Iris Murdoch

Extract

Iris Murdoch is a philosopher and a novelist. Her novels are not philosophy in narrative form: we would not expect her philosophical writings to be categorical formulations of her narrative line.

Why should Murdoch, an Irish agnostic, be of interest to the clergy or those with theological preoccupations? Well, perhaps because much modern theology and spiritual writing employs, consciously or otherwise, a neo-Cartesian mentalist individualist epistemology. Or perhaps because we must be attuned to hearing people’s stories, or perhaps because when we understand people’s mental furniture better, many of our tasks will be clarified.

Is there some more important reason? Yes. Because our way of praying, lamenting, celebrating, and perhaps what ever counts as prayer, will be affected by the kind of narrative we feel at home in.

It may seem odd to speak of us ‘feeling at home’ in a novel, but if we easily see ourselves as the hero of Lucky Jim or This Sporting Life, feeling more at home in that role, than in a piece of more chaotic, fabulist metafiction like, say, The Philosopher’s Pupil it should tell us something about the philosophical anthropology we are employing. Put it this way: there are philosophical reasons for the hero of many modem novels being a rather alienated character, engaged in a more or less fruitless attempt to be ens causa sui, but these are not good reasons.

A clue to what Murdoch is getting at may be found in her comment on the existentialist view of evil as found in Sartre’s La Naus?e ‘Sartre as Cartesian solipsist seems especially ... to exhibit a lack of any lively sense of the mystery and variousness of individuals’.