Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.
Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good” quoted in An Occasion for Unselfing: Iris Murdoch on Imperfection as Integral to Goodness and How the Beauty of Nature and Art Leavens Our Most Unselfish Impulses
Post 1922: Contemporary
In the 1930s historians such as TW Moody and RD Edwards were questioning the “Young Irelander” style nationalistic history.
Whenever it’s the turn of a country, however small, to rise against its tyrants…
…it represents the oppressed peoples of the whole world.
Iris Murdoch, “The Red and the Green”
Iris Murdoch: the virtue of paying attention
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.
The Nice and the Good (1968)
I doubt that the description of damnation given by Willie in The Nice and the Good owes anything to that given by CS Lewis in The Great Divorce, but they agree surprisingly well. Lewis’ version of Hell is of an extreme social distancing, of each damned soul retreating from the others to focus on themselves, how they were wronged, how they were misunderstood.
This, of course, is not a state that requires an after-life to experience. Willie is saying that the difference between damnation and happiness (in the normal run of things) is purely a matter of where attention is directed: internally or externally. As Murdoch pointed out in her philosophical essay “The Sublime and the Good” (1959, Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3), “love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality”: the recognition of the entire world, not just what is inside ones own head.
Art and morals are…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.
Iris Murdoch (1959) “The Sublime and the Good” Chicago Review Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 42-55. See page 51.
Words of Wisdom: the life and work of J. O. Wisdom
OTHERWISE, adj. Knowing the difference between two philosophers with identical interests and the same name, hence otherwisdom, n.
(Indy obit J. O. WISDOM: ‘To the confusion of some
David Papineau, Twitter.
he shared both interests and apposite surname
with cousin Cambridge prof J. A. T. D. Wisdom’)
It can be difficult to distinguish Wisdom. John Oulton Wisdom who was born in Dublin on the 29 December 1908 is often confused with his cousin, also John Wisdom (Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom), also a philosopher and who also brought together psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Philosophical paradigm shift: CS Lewis on the fall of English Hegelianism.
I have learnt in other fields of study how transitory the ‘assured results of modern scholarship’ can be. When I was a boy one would have been laughed at for supposing there had been a real Homer: the disintegrators seemed to have triumphed for ever. But Homer seems to be creeping back. Even the belief of the ancient Greeks that the Mycenaeans were their ancestors and spoke Greek has been surprisingly supported. We may without disgrace believe in a historical Arthur. Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of scepticism about scepticism itself. We can’t keep ourselves from muttering multa renascentur quae jam cecidere.
Nor can a man of my age ever forget how suddenly and completely the idealist philosophy of his youth fell. McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley seemed enthroned for ever; they went down as suddenly as the Bastille. And the interesting thing is that while I lived under that dynasty I felt various difficulties and objections which I never dared to express. They were so frightfully obvious that I felt sure they must be mere misunderstandings: the great men could not have made such very elementary mistakes as those which my objections implied. But very similar objections – though put, not doubt, far more cogently than I could have put them – were among the criticisms which finally prevailed. They would now be the stock answers to English Hegelianism.
C.S. Lewis (1996) The Essential C. S. Lewis NY:Scribner, p. 357. Available online .
C. S. Lewis gives his testimony on the suddenness of English Hegelianism’s decline. He views it as the end of a philosophical approach rather than the eclipse of certain ideas. It was, to use Kuhn’s term, a paradigm shift.
The Latin phrase “Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, cadentque quae nuc sunt in honore” is from Horace and means “Many words now in disuse will revive, and many now in vogue will be forgotten”1. (It is inscribed on Robert Clayton’s memorial in Celbridge, probably expressing the hope that his ideas would be judged more kindly in the future than by his contemporaries. In other words, for an 18th century paradigm shift.)
JD Bernal: politics and science
Eugene Garfield on JD Bernal and Bernal’s book Social Function of Science, which was an inspiration for the field of Scientometrics (the study of “the science of science” as Bernal put it in The Social Function of Science .) From Web of Stories.
Wittgenstein Uncovered (in Ireland)
On the 129th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s birth, enjoy this programme from the Lyric Feature series (on RTE Lyric FM) originally made in 2002. Exploring Wittgenstein’s thought, it also looks at “Wittgenstein’s pupil” Con Drury, Wittgenstein’s time in Ireland and the reactions of those he encountered. Among those spoken to are the Irish Wittgenstein scholar Cyril … Read more
Erwin Schrödinger: What is Life?
If parallel universes exist, there is one in which Eamon de Valera lived out his days as a maths teacher. In that universe, Erwin Schrödinger never came to Dublin, and probably never wrote What is Life?.
Erwin Schrödinger fled Berlin and Nazism in 1933, travelling to Oxford (where he heard he had won the Nobel Prize) and Princeton. The famous Schrödinger’s cat paradox appeared in his essay The present situation in quantum mechanics (1935), based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. A thought experiment where a cat sealed in a box either lived or died depending on whether a quantum event occurred, it seemed to suggest two universes, one with a dead cat and one with a living cat, existed in parallel until an observer saw whether the cat was alive or dead.
Iris Murdoch on the unity of the virtues
[M]oral advance carries with it intuitions of unity which are increasingly less misleading. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialised daring of spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom and love.[…] Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.
Iris Murdoch (1970/2013) The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, p. 93.