Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy

I want to talk to you this morning about a person whom I consider to be one of the most important writers and philosophers of the 20th century, Iris Murdoch. It has been two years now since Murdoch died, and it seems an appropriate time to recall her and to recommend her to you.

For many reasons, most of them good ones, there has for at least the last fifty years, been incredible skepticism about even the possibility of an objective ethics. The assault on ethics by philosophers reached its zenith during the hayday of what is called logical positivism—the view that the very meaning of propositions consists in their methods of verification, thus, if we can’t say what would verify a proposition, it is literally meaningless, empty. Although positivism died a fairly quick and justifiable death among academic philosophers (who realized that we simply must not confuse meaning and verification—many important, meaningful beliefs are not, at least fully, verifiable), its influence spread quickly and widely into the sciences, especially the social sciences. The damage that it has done there will last, in my estimation, for many years to come.

So, one reason for the attack on ethics has come from this epistemolgical drive for clarity and certainty. Wanting to be clear, even wanting to be certain, is not a bad thing in itself, but it can cause peculiar and dangerous moves. As I learn so often from my students, there is a tremendous temptation to move from the claim that nothing is certain to the claim that everything is equally true/certain. What begins as an obsessive fascination for certainty can, though not for good reasons, lead quickly to a lazy acceptance of whatever view one likes.

However, another factor that has driven the attack on ethics is the flat out truth that cultures from time to time and place to place differ (at least in part) on what they hold dear, what they value and seek out. Dominant cultures tend always to suppose that their values (their beliefs about what is valuable) are true for all and for all times, leading to a dangerous and blind ethnocentrism. The tremendous advances made in sociology and anthropology in this century, due primarily to the careful and in so far as possible objective scrutiny of other cultures by social scientists, has culminated in a healthy humility when it comes to making carte blanche statements about other cultures. For even if there is some objective ethic, even if there are some cross cultural or universal moral truths, making judgments about the rightness or wrongness of practices of those in other cultures, and especially judging the moral worth of those involved in such practices, requires extreme care and tolerance. We can never be sure that we have all the morally relevant facts at hand, and if there is anything close to a shared moral principle among social scientists, it is that we ought not judge without complete understanding.

To put this quickly and overly simply, our increasing understanding of cultural diversity has caused many careful thinkers to be much more careful in making moral and value judgments about other cultures, even other groups within a culture, and finally even about individuals within the same group or culture.

Even from this quick overview, it should be obvious why scientists and philosophers have become more suspicious of ethical theories that claim to have arrived at cross-cultural and/or universal truths. However, none of this explains why there has been so much resistance from leftists regarding the possibility of an objective ethics. Of course, it was very important to early Marxists to carry on what Marx and Engels saw as a scientific approach to economics and cultural studies, and thus not surprising that the scientific suspicion of ethics should carry over to leftists. But it is obvious that Marx is arguing that certain forms of production are unfair, that the capitalist mode, in particular, oppresses whole classes of people. No one can read Marx carefully without realizing that he thought that capitalism ought to be overthrown. Whether or not he thought that its eventual replacement by communism is inevitable (a claim Marxists continue to argue), there is no doubt that he thought that it ought to be overthrown, that communism is a better, morally better, system.

And yet it is almost as difficult to find leftists who will seriously entertain claims to an objective ethics as it is to find positivists who will do so. Ethics is simply out of vogue, and thinkers of all sorts are fond of the mantra that there is no absolute truth (especially in ethics), and that everything must be regarded from a relativistic stance. (Such a dangerous claim for leftists to make, since, I think, it undercuts many of their most passionate beliefs and argues for a kind of status quo.)

I have used up most of my time already, and I have not yet even mentioned Murdoch’s place in all of this. What I would like to invite you readers to do is to read Murdoch. First, read one or two of her novels. Get irritated by them, get depressed by them, wonder about them. Then read a bit of her philosophical essay; I would suggest starting with a difficult but excellent essay entitled “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” which can be found in a collection of essays under that same title. It can also be found in a newer and much larger collection entitled “Existentialists and Mystics.” Then return to her novels with an understanding of her theory as a background for the novels. What you will find, or perhaps I should say what I have found in fifteen years of reading Murdoch, is a thinker who understands all the perils of ethnocentrism, who understands the arrogance and blindness of what we might call scholasticism, who even understands the mistakes and excesses of both Anglo American analytic philosophers and Continental philosophers (especially the existentialists), and yet who continues to be committed to the objectivity of good. Perhaps, as some analytic philosophers have insisted, good (unlike many other important concepts) is not further reducible, cannot be expressed by synonyms (in philosophical parlance, it is simple and unanalyzable). Still, not only is there good, but we can see it everyday, we can recognize it in ourselves and others. Indeed, if Murdoch is right, we can even learn to be good, or, at least, to be much better than we are now.

It is obvious that Murdoch loves the moral zeal of the existentialist writers, loves their passion and their calls to action. But she also sees that they put much too much stress on freedom, on what gets called by both analytic philosophers and existentialists, free will. She thinks there has been much too much stress on the vaunted freedom of the will, as if one only does the good, only does her duty, in exceptional cases where the mighty will overpowers the lowly inclinations and heroically does right. Murdoch, giving in partly to Hobbes and to the legion of psychologists since, admits that we humans are organic; we are animals among animals, and we are selfish by nature. Why deny it when it is so much a datum of everyday life. But, though selfish by nature, we are not selfish necessarily; we can learn to see the world in such a way that we are not completely blinded by the veil of our own cares and concerns. Just as the scientist or painter can, through careful attention, learn to see the world as it is (rather than as s/he wants it to be), so, too, we as moral agents can come to attend to the needs of others without always or completely filtering that view through the distortions of self.

Murdoch sees also that the call-word of Satrean existentialists, that existence precedes essence, that there is no human essence, undercuts completely the possibility of an objective ethics. If there are cross cultural rights and wrongs, then they must be based on some shared essence. I understand fully the suspicions of feminists, of all careful thinkers, to claims that are based on having discovered the essence of women, or of men, or of human beings generally. But the fact that essentialist arguments have been misused, that essentialist claims have been made that are dangerous and false, cannot be a sufficient reason to give up the search for what we are essentially. Granted, we must always treat these claims gingerly, even suspiciously, but if morality is not somehow grounded in universal or shared biologies (which is also the ground for understanding how we mistreat other animals, how we abuse the organic world we live in), then we will be left with a kind of relativism that yields to the loudest voice, that disintegrates into might makes right.

Well, I haven’t really told you what Murdoch’s ethical theory is, but you can find out for yourselves. Here is a person who believes in good, who thinks we can and must eschew bad (evil), and who is willing to tell us how at least to start going about it. She is a wonderful thinker, a great writer and philosopher, and was herself a deeply good and humble being. Read her. She is a treasure of the age.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

I want to talk to you about a little jewel of a novel by Lorrie Moore, entitled, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? I had read one of her novels before, though I don’t remember much about it, and I may have forgotten about her entirely had I not run across an astoundingly good short story of hers in an excellent text and anthology on existentialism. The story was chosen for the anthology because it dealt very starkly with the fact that we are, all of us, situated towards death. The story is one about a young woman confronting her own death and trying neither to frighten nor to lie to her daughter about what is happening. The story is good, so moving, and yet also one that avoids false pathos.

At any rate, it was my memory of that story that led me to pick this novel up, along with the recommendation of the dear friend who loaned it to me. This is a wonderful little coming of age novel with all the intimacy of a journal or memoir. Often novels of this sort fail because they try to do too much, to cover the whole of a young life, seeming unsure of just what to emphasize and what to leave out. Moore simply takes two strands of a life, one in the present, a woman in a sadly failing marriage wondering around Paris wishing she were in love, wishing she were with someone else, and the other strand the memory of her fifteen year old self. The child of caring but cold and distant parents, this young girl, Berie, turns to a girlfriend for the love and attention that she does not get from her parents. Berie, still flat chested and little girlish, finds herself completely fascinated by a much more mature girl named Sils. This is really a story about first love, not particularly about sexual love, but love none the less. For many of us, if we are honest with ourselves, our first real ‘love-affairs’ are with friends of the same sex, and though perhaps not overtly sexual, there is a kind of delicious aura of sexuality about them. Certainly, Berie’s admiration for Sil’s lush, womanly body, has a sexual component. Truthfully, Bernie does not have overtly sexual desires for either boys or girls, but because Sils includes her in so much of her life, even welcoming her along as a third in the heated mashing sessions she has with her boyfriend (Bernie looking on from the backseat, half disgusted, half excited), there is a dimension to their relationship that would have to be called sexual.

Both girls work at a kind of amusement park called Adventureland—Bernie as a cashier and Sils as a storybook version of Cinderella. Even there, Bernie gets vicarious satisfaction from the long lines of little girls who queue up to get on the ride with Cinderella, paying for the privilege of riding around the park with her in a papier-mache pumpkin coach.

The reader is treated to the innocent development of this love story. Two girls, who, for different reasons, are allowed to run free for a long summer—hitchhiking to slightly bigger towns and using false ID to get into bars, to drink and dance, but mostly playing games not that far removed from their eight and nine and ten year old selves.

But the best way to introduce you to this delightful little book (perfect for busy city-readers—only 150 pages from start to finish), is not to tell you about it, or to describe the events. For it is the lovely, honest prose that glides one through this book. The sadness and loneliness of a little girl, echoed by the loneliness of a grown woman who finds herself in that particular loneliness of a loveless relationship. A wise woman reflecting back on a girl also wise, though profoundly inexperienced. Let me select out a few passages to share with you; I think that is more likely to get you to read this book than any overview I might muster.

The grown Berie reflecting back on the fifteen year old Berie:

In some ways my childhood consisted of a kind of wasting away, a wandering dreamily through woods and illegally in the concrete sewer pipes, crawling, or pleasantly alone in the house (everyone gone for and hour!) chewing the salt out of paper bits, or hiding under quilts in the afternoon to form a new place somehow, a new space that had never existed before in the bed, like a rehearsal for love ... My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song—nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.

Berie remembers little of her silent father who seemed to love music much more than he loved his children. A stranger who reminded them when they hit a wrong note, corrected them and then left then alone again.

You’d be standing there talking to no one ... Nonetheless, we adored him. If he didn’t know us, love us, even recognize us, it wasn’t because he was invested elsewhere in other children. We had no rivals for his affection, except perhaps Brahms, Dvorak, the daily crossword, and our mother--and even then, not often her. In his iconic way our father remained very much ours. And in the long shadows of his neglect, we fashioned our own selves, quietly improvised our own rules, as kids did in America, in the fatherless fifties and sixties. Which was probably why children of that time, when they grew up, turned out to be such a shock to their parents.

And now this girl, this woman, wandering the streets of Paris and trying to pretend or to rekindle love with yet another man who has become a stranger, both wanting to be close but not knowing how to get there. She remembers Sils again, Sils who stayed in that little town, unable to live out their dreams of going to college together. They were so certain they would be friends for life, unthinkable that they would not, though when she sees Sils again, ten years later at a high school reunion, their lives are utterly different. Sils congratulates Berie on her upcoming marriage, insisting that she had always known that Berie would be the one to end up with the best husband of all.

For a fleeting moment, as anyone can, I imagined I felt the poverty of my future, all its unholdable surfaces; I felt inexplicably ungrateful and sad. It was a moment of stillness in which one looks around and ruefully sees only the rocks and searing sun and cheap metal. “You wanted an adventure and instead you got Adventureland,” Sils herself used to say. I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed—I wanted it back!—those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.

Hopefully, these few passages will give you some flavor of the liquid prose of this beautiful little book, a touch of the wisdom of the author in dealing with the existential angst that invades us all at some time or other.

Penelope Lively

I would like to talk to you this morning about an author I have mentioned once before, Penelope Lively. Last year, when I first discovered this wonderful author, I reviewed her 1987 Booker Prize winner, Moon Tiger. Today I want to recommend to you three more of her novels, and indeed, to recommend to you everything she has written. Lively is definitely writing about the world we find ourselves in today, and she is doing so with a sense of history and an intellectual acuity that we readers are likely to find very infrequently.

Moon Tiger was published in 1987, but Lively had been writing excellent novels long before that. Judgment Day was written in 1981, and any observant reader should see that the philosophy of history that she lays out in Moon Tiger is already very much there in this earlier novel. Like another important British novelist writing at the same time, Iris Murdoch, Lively insists on not just telling, but showing her readers that while there are patterns in history that can be understood, there is no teleology, i.e., that there is no human independent purpose functioning in the universe. And again like Murdoch, Lively does not think this is something that needs to be argued for; rather, any halfway careful perusal of history should convince us that, as Nietzsche puts it, being aims and nothing and achieves nothing. It is human beings that have purposes and goals and intentions. However, to say that history is not teleological is not to say that we cannot learn by studying it. Indeed, if we have any chance to predict what the future will bring us, any chance to avert global disaster, that chance lies in understanding how the present is a function of the past, and the future a function of the present. Judgment day will not occur at the hands of an angry father god, but through the future that we bring on ourselves, the chains that we forge with our of own activities.

In my view, most great novelists reveal features of the world to us that are far more important than the stories they tell us, more important than the characters they describe to us. And it also true that great novelists tend to tell us the same ‘big’ story over and over in their works. In the case of Murdoch, it is the laying out of an ethical theory and an attempt to point to the good via her allegorical stories. Lively, who is a much better and more acute historian and social critic than Murdoch, wants to show us how failing to learn from history condemns us to ever more disastrous consequences.

Her 1991 novel, City of the Mind, takes us into the world of giant corporations; corporations that raze huge tracts of land (with important histories of their own) to build cites of glass. Lively, the historian and archeologist is there to remind us, over and over, about what such tracts of land looked like in another time—during the second world war, or at a much earlier time when there was only land and crops, and then again changing her time-scale suddenly, drastically, reminding us of what the land was like long before human locusts swarmed over it. It is not only her readers who are taken on these sweeps through time; she likes to show us how each of us lives always in a rather confused welter of past, present, and future. We travel along in this story with an architect who drives from London to its outskirts to oversee the building of one giant glass structure, but as he drives, he remains in the present only because he must guide his car along a river of cars, a modern freeway, while his mind never rests, taking him back to the ‘great war’, to the nightly air-raids that brought down buildings and people, and further back to his own childhood, and then sweeping him along, adding to what he has experienced what he has read, what he has come to know through his interest in science, in paleontology. Expanding and contracting his universe, his city of the mind. This novel, more than any of her others, shows us the ruthlessness of market economies, the lack of concern for people in the rush to destroy countryside and to construct ever bigger and in so many ways, ever more fragile and technology-dependent structures.

The title of her 1993 novel, Cleopatra’s Sister, tells us immediately that this is, at least in some sense, a historical novel. Her readers learn more about Cleopatra and her less famous (and perhaps more ruthless) sister than they could have known, though always learning by looking back through the eyes of a living person, always a history constructed through a discrete, particular historical person. And so, Lively reminds us, is all history constructed. Lively is like Mark Twain, wanting to remind us that what gets called history is simply lies that are agreed to. All views are perspectival, and the human-eye view is, itself, perspectival, revealing only so much, and leaving much more concealed than it reveals.

And finally, let me mention a very recent novel of hers, again a superb piece of writing bound to make any thoughtful reader wonder and worry about the world we live in. Its title is Spider Web, and as the title suggests, the reader is shown again how complex and interrelated is the web of history, the web of our own lives. The lead character in this novel, Stella Brentwood, is a semi-retired anthropologist who decides to settle in a village in the west of England that was once remote and almost inaccessible. Today, with the shrinking of space and the rapidity of travel, it is close to the center of things, to Birmingham and Liverpool and Manchester and London. A lifetime of observing people leaves her unable not to observe and record and speculate about family trees, about ancestry and happenstance. But even as she loses herself in research and speculation about the local people, she is swept at once into a much broader world of human relations. During her life as an intellectual, she has traveled all over the world, never having a place she could or would call home. All her life she has tried to understand family structures, and certainly she is unable not to do so now in what she has decided will be her home, her resting place. And if her body is at rest here, certainly her mind is not. Social anthropologists, she suggests, meddle with people’s lives, meddle by the very fact of their presence; thus, their task it to meddle constructively. And that is what Lively wants to do in our lives, to meddle constructively, to remind us again and again that we must study history, must learn from history. Since we are bound to shape what will come, just as what has passed has shaped what is now, we must all learn to meddle constructively.

While Lively is a realist, not at all interested in trying to calm us about the future, about the world we have created, neither is she cynical nor unduly pessimistic. Her lead characters always describe themselves as agnostic, meaning that they have no real belief in any form of teleology. They do believe in the reality of chance, not meaning contra-causality, but in events that are not planned, are not on purpose. She wants to remind us that any day, any moment, we may be thrown back into the real world--the world that cannot be fit into our neat sense of teleology. Most of us are not starving, are not dying of a dread disease, are not hopeless third world victims of global greed, but a slip on the ice, the loss of a job, the wreck of a car—anything could rent the fabric of our articially spun security, our secure teleology, and cast us into the real world. Then we would be unable to ignore, as we are so often now, the vicissitudes of that real world. Perhaps, she suggests, we would all be better of, and the world we live in a better place, if we would suspend our cozy teleologies.

Let me leave you with one of the ruminations of the retired anthropologist, Stella:

She recognizes that she has landed at one of those alarming junctions in life, where decision is treacherous, where alternatives existences stream into an unimaginable future.

I have no doubt that Lively believes we are all of us, always, at just such a crossroads. The trick is to convince us of this, to convince us to seize the moment, to transform history. I think Lively does her best to help us along.