Iris Murdoch, (1919-1999) was a significant twentieth century writer, philosopher and literary critic whose 26 novels display the features shared by Post-modern writers. Her novels portray bizarre and carefully observed social and sexual narratives within an intellectual middle-class milieu that live in an eccentric nightmarish world. She often uses fantasy and gothic elements but her characters always grope in dark to find meaning to their lives in extra-ordinary situations. Her novels offer a wide world of characters and plots with ‘multiple interpretations’. She is a ‘prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic writer’ who attacked both ‘self knowledge’ and sincerity as second rate and found those virtues to be delusive. It was inconsistency and paradox that Murdoch specially wanted to capture in her novels.

She was awarded Whit-bread prize for her novel ‘Sacred and Profane Love Machine’. ‘The Black Prince’ got James Tait Black Memorial Prize and she was awarded the Booker Prize for her novel ‘The Sea, the Sea’ in 1978. Several of her works have been adopted for screen like ‘An Unofficial Rose’ and ‘The Bell’. She has also written handful of plays, anthologies of poetry and 5 books on philosophy. She is one of the dominant figures of postwar British literature. She has published more than 50 titles during her lifetime. She was born in Dublin, studied at Somerville College, Oxford, entered politics briefly also. Between 1942 and 1944 worked for British Treasury and then for two years as an Administrative Officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne’s College Oxford where she worked as a tutor until 1963. She resigned to be a full-fledged writer but continued to deliver lectures at Royal College of Art. In 1987, she was made Dame Commander of the order of the British Empire. She married John Bayley – an Oxford Don and a fellow writer who was six years younger to her. She had no children. She contacted Alzheimer’s in later years of her life and died in 1999.

Iris Murdoch, despite having a post-modernist context, explored truth both in her fiction and philosophical writings. There is almost always in her novels separate internal and external world of characters and there is a complex relation between the internal and the external world. Murdoch explores the internal and links it with external. Suguna Ramanathan suggests that Murdoch’s focus on the internal is to convey to the readers what they do not want to know about themselves, the convulsive, dark interior of ego and self. She shows her characters with all their failings with whom the reader can empathize. She shows reality not realism in her novels which Dipple calls ‘the profound truth the questing mind seeks’. She brings out unexpected features of one’s life out which lie dormant in the unconscious. She believed that for a novel to convey meaning, the dark and incomprehensible nature of the human mind must be shown. Her main motive was to show people their true selves and to be ethical.

Unconscious means that of which we are unaware. She tried to make us more aware of our surroundings so that there is a greater chance for us to leave our ego. She felt that the novelist should also come out of egoism of his own fantasy and love is what they require to come out of it. She gives the example of 19th century great writers Jane Austin, George Eliot and Tolstoy who had such kind of loving tolerance towards their characters. She believed that 20th century novelists are not able to conjoin form and contingency properly in their novels and that the ability to portray characters may be associated with love, respect and tolerance which she saw in 19th century writers. She saw,

        “The recent changes in the portrayal of characters in novels as symptoms of some more general change in consciousness”. (Sublime and Beautiful)

There are two dangers in which while portraying an individual one can fall in. First she calls ‘neurosis’- we are involved in our fantasies and myths that we fail to recognize the reality of others (solipsism) and other danger is ‘convention’ – the loss of the individual other in the face of a larger social totality. She associates ‘neurosis’ with Romantics and the Existentialists. In convention, the importance of the individual is completely lost. She fears this in Hegel’s totality. She feels that 20th century novels succumb to one of these faults which in her neologism are either ‘crystalline’ or ‘journalistic’ novels. For her the ideal novel should have both ‘form’ and ‘contingency’ but in tension. Form represents the novelist’s desire to unify, to give a general order to the material that he is working on and contingency represents the disunity and disorder which are essential for a realistic portrayal of human life. She said in an interview with Christopher Bigsby about art

         “Without some kind of strong form there is not an art object present” and in the same interview she says about novels.

        ‘Within this closed structure you can picture free beings’. This is probably what she means by the word tension between form and contingency.

She says in another interview by Brian Magee

“A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise be a mass of senseless rubble”

She thought of her complete plan of action of writing( form) a novel before beginning it. Her ideal novel is that which combines form and contingency in a perfect way, similarly in Murdoch’s ethical philosophy, She is attempting to find a midpoint between metaphysics and empiricism by allowing a kind of metaphysical unity in which there is a contingent individual and his ordinary moral struggle. She has brought back metaphysics to ethics in 20th century with her Metaphysics as a guide to morals. She believed that metaphysics tries to find the basis of everything, to identify the deep structure which cannot be thought away from human life. Maria Antonacio puts metaphysics as

        ‘A fundamentally “one making” endeavour which seeks to impose unity on a mass of detailed perceptions about human life in order to provide a guide to moral reflection’. (pg 126)

Giving importance to empiricism Murdoch felt that it remembers the contingent, so it is an essential part of ethics. Defending the value of the contingent human beings, She says

        “Human beings are valuable….. Because they are human beings.”(MGM)

She hopes to revive the inner regions of consciousness (unconscious, subconscious) as a moral territory. Again, consciousness also at individual level has the problem of form and contingency. Consciousness always creates unities. It makes wholes from fragments and is a continuous unified stream which is a permanent part of our being. Consciousness’ second aspect which can be related to contingency is we as human beings are constantly discriminating in good and bad, true and false, better and worse. This is what is Murdoch is seeking in her philosophy – a journey from appearances to reality with the help of consciousness with a desire for spiritual improvement or change. She believes that there is more than contingent connection between beauty, truth and goodness, the three great values. She criticized the contemporary emotionist and meta-ethical theories and looked up to Plato for an alternative concept of ethical life where sensibility and vision are emphasized over principles and will. Ethical progress and aesthetic experiences are discussed together in her philosophy. She uses the term ‘unselfing’ for the activity by which one can free oneself from the egoistic, instinct driven psyche directed at self-preservation, which is helped by aesthetic experiences. Beauty for her is

        “The convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness” (SoG)

In aesthetics there happens to be a history of merging of boundaries of the subject and the object. Murdoch thinks this to be the strength of ‘beauty’ which has the ability to make us better by making us less self-centered. Murdoch thinks that moral improvement is gradual increase of our knowledge of the world. Wrong choices and moral conflicts are caused by failures in knowledge of the world in Murdochian ethics. She believes that literature is a vehicle for moral improvement by increasing our imaginative capacity by showing us details, subtleties and differences.

She gives no guarantee of happiness with morality. It is about facing the frailty and transitoriness of human condition and wanting to understand something more than it. This idea is the main premise of her novels. She envisions the idea of Good which gives unity to virtues and human experience as ultimately undefinable and thus unreachable. This Good is a motivating, transcendent principle which compels us to be good, yet, we as limited beings are bound to fail in attending perfection. The endeavour to be good promises no reward. Aesthetical experience can console us for a moment. We feel pleasure in perceiving something as a unified whole, a meaningful object – this is what art and literature show us through their form.
Literature shows us in a rewarding form what otherwise would be too difficult to comprehend that is, endless, formless and inexhaustible variety of human life and its experiences (contingency).
Murdoch thought that philosophical thinking should not be rigid and considered the possibility of alternative approaches to philosophical questions.

Literature shows us in a rewarding form what otherwise would be too difficult to comprehend that is, endless, formless and inexhaustible variety of human life and its experiences (contingency).
Murdoch thought that philosophical thinking should not be rigid and considered the possibility of alternative approaches to philosophical questions.

Her style of writing is unlike any other philosopher. Her style is same like her fiction where ‘the literary writer deliberately leaves space for his reader to play in’ she leaves a lot of room for creative imagination as imagery performed by the consciousness is ‘for better or worse a function of moral change’ (MGM Pg. 329) She uses metaphor, assonance, simile like devices to ignite the mind of the reader. In her philosophy style and content, conception and expression suit each other.

She acquired the title of ‘mystical and idiosyncratic thinker’ during her Oxford days as she gave away the standard analytical ethics. Her philosophical style was to do philosophy in a way which both comments on, and presents an ideological alternative to the prevalent standard analytical ethics.

Although she has written generous amount of individual works of philosophy like ‘Thinking and Language’, Nostalgia for the particular’, ‘Vision and choice in morality’, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics, ‘Sovereignty of Goodness’. Her last seminal work ‘Metaphysics as a guide to morals’ contains all her previous ideas with a great amount of new material.

Her first philosophical book was on Sartre (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist). She was attracted to existentialism in the beginning as it seemed to her as taking study of consciousness seriously but soon she was disappointed, as noted by Conradi. Her central goal is to establish the idea of an individual’s consciousness and ‘moral being’ at the centre of moral inquiry note Maria Antonaccio and Heather Widdows separately. This can be understood by her famous mother-in-law M and daughter-in-law D example. She stresses on the idea of ‘attention’ taken from the philosophy of Simone Weil. It means ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’. Her moral activity is thus ingrained with visual imagery. The change in M’s vision towards D is a private affair as outwardly she was behaving in a nice manner with her earlier also. Now, with ‘attention’ M’s thinking pattern has changed. So, morality is essentially connected with change and progress. It is an unending job.

She connects morality with inner moral activity of an individual and Platonic idea of Good.
“Goodness is not something that exists outside consciousness as a property of things or states of affairs; rather, goodness can only be apprehended through the reflexive activity of cognition” (SoG)
Murdoch’s Good is a concept that should according to her, take the place in moral philosophy that belonged to God. She tells Good is – like God was one, transcendent, indescribable and necessarily existing object of attention (Sovereignty of Good pg.55).

Undesirability and indefinability are characteristics of Good. Metaphors can help to understand its meaning. Her most famous metaphor of sun: it is difficult to look at with naked eye but we can see it with the help of various instruments. These metaphors do not define Good, but they tell us how it functions in our lives and its different forms, but we can never have ‘possession’ of the whole idea of Good.

Murdoch also presents the idea of contingency. She believes it to be an essential feature of human life and it is a moral task to understand this. Life is filled with meaningless suffering i.e. suffering for nothing. She says that it is a mistake to glorify death and suffering by giving them a higher status of some ‘higher plan’ (SoG 82 and MG M 133). The main problem of moral philosophy is

‘how is one to connect the realism, which must involve a clear-eyed contemplation of the misery and evil of the world with a sense of an uncorrupted good without the latter idea becoming the merest consolatory dream’(SoG,61).

Murdoch adapts Plato’s idea of morally high and low form of imagination into fantasy and imagination. Fantasy is an egoistic activity which includes neurotic fantasies, delusions of grandeur and dreams of power. Fantasy keeps the psyche from facing the tragic realities of life (contingency). Fantasy is a misuse of creativity. Imagination is truth-seeking activity; it is an activity in order to improve one’s vision of reality.

For Murdoch human beings are ‘fantasizing imaginative animals’ and moral progress is a gradual process from fantasy to imagination. Fantasy is misuse of creativity, whereas Imagination requires a lot of effort to form truthful images. So morality is a ‘creative task’.
Murdoch’s solution to the question that how a fantasy ridden individual should approach the surroundings imaginatively is by ‘unselfing’. Unselfing is changing one’s consciousness which is redirecting one’s consciousness away from oneself. She believes beauty is perhaps the most common thing in our surroundings which will lead us towards unselfing as beauty prompts ‘attention’ automatically. Another name for ‘attention’ is love if understood as an emotion purified of selfishness. Experiences of beauty are examples of how to love virtuously. Same loving attitude is the morally right way of dealing with other people, which is a very difficult task. But experiences of beauty can lead the way.

Murdoch differentiates very clearly about the end results of beauty experiences and moral goodness. She thinks that both beauty and moral goodness requires same attitude, but, whereas beauty has an inbuilt pleasurable element to it and always consoles, morality is mostly difficult and without consolation. Giving example from literature she says a novelist, to succeed must overcome herself and attend to particular beings outside herself which is the quality of the author’s awareness of others. Similarly, morality is about the imagination trying to understand that ‘others are to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves (Sublime and the Good, pg.216). This is possible with love or ‘attention’ the loving gaze. Murdoch’s loving attention requires the recognition of a general feature of humanity. As

‘Human life is, on the one hand, void of purpose, order and telos. On the other hand, our consciousness is structured around the dream of order, which shows itself in the magnetic pull the idea of perfection exercises on us. In this sense the recognition of other people as demanding loving attention begins with the realization of the universal feature of humanity’(1).

For Murdoch and her morality this is just a beginning, the endless task of love will continue till eternity as every individual has her own contingent history. It is impossible to fully understand the Other. Murdoch’s lofty idea is the experience of overcoming oneself. ‘Unselfing’ with the infinite task of love. Answering how can we make ourselves better? She said by close attention to what lies outside the selfish mechanism of the human psyche. She believes that literature is a better medium of truth than philosophy because of its closer approximation to the ambiguity of life experience. Great novels picture individuals with their particularity and their individual consciousness’s. In this way they also display, the moral quality of the author’s consciousness. She thinks that great literature reveals deep truths about human predicament with its ability to capture the particular. Abstract Philosophy cannot compete with great literature and it should also take truths revealed by literature seriously in its ethical theorizing.

“Moving beyond the confines of the self and discerning the reality of the existence of others lie at the heart of Murdoch’s philosophical and artistic projects.”(2)

The knowledge of the Other is the most important knowledge for her. She uses literature as her major tool for exploring the solipsistic and truth finding elements of individual acts of consciousness. She uses the literary text as a base for investigating the idea of ‘inter-subjective truth’. She uses literature to explore the relationship between beauty (aesthetic value) and ontology which is phenomenological in nature.

REFERENCES

1. https://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/42891/ethicisan.pdf
2. Calley A. Mornbuckle – Exploring aesthetic perception of the real in Iris Murdoch’s the black Prince.
3. Antonaccio,Maria. “Form and Contingency in Ethics.” Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness.Ed.MariaAntonaccio and William Schweiker:The University of Chicago Press,Chicago,1996,126.Print.
4. Bigsby, Christopher. Iris Murdoch, Interviewed in the Radical imagination and the Liberal tradition: interviews with English and American Novelists.eds.Heide Zeigler and Christopher Bigsby (London: Junction Books, 1982), pg.214.Print.
5. Conradi,Peter.J.IrisMurdoch:A Life. .London .Harper Collins.2001.Print.
6. Dipple,Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch:Work for the spirit.London.Metheun,1982.Print.
7. Murdoch,Iris.Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.London:Chatto and Windis,1992,365.Print.
8. The Sovereignity of Good.London:OUP,1970,47.Print.
9. Ramanathan,Suguna.IrisMurdoch:Figures of Good.London.Macmillan Press Limited,1995.Print.