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I've tried to read a couple of novels by Iris Murdoch, but couldn't get past ten pages. I thought they might grasp hold of me since she deals with religious and philosophical themes. Maybe I'll try again later.
Then I decided to go straight to her non-fiction writings. I just read a little book about philosophy by Murdoch called The Sovereignty of Good. (Not 'God,' but Good.) In the three essays of this book, Murdoch mounts a force of resistance against existentialist-behaviorist schools of thought. She emphasizes the universal over the concrete, the objective over the subjective, and action over thought. She poses 'perfection' as the ultimate standard that should move philosophy.
Iris Murdoch is an unabashed Platonist. She argues that there must be some transcendent 'Beyond' that judges all that we assert. I like this emphasis on transcendence. It sounds very Lutheran, i.e. we are judged and saved only by that which comes from outside us. She is very hard on the Nietzschean emphasis on 'will,' just as Lutherans are on works righteousness.
The plumb line for her philosophy is the 'incorruptible.' This is the Platonic Ideal. She refers to 'art' as the perfect model for understanding the transcendent Ideal that is the measure of all things. Beauty exists not in the eye of the beholder, but beyond us in the eternal realm and manifests itself in our artistic expressions. She writes, "Art pierces the veil and gives sense to the notion of a reality which lies beyond appearance" (p. 86). And, "It is a kind of goodness by proxy" (p. 85).
Murdoch also refers to Plato's myth if the cave and makes the image of the 'sun' the analogy for the transcendent Good. It is by the light of the sun that we see; but looking directly at the sun blinds us.
Simone Weil's notion of 'attention' is used by Murdoch to express her belief about the 'gaze of love' that brings real knowledge.
This all sounds a lot like a Christian philosophy, and, after all, St. Augustine's theology is laced with Platonic thought. But the stinger for me was to find out that Murdoch does not believe that human life has a purpose. "We are simply here," she says (p. 77). Her realism about human nature is to the point, but her notion of pointlessness seems odd. She says, "I assume that human beings are naturally selfish and that human life has no external point or telos" (p. 76). It's hard for me to make sense of the viewpoint that there is an Eternal Good, but that life has no purpose. She says that we can be good, but we ought to be "good for nothing." She is clear: "The acceptance of our death is an acceptance of our own nothingness" (p. 100).
I wish Murdoch had a sense of the meaning of it all. Without that, I can't see a real foundation for the morality she is aspiring to. She says that the transcendent Good is the source of moral thinking and action. But a Good which has no purpose doesn't seem good to me. She tries to answer the philosophical What, but can't answer the Why. She even quotes Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity." But Ecclesiastes does not a gospel make. Where is the Good News in Murdoch's Good? Nowhere. It is truncated. It is Good without News. Which turns out to be Bad News—life without purpose. I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I'm too teleologically wired. But aren't we all? If there is no reason to be, why be?
I believe Murdoch is on the right track in some ways. She is not willing to accept the relativistic direction of modern philosophy. But she doesn't go far enough. No is no reason to accept a Real Road if the road doesn't go anywhere. Perhaps she can accept a Jesus who is the Truth and the Life, but not one who is the Way, since her philosophy is going nowhere.
I was hoping to find more. But I was shocked to discover the Murdochian dead end. Perhaps we could call it the Murdochian murder of meaning. Not exactly a thriller.
