When Iris Murdoch published The Sovereignty of Good, she no longer believed in moral philosophy. During English philosophy's linguistic turn, large parts of our moral vocabulary were thrown out. Systems of ethics were contrived to take the place of good and evil. It was such a dead end that Murdoch left Oxford to spend the next few decades writing novels instead.
Before she went, she gathered three of her essays together in The Sovereignty of Good, arguing that moral philosophy must embrace metaphor and emotion. We won't learn much by thinking about moral behaviour in terms of an unhindered will that bursts into the world at explicit moments of choice. Rather, it is how we think about and look at the world that conditions how we behave: "visible acts of will" emerge in ways which "are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of [our psyche] in between the moments of choice."
Instead of rationalising every choice and action, Murdoch invites us to still our minds and attend to the world that exists apart from us. That is the only motive we need to be good. Once we witness the light shining through reality, we are drawn to imitate or attain it. Having personally observed certain broadly manifested concepts--truth, justice, greed, etc.--we develop an idiosyncratic vocabulary to understand them. This is where we need metaphors. Philosophy can help us to examine and clarify them.
Though goodness may elude us, having acknowledged its distant star we may begin the journey towards it, seeking "a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue."
craigthelinguist OP t1_j4aozk5 wrote
Reply to The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch by craigthelinguist
When Iris Murdoch published The Sovereignty of Good, she no longer believed in moral philosophy. During English philosophy's linguistic turn, large parts of our moral vocabulary were thrown out. Systems of ethics were contrived to take the place of good and evil. It was such a dead end that Murdoch left Oxford to spend the next few decades writing novels instead.
Before she went, she gathered three of her essays together in The Sovereignty of Good, arguing that moral philosophy must embrace metaphor and emotion. We won't learn much by thinking about moral behaviour in terms of an unhindered will that bursts into the world at explicit moments of choice. Rather, it is how we think about and look at the world that conditions how we behave: "visible acts of will" emerge in ways which "are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of [our psyche] in between the moments of choice."
Instead of rationalising every choice and action, Murdoch invites us to still our minds and attend to the world that exists apart from us. That is the only motive we need to be good. Once we witness the light shining through reality, we are drawn to imitate or attain it. Having personally observed certain broadly manifested concepts--truth, justice, greed, etc.--we develop an idiosyncratic vocabulary to understand them. This is where we need metaphors. Philosophy can help us to examine and clarify them.
Though goodness may elude us, having acknowledged its distant star we may begin the journey towards it, seeking "a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue."