In her essay ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959), Murdoch situates herself in relation to Kant’s aesthetics. The world of practice is so messy that it can never be fully conveyed in any work of art. By contrast, “the love which is not art inhabits the world of practice, the world which is haunted by incompleteness and lack of form, which is abhorred by art, and where action cannot always be accompanied by radiant understanding, or by significant and consoling emotions” (p.220). The best art does this so convincingly that, when we are shown what exists outside of our egotistical concerns, we are momentarily knocked off balance. She means rather that the artist, godlike, shows us a small part of reality beyond our egos. This is not to say that Murdoch believed in God: she did not. She would agree that dictators often have a liking for bad art.Īs to the relationship between art and morals: well, the artist “is more like God than the moral agent” (p.219). ‘Art’ is here used to specifically mean good art. That is why all dictators, and would-be dictators… have mistrusted art” (p.218). And indeed it is of the nature of love to be something deeper than our conscious and more simply social morality, and to be sometimes destructive of it. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement. “It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were accidental. But although the essence of art is love, that is not to say that art explicitly tells us to love: We make these mistakes in our social lives, but they can also be seen recurring throughout the history of art – think of artists before and after they’ve reached their peak. In the first case our view of reality is obscured by the influence of predominant social mores in the second, reality is obscured by our attempts to assimilate the ‘other’ into an egotistical fantasy world. Murdoch claims that art, morals, and love share the same enemies: social convention and neurosis (by ‘neurosis’ she means, I think, self-obsession). All page numbers are from Existentialists and Mystics). What stuns us into a realisation of our supersensible destiny 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” Love and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. “Art and morals are, with certain provisos… one. 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: I shall try to summarise her view and, in the final section, discuss three criticisms. Murdoch set out her view of love in a number of essays on art and morals published between 19, which were subsequently republished, along with others, in the compilation Existentialists and Mystics (1997). How it does so is a mystery, but we seem to recognise that it does. 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. It does not store any personal data.SUBSCRIBE NOW Love & Romance Iris Murdoch & The Mystery of Love Stephen Leach looks with Murdoch at the three graces of love, art, and morality. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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