Iris Murdoch Philosophy Quotes

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth" "Great art is able to display and discuss the central area of our reality, our actual consciousness, in a more exact way than science or even philosophy can.

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.

Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art. A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.

Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.

Life is horrible, horrible, horrible, said the philosopher.

Philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious

If you want to eat spaghetti you must use your teeth.’ Wittgenstein." "I don't think Wittgenstein really said any of those things you say he said!

The conversation in the Old Brompton Road was more like an experience of the inferno, but lovers are accustomed to fire.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. - Iris Murdoch

Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. Kant's conclusive exposure of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, his analysis of the limitations of speculative reason, together with his eloquent portrayal of the dgnity of rational man, has had results which might possibly dismay him. How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundelgung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d'etre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure. He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.

It is frequently difficult in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one's own temperament, against one's own personal fears. (It is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?)

The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions. Sartre was always, as he explains in his autobiography, aware of their being at variance with reality. One remembers the comic account of this antipathy in Iris Murdoch Under the Net, one of the few truly philosophical novels in English; truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent novel. As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end. * ____________________ * There is a remarkable passage in Ortega y Gasset London essay ' History as a System' (in Philosophy and History, ed. Klibansky and Paton, 1936) which very clearly states the issues more notoriously formulated by Sartre. Ortega is discussing man's duty to make himself. 'I invent projects of being and doing in the light of circumstance. This alone I come upon, this alone is given me: circumstance. It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to "ideate" the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself... Among... possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not... To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was...' This 'constitutive instability' is the human property lacking in the novels condemned by Sartre and Murdoch. Ortega differs from Sartre on the use of the past; but when he says that his free man is, willy-nilly, 'a second-hand God,' creating his own entity, he is very close to Sartre, who says that to be is to be like the hero in a novel. In one instance the eidetic image is of God, in the other of the Hero.

I can't sleep. The pills don't work anymore. I'm just saving them up now. It's no good imagining gardens and garden gates, that used to help. Now I lie for hours staring at the ceiling. Human life is a scene of horror. I hope you enjoyed the cheese soufflé. Nothing could be more important than that Mozart died a pauper, except that Shakespeare stopped writing. A scene of horror. You'd better go home.' 'But what were you saying?' 'Nothing. What you can't say you can't say and you can't whistle it either, as my old philosophy tutor used to observe. Bugger off, will you.' 'OK,' I said. 'Good-bye, in case you should decide to kill yourself tonight.' 'Good-bye.

I rather liked him.I asked him to come and see us.' ‘Oh Christ !’ ‘But, Bradley, you mustn’t reject people,you musn't just write them of. You must be curious about them. Curiosity is kind of charity.’ ‘I don’t think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it’s a kind of malice.’ ‘That’s what makes a writer, knowing the details.’ ‘It may make your kind of writer. It doesn’t make mine.’ ‘Here we go again,’ said Arnold. ‘Why pile up a jumble of “details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’ ‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t draw direct from life.’ ‘Your wife thinks you do.’ ‘Oh that. Oh God.’ ‘Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one’s spotted isn’t art. ‘ ‘Of course it isn’t -‘ ‘Vague romantic myth isn’t art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the othet.’ ‘Bradley, I know you -‘ ‘Art isn’t chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silnce.’ ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art! It’s people without creative gifts who say that more mean worse!’ ‘One should only complete something when one feels one’s bloody privileged to have it all. Those who only do what’s easy will never be rewarded by -‘ ‘Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That’s what being a professional writer is.’ ‘Then thank God I’m not one.’…

How recognisable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the 'groundwork', who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason...This man is with us still, free, independent, lovely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison detre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational, and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal... his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal..his alienation is without cure... It is not such a long step from Kant to Neitzsche to existentialism, and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it.... In fact, Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Philosophy of mind is the background to moral philosophy; and insofar as modern ethics tends to constitute a sort of Newspeak which makes certain values non-expressible, the reasons for this are to be sought in current philosophy of mind and in the fascinating power of a certain picture of the soul. One suspects that philosophy of mind has not in fact been performing the task … of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgement in the guise of a theory of human nature.

Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave’s pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave’s pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that. They are prepared within certain limits to alter their views. Many of them arrive as theosophists and depart as Critical Realists or Bradeians. It is remarkable how Dave’s criticism seems os often to be purely catalytic in its action. He blazes upon them with the destructive fury of the sun, but instead of shrivelling up their metaphysical pretensions, achieves merely their metamorphosis from one rich stage into another. This curious fact makes me think that perhaps after all Dave is, in spite of himself, a good teacher. Occasionally he succeeds in converting some peculiarly receptive youth to his own brand of linguistics analysis; after which as often as not the youth loses interest in philosophy altogether. To watch Dave at work on these young men is like watching someone prune a rose bush. It is all the strongest and most luxuriant shoots which have to come off. Then later perhaps there will be blossoms; but not philosophical ones, Dave trusts. His great aim is to dissuade the young from philosophy. He always warns me off it with particular earnestness.

To The Times. Steeple Aston 19 April 1974 Sir, I hear on my radio Mr Reg Prentice, of the party which I support, saying to a gathering on education the following: ‘The eleven plus must go, so must selection at twelve plus, at sixteen plus, and any other age.’ What can this mean? How are universities to continue? Are we to have engineers without selection of those who understand mathematics, linguists without selection of those who understand grammar? To many teachers such declarations of policy must seem obscure and astonishing, and to imply the adoption of some quite new philosophy of education which has not, so far as I know, been in this context discussed. It is certainly odd that the Labour Party should wish to promote a process of natural unplanned sorting which will favour the children of rich and educated people, leaving other children at a disadvantage. I thought socialism was concerned with the removal of unfair disadvantages. Surely what we need is a careful reconsideration of how to select, not the radical and dangerous abandonment of the principle of selection. Yours faithfully, Iris Murdoch

So there are long conversations in cafés about Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau, and all the boys that we were just beginning to get excited about in London when the first French literature filtered across after the Liberation. My God, Leo, there is some very interesting stuff being written in France at present on the philosophical and literary front. I begin to get some glimmering too about ‘existentialism’ the latest philosophy of France – Sartre, out of Husserl, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Last week I had a very great experience. Jean-Paul Sartre came to Brussels to give a lecture on existentialism, and I met him after the lecture, and on the following day during an interminable café séance. He is small, squints appallingly, is very simple and charming in manner and extremely attractive. What versatility! Philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism! No wonder the stuffy professional philosophers are suspicious. I don’t make much yet of his phenomenology, but his theories on morals, which derive from Kierkegaard, seem to me first rate and just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Prichard.

History is not a science, nor is it an art, though the historian must, as a writer, be an artist too, he should write well, lucidly and eloquently, and is not harmed by a lively imagination. What is history? A truthful account of what happened in the past. As this necessarily involves evaluation, the historian is also a moralist. The term 'liberal,' mocked by some, must be retained. Historians are fallible beings who must make up their own minds, constantly aware of the particularised demands of truth. What is seen as odd must be allowed to retain its oddity, upon which later a clearer light may or may not shine. There are many dangers. History must be saved from dictators, from authoritarian politics, from psychology, from anthropology, from science, above all from the pseudo-philosophy of historicism. The study of history is menaced by fragmentation, a distribution of historical thinking among other disciplines, as we see happening in the case of philosophy. Such fragmentation opens a space for false prophets, old and new. Not only the shades of Hegel and Marx and Heidegger, but also those, you know whom I mean, who would degrade history into what they call 'fabulation.' Of course it is a truism, of which much has been made, that we cannot see the past. But we can work hard and faithfully to portray it, to understand and explain it. We need this if we are to possess wisdom and freedom. What brings down dictators, what has liberated Eastern Europe? Most of all a passionate hunger for truth, for the truth about their past, and for the justice which truth begets.

Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth.

What does M. Marcel52 think that philosophy is? He uses various phrases to describe it in his first volume of Gifford lectures. It is a reflective quest inspired by a metaphysical uneasiness. It