Iris Murdoch's 1970 essay argues that moral philosophy remains possible—and necessary—even after God, science, and rationality have failed to provide universal meaning. Read it here (about 40 minutes).
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (1970)
Moral philosophy and the use of metaphor are still valid and still important.
Consciousness itself is born of metaphor, and because morality cannot be stripped of its images without losing its meaning, philosophy must abandon the pretense of neutrality, confront human nature as it is, and take sides in prescribing the ideals by which we might become better.
Human nature is fundamentally selfish and delusional—in an attempt to avoid the pain associated with reality.
My argument rests on two assumptions—that human beings are by nature selfish and that life has no external purpose—and modern psychology only sharpens the picture of a psyche driven less by freedom than by self-preservation, fantasy, and consolation, a portrait in which, however unflattering, we can all recognize ourselves.
Moral philosophy is valid in the face of the challenge that we are selfish creatures living out an absurd existence.
There is no God, and furthermore, the attempts to substitute God with science, reason and technology have failed because life does not align to any design.
That human life has no external purpose is as difficult to prove as to deny, yet I will state it plainly: there is no evidence that life is anything but self-contained, with many possible purposes within it but no overarching one secured by God, Reason, or History, all of which are false deities; we are transient creatures subject to necessity and chance, and if there is any unity to be found it lies not beyond us but within the fragile boundaries of human experience itself.
Moral philosophy through the use of metaphor is still useful and possible even though faith in God, science, technology, reason have all failed to give us an underlying structure of what it means to live as a good human being.
Kant began the ideal of the post-God, scientific man, but he might have been dismayed at where this led, that being reason in the face of alienation from the external world.
The notion of life as self-contained arose not from modern despair but from the long march of science, producing the Kantian man—rational, free, courageous, yet irreparably alienated—whose lineage runs through Nietzsche to our own philosophies, and whose truest name, as Milton intuited, is Lucifer.
We are going to construct a moral philosophy in the face of many challenges, mainly that we now know that we cannot rest on any universal, underlying design—not one from God or science or rationality—which have produced the metaphor of the human being separate from the external, absurd world.
The current concept of what it means to be a human being focuses on self-reliance, action, choice, and autonomy.
At the heart of post-Kantian moral philosophy lies the conviction that the will itself creates value, that what was once anchored in heaven and secured by God has collapsed into human choice, leaving "the good" as an empty vessel to be filled by acts of freedom, courage, and power—a vision that, for all its stern independence and its service to political liberalism, mistakes the austerity of decision for a moral foundation, forgetting, as Hume warned, that what serves politics well may serve morality poorly.
We are struggling to prove a moral philosophy in the face of the current concept of a human being, because as science has progressed we have become more splintered, more pluralistic and more relativistic.
The emotions have been cast to the side in the concept of the human being, seen as a distant second class behind rational thought.
Severe as Kant's portrait of solitary, rational man may be, he left a narrow opening through which emotion reentered in the form of Achtung and the Sublime—a painful but ennobling shudder that, even as it acknowledges our frailty, affirms the dignity of our freedom.
How can we find a meaningful moral philosophy now that we know, through science, that we are isolated figures, separate—in reality and through the truths about our psyche—from a cold, absurd, indifferent external reality.
Romanticism poses a danger of self-indulgence through rightful suffering in the face of a "corrupt" world.
What Kant left as a footnote, romanticism made central, turning death into suffering and suffering into a kind of thrilling freedom, so that the harsh fact of mortality was softened into Liebestod and sweet transience, a path that leads from Kant through Kierkegaard to our own popular philosophies, where the figure of Lucifer, faced with real death, hides instead in sublime emotion.
We are establishing a moral philosophy, but first going over the barriers that stand in its way, including the current idea of a rational individual who stands separate from an absurd universe and a romantic ideal that suffering can cleanse one's soul.
We have a notion that by incorporating certain behaviors—prayer, meditation, physical exercise, eating our veggies, rest—we can improve the state of our minds towards a clearer and less self-centered observation of reality.
Kant, searching for something pure beyond the selfish psyche, followed a sound instinct but sought it in the wrong place, turning back into the self and sanctifying it as angelic, where his followers have remained; yet if we begin again with the psyche as it is—anxious, defensive, endlessly fabricating consoling fictions—we see that the proud will alone is insufficient, and that the ordinary believer, with religion's emphasis on states of mind and its devices for purifying them, has grasped more truth than the voluntarist philosopher, for prayer and sacrament, however framed, can alter consciousness itself, generating energies for good action that psychology now confirms are both real and indispensable, and thus the quality of our consciousness, not just the fact of our choices, must be linked to virtue.
How can we know what it means to "live better" in the face of various facts that we have learned through science—meaninglessness, separation of the self from the external world, and the indifference of the external world.
The experience of external beauty can pull us out of ourselves and make our self-centered problems seem less important.
Beauty, whether in art or in nature, interrupts the anxious self and draws us outward into a self-forgetful awareness of things as they are, reminding us that the true significance lies not in how the world is but that it is.
There is a way to know how to live better in the face of the notion—validated by science—that our minds construct a separate delusional self that is at odds with a cold, indifferent, painful external world.
It is possible to observe a sense of beauty—which momentarily rips us away from anxious, self-centered thought—through nature and good art, but the latter can be more difficult because of the translation layer embodied by the artist.
I begin here not because delight in flowers, animals, or kestrels is the highest ground of moral transformation, but because it is the most immediately accessible, so plainly good that those who keep plants or watch birds may be startled to hear it linked with virtue; yet as Plato observed, beauty is the one spiritual reality we love by instinct, and when we pass from nature to art we enter a more precarious realm where fantasy and self-consolation abound, but where true art—rare though it is—offers something akin to nature's gift: a perfection of form that resists the pull of selfish reverie, awakens our finest faculties, and inspires, in the Platonic sense, love in the highest part of the soul.
There is a philosophically rigorous argument for a way to live well, in a way where we strip away the self-centered, anxious mind and face the harsh reality of the external world in a clear way instead of deluding ourselves in order to escape the pain of existence.
Art can be even better than nature because it is created by a human and can tackle human affairs.
The duct taped banana art is actually good because it represents an unflinching lens at the human condition, and provokes so many questions and a response of sheer terror, fakery, how will it be maintained, how flimsily and temporarily is it attached.
OK, we are justifying moral philosophy and one in particular, so there is a way to live better, even if we know a bunch of stuff about science and philosophy, and art is one way to pierce through the barriers of our psyche and glimpse what this morality without meaning might be.
Portrayal of death in art is key, because it can demonstrate the moral that although life is meaningless, the search for virtue in the face of it is beautiful.
There exists a way to live better, and yes, I have read all the arguments against this and I can prove it.
Death and chance, I love that phrase, and she uses it to claim that it is the fundamental job of good art to pierce through our defenses that guard against us clearly seeing the nature of our reality—death and chance.
We are constructing an argument for a specific moral philosophy that holds up to the latest thought and opposing arguments, and while we are definitely executing a slow reveal, and some might say burying the lede, she promises that we should hang on for the punch line and that a little hint is that it might contain the notion that nature and good art break through the walls of our conscious experience and help us pursue a virtue outside ourselves just for the goddamn reason that it is available to us and when we sit with nature and good art it feels like a higher level of existence.
Plato hated art, but he was wrong about art, but his words make me think that, yes, there are things other than nature and art that help rip the psyche away from self-delusion like intellectual thought and reason used in specific ways, including this Greek? word that she keeps on repeating that I need to look up.
The Greek word τέχνη (technê) refers to a craft, skill, art, or technique. It represents the practical application of knowledge to achieve a specific outcome or create something.
This is kind of boring and repetitive, but I imagine it serves some purpose, yes, we are developing moral philosophy and it is complex and multidimensional and we must acknowledge counter-arguments in order to be taken seriously.
Plato loved the exercise of learning and doing math, but a parallel is learning a new language, where you must be humble, and as an extension that preps you for approaching your own thought with humility where you are open to arguments that counter and even defeat your thesis.
Moral philosophy, it exists, but it takes a 40-minute read to argue given the history of thought and our current condition (song by Big Jim Westfall) so let's hang in there and keep taking notes in this recommended way by some guy (who went to Oxford) on the Internet.
We are given a glimpse as to the types of things that she is going to argue are "moral" or good or part of living better, including: love, courage, justice.
Yes, moral philosophy == good, no moral philosophy == bad, because of a really solid argument that is about to come in the second half of this essay, please God, don't let this be crap.
Good through art and nature is more clear-sightedness, a stepping away from self-centered needs.
There is a way to live better even in the face of existential and other recent philosophical arguments and scientific discoveries that make morality appear relative or non-existent.
Can everyone be an artist? Wouldn't the world be crammed with artists and nobody could hear anyone else? And she says "good art" is the path to virtue and morality; but is everyone, am I, capable of creating "good art"?
Morality exists.
The search for freedom is not part of her moral philosophy—the search for freedom is a selfish endeavor. And why does she reference Plato so frequently and centrally? He is so old. And hasn't his philosophy been disproven by current thought.
Morality exists and she can "prove" it, but there are a lot of things in the way, including language itself and the imprecise and manipulated way people have used language to reference selfish ideals like "good."
Plato used the metaphor of the sun as representing good, in that you can't look directly at the sun, it is distant and somewhat unknowable by raw, direct experience (without instruments, especially at Plato's time,) but the sun lights the world around us, it illuminates and helps us see the truth.
Morality is centered around virtue, and that virtue (to be proven later in this essay hopefully,) is universal and not tied to cultural preferences or a belief system [that seems really, really hard to prove in a convincing way.]
The love of virtue is the center, and metaphor is the way to see virtuous/true things.
Moral philosophy is the next viral meme.
She has beaten me into submission with droning text that won't get to the freaking point. I now "believe" in her concept of morality.
I worship her version of morality, I am now her cult follower, brain-washed by boring, sprawling text that references a dead white man who couldn't even speak English.
I want to give up.
I really want to give up.
I like her examples of moral decisions, because they are every-day and nuanced, like deciding to kick auntie out given the concerns and needs of multiple people that I love. Not trolley car crap.
Moral philosophy, Plato, Plato, more Plato, Play-Do.
I am Bad because I disagree with her.
I'd rather she focus on Bad.
Why did I wake up so early? I had a bolt of energy and now a massive lull. At least I am at Pinewood.
Good schmood.
Stop it with the Greek and Latin.
Moral philosophy is something that exists and cannot be understood, how the fuck is that an argument?
Blah Blah Blark.
Good grief.
Jeepers, Plato and the cave, I mean there have been so many, so many thinkers since Plato and they all read Plato and we have moved well beyond Plato. I am discouraged that this is her central argument with only four minutes of reading to go. I feel jipped, like watching all seasons of Lost only to come to an unsatisfying conclusion.
Moral philosophy was impossible to argue for in the 1970s and it is even harder to argue for now. I mean if Good is serving others won't that require needy suffering others. Surely everyone can't humbly serve others, because we need those needy, suffering others to serve. I guess you could argue that there will always be endless suffering because we die, but I know philosophy exists that disputes this and points it out as limited thought within our current culture and technology.
Moral philosophy centers around Good and if you Capitalize anything it becomes True.
It seems so unlikely that Plato was right and Kant was wrong about moral philosophy. Kind of like Newton being right and Einstein being wrong, and we should go back to Newton. Nothing against Plato or Newton in their time and even today, but Kant and Einstein created while standing on a mountain of data and knowledge compared to Plato and Newton's ant hills. I mean Newton read all scientific knowledge of his day during his summer break!
Preaching moral philosophy can get someone published in the 1970s.
OK, so the title is The Sovereignty of Good, which I am coming to understand that she is touting a hierarchy of concepts with Good at the peak. It depends on nothing, but we can't define it. Other concepts like Love and Humility and Courage and Freedom lie beneath and depend on the concept of good within this hierarchy.
I mean at least this is readable and understandable, at my level of comprehension. And it introduces me to different ideas, and it is written relatively recently, not detached from my current experience with my culture.
True Love moves towards true Good and false Love moves towards false Good, and oatmeal turns to mush if you leave it too long without eating it or if you write a long essay on moral philosophy.
Moral philosophy is oatmeal, but only if you are Bad (er, false Good.)
I'm done. I read the whole thing and took notes. Good.