Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (hereafter MGM) was Iris Murdoch’s major philosophical testament and a highly original and ambitious attempt to talk about our time. Based on her Gifford Lectures in 1982, it was reworked over a ten-year period before its publication in 1992. Her manuscripts as well as her correspondence from the period attest that this was not an altogether easy process, as Frances White reveals in the second chapter of this book. Her ambition was to do serious philosophical work, and yet to speak in a way accessible to the ordinary educated person about the cultural and moral predicament of largely liberal modernity: perhaps a nearly impossible task in the academic and compartmentalised context of late twentieth-century anglophone philosophy.
It is perhaps precisely the broader ambition that gives MGM lasting philosophical relevance and opens up dimensions as yet unexplored. Murdoch’s earlier work resonates with contemporary turns in ethics towards ‘vision’ rather than ‘choice’, to virtues, to love and other emotions, to the relevance of literature and art for morality. These themes are also present, and further developed, in MGM, but are complemented by a profound exploration of our condition as spiritual creatures in a secular world and as creatures who cannot avoid holding metaphysical views even in a post-metaphysical age. The book makes distinctive contributions to questions of ethics, the possibility of metaphysics in the contemporary world, spiritual life without god, the nature and relevance of philosophy, questions of style and sensibility in intellectual work, and the nature of evil in a secular world, among other things.
Many of these topics in Murdoch’s work have been discussed by scholars in the past 20 years, but the influence of MGM has been significantly smaller than that of her previous work, partly because many readers find the book difficult and messy. The nature of the difficulty is, however, hard to pin down. It has something to do with the scarcity of metatextual instructions for reading, and the unfinished and circling character of many of the chapters of the book. But it also has to do with the ways in which her take on its different subject matters, and indeed on philosophy overall, differs from what most readers expect her to deliver.
Stanley Cavell (1981, 10) notes that in some cases you must ‘let the object or the work of your interest teach you how to consider it’. MGM is undoubtedly one of these works.
Though well received by theologians, who appreciate her sustained engagement with the question of faith in secular modernity, MGM has not been a great favourite among Murdoch’s large readership of literary scholars and writers. The slighting attitude to the book sometimes gets what to a philosophical reader looks like a comic twist, as when Andrew Wilson, in his keynote talk at an Iris Murdoch conference at Chichester in 2017, aired the suspicion that the effort of writing of the book ‘broke’ Murdoch, that is, prevented her from developing as a literary writer in her last years; as if it were indeed obvious that more or stronger novels would have been preferable to MGM. Part of the difficulty is related to the form: chapters do not always open up as systematic arguments. But this should perhaps bother the philosophers more than the literary scholars; the latter’s problems may rather be due to the difficulty of getting a good grasp of what she is up to, a difficulty they certainly share with many philosophical readers too. This is where the present volume comes in, offering paths through different topics and chapters in the book, in thoughtful company.
In this introductory essay we attend to a few themes that we believe will be useful for readers of MGM and this book: some central topics of MGM, the formal and textual aspects of her writing, and the continuing relevance of the book for contemporary philosophy as well as humanist and social scientific thought more widely. At the end, we provide a short tour through the essays included here.
Philosophical Ambitions
Murdoch’s philosophical ambition in the book is nothing less than a comprehensive view of the human situation at the time of writing: a historical situation of gains and losses, distinctive matters of concern, things we can ‘no longer believe in’, things we take for granted, fundamental commitments, inspirational images, and root metaphors.
It shows deep commitment to the idea, shared by younger contemporaries like Charles Taylor, that a deep and complex, historically aware understanding of our present is a prerequisite for an intelligent normative conception of our moral lives. As she puts it at the end of MGM: ‘We live in the present, this strange familiar yet mysterious continuum which is so difficult to describe. This is what is nearest and it matters what kind of place it is’ (MGM, 495).
It matters, indeed, in more than one way. It does so for us as people: for our lives, for how the world of our present opens up for us, what it allows us to do or be, what options it gives for us in practical, moral, existential and spiritual terms. But it also matters for us as philosophers, scholars, social scientists, and theologians who try to get a more objective view of some contemporary phenomenon. In these capacities our challenge is double: to inhabit our present and yet also understand it as well as we can, in medias res, without the cooling benefit of hindsight.
In a letter to the French author Raymond Queneau in 1947 Murdoch writes, ‘the question is, can I really exploit the advantages (instead of as hitherto simply suffer from the disadvantages) of having a mind on the borders of philosophy, literature and politics’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 99). The advantages of this mind lie in its capacity to read her own present, and the multiple pasts embedded in that present, without reducing experience to its historicity.
In the introductory chapter to MGM she talks about our thinking taking place against a horizon that goes back to the Greeks (or so we are taught), and about the claims made ‘(for instance by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida)’ (MGM, 2) that this horizon has been sponged away. She does not quite buy the common story of a modern, disenchanted world, devoid of metaphysics. But she doesn’t have a ready alternative account either: MGM is framed as an investigation of this situation.
Sometimes art is better and quicker than philosophy at picking up what is happening to us. As she puts it in the oft-cited interview with Bryan Magee: ‘Our consciousness changes, and the change may appear in art before it receives its commentary in a theory, though the theory may also subsequently affect the art’ (Murdoch 1997, 22). In MGM both literature and visual arts have a continuous strong presence in a variety of roles: as objects of contemplation, as sources of insight, sites of existential and phenomenological discovery, as clues to the historical formation of our conceptions of ourselves and our world.
What is also useful for a reader to appreciate, is how Murdoch’s literary sensibility is at work in the book. It is not so much a matter of the ‘literariness’ of the text itself, but of her style of handling her plural subject matters. While writing something well recognisable as somewhat essayistic philosophical prose, she reads her present as a novelist, seeking out moods, modalities, metaphors and complexities. She is taking the pulse of her present as much as making claims about it. This exploratory emphasis may also be seen as a key to what is interestingly ‘political’ in her thought: not her normative political views (which changed over the course of her life), nor any normative political theory (she did not present one), but her critical interest in, and ways of looking at the interplay of worldviews, mythologies, forms of personhood, moralities and societal visions, in philosophy, art and society at large.
Religion
In his essay ‘Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy’, Taylor describes two transfers in Murdoch’s philosophy: ‘We were trapped in the corral of morality. Murdoch led us out not only to the broad fields of ethics but also beyond that again to the almost untracked forests of the unconditional’ (Taylor 1996, 5).
Answering to a latent need in late twentieth-century anglophone moral philosophy, the move from the corral to the field, from morality (action and obligation) to ethics (the good life) has absorbed a large part of the philosophers’ attention to Murdoch. Connecting the narrower issues of what we owe to each other to the Socratic question of ‘how one ought to live’, to what we find or should find worthy, important or beautiful; to the inflections of moral personhood, and so on, she served as an inspiration for thinkers like Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Raimond Gaita, and their students and followers, as well as for the boom of philosophical Murdoch scholarship in the twenty-first century.
The path to the forests of the unconditional, though central for MGM, has for the philosophers been less interesting, partly due to the secular tonality of contemporary philosophy and the lack of a relevant frame in which to place her thought on these issues. Though they are as convinced as Murdoch of the idea that ‘God does not and cannot exist’, they have been less concerned than she was with the spiritual needs and propensities of their contemporaries. For theologians like Hauerwas, Schweiker and Antonaccio the further move seems to be at the centre of their interest in Murdoch. Taylor thinks that she is genuinely out in the wilderness:
The forest is virtually untracked. Or rather, there are old tracks; they appear on maps that have been handed down to us. But when you get in there, it is very hard to find them. So we need people to make new trails. That is, in effect what Iris Murdoch...