The English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) believed that although we may never fully know reality itself, love may help us glimpse something of it, since love alerts us to reality as it exists independently of our egos. How it does so is a mystery, but we seem to recognise that it does.
Murdoch set out her view of love in a number of essays on art and morals published between 1959 and 1969, which were subsequently republished, along with others, in the compilation Existentialists and Mystics (1997). I shall try to summarise her view and, in the final section, discuss three criticisms.
Something Other than Oneself is Real
Whereas Plato believed that art distracts us from reality, Murdoch argues in The Sublime and the Good (1959) that, on the contrary, art, by virtue of love, alerts us to what is real:
“Art and morals are, with certain provisos… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realisation of our supersensible destiny [ie, our mortality] is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable particularity; and the most particular and individual of all things is the mind of man” (p.215. All page numbers are from Existentialists and Mystics). Murdoch claims that art, morals, and love share the same
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The Two Dennises
Hannah Mortimer observes a close encounter of the same kind.
Heraclitus (c.500 BC)
Harry Keith lets flow a stream of ideas about permanence and change.
Does the Cosmos Have a Purpose?
Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention.
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Rufus Duits asks when we can justify driving our carbon contributors.
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Frank Breslin says 'yes and no' to presenting both sides of an argument.
Frankl & Sartre in Search of Meaning
Georgia Arkell compares logotherapy and atheistic existentialism.
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Luce Irigaray, now ninety-two years old, was, among many other things, one of the most impactful feminists of the 1970s liberation movements - before she was marginalised, then ostracised, from the francophone intellectual sphere.
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Ruben David Azevedo tells us why, in a limitless universe, we’re not insignificant.
The Present Is Not All There Is To Happiness
Rob Glacier says don’t just live in the now.
Philosophers Exploring The Good Life
Jim Mepham quests with philosophers to discover what makes a life good.