Iris Murdoch : survival and community

Iris Murdoch's philosophical and, most notably, literary work is marked by three voices associated with three features of the human domain: human suffering, the heightened internalisation of the Good, and the well-being attainable by individuals in moral/political community. These voices are crucial in this thesis, but their significance is shown, largely, by following the movement from a particular form of suffering that intrudes on human lives to attainable well-being. In Murdoch's work there is, one might say, an internal logic to this movement. Her work is exemplary in providing such a logic, in its handling, and in the inventiveness with which it is pursued. Within Murdoch's work there is a range of cases in which suffering intrudes on human lives. What links these cases is that individuals are placed outside a situation within which they could experience well-being: a certain understanding of themselves and others, one attendant feature of which is possession of a sense of self-assurance. Though there are a range of cases evident in Murdoch's work, I will focus on cases that are, given their severity, towards one end of this range. At this pole we encounter a mode of suffering revealed most starkly in the Nazi-camps, but also (following Bruno Bettelheim) in the lives of those who have been subject to other trauma-inducing situations. Well-being is not available to those whose lives are, given exposure to these traumatic situations, underwritten by despair; a despair that the character of Bellamy in The Green Knight feels as "the old stale hopeless weariness.... the black sickness which almost no one else, certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand at all."(p.l 16). In Chapter Two I will focus on lives that are so marked, and suggest that they lead us to speak of individuals being in the possession of a spiritual malady of diminished self-assurance; a malady that sees individuals settling for survival. In showing how lives turn from the suffering that has informed them, we will direct our attention to two versions of community - present in Murdoch's work - which make available two levels of human conduct. These versions of community, outlined in Chapter One, are integral to the discussions in Chapters Three and Four. What is demonstrated is that the version of community that affords (within a naturalistic setting) well-being is brought-about through the witnessing, being the recipient of, or sensitivity to, that which evokes a heightened internalisation of the Good. But it is also a conception of community that has a prior history as one that makes no use of the concept of the Good. Its existence in the prior mode, then, is subject to modification. In identifying these conceptions of community reference will be made to the work of several writers. In endeavouring to give a more philosophical exposition of activity that discloses a heightened internalisation of the Good, Raimond Gaita's work Good And Evil: An Absolute Conception will be referred to. This work makes available a certain perspective on the participation of individuals in a form of life. It is a perspective determined by the ethically-conditioned sense of individuality associated with such participation. And activity arising from the perspective constitutes, for Gaita, the moral plane.(p. 149). Such a perspective exists in Murdoch's work alongside another, and together they reveal two separate levels of moral activity. This other perspective is informed by more of a first-personal element through which one sees oneself and others to be self-disclosing, self-enacting individuals. A certain situatedness is made available here that involves one in the subscription to moral practices. Such involvement arises with just and loving attention and is embodied in a form of naturalism governed by the Good. It is a situatedness conditioned by the ethically-conditioned sense of individuality - given the different perspective this sense has a different complexion to that which informs Gaita's work - at the base of a position we encounter in Michael Oakeshott's work. It is especially in Chapter Four that we will see how such a position is subject to modification given the aim of interpreting Murdoch's work. The conception of well-being that we can see informing Murdoch's work, associated as it is with a situatedness conditioned by responsiveness to a certain understanding of ethically-conditioned individuality, is unique in recent moral philosophy. We can, for example, contrast Murdoch's work with recent work within which the notion of self-direction is given emphasis. One such work is The Examined Life by John Kekes, a work I will characterise in Chapter Four. Rather than working with the kind of situatedness to be found in Murdoch's work, Kekes favours a position within which we form an amalgam between elements of the moral tradition and our unique personalities. And it is from such a perspective that Kekes interprets Murdoch's employment of the metaphor of unselfing, an interpretation we will scrutinise. It is, however, on Murdoch's literary work as such that I will now briefly comment. Murdoch's personality as a writer is located in the fusion of elements that are usually found in separation: an imaginative seizure with which the reality of characters and places is established, and the presence of a certain understanding of human life and conduct. We get a clearer grasp of the former element by following Oakeshott's description of the imaginative expression of human conduct: "To understand a substantive performance in which an agent discloses and enacts himself is to put it into a story in which it is recognised to be an occurrence contingently related to other occurrences... This story has no overall meaning; it is occurrences understood in terms of the meanings they acquire from their evidential contingent relationships. And the teller of such a story has no message for those who listen other than the intelligibility with which he purports to have endowed the occurrences concerned by putting them into a story. It is, of course, true that a story may be used to point a moral... But to do this is to give up the story-teller's concern with the topical and transitory and to endow occurrences with a potency they cannot have without surrendering their characters as occurrences. It is not to tell a story but to construct a myth." It would seem that Murdoch's work flies in the face of adherence to what Oakeshott says here; for the impression we receive from the fusion of the two elements in Murdoch's writings is not dissimilar to that conveyed by John Cowper Powys' appreciative remarks on Rabelais. For Powys comments on our finding some clue "to a Way of enduring all the disgusting evils of life, to a Way of distilling all the magical wonder out of life...." And this is achieved by digging beneath the injustices in the world and finding that "the whole chaotic spectacle falls into gigantic and friendly homeliness no longer desolate and futile, but with all its piled-up abominations taking on new significance" .5 Speaking in a different appreciative voice, we can say that Murdoch achieves an involuntary greatness in her writing through the fusion of a certain understanding of human life, and conduct, with the play of contingency. Myth - with which the former is connected in Murdoch's writings - and story function together in Murdoch's work; and this fusion is discoverable by us in work that has great claims to memorability