Iris Murdoch
From Philosopedia
Murdoch, (Jean) Iris [Dame] (15 July 1919 - 8 February 1999)
Murdoch, a member of the Irish Academy, was a novelist and a philosopher. Her novels have been described as “subtle, witty, convoluted, puzzling, and often wildly comic,” in which she views man “as an ‘accidental’ creature thinking of himself as free but actually constricted by the boundaries of self, society, and the natural world.” Her works often show an individual’s finding that he lacks freedom as well as the lack of capacity for self-knowledge.
Among her writings are The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), An Accidental Man (1972), The Sacred and the Love Machine (1974), and Nuns and Soldiers (1980). In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), she develops her version of Platonism, stating that mankind has imperfect apprehensions concerning morality, apprehensions which we can never fully understand. In her view, Christianity needed to be demythologized, that its claims concerning incarnation and divine existence are philosophically incredible. We may need the idea of the Good for the moral life, but do we need any ontological proof of the existence of God? The figure of Christ may be religiously significant, but can Jesus, like Gautama, be both real and mystical without the old god-man mythology?
Murdoch was influenced by the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl as well as Husserl’s Zen Buddhist critic Katsuki Sekida. She found fault with much in Wittgenstein’s thought, preferring the dualism she has modified from the thinking of Plato and Schopenhauer.
One of her concerns, reported New Economist (25 Sep 1993),
- has been religion and its role in the modern world. She herself does not believe in God and, in the specific case of Christianity of the more orthodox sort, has a problem with the picture of God as a person up in Heaven, and Christ as his son, a magical, spiritual being. But she thinks that the maintenance of religion is essential; that it must be preserved. She notes that many are comforted by the belief that they will meet their loved ones after death but, in her opinion, such beliefs are, literally considered untrue.
Buddhists and Hindus do not have this problem, she noted, for what matters to Gautama is a “mystical” matter, mystical not as something magic but what Meister Eckhart taught, that what matters is the soul, the spirit, and what is meant by these.
An Anglican who became a Marxist then a non-Marxist, Murdoch has written that although philosophy is not itself religion it can teach people much about religion:
- To lose Christianity would be a most terrible thing. The figure of Christ is so compelling. That is what we’re so lucky to have, as it were. . . . I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”
In a review of her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Peter Heales in New Humanist concluded that “we shall delude ourselves if we look here for the philosopher’s stone. Perhaps the most rational response would be a ‘flight from the enchantress.’ ”
Colin McCall, in Freethinker (June 1996), noted that Murdoch had been included in Women Philosophers (1996) but added,
- I certainly cannot go along with Iris Murdoch in her belief in transcendent ‘beauty.’ The statue is broken, the flower fades, the experience ceases,’ she says, ‘but something has not suffered from decay and mortality.’ ”
According to Jim Herrick, Murdoch once declined being a vice-president of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association because she did not share what she felt was the “anti-religion” in some humanistic outlooks. She had, in fact, once described herself as being a Christian Buddhist.
In 1987 the daughter of an Irish woman who trained as a singer and an English civil servant, who was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and became a fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, in 1949, was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1997, her husband, Prof. John Bayley, reported that his wife was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. As her death approached, Bayley wrote Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998), in which he describes his attempt to understand his wife’s physical condition. She had told a friend that she was “sailing into the darkness,” but of their last years together, he wrote that
- we are physically closer. . . . She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.
