Iris Murdoch and Existentialism

*
Richard Moran
It is not unusual for even the very greatest polemics to proceed through some
unfairnesstoward what they attack, indeed to draw strength from the very
distortions which theyimpose upon their targets. In the same way that a
good caricature of a person’s face enables us to see something that we
feel was genuinely there to be seen all along, aconviction that persists in the
face of, and may indeed be sustained by, our ongoing senseof the discrepancy
between the picture and the reality. Some such distortion may benecessary
in order to point to or make visible a feature that is perfectly present, but
isobscured by the mass of other details. In the case of ideas and systems of
thought there isan additional reason for a positive concern with distortion,
and that is that we do notencounter ideas in a social or intellectual void.
Rather, they come to us through their admirers, detractors, followers,
and opponents. The social and intellectual reception anddissemination of Plato,
or Marx, or the Bible are now and forever part of the meaning of those texts, and
this remains true however demonstrable it may be that their receptioninvolvesa
large distortion of what is actually there in those texts.To concern
oneself with them must also be to concern oneself with what both their
advocates and opponents have made of them, and in this or that context
this image may be of greater social and intellectual importance than the
question of strictly ‘correct’ readings. And of course for no contemporary
school of philosophy has the social and culturalmilieu of its reception
been more important to its identity as a trend of thought than inthe case
of Existentialism, particularly in its French, Sartrean form. Today,
of course,th a s b e e n a f a c t o f i n t e l l e c t u a l l i f e w i t h i n t h e A c a d e m y
f o r o v e r t h i r t y y e a r s t h a t Existentialism has no friends, and is
probably even more fully dead on the Continent these days than it ever
was within the Anglo-Saxon establishment. And even when
figures like Nietzsche or Heidegger are given respectful philosophical attention
today, it seems a requirement of such attention that we first be told that this
interest is sharply divorced from any association with
Existentialism as such. (I can’t s p e a k f o r t h e situation in Europe,
but in the USA anyway a peculiar feature of the institutional
oblivion of Existentialism within professional philosophy is that this has
not made any difference to its hold on the imagination of youth during
that same thirty years. For some, such a fact will only serve to confirm
its oblivion.) Iris Murdoch encountered Sartre’s Existentialism at the height
of its cultural fashion and in fluence, and as one of its first and most
important expositors in English, she played a crucial role in bringing
these ideas out of the realm of posture and fashion and into the
realm of serious thought. And much of her later thought involved a self-
conscious distancing of
herself f r o m t h e s e b e g i n n i n g s , c u l m i n a t i n g i n t h e s u s t a i n e d c r i t i c
i s m o f E x i s t e n t i a l i s m contained in The Sovereignty of Good. I hope it
will be understood as a form of praise if I characterize Iris Murdoch’s
book The Sovereignty of Good as a polemic. It is a passionate rejection of
an entire climate of opinion and a deep-seated conception of the practice
of philosophy in general and of moral philosophy in particular. But what is
rejected there is more than a particular wayof conducting a certain form of
scholarly business, or a particular conception of thesubject matter. Rather,
in Sovereignty she is rejecting a conception of ourselves whichcan be
found in movies, popular songs, and forms of romantic life as much as in
worksof philosophy. It exists as a style and an attitude much more than simply a
theory. Whatis Murdoch’s target here, then? I t
is an idea of the person which emphasizes his status as an agent
, o n e w h o deliberates, chooses, and acts. It is a picture that
emphasizes sincerity and purity of motive, but which also,
curiously, has no real place for the ‘inner life ’ , i n t h a t t h e meaning
and moral importance of what we do is restricted to the overt,
publicly observable act. It denies the existence of genuine objective
value but endows theperson with the super-human ability to invest
features of the world with value, by thesimple exertion of his arbitrary
and unconstrained will.This presents us with a familiar image of
‘Existentialist Man’ , and no one will have alivelier appreciation than
Murdoch herself of how much caricature is involved in thispicture. In her
hands the caricature is hardly born of a superficial acquaintance with thetexts in
question.
1
Rather, in Sovereignty and elsewhere the caricature has a positive
philosophical point, and a complex one. For she wants to examine living
ideas in their actual social and intellectual setting, and to look at how
such ideas function in the lifeand culture of actual human beings. For this
purpose the caricature itself is a genuine datum, of just as serious a claim
on our philosophical attention as the actual texts of Concluding Unscientific
Postscript or Being and Nothingness. At the time she wrote
Sovereignty (roughly 1964 – 1970) ‘existentialism’ still survived as a
cultural phenomenon, astyle of life and literature, and a political stance. Her
concern here is not exclusively, or even centrally, with a doctrine existing in
books. And if the caricature itself has had its attractions for otherwise
thoughtful people, then it will be worth the philosopher ’ strouble to
investigate and criticize the sources of that attraction. A further reason for
choosing this simplified and exaggerated figure as her target isthat she is
interested in how certain ideas with an Existentialist pedigree combine with
aconception of moral discourse from a very different tradition of
philosophy — British analytic empiricism —
to p r o d u c e a n u n s t a b l e b u t s t i l l p e r v a s i v e m o d e l f o r m o r a l thinki
ng that is not only mistaken, but which functions to make it diffic u l t
t o s o much as imagine an alternative to it.
2
Even for those who disagree with her conclusions, or even resist the
entire drift of her thought, the reason for gratitude to
The Sovereignty of Good and related essays (especially
‘Vision and Choice in Morality’
(1956)) is their resoluteness about breaking the grip of such res
t r i c t i o n s o n o u r thinking, and expanding the field of the philosophically
imaginable. But at the sametime, I want to argue that, in addition to the
genuine virtues of Murdoch’ s very broad-brush approach to the traditions
of thought she characterizes as ‘Existentialist’ , especially in their social
setting, the distortions she imposes on this thought ill-serve the
presentation of her own thinking, and indeed may prevent the deeper reception
of whatis most powerful and important in Murdoch ’s own thought. A
familiar story we are told about Murdoch ’s intellectual development is that,
whileshe was one of the first and best interpreters of (Sartrean)
Existentialism in the 1950sand 1960, she soon came to see through its
political and intellectual barrenness, findingher way to a deeper
engagement with the more contemplative ideals of Plato and Simone
Weil (among others).
3
The encounter with Sartre was a youthful indiscretion,or an adventure we
can admire and even learn from, but a decidedly wrong
turnnonetheless. I think this story is wrong about Existentialism and
misleading about thedirection and content of Murdoch’s thinking. To the
contrary, I would argue that wereach a better appreciation of many of the
distinctive features of her thought
abouta c t i o n , v i s i o n , a n d t h e i d e a l s o f l i f e b y s e e i n g t h e m a s r e s p
o n s e s t o a n d c r e a t i v e elaborations of characteristic Existentialist
ideas. This is not a matter of either denyingher originality or of simply
dragging a philosopher back to her sources. Instead, I wantto suggest
that the broad cultural repudiation of Existentialism since the 1970s,
dismissing it for its faddishness and doing so on the basis of no
more than a addish
acquaintance with its texts, stands between us and a deeper
u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f Murdoch’ s own thought. Downplaying this
inheritance prevents us from
appreciating just what kind of philosophical work is being done by the
characteristically Murdo-
2
On p. 2 of
The Sovereignty of Good
(Routledge, 1970) Murdoch speaks of
‘
a kind of Newspeak whichmakes certain values non-expressible
’
(IP 2/300). Except where indicated otherwise, all quotations fromMurdoch
are from this book.The individual essays
‘
The Idea of Perfection
’
and
‘
On
“
God
”
and
“
Good
”’
Are abbreviated as IP and OGG respectively, followed by page numbers
referring both to the 1970 edition and tothe reprintings in
Existentialists and Mystics
[E&M], edited by Peter Conradi (1997; Penguin, 1999).
3
See, for instance, Peter Conradi
’
s introduction to
Existentialists and Mystics
, where he says that,
‘
for reasons already touched upon, it was felt necessary fully to document
Murdoch
’
s growing scepticism andhostility towards existentialism
’
(E&M xxviii), and
‘
It is hard to escape the conclusion that by the late 1970sIris Murdoch had
helped to render existentialism out of date.
’