list): ‘Art and morals are, with certain provisos . . . one.’14 Now, it seems to me that Rowe and Horner seriously 11 12 13 14

Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 293. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 85. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 218. Rowe and Horner, ‘Introduction: Art, Morals and “The Discovery of Reality”,’ 1.

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downplay Murdoch’s reservation ‘with certain provisos,’ for they take Murdoch to be insisting on ‘the indissoluble link between art and morals’ here.15 But if we look at the following few sentences, it should become clear that it is not evident that this shared ‘essence’ establishes an ‘indissoluble link.’ This is what Murdoch said: ‘Art and morals are, with certain provisos, which I shall mention in a moment, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’16 First of all, we should note that ‘art and morals’ does not necessarily translate ‘literature and philosophy.’ Art is more than literature. Philosophy is more than morals. So there is no reason to assume that Murdoch would hold the view that ‘Philosophy and literature are, with certain provisos, one.’ Secondly, the ‘indissoluble link’ they see here is, obviously, derived from Murdoch’s claim that art and morals have the same ‘essence’: love. The way Murdoch explicates this notion (here) is to say that love is the struggle to perceive the individual in its or her individuality.17 Seeing, furthermore, requires the recognition that the other is real; it (or he, or she) is a reality beyond me. Art and morals both strive to ‘discover reality.’ Is this enough to proclaim an indissoluble link? It seems to me clear that Murdoch can only with a very large pinch of salt be taken to mean that art and morals are indissolubly linked together. (Can one, for example, say that the essence of running and cross country skiing is the same, since we may engage in these activities to reach the same goal, say ‘an increased lung capacity’? Would that establish an indissoluble link between them? Does not physics and sociology both strive to attain truth, to discover what is real? Are they thereby married?) Note also that Rowe and Horner have – as I did in compiling my third list – deleted the ‘which I shall mention in a moment.’ Murdoch’s reservations against her own formulation are not taken into account. Murdoch makes this claim as a way of stating ‘briefly and dogmatically’ what she takes to be ‘in opposition to Kant’s view.’18 But that which is ‘briefly and dogmatically’ stated as a contrast to what she takes to be a faulty view cannot possibly be understood as an expression meant to guide us in our attempts to grasp her philosophy as a whole. Her complaints about Kant’s view are that ‘Kant is afraid of the particular, he is afraid of history’19 and that the idea of general rules which, according to Murdoch, permeates Kant’s ethics leaves ‘no place for the idea of tragedy.’20 A reliance on rules in ethics amounts to a ‘suppression of history, suspicion of eccentricity.’21 She also thinks that the ‘short-comings of Kant’s aesthetics are the 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

Ibid. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215. Note also that the formulation ‘perceptions of individuals’ does not merely mean ‘other human beings.’ ‘Individuals’ can also refer to (other) things in their individuality, as unique and singular exemplars. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215. Ibid., 214. (See also Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1ff., and 171f). Ibid., 215. Ibid.

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same as the short-comings of his ethics.’22 This means that Kantian aesthetics is as afraid of the particular and of history as Kantian ethics is. It is in opposition to these forms of anxiousness that Murdoch ‘briefly and dogmatically’ states that both art and morals are about love, and that love is about the perception of individuals and that the perception and acknowledgement of individuals or individuality is the discovery of reality. It follows that perceiving individuality (in morals and in art), the discovery of reality, must include the struggle not to avoid the particular, history, or eccentricity and to embrace the fact of tragedy. It is important to call it a struggle: ‘[i]ntellect’ Murdoch says ‘is naturally one-making.’23 The fear of ‘plurality, diffusion, senseless accident, chaos’ is something that comes natural to the human being.24 Kant’s fear is part of the human condition. A difficulty here that must be taken into account is that Murdoch is not the kind of scholar that one should trust when it comes to minute details of the philosophers and ways of thinking that she critically engages with. One more often than not gets the feeling that she is unfair and that she might have done better had she focused more on details and read more carefully (dare I say ‘lovingly?’). Nevertheless, her critical comments are never completely off target and one can nearly always see that she is onto something – something profound and challenging – even when she paints with her broadest brushstrokes. So it is in this case too. One can go into details of Kant’s view and mark out features of it that she has missed or dismissed on faulty grounds. But as we do that, we run the risk of missing what really was her point. Her response to Kant – which includes the comment that ‘art and morals are with certain provisos . . . one’ – comes from a sense that Kant (or ‘we’) shouldn’t be afraid of the particular or of history and that we needn’t be suspicious of eccentricity. That remark is to the point. But this also means, I take it, that we should not think that Murdoch is merely saying that we go wrong if we think that we can, once and for all, lay down the moral rules which everyone are to follow (which is a thought that she truly and justly criticizes), and that she wants to replace this reliance on rules of conduct with her own conception of love as that which is supposed to guide us when making decisions, comfort us in moments of crisis, console us when we are facing tragedy. That response – where rules are replaced with love as an alternative reply to the same issue – builds on the denial of, or a failure to see, what Murdoch’s point really was. Kant’s mistake is, in Murdoch’s view, not to say that rules of conduct will sort this messiness out, but that this is something that needs to be sorted out, or at least, that this is something that can be sorted out by means of philosophical reflection. But this is, evidently, not a simple mistake on his behalf, since the fear of the particular is human, all too human. To understand particularity, human tragedy and eccentricity is, truly, a struggle. So we should not take Murdoch to suggest that Kant’s ‘answer’ in this schematic presentation is faulty and should be replaced with her own: 22 23 24

Ibid., 214. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1. Ibid.

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Problem

››››

Solution

Human life is historical, particular, messy and tragic

››››

A moral rule, or law, should govern human conduct and moral actions.

Human life is historical, particular, messy and tragic

››››

If we perceive ‘lovingly’ we will live justly and choose rightly.

In a similar way, we misunderstand Murdoch if we take her to be offering just another theory among others (as many commentators seem to do) in the same scheme: Life is historical, particular, tragic

››››

Theory 1: Kantianism

››››

Theory 2: Utilitarianism

››››

Theory 3: Virtue Ethics

››››

Theory 4: Murdoch’s ‘Love’

››››

Theory n . . .

Murdoch’s work, as I see it, is focused on attaining a clear sense of our reality already on the ‘problem-side,’ with the goal of making us see the world rightly so that we will be relieved from the impression that these aspects of our reality constitute a ‘problem’ that can be overcome by means of philosophical theorizing, can be settled by means of figuring out which of these alternatives has the most arguments speaking in favour of it. In relation to the concept of art we can see that Murdoch’s reading of Kant here misses the details – even to such an extent that she obscures the strong affinities between her own view and Kant’s – but Murdoch more aptly (I think) criticizes Kant for failing to see the extent to which artists are responding responsibly to our world too. It is true that arts (including the reading and writing of novels), in Murdoch’s view, constitute ‘exercises of the imagination’ and are in that sense forms of love.25 But this is pretty much as far as she claims that she can go ‘in the direction of identifying art and morals.’26 The differences between art and morals – the ‘provisos’ that Murdoch-interpreters tend to neglect – are indeed profound and clarifying: To say that the essence of art is love, is nothing to do with saying, that art is didactic or educational. It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally,

25 26

Ibid., 216. Ibid., 218.

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Language Lost and Found but this is, as it were, accidental. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement. And indeed it is of the nature of love to be something deeper than our conscious and simply social morality, and to be sometimes destructive of it.27

Murdoch’s other reservation against her own brief and dogmatic claim that art and morals are one is ‘connected with sense and form.’ Here she comes back to Kant and to one of the things she thought he got right: ‘The exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention . . . is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly, which we hardly ever do, painful. It is very much like Achtung. Kant was marvelously near the mark.’28 The problem is that Kant, in Murdoch’s view, did not leave room for a tragic sense of freedom, but pushed us to try to think of freedom in terms ‘a prefabricated harmony.’ In contrast to this, and in an attempt to not be afraid of the particular and the historical, to face them courageously, Murdoch notes that love (in relation to art and in relation to morals) points us in the direction of a tragic freedom. But it is not tragic in the Sartrean sense in which we are ‘condemned’ to freedom.29 Rather, the ‘tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves.’30 As Murdoch understands Kant, he was entirely right to think of art in terms of ‘independence, of self-containedness.’31 I must refrain from drowning myself (and my reader) in Kant exegesis here, but we need to take some details on board in order to see how Murdoch claims to be diverging from Kant, and to see, furthermore, how this divergence sheds further light on Murdoch’s conception of the relation between art and morals. For Kant, the aesthetic object holds a specific position in his system. It is almost impossible to understand anything about Kant without going through, what one might call, the ‘hinge-proposition’ of the first Critique: ‘Intuitions without concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty.’32 The condition of possibility 27 28 29

30 31 32

Ibid. Ibid., 216. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Taylor and Francis, 1956), 129. The Sartrean idea of the free agent as someone ‘condemned to be free’ is tragic in the sense that she always must transcend what she (mistakenly thinks her or she) is. Freedom is conditioned by the lay between ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence.’ A human being must always transcend what is given to her. This surely differs from a Kantian idea about freedom as a refabricated harmony, but it is also very different from Murdoch’s view. For example, the relation to the other is radically different in Sartre and in Murdoch – in Sartre one’s other can never be seen for what she is and you can never fully be seen (or known) by them, whereas the recognition of the reality of one’s other is not only possible for Murdoch, but a root to morality in general. Furthermore, as we will see, Murdoch and Sartre have very different conceptions of the human subject and Murdoch is also critical to Sartre’s emphasis on actions and choice in his philosophy. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 216. (Italics added). Ibid., 219. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, with an introduction by Howard Caygill and a new bibliography by Gary Banham, revised second edition (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [1781, 1787]), A51/B75.

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of knowledge, Kant claims, is that sensibility and understanding must, as it were, come together (harmonize) for knowledge to be possible, even though they are two independent ‘sources’ of knowledge. A too strong emphasis on one side will lead to a faulty (sceptical) form of empiricism, and a too strong emphasis on the other side will lead to a faulty (sceptical) form of rationalism. As we, we human beings, go about in our world making judgements there has to be a sense in which these two (concepts and intuitions) come together. Since it is not really possible to separate concepts and intuitions, making an experiential judgement and having an experience are both matters of conceptualization. This means that without a firm understanding of how that ‘link’ works, we have not understood the conditions of the knowledge that we do in fact have. So a judgement (a conceptualization) is of something else (the thing that we experience). What characterizes the aesthetic object for Kant is its ‘self-containedness.’ That is, it is its own idea. It is what it is about.33 The harmony that we may find to be hard to elucidate concerning other forms of judgements is what the aesthetic object is. So in that sense, the artwork does not ‘point,’ as it were, to anything else. To simplify: in art the expression is its own idea; the ‘word’ is its own concept – there is no distinction to be drawn between exemplarity and ideality. It does not stand or fall in relation to something outside of it. If we think of it as a concept in its own right, it is not, as it were, true or false depending upon how it relates to an empirical fact. It is what it is, and now it is up for us to relate to it. When we see an artwork, we see its concept (for, as he made clear already in the first critique, all cognitions are conceptual). So the artwork, and the judgement of it as ‘beautiful,’ are both related to ‘it’ being an expression (a conceptualization) of its own idea. But, to Murdoch’s credit, it is clear that the concept of a concept is here stretched. For example, it does not make much sense to ask about how many things fall under this concept (since it is just one). This does not mean that the artwork points to something out of reach for human cognition, nor does this fact about art ‘place’ the artwork in a so-called ‘transcendent’ realm. One might say that we can see the gist of this thought of Kant’s in the simple fact that my descriptions of a painting or my reflections on a novel (my attempts at paraphrase perhaps) cannot replace the painting or the novel, or do exactly what it does, because its value and/or sense is not determined by means of investigating just how well it represents/copies an empirical reality, a reality outside it. Thus, we sometimes say ‘You have to see it (or read it) for yourself!’ But when we say that, we are hardly attempting to point at something that is ‘out of reach’ for human knowledge, and we are certainly not saying that the painting or the novel is in another realm . . . It is right there. I can point at it or give it to you. Now, Murdoch’s reservation about Kant is precisely that he misunderstands the selfcontainedness of the artwork in placing it out of reach for human knowledge. She wants to say that we ‘can keep, if we wish to, a great deal of what Kant has to say about form.’ But we must allow for (and I take it that she means that Kant fails to do this) ‘conceptual 33

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated with an introduction by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1972 [1790]), §§ 2, 4, 6–9, 17, 22, 59.

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content’; and we should not think (and I take it that she thinks Kant thinks this . . .) that ‘aesthetic enjoyment’ is only ‘a momentary quasi-perceptual state of mind.’34 And since she takes Kant to have placed the self-contained artwork ‘outside’ (while it still is, obviously, something we can perceive), she then takes the fact that we cannot spell it out, or see how it connects with our reality, to come down to a supposed claim about human impotence. Murdoch takes Kant to be describing a ‘failure of imagination.’35 Here, Murdoch gives voice to a rather common misunderstanding of Kant’s position, a misunderstanding that relates to a failure to see what kind of critique Kant’s three critiques constitute. The failure to see this, more often than not, leads to a failure to recognize that Kant is not at all attempting to describe (or claim to fail to describe . . .) something transcendent. A critique for Kant is an investigation into the limits of human knowledge. But we should not understand this talk of limits in terms of a border that we cannot cross (which obviously gives rise to the temptation to think that there is something on the other side, something transcendent). In fact, Kant is explicit about this.36 And a philosophical critique must always work from within. The very idea of a limit understood as a form of fence we cannot force our way over, is precisely what Kant is not talking about. I do not mean to suggest that Murdoch does not see the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent (she clearly does37), but she seems to follow the common understanding of Kant’s view according to which he does proclaim that there is something transcendent. Murdoch’s misreading (common as it is) sheds light on our issues here. For what she criticizes (mistakenly described as Kant’s view or not) is, on the one hand, the idea that the self-containedness of art places it in a position at which is loses contact with our world, and she criticizes the idea that self-containedness of art entails something without ‘conceptual content.’ This helps us see that when Murdoch talks about art and literature as something that may capture an ‘unutterable particularity,’38 she is not thereby suggesting that there is, exists, something ineffable. The phrase ‘unutterable particularity’ is to be thought of as something that stands in opposition to (what she takes to be) Kant’s view (according to which there is something ‘transcendent’), and she wants to, as it were, revise Kant so as to yield a ‘more liberal view of the extent to which it [the art object] might incarnate or express concepts.’39 Murdoch’s complaints against Kant also make it obvious that even though she does not want us to confuse her philosophical and her literary writing she does not want us to carve up reality in two halves. That literature and philosophy are different operations, does not mean that there is one hard world that the sciences and philosophy try to understand, and one ‘soft’ – at bottom unknowable, but still talked about in religious and literary discourses (and read almost in secrecy by the scientific man). The positivistic (here using the term very broadly) separation between fact and value 34 35 36 37 38 39

Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 210. Ibid., 213. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A296/B352. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 28. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215. Ibid., 210.

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or between the world of knowable things and a mystic nonsensical beyond, is precisely what Murdoch is opposing. We may talk about two different struggles to discover one and the same reality, but not two realities. There is not one world of facts, of arguments, of ‘what can be said,’ and another one of morals, of existential concerns, that ‘can only be shown.’ It is more true to say that in Murdoch’s view philosophy and literature share the same object but differ in objectives. This means that we easily go wrong if we try to solve the apparent conflict inherent in Murdoch’s stance if we think that literature ‘takes care of ’ something that is out of reach for philosophy. So, one may say that if something is attainable for literary expression it is attainable for philosophical ditto and vice versa. There is, at least, nothing in principle about philosophy that makes it impotent concerning things that literature manages to express. If philosophy has a hard time understanding, say ‘unutterable particularity,’ that is not due to a fact about a divided world, but about philosophy being too narrowly construed. As a note of caution it should also be said that when I say that there is nothing that literature can capture that is out of reach for philosophy, I do not mean to suggest that philosophy can do everything that literature can do (and vice versa). If one looks at the form these two discourses take today it is clear that the professionalized and institutionalized philosophy that we encounter in the contemporary university, is something very different from literature (which is so many things). So there is a trivial sense in which one does not write philosophy if one writes literature. But to say that is not to say that ‘academic philosophy’ exhausts what philosophy is and may be(come); and it is not to say that other forms of expression are ‘not philosophical.’ Philosophy is where philosophy happens. Furthermore, it would be too much of a simplification to say that these two forms of discourse can be separated by the distinction between fiction and reality. Philosophy is full of thought-experiments and many of them are not only fictional, but true science fiction, fantasy – swamp-men, twin-earths, mystical tribes, brains in vats, possible and impossible worlds, builders with no tools and nothing to build, and other forms of imaginative wordings designating, say, assemblages of rabbit parts. Add to that the fact ‘contemporary academic philosophy’ is relatively young. Philosophy has not always been the professionalized discourse it is now, and philosophers in earlier times have had a greater variety of forms of expression to ‘choose from’ (dialogues, essays, aphorisms, letters, novels, prayers, confessions, etc.).40 There is no reason to assume that the meaning of the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ will remain exactly the same in future attempts at self-examination. All in all, one might say that there are things philosophy (as we know it today in the academies) does not do, which is not to say that it cannot do them. But these institutionalized demarcations are just that, institutionalized demarcations. Logically (or temporally) nothing is excluded. So to the extent that there is a truth in the claim 40

Of course, philosophers can choose whatever form they like today too, but there can be no doubt that the ‘academic journal paper’ is the fostered form, and that that form tends to guide how and what ‘we’ write. This may seem strange because it is no secret that this is not all good: not all philosophical issues can be dealt with in 20 pages or less, and not all serious philosophizing belongs to an ongoing ‘debate,’ and not all philosophical thoughts are deemed ‘kosher’ by the peer review boards of the most highly esteemed journals.

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that literature can convey things that philosophy cannot convey, this should not be taken to mean that literature has ‘access’ to a secret room that philosophy may not, or cannot, enter. Indeed, I do not think that it should be taken to mean anything much more than the claim that contemporary philosophy may have framed itself too narrowly; which also means to suggest that ‘academic philosophy’ does not possess any exclusive rights to examine and speak about a specific set of problems or areas. If a concept or thing that traditionally has been occupying the philosophers’ minds is examined and challenged at some other ‘place,’ that’s all good – we get more to go on. I take these observations to be adding up to the first necessary step in coming to clarity regarding Murdoch’s authorship as a whole – that is, in dissolving the appearance of paradox that may arise from a faulty understanding of what she says about the relationship between philosophy and literature. In brief, these are the points that the explication of Murdoch’s reservations about her own formulation that ‘art and morals are one’ brings into view: ● ●

●

the self-containedness of art does not hamper its capacity to be about our world we should not think that there is a transcendent, non-conceptual, realm; the idea that the world could be cut up in halves is mistaken art is only accidentally educational

It is now possible to begin to see that art (and so literature) can be one of our ‘most educational’ activities, even though art (and so literature) is not ‘didactic or educational.’ It is likely that the presence of the same word (‘educational’) in the two different passages tempts us into making them clash. At a closer look, however, the air of paradox transforms itself into mere hot air. In philosophy, we often deliberately strive to be educational or didactic. This is, obviously, not true about all philosophers, and it needn’t be. The point is that a philosophical text strives to carry and convey philosophical conviction – or challenge it. There is a sense in which philosophy – being a quest for clarity – must embrace the idea that the words through which I claim to speak ‘philosophically’ carry conviction. Philosophical texts, as Murdoch understands them, more often than not strive to reach specific points, to take the reader to a particular place, or enable a certain line of thinking or challenge another. Art (what Murdoch would think of as ‘good art,’ that is exercises of the imagination and not expressions of fantasy) on the other hand, does not. Furthermore, Murdoch makes clear that art – and so literature, and so Murdoch’s literature – does not ‘deliberate concerning improvement.’ To the extent that literature makes us morally better, that effect is ‘merely accidental.’ Insofar as it is successful art, it teaches by accident, unconsciously, without specific authorial intent. It is thus quite possible to say that precise art-expressions – carefully carved out to capture particular and unique individualities of our world precisely and accurately, without attempts to overcome messiness, historicity and tragedy – may educate us on an unconscious level without deliberately striving to teach its readers (or perceivers) a specific something. And let us not be intimidated by the word ‘unconscious.’ We should not inflate Murdoch’s words here, turning them into an empirical hypothesis about the nature of human cognition and psycho-physical constitution. Also, and perhaps more importantly, the word ‘unconscious,’ as it is employed in this context, specifically

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highlights features of the artwork as being autonomous, self-contained – the work works unconsciously by not being dependent upon its author’s intention. The artwork does not teach us by being the expression of its author’s intention to teach us this or that. It does not simply make simple points. ‘Art is informative. And even mediocre art can tell us something, for instance about how other people live. But to say this, is not to hold a utilitarian or didactic view of art. Art is larger than such narrow ideas.’41 This means that no matter how we read Murdoch’s novels – no matter what philosophical work we find them doing (them, or it, not ‘Murdoch’) – we should not think that we get ‘the meaning of them,’ if we try to uncover the ‘this or that’ that we take Murdoch to have wanted us to see and/or learn. It is a work of art; as such, self-contained – as such, self-sufficient. It is standing on its own. When the work is done it is out of Murdoch’s hands, and what its readers will find in it, Murdoch does not know. She cannot know. It is a piece of art. Not unlike a painting. More like a painting than a treatise. Like a painting, it says: ‘There it is!’42 And now it is up to us to relate to it. Importantly, this is not to say that the novel may mean whatever a reader takes it to mean. There is a sense in which Murdoch does not want to ‘hand over the interpretation to the reader.’43 She takes herself to be writing realistic novels. There is something specific she wants to portray. This connects with the idea of the artwork as autonomous in the sense that the realistic picture that the novel presents is an authoritative picture. It says that the world looks like this. Thus: if she portrays an ass, it is pivotal that we see an ass. If she pictures a man who fails to carry the sense of his words, Murdoch is counting on us to see that. ‘[A]ny novel contains this device where the character is saying something which the reader is supposed not to believe.’44 But all this is ordinary, right there on the surface (and so it is ‘ordinary language philosophy’ if you wish). There is no decoding required for seeing these kinds of authorial intentions. They are, in some sense, not different from what goes on in our day to day talk. The one thing that is certain is that we will not understand Murdoch (her philosophy or her novels) if we try to unpack them by displaying a hidden philosophical message, or communication, that she supposedly (and regardless of years and years of denials) must have put there. I think we should take Murdoch quite literally when she claims to feel in herself ‘an absolute horror of putting theories or “philosophical ideas” as such into my novels. I might put in things about philosophy because I happen to know about philosophy. If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships; and in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.’45 Most readings (with philosophical aspirations) of Murdoch’s novels that I have encountered take them to be expressions of her philosophy. The standard way of explicating them leaves no room for Murdoch’s fear, her absolute horror. If I am right about this, Murdoch’s novels are yet to be received by philosophy. 41 42 43 44

45

Murdoch, ‘Philosophy and Literature,’ 14f. See Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”,’ 348. Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 104. Ibid. (Murdoch is here actually talking about some of Bradley Pearson’s words. I will come back to this in Chapter 4). Murdoch, ‘Philosophy and Literature,’ 19f. (Italics added).

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There is philosophical significance in them – I am sure Murdoch would agree to that – but it is not something we find by means of trying to read between the lines or by means of trying to figure out where among the novels’ many various voices Murdoch’s is to be found. It is there, in black on white – again and again and again and again. One can easily extend my second list (presented in the opening of the first chapter), which is based mainly on the 1977 interview which then became the opening chapter of Existentialists and Mystics, with similar expressions in other interviews. If there is one view Murdoch held consistently, it is this: Second List (Extended) (1976) “I certainly do not want to mix philosophy and fiction – they are totally different disciplines, different methods of thought, different ways of writing, different aims.”46 (1976) “I have definite philosophical views, but I don’t want to promote them in my novels or to give them a kind of metaphysical background.”47 (1976) “One can only write about the world one understands. I would be very pleased if I did know more. I would be very pleased if I’d been a sailor, or a coalminer, or had kept a shop.”48 (1979) “No, [literature’s] function is art; forget about morality, its function is to be good art.”49 (1983) “I reveal other people’s secrets, not mine, except to the extent that any artist reveals himself to some extent in his work. But it’s the secrets of my fictional characters that I am giving away.”50 (1983) “My theoretical preoccupations don’t come in much . . . . Putting in too much theorising is an obvious danger, but it’s not a temptation I especially feel.”51 (1986) “[T]he notion that one has got a philosophical position which is being propounded in the novel is, I think, an idea which many critics latch on to (about many novelists), where this is not so, where insofar there is a philosophy it’s something which is diffused into the whole object.”52 46

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Stephen Glover, ‘Iris Murdoch Talks to Stephen Glover,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 36. It may be worth noting that Murdoch follows up this sentence by saying: ‘A little theory may come in just for fun in a sense, and because a particular character may hold a theory, but that won’t make the theory into the whole texture or background of the novel.’ Jack I. Biles, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 36. Ibid., 40. Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 112. John Haffenden, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 131. Ibid. ‘Discussions from Encounters with Iris Murdoch,’ edited by Richard Todd, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 173.

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(1986) “[T]here’s nothing in the novel to do with philosophy. After all, it’s a novel.”53 (1987) “The novels are not moral tracts. They are works of art.”54 (1988) “I don’t think this connects with philosophy. The consideration of moral issues in the novel may be intensified by some philosophical considerations, but on the whole, I think it’s dangerous writing a philosophical novel.”55

As one goes through the interviews with Murdoch it is surprisingly hard to find expressions that challenge, or even problematize, this view of hers. In fact, I don’t think there are any. There is one early formulation (1968) of hers that may seem to suggest that she did strive, intentionally, to ‘let philosophy come in.’ She is asked about if the ‘double career’ of hers is complementary or conflicting. Murdoch responds by saying that they are conflicting merely in a temporal sense, and she suggests that they are complementary in other ways: ‘I felt a little worried about this for a while, but I think I am not now so worried. More philosophy seems to get into my novels. The reason, I think, is that I now got a philosophical viewpoint, a more organized position than I had earlier.’56 At this time, Murdoch had published a great deal of the essays collected in Existentialists and Mystics and about a dozen novels. The questions that arise now are what this viewpoint is, and how ‘it’ gets into the novels. The latter question is answered by Murdoch: mostly ‘it comes in through a character wanting to talk in a kind of metaphysical way.’57 This is something she says in relation to Rose’s suggestion that there might be an affinity with Sartre here, which Murdoch (as on all other occasions) denies by adding that ‘I am a little worried about how far one should let philosophy come in.’ So this much is (already) clear: philosophy should not come into novels in the Sartrean sense where the novel is used as an expression of the philosopher’s philosophy. The presence of Murdoch’s ‘viewpoint’ in the novels is not a philosophical expression of hers. Murdoch’s ‘viewpoint’ at this time already contains some of her most central philosophical convictions: that language is never morally neutral; that a humans moral vision – which I take to include something like ‘the way the human sees her world and herself ’ – is something that runs deep in her, affects all that she says, thinks and writes; that a change of one’s moral vision is not likely to be induced by means of arguments; that the human life is vulnerable to accident and chance; that the human may not be transparent to herself; that morality cannot be spelt out as one regulative ideal; that morality is not a 53 54

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Ibid., 182. Barbara Stevens Heusel, ‘A Dialogue with Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 199. Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Two Interviews with Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 225. W. K. Rose, ‘Iris Murdoch, Informally,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 20. Ibid., 21.

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matter of rational considerations of alternative ‘moral accounts’ that we then go on to ‘apply’ as free individuals in an otherwise neutral world; that we (we humans) strive to be good, to become better; that ‘the good’ is an ideal that is hardly ever realized and is something that can only be characterized negatively; that human perfection is something that haunts us, calls upon us, but something that can never be attained; that love (as the patient delay of judgement and the realization that the other is real) is a central route to knowledge of the world and one’s others; that love, like perfection, is a lifelong struggle without end. We know she thinks this. We know she thinks this ‘comes into’ her novels. But we also know that she does not want to propound these thoughts in her novels. (Indeed, it is somewhat challenging to imagine what it would mean to do so, given the contents of these thoughts of hers that I just listed.) Murdoch’s ‘general outlook’ shines through in the same way that all authors’ general outlooks come into what they write. That a human is a particular person, coming from somewhere, striving to get somewhere else, cannot be circumvented. Thus, Murdoch’s picture of what a human being is will shine through. One aspect of that picture is that the impulse to philosophize the ‘wanting to speak metaphysically’ – to decline our community in a language and a world, to ‘speak outside language games’ – is something that comes naturally to us, and that we are in a kind of denial regarding our own constitution when we strive to be neutral, rational and scientific through and through, in all aspects of our lives. If this is what she thinks about the human, and if she strives to picture real people as realistically as possible – record us as it were – then, this will shine through. How could it not? But that does not make it into an expression, or an argument in favour, of her philosophy. But she invites her readers to think about what the reality of, or the possibility of, this kind of human being means. Artworks make that kind of claims. Artworks are invitational. It should also be noted that it is easy to think of this ‘comes into my novels’ in an one-dimensional way, as if the direction of influence works one way but not the other. That is, the quotation may make it look like Murdoch first (and independently of all other writing activities of hers) just sat down and thought her philosophy out into a coherent whole, and then, in a second and equally independent phase let that ‘come into’ her novels. But this is not a picture of complementarity since it works one way only. To get complementarity we must also include, or at least ponder the possibility that, her philosophy became ‘more organized’ due to the fact that she wrote dozens of novels.58 Murdoch strives to be a realistic writer, to present realistic pictures of what a human being is, how she orients herself in our world, today as an historical being, having and being formed by these particular pretences and these particular guiding visions of herself.59 It is not hard to see how this should lead Murdoch (and us), in a more or less accidental way, to a better understanding of what the moral lives of human

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This is a point well made by Marije Altorf in Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imaging (New York: Continuum, 2008). I am here using the word ‘pretenses’ in the sense elaborated by Jonathan Lear in his A Case for Irony (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2011). Lear’s understanding of pretense is developed by means of a reading of Kierkegaard. And I will return to this thought in section 4.3, in relation to Kierkegaard, Murdoch and the idea of an indirect communication.

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beings look like today, and so, incidentally, to more adequate philosophical pictures. Complementarity works both ways. It may well be that Murdoch tried to develop her moral views in philosophy, and then came to see that some of her central concepts had a hollow sound today, and then she went on to create pictures of ‘flimsy and shallow’ human beings that are unable to carry the sense of these words. Or, it may be that she tried to paint pictures of a contemporary man who attempts to lead his life guided by concepts such as love and attention, and then realized that these concepts did not sit well in this form of life and then went on to elaborate on these themes in her philosophy. It does not really matter which of these are true. In neither case would it be adequate to say that Murdoch wanted to express or propagate her philosophy in the novels, and in neither case can we find any profound sense of the idea that literature is able to show something that cannot be said in philosophy. All other ‘hard cases’ point in the similar direction: As a novelist, it is inevitable that one’s ‘general moral outlook’ on the world shines through, but that is not to be confused with a directed ‘philosophical expression,’ and that this ‘shines through’ does not make the novels one writes ‘didactic.’ The novel is of course, the whole world of the novel, is the expression of a world outlook. And one can’t avoid doing this. . . . And of course I have my own philosophy in a very general sense, a kind of moral psychology one might call it, rather than philosophy. I have views about human nature, about good and evil, about repentance, about spirituality, about religion, about what religion is for people without God, and so on. And these views may add up to a world outlook, which comes to be expressed, directly or indirectly, in the novels.60

So Murdoch thinks that she cannot avoid – no one can – being a moralist of sorts.61 But she does not think that she can argue in favour of, didactically persuade, anyone by means of a literary presentation. ‘A novelist is bound to express values, and I think he should be conscious of the fact that he is, in a sense, a compulsory moralist. . . . I think a novelist should be wary of being a teacher in a didactic sense, but should be conscious of himself as a moralist.’62 Indeed, as will become clear, there is a sense in which a human being’s most fundamental beliefs cannot be reached by means of any kind of didactic presentation. These have to be conquered – again and again, by means of repetition and continuous struggles, by means of gradual attainments and renegotiations of one’s self-knowledge.

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Chevalier, ‘Closing Debate, Recontres avec Iris Murdoch,’ 92. These reflections also help us understand in what sense Murdoch thinks that ‘we are almost always morally active’ as she says. (Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 27). It is easy to understand ‘moralist’ in a purely pejorative sense, as one who tries to impose her own morals on others, and condemn those who do not share her views. This is, clearly, not the sense that Murdoch has in mind. Rather, we are all moralists in the sense that ‘almost all language convey value’ (ibid.), and so one cannot help but revealing oneself as a moral being, with an orientation. See also Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 495. Meyers, ‘Two Interviews with Iris Murdoch,’ 226f.

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In order to get a clear view of these thoughts, we need to slowly tread along the lines that form the relationship between form and sense in philosophy and literature respectively, and by means of an equally slow entrance into Murdoch’s view about just how deeply a ‘philosophical viewpoint’ is rooted in a human being. Two pictures of human cognition – relating to rather specific views about the attainment of self-knowledge and the nature of philosophical expression – will guide me here. One is that of the mirror. Novelists must resist the temptation to tie up all the loose ends. And perhaps that’s the context in which I should say that I do regard myself as a realistic novelist – that what I am trying to do is imitate nature and hold up a mirror to the world and do those things which are so frightfully difficult to do, to create characters who are like real people.63

The other is that of an indirect communication. I want to say that literature is like philosophy in this respect, because I want to emphasise that literature too is a truth seeking activity. But of course philosophy is abstract and discursive and direct. Literary language can be deliberately obscure, and even what sounds like plain speaking is part of some ulterior formal imaginative structure. In fiction even the simplest story is artful and indirect, though we may not notice this because we are so used to the conventions involved, and we are all to some extent literary artists in our daily life. Here one might say that it is the directness of philosophy which strikes us as unnatural, the indirectness of the story as natural.64

These two pictures, in turn, reconnect us with the central theme of this book: how to reclaim the sense of a language lost? Murdoch strives to find a way to understand morality ‘in a philosophical sense which I feel can’t be done without the reintroduction of certain concepts which in the recent past have been regarded as metaphysical in some sense which made them impossible.’65 Then this is our question for the next section: how should one go about to write and think clearly if this is our problem, if this really is our situation?

2.2 What is a mirror? In order to become clear on these issues in relation to Murdoch’s thought, we need to take a couple of detours via Ludwig Wittgenstein and Søren Kierkegaard – two more philosophers who have claimed that a mirroring strategy may be necessary to arrive at philosophical clarity. It is well known that Murdoch was seriously influenced by Wittgenstein, even though she has also raised a few critical concerns against aspects of 63 64 65

Chevalier, ‘Closing Debate, Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch,’ 72. (Italics added). Murdoch, ‘Philosophy and Literature’, 11f. (Italics added). Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 99. (Emphasis added).

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his thought as well.66 It is also evident that she had read a lot of Kierkegaard and admired him greatly.67 And even though most of her published remarks on both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard are often fairly critical, it is clear that their works formed her, in the same profound sense that Plato and Weil formed her. Who learnt what from whom and who is and who is not under the influence are questions I would happily concede to another kind of scholar. The main point of my criss-cross reading here is that they all share a similar conception of the nature of philosophical problems and that they all thought that a mirroring strategy at times is helpful, even necessary. This is not to say that all problems called ‘philosophical’ may require such a strategy, but when it’s called for, it is not a circuitous movement of thought that could be sidestepped. The specific interest for me in making these links is that Murdoch, the self-proclaimed ‘Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist,’68 employs Kierkegaard’s distinction between direct and indirect communication to mark out the difference between her philosophical and her literary works, and that there is a close connection between the idea of a book as a mirror and the idea of indirect communication. In short, I aim to make this thought clear: a reflection of oneself that shows something that was (in a certain sense) already known and familiar – but neglected, forgotten, repressed or disregarded – is of immense importance in the struggle to attain philosophical clarity. That is what I will aver. Note that I am merely claiming that there are some lines of philosophical reasoning that might require a mirroring strategy and I make no claims about everything that may be called philosophical problems. And, as a further note of warning, in what follows, I will not present a theory about the nature of communication or of language. As will become clear, ‘indirect communication’ does not mean saying one thing and meaning something else. Indirect communication, as I understand it, is not allegorical or metaphorical language; it does not mark out a difference between ‘sentence meaning’ and ‘speaker meaning’ to borrow Grice’s terms.69 Furthermore, when I in this chapter try to make clear how the idea of indirect communication and the idea of the book as a mirror may help us to understand Murdoch better, I do not mean to suggest that these particular ideas are necessary if one is to understand Murdoch – and Murdoch’s novels in particular. It is simply impossible to go through Kierkegaard’s work and give a complete account of his view here. The same is, evidently, true about Wittgenstein. Thus, I cannot address all questions concerning, for example, the extent to which Murdoch was entirely true to Kierkegaard, or the extent to which Murdoch understood the concepts involved here as Kierkegaard did. The central claim that I will substantiate 66 67

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Some of these points of divergence will be discussed in section 2.6 below. For example, making notes for a talk at the British Council in 1976, Murdoch lists three philosophical works that has influenced her, Plato’s Symposium, Simone Weil’s Attente de Dieu, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. See Justin Broackes, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays, ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17n.42. ‘I am a kind of Platonist, though I am also a linguistic philosopher. I was trained a linguistic philosopher and in many ways I remain one, but for purposes of moral philosophy I am a sort of Platonist. I might describe myself as a Wittgensteinian Neo-platonist.’ In Chevalier, ‘Closing Debate, Recontres avec Iris Murdoch,’ 92. Cf. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 222–50.

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is that it is helpful to think about Murdoch’s fictional production in terms of indirect communication – for that notion helps us see more clearly how Murdoch may hold that art and morals may have the same essence while philosophy and literature are completely different operations; and it helps us see how her novels may be seen to be ‘educational’ but not ‘didactic’; and it helps us see what the philosophical significance of her fictional writing may be, now that it is clear that they do not express, or argue in favour of, her philosophy. Murdoch’s ‘philosophy’ – and now we are forced to use that term very loosely – shines through, only in the general sense that all authors’ ‘general outlook on life’ shine through in their writing. Here are three quotations that may help us unpack the content of the idea of the book as a mirror: i. A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.70 ii. Have I, after all (however much I should like to have someone share my point of view), the right to use art in order to win over a person, is it not still a mode of deception? When he sees me moved, inspired, etc., he accepts my view, consequently for a reason entirely different from mine, and an unsound reason.71 iii. [O]ne does not discuss the unutterable by talking about something else which is so easy that one can say it by rote. To talk about the unutterable in this manner is similar to the language in Behrent’s advertisement: when he had lost a silk umbrella and out of fear that someone might keep it if he came to know that it was made of silk, he advertised that a linen umbrella had been lost.72

The first quote, one of Lichtenberg’s classical formulations, has been reverberated by both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, and so one might say that the specificity of the philosophical line of reasoning here under discussion can be described as one that requires a Licthenbergian mirror.73 Someone might claim that the most palpable rendering of Lichtenberg’s aphorism is simply that a truly wise man can find something intelligent in almost any text; that, say, the advertisement on a milk can can be made astonishing by a grand enough reader. Lichtenberg’s aphorism lends itself to that reading, but I think that there is a deeper thought in Lichtenberg’s words that deserves attention too. It also opens up a thought about the 70

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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, translated and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 1990), 71. Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Volume 1. A-E, edited and translated by Edward V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967), 253. Ibid., 255. It is well known that both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein were great admirers of Lichtenberg, and Kierkegaard makes a few direct references to him as we shall see. (One of them is the mirror-analogy quoted above.) And Wittgenstein was a great admirer of Kierkegaard – indeed, he learnt Danish so that he could read him in the original. See James Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,’ in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. Tessin, T. (Ipswich, MA: St. Merlans Press, 1995), 249, 304n.4.

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book which, at first, might seem rather counter intuitive. It makes the claim that a book may convey information, or have its desired effect, not (merely) by a handing down of propositions, or information or content from an author to a reader, from sender to receiver, but by a reader coming to see his or her own reflection in it. If this is so, the aphorism also directs attention towards an auxiliary thought: Certain manners of persuasion, or influence, work not through ordinary argumentation (whatever that is) but by means of a reflection of me and my world. Thus the authorial intent is, if not redundant, secondary and devaluated: If I, as a reader, fail to see myself or my own line of thinking reflected the book fails, as it has no (or not the relevant, or the desired) effect on me. A mirror is a mirror only insofar as I deem the picture it presents to be an adequate picture of me. The mirror analogy is still an analogy, so ‘I recognize myself ’ should not be taken too literally. What the analogy helps to bring into view is that I may discover something that depends on who I am, but it is not necessary that I see as it were, a photographic copy of my appearance. Lichtenberg also suggests that we sometimes lack words, or at least that words (alone) are not enough. ‘We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid.’ We say what we can say and if that does not suffice there is nothing else that can be said to bridge the gap between my understanding and yours. Does this mean that argumentation, even conversation, is more or less impossible at times? Given these opening remarks on the mirror, the first set of questions that I aim to respond to might be formulated: What kind of thinking, what form of persuasion, requires a mirror? Since a mirror only reflects something that is already there, what effect can such a mirror truly have? And if that which is mirrored is already known, or familiar, why not say it outright, straight to the face, as it were? Why not argue? Is there a sense in which we do not need arguments here, simply because that which is to be communicated is already familiar? But if it is familiar, why need we talk about it at all? If no information is lacking, what is there to say, and why? Suppose then, that I come to the conclusion that the shift of your heart and mind that I hope to induce cannot be achieved by merely informing you about something. (Perhaps I have tried that already, and my words had no effect on you.) And suppose furthermore, that I come to think that a certain form of self-afflicted change of heart is required. What strategies am I then entitled to employ? Am I entitled to lure you into sharing my point of view? The second quotation, containing Søren Kierkegaard’s words, displays a concern he had about his own textual strategies. Was he entitled to write in a deceptive (perhaps even seductive) manner? This is a complicated worry especially since Kierkegaard is known for employing that very method: ‘to deceive into truth.’74 This worry of his casts a particular light on the form that his ‘deceptions’ take. There is a sense in which he does 74

‘But just as that which has been communicated (the idea of the religious) has been cast completely into reflection and in turn taken back out of reflection, so also the communication has been decisively marked by reflection, or the form of communication used is that of reflection. “Direct communication” is: to communicate the truth directly; “communication in reflection” is to deceive into the truth. It began maieutically with esthetic production, and all the pseudonymous writings are maieutic in nature.’ Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author,’ in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard V. Hong (Ewing, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 451.

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deceive, and he seems to think that a specific form of deception is necessary if the right insight is to be communicated. But to the extent that Kierkegaard aims at deception, it cannot be a simple deceiving where art is employed to disguise the real thought, to give it, as it were, a pleasing enough coating. A book that sells for its cover is clearly not what Kierkegaard aims at. Nevertheless, certain thoughts, he averred, cannot be communicated directly. At a certain point, or in certain circumstances, communication of an insight must go by other means – it must be communicated indirectly. The very idea of indirect communication is peculiar, and it may even appear to be paradoxical. First, it seems to suggest that there is something (an ‘it,’ a specific thought) which exists that cannot be said, yet ‘it’ can nevertheless be thought, perceived, cognized, embraced. It also seems to suggest that that which cannot be said can nevertheless be communicated – transferred from the one to the other. But how can something that cannot be said be communicable? And how can one make the other share one’s point of view, for reasons that are not unsound, in cases where that which one wants to convey cannot be said or argued for? Are there, really, such cases? The third quotation also consists of Kierkegaard’s words. This passage qualifies the sense of the deception in question. Even though a form of writing that communicates indirectly may aim to change its readers thinking in a way that she is not likely to enter willingly, one cannot deceive the other into truth by saying something else than that which one thinks cannot be communicated (directly). Thus, even though there are thoughts, or insights to make, that cannot be conveyed straightforwardly, the indirect communication must contain no false advertisement. A silk umbrella is a silk umbrella, and your chances of getting it back will not increase if you claim to have lost one made of linen. If you want someone to share your point of view, but you feel that she is not willing or able to do so if you merely inform the other of the ‘fact’ in question (or if there is no fact missing), you must use no false language, present no false pictures. You still have to tell it like it is. Thus: ‘indirect communication’ does not mean ‘saying something else.’ Thus the mirror – a good mirror presents no false pictures, even though they may be deceptive, be used to make us see something particular. A characteristic feature of a mirror is that if I look into it, what I see is myself. If what I see in the frame is someone else, it is simply not a mirror. It is perfectly possible to recognize oneself framed and burst out ‘That is not me! I do not recognize myself.’ Now, this fact does not contradict the characteristic feature of the mirror, for if I feel inclined to say ‘That’s not me!’ at this moment of estrangement, it is still the picture of me that I feel reluctant to identify myself with. No matter how horrific or alien (or, if it really happens, attractive) your own reflection is, it is only a reflection of you if you are reflected. Platitudinous? Yes, of course. But not without relevance – for it qualifies the question about what a philosophical problem might be if this (the mirror in which I see myself with all my deformities) is the adequate form for it to be dealt with and expressed in. If this really is the best way to deal with (at least certain) philosophical problems, then many pictures of what philosophy is and must be – a science, a set of problems, abstract theorizing, not literature, objective, impersonal, etc. – seem to be off target. Obviously, I do not wish to combat with all most commonly employed pictures of what the philosophical activity must be like; I do not wish to claim that there can be only

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one type of philosophical activity. But I do claim that as long as one approaches certain philosophical problems in a, let us call it, ‘scientific and detached’ manner, they will be thoroughly misrepresented and, hence, not properly confronted and attended to.

2.3 Wittgenstein and the difficulty of acknowledging illusions of sense One of the most commonly employed mirror formulations today comes from Wittgenstein who wrote: ‘[My writing] must be nothing more than the mirror in which my reader sees his own thinking with all its deformities & with this assistance can set it in order.’75 What kind of deformities are we talking about here? And why do they require (he says that his writing must be . . .) a mirror to be dealt with? The really short answer is that a mirror can give us a ‘perspicuous presentation.’76 Now, it is well known that Wittgenstein held the view that philosophical problems are due to misunderstandings of the workings of our language.77 And it is also true that he thought that such misunderstandings arise because ‘we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.’78 The question is what it means to say that. According to what might be called the standard reading – though it has been under heavy fire for some years now – Wittgenstein argued that we should make the rules of the grammar for the uses of our words clear (enough), so that we should not get entangled in our confusions (ever again).79 But what would such a perspicuous (re-) presentation of the grammar of our language be?80 A set of rules? A ‘light version’ of

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77 78 79

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, revised edition, edited by G. H. von Wright in Collaboration with Heikki Nyman; revised edition of the text by Alois Pichler; translated by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 25e. (There is, of course, a long history of employments of mirroring metaphors, but my aim here is not to present a history of a metaphor, but to understand a particular line of reasoning). Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, transl. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), § 122. I have amended the translation. Anscombe uses ‘perspicuous representation’ for ‘Darstellung’. But I think that presentation is slightly better, since a representation more easily suggests a faulty picture of language as something complete, static and thus easily surveyable. Ibid., § 109. Ibid. § 122. (Italics in original). This is basically the line of reasoning taken by Baker and Hacker in their monumental exegetical works on the Investigations where they argue that ‘philosophical questions concern the bounds of sense, and these are determined by the rules for the use of words, by what it makes sense to say in a language.’ G. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity. Volume 2 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 40. A similar line of interpretation can be found in Hans-Johann Glock, ‘Philosophical Investigations section 128: “Theses in Philosophy” and Undogmatic Procedure’ in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, eds. Arrington and Glock (London: Routledge, 1991), where he claims that Wittgenstein’s Philosophy ‘clarifies grammar, the set of rules by which we determine the corrects use of words.’ Baker, however, has changed his view of these matters. Baker’s mature view can be found in Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects, edited and introduced by Katherine Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). In this line of thinking, the translation ‘perspicuous representation’ suits better.

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a Carnapian logical syntax? And what would it mean to claim to actually have a ‘clear view of the uses of our words’? What words? Whose words? Where? When? Why? Wittgenstein’s own description of a perspicuous presentation is that it enables us to see connections. It ‘earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things.’81 But ‘the way we look at things’ can hardly be adequately framed in book of grammatical rules. Rather, it gestures towards something multifarious and difficult to frame, such as where we stand, what we do with our language and why we do that rather than something else. Wittgenstein even feels compelled to ask himself: ‘Is this a “Weltanschauung”?’82 What Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting is thus something rather close to what we have seen Murdoch expressing in her talk about the philosophical (albeit unintentional) effects that art bring. The way we look at our world, how we orient ourselves in our world today as historical beings, cannot be disconnected from investigations that aim at making the sense of the words we are trying to carry and lead clear. We live by words. Notably, Wittgenstein nowhere says that there is a clear view of the uses of our words to be spelt out. He merely notes that we often – when we are in philosophical confusions – do not command an overview. This could be read as him saying that we need, in such cases, to reflect upon our uses of our words, upon what we are trying to do with them, upon what we want them to do, as it were, for us. We need to be reminded of what our words do, what we do with them when we use them, when things are running smoothly – and this should bring a contrast into view, not an answer. He does not say that there is a specific order in language that we are uneducated about. To suppose that we could get a perspicuous presentation of a word (of all possible employments of it) on beforehand, seems to me to be a thought that, on the one hand, is false, since it is impossible to say how a word might be put to use now and in the future. On the other hand, it is also a line of thinking that goes against the grain of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a whole. The problem is that the idea that there could be, as it were, one perspicuous presentation of our uses of our words is an idea based on a view of language in which the person is removed from the equation. To think that we could spell out the rules of our language once and for all is to think of language as something outside of us, as a systematic unity, a strange kind of object, that we can investigate, in principle, fully. It is to approach it from a detached perspective – and, to anticipate what is coming – in an ‘objective’ frame of mind, by means of a ‘disinterested reflection.’ I want to say that the need for a clear view of the uses of our words arises when something has gone wrong; when the engine is, as it were, idling.83 Then we need to be reminded of what this or that lever does – we need to get in gear again. The problem with our language, one might say, is that we are all too familiar with it – a blessing and a curse. Since we all know what our words mean (most of them, and to some extent, anyway) it is easy to think that we should not be in a position where they no longer do what we require of them. (‘I know my language! Pick any word: a crime, 81 82 83

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 122. Ibid. Ibid., § 132.

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a thought, a proposition, goodness, love, Christianity, murder, pornography, God, truth, knowledge, democracy – you name it – I know what it means! How, then, could the meaning of these familiar words be a problem for philosophy?’) Of course we are surprised when we find ourselves unable to mean. This is one of the main reasons why Wittgenstein thought mirrors are required.84 He needs to find adequate and precise pictures of certain ways of using (or failed attempts to use) words – pictures of how words function or fail to function in the life that a particular (kind of) human being leads. They need to be true reflections that enable a reader to say ‘Yes, that’s exactly the way I meant it.’85 And then, and this is the really hard part, the reader should also add: ‘That’s nonsense!’ or ‘That sounds strange!’ or ‘What a queer thing to say!’86 One might say that the mirroring strategies become important, because of precisely this difficulty: I cannot tell you that you mean nothing with your words, so long as you are in agreement with yourself about what you mean, as long as you (think you) have a clear idea about what yours words are supposed to do. You must recognize for yourself that you tried to mean, but failed. What words mean does not (merely) depend on what the words mean. What words mean – when they mean – depend (also) on what we are doing with them, what work, if any, we are making them to do. Wittgenstein may be seen as suggesting that a purely ‘philosophical use’ of a concept, is basically no use at all. Words belong in contexts, and the strictly philosophical context is, surprisingly perhaps, something close to a noncontext. Wittgenstein suggests that misunderstandings of our language often arise ‘by certain analogies between forms of expression in different regions of language.’87 So you find yourself able to carry, or lead, be in command of, a word, say ‘belief,’ in one context (one of probability perhaps), and you start trying to look at other contexts of use for that word (say, one of religious nature), only to find that they cannot easily be squared with one another.88 What should you do? Three strategies are common (all problematic from a Wittgensteinian line of thought): First, one may persist and claim, for example, that ‘I know what a “belief ” is! I have written a book-length study on it, damn it. So of course I am entitled to speak about your notion of “belief ” as faulty!’ This would probably make you an insensitive scholar, and hence a bad one. Alternatively, you become confused and start looking for that which unites these two different occurrences of the same concept (working, obviously, on the assumption that the same word must refer to, or at least be connected with, one singular concept). If that is the case, you have removed the forms of life in which your words did their work and created a new one,

84 85

86

87 88

See Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 303. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript: TS 213, German-English Scholars’ Edition, edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 303. ‘In philosophy it is significant that such-and-such a sentence makes no sense, but also that it sounds funny.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007 [1967]), § 328. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 90. This example is a shortened version of an example of Conant’s, which can be found in his ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 275f.

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a non-context, in which something like its ‘pure ideality’ is sought after. Or, thirdly, you become a reductionist, and say that the true meaning, the original home, of this word is physics, or biology or ordinary language – and that all other occurrences are derivative and/or secondary. When we start looking at a concept as a free standing entity, trying to deduce its ideality as it were, something crucial is hidden from view: ‘ The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing.’89 And so we need to be reminded of ‘in what special circumstances this sentence is actually used. There it does make sense.’90 Cavell has, rightly in my view, argued that Wittgenstein’s question ‘Is the word ever actually used this way in the language which is its original home?’91 expresses a sense that in philosophy (wherever that is) words are somehow “away,” as if in exile, since Wittgenstein’s word seeks its Heimat. The image or sense of our words as out, as absent, or truant, casts a certain light on Wittgenstein’s speaking of language in philosophy as “idle” (cf. § 132): it presents that condition as caused, not as it were by something in language, but, since these are our words, caused by us; or at least it is a condition for which we, each of us philosophers, is responsible, or say, answerable, not perhaps as if we personally banish our words but as if it is up to us to seek their return.92

That is, it is we who try to lead our words and fail to do so. Philosophical illusions arise either when we confuse ‘forms of expression in different regions of language,’ or when we try to find and explicate the ‘nimbus’ of sense that occurs when we remove words and sentences from their contexts of use. What is really difficult here is that this is something we do unwittingly. It is almost as if it comes naturally to us. Thus we need a true picture of the moves we made, a reflection (mirroring) of the processes of thought that led us into that confusion. For as long as someone really is in an illusion of sense – if it really is an illusion – she cannot merely be told that she is not making sense. For inside the illusion, it is almost as if there is nothing but sense (for we ‘know all the words,’ it’s just that things do not add up – and so we keep on searching). Notice here that the (in-)famous wittgensteinian task of ‘leading the words back to their everyday use’ does not (merely) mean that we need to reclaim the words as if they had been abducted, stolen, by wicked professors or evil theorists. Cavell emphasizes the fact that words are ours, and as such, lived. It is in the lived sense that we must understand this leading. Making sense is something we do.93 Words ‘will return only

89 90 91 92

93

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 96. Ibid., § 117. Ibid., § 116. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, New Mexico: Living Bath Press, 1989), 34f. Cf. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 194f. I owe this particular formulation to Jocelyn Benoist.

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if we attract and command them, which will require listening to them,’ says Cavell.94 Leading is listening. Metaphysical use, as non-use, is leading by force.95 Returning words to their place in a life led is not merely a matter of words, but also (importantly) of understanding one’s life. ‘[T]he behavior of words is not something separate from our lives, those of us who are native to them, in mastery of them. The lives themselves have to return.’96 In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks that ‘insofar as the words of our ⬍language⬎ seem to us the only possible standards of measurement we are always doing them injustice. And they are first overestimated then underestimated.’97 Because of our words’ common and familiar sense, we often tend to leave the responsibility to mean to them. This is overestimating their power to mean. (‘I mean whatever the words mean, neither more, nor less.’) On the other hand, we also tend to underestimate our words; thinking, perhaps, that the word as it stands is too narrow, that all my intentions cannot possibly fit into, or be fully described by, such a small thing as that puny and worn-out word or phrase. Think for example how flat important phrases of our lives – such as ‘I love you’ or ‘Sorry for your loss’ – may sound. Think also about the impossibility, or the utter emptiness, of the addition: ‘And I really mean what I say!’ The fact that coping with and in language has the double character inherent in the claim that ‘leading is listening,’ means that there are at least two ways to get lost in language – you can fail to lead and you can fail to listen. These failures are connected, and so which is which must be revealed and settled by a detailed case by case study of accentuation and human will. This also means that it is more or less impossible to lead a life free from philosophical illusions. The illusion of sense is, clearly, a philosophical mistake. But that is not to say that it is an academic mistake. Philosophical illusions can originate in many places. As we make our way through life, this failure to mean might happen almost anywhere. If words are not merely names for things – though they can be that too – but, more importantly, interconnected with how a particular life is led, then, the matter of ‘meaning it’ means listening to the sense of our words and to one’s other. To lead by listening is to know and understand how a word and the speaking person belong to a particular context of use or form of life. This is, I take it, the thought behind remarks such as ‘Religious madness is madness springing from irreligiousness.’98 Just as the sense and weight of religious words cannot be disconnected from a person leading a particular form of religious life, the sense and weight of words in general cannot be 94 95

96 97 98

Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 35. On this matter, I think Collingwood made a useful observation when he noted that ‘To define is literally to fix the limits of a lot of land or the like, to show where one thing begins and another ends, or in general to discriminate or distinguish.’ R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 94. To define is leading by force in the sense that a specific linguistic order is established by means of a (form of) decision. I am not arguing that definitions are always, as it were, the wrong tool. They are truly useful in many cases – in the sciences for example – but, a definition will never solve a conflict between two different employments of a word in any other way but by force; especially not if the conflict is a conflict within one person. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 35. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 23e. Ibid., 15e.

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disconnected from the leading of a particular form of life. The realistic picturing of a particular form of life can make all the difference: On Kierkegaard: I represent a life for you & now see how you relate to it, whether it tempts (urges) you to live like that as well, or what other relation to it you attain. Through this representation I would like to, as it were, loosen up your life.99

2.4 Kierkegaard and grammatical illusions This ‘wittgensteinian’ way of conceiving both the nature of a philosophical problems and the way to deal with them, bears a striking resemblance to Kierkegaard’s thought. As D. Z. Phillips and James Conant among others have noted, the confusions that Kierkegaard claimed to be inherent in the religious practices of nineteenth-century Denmark can adequately be described as ‘grammatical’ confusions, and Kierkegaard can fruitfully be seen as doing grammatical investigations (or ‘conceptual analysis’). But Phillips and Conant differ in their respective readings here. Whereas Phillips wants to maintain a fairly strict distinction between the personal and the grammatical (or conceptual), Conant challenges the same distinction. They also disagree on the question about the nature of these confusions. Phillips seems to think that Kierkegaard aims to dispute a more or less false belief about what it means to be a Christian, whereas Conant holds the view that what Kierkegaard aims to show us is that the religious language used (in ‘Christendom’) is idling. In Conant’s view, Kierkegaard is not negating a false belief, but he is trying to show that what is thought to be a genuine point of view is no point of view at all.100 I am leaning more towards Conant’s line of reasoning on this matter. What I take to be a shared conception (between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein) here is the idea that, as Conant puts it, ‘confusions in grammar are not mere confusions in grammar (because grammar in the relevant sense is not merely about words), but also confusions in life. They are symptoms (and sometimes contributing causes) of soulsickness.’101 This does not mean that grammatical confusions are psychiatric illnesses. The impulse to philosophize is not spurred by madness. But the idea of ‘soul-sickness’ must not be taken too lightly either. For I take it that both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard picture the confused as someone who is not attuned with his world or with himself. To not be able to carry the sense of one’s words can indeed be tormenting (as will become clear in my reading of Coetzee’s Elisabeth Costello in Chapter 5 below). Given the tormenting nature of such a sense, it is no wonder that we often develop quite elaborate strategies to pretend that we are not out of tune. (‘We often succumb to 99

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions, eds. James C. Klagge and Alfred Normann (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 83. 100 See Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ and D. Z. Phillips, ‘Authorship and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,’ in D. Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (London: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 101 Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 281.

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temptation with calm and even with finesse.’102) And if the return of words require, as Cavell argued (quite rightly in my view), that ‘the lives themselves have to return,’ then a ‘grammatical confusion’ (in this broad sense of the term) represents the philosophical mistake as something that is interwoven with a human’s life as a whole. So how can Kierkegaard’s criticism of the religious practice of his time be seen as a ‘grammatical investigation’? The core of this line of thought is the simple (yet hard) fact that words mean different things in different contexts. This is how Kierkegaard described the ‘enormous confusion’ of his time: Everyone who in earnest and also with some clarity of vision considers what is called Christendom, or the condition in a so-called Christian country, must, without any doubt have serious misgivings. What does it mean, after all, that all these thousands and thousands as a matter of course call themselves Christians! These many, many people, of whom by far the great majority, according to everything that can be discerned, have their lives in entirely different categories, something that one can ascertain by the simplest observation! People who perhaps never once go to church, never think about God, never names his name except when they curse! People to whom it has never occurred that their lives should have some duty to God, people who either maintain that a certain civil impunity is the highest or do not even find this to be entirely necessary! Yet all these people, even those who insist that there is no God, they are all Christians, call themselves Christians, are recognized as Christians by the state, are buried as Christians by the Church, are discharged as Christians to eternity! That there must be an enormous underlying confusion here, a dreadful illusion, of that there can be no doubt.103

The condition called ‘Christendom’ is Kierkegaard’s name for the state of religion in which people call themselves, and take themselves to be, ‘Christians’ but are, if we are to believe Kierkegaard, merely under the illusion that they are Christians. Indeed, in relation to the above quotation, I think Kierkegaard could even make the further claim that a man who does go to Church every Sunday, prays at night, is baptized and married by the Church, can be mistaken about his own religious belonging! What kind of mistake are we talking about here? How can the utterance ‘I am a Christian,’ uttered by someone who takes himself to be speaking truthfully, be an example of someone who is under an illusion of sense? Kierkegaard claims that what we are dealing with here is a confusion of categories. The ‘delusion on the part of the multitude who call themselves Christians’ is that they employ a religious language, but live in ‘completely esthetic categories.’104 That is, a man living in Christendom thinks, unwittingly, that ‘the esthetic is essentially

102

J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses,’ in Philosophical Papers, third edition, eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 198n.1. 103 Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author,’ 457f. 104 Ibid., 465.

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Christian, since he thinks he is a Christian and yet he is living in esthetic categories.’105 In that sense they are ‘Christians’ only ‘in their imagination.’106 It is clear that there is symmetry here between Kierkegaard’s diagnosis and Wittgenstein’s: ‘The “monstrous illusion” is therefore, at the bottom, a grammatical one. It is the illusion that one can avail oneself of religious categories simply by using certain words; that the words carry their (religious) meanings with them, regardless of how they are used.’107 It might now seem as if the problem is that words are used in a context where they don’t belong; that there is a clash between the meaning of the words employed and the context of use. Now, this is not entirely correct. Such an understanding would indeed be part of the illusion rather than its dissolution. Indeed, one might say that a cause of this illusion is the same belief that nourishes such an idea of a clash: namely, the thought that the words mean whatever they do, regardless of the context of use. (In relation to Wittgenstein, one might say that this thought is due to us overestimating the sense of our words.) They either fit the context or they don’t. The illusion is fed by precisely this thought: ‘I know what the words mean, so I cannot be wrong about them. I cannot, but by a stupid mistake, employ them wrongly.’ Thus, in order to reach clarity here, we need to get a better understanding of the kind of mistake this ‘confusion of categories’ is. The categories (aesthetic, ethical and religious) are attempts to frame different ways in which a subject can relate to an object. If a subject relates to an object in a disinterested, disengaged, fashion, she ‘lives’ in aesthetic categories. In Kierkegaard’s terms the aesthetic reflection is objective reflection. Notice here that the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are not to be understood in today’s common epistemological sense. The subjective does not designate ‘subjective knowledge,’ as if the subjective is something which is not ‘intersubjectively knowable’ (whereas the objective is). Rather, the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ ‘represent pieces of terminology for distinguishing, given a relation between subject and object which is appropriate to a given category.’108 The subjective and the objective marks out two ways of relating to an object, not two ‘realms’ (one private, the other public). What distinguishes the subjective from the objective has basically nothing to do with the object (the subject-matter). Conant formulates this thought clearly in saying that: objective concepts characterize the different ways in which objects qua objects can be, whereas subjective concepts characterize the different kinds of ways in which subjects qua subjects can be. (This allows us to say that being six feet tall, weighing two hundred pounds, being at a certain location, etc., are not characterizations of subjects qua subjects, but rather characterizations of them qua objects.)109

105

Ibid., 467. Ibid., 459. Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 281. 108 Ibid., 310n.33. See also James Conant, ‘Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility,’ in Religion and Morality, ed. D. Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 286–7n.27. 109 James Conant, ‘Cavell and the Concept of America,’ in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell B. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57. 106 107

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Obviously, ‘both objective and subjective concepts can be predicated of human beings.’110 You can be a Christian (as a characterization of a subject qua subject), and weigh two hundred pounds (as a characterization of a subject qua object). But you can employ a word such as ‘Christian’ or ‘husband’ about yourself in two different ways as well, a subjective and an objective. What makes a concept objective or subjective depends on how it is used, what role it plays in one’s life. You can, for example, be a husband in an objective sense – having, for example, a marriage certificate to prove it. In Conant’s terminology, that is how the word ‘husband’ functions when it is ‘inflected objectively.’ But ‘If a wife says to her husband “This isn’t a marriage!” he does not rebuke her by producing their marriage certificate.’111 Being a husband in the objective sense does not require much. But being a husband in a subjective sense ‘is someone (Kierkegaard says) one becomes – it presupposes involvement in an existential task that must be reaffirmed and renewed every day of one’s married life.’112 Thus, it is possible (perhaps even probable) that a man can be under the illusion that he is a husband, because he has, so to speak, the papers to prove it. So he rests assured. Because of that, he fails to be a husband on a daily basis. Kierkegaard’s view is thus not that the ethical and the religious are merely one’s own concern; that they are not intersubjectively open to view. What makes the ethical and the religious ‘subjective’ is the fact that the accent falls on how the subject relates to the object and not on the what the object is, or if the object is in this or that ‘realm.’ Any issue that depends on how it is approached, appropriated and accepted or denied, is thus a subjective concern – and so it also falls under the categories of the ethical and the religious. What matters is the role in one’s life, as a whole, that the concept has. It is not that things or words or sentences can be divided into separate spheres. If one were to put this as concretely as possible, one might say that Kierkegaard has shown us that there are no religious sentences or statements and that there are no ethical objects or statements or sentences. What is ‘factual’ and what is ‘ethical’ is not given in advance. Any sentence can, at least in principal, be ‘turned’ subjectively or objectively. What Kierkegaard criticizes is thus not the aesthetic, or disinterested reflection, per se. Aesthetic reflection might very well have its place. It is, as it were, not necessarily a sin to think about Christianity in objective terms. But knowing it doesn’t make it so. To know Christianity solely in its objective sense is, in a sense, not to know it at all. But to own Christianity subjectively is thereby not to know something else. Christendom is an illusion since it is based on an attempt to understand, or explicate, the nature of one’s religious belief solely by means of aesthetic reflection. His view is that whenever modern philosophy tries to speak to the question of what it is to be a Christian, it unwittingly transforms a religious problem into an intellectual (i.e. epistemic or metaphysical) problem . . . . Modern philosophy is, Kierkegaard thinks, thereby constantly mistaking something that properly belongs to the category of the aesthetic (a problem which can be approached through 110

Ibid. Ibid. 112 Ibid. 111

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Before I explicitly turn my focus back to the mirror analogy, I would like to emphasize that for my purposes, the illusion of Christendom and the truth of Christianity is not what is most important. (On that issue, I state no opinion.) Rather, what matters the most is the nature of the philosophical difficulty at hand – that it consists of a confusion depending on us failing to see how the concepts involved actually function in our lives as wholes – and that this difficult illusion of sense which arises from that confusion is something that belongs to a certain way of living, an ‘age’ or ‘culture.’ The words ‘age’ and ‘culture’ are hard to carry since the connotative load they carry make their employment sound overly pretentious. The ambition here is merely to say that it is quite possible that the problems Kierkegaard faced at his time have not lessened but transformed with the loss of a Christian culture. Kierkegaard’s problem, one might say, was that religious matters were approached aesthetically – that what required a personal reflection on one’s own relation to the words one employs, was only approached in a detached and disinterested way. I feel inclined to say that our problem is that it is hard to find anything that is not aesthetically approached. Today, we suffer not from the loss of the sense of one concept – say, Christianity – but from a massive loss. So to read Kierkegaard’s and his pseudonym’s texts and respond: ‘So we have lost sense of the word “Christian.” So what? Good riddance!’ is to not have understood the depth and complexities of his concern. This talk about a lost sense is likely to sound awfully nostalgic. But if a reader puts down this book at this point on the basis of this charge, she has not seen that the loss of sense here under discussion is not about a move backwards to old, perhaps obsolete, concepts. Obsoleteness is part of our culture too. I don’t hear the sound of nostalgia in Wittgenstein’s, Kierkegaard’s or Murdoch’s words here. To dispel illusions is not conservative. The response ‘Good riddance!’ may be said to have been called for if we were not talking about an illusion – that is, if this loss could be disconnected from something that we do not command a clear view of in our language, in our relation to our world, in our self-understanding.

2.5 Mirroring illusions: The thought of the indirect communication I think that we can now begin to see how this presentation of segments of the grammar of religious belief relates to the ideas of direct and indirect communications. The objective sense of, say, Christianity or matrimony is easily communicated. Just say it. (‘I do.’) But saying it doesn’t make it so (in the subjective sense). That requires a second 113

Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 261.

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reflection on your part. Kierkegaard also talks about direct communication as a single reflection: The one states it, the other repeats it. Indirect communication, on the other hand, involves a ‘double reflection.’ To the reflected statement, a doubly reflected living must be, as it were, ‘added.’ The words need to be owned, not merely mentioned and/or repeated. This gives as a link between repetition, echo, indirect communication and the question of ‘inwardness.’114 The difficulty here then, is that Kierkegaard aims to sway the minds of those who think they have the right form of inwardness already. If it is an illusion that all are Christians, and if something is to be done, it must be done indirectly, not by someone who loudly declares himself to be an extraordinary Christian, but by someone who, better informed, even declares himself not to be a Christian. That is, one who is under an illusion must be approached from behind. Instead of wanting to have for oneself the advantage of being the rare Christian, one must let the one ensnared have the advantage that he is a Christian, and then oneself have sufficient resignation to be the one who is far behind him – otherwise one will surely fail to extricate him from the illusion; it can be difficult enough anyway.115

An illusion of sense that has its root in someone unwittingly confusing categories can never be approached directly. ‘By direct attack he only strengthens a person in the illusion and also infuriates him. Generally speaking, there is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.’116 The difficulty here is that the person in question – under attack if you wish – believes himself to be making perfect sense. There is little effect to be expected from the claim ‘You do not know what you mean when you say what you think you mean.’ Kierkegaard is not attempting to say something false and then display that falsity clearly to the other, so that she feels rebuked and ashamed. Kierkegaard should not be seen as mocking his characters or his pseudonymous authors’ point of view. As remarked above, whatever communication one employs in order to accomplish something, you must use no false advertisement. This also means that we should not take the ‘object’ of an indirect communication to be something ‘unutterable.’ One might say that the ‘object’ is there, in plain view, but he wants us to question our own relation to it.

114

Climacus notes, for example, that ‘Inwardness cannot be communicated directly, because expressing it is external (oriented outwardly, not inwardly), and expressing inwardness directly is no proof at all that it is there (the direct outpouring of feeling is no proof at all that one has it, but the tension of the contrastive form is the dynamometre of inwardness), and the reception intrinsic to inwardness is not a direct reproduction of what was communicated, since that is an echo.’ Climacus, in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: A Mimical-PatheticalDialectical Compilation an Existential Contribution, ed. Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992 [1846]), 259f. (When it comes to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts, I will refer to it by the name of the author that claims to stand for the words I quote, and after that mention the work in which it occurs. The same strategy will be employed for Murdoch’s The Black Prince). 115 Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author,’ 458f. 116 Ibid., 459.

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This hangs together with how we understand the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity. If these concepts are understood as designating two ‘realms’ of things – one which is knowable to all, and one which is knowable only to me – then, we might reach the false conclusion that that which requires indirect communication is some kind of peculiar fact that we can have a sense of (privately as it were), but which cannot be said. But the fact about ‘it’ can somehow (and, indeed very mysteriously) be ‘communicated’ from the one to the other.117 But the indirect communication contains no statements about the existence of a thing or thought that is supposed to be such a secret or so personal that it cannot be talked about. What it aims at, is to display the confused as confused. In order to show that, the author – so Kierkegaard thought anyway – must indulge himself in a certain form of deception. ‘An illusion can never be removed directly, and basically only indirectly.’118 Indirect communication is called for, one might say, because the illusion stands in the way for a direct communication. So long as the concepts of Christianity are understood aesthetically – that is, are lived with and through aesthetic categories – direct communication is impossible. We both say ‘A is the truth!’ but ‘A’ means at some level different things for us. That is, it is not that we simply understand our words differently – one might even say that we want them to mean the same thing – but the roles they play in our lives differ. The mere ‘saying’ of the sentence, in the ‘right’ context, is not – in cases where indirect communications are called for – sign enough of attained understanding. Indeed, one way to spell out the sense of Kierkegaardian ‘indirect communication’ is to say that the criterion of having understood it, is not that one can repeat it (remember Kierkegaard’s ‘echo’).119 For example, a sentence such as ‘ Truth is subjectivity’ that Climacus attempts to convey, is not owned by a reader if he merely manages to repeat it. The correctness of that observation is displayed by the laughter induced by the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which Brian talks to his followers/stalkers from the window, trying to convince them not to follow him: Brian: “You are all individuals!” Crowd: “Yes! We are all individuals!” Brian: “You are all different!” Crowd: “Yes! We are all different!” Brian: “You’ve got to work it out for yourselves!”

117

Cf. Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 308n. 30. ‘The most common version of this incoherence is the following: first, one parrots the claim that certain “subjective” matters (having to do with ethics and religion) cannot be directly communicated but can only be indirectly communicated; then one immediately goes on to directly communicate in perfectly objective terms what it is that cannot be directly communicated; and then – compounding one confusion upon another – one goes on to support one’s own direct assertion (of the directly incommunicable) by simply quoting something which a pseudonymous author (generally Climacus) directly asserts.’ 118 Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author,’ 458. 119 See Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 259f. See also James Conant, ‘A Contradiction between Form and Content,’ forthcoming in International Studies in Philosophy.

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Crowd: “Yes! We’ve got to work it out for ourselves!” Brian: “Exactly.” Crowd: “Tell us more!”120

There is a similarity here between Murdoch’s call for a philosophy ‘in touch’ with the inner self of human beings, Climacus’s plea for subjectivity and Brian’s struggle not to have followers. In all cases, merely repeating them is not a sign of having understood them, but of having not understood them. We may say that the crowd here only manages to relate to Brian’s word aesthetically and objectively. They are repeating, echoing him – and that becomes a sign of them not understanding him. We may also say that they illustrate a form of disinterested reflection as that notion is used by Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous authors – which also makes it clear that ‘disinterested’ does not mean ‘without excitement’; you can be ever so excited by a form of disinterested, objective, aesthetic reflection. This enables us to distinguish two forms of expression that may be identical at the surface level of language, say in employments of the same sentences in the ‘right’ context. One is ‘the echo,’ which is a repetition of what is being said. The other may be called a ‘subjective use.’ Here it is important to keep in mind that ‘subjective use’ is not to be thought of in epistemological terms (e.g. private vs. intersubjective), for the point here is to say that the echo fails to convey the thought whereas the subjective use succeeds in conveying it, so we are in both cases always already in a relational field of shared (or not shared) understanding. We may now be able to ask ourselves as we read novels – Murdoch’s for instance – whether the expressions of ‘philosophical sentences’ that we encounter as used by the fictional characters, are mere echoes or subjective uses. Nothing in this line of thought requires, or even indicates, an ontological distinction between two ‘realms.’ So to the extent that we fail to understand one another, it is not on the basis of what we want our words to mean (we may want to be Christians, we may want to ground our knowledge in Murdochian love, we may want to be true followers of Brian) but it is quite possible that our lived experience of this ‘sense’ that we are attempting to inherit, differs too much. On the surface, we are in perfect agreement, but at depth, no real communication has taken place at all. ‘In the communication of Christianity, when the situation is Christendom, there is not a direct relation, there is first the illusion to remove. The entire old science of arms, all the apologetics and everything belonging to it, serves instead, to put it bluntly, to betray the cause of Christianity. At every point and at every moment, the strategy must be constituted on the basis of having to contend with a delusion, an illusion.’121 This is also, in a nutshell, why Kierkegaard thought that he had to employ pseudonymous authors, rather than speaking directly to his audience.122 The strategy 120

Monty Python’s Life of Brian, directed by Terry Jones (HandMade Films, 1979). Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author,’ 466. 122 Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 256f. 121

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was to start talking about the religious through aesthetic categories, thus making contact with his opponent. But, the strategy was a deceptive one. Kierkegaard wanted to use the pseudonymous works as mirrors in which a man living in aesthetic categories (stuck in disinterested and detached reflections) could recognize his own line of reasoning.123 This means that it was ever so important that the line of reasoning was portrayed adequately, otherwise the aestheticist would not, and could not, recognize himself in the mirror. Kierkegaard’s idea was that this correct reflection (picture) would also make the confusion of categories evident. ‘If the misfortune of an age is to have forgotten what inwardness is, then one should not write for “paragraph-gobblers,” but existing individualities must be portrayed in their agony when existence is confused for them, which is something different from sitting safely in a corner by the stove and reciting de omnibus dubitandum.’124 Thus, one might say, with Conant, that: Kierkegaard . . . does not take himself to be differing with his countrymen about what the word “Christian” means. His claim is simply that by their own lights – if they reflect upon what it is to become a Christian and if they reflect upon their lives and get into focus how much of a claim Christianity actually exacts upon them – they will find that they are not Christians. They are tempted into various (categorical) confusions in order to disguise this fact from themselves. But, if provided with a perspicuous overview of the category of the religious, he thinks, they themselves will be in a position to acknowledge their confusions as confusions.125

The mere recognition of the confusion does not, of course, make the reader a Christian. To say that Kierkegaard removed the confusions is also, in a sense, to say too much. In Kierkegaard’s view, the only thing an indirect communication can do is to make the reader aware of the existence of the confusion. The rest is, as it were, left for the reader to do for himself. Thus, the mirroring strategy is also a strategy that aims to be nondogmatic in a fairly radical sense, since it aims not to present any views of its own, but merely to display where and how one can go (or we have gone) wrong. A mirror holds no positive doctrines other than those shown in your reflection. This way of spelling out the sense of an indirect communication – with the mistake as an illusion, and the illusion having its root in a conflation of categories, and the style of writing that it employs as that of a mirror ‘in which the reader sees his own thinking with all its deformities’126 – clearly marks out a common space of reasoning between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. They both share the idea that we run into confusions

123

When Climacus takes one of his characteristic pauses from the argument and takes ‘A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature’ – discussing the works that Kierkegaard had produced (even those he admits to be the author of only in the legal sense) – he notes that ‘If the misfortune of the age is to have forgotten what inwardness is, then one should not write for “paragraph-gobblers”, but existing individualities must be portrayed in their agony when existence is confused for them.’ Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 264. 124 Ibid., 264f. 125 Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 267. 126 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 25e.

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because we don’t command a clear view of the uses of our words, and we fail to do so because we do not sufficiently pay attention to the way the words function in our daily lives. They both think of the meaning of concepts as inseparable from our lives in language as a whole. If we don’t live as Christians, the words of Christianity will lose their sense. Life and concepts are intimately intertwined and we often lose track of this fact when we approach our words and concepts from a detached (objective) perspective. There is a certain form of loss of sense that haunts these philosophers. Let me now, as a transition from Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard to Murdoch, call attention to an important remark that Conant made (in a footnote) that connects to my reflection of the sense and weight of Kierkegaard’s criticism of the enormous illusion of his age. Conant writes: [Kierkegaard] also thinks that, in our compulsively reflective age, we tend to be almost as confused about the ethical as we are about the religious. We are inclined to convert a problem that calls for a form of action into a problem of a different sort – into one which calls for interminable reflection. Modern philosophy is to this extent merely a symptom of an age. Kierkegaard thinks we have all been corrupted and we all suffer from an inclination towards intellectual evasion. We all tend to conflate the aesthetic and the ethical: we try to resolve something which requires an effort of the will through an application of the intellect – to mistake what he calls a “subjective problem” for an “objective problem.” So – to the extent that we are children of the present age – the prospective audience of the authorship is: everyone.127

With Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, this insight concerning the lost sense of concepts as something that follows from the fact that language and age, words and form of life, come together, also opens up new fields for philosophy (or, rather, it opens up an old field anew). First of all, we can see that we need a philosophy attentive enough to all the details of our everyday lives. This might sound flat, but it is my own impression that this is far from what we have in the specialized forms of academic philosophy that we have grown accustomed to. Furthermore, we can also see how a critique of culture and self-criticism must be, as it were, synchronized – they co-occur, regardless of our intentions and our awareness of it. How I – and the larger community on which the ‘I’ is dependent for its definition and selfunderstanding – relate to my words, how I command them and allow myself to be lead in my life as a whole should be a relevant question for any and all philosophers.

2.6 Inheriting Wittgenstein (and Kierkegaard) It is not unlikely that many Murdoch-scholars will feel that the pictures just painted of both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (and to some extent also Kant) are utterly unlike the pictures of these thinkers that they have picked up from Murdoch. They would be 127

Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together,’ 321n.66.

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right in thinking so. There are, after all, a fairly large amount of critical remarks that Murdoch has directed against them, Wittgenstein in particular. Thus, it remains to say at least something about where and why I take Murdoch to have gone wrong in her interpretative efforts. I cannot escape the feeling that in the case of Wittgenstein, Murdoch’s position is perhaps best described as undecided, turned on bewildered attraction and far from settled. (Just think about the vast amount of question marks that characterizes Murdoch’s writing on Wittgenstein.) Murdoch’s discussions about Wittgenstein (and, to a slightly lesser extent, about Kierkegaard and Kant) take place in a battle between, on the one hand, predominant pictures of what these thoughts amount to and, on the other hand, the world that unfolds in front of her as she reads them. Things do not add up. Murdoch wants to say that she is a Wittgensteinian philosopher: ‘I’m a great admirer of Wittgenstein, and I suppose I am myself, in a way, a Wittgensteinian; but if I am a Wittgensteinian, I am one in a proper, as it were, negative sense. It isn’t that one has got any body of theory, but one has got a style and a way of looking at philosophical problems. He’s a great philosopher.’128 Murdoch is entirely right in noticing that inheriting Wittgenstein is not to adopt a series of doctrines, but is rather something that works at the level of method. It concerns what and how we see, and how we approach philosophical problems. This being said, there are a few central points where Murdoch and Wittgenstein seem to be in fundamental disagreement, at least if one looks at how Murdoch (apparently) understands Wittgenstein. I will focus on two such points of divergence. One concerns the separation between fact and value. The other concerns the question about the idea of a limit of language. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch takes Wittgenstein, and particularly the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, to be advancing a view according to which value, and so ethics, fall outside the realm of the sayable and so the scope of philosophy. Murdoch’s reading seems indeed to be very close to, what has now become known as, ‘the ineffabilist reading’ – a reading which shares with ‘the positivistic reading’ the conviction that the world of the Tractatus is divided into two realms, one of facts and one of values and religion and other aesthetic side dishes.129 (Mysticism and positivism have always been siblings.) ‘Facts are what can be expressed in plain non-evaluative language. There is no place for any idea of “moral facts”, or for the development of a “moral vocabulary”.’130 What differentiates the ineffabilist reading from the positivistic reading is that the ineffabilist holds that there is something valuable to be seen if we climb the Tractarian ladder. Murdoch seems to think that Wittgenstein (too) suggests that value is ‘something separate, lodged in a part of the world, and not a light in which 128

Bellamy, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 52. For an overview and a more substantial discussions of these terms and these ways of reading, see The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), and Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate, eds. Rupert Read and Mathew A. Lavery (New York: Routledge, 2011). 130 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 31. 129

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the whole world is revealed.’131 Ethics and aesthetics are thus presumed to be ineffable ‘things’ that we can intuit (if we climb all seven steps of the Tractatus), yet we can say nothing about the ‘things’ that we ‘see.’ Something strange is going on here – on that, all agree – and the strangeness of this predicament needs to be taken into account. Even though I have not done a full reading of the Tractatus, and so am in no position to claim to present a comprehensive account, I am convinced that the so-called ‘resolute reading’ is entirely right in noticing that the ladder needs to be climbed and thrown away. One can also see that Murdoch is troubled by this situation and she is tempted to say that the Tractatus actually demands this ‘revocation.’ But she does not trust her inclinations here. Value is essentially ineffable since significant discourse is tied to fact. It cannot alter the facts but its operation is thereby extremely pure. Moral philosophy and theology are bound to be ineffable, an attempt to say what cannot be said but can only be, in the whole living life, shown. “Ethics is transcendental” (Tractatus 6.54), since if we attempt to limit the conditions of experience from inside we cannot properly talk about what is outside. Can we not see a little beyond those transcendental barriers, do we not have intimations, gleams of light, glimpses of another scene? The Tractatus is a sustained talk to put a final end to such talk, and to do so (as he explained in the letter to Ficker), in the interest of morality. We must, at least, talk as little as possible and then, as Wittgenstein tells us at the end of the book, “throw away the ladder.” Kierkegaard would have appreciated that image.132

The complexity of this passage is actually rather hard to detect, since the dominant pictures (in this case concerning what the Tractatus aims to achieve) are just that– dominant. But as one slows this passage down, reads it, and sounds out its question mark, the certainty with which we think that Murdoch simply accuses Wittgenstein for a too harsh separation between fact and value doesn’t diminish, but is shaken. For what we see now is a Murdoch who seems to say that Wittgenstein appears to say something and takes it back. She knows that Wittgenstein wants us to throw away the ladder. She also notices that this brings a similarity between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard into view. Wittgenstein’s revocation, Murdoch rightly notices, makes it suitable to describe him as ‘another exponent of “indirect communication”.’133 So why should not the idea that there is a separate world of value that we cannot talk about be a step to be thrown away too? My suspicion is that Murdoch simply does not know how to sort this out. She has already recognized that some (she does not mention who) read the Tractatus as ‘a reductio ad absurdum, of the idea that fact and value must not be allowed to contaminate each other.’134 She knows that whatever 131

Ibid., 39 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 36. 133 Ibid., 7. 134 Ibid., 31. 132

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view that the Tractatus purports to put forward, it is not the positivistic view: ‘Ayer seems to have misunderstood Wittgenstein in the same sense numerous thinkers misunderstand Plato. The “picturesque” structure indicates something beyond it; it is not to be taken literally. . . . Wittgenstein’s silence indicates the area of value. Ayer’s use of the distinction between fact and value deliberately removes value.’135 She also notes that the Tractatus must be seen as a picture and can be seen as a myth.136 Furthermore, she realizes that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, ‘tells us that if we absolutely separate fact and value we can say nothing about the latter.’137 But we can, can’t we? Can we really say that Murdoch thinks that the Tractatus simply puts forward the thesis that there is a clear distinction between the world of facts and a world of values, a world of which we can talk and a world of which we must remain silent? Murdoch is on the verge of climbing the ladder that she knows must be thrown away. She is shaking it, kicking it, hearing it rattle, sounding out the hollowness of its rungs and recognizing that these steps are leading us nowhere. Yet, she clings on to the idea that Wittgenstein argues for a separation that Murdoch wants us to reconsider. Should we say that the ubiquity of the fact/value-separation in her culture and (seemingly) in the Tractatus overrides her inclinations? The main significance of this excursus to Wittgenstein (and Kierkegaard and Kant) is not to decide whether Murdoch got this or that philosopher right (even though one really cannot refrain from saying something about those issues too), but to bring into view the difficulties she inherits from them and her responses to these difficulties. She, clearly, takes the questions about the limits of language and of the division of a world into two separate realms to be real problems of great significance. As she responds to them, she shies away from every attempt to split the world into a sayable world of facts and an ineffable, unspeakable, realm of ethics and religion. So whatever we make of Murdoch’s discussions of the Tractatus, this much is clear: the idea of a divided world and the idea that there are ‘things that can only be shown but not said’ are ideas that she thinks of as untenable. Such ideas build on a faulty separation between fact and value; on a failure to see that value is part of our language or a denial of that fact (‘We don’t want it to be allowed to mess things up!’). Murdoch’s charge is an attack on a philosophical desire to make our language and our world comprehensible and controllable by means of a reductive move (at the cost of making it incomprehensible). ‘They’ are wrong about what our world is (like): ‘The defence of value is not an attack on “ordinary facts”.’138 And if it has not become obvious, this entails that whatever else we may say about Murdoch’s view of the relation between philosophy and literature, we go wrong if we take her to be arguing that there is something ‘ineffable’ that our ordinary language cannot capture, but which a literary expression can somehow (know just enough about to) ‘show.’ That idea is described by Murdoch as a ‘terrible wish’ that lies inherent in 135

Ibid., 43. (Italics added). Ibid., 40. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid., 26. 136

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Heidegger’s view that ‘the language of philosophy, if it is to tell the truth, must be poeticised and become a new sort of prose-poetry.’139 Philosophy, if it is to be of any genuine significance, must concern, dwell in and upon, our lives; and so it must concern, dwell in and upon, our language. A literary artist, just like all of us, can only describe the world we can see (in a wide sense of the term, of course). Without knowing just how much Murdoch has read of Wittgenstein’s work (and how carefully), it is fairly easy to point out formulations of his that should make Murdoch even more hesitant to think that the Tractatus presents and supports a view of a divided world. She notes that the purpose of the book is ethical – which comes out in the letter from Wittgenstein to Ficker that she quotes140 – and she sees that the Wittgensteinian picture of us running up ‘against the limits of language is ethics.’141 So why assume that Wittgenstein attempts to move, however silently, within an ineffable world? One clue on how to proceed beyond this perplexing ‘conclusion,’ may be obtained from Wittgenstein’s remarks about the relation between logic and ethics. The relevance of the link between ‘them’ comes out clearly if we place these two passages beside each other: Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.142 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)143

The first fundamental feature of the conception of logic that the Tractatus purports is that logic is that which we reason through and not about. (In this sense, it is also a priori.) This is a thought hard to attain a clear view of. Since Wittgenstein also claims that ‘The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of natural science),’144 it may be tempting to assume that logic must, somehow, fall outside of the world. Murdoch draws that conclusion – a ‘dangerous’ conclusion. That logic is that which we reason through and not about – as we may reason about flowers, animals, emotions, sins, little and large deaths, stones, the originality of The Rolling Stones and molecules – gives us no reason to assume that logic, thereby, is to be seen as a particular subject-matter, an ‘entity’ (a word we philosophers often call upon when we do not know what we are talking about) that has its own realm of existence. That would again turn it into a thing that we can, and so should, reason about. For 139

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 28–9, 36. 141 Ibid., 29. 142 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinnes (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001 [1922]), § 6.13. 143 Ibid., § 6.421. 144 Ibid., § 4.11. 140

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example, when Wittgenstein says that ‘I know nothing about the weather when I know that it is either raining or not raining’145 he can hardly be suggesting that ‘the law of the excluded middle’ (either A or not-A) is a thing that we have no access to. Rather, his point is that this is part of our everyday language – part of what makes it tick the way it does – and not something that language is about and not something that exists apart from it. But ‘the law of the excluded middle’ is not part of ordinary language in the sense that we can expect it to be commonly and meaningfully uttered by someone. In fact, this is precisely the kind of thing that no one would be expected to say. Of course, we may easily come up with a context in which the sentence ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining’ may do some work – say in an attempt at comedy ridiculing weather reports. I would hesitate to call this context strained or secondary or derivative, but the fact that it is comic (though not especially funny) brings into view, not only a fact about the unpredictability of weather reports, but also about the grammar of our language. As a contrast: picture a man dressed up in cap and gown, occupying the same corner in your hometown every day, repeating the phrase ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining,’ accompanied by a stern stare, to everyone who passes him by. We would not consider him to be a messenger of truth.146 Remove comedy and we move into madness. Yet, one can still see that there is something about ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining’ that we may describe as ‘having a (logical) point.’ To see the logical point of ‘I know nothing about the weather when I know that it is either raining or not raining,’ and so to see the force of ‘either A, or not-A,’ one needs to know one’s language and nothing else. A formal notation – such as ‘"x[F(x) v ⌐F(x)]’ – only serves to elucidate something that already exists and is known to all users of language, and it is important to notice that it does not, and cannot, add anything new to it (that wasn’t present before). A formal notation can only elucidate and not explain or govern.147 Thus, logic is constantly ‘in play’ in every word and sentence we employ. So we may say that a formal notion is a tool we may employ in cases of bewilderment, whereas logic is not. This is the gist of the seemingly provocative claims that ‘all propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order’148 and ‘we cannot make mistakes in logic.’149 This view does not entail that we cannot reason in good or bad ways, but that what makes reasoning good or bad is the fact that logic is always already present in our language. This may (only?) come out as a preposterous

145

Ibid., § 4.461. Cf. Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. I, 195. 147 For more extensive arguments of this point, see Cora Diamond, ‘What does a Concept Script Do?,’ in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991); and James Conant, ‘The Method of the Tractatus,’ in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. Erich H. Reck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). See especially p. 418, where Conant claims that: ‘[t]he advantage of a logical symbolism, for the Tractatus, lies not in what it permits (or forbids) one to say, but in the perspicuity of its mode of representation: in how it allows someone who is drawn to call upon certain words to see what it is (if anything) he is saying.’ 148 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 5.5563. 149 Ibid., § 5.473. 146

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claim if one thinks that logic is a thing, or a tool, that we can apply – precisely the view Wittgenstein contests (but which Murdoch ascribes to him when she argues that ‘his segregation of morality also serves the purpose of keeping the world clean for the propositional calculus’150). Now, the ‘link’ between logic and ethics may be illuminated by saying that if logic is, as it were, always already in play, then so is ethics. This means, above all, that there is no such thing as a separate and enclosed ‘sphere’ called ‘ethics’ and it most certainly does not mean that the ethical ‘sphere’ is ineffable – impenetrable for the human mind. We may paraphrase Wittgenstein and say that we know nothing about a human being, or the particular action that she conducts, if we know that she, or it, is good or bad. (Similarly: ‘knowing’ a moral theory or reading a novel that portrays goodness, does not make you good, but good or bad151 – if it does anything to you.) Like logic, ethics is that on which such questions turn; not an object of scrutiny but that which we reason through. Indeed, it seems that the Tractatus sides with Murdoch rather than what she takes to be the Tractatarian point of view when she said – meaning to criticize Wittgenstein – that the Tractatus presents ethics as ‘something separate, lodged in a part of the world, and not a light in which the whole world is revealed.’152 (According to Murdoch, Wittgenstein holds the first view while she endorses the second. According to me, they both hold the second.) What about the claim: ‘It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words’? Does not that rather bluntly suggest that ethics is unsayable? But are we really to assume that it should mean anything more than Murdoch’s view of the good as something indefinable? Are we to assume that it contains an ontological claim that differentiates the ethical from the logical? If what we call logic is nothing more than mirror-images of the world, of how we think, why are we to assume that moral talk should have its own form of odd existence and not be descriptions, mirrorimages, of how we live? In a similar vein, just as we ‘cannot make mistakes in logic’ we cannot make mistakes in ethics. If logic is that by means of which we think, ethics is what we live in, or by. If good or bad reasoning both turn on logic, good and bad forms of living turn on ethics. That ‘ethics cannot be put into words’ thus means that ethics is not a system of recipes we apply. What ‘the ethical’ designates cannot be reduced to ‘ethical sentences,’ ‘dogmas,’ ‘theories,’ ‘instructions’ – like, say, ‘you shall not ridicule your fathers’ – but resides within living life where sentences such as this may or may not have a place. For all moral decisions (the ridiculing or not ridiculing) are still to be made once the ‘formula’ is in place. So Wittgenstein’s Tractatus does not conceive ‘ethics’ as denoting a particular and enclosed field or branch of philosophy, just as logic cannot be separated from all our thinking. Conant formulates this well when he says: ‘as logic (or later: grammar) pervades all our thinking, so, too, ethics pervades all our living, and each impinges on

150

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 33. I owe this remark to Lars Hertzberg. 152 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 39. 151

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the other, so that, just as forms of logical and philosophical unclarity (and dishonesty) are sources of ethical blindness (and evasion), so, too, forms of ethical unclarity (and dishonesty) are sources of logical and philosophical blindness.’153 Should not these remarks suffice to show that ethics is not in Wittgenstein’s view something (say, a body of doctrines or a ‘thing’ with a set of features) one has? Indeed, hearing Wittgenstein say ‘My ethics is . . .’ is as unlikely as hearing him say ‘My logic is . . .’ I have said that Murdoch was onto something when she noted that ‘the “picturesque” structure’ of the Tractatus ‘indicates something beyond it; it is not to be taken literally.’154 So Murdoch is torn between thinking of the Tractatus as a body of doctrines and as a work that is pushing us, its readers, to do something for ourselves. Her reading of Wittgenstein would have been radically different had she leaned over to think about it as ‘a reduction ad absurdum, of the idea that fact and value must not be allowed to contaminate each other.’155 She notes that ‘Kierkegaard would have appreciated’ the image of Wittgenstein urging his reader to throw away the ladder. I note that Murdoch should have appreciated that image too. The lack of a moral vocabulary in Wittgenstein’s work does not disqualify the claim that the work as a whole has an ethical aim. It is central to Murdoch’s (mis-)understanding of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein does proclaim language to be limited – and limited in a specific sense. She thinks that Wittgenstein pictures language as a cage that we cannot escape from. We seem to lack the right cognitive muscles. In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes: ‘[T]he aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought but to the expressions of thought: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).’156 With reference to this passage, one might say that Murdoch takes Wittgenstein to actually be describing the limit, as it were, from outside. That is, indeed, the only way in which we can describe and theoretically elaborate on the idea that the world of value and religion is on ‘the other side.’ This is why I think that the resolute reading is right on, at least, this point: We need to climb and then throw away the ladder. ‘The illusion that the Tractatus seeks to explode, above all, is that we can run up against the limits of language.’157 So I actually take Murdoch to be on the same path as Wittgenstein when she wants to insist that the world of value does not lie outside the limits of language, but is our world – it’s just that she doesn’t see that the author of the Tractatus shares her view. Murdoch takes this cage-like image to be endorsed by the later Wittgenstein as well. Also in this case I think that Murdoch is much closer to Wittgenstein than she 153

James Conant, ‘What Ethics in the Tractatus is Not,’ in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2005) 40. 154 Ibid., 43. (Italics added). 155 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 31. 156 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Preface, p. 3. 157 Conant, ‘What Ethics in the Tractatus is Not,’ 53.

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sees, and that she might even have learnt more from him than she recognizes. For, in a sense, if one is a follower of Wittgenstein in the ‘profound sense’ that she claims to be – that is, in ‘a proper . . . negative sense’ – one shares (at least some of) his methods and problems. Wittgenstein’s methods cannot be, as it were, disconnected from the particular forms of philosophical difficulties he was struggling with. Sharing ‘a style and a way of looking at philosophical problems’158 is sharing much more than a style and a way of looking at philosophical problems. In this passage, Murdoch expresses her suspicion that the later Wittgenstein endorses the picture of language as a cage too: At the end of the Investigations . . . Wittgenstein seems anxious to remove the concept of “experience,” . . . . Are we to be left with the rather rigid, and indeed not clearly explained, ideas of language games and Lebensformen? Can this be a full account of human life and language? In the Investigations Wittgenstein seems to be shaking off his views expressed in the Tractatus and the Notebooks; we were to be liberated from an earlier cage. But is the “second book,” for all its liberating antiCartesian aspects, not in some sense another cage? There is a feeling of constraint. Perhaps what lingers is a shadow of logic?159

Yes, there is a shadow of logic lingering in the Investigations, but what a lingering shadow of logic means, and what the effect of such lingering is, is a question hard to answer. If we want to get Wittgenstein straight here, we should answer ‘No’ to the remaining questions that Murdoch here poses: No, we are not to be left with ‘rather rigid’ yet ‘not clearly explained, ideas of language games and Lebensformen.’ No, this cannot constitute ‘a full account of human life and language.’ No, ‘the “second book”,’ is not to be seen as ‘another cage’ (just as the first one wasn’t . . .) It is true that the ‘ideas of language games and Lebensformen’ are neither rigid nor clearly explained. But why should we assume that they should be? What we need now are not rigid and clearly defined terms, but a way to get a sense of the complexity of language and life that Murdoch appropriately describes as ‘muddled.’160 After having introduced the famous example of ‘the Builders’ in the opening (§ 2) of the Investigations, Wittgenstein tells us how he is going to use the term ‘languagegames.’ We can – ‘can,’ not ‘must’ – ‘think of the whole process of using words’ in the Builders example ‘as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language.’161 These processes (there are several), will be called ‘language-games’ he says, immediately adding that he will sometimes also ‘speak of a primitive language as a language game.’ But there’s more: ‘the processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games.’ But there’s still more: ‘I shall

158

Bellamy, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 52. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 273. 160 Ibid., 280. 161 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 7. 159

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also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a “language-game”.’162 This is not much of a definition since there is not much that it excludes (which is a typical thing that definitions do: exclude). We are talking about the whole process of learning one’s native tongue, about primitive languages, about ‘the process of naming stones,’ about ‘repeating words after someone,’ and about language as a whole in which ‘the activities into which it is woven’ are to be included (hardly a cage). In short, we learn that Wittgenstein is going to put this analogy to use in a variety of ways, and since he tells us this already at the start, he is going to assume that we will keep this in mind. Keeping this in mind means, I take it, that we are to refrain from thinking that it is a rigid and clearly defined term, a technical concept. Murdoch seems to be expecting too much and too little of Wittgenstein. ‘Too much’ in the sense that she expects him to live up to rather strict (but all too common) ideas about what philosophical writing is supposed to be; ‘too little’ in the sense that she does not trust him to be a fellow traveller along the muddled, messy, complex, personal, emotionally charged, forgotten, downplayed, regions of language. Again, Murdoch seems to be of two minds. On the one hand, she recognizes that (the later) ‘Wittgenstein now allows “imponderable evidence,” “fine shades of behaviour,” glances, gestures, tones, also differing concepts of “experience.” A moral consideration enters, the concept of truthfulness.’163 On the other hand, she takes him to be offering ‘an unnerving account of the bases of language and thought.’164 Here, Murdoch takes ‘language-game’ and ‘forms of life’ to be Wittgenstein’s answer to a traditional metaphysical question: ‘Wittgenstein’s Lebensformen are introduced as fundamental (logical?) judges of the possibility of meaning.’165 What is more, she also takes these ‘terms’ to be freezing language, denying movement – and so, there’s the threat of conservatism lurking in the background. ‘Assent, general agreement, has a background which must be scrutinised. Is there a reason why a despotic state could not be a Lebensform? Any Lebensform may be subject to moral judgment.’166 It appears as if Murdoch takes ‘forms of life,’ not only to denote something static and so conservative and dangerous, but it is also seen as something that is to function as a foundation for language. She is wrong on both accounts. If one goes through Wittgenstein’s use of this phrase, it seems to me obvious that it is employed precisely because it brings into view the multifarious ways in which human life can and may take form; and since life is changing, so is language; and since language is always changing, so are we – thoughts that are all leading towards a disclosure of the close interconnection between ‘language’ and ‘ethics’. (We may also note the risk of making too much of that thought.) Furthermore, as one goes through Wittgenstein’s uses of ‘forms of life’ – how else are we to learn how to trust such a concept? – it seems clear to

162

Ibid. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 276. 164 Ibid., 272. 165 Ibid., 276. 166 Ibid., 281. 163

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me that he uses it negatively, against the tendency to intellectualize and/or to think that language is static, locked, not in constant transformation and renegotiation. Language games are played. Playing is something we do. Murdoch thinks of language games and forms of life as static, governed by rules and not open to change. Thus, she also takes them to be as demanding as that which she took to be the confused trust in formal logic that she sees as part of the armour of the Tractatus.167 Thus, the cage: ‘The image of language thought of in this philosophical context is that of a cage. There are stern and clearly defined limits. This goes with ideas of “logic” and the “conceptual”: or rather abrupt collision with the transcendent (as limit).’168 This is Wittgenstein inside-out. This is not the place to bring into view the various ways in which this term comes to life in Wittgenstein’s work as a whole, but we must see that it is not meant to do the kind of (singular and traditional) job that Murdoch thinks, or suspects, that it is supposed to. Wittgenstein is forcing us to approach this analogy from different angles, in different situations, so that we, the readers of the work, are forced to conquer its sense(s) and, so, its point(s). In fact, one might say that the point of putting this much trust in his readers is a way for Wittgenstein to make clear that whatever we think of language as a whole, it is not fixed, static, governed by a set of given rules (which is not the same as denying regularity), but . . . muddled. Thereby, he also makes it clear that the philosophical struggle to develop a theory that explains ‘the possibility of meaning’ is not the right way forward. Murdoch reads the words ‘language-games’ as giving a bad answer to a question that is not Wittgenstein’s. This is most likely why Murdoch gets so confused when she reads the passages most often referred to as ‘the private language argument.’169 Again, things do not add up in Murdoch’s reading. Since she takes this argument to be part of, as it were, an argument meant to speak in favour of a particular ‘theory’ about the nature of language, she also becomes worried about a ‘too fierce removal of entities deemed to be unnecessary and unknowable?’170 Rather surprisingly (since we know just how deeply influenced by Wittgenstein Murdoch is) she takes his critical remarks about philosophical theories about the nature of meaning (which we now know Wittgenstein thought of as a confused struggle) that are founded on an inner ‘mental image’ that is supposed to ‘breathe life’ into the sign, to amount to a more or less full, or at least too extensive, rejection of the importance of the ‘inner life’ of the human! Murdoch is willing to grant him the negative point that when we, for example, are teaching a child to talk about pain, we are not ‘trying to direct the child’s attention inwards,’ as Marie McGinn

167

Ibid., 272, 274f. Ibid., 282. 169 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 243–315. For one of the best discussions of ‘the private language argument’ that I know of, see Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§ 243–315 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 170 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 270. 168

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aptly puts it, which makes it clear that ‘introspection plays no part in the training we receive with sensation words.’171 But, as should have become clear from previous sections of this chapter, this does not amount to a denial of the importance of one’s inner life or of the fact that language ‘is also the property of individuals whose inner private consciousness, seething with arcane imagery and shadowy intuitions, occupies the greater part of their being.’172 Murdoch’s reservations seem to build on her missing the fact that Wittgenstein does not deny that, in the quite familiar sense, we do have private languages.173 Wittgenstein is here pressing us to move from ordinary experience of the private uses of language that we are familiar with, to a point at which this sense of familiarity disintegrates on us. As this loss of community enters, abstract theorizing tends to enter. This is why it becomes important to remind us of the fact that we cannot teach a child our language by asking it him/her to look into him/herself. The point is not, cannot be, to deny the importance of inner life. Furthermore, if we rid ourselves of the confused idea that Wittgenstein hereby aims to give a theory of meaning (in the rather traditional sense that Murdoch thinks that he is trying to) there is no reason to assume that linguistic sense hangs on, is theoretically founded in, public agreed upon and general rules. (Linguistic ‘rules’ are better seen as descriptions of our lives in language than as its foundation, something that precedes our practise and makes them possible.) It is no surprise that Murdoch finds it hard to see how Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophy of language’ is supposed to go together with his ‘more ethical’ talk about truthfulness and ‘descending into oneself.’174 It would simply be downright wrong to say that Murdoch challenges anything in Wittgenstein’s philosophy when she notes that ‘Individuals are truthful or otherwise.’175 And she is not countering him when she claims that ‘Truth and falsehood are in a perpetual engagement with meaning. Meaning is slippery and free, language is a huge place (structuralists are right here).’176 Murdoch has inflated Wittgenstein’s criticism of inner criteria, thus cancelling the possibility of taking Wittgenstein at his word when he notes that much, much more than we are inclined to think, depends on truthfulness (rather than external systems of rules). Wittgenstein does not remove the human. He should be seen as calling for its return. There are, however, moments at which Murdoch, in my view, poses the right questions about words such as ‘language-games’ and ‘forms of life’: ‘How are we to 171

Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1997), 121. Cf. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 270. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 275. 173 See, for example, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 243, where he says: ‘But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expressions to his inner experiences—his feelings, and the rest—for his private use?—Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language?—But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.’ 174 ‘If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself . . . he will remain superficial in his writing.’ Wittgenstein quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 193. 175 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 281. 176 Ibid. 172

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trust ourselves to such a concept, what is it to “accept the everyday language game” and note false accounts?’177 We are not. Trust in words is, in Wittgenstein’s view just as it is in Murdoch’s, a perpetual struggle that cannot and will not be settled by means of references to any system of rules. Meaning it (or failing to mean it) is, in some respect (often but probably not always), an ethical task. (But all this should hopefully have become clear from the fairly intimate links I have drawn between Murdoch and Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein previously in this chapter.) It should be noted that Murdoch’s reading is not especially uncommon and that some may think of me as the odd figure here. A great deal of Wittgenstein’s readers take him to be supplying an account (if not a theory) about the nature of language. Such readings – based on the ‘Problem ›››› Solution’ schema presented in 2.1 above – do not, in my view, pay sufficient attention to the Wittgenstein (early and late) who stresses that philosophy is to be seen as an activity and not a ‘Lehre,’178 and there’s not much trace left of the idea of philosophy as an activity of ‘working on oneself.’179 But it is true: if Wittgenstein should be seen as a philosopher who simply replaces one picture about the nature of language with another (which he shouldn’t), and if it is true that the picture he presents is ‘grounded’ in limited language-games that tells us what to think as they constitute some kind of standard of correctness (which it isn’t), then Murdoch’s worries would be called for. One may say that Wittgenstein works more negatively, destructively, than what is common in contemporary philosophy. He slowly moves from common everyday uses of words to hyperbolic, metaphysical twists of these – for example, from true, honest and important experiences of the unavailability of one’s others’ inner life to a scepticism about other minds, or from our sense of language as mine, owned and of true understanding of one’s others’ words as intimate to her, to a picture of a Fodorian ‘language of thought’180 – attempting to make clear that somewhere along these roads (that do start off from genuine human experiences) the ground beneath our feet vanishes. (And so we need ‘friction.’181) And we can only see the force of these elucidations if we are prone to think that our feet are grounded all the way into (what Wittgenstein describes as) ‘metaphysics’; which we may spell out as ‘frictionless wordings.’ That is, his readers must share his problems. In that sense, one might say that Wittgenstein’s challenges to, and charges against, ‘analytic’ philosophers can only be fully understood if one can see the temptation to think along those lines. His recurring emphasis on philosophy as consisting of reminders highlights the struggle not to replace answers to confused questions with alternative accounts, but to bring friction, foothold, back. One difficulty in understanding Wittgenstein, that I take Murdoch’s reading to be expressive of, is that she does not sufficiently appreciate Wittgenstein’s metaphysical temptations; she is not sufficiently inside ‘analytic’ philosophy to be able to appreciate the destructive, self-destructive, steps of Wittgenstein’s. (The fact that she 177

Ibid., 276. See, for example, Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 4.112, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 109, 133. 179 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript, § 86, (p. 300). 180 See, for example, Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell, 1975), and Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 181 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 107. 178

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is not ‘sufficiently’ inside analytic philosophy is also one of her strong points – as she can view ‘it’ with a certain form of healthy distance.) Murdoch’s reception of Kierkegaard is driven by a worry about the same difficulties as her reading of Wittgenstein is. Murdoch’s understanding of Kierkegaard also differs from the picture I have presented. Strikingly the differences most clearly come out in relation to the question about a limit of language. Murdoch takes Kierkegaard to hold a view not that dissimilar from Wittgenstein’s (her Wittgenstein). In her view, Kierkegaard also presents our condition as that of a cage. Here, a few further remarks are prompted about the notion of ‘indirect communication’, for Murdoch takes this notion of Kierkegaard’s to be his response to our alleged imprisonment. In a fairly traditional manner – representing a view of Kierkegaard that I take to be problematic – Murdoch takes Kierkegaard’s ‘spheres’ to be limited ‘rooms.’ And she also seems to think of the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ in today’s epistemologically charged sense. ‘The first and the third [the aesthetic and the religious individual] are private and obscure, belonging in the secrecy of the individual soul, the second [the moral universal], being clearly and rationally explicable, can represent a public model.’182 Here, she is picturing the human as if we exist, and are placed (or place ourselves) in different realms – first in the private, then in the public and finally in the private again. This corresponds to a move between different epistemological positions in her reading. The first and the third spheres are private and hence supposed to be subjective (in the contemporary epistemological sense), and we only do an intermediate landing in the objective zone (in the contemporary epistemological sense). So we have three cages. The crucial thing is that she takes Kierkegaard to think that the move from the second to the third requires a form of transcendence that literally moves us beyond the sphere of reason; out of the cage and into a transcendent ‘reality.’ Again, what is ‘really deep’ is beyond. Again Murdoch protests. She does not want to stay within the compounds of ‘objective reason’ where value and religion have no place, but neither will she accept the view that we need to break some kind of barrier so that we can come to see ‘glimpses’ of them again. Her point is that there is no barrier. There is no cage. Murdoch’s Kierkegaard and Murdoch’s Wittgenstein both feel the need for an ‘indirect communication.’ Kierkegaard turns, she argues, to that form of writing because he thought that ‘discontinuity, shock and paradox represented the best way to prompt understanding of what is really deep.’183 And the goal of this form was, if we are to believe Murdoch: ‘a religious truth manifested in a story about a person pointing to a transcendent reality.’184 Murdoch’s Wittgenstein flirts, as it were, with this form of writing because it ‘may perhaps be able somehow to say something about value, morality and the “human heart”; but he would not think it the philosopher’s task to say how this could be done or to evaluate attempts to do it.’185

182

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 124. Ibid., 7. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid., 40. 183

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As often when it comes to Murdoch’s readings of philosophers and philosophical works, her main strength lies not in exegetical examinations of details, but in her response to what she sees as she reads (correctly or not). The difficult thing is that one needs to go through her trails of thought in order to recognize them. (This comes with the view that it is mistaken to think that we can understand a philosopher without understanding her problems, without knowing what she is afraid of.) Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein all bring out her fears. Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein all help her in coming to terms with them. Murdoch is not very different from most of us: we turn on, on bewildered attraction. The rejection of the cage-picture should not, however, lead us to assume that there’s no sense at all to be found in the idea of a limit of language. Language does limit us: we cannot say just anything in any way we want.186 So we may well say that we, at times, are running up against the limits of language, but this does not mean that the limit of language (in Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein or Murdoch) marks a border we cannot cross, and hence there is no secret ‘out there.’ Rather, it is a question of us losing foothold, friction. Sense may disintegrate on us. This is one of the central thoughts of Murdoch’s that come out of her quarrels with Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (regardless of how we position ourselves on the questions concerning the correctness of her interpretations). Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics – whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that whatever definition of the good may be given – it will always be merely a misunderstanding to say that the essential thing, that what is really meant, corresponds to what is expressed (Moore). But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something.187

This helps us to further clarify Murdoch’s recurrent understanding and use of Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect communication.’ Murdoch locks the notion to art and is something that does not belong in philosophy.188 The fact that both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein philosophized with ‘indirect communication’ as a method shows that this particular way of tying the notions to different genres is not theirs. If something 186

The ‘tout-dire’ as the freedom to say anything, in any way, that lies at the heart of our notion of literature (no older than the Enlightenment and Murdoch’s ‘liberal’ human) is in a certain sense impossible, and so it can only be alive in literature. This is not (only) a question of censorship, but about the fact that at some point sense vanishes on us, and that is the point at which philosophy begins by us finding ourselves mute and excluded from communality. 187 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 29. 188 Murdoch, ‘Philosophy and Literature,’ 11f.

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requires an indirect communication, it does so in whatever field or form we are working with. Perhaps we may say that Murdoch does not think of ‘indirect communication’ as a philosophical method and that contributes to her misunderstandings of parts of their thoughts. Indeed, it seems like Murdoch thinks that philosophy always is direct and that ‘indirect communication’ is what literature is, it relates internally to its genre, is a part of its nature. We may say that (most) contemporary academic philosophy fits well with Murdoch demarcations here, and that philosophy and literature are separated since the former is direct and the second indirect. If one does not see that both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein use indirect communication as a method, this may lead one to suspect that their works are more like literature than philosophy. This is, at least at times, how Murdoch seems to frame it. But this framing is, in my view, too simplistic since it overlooks the possibility that philosophy may not only be conducted in an indirect manner, but may require it. I think it is correct to say that ‘indirect communication’ in philosophy is best seen as a method purporting to achieve a specific result, whereas in literature ‘indirect communication’ is not a method or a way of working, but something that relates internally to the genre. The way I am encouraging us to see these relations (between indirect and direct communication and between philosophy and literature) is this: if we say that most forms philosophy is direct and that literature generally operates indirectly (leaves more to its readers), this does not entitle us to think that we have framed the genres’ essences. If we say that philosophy may not be able to deal with all its difficulties by means of direct communications, it does not follow that philosophy should become literature. What follows is that philosophers must be open to the potential powers of literary works (and that we have little reason to assume that philosophy has a form which is its ideal form). Murdoch’s linking of the notion of indirect communication to art actually helps us see that the point of it is not that of communicating an already achieved and self-sustained philosophical position. (And on that point she is in agreement with Kierkegaard). When she quarrels with Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, she is also revealing how we should not understand her employments of these notions and the thoughts to which they are related. Since she rejects the view of the world as cut up into different spheres and the idea of a limit to language, the indirect communication is not prompted by a desire to say something that cannot be said. Rather: ‘Art is artificial, it is indirect communication which delights in its own artifice. . . . The art object is a kind of illusion, a false unity, the product of a mortal man who cannot entirely dominate his subject matter and remove or transform contingent rubble and unclarified personal emotions and attitudes.’189 Of course, as art works, the indirect communications show us something. They show us something that may well be said to go far beyond the simple transmission of a message from an author to a reader, perhaps even beyond argumentation. An indirect communication, as an artwork, that is, as a self-sufficient whole (Kant is here necessary!), deliberately removes the authorial intention and forces its reader to relate to the world presented, to the muddled and the emotionally charged,

189

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 87.

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and makes him/her try to sort out just how these words, as uttered by this person, at this time, in this light, fit (or do not fit) into this kind of life (this ‘context’ if you like). But they do not show us something about, or gesture towards something in, another realm. Murdoch’s quarrels with Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein also show that ‘the transcendent,’ that which confronts us as impossible or incomprehensible in all its complexity (as if it shouldn’t be), is part of our world (too). ‘Mystery,’ one might say, is part of our ordinary language too. There is always something extraordinary in the ordinary. One way in which this is brought into view is in Murdoch’s startling ‘reservation’: ‘Wittgenstein [in the Tractatus] dismisses any general problem of a transcendent “factual” world.’190 Is not this – a transcendent ‘factual’ world – a contradicto in adjecto? That is, is not the word ‘transcendent’ reserved for precisely those ‘things’ that are beyond our world? The perplexing nature of this sentence can only be released, the knots of it untied, if we realize that in Murdoch’s view – as it comes out in particular in her criticisms of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard – is that if language is not a cage, the idea of an ineffable realm comes apart. That does not leave us with the ‘merely objective’ or ‘truly factual’ world in which everyone and everything in principle can be understood and explained (objectively and scientifically).191 That would be to reject only half of the idea of a doubled world. If one says that it is mistaken to think that we should cut the world in halves, one does not say that only half the world is worth saving. When, for example, Murdoch discusses the problem of how the sense of the term ‘God’ has changed – even asking (not claiming) if we should ‘go on using it’ – she makes it clear that ‘these problems can be dealt with by all the vast recourses of our ordinary reflective procedures and our ordinary metaphorical evaluative language. We are not cut off from St. Paul. A division of language itself between fact and value not only isolates and diminishes value, it may damage the concept of truth.’192 Thus, we may say that Murdoch’s employments (and rather untimely endorsements of) the term ‘transcendent’ are deduced, vindicated by her, through this line of reasoning: That the idea of an ineffable realm disintegrates on us, that there is no other world and no other language than ours, does not necessarily mean that there is much sense in thinking that we can have everything in plain view, that nothing confronts us as radically the other, incomprehensible, impossible. That life is lived in our language and that it is thereby lived in a form of habitat which we are familiar with, at home in, responsible to and of, does not mean that sense may not be lost. We do, at times, find ourselves speechless. And we need that train of thought if we are to make sense of Murdoch when she talks about ‘what we cannot say’ – for the ‘cannot’ here is not induced by our inability to cross mysterious borders, but because knowing (and learning and making) one’s language is a perpetual task; a task that involves dealing with the fact that the sense of our terms may be lost or obscured from our view. 190

Ibid., 28. Notice also that she is compelled to put ‘factual’ within scare quotes. 192 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 454f. (Emphasis added). 191

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What is more: we have a great deal to learn from seeking our words’ return. At the border-lines of thought and language we can often “see” what we cannot say: and we have to wait and attempt to formulate for ourselves and convey to others our experience of what is initially beyond and hidden. We look out into the abyss, into the mystery, intuiting what is not ourselves. A difficulty is a light, an insuperable difficulty is a sun. Great poetry may be for all thinkers an ideal image of “pure creativity” (compare “pure cognition”). Of course philosophy is definitely not poetry. (I stay with the “old quarrel”). But, even in philosophy, language is not a cage.193

If one reads this passage without a clear view of Murdoch stern and persistent rejection of an ineffable ‘realm’ and its resulting claim that the extraordinary lives in the ordinary, it is easy to miss the fact that ‘what we cannot say’ demands us to wait, that is, to pay attention. It is also easy to miss that what is ‘beyond and hidden’ is so only initially – which is to say that we can, if we wait (for the disclosure of the world that comes with attentive seeing), recover it or come to see it properly (and so, I take it, we can also say ‘it’ then, or again). ‘Beyond’ does not, in Murdoch’s philosophy, signal something radically out of reach. We can still experience it, and the attainment of truth requires (or may require) that we strive to intuit ‘what is not ourselves.’ There is a great deal of thinking that goes into the familiar view of Murdoch’s that ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’194 ‘A difficulty is a light, an insuperable difficulty is a sun’195 suggests that these moments – when otherness rushes upon us, when community really is challenged, when our words no longer seem to do what we require of them – may be not only important, but the most important moments to fasten upon. It is here that philosophy calls upon us. The trail that I take Murdoch to be following (albeit unknowingly at times), which I have described in this chapter, is this: There is a deep connection between the lost sense of concepts and the need for a non-dogmatic philosophico-cultural self-examination. This is why we need to mirror ourselves, and why philosophy may have to relate to those particular reflections of ourselves that we call literature. What mirrors reveal is not something that has hitherto remained unknown. Rather, mirrors are required because our difficulties are related to the difficulties that brought Plato to engage in anamnesis. That is, mirrors are called for since we need to come to know ‘what we did not know we knew.’196 But how, then, does this theme come to life in Murdoch’s thought? What questions and which fears spur Murdoch’s pursuit of mirrors?

193

Ibid. 283. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215. 195 Ibid. This phrase (‘Une difficulté est une lumière. Une difficulté insurmontable est un soleil.’), borrowed from Paul Valéry, is also the motto for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. 196 Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 12. (Italics added). 194

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3

Sensing a Sense Lost Murdoch and the ‘General Loss of Concepts’

3.1 Loss of concepts, loss of questions In Murdoch’s view, as in Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s, many of our philosophical problems have a particular form that require that we, if we are to come to terms with them, constantly need to train, educate, re-think and re-educate ourselves concerning how our concepts are ‘turned’ (changed but not exchanged) in our everyday lives in language. This does not mean that the philosopher should, as it were, try to stay modern – follow trends, etc. – but, rather, that she must be aware of how cultural changes initiate, and come together with, changes in meaning. In a sense, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein were anything but trendy. (Some even like to think of them, wrongly in my view, as conservative.) This sensitivity to our developments and alterations in the language-praxis patterns of our lives might very well be reached from a certain form of distance. But I do not mean to argue – obviously – that we should take a detached and impersonal stance towards our language. What I mean is that the philosopher must not let herself be swept away, merely tagging along, as it were (the call for self-criticism again). Murdoch was never swept away in this sense. In fact, one might say that she stayed in a constant critical relation to contemporary culture and philosophy – hence her call for a deepened conceptual sensitivity. She too held the view that ‘Philosophy, like newspapers, is both the guide and the mirror [that word again] of its age.’1 So what is it about our age that makes ‘the reintroduction of certain concepts . . . impossible’?2 And what does it mean to ‘reintroduce’ a concept? According to Murdoch, we are guided by a philosophical conception of human personality which joins together ‘materialistic behaviorism with a dramatic view of the individual as a solitary will.’3 These are parts of ‘the modern man, as he appears in many recent works on ethics and,’ says Murdoch, ‘I believe also to a large extent in the popular consciousness.’4 Murdoch traces the history of this notion of the human back to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is here not employed to mark one single and 1 2 3 4

Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 287. Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 99. Ibid. Ibid., 288.

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defining moment, but as a point of reference to mark a long and complicated historical development at which a specific view of human freedom took hold on us, backed up by a philosophy with specific understandings of concepts such as freedom, responsibility and individuality at its core. Murdoch calls this picture of the human ‘Liberal.’5 How this conception of the human being developed and took hold on us is a complicated story, and I can only sketch it rather vaguely here, mentioning some of its defining characteristics. We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age in which the dogmas, images and precepts of religion have lost much of their power. We have not recovered from two wars and the experience of Hitler. We are also the heirs of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Liberal tradition. These are elements of our dilemma: whose chief feature, in my view, is that we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality.6

It is clear that both the secularization and the emergence of the scientific worldview affect the way we understand the human. In our scientific world, man is not in any profound sense thought to be part of something larger, something beyond him, but is rather seen as a singular will, relating to an external world of neutral things and facts. We should also note that the formation of this concept of the human has been a rather slow process – stretching over at least two centuries – and so we should suspect that it will not be easily replaced. We have seen how both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard can fruitfully be seen as philosophers who claim that (many) philosophical problems arise because we have forgotten a certain sense of our words – and yet we continue to use them without hesitation, by habit as it were, as if we were in full command of them. We now hear Murdoch saying something very similar: Something in our form of life has changed in such a way that we are left with a too shallow and flimsy idea of what a person is. But how can we forget that? Don’t we all know what a person is? Don’t you know what to say if someone asks you what a human being is? You probably do have some things to say. The question is, does what you say about the nature of a human being also guide your thinking and research – your life as a whole – or are there other pictures of the human that your thinking really (but, perhaps implicitly) presupposes and (probably unwittingly) works to support, pass on and establish? Are the theoretical pictures of the human being that we make of ourselves in touch with how we actually do lead our lives? There might be

5

6

I will follow Murdoch and employ the term ‘liberal’ to name this picture of the human. I use the term rather loosely. That is, I do not merely mean liberal in the sense of a person who adheres to the doctrines of contemporary liberalistic political ideology, though such a person most likely falls under the concept too. At the core of the relevant sense of the liberal, lies the idea that the human being is a free, autonomous, individual, acting and reacting upon an external world of independent facts. I do not employ the word ‘liberal’ in the even broader sense of ‘open minded.’ In that sense, Murdoch was clearly liberal too. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 287.

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a discrepancy between the picture and the real here. The problem is that a confused picture can become a very real reality. (This is one way of saying that our theoretical elaborations of ourselves matter.) If one poses the question ‘what is a human being?’ today, I suspect that most answers would start off from biology. Nothing of what I will say here concerns biology, at least not directly. What I will say is related to contemporary biological essentialism merely in the sense that I want to note the fact that it comes natural to us today to say that ‘the human is an organism of such and such constitution, having such and such features and properties.’ The accuracy of such statements is not my concern, but the fact that we reach for them is. What concerns me is the ease with which we cling to this line of thinking: A human being just is a member of a particular biological species, and that species has certain characteristics such as rationality and the power and ability to speak. She not only orients herself in the world, but she is more rational than all other species which endows her with the power to stand above the world, to control it, to act upon it or choose not to act, and she can act and choose in a rational and good way (and, of course, in a stupid and evil way too). Today, we can also see theories using metaphors inspired by recent developments in for example neuroscience and evolutionary theories emerging, and one might also note that it is with surprising ease that the analogy between the human mind and the computer at times is employed. Murdoch can hardly be employed to counter such theories directly. But my impression is that her thoughts still carry relevance in relation to these lines of thinking. Though the idea of the ‘rational agent’ with an absolutely free will has lost some of its currency, the ‘determinism’ suggested by these theories remains theoretical and abstract and does not forcefully influence our day to day relations with each other, nor our self-understanding. The idea of the human as something defined by her actions and choices, which was born more than 200 years ago, is hardly challenged by these theories. Furthermore, one might actually see such theories as yet another expression of the tendency that Murdoch wants us to question: the reductionistic tendency to take one picture and use that as a model for explaining what the human is. One might also ask if the attempt to explain human relations with reference to the latest developments in the natural sciences and technology is a typically modern phenomenon, an expression of the human will in full control. If the notion of ‘human being’ is understood according to Murdoch’s description of the liberal man, there is not much moral thinking that springs from that notion. The only thing relevant for moral philosophy to discuss here is the properties she has, the things she does and the judgements she makes. Thus, according to this picture, the question ‘What is a human being?’ is not a specifically relevant question for a moral philosopher to ask. Rather, what is relevant is whether or not a particular creature (be it a human, a Martian or a dog) has the (according to the theory at hand) defining properties.7 According to this picture, there is a raw material of the human – everyone

7

Cf. Cora Diamond, ‘The Importance of Being Human,’ in Human Beings, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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has (more or less) the same possibilities to act upon the external world – and how she acts and judges determines her morality. The view of the human that we have inherited is summarized by Murdoch in this way: He is rational and totally free except in so far as, in the most ordinary law-court and commonsensical sense, his degree of self-awareness may vary. He is, morally speaking, monarch of all he surveys and totally responsible for his actions. Nothing transcends him. His moral language is a practical pointer, the instrument of his choices, the indication of his preferences. His inner life is resolved into acts and choices, and his beliefs, which are also acts, since a belief can only be identified through its expression. His moral arguments are references to empirical facts backed up by decisions. The only moral word which he requires is “good” (or “right”), the word that expresses decision. His rationality expresses itself in awareness of the facts, whether about the world or about himself.8

As we have accepted the picture of man as being essentially a free rational agent, it follows that we should focus more on actions and the truth or falsity of singular propositions when we reflect upon morality, rather than, say, a human’s moral vision of herself and her time and the stories we tell about ourselves and the present-day culture. At this point, it should be noted that this conception of the human being seems to go hand in hand with certain common and dominant ideals about philosophical method. The idea that we must have an objective, impersonal story to tell about moral actions that guides much moral philosophy requires that we take a detached (objective) perspective. It must thus be possible to adequately describe and explain morality as one fact among others in an impersonal world. Morality must be visible. I think Murdoch would even go so far as to say that our actual and personal life in language is sacrificed in the quest for ‘objectivity.’ (So, I take Murdoch’s reflections to be relevant to most philosophy striving to attain this kind of impersonal ‘objectivity’ in moral philosophy, focusing on actions and choices.) G. E. Moore had argued that ‘the notion of “good” could be significantly attached or withdrawn from anything whatever, and the things to which it happened to be attached did not form part of its meaning.’9 Moore came to this thought by realizing that philosophers had come to identify the good with other things. That is, for something to be good, it had to be good-for-something else; most often ‘in terms of some other non-valuable entity, whether a natural entity, such as pleasure, or a metaphysical entity, such as rationality.’10 The good is a non-natural thing . . . Moore’s ‘discovery’ was that whence this identification had been done, one could always re-state one’s original question: ‘But is it, e.g. pleasure, really good?’

8 9 10

Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 288f. Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 59. Ibid.

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What Murdoch thinks is right and what she thinks is wrong with Moore’s view is illuminating. She is in agreement with Moore on the point that ‘the good’ cannot be defined and that it is not a natural property. She disagrees with Moore at the point where he fails to live up to his own idea: ‘Moore was reluctant to abandon the idea that the good was something (and so a kind of fact).’11 This, Murdoch contends, made Moore a ‘shameless preacher.’12 Thus, Murdoch’s view of the good is that it is not a property and yet not a transcendent something. Even though Murdoch wants to speak about the good as something real that we all strive towards, the good is not a transcendent thing – there is no ‘it’ that goodness ‘represents’ or is a proxy of. What has gone wrong in Moore’s thinking, according to Murdoch, is that he could not resist the temptation to retract ‘goodness’ from ‘the messiness of ordinary morals and practical life.’13 Moore was too much of a traditional philosopher, in love with the idea of ‘generalized abstraction.’ Hence, he lost the true sense of the good altogether since it no longer had a place in ‘(to use Keyne’s words) “the pattern of life as a whole”.’14 When Moore tries to talk about the non-analysable sense of the good, for example, by means of comparing it to a colour, Moore does not succeed in making clear its meaning, but falls even further away from real life. Indeed, Moore’s comparisons ‘bring out rather how very unlike “good” is to other concepts. “Yellow” can be learnt instantly by ostensive showing, whereas “learning the meaning of good” is a more complex matter.’15 ‘The good’ is, for Murdoch, a concept that resists definition. It is not a transcendent ‘thing’ – it is real but something that we will never cease discovering. The impact of Moore’s thinking on analytic moral philosophy is hard to underestimate. Even many of those opposing him, did so by following the path that his work had cleared. Strange as it may seem, he opened the door to a way of doing moral philosophy without any notion of something transcendent, even though Moore himself never let go of the idea of an unutterable ‘good.’ Philosophers started to look for what people (of all ages) actually did (in all places), when they attached value to something (at any time), rather than thinking about what goodness per se is. The good ceased to be something transcendent, and became a thing-like attribution, observable in the human activity of ‘attaching value.’ Moore’s argument, Murdoch claims, ‘transformed the central question of ethics from the question “What is the good?” . . . into “What is the activity of ‘valuing’”?’16 As I understand it, Murdoch’s criticism here is not that philosophers started to think about morality in terms of a human activity instead of as a mere abstract concept. Rather, her criticism is that the notion of ‘the good’ was reinterpreted as something with a ‘preferential’ core (instead of something real outside of me). This brief segment of some recent developments in the history of moral philosophy, turned questions of morals into questions of conduct: philosophers stopped asking questions of the sort ‘What is the good?’ and began asking ‘What should I do?’ or ‘What 11 12 13 14 15 16

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 44. Ibid. Ibid., 45. Ibid. Ibid. Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 59f.

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is this good for?’ Now, obviously, this did not mean that philosophers stopped asking questions about what the good is, but the meaning of the word ‘good’ had changed. ‘The meaning of the word “good”, for instance, was to be divided into an evaluative and a descriptive part. The descriptive part would consist of reference to the facts in virtue of which the speaker called something valuable – and the evaluative part would consist of a prescription – “choose this one”.’17 According to Murdoch this development led to the current situation where morality is ‘pictured without any transcendent background. It is presented simply in terms of exhortations and choices by reference to facts.’18 The development within academic moral philosophy that Murdoch highlights can be seen in light of a general methodological development. In Murdoch’s story, this development enabled the philosophers to think that they were in a position to ‘analyse the essence of any morality, to display the logic of any moral language.’19 This line of reasoning provided the background for many of the thoughts that Murdoch challenged. One might say that it was this background, working hand in hand with the picture of the human that the enlightenment had created, that pulled thinkers towards a number of particular theses to debate, questions to answer and problems to solve. (It would not be entirely wrong to think about this in terms of a paradigm.) What interests Murdoch the most, though, is not their specific answers to specific questions, but rather the common ground that worked as a foundation for the discussions. It is this ground on which the philosophical commons such as the fact/value distinction, the idea that saying what a sentence means and saying whether its meaning is good or bad are two different things, and the idea that moral philosophy concerns actions chosen to be performed by a completely free agent, etc. were built. This emphasis on action, choice and judgement might seem unmotivated, given that the moral life of the human seems to involve more than that, say when love takes us by surprise, when we strive to be true to ourselves, when we do things for no apparent reason, when we leave a difficulty aside without difficulty, when we find something of our everyday lives to be completely incomprehensible, etc. etc. But the fact that actions and judgements are not all there is to morality when it comes to our real relations to others seems to have fallen out of the picture as a real question to discuss. Murdoch, however, wants to stress that fact. When we apprehend and assess other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something more elusive which may be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think is funny: in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation.20 17 18 19 20

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 65. Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 80f.

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I read Murdoch as saying that these aspects of our lives have been forgotten, perhaps especially when we reflect upon morality. We have lost the sense of the complexities of the human life in language and so we need to remind ourselves of how we actually lead our lives in language. It is not the case that we have risen above the need to reflect upon ourselves.21 Rather, we have limited the possibility of serious reflection by restricting ourselves to a much too narrow picture of the human. Thus, Murdoch aims to ‘attempt a movement of return, a retracing of our steps to see how a certain position was reached’ in search for ‘facts, as I shall boldly call them, . . . which seem to have been forgotten or “theorized away”.’22 Murdoch’s view was that the picture of the human that we now employ and pass on is built on a confused concept, indeed, a forgotten concept, bordering the senseless. We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity. . . . We have never solved the problems about human personality posed by the Enlightenment. Between the various concepts available to us the real question has escaped . . . .23

The flimsy and shallow notion of human personality that Murdoch claims to be guiding contemporary moral and political discussions should be seen as a result of this ‘general loss of concepts.’ But she is not saying that we lack a concept of the human altogether. Her claim is that we have, more or less unwittingly, adopted a specific picture of man as the picture. This amounts to a specific form of reductionism. But Murdoch also has a further claim. She wants to say that we – by adopting this reductionistic picture of man – have disabled a great deal of serious moral reflection. Murdoch is not saying that everyone but her has lost the sense of ‘human being.’ Rather, it is a description of a state of a culture we are in and hence a state of culture that she is in too.24 This is related to the abovementioned pervasiveness of this picture of the human. It is important to keep in mind that Murdoch thinks that ‘it remains for us to find a satisfactory method for the explanation of our own morality and that of others . . .’25 The Murdochian line of thought thus requires awareness of this picture’s pervasiveness, critical descriptions of the human life in language that displays how narrow our theoretical notion of the human has become and a destabilization of the certainty with which we speak and theorize about the human in moral philosophy.

21

22 23 24 25

So we are not talking about loss of concepts that depend on a context ‘gone missing’ as it were. Cf. Diamond, ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ in Ethics, 98(2): (1998). Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 299. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 290. See also Diamond, ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ 275. Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 75.

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How to move further beyond that point Murdoch did not know. (‘We cannot see the future, but must fear it intelligently.’26 ) What is at stake is something very similar to the stories I have told about Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. The conditions of our self-understanding have ‘evolved,’ and with that evolution – an evolution that includes for example the Enlightenment ideology, the idea of the Liberal man, world wars, secularization, economization, rationalization and a very strong belief in scientific methods – comes a gradual shift of meaning in our (moral) vocabulary. Like Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Murdoch’s view entails that we need a more thorough understanding of how words and life hang together in large. When someone says something, it does matter who that person is, and what that person aspires to be. ‘It is important to remember that language itself is a moral medium, almost all uses of language convey value. This is one reason why we are almost always morally active. Life is soaked in the moral, literature is soaked in the moral.’27 When Murdoch is saying, for example, that ‘almost all uses of language convey value,’ she is often seen as advocating a philosophical position that rejects the existence of the fact/value distinction altogether. It is certainly true that this is a very complicated issue, and it is also certain that Murdoch denies the existence of a specific field where questions of value never arise. So, to that extent, it is true to say that Murdoch denies the fact/value distinction. But, as Diamond has strikingly remarked, if indeed moral issues are always in play, then there is a difference between questions of value and questions of facts, because factual matters are not ubiquitously present. One might say that though we are perpetually moralists, we are not perpetually botanists, mathematicians, historians, etc. In these and similar matters, there are, Diamond claims, ‘distinct practices of arriving at and justifying factual judgments,’ but if value is ubiquitous then there is no single subject matter, a specific branch to which it belongs.28 Understanding the moral life of the human is not something that can be gained by means of a thorough analysis of a specific set of moral concepts. This notion of ‘life’ must be broadly construed. If two forms of life differ, chances are that the sentences we employ in trying to make our points fail to mean what we want them to mean – that is, we mean what we say, but we fail to convey just that (speaking in a theoretical vacuum that neglects the required sensitivity to the other – a sensitivity that should be linked to Murdoch’s notions ‘attention’ and ‘love’). ‘Any attitude,’ Murdoch remarks, ‘may be made to look absurd if its conceptual background is removed.’29 Murdoch calls moral differences ‘conceptual,’ and given that the sense of a concept depends on the 26 27 28

29

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 211. Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 27. See Diamond, ‘ “We are Perpetually Moralists”: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, 106. See also Stephen Mulhall, ‘Misplacing Freedom, Displacing the Imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction,’ in Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 47, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 89.

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place it has in a person’s life as a whole – and that the sense of a concept also might vary, or develop, during a person’s life – conceptual differences are also ‘differences of vision.’30 This means that a shift of one’s moral vocabulary is more or less synonymous with a change of oneself. ‘[A] moral concept seems less like a movable ring laid down to cover a certain area of fact, and more like a total difference of Gestalt. We differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds.’31 A good philosophical analysis of the use of moral language must thus be alert to differences of vision, otherwise it will fail to describe and analyse the sense of the terms it investigates. Questions of vision precede questions of judgement and choice. This is one of Murdoch’s most important criticisms of analytic moral philosophy (in the form of linguistic analysis). If our moral language is not merely a ‘set of moral concepts’ but hangs together with language in its entirety, which in turn then is inseparable from how we lead our lives in large, then ‘taking the linguistic method seriously’ must mean taking these facts seriously too.32 But how are we to make clear the ‘pictures’ that guide us, for they do not seem to be easily accessible, and neither are they substantiated by explicit arguments. Employing the same words (say ‘human’, ‘being’, ‘moral’, ‘right’, ‘good’, etc.) is no guarantee of similarity in sense if the guiding pictures, our alternative visions, the place of these words in our respective form of life, differ. The criticism of contemporary analytic moral philosophy that we can extract from Murdoch is thus not that their analyses are downright wrong, or ill-argued or not stringent enough. It is that they tend to focus on too small a region of our language, failing to take decisive aspects of our lives in language into account. Indeed, the problem Murdoch sees with the ‘linguistic analysts’ is that they do not take language seriously enough.33 What really troubles Murdoch can perhaps be described as if the line of communication has been broken. Being a philosopher, or thinker, or intellectual or writer, who reflects upon morality has come to mean something very specific. The ‘object’ of moral philosophy, the moral life of the human, is a certain picture of the human, and if you don’t share that vision of what the human is, you cannot do ‘serious’ moral thinking. As Murdoch says, ‘[i]f the common object is lacking, communication may break down and the same words may occasion different results in different hearers.’34 That is one aspect of her thought that needs to be dealt with. 30 31 32 33

34

Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 84. The primary target of Murdoch’s criticism here is R. M. Hare. It is probable that many analytic moral philosophers are reluctant to describe their own work as ‘linguistic analysis’ today. The ahistorical approach has been seriously challenged by philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre among others, and the richness and complexity of our language have been emphasized by a great variety of thinkers in ways that make Murdoch’s remarks here slightly off target. But even though Murdoch’s criticism is not relevant to all philosophy we might want to describe as ‘analytic’ today, the idea that we can solve problems in moral philosophy by means of a, more or less ‘formal,’ analysis of specific concepts (classified as ‘moral’) persists and remains strong. Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 326.

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We started to depict the human as ‘a brave naked will’ – we wanted the human to be rational and in total control. Now we have, Murdoch seems to claim, come to resemble that picture. (One should be careful with one’s wishes . . .) It is almost as if one could paraphrase Kierkegaard and say: in Murdoch’s view we now relate to and live in ‘humandom,’ not ‘humanity.’ I think that it is fruitful to think of this evolution in terms of a slow forgetting. It is more a case of a fading away than a blow to the head. It is the slowness of it, the fact that it is not really done, implemented by someone, which provides the illusion that we are still – throughout the changes of our forms of life (and hence the sense of our words) – talking about ‘the same thing.’ This means that the sense of the human lost is not easily accessible. Thus, let us begin with the picture of the human that we do understand (but which, in a sense, harbours an illusion of sense, caused by a certain form of forgetting). We ought to know what we are doing. We should aim at a total knowledge of our situation and a clear conceptualization of all our possibilities. . . . My responsibility is a function of my knowledge (which tries to be wholly impersonal) and my will (which is wholly personal). Morality is a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with other men. On this view one might say that morality is assimilated to a visit to a shop. I enter the shop on a condition of totally responsible freedom, I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select. Both as act and reason, shopping is public.35

This is, according to Murdoch’s bantering picture of the modern man, how we picture ourselves. It is the man of today. It is not a flattering picture; it’s not meant to be. She pictures us as ridiculous. The question is, is she picturing us too unforgivingly, so that we will be unable to recognize ourselves? Let us briefly return to Kierkegaard. In a sense, it is clear that he had an agenda. He was a Christian. He wanted the people who mistakenly took themselves to be Christians to really be Christians. He did ‘deceive’ them. He did not think that he was in a position to lead them right or home, but he did think he was in a position to show them, by means of slightly deceitful textual strategies, that they were confused or lost. The thoughts were in a sense there (in Kierkegaard), but the right kind of wholeheartedness, or inwardness, of the practice was missing (in every other Dane). So Kierkegaard was a deceptive scoundrel, but not in the sense of trying to trick his fellow Danes to believe. Remember that it is by their own lights that they fail to be Christians. Remember that Kierkegaard’s view is that no one can lead someone else into an authentic religious life. Noteworthy, Kierkegaard’s aim was to make his readers aware of the existence of the illusion. ‘Compel a person to an opinion, a conviction, a belief—in all eternity, that I cannot do. But one thing I can do, in one sense the first thing (since it is a condition for the next thing, to accept his view, conviction, belief), 35

Ibid., 304f.

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in another sense the last thing if he refuses the next: I can compel a person to become aware.’36 Notice also that Kierkegaard claims that ‘what follows from this [awareness] no one can predict.’37 There is a goal here, but there is no ‘trickery.’ We should not think that the word ‘deception’ has one and only one meaning either: From the point of view of my whole work as an author, the esthetic writing is a deception, and herein is the deeper significance of pseudonymity. But a deception, that is indeed something rather ugly. To that I would answer: Do not be deceived by the word deception. One can deceive a person out of what is true, and – to recall old Socrates – one can deceive a person into what is true. . . . [D]irect communication presupposes that the recipient’s ability to receive is entirely in order, but here that is simply not the case – indeed, here a delusion is an obstacle. . . . What, then, does it mean “to deceive”? It means that one does not begin directly with what one wishes to communicate but begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value. Thus, one does not begin . . . in this way: I am a Christian, you are not a Christian – but this way: You are a Christian, I am not a Christian. Or one does not begin in this way: It is Christianity I am proclaiming, and you are living in purely esthetic categories. No, one begins this way: Let us talk about the esthetic.38

In the case of Murdoch, there is no special practice gone missing that she wants to resurrect – say leading a religious life of a particular form. Rather, we still need to be able to reflect upon and understand our own morality, but we have begun to use language in a way that blocks the possibility of such an understanding. In that sense, the form of life in which these concepts belong is ever so present! This means that the practice is already in place, it is the sense of our words that are lacking – forgotten. Thus, Murdoch’s ‘loss of concepts’ cannot be understood in a purely, or strictly, historical way; it is not as if the concepts in question had application in a former period of time, and now they don’t. The idea that we must have an objective, impersonal story to tell about moral actions – that everything ‘knowable’ is everything that is not ‘subjective’ – requires that we take a detached (objective) perspective. To speak with Kierkegaard, one might say that the only form of reflection that is, as it were, ‘kosher’ today, is aesthetical reflection, and if our lives are at odds with the ‘results’ we come up with, there’s no limit to how many bullets we are prepared to bite. At times, I almost feel as if the ideal that flourishes in some philosophy departments today is that the more repugnant the conclusion is, the better it is.39 For the more repugnant it is, the more obvious is it that I, the philosopher, 36 37 38 39

Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View of My Work as an Author,’ 464. Ibid., 465. Ibid., 467. The expression ‘repugnant conclusion’ is, of course, borrowed from Derek Parfit’s famous argument against total utilitarianism, presented in his ‘Overpopulation and the Quality of Life,’ in Applied Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). What I say here has little to do with Parfit’s views, at least directly. I borrow this phrase only because it so well captures the common (and old) philosophical play between what objective rationality (which is often thought to be measurable and calculable) seems to demand of us and our own personal views (which often are feared to be idiosyncratic and emotionally charged).

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have been objective. (‘I have even sacrificed myself!’) Human reason and rationality must always trump what I think and feel. That life and philosophy no longer are in contact does not seem to matter especially much, indeed, it is seen as a sign of its progress! But if a philosopher calls his own conclusion repugnant she is, obviously, already implying that it contains something that she, at heart rejects. A wholehearted defence of such a position is impossible, or rather, an illusion. This kind of ‘antonymic philosophy’ – ‘antonymic’ because it includes the attempt to wholeheartedly defend philosophical theses that one feel to be in need of descriptions such as ‘repugnant’ and because it is taking ‘the real sense’ of words to be nearly the opposite of what they ‘normally’ mean – is a form of a repudiation of the ordinary, a more or less deliberate attempt to diverge from shared sense and meaning; an expression of the seemingly everlasting bewitchment inherent in the idea of a doubled world; ours and ‘the real.’ In suggesting that ‘antonymic philosophy’ must be seen as attempts to imply that the philosopher’s heart and ego are the subordinates of rationality and objectivity, I mean to imply that the supposed implications are void. To speak with Kierkegaard, we might say that in an ‘objective sense’ such conclusions may be reached, while they are rejected subjectively at the same time. If I am right about Kierkegaard, this does also mean that we should be able to see that there is a sense in which the ‘objective embracing’ of the repugnant is empty, that such an objective embrace is a failure to mean. To ‘hold’ repugnant conclusions is a flight from the ordinary in this very traditional sense: the ‘ordinary’ is precisely that which philosophy has to escape. Think about it; how much philosophy does not begin with ‘we normally think that . . .’ and then continues with ‘but if you really think things through (as I have done in my philosophy), then you should see that what really is the case . . .’? For example: We ordinarily think that it is wrong to treat infants as not-really-humans, but if you think real carefully about it (as I have done in my philosophy), you should see that we are more obliged morally speaking to treat Martians, or chickens, or what have you, right (because infants lack the morally relevant categories, or attributes, or faculties, or what have you . . .)40 We ordinarily think that ‘respect’ is praiseworthy, but if you really think things through (as I have done in my philosophy) you must acknowledge that ‘respect’ is not a good thing at all (for what it really means is that you say ‘I don’t like you, I don’t think you think or act well, but I still won’t harm you or call you names. That’s how “respectful” I am.’) The same pattern repeats itself in basically all areas of philosophy. Think about Carnap’s radical claim that ‘In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless.’41 Or think about Quine’s amazing ‘regimentation’ of language.42 A great deal of these philosophical movements come down to a form

40

41

42

Cf. Cora Diamond, ‘The Importance of Being Human.’ See also Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), especially Chapters 1 and 2. Rudolph Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,’ in Erkenntnis (1932), 61. See W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960).

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of scepticism: the ordinary man usually thinks that the words his mother taught him really mean what she taught him, but how can we know that she was right? Is what spurs philosophy really the desire to rise above the mass; to strive to be able to say that everyone but me is living an illusion? A further example: It has been argued (quite seriously, I take it) that ‘coming into existence is always a serious harm.’43 The ordinary man, the one not philosophically educated, is (so it is argued) only ‘under the influence of powerful biological dispositions towards optimism.’44 One might say that his idea is that human beings are better off, if they didn’t exist. (He is not suggesting that we should all kill ourselves, but he means to show that ‘we should not create new people.’45) Is it really possible to wholeheartedly believe that we would all be better off if we (all of us!) never existed? Is that even a sensible belief? What conception of a human being is in play here? What is ‘better off ’ supposed to mean? How far away from our ordinary language can we tolerate philosophy to go? At which point does sense disintegrate? At which point do we find the conflict between the repugnancy of philosophy and the world of real people to be a pressing fact?46 I do not mean to ridicule philosophy here. The roots of this idea of philosophy are probably as old as philosophy is. There’s the truth of things and there’s the shadowy appearance of it; there’s objective rationality and there are personal likings and idiosyncratic desires. Philosophy, some philosophy, can be characterized as a play between such opposites. The idea is, of course, that ‘the man on the street’ is not exactly uneducated but living in a shadowy world where the truth of things is hidden from view, and so, the most naïve is the one who thinks that whatever handed to us by our ancestors is to be accepted without any fuzz. It is no wonder that ‘ordinary language philosophy’ quickly became known as a rather un-philosophical philosophy. I do not mean to suggest that ordinary language should constitute a philosophical standard of correctness and I do not think that this is what ‘ordinary language philosophy’ is about; but I do think that there is much to be learnt from the recognition that the movement from a shared understanding to the introduction of new ‘philosophical sense’ is never unproblematic. One can easily predict that one response to the claim that something often goes wrong when philosophy departs from the ordinary: ‘I know quite well that I am not using my words in the ordinary sense. In fact, the whole point is to introduce a new way of talking, one that is nearer to the truth.’ Something is right in that imagined response, for there is nothing wrong per se in departing from the ordinary, and if the point of ordinary language philosophy was to preserve the old sense,

43

44 45 46

David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. Ibid. Ibid. For a more elaborate discussion of these themes in relation to Benetar’s book, see Christopher Cowley’s ‘Moral Philosophy and the “real world”,’ in Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, 31(1): (2011) and Sami Pihlström’s Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2011), 60–74.

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it would be truly (and stupidly) conservative. But this imagined charge still misses the crucial point: Antonymic philosophy (as I have called it) depends on the sense it does not want to talk about. In order to show that what the ordinary man thinks is mistaken, it must first pay heed to our use of words and then go on to suggest an alternative. But if the alternative then is supposed to have nothing to do with the ‘old’ sense, it cannot possibly ‘replace’ it either. One might say that a philosophical ‘replacement’ must be ‘translatable’ – we must be able to see the connection between the old and the new. If philosophy loses touch with ordinary language, it loses touch with our world. So when a philosopher says, like Murdoch (and me), that philosophy ought to avoid jargon and be written in ordinary language,47 she is not to be taken to mean that the ordinary sense is to be accepted as it is, or that we need not think more about it, or that all other uses are faulty, or that philosophy is not allowed to alter or tamper with language or that the best outcome of philosophizing is a radical standstill. The point is rather that we need to be entirely clear about what we are departing from and why. The disagreement between an ordinary language philosopher and an antonymic one (who tries to revise our language) is not about if we are allowed to deviate from the ordinary (and the everyday) or not. The disagreement is about what the ordinary (and the everyday) is.48 My emphasis on this clash between real life and philosophy is not recognized as illustrating that something has gone seriously wrong, is not (primarily) meant to be an accusation directed towards contemporary moral philosophers. Remember, ‘[p]hilosophy, like newspapers, is both the guide and the mirror of its age.’49 And given that we live in an age which worships science and not God, numbers rather than metaphysics (in the widest sense of the term), the objective over the subjective – it is no surprise that the philosophers’ reflections mirror just that. We discuss what we see and what we think of ourselves in terms of what we have become and what we wish to be. To make the point in an almost tautological turn of phrase: We don’t speak dead languages. Or think about it in terms of Chesterton’s striking formulation: ‘Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.’50 In a Godless world, philosophy will be Godless. If we collect the thoughts I have discussed so far, we are facing something of a confusion that we must think through thoroughly. On the one hand, we are in our 47 48

49 50

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 296. This is clear already in the famous quarrel between Austin and Ayer. Ayer takes Austin to be accusing him for deviating from the ordinary. And so he responds accordingly and predictably by saying that that is exactly what he was doing, indeed, that it is what he intended to do. But Ayer’s response completely missed the mark. Austin’s charge was not that he was wrong in deviating from the ordinary but in his understanding of what the ordinary was (like). Austin wants to show that Ayer’s philosophical thesis constitutes a response to a world that, in a deep sense, does not exist. The response – Ayer’s ‘theory’ – is actually not what is threatened here, but its motive is. See J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, reconstructed from the manuscript notes by G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). See especially Chapters 1, 2, 6 and 7. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 287. C. K. Chesterton, Heretics (Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2009), 15.

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moral and political thinking informed and guided by a particular view of the human being as a free and rational being. This picture of the human guides us when we think about morality and it guides us politically since it informs our idea of freedom. (We tend, for example, to think about the individual’s relation to society in a specific way: ‘I am free to relate how I wish to the system outside of me; and questions of politics concern my relation to the state as a system I relate to, but am not part of.’) And this is a very powerful image. Indeed, Murdoch states that ‘for the Liberal world, philosophy is not in fact at present able to offer us any other complete and powerful picture of the soul.’51 On the other hand, this picture is not, and has never been, adequate. I mean, it is clear that this picture of the human does guide us more or less constantly in our reflections upon ourselves, but one can be guided by false pictures too. Thus, there is a sense in which we have never been the human being we think we are. Or, to put it more concretely: our lives in language have never been as simple and innocent as our pictures of ourselves and of our language have suggested. I think of Murdoch as a thinker who can show us that narrow pictures of the nature of the human being often come together, not with a lack of a specific kind of information or with mere stupidity or outright evil, but with a form of conceptual confusion in which they have their roots.

3.2 Contrasting pictures of the human According to Murdoch, the picture of the human that dominates our thinking comes together with ‘roughly a Protestant, liberal, empiricist way, of conceiving morality.’52 She also calls this picture of the human ‘stripped’ and ‘behaviouristic.’53 The fact that important aspects have been removed, stripped, signals that they have a reality – but a reality which is, as it were, denied or neglected. Since it is also called behaviouristic, we can easily assume that what has been removed – denied – is something that is not seen in our overt behaviour. It is, thus, more a question of how we relate to the other than a question of what we relate to. It is, in a sense, a question of attitude. ‘[A]n exclusive emphasis on choice and argument would be itself one conceptual attitude among others.’54 Let us dwell on Murdoch’s thought that moral concepts do not function like a ring that we can place on the ground to cover a specific range of facts for a while, attempting to appropriate it. In calling this ‘human,’ we are simultaneously denying something else its ‘humanity.’ It is not (merely) one fact that is being described. What might be called a ‘worldview’ is also presented. This means that it is hard to state that some words and concepts are truly moral and that others have nothing to do with morality. Obviously, 51 52 53 54

Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 289. Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 70. Ibid., 65. Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 92.

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words such as ‘right,’ ‘good’ and ‘ought’ are often employed in ways that make them overtly moral. But not always: ‘You are exactly right!’; ‘She’s a good painter’; ‘You ought to try the shellfish.’ And sentences that may appear to be clearly factual or ‘objective’ can be of great moral importance. It is, for example, quite possible to rebuke one’s partner by ‘stating’ that ‘there are 109 kinds of tulips.’ She: “You don’t really see me.” He: “I am looking at you right now.” She: “Don’t be cruel. You know exactly what I mean. I am simply not unique to you! You are just a hopeless womanizer.” He: “What? You are my Tulip! You know that.” She: “There are 109 kinds of tulips . . .”

If the Murdochian critical remarks concerning the Liberal view of man that I have employed here are correct, the certainty with which we speak of the human being as a more or less morally irrelevant notion – focusing instead on what we take to be the morally relevant properties that this creature, any creature, has – is far from neutral or innocent. The certainty with which we leave out the question ‘What is a human being?’ is closing the discussion rather than opening it. If we have accepted a certain picture of the human, this ‘acceptance’ will guide what remains to ‘debate’ in ethico-political discourse. Thus, in my appropriation of Murdoch’s line of thought, I want to stress that we are all speaking, still speaking, a language concordant with the Liberal enlightenment picture of the human. The following two quotations present two different pictures of the human being: (a) The Natural Law View The individual is seen as held in a framework which transcends him, where what is important and valuable is the framework, and the individual only has importance, or even reality, in so far as he belongs to the framework. … He is ruled by laws which he can only partly understand. He is not fully conscious of what he is. His freedom is not an open freedom of choice in a clear situation; it lies rather in an increasing knowledge of his own real being, and in the conduct which naturally springs from such knowledge.55

(b) The Liberal View On the Liberal view we picture the individual as able to attain by reflection a complete consciousness of his situation. He is entirely free to choose and responsible for his choice. His morality is exhibited in his choice, whereby he shows which things he

55

Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 70.

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regards most valuable. The most systematic exposition of modern Liberal morality is existentialism.56

I suspect that most of us would be inclined to say that both descriptions have their merits. For starters, we tend to think that ‘morality is exhibited in choice’ and we do picture man as free and responsible. The Liberal View of freedom might indeed seem to be a prerequisite for a juridical-moral notion of responsibility. That is, we need it in order to be able to pass blame (and, occasionally, praise). But the Natural Law View also seems to pinpoint some crucial elements of human life. I do relate myself to something larger than me; be it my girlfriend’s wellbeing, my own future or simply the existential worry that I might not belong here. But these formulations, so it seems to me, require some qualification in order for them to go hand in hand with the most dominant strands of analytic moral philosophy. For example, even though we might say that we belong in a framework which transcends us would we not hesitate to say that ‘what is valuable and important is the framework’? And I suspect that most would agree that we should strive to ‘attain increasing knowledge of [the individual’s] own real being,’ but very few would then go on to say that it is from such knowledge that freedom springs. That is, the Liberal View seems to go well together with modern moral philosophy, whereas the Natural Law View can be accepted, as it were, on the surface if we dispense with its almost Hegelian-sounding residues. Now, the abovementioned worry of not belonging must not necessarily be cashed out in the typical existentialist idiom. Note that Murdoch thinks that a moral philosophy springing from the existentialistic line of thought – as developed mainly by Sartre – shares the fundamental assumptions with contemporary analytic moral philosophy.57 The dividing line here is rather a question of what the weight and importance of the segments of the Natural Law View is that we do or do not include in our moral reflections. The tendency today is, I think, to reduce the facts of the human life that we recognize as more or less accurate in the Natural Law View, so that we might go on to think about our ethico-political lives according to the Liberal View. If it is true that the Natural Law View actually does point to some crucial aspects of the human life (which I think it does) then something is gone missing in the other story, the Liberal View. That is, if we think we can understand our moral lives solely

56 57

Ibid. Notice here, for example, Murdoch’s analysis of Sartre’s picture of man as ‘a non-historical, non-social and non-determined individual. A solipsistic picture.’ She then compares this picture of man to the guiding image of ‘the logical analysts’ from a methodological point of view: ‘They too look at the moment to moment character of consciousness in order to delineate the concepts used in talk about the mind. The being which they examine is a non-historical specimen. The concepts analysed are of a completely general character; one would not, for instance, expect to find here an analysis of a concept such as “class-consciousness.” They sum up their observations on the view that knowing how has primacy over knowing that; that is, that our nature as rational creatures is best considered in terms of activities and skills rather than in terms of the contemplation of truths or the private manipulations of syllogisms.’ Murdoch, ‘The Existentialist Political Myth,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 134. See also Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 70, and ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 305.

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through the conceptual framework that the Liberal View provides, what we have then is nothing short of a conceptual confusion. If (a) contains a truth about my being, then that being cannot be fully and adequately understood solely in the language of (b). That is, if indeed the sense of our words depends not merely on the words’ place in a sentence and the sentence’s place in a particular context of utterance, but on the form of life of which it is a part, then shifting vocabulary solely by means of adding new words or by inscribing new ways of placing ones emphases will not do. This is a safe route to a language idling. A problem here is that the difficulty that we are now facing can only, so far as I can see anyway, be solved (or resolved) if the tension that I struggle to express here is allowed to be a real tension. That is, we do not necessarily stand before a choice between (a) and (b). The difficulty is to acknowledge that there is not only one world or one true vision of the human, where that sense is turned into custom, as a regulatory definition of what we must mean. The really dangerous thought is that we are done with thinking. At this stage, I want to stress that Murdoch is not offering an alternative theory to the common strands of moral thought in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical community. Murdoch’s view is that both the deontological strand and the utilitarian or consequentialist one feed on the picture that she challenges. They both share the logical picture of man and morality. The logical picture of morality, which our modern philosophy has presented us with, shows no awareness of the importance of the contrast of which I have been speaking [between the natural law view, and the liberal view]. We have been led to adopt a method of describing morality in terms of which all moral agents are seen as inhabiting the same world of facts, and where we are unable to discriminate between types of morality, except in terms of differences of act and choice. Whereas, I am arguing, it is possible for differences to exist also as total differences of moral vision and perspective.58

This passage qualifies the sense in which Murdoch does not offer an alternative theory to the most dominant theories of morality. Her thinking should rather be seen as questioning the foundation of most contemporary debates; a foundation in which a specific idea of the human plays a defining role. But we cannot simply forget our own sense of the human by will. Despite all emphasis on linguistic meaning, the importance of language for philosophy is still to be achieved. It is not at all clear, to me at any rate, what sort of philosophical method should now be used in the study of morals and politics. It has been assumed by moral philosophers that they have to be descriptive analysts as well as critics, that is, that they are to produce some sort of positive philosophical characterization of

58

Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 71.

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morality; and it seems that this is a reasonable requirement. But how is it to be done? I think that the implications for ethics of doing philosophy by the linguistic method have not yet become entirely clear. Words are tricky things and must be handled with care. We must not be too impressed by them – on the other hand, we must take them seriously enough.59 We were too impressed by words when we assume that the word “good” covered a single concept which was the centre of morality. We were not impressed enough when we neglected words such as “true,” “brave,” “free,” “sincere,” which are the bearers of very important ideas. The concept of “goodness” is no longer a rich and problematic concept.60

What is lacking, Murdoch argues, is a serious consideration of the ‘great variety of the concepts that make up morality.’61 There is a risk in thinking that we do know exactly what a human being is. There is a risk in thinking that we know nothing about what the human being is. That there are dangers in thinking that one has the nature of the human being framed once and for all is obvious. Our history is packed with too many stories of such exclusions. To take power and control over the name ‘human’ has always been a strategy employed in order to stabilize different variations of the logic of us and them. The consequences of different positions where one with some form of legitimacy have been taken to speak truly when saying that she is not human, are clearly some of the most severe wounds our history bears witness of. All this is as familiar to us as it is horrific. The logic of such wounds however, is harder to grasp. That we do know a lot about what it is to lead a human life is obvious. There are many true and correct tales to be told about that. As I have tried to show, Murdoch’s complaints about the Liberal man (the child of the Enlightenment) should not be seen as a downright rejection. We are in a sense that free individual, orienting ourselves in a world of facts. The problem lies in the supposed neutrality of those descriptions, and in the claim that the solitary will of the individual, and his or her freedom, is so narrowly construed so as to make much of our actual lives with each other and the things which surround us incomprehensible. It is not false to say that morality at times is a question of me willing to act in certain situations according to this or that principle, calculating evils and goods. We all do that at times. We must do so. ‘We do continually make choices – but why should we blot out as irrelevant the different background of these choices, whether they are made confidently on the basis of a clear specification of the situation, or tentatively, with no confidence of having sufficiently explored the details?’62 In Murdoch’s view, moral life is ‘something that 59

60 61 62

Ibid., 72. Wittgenstein makes a similar remark in Culture and Value (quoted above at the end of section 2.3): ‘insofar as the words of our ⬍language⬎ seem to us the only possible standards of measurement we are always doing them injustice. And they are first overestimated then underestimated.’ Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 23e. Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ 73. Ibid. Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 88.

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goes on continually, not something that can be switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial.’63 This also means that the strong focus on choices and actions that follows from a one sided picture of the human misrepresents the moral reality. If we start to think about a human’s vision of the world – how it is achieved, altered and structured on a daily (and historical) basis ‘we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.’64 In a sense, Murdoch’s worry is that if we turn the aspect of human lives where we are free to choose into a template for what the human being is, we are not necessarily lying, but we are stripping the human being of her reality. One might even say that it is the very stability of such definitions through which we speak about the nature of the human being as having this or that constitution, this or that quality, which is the problem. If one characteristic, or property, or ability or rationale, is (said to be) defining the human being, the same property, ability or rationale can be lost, denied or stolen from her. How we relate to one another morally comes with such rejections and such affirmations. If having a name and a history is defining; the name can be denied and replaced by a number; the history can be denied and rejected. Many philosophers have taken questions about what the defining and morally relevant properties of a human being are to be real and important. I think of such considerations as leading us in the wrong direction, since they force us to bypass as irrelevant the ground on which they rest. In that respect, they do involve some kind of deflection from our ordinary lives with each other and a rejection of the sense of language through which we think, speak and live. This danger comes from a belief in a singular sense of a concept. Such singular sense also, and obviously, requires that certain uses are withdrawn from circulation. We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with. We need to be able to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. A simpleminded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it. We need to return from the self-centered concept of sincerity to the other-centered concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.65

To be certain is to stop thinking. Of course, I do not want to argue that we should not be certain at all. We often are, and rightly so. But at times, it is necessary to see that my sense of being at home can be founded on nothing but the fact that I have repressed 63 64 65

Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 329. Ibid. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 293. (Italics added).

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regions of my language, segments of my language that I do depend upon. At times, it is fruitful not to know what a human being is, and to go on and ask what we talk about when we talk about human beings. It is not that we do not know whether this or that person is a human being. But if we close the openness of the question about the human, we fail to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it. The admittance that I might not know the full sense of a concept I do manage to use is not to deny its sense, but to leave open the possibility that there is more to be known about other human beings, always. The situation, as I understand it, is this: We have created a picture of the human according to which he/she is (or at least can be, if he/she is not disturbed or corrupted) smart, cold and rational, a free agent, in control of his/her desires, responsible for her actions (but not to God). This is what has become the guiding picture of the good man. So we strive to become that human. The result is that our attempts at self-understanding can only be, as it were, regional. The full human being remains incomprehensible. Yet, we cling on to this rational human agent when we try to understand ourselves. (Who does not want to be rational?) But when Murdoch’s reminders confront us, it becomes clear that there is a real conflict here – a confusion of categories if you wish – between that picture of the human and the real human. But the question of whether or not there is a conflict between the human and the picture of the human is not the sole concern here. I think that it is possible to see that the idea of the human as a rational agent, whose moral life consists of choosing between acts and goods that are publicly open to view, actually come frighteningly natural to us today. We can see how this liberal/utilitarian/behaviouristic/existentialistic picture of human morality is everywhere present (e.g. in politics, moral discourses, economics and education). As an example, think about the human being that engages in the activity that we call research. What does it really mean to be a philosopher and a researcher today? For a long period of time, ‘research’ involved the idea of ‘not knowing’ and research was thus a concept that always involved, as a necessary part, a moment of risk. That is, research was something one engaged in when one did not know what was going to happen, or if one did not know where a line of thinking would take us. If one looks at what is demanded by a researcher today, ‘not knowing how to go on’ is not really an option. You must be able to tell beforehand where your research is going, what the expected outcome is, and why it is to the benefit to the market, your government (a word that, strikingly, has come to replace that of a nation) or, in some cases, merely your research community – but never to ‘us’ or to ‘humankind’; because to talk of the good of humankind has become a mere gesture. We live in a time where the word ‘utility’ has been given a certain sense, and there are no researchers who do not want to be useful. We might say that the sense of usefulness we are controlled by now also is a utilitarian, economized and politicized notion. So deep into the segments of the researchers’ form of life has this understanding of utility penetrated, that the researchers themselves do not know of any other meaning. If my research is to be of any good, it has to be good for something else, something particular, and clearly defined.

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But if we adopt this sense of ‘utility’ and try to lead a researching life through the old idea of research as a state of not knowing, things begin to fall apart. We find ourselves engaged in an activity which we think of as important, which has a history we admire, but we find ourselves unable to describe, even to ourselves, what the good of our labours are. There is a point to it, but that point seems to be hard to formulate in terms of the ‘utilitarianized’ idea of ‘useful.’ And so we have meetings, workshops and seminars, and try to establish a position in a ‘network’ in which we try to come up with new and exciting ways to be ‘useful.’ The utilitarian-economic-political understanding of ‘useful’ is the only ‘valid’ understanding today, and that makes it hard to square our own practices as researchers with the desire to be useful in the world. Communication has been broken, confusion taken its place. The harder we (still speaking about us academic philosophers, even though these remarks most likely extend to other areas, particularly in the humanities) try to be useful in the world, the harder we find it to show that our practices at the universities could be of some genuine good (if good means ‘good for something particular’: as having direct and measurable consequences for, say, a company or a government). If this difficulty is not acknowledged, all research that does not go hand in hand with the contemporary goal-oriented utility-school will become ornamental relics. What is the cure then? I don’t know. But this much is clear: One needs to make clear that this conceptual confusion exists, that the confusion and the illusion of sense is real. This is no simple matter, for it involves taking a researcher to a place where she recognizes that ‘I, a researcher, do not know what is meant with the word “research” anymore.’ For as long as two conflicting ideas of research are competing, backing themselves up with unanalysed ideas of utility, chances are that ‘philosophy-researchers’ will try to become useful in the new sense, even though they know that their practice cannot be squared with that ideal. In desperation not to become ornamental, we’ll do nothing but ornamental work. The powerful picture of the human thus connects with a view about what is real and useful knowledge. The form of detachment that this goal-oriented understanding of ‘utility’ requires goes hand in hand with The Liberal View of the human being. Our thinking is very often conducted in economic, politicized, liberal and utilitarian terms. It has become part of our self-understanding. This type of forgetfulness is very hard to make visible. Just take a sentence such as ‘More of the good is better.’ It seems so bleeding true to us that not many would feel inclined to question it at all. It has a tautological sound to it, carrying a slight resemblance with a sentence such as ‘the good is not bad.’ ‘Good’ is, as it were, naturally linked to ‘better.’ With the recourses developed above, one can now begin to see that this seemingly obvious statement actually conveys an example of a conceptual confusion. Perhaps we might say that the confusion resides in a conflation between the subjective and the objective. I mean, it is all too easy to think that ‘more of the good’ can be understood as ‘mere adding.’ If one scoop of ice cream is good, then two scoops are even better; three scoops. . . .This thought is convincing only insofar as we take a disinterested (aesthetic) attitude towards the object in which I as subject qua subject am not part of

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the equation. Suppose, for example that I am full . . .66 Even though it is natural to make connections between that which is good and that which is better, it is not necessarily equally natural to link ‘good’ with ‘more’ which we have a tendency to do today. Murdoch talks a lot about a lost sense of the importance of one’s ‘inner life.’67 Kierkegaard talked a lot about a lost sense of ‘inwardness.’68 Wittgenstein repeatedly emphasized that the personal relation to one’s thinking is crucial, that truthfulness is a prerequisite for truth.69 Again, there is a striking similarity here. Cultural criticism, philosophy of language and self-criticism interconnect. As we have seen, for Murdoch, this lost sense of the human inner life has resulted in a ‘general loss of concepts.’70 It is thus not merely the word ‘human’ which has changed. An aspect of Murdoch’s thinking that this little ice cream example highlights is the fact that we have begun to think of ‘the good’ in purely objective terms as well. What is good is no longer good for a particular person in the sense of her growth and development. What counts as good today is a thing or an action. (That is, ‘good’ can always be translated into other wordings such as ‘fills my need for nicotine,’ ‘stimulates economic growth,’ ‘stops my hunger’; ‘leads to a decreasing number of car accidents,’ etc. etc.) Good has become synonymous with ‘good for something particular’ and that particular must be publicly observable and measurable. One might say that in the eagerness to make everything measurable, or at least ‘intersubjectively available,’ we forgot about the true weight and content of our words. Against this focus on action and choice, Murdoch wants to reawaken a sense of a human’s moral vision. [I]f we attend to more complex regions which lie outside “actions” and “choices” we see moral differences as differences of understanding . . . , more or less extensive and important, which may show openly or privately as differences of story or metaphor or as differences of moral vocabulary betokening different ranges and ramifications of moral concept. Here communication of a new moral concept cannot necessarily be achieved by specification of factual criteria open to any observer (“Approve of this area!”) but may involve the communication of a completely new, possibly far-reaching and coherent vision; and it is certainly true that we cannot always understand other people’s moral concepts.71 66

67 68 69

70 71

‘For example, inwardness in erotic love does not mean to get married seven times to Danish girls, and then go to the French, the Italian, etc., but to love one and the same and yet be continually rewarded in the same erotic love, so that it continually flowers anew in mood and exuberance – which, when applied to communication, is the inexhaustible renewal and fertility of expression. Inwardness cannot be communicated directly, because expressing it is external (oriented outwardly, not inwardly), and expressing inwardness directly is no proof at all that it is there (the direct outpouring of feeling is no proof at all that one has it, but the tension of the contrastive form is the dynamometre of inwardness), and the reception intrinsic to inwardness is not a direct reproduction of what was communicated, since that is an echo.’ Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 259f. See, for example, ‘The Idea of Perfection.’ A good example is the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript. For example: ‘You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are.’ Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 33. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 290. Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 82.

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3.3 Vision over choice What is this primacy of vision over choice? The metaphor of vision makes us think about seeing. But it is not a question, not merely anyway, about observing with one’s eyes. The world that ‘I see’ is also shaped by the vision I have about myself and the world, in the same sense that I may have a vision of my future. We are (always) guided by imageries. ‘We differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds.’72 Consider this example: Picture a boy brought up in a home of two religions – his mother Catholic, his dad Jewish. For various reasons he was not circumcised as a child. As an adult he starts having long discussions about morality and religion with his Jewish grandmother. This fact warms the grandmother’s heart. But after a while, she starts talking about the importance of being circumcised. So he begins thinking about whether or not he should have a circumcision. In a sense, it is possible to describe this man as having a difficult choice to make. (‘Should I have a circumcision or not?’) But what that question is about is not whether he should have that particular incision made or not, but rather whether or not he thinks of his present and future self as ‘Jewish’ and in what sense of ‘Jewish.’ To put it bluntly, it is merely on the surface that the question concerns the being or non-being of the foreskin. The issue is not a choice between two competing propositions. Furthermore, what is a stake is not some abstract thesis (say, ‘Judaism is the best religion’) that he should affirm or reject, but his entire vision of himself and his future. He needs to ponder what it means for him to call himself ‘Jewish.’ ‘Do I belong here?’; ‘Is this a decree that is defining for being Jewish?’ Of course, that (last) question is heavily debated among Rabbis and it might be possible to describe that debate in terms of competing propositions, but for our man in the example it concerns his entire being, belonging, becoming – his vision. The question is ‘What does “being Jewish” mean for me?’ and if you remove him, it is no longer the same question. Suppose that he tried to solve this issue ‘objectively’ – trying to disregard the larger issues relating to Murdochian ‘vision’ – and that he, by means of aesthetic reflection (still speaking Kierkegaardian) came to the conclusion that one of the options had ten good arguments speaking in favour of it, whereas the other merely had six. Would he then have anything to act upon? He would still be in a position where he had two hypotheses – one probably (or probabilistically) better than the other – but no conclusion. As long there is a choice, there is a sense in which the decision would be ad hoc. So when Murdoch quotes Weil and says ‘We should pay attention to such a point that we no longer have a choice’73 she can be heard as suggesting that as long as we are in the domain of the hypothetical, we are not in the domain of moral knowledge. As long as we have a choice we do not see clearly, our vision is blurred. But this is not to say that we could simply escape the world of hypotheses and choices – that that level 72 73

Ibid. Murdoch, ‘Knowing the Void,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 159.

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of reasoning could be circumvented. What it means is that if we fail to see the world rightly – to take ourselves to the position where we no longer have a choice – we are forced to live with uncertainty and live on carrying the sense that we might have done the wrong thing or that it might have been wrong to do nothing. There is a sense in which it is true to say that what (many) analytic moral philosophers call ‘rational action,’ the perfectionist calls tragedy. One can imagine someone complaining about this example on the basis that it concerns a man’s penis – a matter not to be treated lightly. Furthermore, a man’s attachment to his penis is a merely private concern, deeply rooted in his self-image and in his psychological well-being (and/or neurosis), so that it has nothing to do with moral concerns which are ‘necessarily’ public. I think that (imaginary) reaction misfires, for two reasons. First, I don’t think we should think of other moral difficulties as less tormenting than the question about the place and importance of the being of the foreskin in a particular religious form of life. Our relations to others are quite often a life and death matter. Secondly: even though this example is meant to bring into view the sense of inwardness that parts of our lives as moral beings require, it does by no means make the matter ‘private’ or secret. The sense of vision – of seeing clearly – is a sense of coming to clarity concerning how one belongs in a community. There are philosophers who think that we need to abstract from the real world situations and contexts and struggle to achieve what they like to think of as a ‘concrete thesis,’ that is applicable to any and all. This is a view that I, and Murdoch and many others, think is wrongheaded. What you get if you subtract situations, contexts and individuals is not something concrete that is valid for any and all, but something very abstract that – although it might, in a weird sense, be applicable to any and all – is of no real moral importance to anyone. Against this picture of the good as a particular thing or action, Murdoch wants to re-awaken a concept of good as something that is connected to the struggle to become truthful to oneself, to the world and to others. In that respect, the good – here obviously linked to the Platonic notion or ‘eros’ – is intimately intertwined with a struggle for perfection. ‘[W]e wish to say that the impulse towards goodness should stir the whole person. This demand does not isolate goodness in the way in which “good” is isolated in an existentialist scheme, where it is merely an empty box into which chosen items are put. If “free choice” alone confers value, then all that is needed is a pointing finger; no place for cognitive struggle involving specialised informative moral concepts.’74 So now, the question is: How do we try to go about in the attempt to communicate with each other; how can these differences in moral vision be reconciled (if they can)? Can one convince another human being that her entire moral vision is faulty? (Is that even a sensible question?) Can such issues be settled ‘objectively’? The true, but really difficult answer is, I fear: ‘Not easily, no – not by any normal straightforward philosophical argumentation anyway.’ This is also Murdoch’s view. The core of this line of reasoning is to be found in Murdoch’s distinction between vision

74

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 323.

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and choice. In her view, contemporary moral philosophy is built upon the idea that the questions of morals concern a free and rational individual, making overt choices in an otherwise neutral world of facts. Choices between alternative goods can be argued for. But are there outward criteria of the same kind that would enable us to anchor the vision one might have of one’s future self? (‘Approve of this area!’75) Moral vision, so it seems, is not easily open to argument. If . . . we hold that a man’s morality is not only his choices but his vision, then this may be deep, ramified, hard to change, and not easily open to argument. It is also less realistic to say that it is itself something which we chose; and then it may seem that our conception of moral freedom is in danger. Here it may be said that those who think that freedom is absolute in the “withdraw and reflect” sense confuse the wish with the fact – and that there is no need to equate the freedom needed to ensure morality with a complete independence of deep conceptual attitudes. It may be argued that we ought always to assume that perfect communication and disinterested reflection about facts can precede moral judgment and it is true that such an attitude may often be desirable. . . . Finally, the notion that moral differences are conceptual (in the sense of being differences of vision) and must be studied as such is unpopular in so far as it makes impossible the reduction of ethics to logic, since it suggest that morality must, to some extent at any rate, be studied historically. This does not of course imply abandoning the linguistic method, it rather implies taking it seriously.76

Murdoch means that our moral lives consist of much more than making choices between competing propositions and actions – even though we do that too. This is a point where Murdoch’s view of the human and her view of language interconnect – and it is impossible not to notice that Murdoch came to see that a word only has sense in ‘the stream of life.’77

3.4 Making pictures (perfectionism and vision) The idea of perfection includes the fact that we all strive to accomplish something, be someone, become better, more true to ourselves, or, in a slightly more pretentious wording: become who we are. As Murdoch says: ‘The idea of perfection haunts all our activity and we are well aware of how we try to blot it out.’78 About this formulation, Stephen Mulhall has aptly remarked: ‘On the one hand, “the idea of perfection haunts 75 76 77

78

Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 82. Ibid., 84. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, eds. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), § 913. It is perhaps worth noticing that ‘stream of life’ is a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, song number 69 in his Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a collection of rose translations made by the author from the original Bengali, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, new edition (New York: MacMillan, 1920), 64f. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 428.

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all our activity”; every time we cleave to a new picture of reality, we become at once certain that it cannot be the ultimate reality, and so cannot be our stopping-place. As finite creatures, we can never lose the sense that our moral perception is capable of further refinement; so the purification of our consciousness can never attain perfection, but neither can it shrug off its demands.’79 Murdoch’s version of perfectionism includes at least three central ideas: First, the search for truth must always be guided by truthfulness, no matter what kind of truth we are seeking to uncover – and so this is not a thought that is relevant only in moral contexts. (‘Truthful imaging requires courage and humility. Truthfulness is aware of the obligation not to cause distress.’80) Second, it also means that one’s own personal positioning in a moral life with words, will always be on the move – never finished. The struggle for perfection is a constant struggle. Truth as truthfulness ‘is a matter of deepening the concepts, in question through a relation to each other. There is a continuous and spontaneous interplay. “Becoming better” is a process involving exercise and refinement of moral vocabulary and sensitivity.’81 And third, an acknowledgement of human separateness: the recognition that others are different from us, ‘to an extent we never cease discovering.’82 From the perspective of moral perfectionism, the removal of self-inflicted confusions is central to honest thinking and true moral progression. In order to highlight that thought, I would like to call attention to a perfectionist moment that takes place in George Cukor’s classic movie The Philadelphia Story (1939). The story in short is a story about a woman, Tracy Lord (played by Katherine Hepburn), who is just about to marry George Kittridge (played by John Howard). The movie opens two years before the wedding with the break-up between Tracy and her former husband C. K. Dexter Haven (played by Cary Grant). Dexter is in place at the scene of the marriage between Kittridge and Tracy, arriving a couple of days before the wedding. He ‘rode in on a filthy blackmail.’ He is trying to protect his (former) family who is threatened by Spy Magazine whose editor in chief wants to publish a story about Tracy’s dad having an affair with a much younger dancer. In order to prevent that story from being published, Dexter has agreed to get a reporter/writer (James Stewart) and a photographer (played by Ruth Hussey) from Spy Magazine to attend the wedding, to write an inside-story about this big celebrity wedding. As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that Tracy has three men around her – her husband to be George, her former husband Dexter and the writer/journalist Mike – who are all interested in her. She seems to be forced to make a very difficult choice.83

79 80 81 82 83

Mulhall, ‘Constructing a Hall of Reflection,’ 226. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 342. Ibid. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 216. For the reader who has not seen the film, and desires a fuller description of its main story, see Chapter 2 of Stanley Cavell’s, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004) and Chapter 4, ‘The Importance of Importance: The Philadelphia Story,’ in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, ed. Stanley Cavell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

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Approximately forty minutes into the film, all three men plus her father get involved, one after the other, in discussions with Tracy concerning how they perceive her. Strikingly, they all provide similar pictures. She is described as a goddess, a statue, someone (or something?) to be worshiped. But these very similar descriptions of her character still vary. Not in choice of words, but in tone of voice, in value connotations. One might say that Tracy receives (at least) three mirrors in which she is reflected. She is now confronted with the question of whether or not the ideal she is on the verge of perfecting is a true picture of who she really wants to be(come). There are many reasons why a short detour to the world of the movie might be instructive. Here, I want to focus on two details. One is the perfectionist moment. The other is the nature of what is being said in the communications. The dialogues that Tracy Lord participates in, work as an illustration of the effect and power of a mirror. She discovers something about herself which she, at some level, already knew. Otherwise she would have deemed the picture of her false, and she could have rebuked their charges as irrelevant and merely mean. But her tears and her anger tell us that she does identify herself with these pictures of her. The three or so mirroring encounters that she faces employ almost exactly the same words. Dexter’s words have the sound of an accusation – and Tracy takes it to be so at first, and responds with anger. But Dexter denies that he has any sort of contempt for her. ‘Not of you Red. Never of you.’ Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a certain, peculiar, form of disdain in the tone of his voice, but he has no contempt for her person (her whole being). What invests Dexter’s words with the sound of an accusation is that she is not true to herself. As Cavell remarks, ‘He is not accusing her of some misdeed (as lying, stealing, treachery of some kind) but rather describing her as being unworthy of herself, of what she could be.’84 Her husband to be, George, also describes her as some kind of Goddess. As a response of sorts, she bursts out that she wants ‘to be useful in the world’ – which I see as a true and genuine longing of hers, this is who and what she really wants to become. George responds with a very degrading laughter. ‘Useful! You!’ He wants to build her an ivory tower. . . Both Dexter and George mirror her as a Goddess, using almost the same phrases. One employs these words to tell her that she is no longer true to herself, or at least, that she has become an entirely different person. She is, as Dexter says, far from being ‘a first class woman, or a first class human being.’85 George, on the other hand, has nothing but praise for her godlike appearance. He adores (but perhaps does not love) her for her ‘ability’ to stand above everything worldly. That she could be useful in the world is a joke to him. The third time she is confronted with a reflection of herself is 84 85

Cavell, Cities of Words, 12. As Cavell rightly remarks, ‘Dexter is here on dangerous moral ground . . . . If we are to take Dexter seriously, he cannot mean that being first class means you deserve to command a greater share of the world’s goods than others do . . . . We would like to take Dexter to mean by “a first class human being” something like being one who makes serious moral demands upon her/himself . . . . What counts as serious demands upon oneself, is what perfectionism concerns itself with, after rational calculations have been made and standing obligations have been assessed and met, or found unworthy.’ Cavell, Cities of Words, 46f.

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the following discussion she has with her father. In this discussion, she starts placing the words of the first two mirrors in his mouth – and they fit. Her life as she leads it now – a life which builds on ‘marrying George’ – is a life that is heading in the direction of perfecting the image of her as a goddess, a statue, something without use and purpose, best placed in an ivory tower. This is the road which she finds herself to be traveling on. As I have said, Tracy is pictured, mirrored, in almost identical wordings. The difference is in the how. Where two of them have the tone or shade of something like disappointment, George’s has the shade and tone of worship. It is up to Tracy to put two and two together. Thus, the mirrors show no hidden secret. They show nothing that cannot be said. (In fact, they say it.) And they present a true picture of reality: this is how she appears. (In fact, George says it: ‘It’s how everyone sees you!’) The question is how she and the men who care for her relate to this image. This illustrates well how a mirroring philosophy must deal with the complexities of language and life. That, for example, words are deeds, that how we say something matters, and where, and why, in what tone of voice even – and how the fact that we sometimes fail to carry the weight of our words can make all the difference. Importantly, it also brings into view that a communication requires more than one. It is not merely a question about what is being said, but it is also about what it means to listen. Tracy’s future is based on how she hears what she hears. How she hears it depends on her vision of herself. Here, the medium of the film – the fact that we learn this by watching a movie rather than by reading arguments and theses – needs to be taken into account. The truth of the matter requires, one might say, that we know a great deal about Tracy, and that we know that the men mirroring her know her very well. The adequacy of the mirrors depends on this fact. Not anyone could have told Tracy these facts. Her difficulty is, in a sense, unique or particular. They wouldn’t have been facts in the same sense if a man who did not know her as well would have simply informed her that she is such and such a woman. In such a case, the same sentences would not have had the same meaning. This is one reason why philosophy might do well in going to the movies and reading literature carefully, not just to assemble well written and amusing examples to bring into philosophy books in order to illustrate or test philosophical theses. If the philosophical point lies in the artwork as a whole, then the watching of the film or the reading of the book are philosophical activities in their own right. The story of Tracy becoming who she is, also shows that the single action – say, marry or not marry – was never the central issue. What mattered was Tracy’s vision of herself. The ‘decisions’ followed more or less naturally after that; vision over choice. ‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.’86 says Murdoch. I see Tracy’s moral pilgrimage as an acknowledgement of the fact that she had come to resemble a picture that she did not ‘want’ to resemble.87 It was 86 87

Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 75. I hesitate to say that Tracy did not want to resemble that picture, since I think that these kinds of ‘choices’ are not really choices in an ordinary straightforward sense. I will return to this below.

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a true picture of the person she was at that moment, but that true picture was at odds with the idea she had, or at least thought she had, of herself. I would also like to add a few further remarks on the context of discovery here. In a certain sense, it is correct to say that Tracy was living an illusion. She was wrong about herself. Her self-understanding stood, one might say, in conflict with her living; her idea of love as including, for example, being seen for whom you really are, stood in conflict with marrying her husband to be. Now, how does one remove someone from such an illusion? The first time she hears that she has become such and such a woman, she responds with anger.88 But what makes her see the truth about herself comes not from some new astonishing information that has hitherto been hidden.89 The illusion is, as it were, indirectly removed. (It hangs more on what the ‘reader’ of the mirror sees, than what its author intended to ‘state.’) Inside the illusion the words that she saw in the mirror made no sense. As long as she was in the illusion, the words she saw in the mirror could not be squared with her picture of herself. Murdoch clearly holds that the weight and import of our moral vocabulary cannot be separated from the way we lead our lives, a view which she shares with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Furthermore, they all thought that conceptual confusions have the particular form where the person trying to lead her words, command them, fails to do so. This illusion of sense, they all thought, can best – and at times perhaps only – be dissolved by a mirroring strategy. The confused must recognize his or her own confusions as confusions, for as long as someone is in the illusion of sense, words seem (obviously, hence the ‘illusion’) to make perfect sense. I have also stressed that this form of illusion often arises because the life we try to lead with the aid of this or that thought, this or that moral vocabulary, are in some sort of conflict with one another. This encounter of a perfectionist moment in The Philadelphia Story, also point to an often neglected aspect of perfectionism – at least in the form we find it in Murdoch and Cavell. Perfectionism, as a moral theory of sorts, is in an important sense not an alternative to the most common varieties of philosophical moral theories.

88

89

At this juncture, recall Kierkegaard’s words: ‘By direct attack he only strengthens a person in the illusion and also infuriates him. Generally speaking, there is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion. If one in any way causes the one ensnared to be antagonized, then all is lost. And this one does by direct attack, which in addition also contains the presumptuousness of demanding that another person confess to one or face-to-face with one makes the confession that actually is most beneficial when the person concerned makes it to himself secretly. The latter is achieved by the indirect method . . . .’ Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author,’ 459. As Cavell notes: ‘[T]he aim of moral reasoning in perfectionism [is] not to assess pluses and minuses of advantage, nor to assess whether the act is recommendable universally . . . . [P]erfectionism concentrates on this moment. First, it recognizes difficulties in moral life that arise not from an ignorance of your duties, but from a confusion over your desires, your attractions and aversions, over whether, for example, you want the duties associated with marriage at all, whether you can bear the sense of failure in another divorce, whether your inability to act on your self-confessed longing to be useful in the world is based on anything more than fear of your vanity on wanting to be perfect, intact, without the need of human company.’ Cavell, Cities of Words, 42.

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Utilitarianism proposes a means of calculation to determine the good of an action. Kantianism proposes a principle of judgment to determine the rightness of an action. . . . [P]erfectionism is the province not of those who oppose justice or benevolent calculation, but of those who feel left out of their sway, who feel indeed that most people have been left, or leave themselves out, of their sway. 90

On this score, it is important to keep in mind that Murdoch’s vision of moral perfectionism contains no claims at all about what a ‘perfected’ human would be. Indeed, as in the case of Cavell, ‘perfectionism . . . specifically sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfection.’91 And in relation to this, one must also not forget that Murdoch has no positive characterizations of what ‘the Good’ is – only negative ones.92 There is not a specifiable goal to strive for that is knowable beforehand. Rather, becoming who you are, is in Murdoch’s (and Cavell’s, and Kierkegaard’s and probably also in Wittgenstein’s) view a constant struggle. This struggle cannot be conducted solely in an ‘outward’ manner by means of objective, aesthetic disinterested reflection. Changing one’s vision, as part of the struggle for perfection, is, Murdoch argues, a coming to see. It requires a specific type of clarity concerning one’s own inner life. Murdoch’s well known example of a mother in law, M, and her view of her daughter in law, D, is meant to illustrate that. For starters, I would like to highlight the fact that Murdoch enters that example through an observation that bears a striking resemblance with Kierkegaard’s (and Wittgenstein’s) thinking, which directly links the question of the achievement of clarity about one’s inner life required by the perfectionist struggle to the question of sense and weight of words as being intimately intertwined with the way one leads one’s life as a whole. So I follow Murdoch’s lead and introduce that example via its very Kierkegaardian starting point: It can be argued that I make a promise by uttering the words “I promise”: a performative utterance. But do I, in a religious context, repent by sincerely uttering the words “I repent,” am I “heartily sorry” simply by saying in an appropriate situation that I am heartily sorry? Is this so even if I then amend my life?93

This formulation helps to bring into view the fact that the issue of words being intimately intertwined with the way one leads one’s life as a whole, is not merely a question of saying the right things in the right circumstances, or of doing what one says one is, or should be, doing. The intimacy of this intertwinement must be understood in terms of inwardness (or some related wording). Murdoch’s example, however, is meant to be ‘ordinary and everyday’ since references to religious life raise ‘special difficulties.’94 90 91 92

93 94

Cavell, Cities of Words, 24f. Ibid., 3. ‘“Good”: “Real”: “Love”. These concepts are closely connected. And here we retrieve the deep sense of the indefinability of good, which has been given a trivial sense in recent philosophy. Good is indefinable not for the reasons offered by Moore’s successors, but because of the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality.’ Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 333. Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 312. Ibid.

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The example of M and D displays the mother in law (M) and her struggle to see D. At the outset, she is certain that her son has married beneath him; M thinks that ‘D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile.’95 As the example develops, we find M reflecting seriously about D in her absence. Murdoch even imagines D to have passed away to make sure that we get the point that such reflection can be called for, and conducted, without the other’s presence. You can change your view of the other more or less completely without attending to specific, publicly observable, acts that she does, and you can perceive the other clearly, see her for what she is, by reaching clarity about your own personal perception and receptivity. M gives, Murdoch imagines, ‘careful and just attention to an object which confronts her’96 – the absent D. ‘D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.’97 What happens here, one might say, is that M’s view of D alters completely without D changing even a bit. She sees her in a different light – indeed, I think Murdoch might even say that she sees her for real, for the first time, and so her new vision demands, or calls for, a shift of vocabulary. Her two descriptions of D are related – linguistic cousins if you wish – but the moral tone of them are different. Murdoch now contends that this development of M’s moral vision can hardly be seen as an act either. Not in a standard intentional sense anyway. She did not decide to see D correctly, but she has been ‘morally active’ – on her own. ‘M looks at D, she attends to D, she focuses her attention. M is engaged in an internal struggle.’98 And, as Murdoch remarks, this is not something that M could have done ‘in conversation with another person.’99 (This ‘could not’ must not be understood superficially, as if the struggle forbids contacts and conversations. Of course, many contacts and many conversations serve to make such struggles more clearly directed and they might situate them more fully in the life of the one struggling. But the struggle itself will always be personal – one’s own, and necessarily one’s own.) What M is doing is not merely to try to see D accurately, but to see her lovingly and justly, and, in Murdoch’s view, seeing lovingly is a prerequisite for seeing accurately. There is a sense in which love is not a decision. Even though we may say that we can, and perhaps must, command love, that love also is a form of repetition (to speak with Kierkegaard), there is a sense in which we can’t decide to love someone. (As if it was possible to say to the other ‘Love me!’ and then she does so, by will.) And if seeing is to be linked to loving, seeing someone or something is not a mere fact of simple observation. Love is not a simple and single act, founded on a neutral decision. Rather, it requires a Kierkegaardian repetition and thus, ‘M’s activity,’ Murdoch states, ‘is essentially something progressive, something infinitely perfectible. . . . M is engaged in an endless task.’100 95

Ibid. Ibid., 313. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 317. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 96

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Thus seeing is linked to loving. The struggle to see, that is to love, is an endless journey of progression, and that endless struggle is, Murdoch claims, ‘the idea of perfection.’101 Importantly, this struggle for perfection must include, Murdoch argues, a constant openness to the flexibility of language. As we change, so does language (though the words employed might be the same), and vice versa. ‘Love is knowledge of the individual. M confronted with D has an endless task. Moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing.’102 At this juncture, Murdoch makes a diagnosis similar to that of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard concerning the roots of this form of philosophical confusion. As we go through life, our concepts change, alter, become different – but the words stay the same.103 We may end up in an illusion of sense because we think we know what our words mean since we think we have learnt to master them in one context, or in one segment of my individual history, and so we go on to employ them, habitually, taking tourselves to be in command, but lacking the right form of inwardness, thus leaving our language idling. Murdoch repeatedly argues that we need to train and re-train, learn and re-learn our language – that language is not something fixed one can appropriate, a lesson one can learn once and then be done with. We learn our language our entire life. An important point which the M and D example highlights then, is the fact that the mother in law re-educates herself by looking more carefully, attentively. As she comes to see more clearly, her language alters. This alteration – from one ‘set of normative epithets’ (vulgar, undignified, noisy, tiresomely juvenile) to another (refreshingly simple, spontaneous, gay, delightfully youthful) – changes her perception altogether. If Murdoch is right, which I think she is, vision precedes choice. But altering one’s language is not something which one can simply choose to do. Sure, one can say to oneself: ‘I have read my Murdoch, I’ll never stop learning language!’ But that would amount to having said nothing, for it would be to claim to choose something that is not a question of choice. The ‘work of attention’ is something that goes on continuously, and it is not something that can be, as it were, ‘switched off.’104 But it is something which we can block, deny or reject. One may indeed say that philosophy often (but probably not always) begins in such deflections; that philosophical problems, in a sense, are such blockings. We may say that in cases where intolerable messiness is ‘solved’ by the human will to one-making, we can often see the movement of philosophy as a form of deflection from the ordinary, a shared community. Thus, we need to find ways to get back home (granted that we know we are away, drifting) – a need to be reminded about, and perhaps jolted back into, the world which is ours. Murdoch argues that what is most important are not the explicit moral choices that we make or fail to make, but ‘[w]hat happens in between such choices.’105 It is in that ‘in between’ that our language is shaped, our vision sharpened and our attention matured. 101

Ibid., 318. Ibid., 321. 103 Ibid., 324. 104 Ibid., 329. 105 Ibid. 102

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Choices follow after that. This is the deepest sense, and the most difficult thought, that lies inherent in Murdoch’s claim that ‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.’106 What makes this ‘in between’ so profoundly difficult is not only that it seems to precede and control our moral choices and actions, but that the ‘in between’ itself is out of our control. We do make pictures of ourselves, and we do come to resemble them. But that is not to say that the pictures we have come to resemble are good pictures, true pictures – that we were on the right track when we are, as it were, ‘choosing’ our mirrors. ‘Of course psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world, complete with systematic vocabulary (M seeing D as pert-common-juvenile, etc.) Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusions.’107 So, even though one might say that ‘picture making’ is part of human nature – in the sense that we cannot avoid reflecting upon what we are and where we are going – creating (in the sense of ‘inventing’) pictures to guide us is a risky business. If what is important happens between choices, we do not form our self-perception by will. That is one reason why I don’t think Murdoch thought that this was a task one should try to engage oneself in light heartedly. This is, furthermore, one major reason why we should not think that Murdoch was ‘making pictures’ when she wrote novels, and that we are far better off if we consider her novels as forms of mirrors. She is taking pictures, showing us who we are and so what we are on the verge of becoming, the pictures we seem to be struggling to ‘perfect.’ That ‘we need a new vocabulary of attention’ does not mean that it is possible to suggest a new language for us to speak – it is rather a business of making clear a conceptual richness that may lie dormant in our language. In that respect, she is a true follower of Kierkegaard: ‘Compel a person to an opinion, a conviction, a belief – in all eternity, that I cannot do. But one thing I can do, in one sense the first thing (since it is a condition for the next thing, to accept his view, conviction, belief), in another sense the last thing if he refuses the next: I can compel a person to become aware.’108 So there is a sense in which Murdoch has come to think that at its deepest level, mere instruction, or suggested courses of action, will not do. Morality has always already been ‘formed’ when we reach the level of actions and judgements. Thus, we need in one sense more and in another sense much less than ‘a pointing finger.’109 More, since we need rich picturing, adequate mirrors, of how we do look and how we do think. Less in the sense that the Murdochian, Kierkegaardian, Wittgensteinian moral thinker’s most important point is that pictures are not simply to be followed either – pictures can become pointing fingers as well. As I have argued, the mere repetition of a moral statement, of the other’s inwardness (to speak with Kierkegaard), is not an expression but an echo. 106

Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’, 75. Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 329. 108 Kierkegaard, ‘The Point of View of My Work as an Author,’ 464. 109 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 323. ‘[W]e wish to say that the impulse towards goodness should stir the whole person. This demand does not isolate goodness in the way in which “good” is isolated in an existentialist scheme, where it is merely an empty box into which chosen items are put. If “free choice” alone confers value, then all that is needed is a pointing finger; no place for cognitive struggle involving specialised informative moral concepts.’ 107

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When I began talking about the ‘general loss of concepts’ that torments Murdoch, I spoke mainly through her diagnosis of the conception of the human being that she takes to be dominant in our time – and even though there is a substantial gap in time between the time of her writing and our time I think Murdoch’s diagnosis still is to the point. We see variations of it, true, but the core of it and the problems that come with it have not decreased. We have seen how that notion of the human is intertwined with other central notions of her philosophy. Love (attention) for example. We have also seen how a specific idea of method in moral philosophy comes together with this picture of the human. Indeed, the very idea that what moral philosophy is – a specific discipline that deals with a specific region of actions and judgements (plus a number of ‘metaissues’ on top of that) – is more or less inseparable from the ‘Liberal’ picture of the human; and that also means that other forms of expressions registering other aspects of our moral lives fall outside the domain of ‘moral philosophy proper.’ With the fall of ‘the human’ – with ‘it’ being theorized away from language – comes a shift in meaning for a whole range of concepts. The further into the human psyche, our ‘mentality,’ this loss sinks, the harder it will be for us to see the human in the language which is her home. If we really think that actions and judgements are all there is to moral philosophy, and if ‘good’ really means nothing more than ‘good for something else,’ then the idea of love as a lifelong repetition of conquests will disintegrate on us. This is, I take it, one reason why the word sin recurs so many times in Murdoch’s philosophy. Murdoch was not a believer in the Christian God (even though she did think of herself as a very religious being) so when she calls out for a new conception of original sin she is not suggesting that we should strive to get ‘back’ to a time at which God was not yet dead. The idea of original sin that we must strive to attain a clear sense of must rather be something like a sense of the good as beyond me, and of misbehaviour not as miscalculation or mere neglect. That is, we can see Murdoch as striving to bring into view the fallen human being – the human which is collective yet responsible and to be held answerable; the human that is a sinner not merely in her deeds but also in her failure to see and to become what she is; that human perfection is unattainable. ‘We are,’ Murdoch says, ‘guilty not of what we do but of what we are.’110 (Is not this exactly what Tracy discovered?) And this is something that has, as it were, fallen out of the picture. Although the concept of original sin has a Christian history, the picture of the human that the concept of original sin comes with, the picture of the human as faulty and imperfect by necessity, is not dependent upon Christianity. One might say that secularization functioned as a handrail into a world without original sin, but that was because the birth of the enlightened modern man included a specific form of belief in human reason and not because original sin may make sense only in a Christian idiom. ‘Briefly put, our picture of ourselves has become too grand, we have isolated, and identified ourselves with, an unrealistic conception of will, we have lost the vision of a

110

Ibid., 69.

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reality separate from ourselves, and we have no conception of original sin. Kierkegaard rightly observed that “an ethic which ignores sin is an altogether useless science”, although he also added, “but if it recognizes sin it is eo ipso beyond its sphere”.’111 We can, of course, hear the echo of Elisabeth Anscombe’s ground-breaking ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’112 here – in which she also strives to attain a sense of what it means to lose one’s language. Both Murdoch and Anscombe share at least this idea: as religion fell out of our self-conception, moral philosophy went on, not registering that the concepts on which it feeds were formed in a religious framework (which is not to say that the loss of the framework makes any application of them senseless, and this recognition should not be seen as a call for a form of linguistic regimentation). And this loss – the slow turns and twists of concepts – has to a rather large (and devastating) extent, gone unnoticed (largely due to the fact that our words have remained the same). What this kind of loss amounts to, or is a symptom of, is not that the concepts (and so the words) have become obsolete and should be done away with (a rather common misunderstanding), but that ‘reflection upon our lives’ and ‘the lives we actually do lead’ have gone separate ways.113 Thus one might say that the true radicality of Murdoch’s thought has nothing to do with an attempt to reinvent religion and make us want to ‘go transcendent’ in philosophizing again. Rather it attempts to make clear that philosophy has gone astray since we can no longer see what the ordinary is, what we are – and since philosophy is a mirror of its time, so has culture. We are, as it were, stuck in the illusion that there is an autonomous ‘I’ which is the core of morality, and what this ‘I’ needs is to figure out what action to perform or which judgement to pass. We fail to see reality because we are too preoccupied trying to measure features and properties and alternative outcomes. This can also be seen in the concept of love. Our relations to others simply cannot be cast and recast, lived and interpreted, by means of a model of an ‘I’ relating to her words and her others in a strictly hypothetical way. I have said that Murdoch’s concept of love should not be seen as a theoretical construct that is aimed to substitute other action-guiding moral principles and/or methods and theories. Rather, it is a forgotten concept that we all, to some extent, already share. ‘We need and want to come home to what is categorical not hypothetical, to return to the present, where we also and essentially live.’114 Murdoch claims that ordinary (and hence real morality) harbours and depends on the idea of the absolute, and that we are living in a time where we tend to strive to look away from that ‘fact’ when we try to achieve self-comprehension in theoretical discourse, philosophy for example. She argued this in relation to the much expected charge of being ‘otherworldly’ (that we, for example, saw in Nussbaum’s reading).115 But, strikingly, Murdoch claims that ‘the 111

Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”,’ 338. Cf. Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 268. ‘Sin, however, is the crucial point of departure for the religious existence, it is not a factor within something else, with another order of things, but is itself the beginning of the order of things.’ 112 Elisabeth Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy,’ in Ethics, Religion and Politics: The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume Three (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981). 113 See Conant, ‘Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility.’ 114 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 305. (Italics in original). 115 ‘I look here at the question of duty in the context of the charge that the sort of neo-Platonic moral view which I have been reflecting is really a sort of aesthetic view, a kind of wander through pleasant groves of quasi-religious experience.’ Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 304.

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idea of absolute, as truth and certainty, . . . is in our sense of truth; however feeble or “specialised” our response to it may be.’116 We might put it this way: the seemingly stark and harsh ‘demand’ that there is an absolute sense of ‘the good’ already is our notion of the good, is the claim that we have forgotten or repressed our own ordinary language when theorizing or looking to understand ourselves. It is probably true that this ‘amnesia’ comes together with a loss of a religious life, but Murdoch’s view does not entail the existence of something ‘otherworldly’ or a specific object which is supposed to be out of reach for us linguistic beings. ‘We are all the time building up our value world and exercising, or failing to exercise, our sense of truth in the daily hourly minutely business of apprehending, or failing to apprehend, what is real and distinguishing it from illusion.’117 I take this to mean that when we are faced with moral ‘dilemmas,’ the sense of the ‘dilemma’ is fuelled by the sense that there is something here that we could do that is real, true, good; or, alternatively, an unwillingness to think of tragedy as real. That encounters with aspects of reality which we call ‘moral’ – encounters in which reality rushes upon us and forces us to make the choices between bad versus bad, or evil versus evil (hardly ever a choice between good and evil. . .) – are tormenting, haunt us, do so because we are driven by a sense that also in this case, the good exists; it’s just that we don’t know what it is. This is why Murdoch repeats the phrase ‘or failing to.’ Our thoughts gravitate towards something; in morals and in any truth-searching activity. That is the relevant sense of perfectionism – not as a struggle to attain a specified goal, but working with, and reworking, the idea of the absolute as ‘a condition of perfection glimpsed but never reached.’118 Similarly, the concept of ‘love’ needs to be reconquered. We simply cannot understand the sense of Murdochian love in terms of actions, judgements, properties and features. Since these ways of framing love have become custom (at least in philosophy), this is an aspect of Murdoch’s philosophy easily misunderstood. For example, when Murdoch notes that love can be very dangerous, and that it can threaten us, disrupt our attunement with the world, it is easy to start thinking that Murdoch must have had two radically different notions of love. (This tendency to extrapolate two concepts of love explains why Nussbaum inserted the concepts of the Dantean and the Platonic view of sexual love into her reading of Murdoch.) But to say that Murdoch has two conceptions of love – bad love and good love – is extremely misleading. Of course, one might say that Murdoch displays two different conceptions of love when she on the one hand, talks about love as unselfing, and on the other, talks about love as selfish (perhaps even blinding) passion. But these two do not exclude each other. I may love you (or my work) in a way that makes me really see you (or it), that pulls me out of my selfish preoccupations. Yet, this love (which really is attending and selfless) can obscure other events or people from my sight. Furthermore, the idea that there are two kinds of love easily leads one into thinking about what features have to be in place for a love to be good and what features make love bad. 116 117 118

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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But Murdoch’s concept of love is, seen from one perspective, more intricate than the idea of love as something that ‘is what it is’ because it has all the relevant features or properties. Seen from another angle, Murdoch’s concept is less complicated than the picture of ‘two forms of love’ suggests. For, indeed, Murdoch means to use, draw upon, and elucidate, no other concept of love than our ordinary concept of love. It might be true that hers is a concept that does not seem to include responses to the problems that many contemporary theories about love struggle with, but that is not because Murdoch’s conception is strange, but because the contemporary debates must often be described as having lost the sense of our ordinary concept of love by means of a theoretical turn away from the ordinary. You may well love that your wife or partner has blue eyes and is a double-D, but you don’t love her because she has blue eyes and is a double-D. Ordinary language knows this. Philosophy strives to forget it. Love, as the word functions in its home environment, when it is being (dare I say?) ‘authentically’ carried, is Murdoch’s notion of ‘love for nothing,’ and it is our ordinary concept of love. This is Murdoch’s claim. This is also how we should understand her concept of the good, as the ‘good for nothing’ and her notion of love as ‘for nothing.’ If something is good, because it has the best utility value, it is not the good. Ordinary language knows this. Philosophy tends to forget it.119 And so, with Cavell, ‘The return of a word requires the recovery of its object for us.’120 If I am right in my reading of Murdoch here, then the most important task for her is to make us aware of the fact that we are building our self-understanding on a confused picture of what a human being is. Her largest fear is that we actually will succeed in coming to resemble that picture. Thus, she needs to present a picture for us in which this confusion between the real human and the picture of the human becomes recognizable. ‘Literature must always represent the battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.’121 We can now see how Murdoch’s vision of perfectionism – that goes hand in hand with her view of the good as good for nothing, lacking a clear object, goal – sits well with this Kierkegaardian/Wittgensteinian thought: Inwardness is what is crucial, but inwardness cannot, in some sense, be communicated directly (not in philosophy, nor in literature). Merely representing inwardness is equally dubious, as that would be, at best, an echo. But it is possible to mirror a man lacking inwardness, living in a certain form of forgetfulness. But being able to produce an echo does not make one someone who fully carries the consequences and responsibilities of a moral life. In Murdoch’s novels, we hear a lot of echoes of her philosophy, but none, if I’m right, expressed.

119

Murdoch’s investigations into this concept can help us see that there’s something deeply confused in the contemporary debates about love that builds on the idea (often called ‘the intuitive idea’) that we love a person because a set of features or properties. This idea leads to further confusions, such as the proclaimed difficulty that if I love A, because she exhibits properties x, y, z, then, I should also love B if B also exhibits properties x, y, z . . . 120 Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 64. 121 Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 295.

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4

Reading The Black Prince Bradley Pearson as Living in an Illusion of Sense

One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.1

4.1 ‘Murdoch’s most self-consciously Platonic Kierkegaardian love story’ Let us now return to The Black Prince and ask what the novel looks like if it is not an expression of Murdoch’s philosophy; if ‘her philosophy’ is something that is present only to the extent that an author’s ‘outlook’ always and necessarily ‘shines through’; if expressions of ‘philosophical sentences’ are there merely to portray a particular (fictional) character’s desire to ‘speak metaphysically’; and if we try to take on board the idea that the expressions of philosophical sentences in the novels reveal next to nothing about Murdoch but a great deal about the particular (fictional) characters. Let us furthermore take Murdoch’s own instructions quite seriously when she claims that her novels are meant to be artworks, that is, self-contained, autonomous wholes; that art is not didactic (in the, as she calls it, narrow ‘utilitarian’ sense); that her novels are meant to be realistic – that is, true pictures of what our world looks like; that her novels are meant to function as mirrors of our world in which we may (or may not) recognize ourselves; that a novel communicates indirectly; and that she as a novelist is ‘making pictures’ only in the banal sense that follows from the fact that she is a fictional writer. Mirrors reflect but do not contend. They describe but do not put forward any hypotheses. They mirror, but do not justify or explain. Iris Murdoch is only claiming to hold the mirror and thereby direct our attention to what is reflected. There is one thing that Nussbaum (like many other readers of Murdoch’s who assume that her novels express her philosophy) gets exactly right. If that which is expressed in The Black Prince is Murdoch’s philosophy, it does not seem to be very good. Many of Murdoch’s characters are indeed ‘hard to like.’ They are flimsy and shallow and their actions can hardly be described as ‘exemplary for conduct.’ This much is true. 1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rhees (New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1979), 3.

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The assumption on which Nussbaum’s description of The Black Prince as ‘Murdoch’s most self-consciously Platonic love story’2 as well the Conradian picture of it as a ‘Neoplatonic manifesto’3 is that Murdoch uses her novels as vehicles for her philosophy (of its ‘sayable’ and/or its supposedly ‘unsayable’ part . . .). This supposition is also what enables the Nussbaumian understanding of Murdoch’s view as an untimely and otherworldly form of ‘Platonism’ which entails a disdainful attitude to people who do not try to be perfect (which we learn, notably, only by reading her novels). My reservations against this way of approaching the novel are not merely rooted in my wanting to take Murdoch quite seriously when she (repeatedly and sternly) states that she does not want to write philosophical novels or even propagate her philosophy in her novels. As indicated, I think that the most fruitful way forward here is to read her novels as indirect communications in the sense developed in Chapter 2. This suggested approach is grounded not solely in Murdoch’s claim that literature communicates indirectly. The ‘indirect communication’ is not merely a stylistic choice, but hangs together with the kind of problems we are facing and, also, with what Murdoch thinks art is and what it can do. The moment Kierkegaard’s presence in The Black Prince dawns on us, it becomes evident that this work ‘toys’ with a Kierkegaardian architecture. One does not have to read the novel to see that. Already in its physical appearance, at an almost typographical level, the book breathes Kierkegaard. A brief familiarity with Kierkegaard’s writings – his use of (layers of) pseudonyms; his recurrent use of pauses in the text in which the ‘author’ reflects on the relationship between form and content, and the mode of presentation that he, this particular ‘author,’ now is engaged in; the often dialogical character in the works where A talks to B, or an author receives a letter or accidentally comes over a manuscript by an unknown author – should make it clear that if The Black Prince ‘plays’ with any author from the history of philosophy or literature, it is neither Plato nor Shakespeare, but Kierkegaard. To paraphrase Nussbaum, The Black Prince is ‘Murdoch’s most self-consciously Kierkegaardian love story.’ My aim here is not to mark out all the textual and intertextual connections that may be found between Murdoch and Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous authors. But I will insert a number of Kierkegaard-quotes in the chapter, italicized in order to separate them from the text, conceding it to the reader to add ‘two and two together’ (not a difficult equation). My main purpose is to make it evident that this novel, The Black Prince, is not to be seen as an expression of Murdoch’s philosophy in any straightforward way. Rather it works with its reader in a way similar to the way Kierkegaard wanted his pseudonymous texts to work. That is, this is a mirror of our world, our times – where some of the concepts (not words) Murdoch wants to reawaken are almost impossible to invoke.4 This means that I take Bradley Pearson to be under the illusion of meaning them, and that Murdoch counts on us seeing that. (She is, after all, a realistic novelist.) What we will see then is not an exemplification, not an illustration, not a testing of 2 3 4

Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 43. Conradi, ‘Preface,’ xxiv, in the footnote marked ‘*’. Cf. Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 99.

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Murdoch’s philosophy. But neither will we see Murdoch showing something that cannot be said. We may, however, say that the novel shows something, in the sense that it is a portrayal of such a man. We may also say that it manages to show that in a way that exceeds ‘mere stating’ and that this showing could not have been done without showing us the world of this novel in which these particular wordings do or do not have a place. But that kind of ‘showing’ does not really stand in opposition to ‘saying it.’ What I aim to make clear is that The Black Prince is a picture of a contemporary human being who sincerely and honestly tries to appropriate views about art, love and knowledge that resemble Murdoch’s to some extent. (We may say that they ‘are hers’ in the sense that she struggles to appropriate these views as well.) But Bradley is utterly unable to do so, due to the fact that he misunderstands their nature. Indeed, he seems to adopt them as specific philosophical positions, to be measured and weighed against other competing positions (in a manner not unlike how many readers of Murdoch think of her philosophical texts). But he completely misses the content of these since he does not know how to move from the echo of them to a subjective use of them, from ‘parroting’ to ‘expression.’ Arnold Baffin disarmingly makes a similar observation about Bradley: ‘You sound as if you were quoting something all the time!’5 In short, The Black Prince is a Kierkegaardian work since it strives to make clear that if we approach these sentences, these thoughts and positions, in the way that Bradley does – and I do take Murdoch to think of Bradley as a very likely human being, a real character – then we can be sure that we have misunderstood them. The content of Murdoch’s philosophy actually demands the struggle to attain and achieve the sense of these ways of thinking in a way that makes the completion of that attainment a hollow idea. Indeed, one way to spell out the core of perfectionism is to say that there can be no such thing as ‘a position’ that one may learn (say, by heart), and then go out and employ it and in that way make it one’s own; the concepts we are trying to invoke here as morally significant are such that they require a perpetual renegotiation at a personal level. The idea of selftranscendence depends on that. In one sense, Bradley has done his homework, and so he can repeat ‘Murdoch’s(?) Neoplatonic philosophy’ – he knows its doctrines and dogmas. There’s only one problem. Knowing its doctrines and dogmas is not to know it at all. If God’s Word is only a doctrine to you, an impersonal, objective something, it is no mirror. (Kierkegaard)6

Murdoch has gone to great lengths in trying to make sure that Bradley Pearson’s words and beliefs are Bradley Pearson’s. Like Kierkegaard often did, she is distancing herself from the contents of the book by more than one layer of ‘pseudonymity.’ One function of signalling distance is to mark that the point of the book cannot be seen if one tries to tie what its characters say or are portrayed as believing to its author. 5 6

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ in Murdoch The Black Prince, 50. Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination: Recommended for the Times, transl. Edna and Howard Hong (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1940), 51. (Italics added).

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Just before the main story – ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’ – begins, just after Bradley Pearson has signed his ‘Foreword,’ Loxias includes an editorial remark that emphasizes this distance again, in capital letters so we won’t miss it: ‘Now follows BRADLEY PEARSON’S STORY which is entitled:’7 Murdoch’s intended detachment from the content of that story cannot be made more explicit than it already is. She is practically screaming, ‘These are not my views!’ The absence of an author is a means of distancing. (Climacus)8

The fact that The Black Prince is layered should not be skirted. The different voices of the text speak to us in different ways, and prefaces and postscripts are about the text. Loxias, for example, claims to have no part in this work at all, apart from (i) making it available to the public and (ii) being someone who believed, and believed in, Bradley. One further reason for providing such a multi-layered text with the author hidden at a safe distance from its content, is that it enables a picturing of a human being that may sound a great deal like its author, who, at the same time, comes out as a kind of person who is most likely not to be believed – like a madman, at odds with his surroundings. So if we come to think that the kinds of insights in play here require a form of ‘negative pedagogy’, that they need to be conquered in ways that require that the teacher is denied or rejected – ‘Follow your own heart!’ ‘Yes, Master!’ – then we may need to proceed by first distrusting our teacher, or learn to see what, say, ‘following’ does not mean. We may need a teacher that we cannot believe in. In this world, a person like Bradley is unlikely to be believed. ‘Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world often weary, fall silent, or come to doubt their own wit. Without my help this could have been so with Bradley Pearson.’9 There is a sense in which ‘our age’ has no patience with a person like Bradley. He is untimely, at odds with his habitat. We learn that Bradley is crying out, that his text has the character of something of an outburst. But is the world merely indifferent to Bradley’s outbursts or is it indifferent, as it were, in its nature? Is it indifferent to his outbursts because it is an indifferent (or, to speak with Kierkegaard, ‘aesthetic’) culture? If we take ‘crying out to an indifferent world’ to mean that the world merely is indifferent to Bradley (and not in its nature), then he can easily be seen as nothing but a fool about whom we need not bother too much. If, on the other hand, he cries out to a world which is inherently indifferent, then even Bradley, this kind of ‘fool,’ can teach us something. I have noted that even on a very cursory reading, it is clear that Iris Murdoch is not the author of ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’ – Bradley Pearson is. In fact, Murdoch is not even the editor of the book – Loxias is. Loxias, in turn, is only ‘in a mechanical sense’ responsible for bringing Bradley’s words to the public.10 Here, Murdoch makes it clear that she is at least three removes away from Bradley’s words. 7 8 9 10

Editorial remark by Loxias, in The Black Prince, 19. Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 252. (Italics added). Loxias, ‘Editor’s Foreword,’ in The Black Prince, 9. Ibid.

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Not even in the mechanical sense of making them available to the public will she take responsibility. Of course, Bradley, his editor Loxias, and the world in which they live, are all products of Murdoch’s imagination; an imaginative effort based on the desire to picture realistically the reality of a reality outside me (her). The structure of the book is thus not unlike that of, say, Either/Or. Kierkegaard claims to stand behind his pseudonymous production merely in ‘a legal and a literary sense.’11 Regarding a work such as Either/Or, Kierkegaard claims not only that he is not the author, it is not even edited by him. Victor Eremita (the victorious hermit, he-who-stands-alone-will-triumph) is the one who has made this material available to the public (pretty much in Loxias’ ‘mechanical sense’). So in both cases, distance is not only signalled but doubly marked and thus emphasized as crucial for the understanding of the work. It is important to keep in mind that Murdoch did think of a novel as an art-work (a self-sufficient whole) – which also is way of marking distance. Just how removed from Murdoch Bradley is comes out quite clearly in his preface, when states that ‘A sort of Seducer’s Diary with metaphysical reflections might have been an ideal literary form for me.’12 ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ is, of course, the closing manuscript of Part I of Either/Or. Victor Eremita has come across a big pile of papers hidden in a drawer of a desk he had bought second hand. The papers appear to have been written by (at least) two people. One group consisted of ‘esthetic essays,’ that is text written by an ‘esthete’ that Victor will call ‘A.’13 The other group included ‘two long studies and one shorter one, all with ethical content, it seemed, and in the form of letters.’14 These were written by a ‘Judge William,’ a man of principles, an ‘ethical’ man (whom our editor will call ‘B’), as a response to A’s papers. A’s esthetical papers are collected as volume I of Either/Or; B’s ethical response as Volume II. But as we get to ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ at the end of volume I, a further level of pseudonymity is introduced. A is not ‘the Seducer’, at least, that’s what A claims. A is merely the editor of ‘The Seducer’s Diary.’ So ‘the Seducer’ – Johannes – is, even by A’s light, even from the aesthetic point of view, a rather extreme case. Victor Eremita, however, distrusts A here and suspects him of using an ‘old literary device’ in which one author merely claims to be the editor of a work he has actually written.15 So a ‘Seducer’s Diary’ is an extreme finalization of a life lived in aesthetic categories, four removes away from Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard – Victor Eremita – A – The Seducer’s Diary). Whatever else the Seducer is, he is unable to live in ethical or religious categories. ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ is, in a sense, aestheticism full blown. And this is the ideal form for Bradley Pearson’s selfpresentation! Murdoch is telling us from the start, quite clearly, that this, if anything, is a flimsy and shallow human being who is utterly unable to understand the ethical and the religious. If one would want to propose one’s philosophy to the world, especially a

11 12 13

14 15

Søren Kierkegaard, ‘First and Last Explanation,’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 627. Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ in The Black Prince, 16. Victor Eremita, ‘Preface,’ in Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, A Fragment of Life, ed. Victor Eremita, Part One containing A’s Papers, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1843] 1987), 7. Ibid. Ibid., 9.

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way of thinking like Murdoch’s, one could choose a better spokesman than Johannes the Seducer. I am an esthete, an eroticist, who has grasped the nature and point of love, who believes in love and knows it from ground up, and I reserve for myself only the private opinion that no love affair should last more than a half year at most and that any relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the ultimate. (Johannes the Seducer)16

It should also be noted that Bradley, as he writes his Preface and his Postscript, distances himself from his own text. He knows that the picture of him that comes out of his work of art, ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love,’ is a picture of, well . . . an ass, inattentive and unfair in his judgements of other people. ‘I hope that I am a wiser and more charitable man now than I was then.’17 We must take Murdoch quite literally when she states that ‘I reveal other people’s secrets, not mine, except to the extent that any artist reveals himself to some extent in his work. But it’s the secrets of my fictional characters that I am giving away.’18 So even though we may find it hard not to ‘see connections’ between Murdoch’s philosophy and statements that Bradley makes and views he claims to hold, the words are his. Murdoch only comes in here as revealing him, his secrets. Thus, if we are to learn anything philosophical from this novel, we need to figure out what the philosophical significance of Bradley’s secrets is. That being said, we should immediately recall one of the defining features of mirrors: we need to recognize ourselves in them if they are to have any effect. So if we are going to get something out of reading either Either/Or or The Black Prince we need to be able to recognize ourselves, our tendencies of thought, in them. The characters we meet may be extreme and they may be struggling to make sense of thoughts and ideas in very confused ways, but they were loved by their inventors who turned their mirrors in specific directions. There is a piece of reality here. Our aestheticists are not to be fended off easily; they are part of what we are. The kinds of confusions that they get entangled in, and the way they get into them, may be part of what make them ‘one of us.’ We may call this cultural criticism: this is what we may become if we think that we can live our lives solely in aesthetic categories. This is what we may end up thinking if all we can do, and all we can rely on, is disinterested reflection. If we refuse to take responsibility for our wordings – abandoning responsibility in favour of ‘objective criteria’ – we become, not moral beings, but visitors in a shop: seducers and seduced.19 Thus I take this mirror, The Black Prince, to invite the question: ‘Can we recognize ourselves in this mirror, and if we can, how do we relate to this reflection?’

16 17 18 19

Johannes, ‘The Seducer’s Diary,’ in Either/Or, 368. (Italics added). Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ 11. Haffenden, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch,’ 131. Cf. Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 304f.

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I have suggested that the mere presence of sentences that sound a great deal like Murdoch’s philosophical texts should not be seen as evidence of her trying to sell her philosophy by means of a literary coating; it is important to see that Murdoch’s philosophy is not in the novels. I am impersonally or personally in the third person a souffleur [prompter] who has poetically produced authors, whose prefaces in turn are their production, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me. I have no opinion about them except as a third party, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them, since it is impossible to have that to a double reflected communication. (Kierkegaard)20

I have tied these remarks to Murdoch’s view of art as autonomous, to her ‘absolute horror’ of putting philosophy in her novels, and to her view of the ‘Heideggerian’ idea of philosophy as being in such a state that it needs to be ‘poeticized’ because it cannot say what it wants to say in ordinary language as ‘terrible.’ I have also raised some doubts about the view that there are some elements of her philosophy that are out of reach for a philosophical presentation more generally and I have argued that such a conception more often than not builds on philosophical conceptions that she rejects. ‘Out of reach’ means – if inflated – that language is a cage and that there is a ‘domain of value’ that lies beyond the world of facts. These are two views Murdoch fiercely opposed. I have also tried to show that she wants us to reawaken a sense of our language that we tend to neglect or have forgotten. That certain concepts (not words) are hard to invoke today is part of our world, and that will shine through in her portrayal of it. But I think that it can only shine through in a fruitful way if we read literature as literature (and not as philosophy in disguise). It is easy, as a ‘philosophico-critical reader’ (whatever that is), to think that the job of the reader, the critic, is to penetrate the book, to show that which is hidden from view – as if the critic’s job were to make explicit that which the book has made obscure (as if the text does not want to say what it says). But is not this criss-cross reading of mine just that? Am I not merely replacing one ‘interpretative strategy’ with another, leaping back and forth between Kierkegaard (and his pseudonyms), Murdoch and Bradley? Well, we do not need to escape the world of the novel to see these links. It is Bradley who claims that ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ would be an ideal literary form for the presentation of his (kind of) being. We may learn to understand him (not Murdoch) better if we make this connection. The novel says so. What more do we need? Does it follow from this that it is wrong to say that Murdoch’s philosophy could be expressed well if it took the form of a ‘Seducer’s Diary’? Well, no. But in order to argue that, one would have to go far beyond the novel and even further away from Murdoch’s philosophy. My claim is that we are not letting literature have its say if we feel that we need to ground utterances made by a fictional character by 20

Kierkegaard, ‘A First and Last Explanation,’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 625f. (Italics added).

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means of showing how similar they are to sentences that Murdoch has written and signed as a philosopher (with the responsibility for the words that comes with that kind of signature). Literature as literature, as having a philosophical import of its own, means: This sentence, as uttered here, by this person, under these circumstances is what is important – that is letting literature have its say. So what we need to do is ‘look and see.’21 Art, Murdoch claims, teaches by accident, without directed intent. Art’s ‘educational value’ exceeds ‘narrow’ utilitarian ideas about education. There is no didacticizing, but this does not mean that there is no thought-content; to think one thing and to exist in the thought is something else. Existing in relation to thinking is not something that follows by itself any more than it is thoughtlessness. (Climacus)22

4.2 In the context of Bradley Pearson’s form of life We already know the frame of the novel, and we have seen how it may seem to lend itself to a reading according to which it can be described as a form of ‘progression’ from a self-obsessed but failed writer, via an eye-opening love relationship, to a selfsacrificing writer – a martyr, imprisoned for life for a murder that he did not commit, writing solely out of love. One can see that it is tempting to link this tale to Murdoch’s philosophy, especially since Bradley Pearson says, in his preface, that ‘Good art speaks the truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth’23 and since his work is introduced by Loxias saying that ‘What follows is in its essence as well as in its contour a love story.’24 But are things that simple? How are we to trust Bradley? How are we to trust Loxias? We know that the main story here is written by Bradley, a man who actually did get sentenced for life for a murder he claims not to have committed. We also know that basically all persons involved assure us that he is not to be trusted. The only one who claims to believe in him is Loxias, a God(!) and Bradley’s ‘alter ego’ – acting both as Bradley’s fool and judge.25 And what God it is! After having made clear that The Black Prince is Apollo and not Hamlet (‘there was a picture of Apollo on the front! . . . I thought really this is going too far in telling them what to think’26), Murdoch goes on to explain what Apollo (a.k.a. Loxias) is: ‘the god of art, and is also identified by me with black Eros, destructive and violent: Apollo, a murderer, a rapist, as is said in the novel when they’re discussing who Loxias is, who killed a fellow musician in a horrible way, a great power figure, but not necessarily a good figure.’27 Bradley, Murdoch contends 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 66, 340. Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 254f. (Italics added). Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ 11. Loxias, ‘Editor’s Foreword,’ in Murdoch, The Black Prince, 9. Ibid., 10. Chevalier, ‘Closing Debate, Rencontreres avec Iris Murdoch,’ 77. Ibid.

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in the same passage, is ‘full of prejudices and self-deceptions and delusions.’28 Does this not make it abundantly clear that these men are not to be trusted? I don’t think we need Murdoch to tell us this. It is part of real life that words sometimes ring false. Why not here? Can the mere presence of a combination of words – say, ‘Good art speaks the truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth’ – be so overwhelming that we stop thinking about what these particular words mean in this context, uttered by this man, in this way? Is the sound of philosophy enough to make it philosophy? Or, is this difficulty due to the fact that we, as readers, have become accustomed to trusting the narrator of a book? Bradley speaks in the first person, so we take his voice to be the voice of veracity? (And hence he must be Murdoch’s spokesman?) Looking at the first part of Bradley’s book, it is not hard to see that he is inattentive and obsessed with becoming a good writer. He presents specific ideas about literary perfection, and there is a sense in which he tries to live up to them. Bradley does not try to describe himself as inattentive and self-absorbed as he writes his ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’. Rather, he seems to be very keen on making clear that other people around him are superficial and not as profound as he is, and that their relationships are shaky. His derisive remark about Arnold Baffin’s authorship is one of the clearest examples. Arnold is described as lacking all the features that make a great artist, features that Bradley shamelessly ascribes to himself. He goes to great lengths in attempting to convey to us, his readers, that he is a very serious author, driven only by the holy quest for truth. But his attempts at selfdescription are only comical. For example, he claims that ‘The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait’29 and it is hard not to hear the echo of Murdoch’s appropriation of Weil’s ‘attention’ – ‘We should pay attention to such a point that we no longer have a choice’30 – in Bradley’s words here. But the way this line of thinking takes shape in Bradley’s life turns seriousness into comedy as he tries to turn his own failure to write into a sign of his own seriousness. That he has ‘published very little’ links him, he thinks, to what he takes to be ‘saints of art who have simply waited mutely all their lives rather than profane the purity of a single page with anything less than what is perfectly appropriate and beautiful, that is to say, with anything less than what is true.’31 Truth and silence become synonymous. Is it not obvious that seriousness and perfectionism (misunderstood as the attempt to realize a specific ‘something’) are ridiculed here? Bradley’s ability to wait and pay attention is in fact so meagre that it takes less than a page for him to repel his own view. ‘I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already “done” them: not because they were bad, but because the already belonged to the past and I had lost interest.’32

28 29 30 31 32

Ibid. Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ 12. Murdoch, ‘Knowing the Void,’ 159. Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ 12. Ibid., 13.

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Bradley completely lacks the ‘attentive patient delay of judgement . . . which lets the object be’ that Murdoch takes to be the hallmark of great artists.33 His ‘perfectionism’ requires no work, no renegotiation of concepts, no struggle to see, no act of discovery of reality, no realization that ‘something other than one self is real’34 – there’s not much love in him for the world outside. He does not know how to wait. He requires only an idea, a brief glance, and then he has perceived the reality of things. ‘I am a puritan rather than an aesthete’ Bradley claims at the end of his ‘Foreword.’35 This attempt at self-description comes as a response to how he appears in his own tale as he is preparing his Foreword. Looking back at the self-description that ‘The Black Prince’ is, he sees a picture of an aesthetic person, so he feels the need to convince us that this is, as it were, ‘mere appearance.’ Now, it is not clear what, exactly, Bradley puts into the term ‘puritan.’ Is it merely a question of asceticism, moderation, abstention and continence? (Does he not fail on all accounts?) Or does he mean to allude to the demand for self-examination that we can find in puritan theology? Would he want to say that original sin is unevenly distributed between the sexes? He is not a religious man. ‘Conventional religions are dreamy stuff.’36 This much at least is clear: aestheticism and puritanism stand in opposition to each other and he tries to (and claims to) lead a life outside aesthetic categories. He knows he appears to fail on this account, but he maintains that that is mere appearance. One might say that a call for self-examination is voiced when he claims to have no religion ‘except my own task of being.’37 But there’s self-examination and there’s selfexamination. Misinterpreted puritan self-examination can erode into selfishness, and it seems clear to me that his sole aim in life is himself, that he lives only in the present and there’s very little left of the attempt to let art be love. The dominance of his self-obsessive traits comes out abundantly clear in his attitude to his fellow beings, friends, family and others. Just think about how he describes and treats his younger sister, Priscilla. In Bradley’s opinion, she is ‘unskilled,’ without talents and indolent.38 She did not ‘settle down’ like a woman (in Bradley’s view) should, she was not interested enough in books and too interested in fashion and other ‘worldly’ pleasures. ‘What she did become, virtually, and not to put a fine point upon it, was a tart.’39 In time, Priscilla got pregnant, and Roger, who made her pregnant, offered to ‘pay half of the abortion bill’ under the condition that Priscilla’s family paid the other half. Bradley and his father did so. But they were tormented with shame and afraid (of being caught?) – ‘[My father] was a puritan, like myself.’40 After the abortion, and most likely due to some pressure from Bradley’s mother, Roger and Priscilla got married. Now he accuses her of marrying too late, with the wrong man. 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 377. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 215. Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ 19. Ibid. Ibid. Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 68. Ibid., 69 Ibid., 70

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In due course, Priscilla ends up on Bradley’s doorstep, having left Roger. Only reluctantly does he invite her in. But even though he loathes Roger, he now thinks that she was wrong to leave him. ‘You can’t leave Roger. It doesn’t make sense. Of course you are unhappy, all married people are unhappy, but you can’t just launch yourself on the world at fifty whatever you are now –’41 Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. (A, the Esthete)42

Bradley makes clear to her that he will not be of much help. ‘I simply did not love her enough to be of any use for her, and it seemed wiser to make this plain at once.’43 Priscilla responds by taking all her sleeping pills. Ten minutes in Bradley’s care and she has attempted suicide.44 At this moment Francis Marlow (Christian’s brother) shows up, and they start to look for the pill-bottle which contains vital information for her rescue. Now, Arnold, Rachel and Julian show up too and . . . what’s on Bradley’s mind? ‘They were neat and smartly dressed, Julian in a sort of flowered smock looking about twelve.’45 Panic spreads, and they all run around trying to locate the pill-bottle, find the telephone number to a hospital and take care of Priscilla. Bradley runs into the sitting room where he finds Julian: ‘I was surprised to see a girl there. I got an impression of freshly laundered dress, freshly laundered girl, girl on visit.’46 Do we need to interpret this in order to get a picture of a man who is contradicting himself when he describes himself as a puritan and not an aesthete, when he praises himself for knowing how to see the world rightly and knowing what love really is? The point is not that he is an ass (although that may be clear too), but that his selfunderstanding is at odds with how he actually leads his life. Words and world come apart. I have said that it is not hard to see, as we read the first third of the book, that Bradley is self-centred and inattentive. (A prerequisite, of sorts, for the tale of his supposed spiritual pilgrimage – we only climb up from lower places). But we do not see that because Bradley says he is so. Quite to the contrary, why we feel inclined to say that is because we come to see that his fine words and praise of love, art, purity 41 42 43 44

45 46

Ibid., 73. A, in Either/Or, 38. (Italics added). Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 75. It may be worth noting here that the belief that Bradley is to be trusted has dominated not only the philosophical reception of the book, but also the reception at large. For example, in Candia McWilliam’s introduction to the book, we learn that ‘Between Bradley and Christian, Arnold and Rachel and Julian, various forms of what represents itself as love are played out, complicated by the incrudescence of Bradley’s pathetic deserted sister Priscilla . . .’ in The Black Prince, 4. (Emphasis added). Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 76. Ibid., 77.

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and perfection cannot be squared with how he lives. We see that he is self-centred and inattentive, acting-out the inversion of his self-descriptions. In his ‘Foreword’ Bradley himself admits that he appears to be an aestheticist rather than a puritan in his own, ‘autobiographical’ work. He informs us that this kind of contradiction, between word and life, is to be expected. Furthermore, since he is referring to the work as a whole, we should not expect him to be on the mend in the book. There is no progression to be seen in ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’. Before the relationship between Bradley and Julian begins, we learn that Bradley thinks that marriage is hell – a strange and violent world. The way he ‘reasons’ about Priscilla’s marriage also makes it clear that even though it is a private thing (violent in nature and only vaguely related to friendship), one of its major roles is to secure one’s place in the social hierarchy. A girl should marry young with a man who gives her credibility and status and she should not divorce him no matter how horrible the marriage is. Its function is reduced to a private contract. His view of marriage is supposedly further ‘vindicated’ in more than one way in the first part of his ‘book.’ It opens with Francis informing Bradley that his former wife Christian is back in town, so Bradley gets to tell us that he was married but came to his senses and ‘got out of it.’ In his view, there can be no talk of friendship after a marriage has ended.47 Indeed, friendship and marriage are in general, he claims, a mismatch.48 A marriage is, at bottom, a contract between two persons, something private even: ‘A marriage is a very secret place.’49 It continues with the violent scene in which Rachel and Arnold have had a fierce argument and Arnold has hit Rachel rather badly – that is at least how Bradley recounts it. Then there’s Priscilla who has left Roger. In between these marital horror stories, Bradley has proudly declared his view of art in discussions with Arnold as well as with Arnold’s daughter Julian. He has stressed that his own view of art is superior to Arnold’s and that Arnold lacks the right kind of seriousness. Arnold emphasizes the importance of attention to details; Bradley responds that ‘Art is not the reproduction of oddments out of life.’50 Art, Bradley contends, is imagination of a certain kind: one that ‘comes out of endless restraint and silence.’51 (A claim to which Arnold responds: ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art!’52) We learn more about what Bradley thinks of art when Julian asks him to be his teacher. It is impossible to see just how full of pride (and of himself) he becomes when he is assigned that role and when she tells him – remember, we are still only hearing Bradley’s own account of things – that she wants to be a writer like him and not like her dad. Now, Bradley thinks that becoming the right kind of writer is not something that can be taught, so even though he loves the idea, he feels the need to reject the offer in a letter to Julian. Of course, he cannot refrain from teaching her more about ‘art’ in the 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 50. Ibid.

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letter, and, of course, he will later on become her ‘teacher’ nonetheless. In declining to teach Julian because he thinks that ‘such teaching is . . . impossible,’ Bradley explains: ‘[a]rt is concerned not just primarily but absolutely with truth. It is another name for truth. The artist is learning a special language in which to reveal truth.’53 We may ask to what extent the contents of the theories to which Bradley alludes are his own since he claims that ‘For myself, I have no theories.’54 Is he merely attempting to live out certain views (about love and art) which he has come to hold or that he wants to be able to hold? A familiarity with Murdoch’s comments on the nature of art may here lead one to suppose that the theory which he employs, but which is not his, is Murdoch’s. (Look back at my third list, in section 1.1 above, to see just how close to each other Bradley and Murdoch may appear to stand.) But there’s a form of dissonance here too that needs to be taken into account. Murdoch holds art to be concerned with truth, and thinks that art, in some sense, may clear us a path to truth that no other field of inquiry can. But does she also believe that ‘The artist is learning a special language in which to reveal truth’? I think not. That view seems rather to be closer to what Murdoch described as Heidegger’s ‘terrible wish’ than to Murdoch’s own view. For Murdoch, whatever force literature has that may help us see truthfully, it is not that literature is able to express something that is out of reach in ordinary language, but anamnesis – ‘ “memory” of what we did not know we knew.’55 In fact, when Bradley describes what he would have wished to be able to write, we get a picture of precisely the type of philosophical novel that Murdoch loathes. ‘I wanted to produce a sort of statement which might be called my philosophy. But I also wanted to embody this in a story, perhaps in an allegory, something with a form as pliant and as hard as my cast-iron garland of roses. But I could not do it. My people were shadows, my thoughts were epigrams.’56 At this point, after three horrific pictures of the nature of marriage (painted by Bradley, but repudiated in several of the Postscripts) and after getting to know ‘Bradley’s’ view of art, Bradley interrupts the story: Perhaps at this point in my story, my dear friend, I may be allowed to pause and speak to you directly. Of course the whole of what I write here, and perhaps somehow unconsciously my whole œuvre, has been a communication addressed to you. But this direct speaking is a kind of relief, it eases some pressure upon the heart and upon the intelligence. There is an element of confession. It is a relief to be able to stand back, even to admit failure, and to admit it in a context where such an admission has no element of falsity.57

Bradley takes a step back from the text here, reflecting upon how he is speaking to us (in the main flow of the text), and he is allows himself to make it clear that there are failures and flaws to be found there. Unsurprisingly, the form and method he claims to 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 64. Pearson, ‘Bradley Pearson’s Foreword,’ 19. Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy,’ 12. Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 62. Ibid., 79f.

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employ in the main text is ‘indirect communication.’ He describes it as a necessary tool and he also goes into some of the details of that ‘device.’58 Speaking directly, Bradley Pearson is able to inform us that he is not to be trusted. So we need to take his words with a pinch of salt and think carefully about what it might mean to trust him, when to trust him and what it might mean not take him at his word. But we must also recognize that Bradley’s direct communications speak to us in a different register than the main, indirect, text. In his direct communication, he gives us the keys to unlock the work as a whole. (Of course, at a safe remove, in a literary and juridical sense, it is Iris Murdoch who is holding the pen.) These pauses in the text (there are several) serve to make clear how the work as a whole is supposed to function. The indirect method is motivated by Bradley claiming that ‘Art . . . is the telling of truth, and is the only available method for the telling of certain truths.’59 So does his work attempt to communicate something that it cannot communicate directly? Well, we know that it is a book about love (the title says so) and that love is somehow connected thematically with art. But there is, apparently, something about these themes that makes Bradley think that the truth about them must be attained ‘through irony.’60 What is it about love and art that requires irony – a ‘dangerous and necessary tool’61 – to be expressed? And how is the irony to be revealed? Well, our first clue is that we now know that ‘The Black Prince’ is an ironic work, which means, to say the least, that we should be careful about taking Bradley’s indirect communications, his ironic text, as an ‘objective’ report. Thus, we now need to understand just why Bradley’s words ‘ring false.’ Bradley does give expression to ideas about art and love that are not his – and they do resemble Murdoch’s. He also seems to think of these as impossible to teach. They are not impossible to express – Bradley, for instance, expresses them – but there is something about these views that requires something other than learning them by heart. They need to be lived, to become connected intimately with one’s life as a whole, but he does not understand how to do it. He is not unlike, say, a boy who has learnt his catechesis but who does not know how that knowledge is supposed to inform his life. Thus, things do not add up. The undersigned, Johannes Climacus, who has written this book, does not make it out that he is a Christian; for he is, to be sure, completely preoccupied with how difficult it must be to become one . . . (Climacus)62

Bradley becomes more and more inclined to think of the truth about love and art to be ‘beyond’ this world. It is as if he knows all the facts, yet he cannot make it 58 59 60 61 62

Ibid., 80. Ibid. Ibid., 81 Ibid. Climacus, ‘An Understanding with the Reader,’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 617. (Italics added).

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work. Thus, these ‘views’ become mysticism, out of reach for human cognition and ordinary language. Here we can see clearly how a figure like Bradley parts company with Murdoch: where Murdoch strives to take us back to the rough but very real ground, Bradley starts to dream about a new form of ‘beyond.’ Where Murdoch emphasizes detailed descriptions of what our world is like, Bradley wants to invent a new language. The world is again divided in halves, one factual and scientific, and the other one mystical. Bradley has taken himself to a position where he can repeat the ‘dogmas’ of (Murdoch’s) Platonism, but he is clueless when it comes to having anything to say about how these thoughts are to be brought to life. Thus, ‘art becomes not communication but mystification.’63 He remains silent (or, rather, talks a great deal about being silent). One might say, with a pinch of salt of course, that Bradley must know these thoughts well enough to try to enact them, and we should read him as someone who honestly and wholeheartedly tries to lead that kind of life, but fails, admits to the failure and leaves it to his readers to move on from there. So in that sense, it is both crucial: that we see that his life is coming apart, and that he sees that too. Again: indirect communication says nothing other than that which one wants to say. (Recall the silk umbrella.) To make the point, we need to tell it like it is. What he is telling us now is that he knows that his life is coming apart, that something is not right. How can one describe a human being “justly”? How can one describe oneself? With an air of false coy humility, with what an assumed confiding simplicity one sets it about! “I am puritan” and so on. Faugh! How can these statements not be false? Even “I am tall” has a context. How the angels must laugh and sigh. Yet what can one do but try to lodge one’s vision somehow inside this layered stuff of ironic sensibility, which, if I were a fictitious character, would be that much deeper and denser.64

Of course, things are that much deeper and denser. Bradley is a fictional character. We are truly drenched in ‘this layered stuff of ironic sensibility.’ What is to follow may be seen as an intensification of Bradley’s struggles to become what he wants to become. It would be too simple to say that the Platonic ‘philosophy’ that he struggles to bring to life bears no resemblance with Murdoch’s, but confusion will be piled on confusion and we, the readers of the work as a whole, will at some point be forced to renounce Bradley’s teachings completely. Consequently, the book is superfluous. Therefore, let no one bother to appeal to it, because one who appeals to it has eo ipso misunderstood it. (Climacus)65

63 64 65

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 82. Ibid., 81. Climacus, ‘An Understanding with the Reader,’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 618. (Italics added).

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We must follow Bradley through his downfall, and if we are to be inclined to follow him, we must think that the rungs of the ladders he attempts to climb carry his weight. We need to recognize ourselves in this mirror before we can see the value of this image (by renouncing it). The concept of marriage remains central after his first ‘Kierkegaardian’ pause. Rachel attempts to ‘seduce’ Bradley, and Arnold and Christian are revealed to be having an affair. Marriage does not seem to mean much to the married. Bradley actually takes the institution to be impossible and people who claim to have a happy marriage are ‘usually self-deceivers, if not actual liars.’66 The idea of ‘continued proximity’ – ‘until death do us part’ – is against human nature, according to him. ‘Continued proximity’ is a rather peculiar way to describe a marriage, but it brings into view one of the problems that Bradley has with the concept. He thinks that the ideas of an eternal bond and continual intimacy are nonsense. Consider, for example, Bradley’s reaction to Rachel’s proclaimed love for him.67 After it has become evident that Rachel’s husband, Arnold, is having an affair with Bradley’s former wife, Christian, nothing stands in the way of Rachel and Bradley living out their desires. In a letter to Bradley, Rachel writes: ‘Bradley, we must have an alliance which is forever. Nothing else will do, and only you will do. . . . There is a bond between us now which cannot be broken and also a vow of silence.’68 Bradley’s reaction is telling: ‘Why did women have to make things so definitive? Why could she not have let our strange experience drift in a pleasant vagueness?’69 Another striking thing about Bradley’s attitude towards Rachel is that he enters into the ‘relation’ haphazardly, without any form of conviction, yet he does not hesitate to accept all her invitations.70 She practically throws herself at him, and he responds with a ‘how nice’, as if he almost hadn’t noticed. Rachel is never informed about his undecided nature, and it is only we – the readers of his ‘The Black Prince’ – that are allowed to know that he is not serious about it and that he thinks that her talk about an ‘eternal bond’ is against human nature and thus nonsensical. Never become involved in marriage. Married people pledge love for each other throughout eternity. Well, now, that is easy enough but does not mean very much, for if one is finished with time one is probably finished with eternity. If instead of saying “throughout eternity,” the couple would say “until Easter, until next May Day,” then what they would say would make some sense, for then they would be saying something they perhaps could carry out. (A, the Esthete)71 66 67 68 69 70

71

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 91. Rachel’s rendition of their relationship in her Postscript is strikingly different from Bradley’s. Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 128. Ibid., 129. Murdoch’s continual return to the concept of marriage in her novels is well known, but it may be worth noticing that she often portrays it as something that we indulge in without much reflection. Think for example of the opening of An Accidental Man: ‘Gracie darling, will you marry me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What?’ Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man (London: Vintage, Random House, 2003 [1973]), 1. A, in Either/Or, Part I, 296. (Italics added).

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One might say that Bradley understands the institution of marriage objectively, to speak with Kierkegaard. This comes out quite clearly when he says that ‘the unit of two can scarcely communicate with others, and is fortunate, as the years go by, if it can communicate within itself.’72 Here, again, the effect is comical. Bradley understands marriage as if two individuals were quite literally to become one. This is what makes communication impossible. They do say that marriage partners become one, but this is very obscure and mysterious talk. If an individual is many, he has lost his freedom and cannot order his riding boots when he wishes, cannot knock about according to whim. (A, the Esthete)73

There is, however, a point at which Bradley seems to have changed his view on these matters completely. This coincides, unsurprisingly, with Bradley becoming convinced that he is in love with Julian. But just before his description of his ‘falling in love,’ he makes yet another Kierkegaardian pause, moves out of the indirect communication and ‘refreshes’ himself with ‘some direct converse.’ Again, Bradley presents his ‘views’ about art, love and marriage. His self-critical examination is here turned slightly differently though. Previously, he admitted failure in not being true to his words. Now, he reflects on why he fails. Three forms of closely related failures should be noticed. First, Bradley claims that his own magnanimity concerning his work as an artist, as well as Arnold’s humility regarding his, are feigned yet ‘genuinely felt.’74 In other words, both of them feel pulled towards, and try to perfect, different pictures of what an artist should ideally be. They do not live up to these images and they know (at heart) that they don’t, thus the ‘feigning.’ But this kind of feigning is not to be understood as mere lying. They are trying to perfect these images. Second, Bradley makes clear that his striving to remain neutral to the world and tell it like it really is, has turned out to be really hard. ‘How hard it is for the best of us to be genuinely indifferent to the world!’75 Thus, his divided world – where emotions, value and art are disjointed from the world of facts to which we are supposed to be able to relate to and lean on without emotional, or metaphorical, involvement – dissolves on him. He begins to see that he is not what he wants to be and that what he sees is formed by his wishes. Thus, thirdly, a very Kierkegaardian thought dawns on him: ‘There is thus an eternal discrepancy between the self-knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the self-awareness which we have of ourselves subjectively: a discrepancy which probably makes it impossible for us ever to arrive at the truth.’76 In other words, he is starting to see that knowing and existing in the knowledge are different things. Bradley now ‘knows’ not only the thoughts or views

72 73 74 75 76

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 91. A, in Either/Or, Part I, 297. (Italics added). Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 186. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 189. (Italics added).

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that he tries to enact, he is also starting to see that without enacting them, without living ‘in’ them authentically, the ‘thoughts’ have not been properly understood. So he knows the difficulties he is facing and it is important for us to see that he does – why else would we keep following this fool? But it should also be noted that he never finds a way to solve this ‘discrepancy.’ After these warnings and clues as to how to proceed as a reader of the work, Bradley recounts his falling in love with Julian. As is often noticed, Bradley’s love for her is sparked when they read Hamlet together and when Julian tells Bradley that she has played the role of Hamlet in ‘black tights and black velvet shoes with silvery buckles and a sort of black slinky jerkin with a low opening and a white silk shirt underneath that and a big gold chain round my neck and – What’s the matter Bradley?’77 He has lost it. Here begins Part Two of ‘The Black Prince’ in which Bradley presents himself as completely transformed by love. Suddenly, he appears to think of love as existing outside time. My love for Julian must have been figured before the world began. Surely it was lovers who discovered astrology. Nothing less than the greater chamber of stars could be large and steady enough to be the context, origin, and guarantee of something so eternal. . . . When God said “Let there be light” this love was made. It had no history. . . . There was no hurry. Time had already become eternity.78

Bradley is now starting to contradict almost every view he has earlier proclaimed to hold. ‘The foreverness of real love is one of the reasons why even unrequited love is a source of joy. The human soul craves the eternal of which, apart from certain rare mysteries of religion, only love and art can glimpse.’79 He not only changes his thinking about love in non-temporal ways, he is also links it to art. It is also now, when he is truly smitten, that he may be said to sound most like Murdoch: ‘Love brings with it also a vision of selflessness. . . . Ah, even once, to will another than oneself! . . . Why cannot this release from self provide a foothold in a new place which we can then colonize and enlarge until at last we will all that is not ourselves? That was Plato’s dream. It is not impossible.’80 We overcome duality by sex and love changes our vision.81 Bradley also manages to describe love as ‘a life-occupation’ that resembles ‘doing everything for God.’82 Does this not sound a great deal like Murdoch? Indeed, is it not now warranted to say that ‘The Black Prince’ really is an expression of Murdoch’s philosophy? If this is not a ‘Neoplatonic manifesto,’ then what is?

77 78 79 80 81 82

Ibid., 201. Ibid., 206f. Ibid., 210. Ibid. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 212.

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What is clear is that we have a picture of a man who is struggling to bring to life a confused version of a philosophy that resembles Murdoch’s on some points (and differs from it on others). I think we simply will go wrong if we think that we will settle anything by means of determining how many ‘strings of words’ resemble Murdoch’s philosophical sentences (and how many seem to say something else). Instead, I take the more interesting question to be: Can we honestly say that Bradley understands what he says here, or is he still merely ‘quoting something’? If we are to start thinking about whether he can stand by his words or not, one might first begin by noticing just how radically Bradley seems to have changed. Previously, Bradley loathed Roger (Priscilla’s former husband) and his new girlfriend, Marigold (whom he considered to be way too young for Roger), to such an extent that when he left their house he ‘wanted to spit upon their doorstep.’83 Now, transformed by love, Bradley greets them warmly and complements them for looking so happy. Their response: ‘I suppose this is some sort of sick joke?’ and ‘He must be drunk.’84 Previously, Bradley thought that Arnold was a sham writer and a sell-out. Now, transformed by love, Bradley realizes that he has been unfair in his reading of his work and so orders all his books, and tells this to Arnold. Arnold’s response: ‘Are you feeling alright, Bradley?’85 and ‘Have you got softening of the brain?’86 This newly attained sense of love and the eternal also changes Bradley’s view of art. Previously, Arnold attempted to deride Bradley by saying, ‘Finish nothing, publish nothing, nourish a continual grudge against the world, and live with an unrealized idea of perfection which makes you feel superior to those who try and fail.’87 ‘How clearly you put it,’ Bradley replied.88 Now, transformed by love, Bradley suddenly thinks that one not only can, but should, write ‘not to compete but to complete.’89 Finishing something that is not perfected may be possible! Perfectionism is now linked to a struggle to become better – not to present only that which is already perfect. Bradley’s newly found warmth and care are clearly out of character and his loving perception was just a momentary lapse of reason: ‘The next morning, of course, I awoke in torment.’90 His anguish is caused by him ‘realizing’ that he had become insane. Love spurs, first and foremost, madness. It may look like love changes everything, but everything actually stays the same. ‘Is it not insane to concentrate one’s attention exclusively to one person, to drain the rest of the world of meaning, to have no thoughts, no feelings, no being except in relation to the beloved? What the beloved “is like” or “is really like” matters not a fig.’91 Bradley had not seen Julian or his friends

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., 107. Ibid., 220–1. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 172. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 243. Ibid.

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in a new light. Nothing in the state of the world had actually changed. His concepts have not been challenged. The human being is not crafted to love. Only God has (or would have if He existed) characteristics at least not totally inimical to the continuance of the pleasures of adoration. As the so-called “ground of being” He may be considered to have come a good deal farther than half-way. Also He is changeless. To remain thus poised in the worship of a human being is, from both sides of the relationship, a much more precarious matter, even when the beloved is not nearly forty years younger and, to say the least of it, detached.92

The eternal perspective on love is once again incomprehensible and, hence, so is marriage. God, if He existed, is almost so constituted that he could embrace it . . . One may wonder why the concept of marriage is under investigation in this book (as it is in many other of Murdoch’s novels). Obviously, it is ‘tied’ to the concept of love and for that reason alone it should be of interest to Murdoch. But that does not exhaust its importance. Marriage is, or at least was, a religious institution, and if we are now living outside religion, there is a question to explore about what those concepts now mean. That ‘a marriage is forever’ may mean, and probably does mean, something very different to a God-fearing couple of, say, the mid-eighteenth century who made their vows to Him, than it does to, say, a drunken couple in an neon-lit Elvis-style church in Las Vegas, may be too obvious to argue. But saying this does little more than scratch the surface of the problem. I take it that one central question is to whom we make our vows (now that God is dead) and why. Someone, or something, whether it is God or not, has to certify a couple’s sworn coexistence. Religious or secular – a married couple stands as a ‘we’ in relation to something else, so there is a subject-object relation here that can be understood subjectively or objectively. That remark displays a shared root for the secular and the religious couple: they are both married in an objective sense, but it is not hard to imagine one part of either of these couples claiming, quite adequately, that ‘this is not a marriage.’ It makes sense to think of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors’ reflections on these problems as a way to gain one’s subjective understanding of the concept of marriage in relation to God, and it makes sense to think of Cavell’s couples in the genre of remarriage comedies to be investigating the same question without a relation to God. But the Cavellian remarriage comedy and Kierkegaardian irony give strikingly similar responses: the question of marriage depends on a continual, perpetual will to seek each other out. It is a question of repetition; of getting married again; of getting married every day. From this perspective, it may well turn out that we find ourselves prone to say that our drunken Las Vegas lovers actually turn out to engage in holy matrimony, whereas our God-fearing couple does not. Thus, that we are ‘secularized’ is not the only relevant fact here.

92

Ibid., 244.

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As I have argued, Murdoch’s view of our contemporary culture – the world that she struggled to represent in her novels – may be characterized as a divided world. There’s the ‘rational’ world of facts, and there’s the ‘mystical’ world of value, emotions and religion. Philosophy being, or striving to become, one of the sciences, is thus considered to be firmly located in the former ‘realm.’ Consequently, the human being has become torn too. She reasons and she feels. She dwells upon facts and evaluates them. The world consists of two fields, or ‘planes,’ at best vaguely related. It makes sense to say that the birth of modern (mainly ‘analytic’) moral philosophy is a product of the picture of the doubled world and the divided human being that frames our worldview. Either philosophy has struggled to move everything from the ‘mystical’ side to the rational, or it has more resolutely proclaimed the non-existence of everything that is not ‘real.’ Hardcore positivism is the most obvious example, ‘emotivism’ as the claim that morality is nothing but emotional outbursts or preferences is nearly as radical; but many (but obviously not all) strands of utilitarian, deontological and virtue oriented theories can be seen as attempts to let morality boil down to reasonable and calculable principles too – one side is reduced to the other, or it is cut off. One may say that philosophy has focused on actions and judgements in order to make morality manageable. But that, true as it may be, obscures the fact that the pictures of the world and the human being that guide us, and so contemporary philosophy, make the importance of a philosophical investigation of the importance of vision, or of world view, redundant. We think we are instances, not wholes. So we look at instances, not wholes. If morality can be understood without considering the full human being (as it was/is believed that it must), then ideas of vision and of world views naturally fall out of the picture. Pictures are powerful things. Murdoch’s philosophical labour has been to show that these separations are not real but lines drawn in the sand. For her, the problem of coming to be a ‘full Mensch’ is in a sense illusory: actually our self-understanding is guided by a faulty picture, but the real human being has never been divided in that way. That we picture the world as divided into separate spheres or planes does not mean that it is cut up in that way – it does not even mean that we live in accordance with the picture we ourselves create. This conflict between the real and the picture is one of the main sources of the ‘loss of concepts’ that Murdoch struggled to sort out philosophically. We may say that a loss of concepts is, at bottom, due to a lack, or a distorted form, of self-understanding. This lack or these distortions are in turn related, but not reducible, to misunderstandings of our language. We do not allow ourselves to see just how differently the same word may be used depending upon who we are, what we see and where we picture ourselves as going, and so we fail to see that the same word may ‘relate to’ different concepts. Concepts change with life, and since we are in the midst of it, and so them, it is not hard to see that it is hard to see how words and concepts turn and change as we change and as they change us in turn. That we tend to think that concepts are locked is just as big a ‘problem’ as is secularization. (Hark back to Nietzsche: ‘I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.’93) 93

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols,’ in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and transl. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 483.

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Bradley, as a result of Murdoch’s realistic imagination, is a product of and a part of the very world and worldview that Murdoch claims to be guided by faulty pictures. What is striking about his reflections is that his concepts are locked. Infatuated (if that is what we are going to call it), he recognizes that words may be turned differently, and one can see how he, at one level, rejoices in a newly discovered sense. But he is not really open to conceptual change and so he wakes up in a conceptual hangover. He does not succeed in the task of renegotiating his concepts, and hence he is riddled with confusion. We, as readers are invited, nearly forced, to think through how the same words are ‘turned’ differently and thus ‘linked’ to different concepts. In that way, The Black Prince, as a whole, is a conceptual investigation. It philosophizes. (But it does not philosophize by means of presenting or illustrating philosophical theses.) It should also be noted that the only way that we may come to see this work of art as being a conceptual investigation in its own right is by leaving Murdoch out of it, and think about the way concepts alter, and of how and why alterations of concepts are obscured from Bradley Pearson’s view. Murdoch’s convictions comes in here, only in the sense that she thought that the (lost) philosophical concepts that she tried to evoke are impossible today – and yes, they are (almost) impossible for Bradley to live by too. That Bradley is a likely (though not especially likable) character is of some importance, since Murdoch does not want to let go of the idea of art as mirroring our world. I do take him to be likely in these respects at least: he reasons more or less solely by means of what Kierkegaard called ‘aesthetic reflection,’ he trusts ‘grammar’ (in a dull lexical sense) to carry the burden of meaning, and he has a hard time thinking about the institution of marriage outside religion. Concepts are for him locked. Words in use may fluctuate, but it is possible to rise above such fluctuation and return to ‘objective’ stability in sense. This is the source of Bradley’s conceptual hangover, and he takes it as a blessing that he is able to rely on ‘locked’ concepts. OK, he was temporarily insane, maddened by ‘love’, but he got out of it soon enough. We should also note that the mere sense of ‘getting out of it’ makes it possible for him to continue to dream about another realm – a sublime and pure ‘Platonism’. If he would really have changed and become a full human being, not torn by the picture of the human as divided, he could not have retained his dream: a ‘long-awaited “breakthrough,” my passage into another world, into the presence of the god.’94 It is of course humour, irony, but Bradley can only retain this romantic dream of his to which love is supposed to bring him, by means of a secular sort of grace, a ‘passage to another world,’ by means of not loving the one and the same woman . . . In Bradley’s illusion, becoming a seducer is the only passage to the Gods. When two people fall in love with each other and sense that they are destined for each other, it is a question of having the courage to break it off, for by continuing there is only everything to lose, nothing to gain. It seems to be a paradox, and indeed it is, for the feelings, not for the understanding. (A, the Esthete)95 94 95

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 142. A, in Either/Or, part I, 298. (Italics added).

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It is also as a rather typical seducer that Bradley starts off his relationship with Julian. He lets her know, almost by accident, that he has feelings for her, and then he immediately declares the impossibility of this love and makes clear that he ought to have kept it a secret. Knowledge and feelings contradict each other, and there’s no genuine place for the idea that feelings can be (a form of) understanding in Bradley’s system of thought. “It’s all spoilt. . . . I can’t talk love to you in the real world. The real world rejects it. It’s not that it would be a crime so much as – absurd. I feel quite cold and – dry. What do you want? To hear me praise your eyes?” “Has telling your love – made your love – end?” “No. But it’s – it’s not – it has no speech anymore – it’s just something I’ve got to carry and live with. When I hadn’t told you I could endlessly imagine myself telling you. Now – the tongue has been cut out.”96

Julian, young at heart, is delighted to be loved (even though she clearly feels that she hasn’t been seen – yet). So Bradley leads her on, but lets her come across as the one taking the initiative – the Seducer’s move par excellence. He makes clear that it is uncertain if they can meet again the next day and leaves Julian bewildered. Bradley has succeeded: ‘I walked along blindly, grimacing with joy.’97 He also thinks he has ‘behaved with dignity.’98 The next morning, Julian comes to Bradley’s house to confirm the truth of their love, as it were. Bradley begins by declaring that their love is real, but it doesn’t take long before he claims that he is ‘unworthy of this love that you are offering me’ – Julian is offering her love to Bradley! – and that they should go slow, shouldn’t be ‘in any way bound or tied’ and that they should refrain from using ‘certain words’ – ‘love’ in particular.99 Julian responds by saying that she wants to marry him. ‘Impossible,’ Bradley replies. He also makes clear that even though it doesn’t matter to him, ‘society’ will have a problem with their age-difference. That boundless thing which shouldn’t be called ‘love’ must remain a secret.100 This is perfectly consistent with Bradley’s aestheticism. Marriage is an impossible institution at heart and its function now is only external (not internal): to order pairs in society. Bradley’s perfectionism remains locked to the idea of the realization of one perfect ideal: pure form. As soon as life intervenes, ideals are crushed to pieces. Julian, as an ideal, is demolished at the very same moment that she may become a reality. The only way for a ‘Platonist’ of Bradley’s kind to be true to his ‘philosophy’ is either to do nothing or to do everything. In his world, each fulfilled thought is inadequate and, as such, a step backwards deeper into the mud. His world rests entirely on the failure to see that perfectionism, rightly construed, requires a perpetual struggle to see and

96

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 264. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 273. 99 Ibid., 276f. 100 Ibid., 278. 97 98

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openness to conceptual change. It may seem odd, but it is precisely Bradley’s conviction that he already has arrived at true knowledge (which just so happens to be impossible to articulate) that obscures his view. When Julian informs her parents, Rachel and Arnold, of their ‘affair’, they are, of course, furious. Rachel approaches Bradley: ‘[G]iven that you feel randy about my daughter, why the hell didn’t you keep quiet about it instead of annoying and upsetting her and confusing her –’101 Arnold goes even further, describing Bradley as ‘some filthy lustful old man,’ and he makes clear that Bradley will not see Julian again – ‘I’ll be ruthless about this.’102 Emotions seem to settle the next day when Rachel and Arnold realize just how short the ‘relationship’ between Bradley and Julian had been – it simply does not seem to be ‘serious’ to them. Bradley wonders if he has used the right tactic. ‘I could have broken it to her slowly, moved in on her gradually, wooed her quietly, hinted, insinuated, whispered.’103 Julian, however, actually seems to take it quite seriously and breaks her ‘curfew’. This is when they run off to Patara. Their time in Patara can be described as riddled with conflict – not only between them, but also within Bradley. It is Bradley’s internal conflicts that seem to spur their disagreements. On their way to Patara, Bradley is tormented by two troubles: ‘one vast and cosmic, the other one horribly precise.’104 The ‘cosmic’ problem is that Bradley (intellectually) has come to the conclusion that their relationship is impossible, and that its ending coincided with its beginning. ‘I did not doubt now that she loved me. But I felt a kind of absolute despair, as if we had loved already for a thousand years and were condemned to be weary of something so perfect. . . . There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented present.’105 Their ‘love’ was too ideal to be real. He got exactly what he wanted, hence it must die. The horribly precise problem concerns whether he would be able to get an erection. ‘So’ – so! So what? Consequently? Hence? – ‘we started arguing.’106 Bradley starts going about them having but the illusion of a future, that a shared home is impossible, that they ‘have no language in which to tell the truth about ourselves,’ that their ‘love is in the nature of a closed system. It is complete within itself.’107 Even though they found each other ‘millions of years ago’, Julian has, ‘Sub specie aeternitatis,’ already left him. ‘We are for breaking, our smash is what it’s for.’108 Julian, quite expectedly and naturally, thinks that this abstract rambling is ‘wicked talk and a betrayal of love.’109 But Bradley is too obsessed with the co(s)mic problem of having (what appears to be) realized perfection at his disposal to listen. So he goes on, maddening Julian to the extent that the only way out that she can see is to throw

101

Ibid., 281. Ibid., 283. 103 Ibid., 290. 104 Ibid., 306. 105 Ibid., 306f. 106 Ibid., 307. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 308. 109 Ibid., 307. 102

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herself out of the moving car. Which she does; which brings Bradley back to reality (momentarily). Julian is hurt, but not badly. Bradley starts to reflect: ‘I had had many terrible moments in my life. Many of them came to me after this one. But this was, seen in retrospect, the most beautiful, the purest and the most absolutely punishing.’110 Bradley’s two quandaries – the cosmic and the concrete – set the tone for their stay in Patara. The first (and second) time they attempt to have sex, impotence leads to yet another portion of Bradley’s transcendent vertigo. Julian talks about marriage. Bradley says marriage is impossible and describes himself as her slave. This ‘battle’ continues until Francis manages to figure out where Bradley and Julian are hiding. He has good reasons for attempting to find them – Priscilla has committed suicide. Bradley has continuously let his sister down and as he flees to Patara with Julian, he once again leaves her behind in the hands of strangers. ‘ “Oh don’t go away and leave me, please, please, please –” I was at the door. She stared up at me now with huge slow tears coming out of her eyes, her gaping mouth all red and wet. I turned from her.’111 It is no surprise that Bradley feels guilt as this news reaches him. Just for a second, he manages to see how he looks, what he has become: he has driven into town, called Francis from a phone-booth, and Francis delivers the news. ‘I became suddenly and strangely conscious of the telephone box, the sunshine, somebody waiting outside, my own staring-eyed face in the mirror.’112 The mirror shows him what he has become and in the light of that image he speaks from his heart: ‘ “It’s my fault.” . . . I wanted to take Priscilla in my arms again and make her live again. I wanted desperately to console her and make her happy. It would have been so easy.’113 A second later, Bradley starts ‘reasoning’ again. He makes sure that Francis has not revealed his whereabouts to Julian’s parents, demands that Francis take care of the funeral arrangements (with the comment ‘I hired you to take care of her’114) and argues that there’s nothing he can do for her any more since she’s dead. This ‘argument’ is one that he will rehearse several times. The line of reasoning he employs – combined perhaps with a longing for love (and lovemaking), a longing for authentic longing one might say – is an act of abundant avoidance legitimizing his decision not to go back to care for his dead sister and instead pursue his attempt to consummate his seduction. ‘Of course I was stricken with guilt and horror at my unforgivable failure to keep my dear sister alive. But as I drove along [he’s heading back to Patara and Julian] I was also employed in minute calculations about the immediate future.’115 Since she’s dead, there’s nothing he can do. So why not concentrate on how to find a way to ‘keep Julian forever’ and to ponder ‘the necessity of making love properly to Julian . . .’116 110

Ibid., 309. Ibid., 302. 112 Ibid., 323. 113 Ibid., 324. 114 Ibid., 325. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 326. 111

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As Bradley returns to Patara, he finds her in a Hamlet outfit. At last, his body responds and his seduction can be consummated. Violently. ‘What made you like that Bradley?’ Julian asks. Bradley’s first thought is ‘the Prince of Denmark.’ Then he reflects: ‘this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. “It was love,” I said to her.’117 What surprises Bradley now is that the result of this ‘consummation’ is not what he expected. ‘I had prefigured the proximity of some simplifying intellectual certainty. What there was now was my relationship to Julian, stretching away still into the obscurity of the future, urgent and puzzling and historically dynamic changing, it seemed, even from second to second.’118 Not surprisingly, Francis reveals their hiding place to Arnold and Rachel. Not surprisingly, Arnold rushes to retrieve his daughter. Not surprisingly, Julian is devastated to find out that Bradley’s sister has committed suicide and that Bradley knows this and that Bradley does nothing about it and that Bradley has said nothing to her and that he drove straight back to her to have sex. Violently. Arnold also lets Julian know that Bradley is fifty-eight and not forty-six as he has led her to believe. Very surprisingly, Bradley manages to convince Julian and Arnold that Julian should not go with her father, but stay the night and go back to London with him the next morning. They sleep in different rooms. During the night Julian hitchhikes back to London without telling Bradley. The funeral follows. Julian is out of Bradley’s sight and reach. Bradley starts to doubt that moral refinement is possible. The world according to Bradley is now a world of suffering. Pure love is suffering. Moral refinement is replaced by a quasi-stoic idea of strength as acceptance: ‘Banish remorse, banish resentment and the screaming contortions of degrading jealousy. Give yourself over to immaculate pain. So, at best you will rejoin your joy with a purer love. And at worst – you will know the secrets of the god. At best, you will be privileged to forget. At worst, you will be privileged to know.’119 Morals for morals. Excuse for excuse. Rubbish, of course. Back in London, Rachel tries to knock Bradley out of his delusions, arguing that ‘[o]nly the insane think that there are planes which are quite separate from other planes’120 and that ‘[y]ou can’t make yourself into a new person overnight however much in love you feel you are. That sort of love is an illusion, all the “certainty” you were talking about is an illusion. . . . Look at yourself in a mirror. Come back to earth.’121 If Bradley could only see himself in a mirror, he would come to see that he is living an illusion. But Bradley won’t listen. He now claims to speak another language, so Rachel’s words are mere nonsense to him.122 Bradley shows Rachel, by accident he claims, a letter from Arnold in which Arnold declares his love for Christian. Rachel claims that she will never forgive Bradley 117

Ibid., 329. Ibid., 329f. Ibid., 351. 120 Ibid., 356. 121 Ibid., 359. 122 Ibid., 357. 118 119

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for showing her this. ‘You do not know what you have done.’123 This rupture is not insignificant for it supplies us readers with a motive for Rachel to kill Arnold; and Arnold is just about to get killed. Next, Bradley receives a letter from Julian saying that she is with her father in Venice, and Bradley interprets this as her invitation to come and rescue her from her father. Francis volunteers as his ‘Sancho Panza’ in this rescue operation, and is assigned to buy the plane tickets etc. At the same time, Rachel calls Bradley and asks him to come over. Which he does. As Bradley recounts this event, Rachel and Arnold have had a fight over the abovementioned letter, and Rachel has given Arnold a deadly blow to the head with a poker. Bradley burns the letter and cleans the poker, thus leaving his finger prints on the murder weapon and footprints in Arnold’s blood. Bradley calls for an ambulance and reports an accident. ‘A man has hurt his head. His skull cracked, I think. Yes.’124 A few minutes later he calls the police and tells them the same story. This is how Bradley’s dark celebration, ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’, ends: At the police station I told them all over again who I was. I sat with several men in a small room. “Why did you do it?” “Do what?” “Why did you kill Arnold Baffin.” “What did you hit him with?” “I didn’t hit him.” “Why did you do it? Why did you do it? Why did you kill him?” “I didn’t kill him.” “Why did you do it?”125

4.3 Passing verdict: Who did it? After Bradley has ended his story in this way, Postscripts – by, in turn, Bradley, Christian, Francis, Rachel, Julian and Loxias – follow. Bradley, now speaking outside his indirect text again, proclaims his innocence, but he also notes that the whole thing has a ‘sort of perfection about it.’126 And even though he did not plead guilty, he nevertheless ‘rolled in my guilt, in the very filth of it. Some newspapers said I seemed to enjoy my trial. I did not enjoy it, but I experienced it very intently and fully.’127 Our aesthete has finally achieved some kind of authenticity. 123

Ibid., 363. Ibid., 378. Ibid., 379. 126 Pearson, ‘Postscript by Bradley Pearson,’ in The Black Prince, 382. 127 Ibid., 383. 124 125

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Bradley did protest his innocence, but only half-heartedly. ‘The notion of actually assuming Arnold’s death (and “confessing”) did occur to me an aesthetic possibility. If I had killed him there would have been a certain beauty in it. And to an ironical man what would be prettier than to have the aesthetic satisfaction of having “committed” murder without actually having had to commit it?’128 The writing of ‘The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love’ came about in prison but now he sees it, not as a story about him, but as ‘my gift to [Julian] and my final possession of her.’129 Thus, even though Bradley has now stepped out of his indirect mode of presentation and aims to speak to us directly, he is still a seducer at heart. His new ‘situation’ has only served, he claims, to move him from knowing the truth in a dark and unclear way to a vivid sense of it. The truth he now claims to have is a clear view of still the aesthetic view he has held throughout the book in its entirety. Again he refers to Plato and the thought that ‘love is the gateway to all knowledge’ and ‘[a]ll truths are mysteries, all morality is ultimately mysticism, all religions are mystery religions, all great gods have many names.’130 He has, finally, attained his long-sought ‘ineffable understanding.’131 Art, he now seems to suggest, is simply ‘a vain and hollow show’ if it does not point towards a beyond. Alas, nothing has changed. All that has happened – his imprisonment for a murder he claims not to have committed included – is that he finally has found a way to his purely aesthetic vision. Now it is up for us to relate to that. In the four postscripts by the ‘dramatis personae’ that follow, both Bradley’s innocence and the truth of the contents of Bradley’s story are challenged – ‘the whole book seems to me to be sort of off key,’ says Christian.132 She is certain that Bradley killed Arnold and she claims that Bradley’s story about their marriage as well as her second marriage is completely false. Bradley is, in her view, quite mad. Francis, who, according to Bradley, believed in Bradley’s innocence, psychologizes Bradley’s story and sees it as a clear case of ‘Oedipus complex.’133 Moreover, Bradley is a narcissist, a masochist and, most importantly if we are to believe Francis, a homosexual. Arnold was Bradley’s father figure and he both loved and hated him. He does not take an explicit stance on the issue of Bradley’s innocence. Furthermore, he finds it necessary to stress that ‘Loxias’ does not exist, but is Bradley’s own invention.134 Rachel also pictures Bradley as rather mad – as someone who has ‘come to believe or half-believe both in his “salvation” and his story.’135 In her view, Bradley loved her and not Julian. So the deed was that of a jealous man. She also thinks that all Bradley’s self-descriptions are comically poor. The man she knew was not a puritan but ‘a person quite without dignity.’136 He was no perfectionist but would have ‘published anything’

128

Ibid., 388f. Ibid., 389. 130 Ibid., 390. 131 Ibid. 132 ‘Postscript by Christian,’ in The Black Prince, 393. 133 ‘Postscript by Francis,’ in The Black Prince, 397. 134 Ibid., 401. 135 ‘Postscript by Rachel,’ in The Black Prince, 403. 136 Ibid., 404. 129

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if possible and he was ashamed of his ‘social origin and his illiteracy.’137 Furthermore, she claims that the opening episode where Arnold supposedly has hit her quite badly was Bradley’s invention. Interestingly, she does not find it necessary to claim her own innocence even though she has been accused of murder by means of the publication of ‘The Black Prince’. Julian denies having written the letter that Bradley recounts, and claims that the things that she supposedly has said are ‘the inventions of another mind.’138 Julian, interestingly, says that Bradley’s book is full of both ‘theory’ and ‘unstudied personal emotions’ and suggests that if we are to understand the book, ‘it needs, like a poem, to be again and again reflected.’139 She also claims that Bradley does not really have any views of his own. He is merely parroting, for example, when he states that music is the highest art.140 In other words, when language leaves off, music begins . . . . Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate. (A, the Esthete141)

On the question of Bradley’s guilt she stands by her mother’s words (roughly).142 While she claims to have ‘loved the man Pearson was,’ she also claims that Bradley’s words do not do justice to that kind of love and that this is, at bottom, a literary failure.143 So we have four comments on Bradley’s account of things. They all give different stories, but no one supports Bradley’s own story. Rather, the comments on the text that we get make clear that he is not to be trusted, he is wrong about himself, he is mistaken about who he loved (if there’s a common thread here it is that he loved himself the most), and that his piece of literature is not to be seen as a report. That is, we need to think it through again! The book closes with Loxias’ Postscript. Loxias initially wanted to write an essay ‘criticizing and drawing morals.’144 That is not necessary now. ‘The reader will recognize the truth when he hears it. If he does not, so much worse for him.’145 Thus, the truth of the work depends on the reader. We, as readers, must work our way through this work, surmount it. I take this to be the final and most important clue about how the book as whole is supposed to work.

137

Ibid. ‘Postscript by Julian,’ in The Black Prince, 408. 139 Ibid., 409. 140 Ibid., 410. 141 A, in Either/Or, 69f. (Italics added). 142 ‘Postscript by Julian,’ in The Black Prince, 411. 143 Ibid. 144 ‘Editor’s Postscript,’ in The Black Prince, 412. 145 Ibid. 138

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Where does that leave us with the question: Who did it? Bradley has a motive, since he has always envied Arnold’s success – undeserved success, in his view – and since Arnold terminated his relationship with Julian. Rachel . . . well, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned . . .’146 On the one hand, the evidence against Bradley is overwhelming, and he is immediately convicted. We also know that Bradley is not a man to be trusted and it is only he and his ‘con-mate,’ Loxias, who insist on his innocence. All other Postscripts express doubt, to say the least, concerning Bradley’s self-proclaimed innocence. On the other hand, it is not as if Rachel is without a motive. That she does not protest when Bradley is convicted can hardly come as a surprise either. She had a motive to kill Arnold, for example, because of the letter Bradley had shown her, and if Bradley’s description of their marriage is true, it was rather violent. One may also note that she had good reason to be glad to be rid of Bradley whom she accuses of having destroyed her marriage and almost managed to steal her daughter from her. So who did it? The general consensus among Murdoch’s interpreters who want to insist that Bradley is Murdoch’s spokesman is that Rachel did commit the murder exactly as Bradley describes it. Bradley was innocent and took the blame as an expression of a Murdochian form of (Simone Weil’s) ‘unselfing.’ Love (what love? for Rachel? for Julian?) is selflessness, and so he ‘performs’ the most extreme version of Murdoch’s highest philosophical virtue: the true literal loss of self. Now, this line of reasoning has actually surprisingly little support if we look at the book as a whole. According to the reading presented here, our ‘seducer’ (Bradley) is a very poor spokesman for her philosophy. It is not merely so because he misunderstands her philosophy fundamentally on several focal points and holds contradictory beliefs, but he is completely unable to move from parroting to what I in section 2.5 dubbed ‘subjective use.’ This is clear since we can see that Bradley often becomes comical as soon as he becomes philosophical, that he turns to philosophy in order to escape reality, that he himself notices that he has become a complete aesthete, that he himself acknowledges his failures, that he himself presents ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ as the ideal literary form for his self-presentation and describes his own work as an indirect communication, ironical through and through. But what if we flip the coin and claim that he did commit the murder? This line of thought has recently been explored by David Robjant.147 Robjant, like me, wants to take Murdoch quite seriously when she stresses that her philosophy does not come into her works of literature. Taking that thought at face value immediately releases some interpretative pressure to save Bradley’s honour. Robjant is exactly right to bring Bradley’s unreliability into view and to emphasize just how seriously he is questioned in the postscripts. But are we entitled to conclude that Bradley actually did commit the murder? And supposing that we did, what would follow from that? It would, to 146

These famous words from William Congreve’s play The Morning Bride (1697) are rehearsed in ‘Bradley Pearson’s Postscript,’ 382. 147 David Robjant, ‘Who Killed Arnold Baffin? Iris Murdoch and Philosophy by Literature,’ forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature.

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be sure, support the contention (which I share with Robjant) that Bradley is not to be trusted and that he is not Murdoch’s spokesman. Robjant argues with precision that there are many passages where Bradley contradicts Murdoch (the philosopher) and he can thus show how many readings of the novels are dead wrong. The problem with Robjant’s reading is that it is easy enough to show where Bradley says things that do not sit well with Murdoch’s philosophy – but can we really reduce his ‘close-toMurdoch-quotes’ to Murdoch having fun, playing, entertaining? And what about the many layers of pseudonymity? What about the multiple voices and the fact that the text is layered and ironic? What difference does it make for Robjant that Bradley at times speaks to us directly and at other times indirectly? (Even Bradley communicates on many different ‘levels’ here.) What about the work’s Kierkegaardian architecture? It may be that it is a ‘relevant fact’ that ‘Bradley killed Arnold.’148 But if we really are to be ‘loyal to the facts,’149 we need to be able to take into account all things (layers, multiple voices, intertextual references and also the sentences that sound a lot like philosophy). To be ‘loyal to the facts’ requires that we have something to say about why Bradley said those words, in that context, meaning to say one thing but ending up entailing another, etc. It is true that Murdoch did not express her philosophy in her novels, but that does not mean that her fictional characters did not attempt to express theirs. Robjant’s suggested reading manages well to take the Murdoch that repeatedly claimed that her philosophy does not come into her novels into account, but has very little to say about the Murdoch who thought that art, and especially literature, is one of the most educational of all human endeavours. As I have argued, there’s only one Murdoch and this means that both her ‘sides’ must come together. This is not to say that I find it unlikely that Bradley (in the world of the novel) actually did commit the murder. He very well might have. But I find myself surprised to say just how little that question matters for the understanding of the work as a whole. Most major concerns one may have with that work must have been on the table before that dawns on one (if it does). One is prone to believe in his proclaimed innocence if he is taken as professing a sustainable and commendable ‘philosophy’. Taking the blame for a murder he did not commit was his ultimate sacrifice for the good. If this is what Murdochian perfectionism is about, it is no wonder that Nussbaum thought that Murdoch was advocating an otherworldly kind of Platonism which contains a ‘disdainful attitude’ to people who do not try to perfect themselves, ‘who do not re-educate their instincts.’150 If, conversely, you have come to see Bradley’s view as quite different from Murdoch’s philosophy, you have good reason not to trust him. If you are ready to say that the work as a whole is written in a state of profound confusion, then why should you believe that he has given a truthful story about Arnold’s death? The thing is, whether you believe Bradley or not does not hang on whether you take him to have committed the murder or not. The question about his trustworthiness necessarily precedes the question of 148

Ibid. Ibid. 150 Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision,’ 49. 149

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his guilt, and how you stand on the question of trustworthiness will probably guide the question of guilt. The question about Bradley’s trustworthiness, in turn, depends upon how we relate to the work as a whole. As an indirect communication, as a work that demands a double reflection, as a work that requires that we surmount what is professed in it, it cannot be too didactic, too lecturing. So, is perhaps the resonating indecision precisely what we should pay attention to? After all, texts that lack conclusions often do so for a reason. They leave something for the reader to do, and they mean to leave something for the reader to do. We must smash the mirror when we’re done. That there is no conclusion and no final decision is an indirect expression for truth as inwardness and in this way perhaps a polemic against truth as knowledge. (Climacus)151

4.4 In disagreement with oneself: A failure to mean My argument in this chapter is not: ‘Bradley Pearson was a despicable character hence he cannot be a spokesman for Murdoch’s philosophy.’ Rather, I have tried to show that Bradley is riddled with confusion. We might say that he is someone who presents himself as an ally in thought with Murdoch, but he is deluded about how to make that philosophy live. When it comes to ‘philosophical sentences’, Bradley never rises above mere parroting. ‘Philosophical sentences’ are reduced to doctrines. Even though we may hear the echo of Murdoch’s philosophy in his voice, it would be wrong to call them ‘subjective uses.’ And, importantly, if we as readers of the novel take these philosophical statements to be philosophical expressions – we will also take them as doctrines, and thereby we also misunderstand the work (of art). We are not letting literature have its say. I am suggesting that Bradley is not in agreement with himself – and that this is the root of his delusions. There are several ways to approach that thought. One is to note how Bradley strives but fails to be guided by ‘his philosophy.’ He aspires and aspires . . . with devastating results. This is the difficulty arising out of the discrepancy between ‘the self-knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the selfawareness which we have of ourselves subjectively.’152 So he is aware of the fact that he fails to lead a life beyond aesthetic categories. But he also takes himself to have all the relevant knowledge – there is, as it were, nothing wrong with his philosophy. He seems to conclude that there’s something wrong with the world (rather than his philosophy or himself). That ‘his philosophy’ is impossible to bring to life in this world, leads him to suppose that he needs a ‘passage to the gods,’ an escape from this

151 152

Climacus, ‘A Glance at Danish Literature,’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 252. (Italics added). Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 189. (Italics added).

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world. This is perhaps the starkest picture we get of Bradley’s delusions. Here he quite explicitly rejects community. He now (claims to) speaks another language – and if he is incomprehensible to his fellow humans, so much worse for them! Can we get a more concrete picture of a man living in an illusion of sense? It is no wonder that Rachel tries to call him back to earth.153 When I call Bradley deluded (as Murdoch does) I mean to suggest that his inability to stand behind his words is not due to a lack of information or because he is uneducated about his language or about the doctrines he claims to be guided by. The diagnosis is not that he is (merely) stupid, evil or ill-willing. He does not deceive us by means of knowingly and intentionally misrepresenting himself and his deeds. He does believe in the ‘philosophical sentences’ he employs, and he wants to live accordingly. It’s just that he can’t. He does not manage to mean what he wants to mean with his words. This is one of the reasons why I called attention to Bradley’s feigning.154 He is trying to perfect images, but he does not know how to give beliefs true bearing on his life. This helps us unpack some of ‘this layered stuff of ironic sensibility.’155 As Lear has argued, Kierkegaardian irony should not be understood as the attempt to say one thing and mean its opposite, but as pretense.156 And ‘pretense,’ in turn, should not be understood as ‘make-believe.’ Rather, Kierkegaard uses the concept in ‘the older sense of put oneself forward or make a claim. Think of the pretender to a throne: she is someone putting herself forward as the legitimate heir.’157 Bradley exhibits this kind of pretense. He is putting himself forward as someone aspiring to be a true ‘Platonist,’ as someone who understands love, art and the relation between them. He is ‘feigning it’ in the sense that he knows that he has not reached his goal yet. What he does not know, and which we who peer into this mirror may come to see, is that the way he aspires to become what he wants to become collapses the project. He displays a failure by truly trying. He doesn’t know that he is part of a culture in which certain concepts are impossible, but we may come to see it. The possibility of irony arises when a gap opens between pretense as it is made available in social practice and an aspiration or ideal which, on the one hand, is embedded in the pretense—indeed, which expresses what the pretense is all about—but which, on the other hand, seems to transcend the life and the social practice in which that pretense is made. The pretense seems at once to capture and miss the aspiration.158

Bradley is continuously putting himself forward as this or that – a true artist, someone who knows what love is, and someone who knows what true knowledge is. He is putting

153

Ibid., 359. Ibid., 186. 155 Ibid., 81. 156 My thanks to Mark Hopwood who pointed out this link between Murdoch and Lear. 157 Lear, A Case for Irony, 10. 158 Ibid., 11. 154

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himself forward as a Platonist of sorts. This enables us to pose the Kierkegaardian question: ‘Among all Platonists, is there a Platonist?’ This is, to be sure, a peculiar kind of question. The first occurrence of ‘Platonist’ in this sentence designates, one might say, the doctrines Bradley claims to know. This is Lear’s ‘pretense.’ The second occurrence questions the first – not in the sense that we are forced to ask if a specific being, for example Bradley, really is a ‘Platonist’, in the sense that he falls under that concept or stands behind its doctrines, or not. We already know he does. Rather, it forces us to ask whether or not we know what it really means to be that kind of being, to strive to perfect that kind of pretense. We might say now that the mirror that Murdoch is holding up before us is a picture of a man who fails to carry the weight of his word, who recognizes that, rejects community and claims to speak his own language. It is inevitable that any reader of The Black Prince who is familiar with Murdoch’s philosophy can see evident connections and similarities between Pearson’s language and Murdoch’s philosophy. One way to argue that we should not see Bradley’s private language as an expression of Murdoch’s philosophy is that he takes that kind of philosophy to demand a passage into another realm, whereas Murdoch so clearly has argued that such talk about different realms, or planes, is pure nonsense: ‘to call truth ineffable is to offer a quasi-religious principle.’159 This helps us see just how wrong one can go if one takes Murdoch’s novels as expressions of her philosophy and as a way to enter her ‘Platonism’. But the fact that Bradley’s ‘philosophy’ contradicts Murdoch’s is only incidentally relevant, and only relevant for those of the novel’s readers that are educated enough about Murdoch’s philosophy to see that. Bradley is fundamentally unable to make his thoughts clear, even to himself, and he ends up with a confused view which may be described as Murdoch inside-out. If we learn anything about Murdoch’s philosophy – her ‘Platonism’ in particular – by means of reading The Black Prince, it is that this is not it. (No wonder that she finds it necessary to echo Kierkegaard’s warning about his pseudonymous texts – ‘there is not a single word by me’160 – and stress that her philosophy is not to be found in her novels.) If you read The Black Prince and think that this is a wretched man and a confused philosophy, you get something right. If you read the novel and think that this is Murdoch’s philosophy, you get very little of the book right and a great deal of her philosophy wrong. So how and why do we come to see that Bradley’s language comes apart? The short answer is: all we need to do in order to see that is to read the novel. The only way we can see that his words become void, or hollow, is by means of thinking about how his sentences – uttered here, by this man, in this form of life, for these ‘reasons’ – carry or fail to carry weight. The way these questions are answered is by the presence of a conflict between form and content. When I claim that Bradley does not know what his wordings mean, that is not because he is uneducated about them – as 159

Iris Murdoch, ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Poets,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 463. 160 Kierkegaard, ‘A First and Last Explanation,’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 625f.

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if a philosophy course in semantics and syntax could help him out. But neither is it a matter of him using the right words in the wrong context – as if an additional course on pragmatics (understood as a form of appendix or addendum to the first course) would solve his problems. What literature brings is a way to see how sentences come to life, or fail to come to life in the context of a human life. This is rare in philosophy. I would also want to stress that there is a lesson to be learnt regarding the philosophical import of context for meaning here. The ‘context’ in question here is not the syntactical/semantic issue of determining if a word is employed correctly in a sentence, or if the sentence is used correctly in relation to its context or if ‘the meaning’ is uttered in the right circumstances. Rather, it is a question about what place these words and sentences have in a life as a whole. Literature is one of the art forms that can do this. We can attain a picture of what a particular kind of life may look like and we can look at it from a distance; a distance impossible to attain regarding one’s own life as a whole. Indeed, it is utterly unclear what it would mean to claim to have such a distance to oneself and one’s life. Nota bene: if I say that Bradley does not know what his words mean, I do not mean that he is employing them in the wrong context (as if he could have carried their weight under slightly different circumstances). It may be helpful here to remind ourselves of Murdoch’s realistic spirit – she tries to present true pictures of our world. One crucial fact about our world is that the employment of certain concepts has become (nearly) impossible. Our worldview is a picture of an indifferent, aesthetic world in which philosophies are reduced to doctrines, morality to judgements and actions, human beings to free rational sovereigns. We may now begin to see why one, like Bradley, may be prone to think that Murdochian philosophical sentences are ready for us to receive, being part of, and on a par with, other philosophic doctrines with which they compete. I choose whatever doctrines I want to choose to guide and inform me about my life. But if we are crying out to an indifferent world, if we are struggling to attain a clear sense and carry the weight of a way of thinking that is only alive in ethical or religious categories (to speak with Kierkegaard), whereas our whole culture and our being in it is aesthetic, we should not be surprised to see that this is an attempt that is likely to fail. It is indeed truly helpful to think of Bradley as dithering between categories. It may, in fact, be too generous a description, for it is not even clear that a figure like Bradley ever leaves (or manages to see beyond) a world that is aesthetic through and through. If the concepts Murdoch’s wants to reawaken are impossible to invoke for her, there’s no reason to assume that Bradley could carry them. That being said, we would go wrong if we here conclude that Bradley’s problem is that he is untimely. That would be a kind of comedy too. Moments when Bradley’s life is not going so well reveal him as resorting to intellectualization precisely to block reality from invading his mind and world. Bradley tries to reason philosophically and rely on intellectualizations to take him out of his misery, but philosophy fails. ‘Philosophical sentences’ – ‘Murdochian’ or ‘Platonic’ on the surface – come into his world more as a form of excuse, rather than as descriptions of something he has attained a clear sense of. Bradley’s loss of sense, of language, is his rejection of community. But his rejection

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of community is not ungrounded; theoretical pictures can be powerful things. He trusts them too much, not too little. In his view, if his world falls apart it is not because his views are faulty but because the world is corrupt. Community is theorized away. In saying that, I do not mean to suggest that this is Murdoch’s philosophical intention encapsulated in a literary coating. My claim is that we can see this, if we reflect upon Bradley Pearson’s life (and death). If we also share many of Murdoch’s philosophical concerns we may well say that we can come to understand her philosophy better by means of reading her novels. But that is most likely to be true about many other novelists’ works too. The sense of a loss of language that has emerged may now seem to be too historical. But I hope to have made clear that even though Murdoch’s sense of ‘the massive loss of concepts’ has an historical dimension and is the result of slow processes in which words are slowly turned and twisted to such an extent that their concepts change, the relevant sense of a language lost is not to be disconnected from a human beings’ personal struggles to be true to his or her words. Indeed, one might see Murdoch’s sense of a language lost as arising in the conflict between a human being’s quest for the right kind of inwardness in relation to herself as a historical being. We have also seen how ‘intellectualization’ may come in as a part of this struggle to carry one’s words in a confused way – indeed, in a way that makes it evident that we sometimes use ‘theorization’ as a way to avoid confronting the world. Bradley’s conceptions of ‘love’ and ‘art’ are instances of such avoidances. Murdoch holds up her mirror to nature and lets us see how concepts such as art, love, marriage, transcendence (among others) are modulated in this form of life. But since a mirror holds no doctrines of its own, we must now reflect on her reflection. We must learn to look beyond the mirror. Bradley did not know just how right he was when he said: ‘We are for breaking, our smash is what it’s for.’161

161

Pearson, ‘The Black Prince’, 308.

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5

What is it Like to Be a Corpse? Diamond, Coetzee and the Awareness of a Language Lost

‘Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughter houses?’ ‘No.’1

5.1 Introduction: Running out of arguments? Contrary to the received view of Murdoch’s authorship as a whole, I have argued that we should take her quite seriously when she tells us that we must not think that she employs literature to convey her philosophy. This does not mean that there are ‘two Murdochs’ – one who claims that literature is not philosophy and another one who claims that art and moral (and so literature and philosophy) have the same essence. Murdoch was happy in the quarrel between philosophy and literature, and I have tried to show that this kind of contentment is something we should try to embrace. These views of hers have guided my reading of The Black Prince. It is possible to read that novel as having a standing on its own even though we, readers familiar with her philosophy, may find it hard not to see parallels. The philosophical views we find expressed in the novel are Bradley Pearsons, not Murdoch’s; and the philosophical work that this novel does, depends on us noticing that. Her novels may be philosophically significant, do philosophy on their own, just like any novel may. The only way in which ‘her philosophy’ shines through is in the sense that an author’s ‘Weltanschauung’ necessarily shines through. A novelist holds a mirror and the way she points it will say something about her. But what is shown in the mirror cannot be revealed by means of linking its world to doctrines and theories that the author adheres to in philosophy. This means, I take it, that her view of our times, of how the human being understands herself today, will ‘shine through’ but this is not

1

An exchange between Elisabeth Costello’s son, John, and Elisabeth in J. M. Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage Books, 2004 [1999]), 103.

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something she argues. In fact, this is something that is very hard to argue at all. There is a level at which argumentation fails us. ‘If . . . we hold that a man’s morality is not only his choices but his vision, then this may be deep, ramified, hard to change and not easily open to argument.’2 That we at times run out of arguments means something, and Murdoch can help us see that these moments may be the most significant ones for philosophy, for here, it may seem as if our resources have run out. At the level of vision, that which precedes and forms the ground for our rational judgements and choices, argument may have little effect. This is so not merely because ‘arguments’ tend to be specific (whereas one’s moral vision of herself, her times and her future is something muddled and may even be unclear to herself), but also because we may encounter cases where we do not know what it would mean to argue. This is, one might say, where literature comes in. In being a self-sufficient whole that can picture a particular kind of life it may show us how concepts are inflected (unknowingly or not) in this kind of life. This does not mean that philosophy should become literature or that philosophers must become literary artists, but that philosophers must be open to the eventual challenges to our conceptual certainties that literature may bring. Frame philosophy and philosophy dies (or becomes a new science). If truth as truthfulness ‘is a matter of deepening the concepts,’ and if, ‘ “[b]ecoming better” is a process involving exercise and refinement of moral vocabulary and sensitivity’3 then we need a lifelong exercise in learning language and seeing connections. This is something we get from literature (among other places). ‘This does not of course imply abandoning the linguistic method, it rather implies taking it seriously.’4 It is easy, or at least tempting, in philosophy to bypass as irrelevant the ground on which our judgements rest (since they belong to our field of vision rather than our true and justified beliefs). In that respect, philosophical judgements and theories often involve some kind of deflection from our ordinary lives with each other and a rejection of the sense of language through which we think, speak and live. In fact, we may, just as Bradley does, use such theories in order to not face reality. But the thought that theorization may be what blocks our path to philosophical clarity is a thought hard to earn. Here, Diamond’s and Cavell’s works are helpful. The remainder of this chapter is an attempt to think further about these themes in dialogue with Diamond’s reading of Coetzee’s Elisabeth Costello. Four Murdochian themes are seen in variation here. (i) The idea that there’s register of the human life in language that may not be open to argument. (ii) That real life problems and difficulties often take on a distorted form as they ‘become philosophy’. (iii) How a loss of one’s concepts is not something that can be reduced to a historical ‘progression’ but depends on our lives in language, on our attitude to our words and that the fall from community may be done ‘intentionally’ as it were. (iv) That the philosophical significance of a novel cannot be reduced, or explained, by the presence of ‘philosophical sentences’ in it. 2 3 4

Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 84. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 342. Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 84.

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5.2 Costello’s speechlessness and Diamond’s concerns In his introduction to Philosophy and Animal Life – a small book containing Diamond’s startling paper ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ and part of the bow-waves of commentaries that it occasioned – Cary Wolfe claims that ‘there is the suggestion in Diamond, I think, that imaginative and literary projection can somehow achieve this instance what propositional, syllogistic philosophy cannot achieve (the nonconceptual, nonlogical force of “I know what it’s like to be a corpse”).’5 In making this claim, Wolfe points to a recurring thought in discussions concerning the relationship between philosophy and literature: There is something that philosophy cannot do – at least not in the form of linear argumentation, of ordinary propositional or syllogistic reasoning – that literature somehow manages to do. The question is, of course, what it is that literature manages to say and/or do that resists philosophical expression, and what it iswith philosophical and literary language use respectively that endows these traditions of thought with their respective (but not converging) powers? Can literature really teach us what it is like to be a corpse? And if it can, then how? And how come philosophy cannot? Is literature really a ‘nonconceptual place’ where reason can grow – if indeed, we can achieve a clear conception of a non-conceptual place? And can it grow to such a point that we can come to know what it is like to be a corpse – if indeed, there is something that counts as knowing what it is like to be a corpse? Even though it may be right to say that much contemporary philosophy has a rather narrow conception of ‘argumentation,’ there is something in the claim that ‘imaginative and literary projection can somehow achieve this instance what propositional, syllogistic philosophy cannot achieve’ that troubles me. Wolfe’s line of thinking runs the risk of turning literature’s philosophical importance into a stand-in for, or back-up to, philosophical discourse, thus blocking the task of trying to become clear about what’s wrong with the idea that everything of philosophical significance can be framed in a proposition and properly attended to by linear reasoning. Alternatively, it runs the risk of mystifying literature. For if indeed literature can teach us what it is like to be a corpse, it is beyond extraordinary – managing to speak, literally, from the other side. The phrase ‘I know what it is like to be a corpse’ is Elisabeth Costello’s.6 She is not real, and that matters. When I say that she is not real, I merely mean that she is a fictional character – not that what she says is not true, and not that her life cannot fruitfully be seen as picturing our reality in a striking and highly informative way. But the fact that Costello is a fictional character signals that there is a gap in Wolfe’s saying that needs to be, first, made clear, and secondly, bridged (if possible). The fact that Costello knows – or claims to know – what it is like to be a corpse gives us no reason to assume that anyone who reads Coetzee’s novel Elisabeth Costello comes to know that. This thought strikes her occasionally, constituting a confrontation with 5

6

Cary Wolfe, ‘Exposures,’ in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 23. Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, 76f.

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a very real and pressing reality. Costello’s ‘knowing’ is indeed very uncertain. ‘For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive in that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time.’7 Costello claims that poetry is capable of enlarging our imagination so that we can picture the embodied being of the other in a way that abstract arguments about the mind of the other cannot do, but that does not necessarily mean that poetry can teach us to cognize beyond demise. The force of poetry that Costello cherishes is its power to embody rather than describe the animal. She calls attention to a kind of poetry ‘that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead a record of an engagement with him.’8 In the poetry she favours she claims that even the poet finds himself ‘entranced and horrified and overwhelmed, his powers of understanding pushed beyond their limit.’9 So to the extent that Costello claims to know what it is like to be a corpse, it is in brief moments when she is alive in a contradiction. Furthermore, to the extent poetry can portray the embodied life of the other, the animal, it is beyond the limits of understanding – even the poets own understanding. What kind of knowledge is to be gained here? Must we not suspect that the concept of knowing is stretched here? Is there a knowing that can be transmitted from the one to the other here (in whatever form)? ‘Knowledge’ is and must be, as all other concepts are, elastic. But elasticity must come to an end somewhere. Even rubber bands break at some point. Otherwise, there would not be much sense to her feeling of being alive in a contradiction. Costello does not say that it is by reading literature that she became able to imagine what it is like to be a corpse. This kind of imagining is possible to all. ‘That is the kind of thought we are capable of, we human beings, that and even more, if we press ourselves or are pressed.’10 Costello’s claim is about human imagination, not about the powers of literary language use. As I see it, the question that a reading of Coetzee’s novel Elisabeth Costello should pose to philosophy is not ‘Can literature make us think the unthinkable?’ but, rather, ‘If this is an adequate description of human imagination, can we see it in philosophy, or is it denied there, rejected; and if so, then, why?’ Thus, it would be a mistake to think that the issue is a competition between two propositions (one true, the other one not):

a. Philosophy can teach us what it is like to be a corpse. b. Literature (but not philosophy) can teach us what it is like to be a corpse. Both these claims harbour the idea that there is a specific something which constitutes knowing what it is like to be a corpse. The fact of the matter is already settled and all that remains to debate are questions of pedagogy. One form of textual strategy can represent and communicate the fact of the matter adequately, while the other one can’t. But is the question at hand really a question of a fact of the matter? And is the question 7 8 9 10

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 77.

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of the fact of the matter really a question independent of, preceding, the question of the form? Wolfe talks about a ‘nonconceptual, nonlogical force of “I know what it’s like to be a corpse”.’11 An emphasis on the word ‘force’ points to what’s right in Wolfe’s thought here. But, the acknowledgement of such a force does not necessarily come to a ‘knowing what it is like.’ To say that we can see the force of a claim is, for example, to say that we can come to see how such a claim can, or might, fit into a certain form of life, or how it can affect us in different ways. We might, for example, be stunned by bewilderment, struck by a newly achieved clarity, knocked out of our seats, find ourselves angry with the bluntness of the contradiction, etc. The reality of the other can make our own certainties less certain. But the recognition of that life of the other does not entail that I know what such a life, as it were, feels like. ‘I know what it is like to be a corpse’ is not a pair of shoes that we can try on. This means that there is something confused in Wolfe’s discussion since he, first, claims that ‘Diamond affirms Costello’s assertion “I know what it is like to be a corpse”, ’ and, second, applies Derrida’s philosophy as constituting a countering position holding that no one, but the other, knows what it is like to be a corpse.12 But does not this mean that Wolfe has removed whatever nonlogical force there was in a woman claiming to know something exceptionally peculiar and re-inscribed her saying in a debate about two alternative propositions (with supposedly clear meanings), thus performing the very manoeuvre he sought to reject? I am less certain about the sense of these claims than Wolfe seems to be. I feel inclined to say that whatever force there is in such a claim comes from a sense of loss of sense – that what drives a person to say such a thing as ‘I know what it is like to be a corpse’ comes from a reality that rushes upon her, uncontrolled, hitting her as it were, and forces her to make claims about the world for which she has no reason. Yet, these sayings might matter immensely. I think Wolfe would agree with me here, at least up to a point, since he notes that the difficulties under discussion in Diamond’s paper concern problems which cannot ‘be dissolved or overcome by ever-more ingenious or accomplished propositional arguments, ever-more refined philosophical concepts.’13 In my view, the thought that Wolfe expresses here, is yet to be appropriated by him. Wolf rightly claims that what Diamond highlights are cases where reality confronts us by either making our claims about it impossible or blunt or bland or platitudinous, or by making us entirely speechless – and that these confrontations often run far deeper than any ordinary philosophical argument can ever do. But as soon as he starts to talk about what it is that the world confronts us with, he re-inscribes that experience into institutionalized philosophical argumentation. The problem is that if we wish to say that the philosophical thrust of literature depends on the philosopher letting literature speak for itself, then the philosophical incorporation of literature in philosophical discourse will always be 11 12 13

Wolfe, ‘Exposures,’ 23. (Italics added). Ibid. (Italics added). Ibid., 5f.

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problematic, since a philosopher speaking or writing about literature is in one sense not speaking on literature’s behalf. There is always a philosophical setting loitering somewhere in the background, which cannot, and should not, be circumvented. Diamond’s main concern is the pressing fact that we do encounter a reality which we cannot think (clearly about). Her first example is that of a poem of Ted Hughes’ which describes a photograph of six vital young smiling men, killed within six months after the picture was taken. This picture can be seen as representing both vitality and death in one single snapshot. Diamond starts off with a discussion of this example since it highlights: ‘the experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters. It is capable of making one go mad to try, to bring together in thought what cannot be thought: the impossibility of anyone’s being more alive than these smiling men, nothing being more dead.’14 The fact that reality, at times, does confront us with facts which render us speechless, is what Diamond calls ‘the difficulty of reality’: ‘experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability.’15 The fact that we do recognize segments of reality as resisting expression still doesn’t prevent us from trying to express that which we deem inexpressible; it still doesn’t prevent us from trying to think that which we claim to be unthinkable. But this urge to think the unthinkable is not inevitable and neither is it evident that we must think of ‘it’ as unthinkable. It’s a photo of men who died young, not long after the picture was taken. Where is the contradiction?—Taking the picture that way, there’s no problem about our concepts being adequate to describe it. Again, one might think of how one would teach a child who had been shown a photo and told it was a photo of her grandfather, whom she knows to be dead. If she asks, “Why is he smiling if he’s dead?,” she might be told that he was smiling when the picture was taken, because he wasn’t dead then, and that he died later. The child is being taught the languagegame, being shown how her problem disappears as she comes to see how things are spoken of in the game. The point of view from which she sees a problem is not yet in the game; while that from which the horrible contradiction impresses itself on the poet-speaker is that of someone who can no longer speak within the game. Language is shouldered out from the game, as the body from its instant and heat.16

The ‘difficulty of reality’ that ‘impresses itself on the poet-speaker’ has a few characteristics that make it philosophically interesting. There’s a difference between the

14

15 16

Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ in Philosophy and Animal Life, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 44. Ibid., 45f. Ibid., 45.

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child and the ‘poet-speaker’: the child is ‘not yet in the game’ whereas the poet-speaker is ‘someone who can no longer speak within the game.’ This means that one might say that ‘the difficulty of reality’ has its beginning in a loss of language (earlier attained and appropriated). One might also say that this beginning pictures the one ‘shouldered out from language’ as deflecting from, or repudiating, the ordinary. A particular ‘difficulty of reality’ is not necessarily everyone’s difficulty. If this loss of language is a crucial element of the difficulty of reality, it should be evident that this loss of language, more often than not, goes unnoticed, since we should assume that the one struck by a difficulty of reality is a ‘competent speaker’ of the language in question. We must assume that the person in question knows how to speak in the game, knows that his or her words usually make sense, and that there is no evident reason why they should no longer do so. It is the feeling of ‘I know all the words, and their place in the sentence is OK, and I am in familiar surroundings and the words do not seem to be misplaced here. Yet something is not right: the words no longer carry their weight.’ It is no surprise that we find it hard to acknowledge that we do not mean what we mean, that we fail to mean what our words mean since we (think we) know our language. This is a reason why it is hard, very hard, to notice that one’s language is idling.17 Diamond’s description of the difficulty of reality resembles the opening words of Kant’s first Critique: ‘Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.’18 Thus, one might think that we at this point have both difficulties – that of reality and that of philosophy – in play already. But it is not entirely clear that Diamond thinks so. At a much later stage of her paper, Diamond introduces the opposing difficulty, that of ‘philosophy.’ But in her description of that difficulty, the profundity and intensity of the problems we might have with a difficulty of reality are surprisingly absent. A difficulty of philosophy is, in Diamond’s description, something we encounter only in philosophy departments, where we ‘learn how to discuss hard problems, what constitutes a good argument, what is distorted by emotion, when we are making assertions without backing them up.’19 Diamond initially separates her two difficulties and this is a problematic aspect of her essay, for it invites misunderstandings and may seem to force Diamond to think ‘un-Diamondian’ thoughts. Her thinking as a whole is not, in my view, leading her in that direction. (I will return to this.) I think it is pivotal to recognize that this intolerable breakdown of reasoning – the sense of a language lost – is Diamond’s primary concern. The human/animal relation is approached by means of a long reflection on a very striking and convincing picture of a woman who is indeed haunted by this very ‘Kantian’ breakdown. This picture is Coetzee’s novel. In that novel, Elisabeth Costello is facing a reality that confronts her with questions or concerns that she indubitably is, to speak with Kant, ‘unable 17 18 19

Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 132. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 7. Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 58.

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to ignore’ but that she feels she ‘is not able to answer.’ Her inability is not due to a deficient intellectual capacity or a lack of information. In fact, she claims that we all know the horrors of the meat industry, but we do nothing about it. Nor does she lack a philosophical language to speak about the intellectual difficulty.20 When I say that she does not lack such a language, this is only true with some reservations. Costello claims to be searching for ‘a way of speaking which is cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical.’21 This is the language that she claims to have at her disposal, the language of ‘Aristotle and Porphyro, of Augustine and Aquinas, of Descartes and Bentham, of, in our day, Mary Midgley and Tom Reagan.’22 Clearly, Costello knows how to speak ‘philosophy.’ So she wants a cool and philosophical language, but she already knows such a language – so what is she searching for? Well, to begin with, this passage occurs at a place in the story at which Costello has most clearly failed to be cool rather than heated. She has just compared meat factories with the Holocaust and she feels that she has crossed the line. (‘Pardon me. I repeat. This is the last cheap point I will be scoring.’23) Thus, even though she knows a cool language, she does not think that this ‘language’ offers the right kind of coolness. Furthermore, she is invited as a novelist to give a public lecture and a seminar for literature students. She feels that this is not the place to rehearse philosophical theories. In fact, it is not clear that she thinks much is to be gained by repeating philosophical arguments. Indeed, her view is that the very idea of treating matters such as these in a purely abstract way distorts the reality and neglects the gravity of the subject. Arguments about the pros and cons of various philosophical theories are precisely the ‘cheap point-scoring’ that she wants to move away from. Costello is also very hesitant about the powers of philosophy’s precious ‘reason.’ Though not in line with Kant’s view, but still within a Kantian idiom, she claims that ‘reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought.’24 Diamond concentrates on Elisabeth Costello’s description of herself as a ‘wounded animal.’ Costello is a person who feels that the way we treat animals is utterly and truly horrific, and she feels alone in thinking so.25 She is surrounded by scholars approaching her horrors in a detached manner, as if nothing was at stake at all. Her fellow humans, family, friends and foes, all treat her horrors ‘as the mere accepted background of life.’26 There is no point in arguing – her sense of horror is beyond reach, and she knows it. “It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easy among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, 66. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 67. Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 46. Ibid., 47.

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myself, that all of them are participants of a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.” . . . “Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?”27

Costello is portrayed as far from confident, well aware of the fact that she is the odd figure. Indeed, she calls her own sanity into question. Since Costello is the one who can no longer partake in the form of life that surrounds her – is hers, was, at least, hers – she is the one whose words seem to be hard to fill with sense. Where the rest of the world says ‘Yummy!’ she cries ‘corpses!’ It is the sense of her words that are in question –‘they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.’28 If there is a language lost here, it is Costello’s. She is not at home in her language, in her form of life. Costello and her opponents cannot really be said to be talking ‘the same language,’ and so there is not enough agreement to make argumentation successful. On that note: any reader who merely takes Coetzee’s novel to be a set of philosophical arguments presented in a literary setting, misrepresents the book and partakes in the very activity that the book as a whole rebukes: the idea that our moral lives with animals is a question that could be settled by means of philosophical argumentation (which is not to say that philosophical argumentation is of no use at all). On this point, Diamond’s reading departs from earlier attempts to appropriate the philosophical significance of Elisabeth Costello’s lectures. A clear contrast can be drawn between the commentators we find in The Lives of Animals and Diamond.29 Even though some of them find it hard to know who they really are arguing with (Coetzee or Costello), they all lean towards treating Costello’s lectures as presenting a philosophical position concerning animal rights. Diamond rightly notes that ‘the wounded woman,’ Elisabeth Costello, has no significant role in this. She has been reduced to ‘a device for putting forward (in an imaginatively stirring way) ideas about the resolution of a range of ethical issues, ideas which can then be abstracted and examined.’30 Moments when philosophy calls upon literature are always problematic, especially if the literature in question has some obvious links to philosophical discourse, or if it, at least seemingly, partakes in an ongoing debate. In such cases it is, I believe, easy to avoid thinking about the fact that it is literature and not philosophy that we are

27 28 29

30

Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, 114f. Ibid., 114. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, edited and introduced by Amy Gutman, with reflections by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, Barbara Smuts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 48f.

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confronted with. After all, there is a ‘position’ there, regardless of who its author is! Right? Of course, Coetzee’s lectures might indeed be intended to grapple with that ethical issue; but since he has a character in the story he tells, for whom it is as problematic to treat this supposed “issue” as an “ethical issue” for serious discussion as it is problematic to treat Holocaust denial as an issue for serious discussion, one can hardly, I think, take for granted that the lectures can be read as concerned with that “issue,” and as providing arguments bearing on it. If we see in the lectures a wounded woman, one thing that wounds her is precisely the common and takenfor-granted mode of thought that “how we treat animals” is an “ethical issue,” and the knowledge that she will be taken to be contributing, or intending to contribute, to discussion of it.31

If we see the novel more as a picture of a woman who can’t come to grips with her surrounding world than about Coetzee presenting arguments in disguise; then, what we get is a picture of how a particular form of life looks, and of how that form of life is at odds with contemporary culture at large. Instead of being a contribution to an ongoing philosophical debate, the book is a criticism of the intellectual climate of which the philosophical debate is an expression. For one important aspect of our cultural climate is that we tend to treat our moral lives as something that can be properly and fully attended to with mere rational reasoning – with argumentative philosophy. This, however, is precisely the orientation of thought that Costello can be seen as challenging.32

5.3 The exemplary bat Let us now turn to how Costello engages with Nagel’s classical paper: Merely to imagine what it is like to live as a bat does, says Mr. Nagel – to imagine spending our nights flying around catching insects in our mouths, navigating by sound instead of sight, and our days hanging upside down – is not good enough, because all that tells us is what it would be like to behave like a bat. Whereas what we really aspire to know is what it is like to be a bat; and that can never be accomplished because our minds are inadequate to the task – our minds are not bats’ minds.33

Diamond claims that Costello does not want to partake in the philosophical argumentation. But what is this reference to Nagel then doing here? It seems evident that Costello is arguing with Nagel. But argumentation comes in many forms and there 31 32 33

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, 76.

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are at least two ways in which Costello refrains from arguing with Nagel. First, she denies that knowledge must take the form it does in Nagel’s argumentation. Secondly, she transforms Nagel’s thought-experiment by twisting it, employing it for other purposes than Nagel intended. Nagel places certain restrictions on the phrase ‘knowing what it is like’ that Costello distances herself from. This ‘rejection’ can be seen if we attend to the fact that even Nagel claims that it is possible (albeit very difficult) to imagine what it would be like to be a bat in the sense that he can imagine himself orienting with radar, eating insects and hanging upside down in a cave during day time. But this is not enough for Nagel. ‘In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as bats behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet, if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate for the task.’34 Nagel’s argumentation depends on a recognition of the importance of embodiment. He decided to go with bats ‘instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.’35 ‘Knowing what it is like’ requires, in his view, embodied recognition, a similarity of sensory organs, so bats were chosen because they are bodily different from us but not different enough to disable our imagination of what that kind of embodied life is like. But Nagel is concerned with refuting materialism, so he needs to downplay that sense of embodiment. A sympathetic sense embodied bat-life is precisely the life of the other that Nagel does not want to know. Embodiment is introduced as indispensable, only to be denied. Costello focuses on the imaginative powers that Nagel actually had (but felt obliged to deny). One of the most important formulations here is when Costello says: ‘I know that Nagel is only using bats and Martians as aids in order to pose questions of his own about the nature of consciousness. But like most writers, I have a literal cast of mind, so I would like to stop with the bat.’36 In saying so, Costello removes Nagel’s bat from the context of philosophy of mind, sidesteps its designed function as a counterargument to materialism, and rebukes the philosophical function of the thought-experiment. She, as a writer, has ‘a literal cast of mind,’ and so the fictionality of the philosophical thought-experiment – the fact that it is designed for a particular purpose – is denied. She wants to focus on the real imaginative powers of the human that the idea of a thought-experiment only incorporates as a minor detail. Here we can see, in a fictive setting, how the philosophical function of narrative literature cannot be reduced to fiction being, as Mulhall describes it, ‘a container for philosophical arguments.’37 Thought-experiments are often ‘explicitly designed so as to strip away the complexity and detail of real-life situations, in order to isolate a specific theoretical issue in as stark and plain manner as possible.’38 34 35 36 37 38

Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ The Philosophical Review, 83(4): (1974), 439. Ibid., 438. Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, 76. Mulhall, The Wounded Animal, 22. Ibid., 24.

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Costello does not enter into a dialogue with Nagel precisely because she does not want to ‘strip away the complexity and detail of real-life situations.’ She wants to highlight the imagination that Nagel’s mind actually was able to create (if only to deny), thus suggesting that the philosophical separateness between individuals, the human and her other (be it another human or an animal), depends upon a deflection from a more original community. Here it is possible to see how Coetzee’s Elisabeth Costello may have philosophical significance precisely because it is not a piece of philosophy, precisely because it does not really engage in ongoing discussions of the human/animal relation or the debates about which theory of consciousness is the better. By picturing a woman who denies a crucial step that the philosophical debate requires, Coetzee can be employed as showing us that this step has been taken and that it is problematical. Something happens when something of blood and heart is removed from its natural surrounding and turned into a representation of a ‘position’ in a philosophical debate. Nagel is exemplary precisely because he seems to be denying his own imagination, more or less deliberately, for the ‘benefit’ of philosophical clarity. This is a kind of deflection that so much philosophy depends upon. Furthermore, Costello does not have set of arguments that run ‘We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, because . . .’ Costello can thus be seen as making an implicit claim: we misrepresent our moral lives if we focus too much on this ‘because.’ Such thinking invites us to make lists of properties or capacities which are then put to use in order to warrant that ‘because.’ But Costello’s sense of horror and her vegetarianism is not a ‘stance’ that she has taken for a number of ‘reasons.’ In a sense, she does not have the ‘belief ’ that vegetarianism is right. Her ‘convictions’ run far deeper than that. In fact, the way we treat animals is incomprehensible to her, our cruelty inexpressible. We are pushed into regions of vision rather than one of affirmations or negations of propositions. “But your own vegetarianism, Mrs. Costello,” says President Garrard, pouring oil on troubled waters: “it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?” “No, I don’t think so,” says his mother. “It comes out of a desire to save my soul.” Now there truly is a silence, broken only by the clink of plates as the waitresses set baked Alaskas before them. “Well, I have great respect for it,” says Garrard. “As a way of life.” “I am wearing leather shoes,” says his mother. “I am carrying a leather purse. I wouldn’t have overmuch respect if I were you.” “Consistency,” murmurs Garrard. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eating meat and wearing leather.” “Degrees of obscenity,” she replies.39

Even when we have drained our argumentative recourses, the fundamental questions seem to remain. ‘No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. No 39

Coetzee, Elisabeth Costello, 88f.

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awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I have in mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why?’40 Costello is not challenging the correctness of the arguments, but the understanding of ‘understanding’ presupposed in the contemporary intellectual climate of today. ‘Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don’t . . .’41 Costello’s exclamation, ‘I know what it is like to be a corpse,’ can hardly be seen as a counterargument to Nagel’s claim that he cannot know what it is like to be a bat, even though Costello at one point says ‘If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.’42 This is not to be seen as an argument designed to enable a reader to say ‘It is true that x, therefore . . .’ According to Costello, ‘The question should not be: Do I have something in common – reason, self-consciousness, a soul – with other animals?’43 How we treat the other, she claims, should rather be a question of sympathy than of likeness, and ‘Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the “another”. ’44 The moral question of our relation to others is thus not so much a question about the facts of that other, as it is a question about my attitude towards ‘it.’ This brings us back to her imagined corpse-life and to the problematic comparison between the Holocaust and the meat industry. The particular horrors of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with the victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, “It is they on those cattle cars rattling past.” They did not say, “How would it be if it were I in that cattle car?” They did not say, “It is I who am in that cattle car.” They said, “It must be the dead who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.” They did not say, “How would it be if I were burning?” They did not say, “I am burning, I am falling in ash.”45

Sympathy requires a willingness to ‘embody’ the other. Imagination lets us do that. We are capable of it. This is what Costello seems to be saying. But she is denying that we can learn how to relate to the other by (merely) studying philosophical arguments. Is she thereby claiming to know what it is like to be a corpse? Is she thereby saying that she understands the Holocaust? That she thinks that the way we treat animals is 40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 90. Ibid. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 79. Ibid. Ibid., 79.

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incomprehensible but the horrors of the holocaust is not? I don’t think so. That would be a return to the argumentative form that she rebukes: ‘It is true that x, therefore . . .’ In a sense, Costello is running out of arguments; her recourses are drained. But to call for further reasons here is incomprehensible to her. ‘Arguments’ are out of place, not only because Costello’s form of life (in language) differs from her opponents, but because it is unclear to her what an argument could do. There is, as it were, nothing here that she has misunderstood.46 She is speechless. But to call something ‘inexpressible’ is not to say nothing. It is to give the world a description too. The expression ‘I’m speechless’ is part of our common language too. Ted Hughes’ poem might be said to be such a description. Coetzee’s novel pictures many such moments of speechlessness. Costello can talk endlessly about cruelty to animals. It is when she tries to give voice to her own separateness that her words fail her. Why should we not say that this portrayal of a woman running up against the ‘limits’ of her language is philosophically significant? Peter Singer notices that Costello is running out of arguments, that she criticizes reason and appeals to emotions.47 A very dangerous line of thought in Singer’s view, and he argues vehemently that the distinction between feelings and ‘moral data’ must remain intact.48 It is true that Costello appeals to emotions. There is a sense in which we can take the story about Costello as representing that fact that feelings at times express knowledge, are knowledge. But this need not result in a subjectivistic form of ‘emotivism.’ It is not to say that feelings are the ground on which our moral judgements rest. Philosophers often shy away from anything that even remotely resembles ‘mere feelings’ – thinking that they cannot play any significant role in any real philosophical (rational, objective, scientific) investigation. But I think that Cavell put his finger on something important when he said: ‘ The idea that passion and reason are antithetical to one another seems to me a libel on human nature and conduct. As if passion were a form of superstition.’49 For feelings connect with understanding in, at least, this way: In some situations, to not feel something particular is to have failed to understand the situation. For example, if you don’t feel hurt if your loved one leaves you, you have undoubtedly not understood (but probably denied) that she actually has left you. If you don’t feel disgust in the face of an ongoing, bloody, pointless and torturous murder, you do not understand that you are facing such a murder (or you’re mad, your understanding blocked by insanity or the mere incomprehensibility of the fact in front of you; or you’re watching a movie . . .). If you don’t feel, say, warm, calm and happy if the one you love tells you 46

47 48 49

What is important to note about these moments of speechlessness is that although there might be a certain kind of failure involved in many such moments, they should not to be seen as failures to understand in the same sense that we often fail to understand because an issue is easy to misunderstand. Lars Hertzberg makes this point clearly in ‘The Limits of Understanding’ in Sats – Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 6(1): (2005), 8f. See The Lives of Animals, 85–91. Ibid., 89. Andrew Klevan, ‘ “What Becomes of Thinking on Film”: Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Andrew Klevan,’ in Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, eds. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 177.

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that you mean the world to him/her, you probably have a hard time facing the fact that such a wonderful creature can love a lowlife like yourself (and, hence, you have a bundle of issues to come to terms with).50 This is not to say that what makes an action right or wrong is the feeling that it induces in most humans (backing that up statistically), or that morality consists of nothing more than feelings, but it is to say, with Murdoch, that our uses of language are coloured.51 At the heart of the difficulty that Costello is facing in trying to communicate with her audience lies a sense that there is something confused in the way philosophers tend to talk about these matters. It is not that their arguments are unsound, but that they seem to be neglecting, or downplaying, many crucial regions of our lives in language in order to turn something of great personal and moral importance into something that can be ‘debated.’ Costello’s line of thinking challenges the importance of philosophical argumentation (of a certain kind) as it shows why the philosophical desire for a ‘because’ misfires. It will not matter much if (however unlikely) we could rationally establish moral rules, for it will always be up to me whether or not I am to follow that rule or not. If rational argumentation about which principle or rule of conduct hold up against most argumentative attacks is all there is to moral philosophy, then, in a sense, all moral questions will remain when moral philosophy is done. Arguments enter and have their proper place when we are in agreement about how our concepts are to be turned.52 I have tried to show that a breakdown of reasoning is a central concern of Diamond’s and that such breakdown often comes with a loss of language, a loss of a (previously attained and carried) sense. Costello’s exchange with Nagel holds a double importance here. First, because it captures well how something which might look like the beginning of a philosophical discussion, is stalled by the pressing feeling that they are no longer talking the same language. Secondly, it brings into focus a complicated and far from innocent move that many philosophers make – the move to withdraw words from circulation, to deny, reject, put in parentheses, projections of their wordings, intimacy with our words’ surrounding and community with one’s other. So if Coeztee’s Costello is exemplary since she is someone who is shouldered out, well aware of the fact that she is so, Nagel, in turn, is exemplary because he is shouldering out, not aware (enough) of the fact that this deflection of his guides and forms his investigations. For Costello – the aware – this is tragedy. For Nagel it is progress, clarity. The ‘nagelian’ sense of clarity is achieved by means of a certain directedness of thought. The bat is employed 50

51 52

I take these examples to be in line with Diamond’s view that ‘In a sense, someone who has not learned to respond with the heart in such ways has not learned to think (“thought with him/Is in its infancy”); for thinking well involves thinking charged with appropriate feeling.’ Cora Diamond, ‘Anything but Argument?’ in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 298. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 495. Diamond observes that: ‘if we proceed by giving arguments, we presumably do not expect to be able to convince anyone who is incapable of following our arguments, or who is too prejudiced to consider them. And if we are talking about convincing human beings, surely it is a fact about many of them that one certain way of not convincing them is to try to arguing the case.’ Diamond, ‘Anything but Argument?’ 292.

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so that we should reach a specific idea if we follow Nagel’s train of thought. Costello’s sense of tragedy is the flip side of the same coin. As we, philosophers, tend to have a particular goal in view when we call imagination to our service, we thereby also block our possibilities of taking in the world. This is a form of ‘deflection’.

5.4 Understanding deflection ‘Deflection,’ as it is put to use here, can be described as the idea that many philosophical problems depend on us rejecting, or deflecting from, our ordinary ways of talking. This is a true but misleadingly simplified description. True because it is so, but misleading since it invites understandings according to which ‘the ordinary’ (whatever and wherever that is) may be regarded as too safe, as if ‘it’ was philosophically neutral or innocent. But it is not obvious that the use that departs from ordinary language is wrong, unhappy, false or misplaced. This is another reason why the life of Elisabeth Costello becomes philosophically instructive. She finds herself shouldered out from the ordinary, but it is not obvious that she is wrong in insisting on her specific employments of our words (even though one might easily picture someone disagreeing with her). Diamond claims that facts of the world often are distorted when they are incorporated in philosophical discourse. Being misrepresented, they cannot be dealt with properly. She also suggests that ‘understanding can be present in poetry, in a broad sense of the term.’53 Diamond employs Cavell’s notion of ‘deflection’ to describe ‘what happens when we are moved from the appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity.’54 Cavell employed the notion of ‘deflection’ in ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’55 while discussing (philosophical responses to) scepticism. His original take on scepticism tries to do justice to the very human and common worry that the other’s inmost feelings at times are out of reach. That fact is not what needs philosophical refutation. Rather, in order to fully understand the philosophical temptation of scepticism it must be taken at face value. ‘I am filled with this feeling – of our separateness, let us say – and I want you to have it too. So I give voice to it. And then my powerlessness presents itself as ignorance – a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.’56 This is where the distortion comes in. Reality is transformed so as to be possible to approach philosophically, intellectually. In all simplicity: the difficulty of reality here is the fact that we sometimes feel that we cannot reach the other. The difficulty of philosophy is this fact transformed into an intellectual ‘puzzle’ requiring philosophical scrutiny. The intellectual puzzle presents the others’ inner life as if it is out of reach in a similar sense that a plant on the other side of a wall may be. Philosophical scepticism builds

53 54 55

56

Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 56f. Ibid., 57. Stanley Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging,’ in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976). Ibid., 263.

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on a deflected understanding of a real, ordinary, concern. The academic response to that scepticism becomes doubly deflected since it denies not only the sceptic the sense of his words, but also the sense of our ordinary human separateness from which the philosophical scepticism departed. Cavell’s treatment of scepticism is an attempt to resolve the problem without denying the experience that the others’ inner life can be out of reach (which is not to say that that is the ‘normal’ or standard scenario). This means that philosophy must be attentive to the non-deflected sense of otherness if we are to come to terms with scepticism. Philosophy has to struggle to find ‘a way of hearing these voices that puts them back into the situation within which the humanness of the other seems out of reach, and thereby shows us where and how philosophy has to start,’ as Diamond puts it.57 To disregard the genuineness of these experiences is a form of a repudiation of the ordinary. It is no surprise that the philosopher might want to repudiate the ordinary, since such experiences often are (or seem) hard to handle, difficult to understand, muddled with emotional frustration, deeply rooted in the soil of one’s particular form of life, and they can, at times, be ‘deadly chilling.’58 This kind of hardness functions as a motivation for philosophical simplification, intellectualization, deflection – the ‘shared desire for a “because”. ’59 Thus, the repudiation of the ordinary can often ‘be heard as expressing such-and-such position in an intellectual debate.’60 The Cavellian line of thought that Diamond follows requires that we should not be too hasty to assume that the transformation of a muddled ordinary concern into a ‘position’ is leading us in the right direction. Since the root of this philosophical problem lies in a genuine ordinary (though not necessarily common) experience, any philosophical representation that does not rely on a rich enough understanding of this, will fail to respond to the problem at hand adequately. It is a misunderstanding to think of our human separateness primarily as an epistemological concern.61 Or to speak with Murdoch: if philosophy consists of ‘a two-way movement . . . , a movement towards the building of theories and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts’62 then philosophy is not done if the return to the beginning is not made. One way in which the limitations of an epistemological approach to human separateness and knowledge are rephrased is Cavell’s idea that we are ‘exposed’ to the other. Exposure means that knowing or understanding the other is not a thing that can be settled, as it were, objectively or externally.63 So philosophy must try to ‘accept’ our exposure, which, Cavell argues, ‘seems to imply an acceptance of the possibility 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 68. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 68. Ibid. Of course, this is not to say that my relation to the other has nothing to do with knowledge. For further references and reflections on the relationship between acknowledgement and knowledge, see Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 428. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 1. (Italics added). Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 433. Cf. Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 71f.

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that my knowledge of others may be overthrown, even that it ought to be.’64 Instead of thinking that a well-established singular sense of our terms would solve our problems, Cavell suggests that we need to take on board the fact that our wordings can and should be challenged and that they are necessarily elastic. This is not to be understood as ‘Cavell’s theory of meaning.’ Rather, Cavell claims that these are real features of our lives in language that must be taken into account, otherwise sense and knowledge may remain obscure. In fact, we may say that this emphasis on the openness and flexibility of language is not only a course to a more adequate understanding of language, but is also a way to start thinking more fruitfully about what conditions morality. In all simplicity: If it were not possible that I could fail to understand the words of my other – the weight of them – then, all promises would be empty, love would be physics, and tragedy impossible. But it is not so. Deflection means that we take a real difficulty and bend it so as to fit the methods and tools available to philosophical theoretical reasoning. But does this not also mean that a difficulty of reality is a difficulty of philosophy? Cavell certainly thinks so. Indeed, he claims that a Diamondian ‘difficulty of reality’ is ‘a difficulty that philosophy must incorporate.’65 This brings us back to my abovementioned worry that Diamond might make too much of the distinction between her two difficulties. At this point, where it is acknowledged that much philosophy begins in a deflection and hence a neglect to take in reality in full (a neglect to accept our ‘exposure’ as it were), Diamond becomes somewhat irresolute. Even though she argues that ‘[p]hilosophy characteristically misrepresents both our own reality and that of others, in particular those “others” who are animals’66 and that literature often manages to represent the human’s relation to her others in a way that does not distort reality, her response to the question ‘Can there be such a thing as philosophy that is not deflected from such realities?’67 is indistinct. This indistinctness is in fact not especially surprising. As noted by Alice Crary, Diamond’s own descriptions – up till the very concluding section of her paper – ‘seem to have implied the answer “No” to [Diamond’s] question whether there can be a non-deflecting practice of philosophy.’68 Now, Diamond does not want to deny that ‘there could be such a practice, and that argument may have an essential role to play in it.’69 But it would be wrong to say that Diamond thereby has answered the question, and one might see how that question is hard to answer. Indeed, it remains unclear to me what it would mean to say that this problem is solved, for two reasons. First: if indeed ‘deflection’ is a pathway into philosophical difficulties, then the idea of a ‘philosophy that is not deflected from such realities’ is the idea of a philosophy that 64 65

66 67 68 69

Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 439. Stanley Cavell, Stanley, ‘Companionable Thinking,’ in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 92. (Italics added). Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 56f. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 86n.22. Ibid.

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never begins in deflection (from our everyday language and all the complexities that that form of life brings with it). Can we even make sense of that idea? To the extent that this is an accurate description of how many philosophical problems originate, then the idea of a non-deflected philosophy comes close to the idea of a world without that kind of problem. Concerning philosophical problems of this type, the philosophical work should rather be the struggle to understand and become clear about the fact that we are dealing with a deflected (and so a distorted) picture of our world and to understand how that deflected picture took hold on us, than a search for a nondeflecting practice of philosophy. To my mind, the closest we will ever get to the idea of a non-deflecting practice of philosophy, are those short, few and rare moments when a specific philosophical problem disintegrates on us (is dissolved, if you like). The other reason why we shouldn’t be surprised by the sense of inconclusiveness that seems to characterize Diamond’s position at the end of her paper lies in the everlasting quarrel between philosophy and literature (or poetry). There is a sense in which the question ‘Can there be such a thing as philosophy that is not deflected from such realities?’ is analogous to the question if philosophy can become literature. But is that a clear enough question? Indeed, the question itself seems to suggest that (a) we know what philosophy is and (b) we know what literature is. But is that true? Suppose that we would have distinct definitions of these practices at our disposal; would we even then be able to say what their ‘marriage’ would be like? That is, I am not sure that we can know what would happen if philosophy and literature were to become one.70 This means that if we wish that philosophy should become literature, we don’t know what we wish for. Rather, we need to come to terms with that fact that philosophy, like literature, is an open-ended practice, constantly under its own investigation, and that it dies if it is (too) unbendingly framed. One may say that Diamond’s paper can be read as pointing in two directions. According to the first, it’s a call for a philosophical practice that strives to make clear how philosophical problems originated, that tries to take philosophy back to its common but pressing origin in real human concerns in order to make clear how philosophy may have distorted its own problem. (The ‘may have’ is important since this is not a result that one can reach without doing the work, and it is not necessary that philosophical problems are rooted in deflections. Neither problems nor their resolutions can be stated in advance.) Literature here only comes in as something that philosophy must be open to and its force is that it may be able to take us back to an understanding of our difficulties that are (still) grounded in our everyday lives. Diamond’s indistinctness is thus not really a problem, but something that follows from her investigation. This is the direction that I think of myself as pursuing. Wolfe, representing the other direction of thought, does not seem to recognize anything indistinct in Diamond’s position. Diamond’s view is simply that there are forms of thought that can be dealt with in philosophy and there are others that require literature in order to be conveyed. So some ‘thing’ is out of philosophy’s reach. Wolfe takes the distinction that Diamond leaves us with (where it is unclear if philosophy 70

I take this remark to be in line with what Cavell says in This New Yet Unapproachable America, 4f.

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could become a non-deflecting practice) to invite a picture of a doubled world. He seems to take Diamond to be suggesting that she has encountered a collision between two ‘spheres of reason.’ There is one in which we argue, that philosophy knows how to handle, and then there’s one of, say, ‘existential vertigo’ which literature and poetry (but not philosophy) take care of. Two forms of representation are assigned a sphere of phenomena each. But clearly, ‘deflection’ does not suggest that we have two worlds, but marks a typical desire to escape our (only) world: and we can be sure that Diamond does not want to suggest that there is something unspeakable that philosophy cannot talk about, whereof we (employees of philosophy departments) must be silent. But one can see what it is in Diamond’s paper that Wolfe feeds on: Diamond may appear to be willing to identify ‘philosophical argumentation’ with ‘contemporary academic discussions’ of a certain form, as if any form of reasoning that differs severely from this falls outside the domain of ‘philosophy.’ This is a point where I mean that Diamond invites her readers to think ‘un-Diamondian’ thoughts. Diamond claims that ‘Costello’s responses to arguments can be read as replies in the philosophical sense only by ignoring important features of the story.’71 I understand why Diamond wants to say this, and I agree with her to a high degree – especially in the sense that it is possible to include Elisabeth Costello in the contemporary Anglo-American academic debates about animal rights only if we read it in a special way that downplays the fact that it is a work of literature that we read. But how are we to understand her formulation ‘in the philosophical sense’? Are we to assume that there is a proper form of argumentation for philosophy? Are we to assume that there is no way for us to see Coetzee’s novel to be ‘arguing’ in a philosophically relevant sense? The answers to these questions are clearly ‘No!’ (and I believe that Diamond is in agreement with me here). It is as if Diamond gives too much to her opponents, reducing the thrust of what I take to be one of her own most important points: that the picture of how unaffected Costello is by philosophical arguments at her disposal and by those directed against her, is philosophically significant on its own. For it shows that that kind of reasoning doesn’t reach to the heart of someone like Costello. If we read Coetzee’s novel and come to think that this is an adequate picture of a particular form of life, then we should also be able to say that ‘the fact that contemporary academic philosophy (of a certain but dominant strand) has no patience for this form of life, that it rejects Costello’s indirect responses and sticks to its own deflected and reduced forms of understanding, discredits it.’ Given that Diamond has, consistently and with precision, challenged the narrow conceptions of what it is to argue that dominate contemporary Anglo-American philosophy,72 I do not think this is the direction we should walk if we are to continue to think with Diamond. What I think we should add to Diamond’s paper is the thought that the distinction between her two difficulties must be seen as a methodological tool, a way to start working with and come to terms with what troubles us as philosophers, and not as a representation of reality, as a theory about the nature 71 72

Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 53. (Italics added). Most notably in her ‘Anything but Arguments?’

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of our world which may or may not be true. To use a familiar metaphor: it’s a ladder that must be thrown away. Diamond employs Cavell’s notion of ‘deflection’ to describe ‘what happens when we are moved from the appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity.’73 To say that philosophy is ‘in the vicinity’ is to say that it is near but not (really) here. I want to suggest that philosophy is not in the vicinity of a difficulty of reality, it is already there. Diamond claims that a poet like Ted Hughes manages to put a difficulty of reality into words. He does this by coming out as someone ‘who can no longer speak within the game.’74 I have tried to show that this description functions well for much, if not most, philosophy – and this means that where there is a difficulty of reality, there is one of philosophy. Diamond describes the difficulty of reality as a situation in which we are ‘pushed beyond what we can think.’75 This sense of ‘beyond’ is, in turn, explicated as a sense of loss of our linguistic community: ‘Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life.’76 Notice that deflection involves something of a repudiation of the ordinary. The problem is that if it is true that ‘our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there,’ then we might think that our ordinary lives with our concepts are faulty or insufficient and that the turn to philosophy (as a turn away from the ordinary) is a turn in the right direction. And why should we not think that? (Most philosophers seem to do so.) I want to say that philosophy often – but probably not always – begins in a turn away from the ordinary. I also want to say that a return to the ordinary often is the way out of a philosophical problem (which is not to say that the philosophical activity consisted in nothing more than a U-turn, or that the philosophical problem was not an authentic problem at all). But this does not mean that the repudiation of the ordinary is something that only happens to trained philosophers, scholars. What does it mean to say that ‘our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there’? If we think of the philosophical movement of ordinary language philosophy as a mere return to the ordinary, where we started, then the successful philosophy would be one that takes us back to a position where we can pass these difficulties by as if they were not there. The problem is, of course, that they are. The fact that a difficulty of reality can be both ‘deadly chilling’ and seen as a recognition of me being shouldered out from community – that I can no longer rest comfortably in my ordinary life with words – shows that the turn to philosophy was not a stupid mistake and that philosophy is already present, to some extent, in the ordinary. It had, at least, its beginning there. Furthermore, it is important to see that if philosophy can only ‘appreciate’ a difficulty of reality by reducing such experiences to ‘positions,’ then deflected philosophy

73 74 75 76

Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,’ 57. (Italics added). Ibid., 45. Ibid., 58. Ibid.

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is also treating the difficulty as if it were not there, since its defining movement is a move away from the reality of the difficulty. But the force of a philosophical movement away from and back to the ordinary must not be to take us ‘back’ to where the problem appeared not to exist, but to take us back to a comprehension of the root of the problem, work it through and only thereafter go on. At that point, there can no longer be any ‘as if the problem did not exist’ – it has to be a place where the problem ‘no longer’ exists. This means that it has to be the task of philosophy to try to achieve an understanding of the non-deflected uses of our words in which the original problem took form. There is philosophy (already) in a difficulty of reality. In Diamond’s elaboration on this issue, the question of a non-deflecting practice of philosophy is nearly analogous to the question of literature’s place in philosophy. (Understanding is present in poetry, distorted in philosophy.) And so the question of the opposition that is marked between a difficulty of reality and a difficulty of philosophy becomes a version of the question with which Cavell ends The Claim of Reason: ‘can philosophy become literature and still know itself?’77 Since Cavell’s book ends with a question mark, we should not be too hasty to assume that that which precedes the question mark – the book as a whole – already has presented the answer to that question as it were, in between the lines.78 That question is, as it should be, left open. The question ‘Can there be such a thing as philosophy that is not deflected from such realities?’ has one crucial mark that separates it from Cavell’s question: ‘Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?’ If we understand deflection as a way into philosophical problems, then philosophy should acknowledge difficulties of reality as difficulties for philosophy. It is not as if the appreciation of a difficulty of a reality has to enter, or come into, philosophy. It is not a competition between two distinct forms of representation (though it is a criticism of philosophy’s obsession with a certain type of writing and reasoning). It is not a question whether or not philosophy can take a difficulty of reality seriously, can take it on board. It has to. It is already there. The recognition that a difficulty of reality already is a difficulty of philosophy, should lead us to say, with Cavell, that: ‘[If you give up] something like formal argumentation as the route to conviction in philosophy, and you give up the idea that either scientific evidence or poetic persuasion is the way to philosophical conviction, then the question of what achieves philosophical conviction must at all times be on your mind.’79 Good philosophy is self-reflective – reason is under reason’s investigation. I have argued that it is problematic to claim that poetry (or literature) can make us transgress the limits of understanding. That view seems to build on the thought that the propositional and linear reasoning that we have come to call ‘philosophical’ actually does capture what argumentation is. If we want to say that literature can achieve something of philosophical importance that our own understanding of philosophy

77 78 79

Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 496. Cf. Conant, ‘On Bruns, On Cavell,’ Critical Inquiry, 17(3): (1991). James Conant, ‘An Interview with Stanley Cavell,’ in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Fleming and Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 59.

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obstructs, it must not be that it reaches beyond, or to the other side of, argumentation and understanding. Rather, it must be that it can remind us about what understanding is outside, or before, philosophy – thereby ‘widening’ the sense of ‘reasoning.’ That there is sense in saying that a literary work cannot be paraphrased (into, say, philosophy) without significant loss, does not mean that it can express the inexpressible. The kind of philosophical clarity that we can attain by confronting ourselves with Diamonds essay, Coetzee’s novels and the philosophical commentaries thereof, is not that we can achieve a new form of knowledge or understanding, hitherto unknown to all but some poets and writers of fiction, but that certain real forms of knowing, of understanding, ways of changing one’s mind, have been excluded from philosophy. Exclusions made, I believe, because we have been too certain about the sense of the term ‘philosophy’ – letting that sense determine where we look and how we look for guidance and clarity. The importance that the philosophy/literature distinction brings to philosophy is not to be overcome by any claim pertaining that philosophy is, or is not (like) literature. The importance lies rather in this debate’s power to make us uncertain about both these notions. Good philosophy is often (if not always) uncertain about its own status as philosophy. When a philosopher, or a tradition of philosophical labourers, have reached consensus about what philosophy is, and how we must proceed (in an almost instrumental sense) in doing it, philosophy ends.

5.5 Concluding remarks In one sense, this chapter has been a reflection on a sentence of Wolfe’s: ‘there is the suggestion in Diamond, I think, that imaginative and literary projection can somehow achieve this instance what propositional, syllogistic philosophy cannot achieve (the non-conceptual, nonlogical force of “I know what it’s like to be a corpse”).’80 But we have also attained a richer picture of how the two-way movement of philosophy that Murdoch talks about may come about. The notion of deflection may be helpful in coming to see how words and world come apart and it makes it comprehensible that we may ‘choose’ (subconsciously or not) to be guided by faulty pictures. Diamond’s reading of Elisabeth Costello may furthermore help us see that the return to the ordinary, foothold, community, may be a struggle, an achievement, and it is also an achievement that does not boil down to a mere acceptance of ‘how we normally speak.’ The novel Elisabeth Costello, read in the way that Diamond suggests, is very far from (what Murdoch called) a pointing finger: there is no simple resolution or salvation offered to its reader. Coetzee’s mirror is truly a representation of ‘the battle between real people and images.’81 If we think that we have found such a pointing finger, Diamond has given us many reasons to doubt our conclusions. Elisabeth Costello may be said to have lost community and to be cut off from the world because of this loss. But her loss

80 81

Wolfe, ‘Exposures,’ 23. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 295.

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is intentional. She thinks everyone but her are turning our concepts in bizarre ways. If there is a ‘way out’ here, it may come from a recognition of just how big the contrast is between intellectualistic theories and real human difficulties. But (just like with Either/Or) there’s no simple either/or to choose between here. Not: Either Elisabeth Costello is right in urging us to ground our judgements in emotions and by reading poetry or ‘the philosophers’ are right in thinking about it as a difficulty that can only be solved by means of rational argumentation. Rather, Coetzee invites us to think about how we (his readers) inflect our concepts and to think about how we are to measure the distance between a life lived and theories about a life lived.82 The Black Prince and Elisabeth Costello are two novels in which philosophical sentences and theories are given prominent positions. But if I am right about The Black Prince and if Diamond is right about Elisabeth Costello there are deeper philosophical insights to be found in these novels if we take these philosophical sentences to belong to the world of the novel; if we follow Murdoch’s advice and think about them as mirrors in which we may (or may not) see the reflections of our own deflections.

82

A similar line of reasoning has been developed by Jonathan Lear in relation to Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, in ‘The Ethical Thought of J. M. Coetzee,’ in Raritan, a Quarterly Review, 28(1).

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6

Smashing Mirrors, Collecting the Pieces, Returning Our Words Regained Sense and the Philosophical Aspiration

6.1 The concept of a concept and the loss of concepts I started this investigation by painting a common picture of Murdoch’s philosophy and of how that philosophy supposedly relates to her fictional writings. That picture builds, it was argued, on two fundamental assumptions – and I really take them to be of the fundamental kind, which means that they are most likely to be unwittingly ‘made.’ One is that Murdoch’s philosophy is easily framed. The other is that the philosophical significance of her novels is to be measured against the extent to which her (easily framed) philosophical position is expressed. I described how these two assumptions come together with a particular view of what philosophy is: philosophy is the attempt to work out solutions to philosophical problems or answers to questions, more often than not, by means of measuring the pros and cons of competing theories (and, of course, by means of the communal labour of revising the main theories in competition). I do not think Murdoch belongs here. Her work, I argued, comes already at the stage of the problem formulation. She is continuously asking ‘What are we assuming when philosophy takes this form rather than that, when we consider this to be a relevant problem to ponder about but not that?’ Philosophical delineations of what counts as philosophically relevant are never neutral and one may say, with Murdoch, that the very idea that philosophy must proceed objectively hand in hand with the sciences is one ‘conceptual attitude’ among others.1 I have tried to show that when Murdoch says that we have suffered a major loss of concepts, we must keep in mind that words may stay the same while their concepts may change. ‘Words may mislead us here since words are often stable while concepts alter.’2 One source of linguistic confusions is thus related to an uncertainty about the particular relations that hold between words and concepts. Murdoch’s view of this distinction is not the most common one, and so it remains to say a few words about what her view is here and how it relates to my overall themes. 1 2

Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 92. Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 322.

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It is often assumed that the concept of the concept is invoked because there is too much fluctuation at the level of words. It may seem natural to say that what makes different utterances of a word, say ‘car,’ mean the same thing is that there is a concept ‘car’ which these particular utterances are instances of. The concept of blue unites all blue things and all shades of blue (fading, of course, into another concept); and strawberry, raspberry, blueberry all fall under the concept ‘berry.’ In short, what (a class of) words have in common is the concept. The concept is what grants us capability to move from the particular to the general. (This description is schematic and it does not capture the great variety of theories about the concept of the concept, but it is only meant to capture a general line of thinking that Murdoch’s thought challenges.) What one might neglect in speaking about the concept in these terms is that the essentialist aspirations that reside in the struggle for a true theory about the concept all pay tribute (unintentionally and unwillingly) to . . . diversity. The concept of the concept can never yield us essence alone; it will always form an emblem of the reality of linguistic diversity. This is not news. Nietzsche, for example, knew it. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what it unequal.3

This form of one-making tendency that is common in most conceptions of the concept often leads into suspicious metaphysical questions. We wish to hang generality on the concept of the concept, but we do not know what it ‘is,’ what form of existence ‘it’ has – and so speculation is spurred. For example, ‘the concept “leaf ” is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from . . . individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be “leaf ”—some kind of original form.’4 The concept of the concept – although having diversity built into it – thus easily leads to various forms of essentialism. This is not Murdoch’s concept of a concept. One might say that Murdoch’s use of the distinction between word and concept moves, and is motivated by, the same traditional interplay between particularity and generality; but there is a sense in which the order of things is reversed here. In Murdoch’s view, words tend to stay the same while concepts fluctuate. As we go through life, we habitually use the same words, but as our lives change our concepts change. Conceptual variation takes place at the level of concepts rather than words and conceptual variations depend on how a word is inflected, or turned, in one’s form 3

4

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,’ The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 46. Ibid.

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of life. This makes conceptual variations hard to detect and conceptual clarity difficult to achieve. To make things even more complicated, add historical changes of ways of living that are not initiated by, or fall back upon, an individual’s choice or action. Our concepts are continuously turned and altered on levels that are literally beyond the conscious, beyond the level of actions and choices. It is no wonder that we are never in full command of our (own) language. The Murdochian question about a loss of concepts that I have focused on, is not a question about which words one employs but about which concepts one invokes by them. Of course, it matters if we call upon words such as love or attraction, or jealousy or suspiciousness, or pretension or ambition, when we relate to our others. But love is not simply separated from attraction by means of being a different word (and falling under a different concept in that sense). Love can ‘be’ many different concepts. What concepts our words ‘stand for’ depend on how our words come to life and upon how we relate to them (their lives); upon how they function (or fail to function) – and we with them – in our lives as wholes. So in a sense, Murdoch’s distinction between words and concepts locates a kind of atemporal stability (as a deceptive form of stability) in words, and concepts fluctuate with time and with human projections. This is part of what makes room for the question if we are, as it were, true to our concepts, or if we use our words in unclear ways, dithering between different concepts although our words stay the same. (One may say that a Murdochian loss of sense is rather similar to a Kierkegaardian dithering between categories.) We may mean our words ‘incoherently’ and so we may not manage to mean with our words what we want them to mean.5 When Murdoch claims that we have lost our language she is not suggesting that we lack a specific range of words. But neither is she suggesting that our depleted vocabulary is senseless. For example, it is not as if the words ‘love’ or ‘human being’ have disappeared and it is not as if people who are in love and talk about love (now) necessarily are wrong about themselves. Just try to take this sentence seriously: ‘We who live now after the experience of Hitler and the Enlightenment do not know what love is or what a human being is, because we live now and not, say, 250 years ago.’ The renegotiation of our concepts, the sense of our words, is to some extent the result of slow, and unconscious, historical processes. Conceptual loss comes about because we have not renegotiated them, appropriated them in their changed form. It would be hasty to conclude that our world has changed to such an extent that the application of certain concepts now has become impossible. Her view is not, not really anyway, that there is some kind of ‘background-condition’ that our concepts require that has gone missing, so that now when the context is gone our words no longer make sense. Murdoch’s view is not MacIntyre’s. In After Virtue, MacIntyre famously argued that our moral notions have become empty, or dead, since the relevant context which made them meaningful have disappeared. In his view, ‘the language and appearances of morality still persist even though the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and 5

See Conant, ‘Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility,’ 265.

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then in part destroyed.’6 So the MacIntyrean version of a loss of concepts (which shares certain features with Anscombe’s claim made in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’7) is that there are conditions for the application of our moral terms that have gone missing.8 We use certain moral words but the conditions which make the intelligible have gone missing. MacIntyre suggested that emotivists such as for example Stevenson had, as it were, made the right diagnosis: there is nothing that separates morality from mere persuasion and propaganda. Hence, moral language, as we know it, is dead and gone. I think Diamond is entirely right when she highlights this difference between MacIntyre and Murdoch: ‘Murdoch is not saying, as Macintyre is, that we lack the kind of life within which such concepts as we need could be intelligently applied. He says we are naked irrational wills disguised as moral reasoners; she . . . says that what goes with our present depleted moral vocabulary is that we appear to be such wills.’9 Murdoch thought about this as a conflict between the picture of the human and the real human. Self-reflective practices and the reality of human life do not harmonize and this is the root of the problem. If we continue to picture ourselves as simply free rational agents acting in and against a world of neutral facts, there are real and important aspects of human life in language that have no room in that picture. It is as if we are unable, or unwilling, to recognize what we know. The deeper the picture penetrates our culture the harder it will be for us to understand ourselves. As I said: I think that Murdoch’s worst fear is that we will come to resemble our own confusion. But this is not to say that a mere introduction of new words and concepts would solve anything. The idea that the mere (re-)introduction of a new vocabulary could solve anything depends on a set of highly doubtful and unclear ‘premises.’ The idea that what is lacking is a set of words suggests that, on the one hand, we have a clear conception of something in our world about which we cannot think properly now; but we could if we only found the right words for ‘it.’ This idea depends on a suspect separation between thought and language: we know and understand the world without language and yet we need new words to know and understand it. One might say that the idea that the problem is that we are lacking a certain set of words throws us back into the Augustian picture of language (that Wittgenstein employed as the opening of his Philosophical Investigations) according to which thought and sense are somehow already in place before language and we only need to find the right words for them. Wittgenstein found this temptation expressed in William James’ work: ‘James: “our vocabulary is inadequate.” Then why don’t we introduce a new one? What would have to be the case for us to be able to?’10 The Jamesian view suggests a radical separation between thought and language and the response we should give to Wittgenstein’s questions is that we simply cannot know what we wish for here. I think Murdoch would 6

7 8 9 10

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 5. Also quoted in Diamond, ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ 256. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy.’ See Diamond, ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ 257. Ibid., 261f. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 610.

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agree with me here. Murdoch’s problem is not that she has a peculiar kind of moral (or religious) experience that she cannot put into words. This is not to say that we never run out of words or that we never actually find ourselves speechless. We do. We should also bear in mind that Wittgenstein did not take this problem lightly. The sentences just quoted from Wittgenstein are, for example, preceded by Wittgenstein recognizing his own temptation: ‘I should like to say: “These notes say something glorious, but I do not know what.” These notes are a powerful gesture, but I cannot put anything side by side with it that will serve as an explanation. A grave nod. James: “Our vocabulary . . .”.’11 There is, however, a sense in which these kinds of expressions that tempt James (and Wittgenstein) here are precisely not the kind of linguistic loss that Murdoch is talking about. Murdoch did not think that she was onto something deeply informative about human life and morality that cannot be said, except by means of powerful gestures and sentences that we think, say something deep and profound, even though we do not know what. In light of that temptation – that way of misunderstanding Murdoch’s claim about a loss of language and her call for a new vocabulary – it is important to stress that her difficulties, our difficulties, have a historical root and dimension. Murdoch does not mean to suggest that the difficulties in question have nothing to do with historical situatedness even though she does not endorse the MacIntyrean view that a particular form of life has gone missing so that the context that ‘enables’ a correct, or authentic, employment of these concepts has disappeared. We have seen how Murdoch’s loss of concepts is connected with the Enlightenment, with secularization and the emergence of what she called the Liberal man (the autonomous ‘I’ that has the possibility to freely and neutrally survey the world), the emergence of the scientific worldview and industrialized life. But it also connects with scientism: the philosophical view that not only is science a great thing that has given us, and will continue to give us, many great things, but science is something that concerns everything and all things worth knowing must be known scientifically. It’s also connected with G. E. Moore’s discussion of the naturalistic fallacy, with the more broadly held view that there’s a crucial difference between factual and evaluative statements, and with the positivistically grounded idea that the world comes in two halves: one factual and one ‘other’ (within which unknowable ‘things’ such as morals and religion lurk). In short, even though its root is in some sense always personal, cultural, scientific and philosophical aspects are intertwined with and contribute to this ‘loss.’ One common picture – that has not gone uncontested – is that these developments are all for the better. The revolt against a dominating church; the quest for democracy; the rise of science – how can we not think of these as developments, as that which have fostered us? There is something profound in Kant’s description of the Enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.’12 But this is not to say that one might ask, with Murdoch, if the children of the Enlightenment feared the future intelligently 11 12

Ibid. Immanuel Kant, ‘Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” ’ in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54.

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enough?13 We may or may not think about our times as secular. What is true is that with a diminishing Church and the death of God, human beings did not stop having the need to picture themselves as parts of wholes. One might actually, albeit somewhat hesitantly, say that the fact/value distinction is a proof of that point. Positivism’s sibling has always been mysticism. ‘The segregation of the factual world allows in both cases a stoical morality which verges towards mysticism.’14 And indeed, if we ‘absolutely separate fact and value we can say nothing about the latter.’15 Murdoch’s words must be taken quite literally here. ‘Separations’ are made. The fact/value distinction is not found but drawn. It is we who do the separation, and a separation means that they originally exist as intertwined (which is not to say that there are no facts), and if we try to remove the field of value from philosophy, it is bound to surface somewhere else. This is the birth of a human with split personality (publicly a scientist, privately spiritual). This is what makes carving up the world in separate spheres – carving, making cuts in a body – seem like a sensible idea, and this is what makes us prone to think that religious and ethical matters are subjective in the sense of private. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Murdoch, are united in the attempt to show the misguidedness of that kind of thinking. There is in Murdoch’s view a way in which all of these concerns connect with the widespread belief that inwardness is no longer a philosophically relevant topic, but is seen, rather, as a confused form of subjectivism caused by a (faulty) metaphysics. As we try to attain self-understanding by means of a vocabulary with the aid of concepts such as of action, reasons, judgements, decisions, choices, objectivity and rationality at its centre, and without any attempt to reach a sense of the individual’s struggle and her becoming, ideas of truthfulness or inwardness fall out of the picture. But if we can see subjective issues, not as something locked in a private mind but as a question about how the ‘I’ relate to others and objects, subjective issues cease to be epistemologically private. Put otherwise, the subjective, rightly understood, always already resides in the realm that contemporary metaphysics (or ‘epistemology’) wants to call objective. Murdoch can help us see how the tendency to lock the ‘subjective’ to an inner private realm comes together with a specific picture of what we are. In this passage, we can see how the themes under discussion here – the loss of language, perfectionism, transcendence, morals, art, eros – are converging: Life is made up of details. We compartmentalise it for reasons of convenience, dividing the aesthetic from the moral, the public from the private, work from pleasure. We feel we have to simplify, and in our busy lives cannot care about minimals. Yet we are always deploying and directing our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it, and it is always easier to do a thing a second time. “Sensibility” is a word which may be in place here. Aesthetic insight connects with moral insight, respect for things connects with respect for persons. (Education.) 13 14 15

See Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 211. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 40.

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Happenings in the consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have a moral “colour.” All sorts of momentary sensibilities to other people, too shadowy to come under the heading of manners of communication, are still parts of moral activity. (“But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly.)16

Philosophy tends to simplify (often for good reason), but simplification may turn into distortion. In order to see the details clearly, we need to perceive lovingly, that is, we need to let the object (or the person) be, not want it (him/her) to change. In order to perceive lovingly, one needs to overcome one’s own limitations and distortions. Concepts transform slowly and gradually at a ‘historical’ level while words stay the same. At a personal level, a true understanding of one’s concepts may be obscured by the fact that the life I lead with my words may have turned their concepts without my recognition. Add to that the fact that theoretical reflection (and perhaps specifically philosophical theorization) tends to move towards simplification and generalization, and although these aims are not simply wrong (but often well motivated and even desirable), they may make an imaginative attainment of conceptual sense impossible. In the end it must be a question of detailed examinations of how our concepts are turned. Murdoch demands a great deal of us, for it is also clear that we might be in a situation in which we simply cannot see how and into what our concepts have turned. We are (always) in the midst of them. Even though the problem of a ‘general loss of concepts,’ as thematized in her essays of the 1950s, were written (at least in part) as a response to a specifically scientistic and naturalistic phase of modern moral philosophy, the claim about a language lost cannot be reduced to a mere reaction against a specific set of narrow theories. She speaks about something that troubles us, our consciousness (where we live), our Weltanschauung. Philosophy is, like literature, a mirror of its age. It is true that a great deal has happened in analytic moral philosophy since then, and that there are philosophical attempts to make philosophy see the width of morality. (I am thinking about the renewed interests in virtue-ethics and in the historicity of moral thinking, of moral thinking in the wake of Wittgenstein’s work and of the more generally widespread turn towards literature in moral philosophy – represented by diverse thinkers such as for example Filippa Foot, Elisabeth Anscombe, Martha Nussbaum, Raimond Gaita, Cora Diamond, Mary Midgley, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Stanley Cavell, etc.) But worldviews are not (easily) crafted and hence not easily turned around. Contemporary philosophy is, in a deep sense, responding to the same world as Murdoch was – and even though the number of similar responses has increased, they are still responses to a worldview. That there are more responses to a phenomenon should not be seen as evidence of its demise. These difficulties have multiple roots and come together with the worldview that guides us (and so, our philosophizing). We are in the midst of it all, which makes the terrain hard to survey. Discussing the hardness of trying to account for a sense 16

Ibid., 495.

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of unity in our times, Murdoch said: ‘The conceptual loss involved poses moral and theoretical problems for the sceptics, for philosophers and artists and demythologizing theologians. Can, and should, what is lost be recovered in some other way? In such contexts we see how deep metaphysical imagery goes down into the human soul. Farther than we can see?’17 The problem concerning a Murdochian ‘general loss of concepts’ can be said to have a fourfold root. (i) Historical changes. Changes in forms of life are slow, not simply implemented, hard to survey, and there’s no reason to suspect that we can choose, by will, to evade the course taken once we have discovered that a path is leading us astray (or in circles). Sometimes it is true to say that there is no, and can be no, subject in charge (which is not to say that there is no subject). Thus, we need a historically sensitive linguistic method. (ii) Human one-making. If, as Murdoch claims, ‘one-making’ and simplification come naturally to us, then one might say that it is human to evade linguistic particularity and the complexities of human life. We should at least be able to say that it is no wonder that philosophy tends to include the movement where diversity and the personal are deflected. At a more general level, one might say that it is not hard to see that having become ‘too grand’18 is grounded in well-motivated practices. ‘I may be argued that we ought always to assume that perfect communication and disinterested reflection about facts can precede moral judgment, and it is true that such an attitude may often be desirable. But this is itself a Liberal ideal.’19 The flight from the ordinary is, one might say, a real desire. We do not want to be less grand than what these fine pictures tell us that we are. Thus, philosophical method must incorporate a struggle to see when one-makings are called for, and when and in what sense these may distort our perception. We must learn to take them for what they are. (iii) Linguistic blindness, conceptual blindness. Murdoch’s analysis of how concepts change even though the words stay the same makes clear to us that clarity about one’s language is something that, on the one hand, is hard to attain and, on the other, is something that (like one’s knowledge about one’s other) can never be completed. Since concepts are turned and renegotiated, our ‘philosophy of language’ must continuously be open to change. If what we see depends on how our conceptual tissue is formed, what we say will be ‘formed’ by that. ‘[T]he notion that moral differences are conceptual (in the sense of being differences of vision) and must be studied as such is unpopular in so far as it makes impossible the reduction of ethics to logic, since it suggests that morality must, to some extent at any rate, be studied historically. This does not of course imply abandoning the linguistic method, it rather implies taking it seriously.’20

17 18 19 20

Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 85. Murdoch, ‘On “God ” and “Good”,’ 338 Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 84. Ibid.

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(iv) Language is lived (and thus not fully understood when it is merely observed from an external point of view). The fact that the question about a loss of concepts cannot be disconnected from how we lead our lives – a fact that is intertwined with Murdoch’s view of the word-concept relation – makes it plausible to say that we, we competent speakers of a language, can be mistaken about our own language. As in the case of Kierkegaard, one may be dithering between categories, juxtaposing two concepts by means of using one word, thus failing to mean what one wants to mean. This is one way in which a human being can fail to be who she really is. Since language and culture are mutually forming our Weltunshauung, we are indeed drenched in our philosophical problems. This is why Murdoch’s accusation that our culture being formed by a ‘flimsy and shallow’ concept of the human being can be compared to the ‘dreadful illusion’ that formed Kierkegaard’s ‘Christendom.’ A consequence, undesired perhaps, is that we must struggle to refrain from thinking that we have managed to climb outside the illusion. If language truly is ours, shared, then so are the illusions that it harbours. As Lear says: ‘when a culture is in the grip of a vibrant illusion, philosophical discourse about our ability to step back in reflection can function as an ideology, reinforcing our confinement in the name of liberating us from it.’21

6.2 Smashing mirrors, returning to the ordinary One may say that core of Murdoch’s moral vision may be said to be captured in this claim of hers: ‘the spiritual pilgrimage (transformation—renewal—salvation) is the centre and essence of morality, upon whose success and well-being the health of other kinds of moral reaction and thinking is likely to depend.’22 One of my major claims is that we cannot fully understand this view of hers if we do not see it as a form of response to that fact that we (Murdoch included) are suffering from a ‘general loss of concepts.’ If we do not take that into account, we will fail to see just how difficult her philosophy is and we would be forced to simply reject Murdoch when she claims that her view requires ‘the reintroduction of certain concepts which in the recent past have been regarded as metaphysical in some sense which made them impossible.’23 It would be as if she could simply state her new vocabulary and we would then be able to adopt it by will (or choose not to). No problem! Spiritual pilgrimage, perfectionism – as the recognition that we can never cease to learn who and what the other is, together with the thought that truthfulness requires the patient attention that ‘lets the object be’ – harbour a form of transcendence, but I do not think that it is right to say that Murdoch thereby wants to gesture towards a form of transgression into another realm or the realization of something ideal. Transcendence is, in Murdoch’s view, a form of recovery of our concepts and, so, a return home – it 21 22 23

Lear, A Case for Irony, 8. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 367. Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ 99.

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contains the movement of trying to bring into view concepts that we have theorized away.24 The avoidance of jargon and the struggle to return to the ordinary is not the attempt to close philosophy or to capsulate our sense, but the struggle to reclaim something that has been lost. Returning our words is returning us to our concepts, to make them ours again. It is, as Murdoch says, a ‘return to “the beginning”, which involves discovering what “the beginning” is.’25 One might further clarify Murdoch’s view of the philosophical movement away from the ordinary and then back to it again, by saying that transcendence is not transgression. She is not trying to teach us a way to cross a line that contemporary culture forbids us to. The overcoming of the deadlock that may be created by being stuck with a concept idling, by being unable to fully carry the sense of one’s words, is transcendence as a return to the ordinary, is the return of our words. Isn’t overcoming obstacles noble enough? As I have shown, Murdoch does not claim that the human life has changed to such an extent that the concepts she wants to reawaken are simply dead and gone – she does not think that the loss is merely due to the fact that the world has become different from what it used to be. Neither does she say that the problem is due to a lack of words – which means to say that the difficulties involved cannot be solved by means of inventive uses of language. Human life is similar enough to what it has been before, to be in need of the kind of self-examination that we are blocking ourselves from. Her solution to the problem of a loss of concepts is thus a retracing of linguistic deflections, serving to take us ‘back’: we are blind to something that we at some level already know. We earn our concepts by recovering them in their changed form – we move from idling concepts back to working ones. This kind of blindness is hardly ever a question of unmotivated attempts to escape the ordinary, to make the fluctuating details of our everyday lives simpler by means of theoretical generalizations and abstractions. (One of the major points of Chapter 5 was to bring that into view.) It is quite understandable that we might want to simplify that which is too cluttered, and if a way of picturing ourselves runs deep into a culture we should not assume that it is easy to, as it were, rise above it. Murdoch doesn’t claim to be free from the faults that surround her. We should not assume that deflected philosophy – in which real sense is theorized away – is based on simple mistakes, or that it is ill-argued. Just because we come to the conclusion that Murdoch was right in claiming that a loss of a moral and political vocabulary has made us unable to fully examine and understand who we are, it does not follow that everyone but Murdoch lacks self-consciousness or self-reflection. The pictures of the human that Murdoch challenges are, of course, well-argued and self-critical. That is how pictures grow strong. Again, Lear’s elaboration of Kierkegaard’s works in relation to the concept 24

25

My reading here is the exact opposite of the one presented by Antonaccio. She claims that Murdoch’s thought does not fit well with the ‘current distrust of “theory” and the turn to historicist and contextual forms of moral thinking that have become a familiar feature of contemporary moral particularism. . . . [Murdoch] believed that it was precisely the failure of moral philosophy to engage in sustained theoretical and metaphysical reflection (such as that of a Plato or a Hegel) that had led it to suffer “a general loss of concepts, a loss of a moral and political vocabulary”.’ Antonaccio, A Philosophy to Live By, 212. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 296.

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of irony is helpful. ‘Christendom itself contains discomfort, disagreement, and reflection on its own practice. It is thus a mistake to—and it diminishes Kierkegaard’s point—to think of Christendom as unreflective or unself-critical. Christendom is the social pretense of Christianity, the myriad ways in which the social world and its inhabitants put themselves forward as Christians.’26 I have also followed Conant’s reading of Kierkegaard to make clear a related point: it is by their own light that they are not Christians. People living in Christendom invest a great deal of energy and argumentation to ground their beings as Christians, and yet they fail to be true to their concepts. If it is the case that we are now living in a time in which our vocabulary is depleted, this is not because we lack the will to understand ourselves, but because we want it too much. (Stare too hard on a single spot, and the world fades away). That a philosophical problem is a problem of the will and not the intellect27 does not mean that human will is lacking. This is one reason why I feel inclined to talk, as follower of Cavell of sorts, about the return to the ordinary (becoming attuned with one’s concepts again) as a struggle or achievement. Murdochian perfectionism, as moving towards ‘perfection glimpsed but never reached,’28 is a struggle to become who we are. Part of ‘becoming who we are’ consists of discovering that we are, or have been, blind to something that we already knew. We can see this as a link between Murdoch’s analysis of the word-concept relation and her claim that we lack a sense of original sin. A human being can fail to be true to her concepts and because of that be wrong about herself. That we lack a sense of original sin contributes to our blindness: we do not expect to be found guilty because of what we are, but only of what we do. We do not expect to be found guilty of not knowing our concepts but only of what we say. That we know our language makes these failures hard to detect. Knowing language blinds us to the loss of it. My reading of The Philadelphia Story was meant to bring the connection between a loss of concepts, perfectionism and ‘becoming who we are’ into view. Tracy is guilty not of any suspicious actions or misbehaviour but of not being true to herself. This fact dawns on her as she is reflected, mirrored, by a manifold of admiring men who all use the same words to describe her – this is who she is (becoming). What has happened to Tracy is that something – say, the concept of marriage – now appears unclear to her. To borrow a force from Lear’s elaboration of the concept of irony again, one might say that Tracy is forced to experience irony, the difficulty of ‘Learean’ pretense, the hardness of claiming to be the legitimate heir of one’s mother’s tongue: ‘The experience of irony thus seems to be a peculiar species of uncanniness—in the sense that something that has been familiar returns to me as strange and unfamiliar. And in its return it disrupts my world.’29 Tracy was blind to something that she already knew. As she becomes clear on how she wants the relevant concepts to be inflected in her life, which course of action that is to be followed comes naturally. (Hypocrisy usually ends when you realize that you are a hypocrite.) 26 27 28 29

Lear, A Case for Irony, 12. See Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript, 300. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 304. Lear, A Case for Irony, 15.

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6.3 Literature, distance and the return of our words All this helps clarify what philosophical readings of literature may do and what they cannot do. We may say, with Murdoch, that ‘taking the linguistic method seriously’ requires that we strive to become clear on historical, contextual and personal matters concerning our lives in language, and that we cannot avoid being moralists (in the sense that we cannot stop being moral beings), and that succeeding in meaning what one wants to mean may require an effort to reclaim one’s concepts.30 These remarks all seem to operate on a methodological level, so there is a sense in which too much work remains to be done after those thoughts have been conquered. ‘If . . . we hold that a man’s morality is not only his choices but his vision, then this may be deep, ramified, hard to change and not easily open to argument.’31 Is this where literature comes into play? Murdoch is running out of arguments? Yes, but not because someone shrewder may come up with them but because she is pushing us into regions where what we normally call ‘arguments’ seem to have no place. We do not know what it would mean to argue here. If conceptual investigations is philosophy’s path, and if conceptual differences are ‘differences of vision,’32 we will, inevitably, come to a point where all that is left to say is ‘Why don’t you see what I see?’ The accusation ‘You do not know your own language’ that seems to be implied when the philosopher who proceeds from the ordinary tell us ‘what we should say when,’33 will always fail if it is not made clear that this is an invitation (to a self-examination) and not a proposed rule. There is a sense in which literature comes in precisely as a response to this loss of concepts. Literature is important because ‘what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons.’34 The philosophical thrust of literature is that it may enable us to ‘re-discover a sense of the density of our lives.’35 Differences of vision are conceptual differences, and since what our visions are cannot be disconnected from how we seek ourselves out, how we picture ourselves, ‘[l]iterature must always represent a battle between real people and images.’36 Murdoch’s call for ‘a new vocabulary of attention’ – a vocabulary that literature may help to bring into view – is not about seeing the world anew filtered by new words but of a renewed sense, of a return to something we have lost. The new is a re-discovery. ‘In morals and politics we have stripped ourselves of concepts. Literature, in curing its own ills, can give us a new vocabulary of experience, and a truer picture of

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

And the word ‘may’ in that sentence earns it lace because it would be plainly false to claim that this is something we do all the time. (‘Pass me the soy sauce.’ ‘Yes, as soon as I have managed to claim my position as the rightful heir of the concept ‘pass.’) Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ 84. Ibid. J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses,’ 181. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ 293. Ibid., 294. (Italics added). Ibid., 295.

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freedom. With this, renewing our sense of distance, we may remind ourselves that art too lives in a region where all human endeavour is failure.’37 It strikes me as odd to say that these remarks should warrant the claim that Murdoch seeks to express her philosophy in her novels. If her philosophy – her call for reminders, renewed sense, re-discovery, as a way to teach ourselves density and distance – is expressed in her novels, then ‘her philosophy’ is expressed in (nearly) all novels. If what literature teaches us are reminders of what a conceptual life is like, how concepts are turned in relation to various forms of life, if it teaches us distance, making clear wherefrom our concepts come, by means of mirroring such forms of life, presenting pictures of real distances, then it does not put forward philosophical theses – and if it does, its relevance for philosophy lies not, not merely anyway, in those presentations, but in inviting its readers to ponder the relevant ‘distance’ of those wordings and by forcing reading upon us; that is, inviting us to seek clarity concerning how these wordings come to life, or fail to attain vitality, in that particular form of life. Literature teaches us two lessons: that of density, where we learn to rediscover ‘a sense of the density of our lives,’ and that of distance, where we learn where our concepts come from. Literature forces us to ask: what is the weight of this concept in this situation, for this particular person? Similar thoughts have been expressed by Cavell: Words come to us from a distance; they were there before we were; we are born into them. Meaning them is accepting the fact of their condition. To discover what is being said to us, as to discover what we are saying, is to discover the precise location from which it is said; to understand why it is said from just there, and at that time. The art of fiction is to teach us distance – that the sources of what is said, the character of whomever says it, is for us to discover.38

This is a sense in which we may say that art (and literature) is ‘the most educational of all human activities’39 and not ‘didactic or educational.’40 Learning, coming to understand distance, is a return to the ordinary in, at least, this sense: words and concepts are again (after we have learnt to understand density and distance) not hovering above us in need of theoretical legitimization, but are grounded, anchored, in a particular form of life. Literature is ordinary language philosophy (but ordinary language philosophy is no ordinary philosophy, and is not what it ordinarily is thought to be). This sense of the philosophical thrust of literature is hard to attain if one is guided by faulty (or much too simplistic) pictures of language. This is why Murdoch’s discussions

37 38 39 40

Ibid. (Italics added). Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 64. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 85. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ 218.

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of the concept of the concept and her claim that ethics must be studied ‘historically’ must be in place if these kind of philosophical insights are to be attained from reading literature. Diamond makes this connection clear. [W]e have to get rid of the idea that using a concept is a matter of using it to pick out what falls under the concept and what does not, if we see instead that life with a concept involves doings and thinkings and understandings of many sorts, into which one’s grasp of the concept enters in different ways, the we can accept that coming to understand a conceptual life other than our own involves exercise of concepts belonging to that way of life.41

This does not mean that literature always mirrors ‘success’ and is ‘exemplary for conduct.’ When we are employing literature in order to teach ourselves ‘distance,’ to see where words come from, the philosophical ‘success’ of that teaching does not depend on it picturing successful uses only. That words may come, as it where, from nowhere, becomes an equally important lesson to learn – it’s just that we then get a picture of a human being who fails to carry the sense of her words. Success or failure depends on something. That is ‘distance.’ Even though literature is exceptionally well suited for this task of teaching us density and distance it would be preposterous to say that it alone can do it (and there is no reason to assume that this is all that literature does or that it always does it). For the philosophical thrust of literature that has been revealed here (there are, of course, others) is that it may make us – we who are struggling with philosophical problems – uncomfortable in the certainty with which we repudiate our communality, insecure about the sense of the concepts we are seeking to invoke, thereby forcing us to once again try to reclaim sense. Literature does not say something that philosophy is unable to say because of its supposedly limited reach or potency. Can we not nonetheless say that is shows something that philosophy only can say? Of course we can say that, especially given how philosophy looks today; but we must have something to say about that kind of showing as well. ‘Shows’ as opposed to what? Literature shows us, teaches us, distance and density by means of words. Doesn’t it? My emphasis on the fact that literature teaches us density and distance has its parallel in Murdoch’s claim that in a novel ‘one sees the moral problem in a real context.’42 A (good) piece of literature brings into view how concepts are carried or not by people in specific contexts. In that sense, it philosophizes, but not my means of presenting theses. The consequence of the view developed here is that Murdoch’s novels are to be seen ‘as philosophy’ in the same sense that nearly all works of literature ‘are philosophy’ – and that form of significance cannot be measured by means of asking how many of Murdoch’s philosophical theses are expressed in her novels. She

41 42

Diamond, ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ 276. Chevalier, ed., ‘Closing Debate, Recontres avec Iris Murdoch,’ 90.

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paints realistic pictures of what we look like today, how we picture ourselves, how our conceptual tissue looks. That’s it. It’s enough. Literature may help us in coming to terms with a Murdochian loss of concepts by forcing us to ask questions such as: What does the human being portrayed look like? How does she understand herself? What concepts does she employ to make sense of herself and her word? Does she succeed? Are these concepts my concepts? Are they (really) hers? If we say that the persons we see mirrored are real – that is, if we can picture them as sharing our world – then the way concepts are turned, the way their words make sense or the way the characters fail to carry their words, show us something about the way our concepts are turned. This is one reason why I often find myself bewildered when I read Murdoch-commentaries, for it is often assumed that the vocabulary Murdoch thinks of as lost is not only ‘here’ but makes perfects sense. To me, however, it is clear that many of Murdoch’s fictional characters are flimsy and shallow and that they often use grand words that do not resonate well with how their lives take shape. It is not, however, always clear that these characters are unlikely. What literature brings into view here is not something that philosophy is unable to do: it’s just that it, in the shape it most often takes today, doesn’t. Speaking about Murdoch, literature and the notion of a human being, Diamond writes: I said that writers can illuminate and also elaborate and deepen our concept of a human being. The same can be said about some philosophers. I could not say such things except as a reflection on my experience of reading, on what I take to be not just my own experience. Reading involves in various ways a sensitivity to the conceptual world in which the work lies. Responsiveness to features of a work which determine its relation to a network of concepts and values, critical awareness of those features, is part of reading with the whole of one’s mind. But that is not a point about reading . . . . A responsiveness to the conceptual world of someone’s remarks is part of an ordinary responsiveness to words.43

This, so it seems to me, is more or less completely in line with Murdoch’s view on the relation between philosophy and literature. Philosophy and literature may still be said to be ‘completely different operations’ even though we claim that literary works can be philosophy, can do philosophy. The way these two seemingly opposing strands of thought come together is through the notion of the artwork as an autonomous whole and by means of us not clinging on too hard to the idea of authorial intent. By teaching us where words come from, novels are philosophy. That can only be seen, of course, by means of a form of reflection upon it. Alternatively, it requires (and I actually think that this is when literature displays its strongest philosophical thrust) that the literary presentation simply jolts us out of a specific conceptual conviction. Neither of these

43

Diamond, ‘Losing Your Concepts,’ 273.

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forces of literature requires that a work must have a philosophical view put into it by its author if it is to be philosophically significant. These forces are not what we see when we recognize merely that a particular literary work illustrates an already attained and developed philosophical idea or position. One may say that if novels can be philosophy, in the sense developed here, a great deal of philosophical work is still to be done when we are done with a novel: it falls back on how we relate to what we read. Conceptual clarity requires conceptual responsiveness. Fine words (sensitivity, responsiveness, attunement, responsibility, etc.) are seductive, but there is no single method to learn and then go on to apply here. There are no guarantees that one will become sensitive, responsive, attuned or responsible by means of reading literature. Things are never that simple. We don’t become good by knowing moral theories or Christians by means of knowing what the Bible says, and we don’t become conceptually sensitive by knowing that literature may train our conceptual sensitivities. It will always fall back on how we relate to the conceptual world we have in front of us. In a sense, literature’s strength is that it is so like our everyday lives in language and so unlike philosophy. One might say that it is often (but not always) the clash between the realistic picture of our world represented in a work of art and our philosophical expectations that make philosophy ‘happen,’ that invests the literary work with its profound philosophical significance. I must caution my reader not to make too much of these claims, for I am not attempting to put forward a theory about the philosophical significance of literature in general and neither am I in the business of proclaiming what philosophy per se is, must be or should be. I am trying to understand a Murdochian loss of concepts and how that kind of problem is to be dealt with philosophically, and how literature may assist us here. It is true that I think that Murdoch can help us see more clearly what’s wrong with a great number of philosophical theories and perspectives, and it is true that I take the kind of difficulty under discussion here to be central to philosophy. But it would be preposterous to go on from those observations to say ‘this is what philosophy must be like.’ Rather, what Murdoch can help us see is that we should be very cautious about delineating philosophy. Philosophy exists, like sense, where we find it. We can find it in literature, and what we find in literature may help us in coming to clarity about our struggles with loss of concepts. More often than not, literature can do so by not being philosophy as we know it. Instead, it brings into view precisely those regions of our lives in language that we tend to discard when philosophizing. If philosophy is a flight from the ordinary, literature can be the return. (But it will not be that – though it may be something else of great importance – if it is, merely an expression or an illustration of an already achieved philosophical view.) There is a sense in which the unexpected and the normal coincide in literature so as to challenge philosophy and philosophy’s self-confidence. [Literature] is something in which we indulge spontaneously, and so might seem to be nearer to play, and to the vast irresponsible variety of play. Literary modes are very natural to us, very close to ordinary life and the way we live as reflective beings. . . . So in a way as word-users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we

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live and breathe literature, we are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interesting forms out of experience which perhaps originally seemed dull or incoherent.44

Many of Murdoch’s commentators have harkened Murdoch’s emphasis on how we are artists in our everyday lives, but this implied thought has remained rather muffled: the difficulty of philosophy and the difficulty of literature are strikingly different – not because they are about different worlds or present varying claims about being true to it – but because there’s something unnatural to philosophy (and something very natural to literature). Philosophy is difficult to us because it exists by removing our natural flow of words; literature is difficult (to interpret) because it does not remove our natural flow of words. I have claimed that literature is most significant philosophically speaking when it is not philosophy (as we know it), or when it does something else other than what philosophy (as we know it) does. Another way to put this point would be to say that when, say, one of Murdoch’s characters utters a sentence that has the sound of philosophy, what matters here is not the lines we are able to draw to Murdoch’s philosophy, but that this man said that thing in these circumstances and was met with this or that response from that particular individual. For example, a sentence such as ‘Love brings with it . . . a vision of selflessness’45 may very well be of lesser importance philosophically speaking than the utterance ‘What’s that bloody smell?’46 Part of why I want to stress that utterances like ‘What’s that bloody smell?’ may be more significant than what appears to be overt philosophical theses (but which are, as we have seen, quite often mere ‘echoes’) comes from the fact that we need to learn much more than what these utterances (or echoes) manage to convey (if they convey anything). A large part of that ‘more’ comes from the work as a whole, for it is only by means of the rest of the book that we are able to, as it were, measure the distances that Murdoch and Cavell talked about. That is, if ‘words come from somewhere’ is an important, maybe even necessary, lesson that we may have to go through, then that is more relevant than the fact that a character spoke in an unmistakably philosophical voice. Furthermore, we need to be able to measure that distance, those kinds of distances, in order to be able to say anything of worth about these ‘unmistakably philosophical voices.’ How else are we to tell if what we read are mere echoes or real uses? More concretely: in the context of The Black Prince, we see that ‘Love brings with it . . . a vision of selflessness’ is nothing more than the sound of philosophy because Bradley is completely unable to attend to his love, because the smell of strawberries matters more to him than Julian does. We may say that it is true that ‘Love brings with it . . . a vision of selflessness,’ but if that is true, we must also say that Bradley teaches us nothing about that truth, but a great deal about what it means to not love and to not be selfless. We don’t really need literature to teach us that a sentence like ‘Love brings with it . . . a vision of selflessness’ has a philosophical sound to it. That is something that the 44 45 46

Murdoch, ‘Philosophy and Literature,’ 6f. Pearson, ‘The Black Prince,’ 210. Ibid., 266.

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sentence wears on its sleeve. Measuring the sense of such a sentence, weighing it, trying to take it in, to learn to own it as one’s own, cannot be done without measuring the distances. The ‘philosophical expression’ on its own, gives us nothing to go on. The words with which I opened this book – its ‘motto’ – are Cavell’s: ‘The return of a word requires the recovery of its object for us.’47 I have tried to show that one of the most fruitful ways to think of the philosophical significance of Murdoch’s novels – and indeed of novels in general – lies in teaching us distance. This does not mean that it is the only thing literature can do. But it is an important thing. In the case of Murdoch, for example, it is far more important philosophically, than is the fact that she wrote about people who knew a lot of philosophy rather than about boatmen.48 I take these words of Murdoch’s to be touching upon how words are to be reclaimed, sense regained: ‘We need and want to come home to what is categorical not hypothetical, to return to the present, where we also and essentially live.’49 In short: we need to return to conceptual elasticity. Concepts need to be earned. You have not understood a concept if you can only use it in the way you have been taught. The further projection (as Cavell would talk about it), the unforeseen (as Murdoch might have said) is in some sense of the term embedded in the first (carried, owned, understood) concept. These thoughts, I take it, constitute the real challenge to anyone who wants to stress that a concept just is a certain form of thing that has a (given) set of properties or features. All this, I take it, comes out of Murdoch’s view of the interconnections between understanding, inwardness and the nature of concepts – a view which she shares with, and which clearly is informed by, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. Literature teaches us (among other things) how words are cast and recast, carried or lost – it shows us where they come from – and so leaves it up to us to judge whether we are their masters, or under their spell, or in an illusion of sense or (perhaps) misguided and confused in our philosophical quests to evade the ordinary. Since literature teaches us distance and calls upon us to respect ‘its’ teachings, it also can make clear this fairly difficult thought: to regain community, to be at home in our world, to be attuned with it if you wish, requires that I, personally, am carrying and taking responsibility for my words, and that I strive to remain open to the possibility that I may fail to do so, that I may not know my language. The understanding of distance is (also) the understanding of togetherness and intimacy. Notice that when Murdoch claims that ‘We need and want to come home to what is categorical not hypothetical, to return to the present, where we also and essentially live’ she must be taken to mean that we are not home now, that our way of understanding morality and moral life – the moral dimensions of our lives in language – is at a distance from where we ‘essentially live.’ In trying to make morals clear to us, methodological convictions have forced us (and this ‘us’ thus includes me and Murdoch) to become outcasts, evicted, self-evicted. We may say that Murdoch encourages us to take Plato’s cave analogy quite literally: we are chained if we only stare at a wall trying to capture 47 48 49

Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 64. Murdoch, ‘Philosophy and Literature,’ 19f. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 305.

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the essence of things by means of looking at simplified forms, and we need to get out of the cave, come up to the light in which the human being lives, and in which France is hexagonal, cars come in a thousand shapes and a million colours, and in which ‘we have a different image of courage at forty from that which we had at twenty.’50 Philosophy (often) springs from a removal of the human and the recovery of the object for philosophy is the recovery of the human language, and the recovery of the human language is the acknowledgement of the distance that we imposed in trying to escape our finitude and overcome our self-created exile – distance forgotten, community lost. Perhaps the most difficult question we have to face is how to make our words our own. Thus literature? Well, yes it may help – sometimes with matchless power and precision. But it does not acquire its peerless power by transcending the way language functions in our everyday lives but by helping us see that words come from somewhere and (should) belong to someone. We may say that community often is to be found in the acknowledgement of our separateness – because human beings, just like words, come from somewhere. When philosophy begins in a loss of language, the attainment of a sense (which may include an acknowledgement of distance) is a search for community, is a search for reason.

50

Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ 322.

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—, ‘The Existentialist Political Myth,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]). —, ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Poets,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]). —, ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999). —, The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine (London: Penguin, 1976 [1974]). —, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001). —, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]). Nagel, Thomas, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ The Philosophical Review, 83(4): (1974). Nicol, Bran, ‘Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel,’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, eds. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). —, ‘The Curse of The Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative,’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,’ The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982). —, ‘Twilight of the Idols,’ in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982). Nussbaum, Martha, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”: Love and Vision in Murdoch’s The Black Prince,’ in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays, ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). —, ‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”: Love and Vision in Murdoch’s The Black Prince,’ Poetics Today 25(4): (2004). —, ‘ “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible”: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature,’ The Journal of Philosophy, 82(10): (1985). —, ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). —, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). —, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). —, ‘Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?’ Journal of Ethics, 3: (1999). Parfit, Derek, ‘Overpopulation and the Quality of Life,’ in Applied Ethics, ed. Peter Singer, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Phillips, D. Z., ‘Authorship and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,’ in Wittgenstein and Religion, ed. D. Z. Phillips (London: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Pihlström, Sami, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2011). Plato, ‘The Republic,’ in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, associate editor D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1997). Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960).

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Robjant, David, ‘Who Killed Arnold Baffin? Iris Murdoch and Philosophy by Literature,’ forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature. Rose, W. K., ‘Iris Murdoch, Informally,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003). Rowe, Ann, and Horner, Avril, ‘Introduction: Art, Morals and “The Discovery of Reality,” ’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, eds. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Sagare, S. B., ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch,’ Modern Fiction Studies, 47(3): (2001). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Taylor and Francis, 1956). —, What is Literature? translated by Bernard Frechtman, with an introduction by David Caute (Methuen, 1967 [1948]). Shakespeare, William, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edition, eds. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). Steiner, George, ‘Foreword,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]). Stevens Heusel, Barbara, ‘A Dialogue with Iris Murdoch,’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003). Tagore, Rabindranath, Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a collection of rose translations made by the author from the original Bengali, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, new edition (New York: MacMillan, 1920). The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor (Warner Brothers, 1940). Tracy, David, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Many Faces of Platonism,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, edited by Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). Weston, Michael, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good (London: Routledge, 2001). Widdows, Heather, The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, revised edition, edited by G. H. von Wright in Collaboration with Heikki Nyman; revised edition of the text by Alois Pichler; translated by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). —, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). —, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, transl. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). —, Public and Private Occasions, edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Normann (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). —, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, edited by Rush Rhees (New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1979). —, The Big Typescript: TS 213, German-English Scholars’ Edition, edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). —, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinnes (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001 [1922]).

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—, Zettel, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007 [1967]). Wolfe, Cary, ‘Exposures,’ in Philosophy and Animal Life, eds. Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Wolfe, Peter, A Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966).

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Index aesthete (esthete) 160–1, 177, 180 aesthetic reflection 88–9, 93, 123, 136, 172 aesthetics 15, 63, 97, 99 Altorf, Marije 74 An Accidental Man 166 analytic statement 61 anamnesis 7, 60, 112, 163 animal(s) 99, 190, 193–6, 198–200, 204, 206 Anscombe, Elisabeth 62, 81, 148, 214, 217 Antonaccio, Maria 17, 39, 41–2, 47–9, 58–9, 220 Apollo 25–6, 36, 51, 158 argumentation 10, 17–18, 38, 59, 79, 110, 117, 127, 137–8, 175, 182, 188–9, 191, 193–7, 199–201, 206, 208, 210 Aristotelianism 22, 45 art 3–6, 17–20, 27, 34–7, 42, 44–6, 48, 51, 57, 60, 62–8, 70–3, 78, 80, 82, 109–10, 112, 151–3, 156–64, 167–9, 172, 178–9, 181–3, 185–7, 216, 223, 226 artwork 5, 37, 48, 67–8, 71, 110, 141, 225 and morals 20, 63, 65–6 painting 19, 52, 67, 71 self-containedness of 66–8, 70, 155 assertions 44, 193 attention 3, 7, 19, 26, 43, 47, 62, 75, 78, 95, 105, 112, 120, 136, 139, 144–7, 159, 162, 169, 182–3, 219, 222 attentive 19, 27, 32, 112, 160 Austin, J. L. 87, 126, 222 author 4, 6, 18, 25, 27, 36, 42–3, 54–5, 59, 71, 79, 91–2, 94, 102, 110, 123, 138, 142, 151–5, 159, 187, 196, 226 authorial intent 70–1, 79, 110, 225

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authorship 2–4, 6, 16–19, 21, 27, 30, 34, 42, 53, 70, 95, 159, 187 Ayer, A. J. 98, 126 Backus, Guy 46 Baker, Gordon 81 de Beauvoir, Simone 50 behaviourism 113 behaviouristic 9, 127 beliefs 10, 14, 75, 116, 153, 180, 183, 188 The Bell 47, 234 Benatar, David 125 Benoist, Jocelyn 84 biological dispositions 125 biological essentialism 115 biology 84, 115 bounds of sense, the 53, 81 Camus, Albert 50 Carnap, Rudolph 124 categories confusion of 87–8, 94–5, 133, 185 esthetic (aesthetic) 87–8, 92, 94–5, 123, 155–6, 160, 182 ethical 88–9, 95, 185 religious 88–9, 95, 185 Cavell, Stanley ix, 8–9, 12–13, 84–5, 87, 120, 139–40, 142–3, 150, 170, 188, 200, 202–5, 207–8, 217, 221, 223, 227–8, 232 Chesterton, C. K. 126 Christendom 86–7, 89, 90, 93, 219, 221 Christianity 83, 89–90, 92–5, 123, 147, 221 Coetzee, J. M. 10–11, 86, 187–90, 193, 195–6, 198, 200, 206, 209–10 Collingwood, R. G. 58, 85 communication direct 77, 80, 90–2, 110, 123, 135, 150, 163–4 indirect 6–7, 74, 76–8, 80, 90–2, 94, 97, 108–10, 151–2, 164–5, 167, 177, 180, 182

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240

Index

community 1, 10–11, 74, 95, 106, 112, 133, 137, 145, 183–5, 188, 198, 201, 207, 209, 228–9 Conant, James 7, 83, 86, 88–9, 92–5, 100–1, 148, 221 concepts conceptual content 68 conceptualization 67, 122 and intuitions (Kant) 66 loss of 2–3, 5–8, 61–2, 90, 119, 123, 135, 147–8, 171, 186, 188, 211, 213–15, 217–22, 225–6 moral 120–1, 127, 135, 137, 146 recovery of 11, 61–2, 220 reintroduction of 7, 76, 113, 219 in relation to words 1, 3, 8, 62, 83, 145, 157, 171, 211–13, 224 conceptual analysis 86 Conradi, Peter J. 47–9, 51, 152 consciousness 17, 19, 60, 106, 113, 128, 129, 139, 197–9, 217, 220 consequentialism 130 conservatism 104 context 10, 58–9, 76, 83–5, 87–8, 90, 92–3, 100, 105, 111, 119, 130, 137, 139, 142–3, 145, 148, 159, 163, 165, 168, 181, 185, 197, 213, 215, 218, 224, 227 contingency 50 courage 8, 139, 172, 229 Cowley, Christopher 125 Crary, Alice 204 criteria 11, 106, 135, 138 critique 67–8, 95 Cukor, George 9, 139 cultural criticism 57, 135, 156 culture 3, 5, 12, 61, 90, 95, 98, 113, 116, 119, 148, 154, 171, 183, 185, 196, 214, 219, 220 Dante see erotic love, Dantean conception of deconstruction/deconstructs 51 definitions 85, 104, 132, 205 deflection 11, 132, 145, 188, 198, 201–10, 218, 220 Derrida, Jacques 191

Language, Lost and Found.indb 240

Diamond, Cora 10–12, 18, 59, 100, 120, 188–9, 191–6, 201–10, 214, 217, 224–5 didactic 62, 65, 70–1, 75, 78, 151, 182, 223 difficulty of philosophy 11, 193, 202, 204, 208, 227 difficulty of reality 11, 192–3, 202, 204, 207–8 Dipple, Elisabeth 48–9 disinterested reflection 82, 89, 93, 138, 143, 156, 218 see also aesthetic reflection doctrines 7, 21, 52, 94, 96, 102, 114, 153, 182–7 Dooley, Gillian 51 duty 39, 87, 148 echo (in contrast to subjective use) 91–3, 146, 150, 153, 182, 227 educational 6, 19, 34, 62, 65, 70, 78, 158, 181, 223 Elisabeth Costello 10–11, 86, 188, 194–5, 197–8, 206, 209–10 embodiment 190, 197 emotions 34, 40, 54, 99, 110, 167, 171, 174, 179, 193, 200, 210 emotivism 171, 200, 214 empirical 6, 67, 70, 116, 119 empiricism 67 empiricist 127 Enlightenment 109, 113–14, 119–20, 131, 213, 215 epistemological 9, 88, 93, 108, 203 epistemology 108, 216 Eros 6, 23, 35, 37, 137, 158, 216 erotic love 24, 27, 29, 36–8, 135 Dantean conception of 17, 27–30, 35–7, 149 Platonic conception of 27–8 sex/sexual 17, 23, 26–30, 34, 44, 149 ethics 6, 10, 39–40, 59, 63, 92, 96–9, 101–2, 104, 109, 113, 117, 119, 127–8, 131, 138, 218, 224 everyday language see ordinary language everyday life 7, 26

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Index everyday, the 29, 95, 107, 126, 205, 227 evil 49, 75, 84, 115, 127, 149, 183 exemplarity and ideality 67 existentialism 58, 129, 137, 146 exposure 203–4 fact/value distinction 96–8, 120, 216 facticity 66 factual 6, 89, 111, 120, 128, 135, 165, 215, 216 fictional characters 15, 30–1, 38, 44, 55, 72, 93, 151, 156–7, 165, 181, 189, 225 film 9, 139, 140–1 Fodor, Jerry 107 Foot, Filippa 217 form(s) of life 5–6, 8–9, 12, 22, 61, 75, 83, 85–6, 95, 104–6, 114, 120–3, 130, 133, 137, 184, 186, 191, 195–6, 200, 203, 205–6, 213, 215, 218, 223 freedom 35, 58, 66, 109, 114, 122, 127–9, 131–2, 138, 167, 223 Freud, Sigmund 26 Gaita, Raimond 217 German, Howard 47 Glock, Hans-Johann 81 God 8, 36, 75, 83, 87, 111, 126, 133, 147, 158, 168, 170–1, 216, 218 good, the 7–8, 24, 26–9, 35, 37, 49, 59–62, 68, 74, 101, 109, 112, 116–18, 133–5, 137, 139, 143, 147, 149–50, 181 goodness 49, 83, 101, 117, 131, 137, 146 Gordon, David J. 17, 46–7, 51–2 government 133–4 grammar, grammatical investigations 81–2, 86–8, 90, 100–1, 171–2 Grant, Cary 139 Grice, Paul 77 Hacker, P. M. S. 81 Hämäläinen, Nora 38, 48 Hamlet 5, 14, 26, 158, 168, 176 Hampshire, Stuart 58

Language, Lost and Found.indb 241

241

Hare, R. M. 58, 121 hedonistic 48 Heidegger, Martin 99, 163 Hepburn, Katherine 139 Hertzberg, Lars 101, 200 historicity 70, 217 Holocaust, the 194, 196, 199 Hopwood, Mark 183 Horner, Avril 49, 51, 62–3 Howard, John 139 Hughes, Ted 192, 200, 207 human being 6–9, 11, 13, 17, 19, 28–31, 37–8, 41, 53, 63–8, 74–6, 83, 87, 89, 93, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 113–22, 125, 127, 128–35, 137–8, 140, 143, 145–7, 150, 153–5, 165–6, 170–2, 181, 185–7, 190, 193–4, 198, 200–1, 203, 210, 213–14, 216, 218, 219–21, 224–5, 229 Liberal picture of 114, 120, 127–31, 134, 147, 215, 218 the Natural Law View of 128–9 Hussey, Ruth 139 illusion of sense 1, 6, 9, 11, 62, 84–5, 87, 90–1, 122, 134, 142, 145, 183, 228 ineffable, the 37, 52, 54, 68, 97–9, 101, 111–12, 178, 184 inexpressible 192, 198, 200, 209 inner life 7, 105–7, 116, 135, 143, 202–3 intellectualistic 16, 210 intellectualization 7, 185–6, 203 inwardness 9, 91, 94, 122, 135, 137, 143, 145–6, 150, 182, 186, 216, 228 irony 164, 170, 172, 183, 221 ironic 164–5, 181, 183 James, Henry 22, 31, 42, 45, 54 James, William 214–15 judgments 1, 8, 11, 41, 67, 74, 115, 118, 120–1, 138, 143, 146–9, 156, 171, 185, 188, 200, 210, 216 Kaehele, Sharon 47 Kant, Immanuel 5, 58, 63–8, 95–6, 98, 107, 109–11, 193–4, 215

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242

Index

Kantian 64, 66, 193–4 Kantianism 65, 143 Kierkegaard, Søren 6–7, 9, 58, 74, 76–80, 86–98, 102, 107–11, 113–14, 120, 122–4, 135, 142–6, 148, 152–5, 157, 167, 170, 172, 183–5, 216, 219–21, 228, 234 A, the Esthete 161, 166–7, 172, 179 Johannes Climacus 91–2, 94, 100, 154, 158, 164–5, 182 Johannes the Seducer 156 Judge William 155 Kierkegaardian 9, 92, 136, 143–4, 146, 150, 152–3, 166–7, 170, 181, 183–4, 213 Victor Erimita 155 language Augustian picture of 214 as a cage 102–5, 108–9, 111–12, 157 as changing 104, 113, 145, 217–18 idling 2, 6, 16, 82, 84, 86, 130, 145, 193, 220 limit of 53, 96, 98–9, 102, 108–10, 200 literary 13, 30, 189–90 loss of 1, 5–6, 10–11, 61–2, 186, 193, 201, 213, 215–16, 221, 229 moral 116, 118, 121, 214 neutral 39–40, 73 philosophy of 106, 135, 218 language game(s) 74, 84, 103–7, 192 Lear, Jonathan 74, 183–4, 210, 219–21 Lebensformen 102–4 Leeson, Miles 46–7 Lichtenberg, G. C. 78–9 Life of Brian 92–3 literary criticism 57 logic 35, 99–103, 105, 118, 131, 138, 218 formal notation 100 law of the excluded middle 100 symbolism 100 love 4, 7, 9, 14, 17, 19–20, 23–38, 42, 44–5, 47, 51–3, 57, 59–61, 63–6, 74–5, 83, 85, 93, 112,

Language, Lost and Found.indb 242

117–18, 120, 140, 142–5, 147–50, 152–4, 156, 158, 160–4, 166–70, 170–81, 183, 186, 200, 204, 213, 227 Lovibond, Sabina 48 M and D, Murdoch’s example of 9, 144–6 MacIntyre, Alasdair 17, 62, 121, 213–15 marriage 9, 89, 139, 141–2, 160–3, 166–7, 170, 172–3, 175, 178, 180, 186, 221 Martin, Graham 46 materialism 197 McGinn, Marie 105 McTaggart, J. M. E. 10 McWilliam, Candia 161 Midgley, Mary 194, 217 Milligan, Tony 49 mimesis 60 mirror 5–7, 9, 12, 60, 76–81, 83, 90, 94, 99, 101, 112–13, 126, 140–2, 146, 148, 150–3, 156, 166, 175–6, 182–4, 186–7, 209–10, 217, 224 Monty Python 92–3 Moore, G. E. 10, 109, 116–17, 143, 215 Moore, Scott H. 52–3 moral psychology 75 Mulhall, Stephen 20, 105, 120, 138, 197 mystic 5, 52, 61, 69 mystical 6, 54, 69, 165, 171 mysticism 96, 165, 178, 216 Nagel, Thomas 196–9, 201–2 narrator 36, 51, 159 naturalistic fallacy, the 215 neuroscience 115 The Nice and the Good 47 Nicol, Bran 50–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 58, 171, 212 nonsense 83, 166, 176, 184 Nussbaum, Martha 3–4, 6, 10, 17, 22–5, 27–32, 34–45, 49, 51–4, 57, 59–60, 148–9, 151–2, 181, 217 objective

80, 82, 88–90, 92–3, 95, 108, 111, 116, 123–6, 128, 134–5, 143, 153, 156, 164, 170, 172, 200, 216 objectivity 92, 116, 122, 124, 216

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Index ontological 13, 93, 101 ordinary language 71, 84, 98, 100, 106, 111, 125–6, 149–50, 157, 163, 165, 202, 207, 223 ordinary language philosophy 7, 125–6, 209, 223 ordinary, the 10–11, 29, 44, 59, 111–12, 124–6, 145, 148, 150, 193, 202–3, 207–9, 218, 220–3, 226, 228 original sin 8, 147, 160, 221 pain 105, 176 paratextual 51 Parfit, Derek 123 particularism 39, 220 perfection/perfectionism 5, 7–9, 19, 26, 35, 42–3, 57, 60, 74, 137–40, 142–3, 145, 147, 149–50, 152–3, 159–60, 162, 169, 173–4, 177, 179, 181, 216, 219, 221 perspicuous (re)presentation 81–2, 94 The Philadelphia Story 9, 139, 142, 221 Phillips, D. Z. 86 philosophical novelist 46–7, 49–50 philosophical novels 46, 152 philosophy academic 12–13, 16, 21, 23, 38, 58–9, 69–70, 85, 95, 110, 118, 134, 203, 206 as an activity 52, 107 analytic 16, 22–3, 27, 38, 61, 107–8, 117, 121, 129, 137, 171, 217 Anglo-American 38–9, 58, 206 antonymic 124, 126 linguistic 58, 77, 121, 131, 138, 188, 218, 222 and literature 2–4, 6, 12, 15, 17–22, 45–8, 63, 68–70, 76, 78, 98, 110, 187, 189, 205, 225 as logical analysis 124 moral 8, 17, 22, 34, 38, 40, 42, 49–50, 59, 77, 115–19, 121, 129, 138, 147–8, 171, 201, 217, 220 of mind 58, 197 two-way movement in 10, 203, 208–9, 220 physics 63, 84, 204

Language, Lost and Found.indb 243

243

Pihlström, Sami 125 Plato 4, 15, 24, 28–9, 31–2, 35–9, 46, 50, 55, 77, 98, 112, 152, 168, 178, 220, 228 Neoplatonic 51, 152–3, 168 Platonic 6, 19, 25, 27–32, 36–9, 43, 48, 52, 60, 137, 148–9, 152, 165, 185 Platonism 6, 9, 25, 29, 32, 35–8, 42–3, 45, 47–9, 59–60, 152, 165, 172, 181, 184 Platonist 28, 77, 173, 183–4 poetry 13, 20, 36, 39, 99, 112, 187, 190, 202, 205–6, 208, 210 positivism/positivistic 68, 96, 98, 171, 216 postmodernism/postmodernist 51 pretense 74, 183–4, 221 principles 22, 39, 42, 50, 148, 155, 171 private 9, 88, 93, 105–6, 108, 129, 137, 156–7, 162, 184, 216 private language argument 105-6 progression 25, 27, 35, 51, 57, 139, 145, 158, 162, 188 protestant 127 Proust, Marcel 37 Proustian 37 pseudonymity 9, 79, 91–4, 123, 152–3, 155, 157, 170, 181, 184 puritan 160–2, 165, 178 Quine, W. V. O.

124

rational agent 115–16, 133, 214 rationalism 67 rationality 115–16, 123–5, 216 realism 6, 51 realistic 5, 20, 71, 74, 76, 86, 138, 151–2, 172, 185, 225–6 reductio ad absurdum 97, 102 reductionism 119 religion 6, 49, 60, 75, 87, 92, 96, 98, 102, 108, 114, 136, 148, 160, 168, 170-2, 215 religious 8, 31, 68, 79, 83, 85–90, 94–5, 108, 122–3, 132, 137, 143, 147–9, 155, 160, 170, 184–5, 215–16

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244

Index

repugnant conclusion 123–4 research 16, 40, 114, 133–4 revocation 97 Robjant, David 180–1 Romanticism 114 Rorty, Richard 62 Rowe, Anne 49, 51, 62–3 rules 18, 22, 42, 63–5, 81–2, 105–7, 201, 222 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine 17, 29, 36, 43 Sartre, Jean-Paul 50, 58, 66, 73, 129 Sartrean 54, 66, 73 say/show distinction 4, 52–3, 55, 75, 141, 224 Schweiker, William 17 scientific 68, 74, 81, 114, 120, 165, 200, 208, 215 secular 8, 49, 170, 172, 216 secularization 62, 114, 120, 147, 171, 215 Shakespeare, William 5, 14, 26, 152 sin 17, 28–9, 42, 89, 99, 147–8 Singer, Peter 123, 195, 200 scepticism 107, 125, 202–3 sociology 63 sphere of reason, the 108 St. Paul 111 Steiner, George 17, 45 Stevenson, C. L. 214 Stewart, James 139 subjective 9, 88–90, 92, 95, 108, 123, 126, 134, 153, 170, 182, 216 subjective use (in contrast to echo) 93, 180 subjectivism 216 subjectivity 17, 92–3 Tagore, Rabindranath 138 Taylor, Charles 217 theories 5, 10–11, 21–2, 41, 57, 59, 71, 101, 105, 115, 130, 142, 148, 150, 163, 171, 187–8, 194, 203, 210–12, 217, 226 theorization 7, 186, 188, 217 theory 2, 4–6, 10, 13, 18, 35–6, 40, 58, 61, 65, 72, 77, 96, 101, 105–7, 115,

Language, Lost and Found.indb 244

124, 126, 130, 142, 163, 179, 198, 204, 206, 212, 220, 226 anti-theory 10 thought-experiment 197 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 52, 96–9, 101–3 Tracy, David 17 tragedy 63–4, 70, 137, 149, 201, 204 transcendence 7–8, 51, 66, 108, 132, 153, 186, 216, 219 transcendent 60, 67–8, 70, 105, 108, 111, 117–18, 148, 175 transcendental 68, 97, 99 truth 17–18, 20–1, 28–9, 35–7, 39, 44–7, 51–2, 63, 69, 79–80, 83, 90, 92, 99–100, 108, 111–12, 116, 119, 125, 130, 132, 135, 139, 141–2, 149, 154, 158–9, 163–4, 167, 173–4, 178–9, 182, 184, 188, 227 truthfulness 104, 106, 135, 139, 188, 216, 219 unsayable 101, 152 unselfing 32, 149, 180 unutterable 12, 68–9, 78, 91, 117 utilitarianism/utilitarian 58, 65, 71, 123, 130, 133–4, 143, 151, 158, 171 Valéry, Paul 112 value 7, 30, 36, 44, 47, 52, 54, 67–8, 75, 96–8, 102, 108–9, 111, 117–18, 120, 123–4, 137, 146, 149–50, 157, 167, 171, 180, 202, 216 value connotations 140 virtue 19, 37, 39, 171, 180 virtue ethics 65, 217 virtuous 32 vision 8, 10, 20, 24, 26–8, 31–2, 35–7, 43, 57, 60, 73, 87, 116, 118, 121, 130, 132, 135–8, 141, 143–5, 147, 150, 165, 168, 171, 178, 188, 198, 218–19, 222, 227 vocabulary 6, 25, 31, 47, 60, 62, 96, 102, 119–21, 130, 135, 139, 142, 144, 146, 188, 213–16, 219–20, 225 new 3, 62, 222

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Index Weil, Simone 4, 47, 50, 77, 136, 159, 180 Weston, Michael 25–7, 32, 35 Widdows, Heather 49 Williams, Bernard 121, 217 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 4, 6–7, 47, 50–2, 55, 58, 62, 76–8, 81–6, 88, 90,

Language, Lost and Found.indb 245

245

94–111, 113–14, 120, 131, 135, 138, 142–3, 145, 193, 214–17, 228 Wittgensteinian 52, 77, 83–4, 86, 96, 99, 146, 150 Wolfe, Cary 189, 191, 205, 209 Wolfe, Peter 46, 50

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