Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

"She taught in Oxford from the late 1940s to 1961. So about 12 or 13 years. She’s a tutor in philosophy and she’s teaching the greats of moral philosophical thought . She teaches Plato and Aristotle , right through to Kant and Nietzsche and beyond—she did come up to the modern era, but she was very happy teaching Hume and Hegel. She had a very wide range of interests in what she taught, but she always went back to Platonism. Platonism was her great love and it underpins a lot of the novels, certainly the ones we’ve been talking about today. This idea of the transcendence towards the good and how we manage to achieve that it in our frail and limited human form, how we move slowly towards potentials of goodness and how some people aren’t able to because of self-obsession, ego—those kinds of issues. It’s a wonderful collection published in 1997 by Murdoch’s biographer, Peter Conradi. He told me it was his crowning achievement, more so that the biography, which I thought was surprising. If readers are coming fresh to her non-fiction, I would say you’ve got to read ‘Against Dryness’ from the 1950s. It’s the best discussion of literary fiction and where we are. Even 70 years on, it’s very much still relevant, addressing contemporary themes such as, ‘Where is the novel now? How do we combat our own insularity and moral life? What does the novel do?’ And she argues that it needs to break out of the forms that it finds itself in and move back to discussing life—the outer lives of characters, but their inner thoughts as well. As I mentioned earlier, in this, Murdoch goes back to major nineteenth-century novelists. “Murdoch ought to be seen as the heir to the nineteenth-century realist novels of George Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, even going back to Austen” I’d also draw your attention to the three essays that were collected in the 1970s and published as kant , but were republished in Existentialists and Mystics. Those would be ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ ‘On God and Good,’ and ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.’ She discusses a variety of ideas, but this idea of perfection, how we reduce the ego, how we move from a form of traditional Christianity that she feels is failing us in the West (in ‘On God and Good’), and moving away from the pervasive, all-seeing God the Father towards a more enlightened view of goodness in the Platonic tradition. In ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’ she continues this discussion, and remarks upon how difficult it is to perceive goodness in others and how we move towards it and how we can do it through nature or we can do it through art. It’s this idea of transcending ourselves and moving away from our own selfish concerns. Those would be the four essays I’d recommend. There’s so much richness in there, but those four might be her most important essays."