The Lives of the Philosophers: Iris Murdoch

0:00Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting 4 hours or more. Botox, on a botulinum toxin A, prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents, on average, 8 to 9 headache days a month, versus 6 to 7 for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugeric's disease, Myasthenia Gravis, or Lambert Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxCronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more.

1:00A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty crunchy peanut, sweet sweet caramel, ravine you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday, P-N-U-T-C-R-M-L-B-R. Hello, my name's David Runseman and this is Past Present Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today it's the final episode in our series about the lives and thought of 20th century philosophers. We are returning to Nikhil Krishnan who is going to be describing the life and thought of someone who is not best known as a philosopher but who really was a philosopher. Aris Murdoch, writer, novelist, and philosopher. We're talking about the relationship between her life and her ideas and the relationship between philosophy and her novels and how in some ways all of them turn on the question

2:05of what is the good and do stick around at the end for an announcement about something new coming from PPF. Nikhil, we're talking today about someone who, unlike the other people we've discussed, I think it's primarily identified not as a philosopher. So she is identified as a novelist, not the only novelist being covered in this series, they're not with you. We've talked about Kamu, Sartre, De Bovoire, these people all wrote novels too. But I think in their case, the primary identification for most people wouldn't be novelist. Sartre people wouldn't say he's a novelist, they would say he's a philosopher who wrote novels. De Bovoire, philosopher wrote novels. Maybe Kamu writer, philosopher wrote novels plays for everything. Whereas Iris Murdoch, I think the primary identification for almost everyone, maybe including herself, which is something I want to ask you about later, is as a novelist. And yet she was also a very serious philosopher.

3:05So to start with, I think we should establish the ways in which for the early part of her life, maybe even for the first half of her life, nearly, she was primarily a philosopher. She was born the same year as Elizabeth Anscombe, just a few months later. Similar background, she was born in Ireland, they were both born in Ireland, but brought up in London. Actually, both of them for a while in South London. She went to Oxford, like Anscombe, like all of the people that we've talked about. Different college, some of them, different subjects to start with English, but then changed to Greats, which is the one that includes philosophy. Was it basically the same story, the same formation in a way, as Elizabeth Anscombe? Oh, with a very important difference that she did not convert to Catholicism. And for all sorts of reasons, I think that's a quite a crucial difference between them, and that they start from quite similar materials. Oxford classics being one of them, sort of complicated Anglo-Irish background,

4:06though at many stages in her life, I think she would. She's quite like to say she was Irish, and it's said that she slightly began to affect an Irish accent, which wasn't entirely authentic in her in her vowels. She had some influence coming from Wittgenstein, though she never got anywhere near as close to him as as Anscombe, did meet him a couple of times. And she was one of the few people thanked by Anscombe in acknowledgments for her, that is Anscombe's translation of the philosophical investigation. So clearly Murock was one of the small number of people who was allowed to see drafts of that. So she's been getting those Wittgensteinian ideas before most of her colleagues in Oxford, were getting, but where Anscombe goes to Cambridge and falls very, very heavily and deeply under a single influence that of Wittgenstein, Murock, I think, has a much more plural kind of formation. For one thing, she is a reader of novels. She's spending her days reading Shakespeare and Tolstoy and George Elliott, and she's beginning to discover some of the excitement of literary modernism. So certainly Joyce and Wolf, also Samuel Beckett, who has another huge early influence,

5:10she's always getting a book of his called Murphy and thrusting them down all her friends throws, because she's so enthusiastic about Beckett. And then she discovers the French intellectual world. She's belongs to that generation of English people who spoke pretty fluent French, which just understood as part of what an educated English person should have got by the end of of school, and she went to Badminton, one of the really solid academically trustworthy girls schools, which not all of them at that point in history were of course. And so she has pretty fluent French, though I think she was one of those people who was very happy to speak it with no attempt to watch over at a French accent. As she meets Sartre, she has some conversations with him, and this is during the war, and just to give you a bit of context, what takes her to Europe during the war is that she's working for a UN agent, the UNRA, I think the rescue and rehabilitation of refugees. And she begins working on the rehabilitation of refugees in London, and then she gets sent to Europe, so she spends time in Vienna and Salzburg in Grats, and she's really looking at

6:10Europe in the last years of the war, really really shattered, broken Europe, starving refugees on the streets. And it's during this period that she comes under two influences, one of them, as you pointed out, was Jean-Paul Sartre. The other is a slightly less well-known French philosopher novelist, Rema Kunu, and she again finds him enormously interesting, and giving her the sort of stimulation and excitement that virtually nothing in British philosophy is giving. She's always kind of, I think she calls the English philosophers, milk and water moralists. And she says, what you're getting here is the really full-blooded stuff. There's something of life here, something of danger and urgency in the work of the French thinker, which is not getting from anything being done at Oxford. At a distinction, it's sometimes drawn, and in a way in this series, we've talked about philosophers from across these two traditions, you and I have been talking about, it just happens to be all of them, Oxford, educated, English or Anglo-Aish philosophers,

7:11so that's often described as the analytical tradition, it's the English-speaking tradition, and then that's contrasted with continental philosophers Sartre, Camus de Beauvoir. It doesn't really make sense. Air went to Vienna, Vienna is on the continent of Europe, and though this is highly analytical, what he ended up doing. And Vidconstein, he's an analytical philosopher, but it didn't really go to Vienna, it's from Vienna. Exactly. So in some ways, it's very artificial, but I think in this case, it does make sense to say that, unlike the other quote unquote, Oxford philosophers that we've been talking about, Murdoch was very open to what tends to be called continental philosophy, not just literature and fiction, not just Beckett, also Irish, but deeply continental indeed, partly French, but that strain of philosophy. I mean, does that make her different in that sense, not just that in Paris, she met Sartre, but the kind of stuff that she was interested in, did it extend to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, is it in that tradition?

8:13Kierkegaard, yes, Nietzsche, Lesse, I think she was always very skeptical of Nietzsche, and I think she's generally skeptical of that sort of, not sure what the right word is, let's very crudely say, immoralist philosopher. She is with a lowercase p, if you like, a very pious sort of thinker, and Nietzsche, I think, never excited as someone is trying to undermine the basis of morality. I think she's trying to do the opposite. She's trying to find a better basis for morality than the one that traditional religion has provided. So she's with Nietzsche, in the sense that she thinks old-fashioned religion is impossible now. We can't believe, serious person can't now believe it. You can't really believe in God, she had a couple of phases in her life, which she slightly diluted at that position, but for the most part, she clearly is some sort of atheist or at least agnostic, but what she wants to do is not to say, right, there goes religion and with it goes morality. She wants to do the opposite. She wants to say, we need to find a better basis for morality than the one that appealed to traditional religion. One more question about her background, her formation. She was, I believe, a student Marxist, but like a lot of people in this

9:19period, she abandoned that faith, or at least she laid it aside because of the things that were revealed and discovered. I think she read Kerstler and a common journey into student Marxism and out again, out into, can we describe her politics into a kind of leftist politics or something else? Well, it can depends on which decade we're talking about. So yes, absolutely student, not just Marxist, student member of the Communist Party. So very much in the literal sense, card carrying. There's a bit of debate, I think, among biographers about exactly when she stops being a communist and exactly what makes her change her mind on this. I think when Clement Attlee wins the election after the war, she is extremely happy. So certainly some sort of social Democrat. She's quite happy to use that word to refer to herself all the way up to at least the 70s. It seems like social Democrat seems like the right word to describe her. In the 80s, you begin to see a slightly further reaction return, I think. She starts to say positive things about Margaret Thatcher being extremely

10:23rude about the IRA. And there's a remark that is quoted of her, one of her students has something like Iris, you do seem to have lurched and drifted a bit to the right haven't you. And she replied, I don't like this talk of lurching and drifting. I have thought about these things. So yes, as perhaps it's a kind of predictable move right where there's one ages. Maybe there's something more interesting going on. And I think there's still some biographical work to be done on what propels each of these little changes of mind. But as you say in some ways, that's a pretty conventional journey. There's another word I don't know if this is the right word to describe her. And this is more about, I suppose, character to use that term that we were using and I was slightly showing away from in relation to Anscombe's philosophy. She was quite bohemian when she was young. So Anscombe has described, Anscombe who married very young, her Catholicism, Anscombe who had a large number of children. And a slightly, I think, people sometimes say of her as a part of a philosophical credentials. She had a slightly chaotic home life, not in the

11:29romantic sense, but in the sense that she thought housework was too time consuming when there were better and more important things to do. Iris Murdoch, it's more again. I don't know if it's a conventional kind of bohemianism, but she was as a young academic, which she was, I think, thought to be quite, what is the word for the kind of way that she lived? She had love affairs, she was, she was not bound by convention. She experimented. Yeah, she did have a long and happy marriage as happy as far as we can tell to the literary critic John Bailey, but it does seem like it was fairly clear even to John Bailey that she had lovers through many stages of this marriage. And a lot of people know about Murdoch's life comes perhaps unfortunately from the film that was made of it, not so long after she died with Kate Winslet playing the young, more obviously bohemian Iris Murdoch and Judy Dench as the old Murdoch who is beginning to show signs of Alzheimer's. And it was really that kind of picture of someone who had this glorious life then, unfortunately,

12:34was struck down with Alzheimer's and her old age and there's an Irish Murdoch center at the University of Sterling and I was walking past it one day and wondered what they do in Irish Murdoch studies and turns out it's just an Alzheimer's research center. So a lot of her post-emiss reputation has unfortunately been come tied with that with her last years rather than the active years of writing and thinking. But yes, there's some accounts we have of things like her kitchen and this is long before Alzheimer's absolutely shocking and I'm pretty squeamish about this sort of thing. It's really awful to read the state of squallor in which she seems to have lived and in many of her novels actually she must make her virtue of it whenever there's a character who's overpuntilius about personal hygiene or tithiness they immediately turn out to be some kind of Nazi. I think she associates cleanliness that kind of bourgeois order with evil and thinks that there's something kind of healthy about about messiness and we might come back to this when talk about some of her writing. So onto the philosophy. With Elizabeth Anscombe, as you said,

13:39one way of viewing Anscombe's philosophy is it would be better if everyone converted to Catholicism but given that's not going to happen, the search has to be undertaken for something that can underpin a moral life in the broader sense which may not have to rely on Christianity and that took her back to Aristotle to pre-Christian Greek thought. As you said in Murdoch's case, there is not going to be that Christian consolation probably anyway so it's not even on the table. She undertook a similar journey back but went further I think I'm writing saying. So took the extra step. Is it fair to say one difference between Murdoch and Anscombe's Murdoch went not just back to Aristotle but back to Plato? Oh yes absolutely. There are many ways of describing exactly why it was Plato that attracted her rather than Aristotle. In many ways Plato and Aristotle are similar thinkers. There are elements of their philosophy which are pretty much interchangeable. They both have a certain picture of human psychology as roughly divided, divided between reason on the one hand and let's very

14:44crudely call them the appetites on the other including things like the appetite for oner and motivations that come out of shame. That's their picture of psychology and virtue in both Plato's and Aristotle's views is about having the kind of soul psyche where reason isn't control of the appetites or if you like where the appetites are fully fully regulated by reason. So in that respect there's no difference whatever but with Aristotle it seems like the focus really is ultimately as you put it earlier on on character. How do we become the sorts of people? How do we arrange our souls in such a way that we produce reliably, perform virtuous actions, brave actions, kindly actions, generous actions, magnanimous actions and so forth. And in Plato that's also there. There's a picture of virtue there as well but it goes a little bit further in that in Plato in a way that's at least not explicit in Aristotle ethics is deeply tied to other parts of philosophy and this comes out most clearly in the Republic which is a book that starts with the question

15:45what is justice and why should I be just in particular why should I be just even if I can get away with being unjust. At the beginning it looks all pretty familiar if you've read your Aristotle before because it says well if you're unjust and your soul is in the state of chaos and your appetites are ruling you and you can't really be happy if you're ruled by your appetites. But then there's a really weird turn halfway through Plato's Republic where we suddenly stop doing ethics and psychology and we start doing metaphysics and epistemology and by that I mean epistemology, the study of knowledge and metaphysics let's say the study of the fundamental structure of reality. The idea is that the rational soul is not simply one that's a kind of calculating machine it's very very much not that idea of rationality it means something like a soul that is properly oriented towards reality. A reality in Plato we're not talking of what you know later but scientifically minded philosophers understand by reality atoms and molecules that's very much not it right and

16:46this is where there's a tiny bit of Plato exposition we can't get around we've got to say a little bit about the idea of a form in Plato because that's the only way we can make sense of what my doc is doing. So with Plato I think the big counterintuitive radical idea in him is that the world around this the visible world the perceptible world the sensible world is not the real world. But you think chairs and tables and trees and mountains and atoms and molecules are real they're not they're mere shadows they're imitations cast by the really real thing and the crudest way of getting a hold of that idea is you know there's I've got a table here in front of me and there's another table in my dining room what is it that makes both of them tables and that's where we get the notion of a form the form of the table and the form of the table is not any particular table it's not even a physical table it's not a thing you can see or touch you can't sit at the form of the table but you can think it right and perhaps it's a little bit more persuasive when you think of mathematical or geometrical concepts no particular circular object in our world is a perfect

17:50circle if you understand by a circular you know a set of points all equidistant from from a center but we still have that idea of the perfect circle and every in our words real physical circle is a to various degrees pale imitation of that real circle. So if then got the form of the circle and the form of the square and the form of the table and the form of the tree we can ask the further question what is it that makes all of them forms right what connects all the different forms to each other and the answer to that is that they are all the most perfect instances of their kind so what it is that makes all forms forms is if you like the form of forms or to put it differently the form of the good so to have any thoughts at all about particular things you have to have the idea of the perfect thing of which all these particular things are our imitations so that's what gets you to the idea of goodness where goodness is something like this idea of perfection that we have to have as a condition of being able to think about the world at all and virtue here

18:53then is not just a matter of your reason isn't control of your appetites it means your reason has got you to the state where you can behold the real truth of the world the real truth of the world is not a physical truth it's not a truth about things you can perceive it is a truth you can only apprehend through the mind a kind of abstract truth about the goodness that underlies everything some of the philosophers that we've been talking about starting with air were rejecting a version of philosophy which would have in a conventional 19th century or early 20th century education had quite a lot of Plato in them or Plato underpinning them and logical positivism among other things is clearly taking philosophy a long way away from that if your Murdoch been educated in Oxford being exposed to these kind of people but also a little bit to Vic and Stein all of the stuff that was going on that we were talking about if you find your way back to Plato is that in itself a reaction against the way philosophy had been going over the previous 10-20

19:54years yes absolutely as long as we acknowledge that she's going against her own undergraduate communist instincts I mean when she first reads Plato and this is proof to some degree of air as well I mean they see him in the way that say Carl Popper saw him as this kind of reactionary who wants to institute a kind of authoritarian government and of course we modern liberal social democrats can't possibly have any time for that so with Murdoch it's kind of a rejection of some of those early impulses of seeing Plato as a reactionary figure and see him actually as a enormously creative figure who can fit with her at least her later politics in in a number of ways so it's not really the political later that interests her at all she doesn't do anything with the you know the idea of the perfect city that's not what she finds fertile in him what she finds fertile in him is this idea of the mind the human soul as something that's constantly being separated from the true nature of reality and ethics morality is really a business of getting

20:54ourselves closer to reality and how do we get ourselves closer to reality it's by fighting all of the natural human impulses that veil the world from us and her word her main word to describe the thing that stops us perceiving reality a right is the ego the greedy ego she sometimes calls it we're always looking at the world in terms of projections projections of us our needs our values our desires and she associates that to some degree with the worst elements of the romantic tradition which says that we're the really important things as you must say you're not important we're not important human beings exist in the world which exists beyond them it's sort of transcendent world if you like and what it is to act rightly will ultimately come from seeing and to see rightly is partly to see that the world isn't oriented around you're or indeed any human interests what then for Mordok is the subject matter of philosophy in the sense what is

21:54the thing to be investigated and how because i'm assuming once she's arrived at something like this position this platenist position some of the preoccupations of mid 20th century english language philosophy including language itself and language in a particular way the sort of J. R. lost inversion of it let's take a sentence let's compare it to a similar but slightly different sentence let's use let's call them parochial examples let's talk about sentences which would be very familiar to Oxford Don's and their students the kinds of promises that we might make all seen in a certain light quite trivial but also preoccupied with the structure of language or alternatively the arguments between Austin and air about sense data sense and sensibility uh does all of that have to be put to one side is all of that not really the stuff that should be being studied because the stuff that should be being studied is something we're in other way putting this how people live it's sort of life life in its richer sense actually some of the things

23:00that would be of more interest to philosophers like sartre you know sartre is not nitpicking in an Oxford analytical way the difference between this kind of promise and that kind of promise sartre is wanted to ask what does it mean in a godless world and a terrifying world to make choices about the really big stuff is Murdoch closer to that not in her approach but in her understanding of what it is that a philosopher should be writing about yeah I find this a really difficult question because of course I've always tried to defend a view of Austin and air as innocent actually writing about the big stuff it's just there's a sort of taboo I think in maybe Britain generally about being to open about one's concern with with these big questions it just seems a bit unseemly a bit grandiose itself are grandizing to say right I'm going to confront what it is to live a human life in the face of the absurdity of the universe with gods non-existence exactly I'm going to confront the base I'm going to look into it and come back and report on what I've seen indeed and for different reasons I think a rile Austin the philosophers we've mentioned earlier

24:05I think all bridal against it just it's a bit much but I think it's a bit more sympathetic to that kind of tone of voice she clearly isn't kind of repulsed by it in the way that some of the others are but it worth saying that there is something she respects at least two things she respects about her Oxford colleagues one of them is something she finds that they have and that the French philosophers don't which is a healthy respect for the ordinary and that comes out I think just as clearly in her novels her novels are in some ways like Sartres and that you know characters will occasionally talk about the good but then few lines later that character who sounds a bit like Murdoch which is writing philosophy will get mercilessly mocked by another characters there's a huge amount of irony and self-awareness there which not sure as always they're in Sartres they're not nearly as grim or dark they're extremely funny small number of jokes I think in in the French existentialist but not not all that many I mean cano in some ways is the funniest of them so she keeps them with that sense of ordinary life and by ordinary means something like a quotidian

25:07or banal and there's a famous line of hers where in her the book she wrote in the early 50s I think about Sartre which is pretty hostile book to be to be clear I mean on the one hand she's unusual just for taking Sartres seriously a tool but it's not like on a pro Sartre book it's a critique of Sartre and some of these elements in his thought and on the one hand there's all this really big picture stuff about he doesn't have enough of a wrong for reality that is beyond the human mind he is obsessed with the ego he thinks human beings basically sort of construct their world and their values and she disagrees with him about all of that but even in the novels I think she's a kind of grimness or darkness about the other world he he describes so she says something in the world of Gilbert Riles the concept of mind that's a world in which I think I'm quoting more or less verbatim people play cricket cook cakes make simple decisions remember their childhood and go to the circus as Sartre he writes novels which depict a world in which they people commit sins fall in love say prayers or join the communist party and many people can read that I say

26:10nah she's making fun of Gilbert Riles because no one falls in love or joins the communist party there but you can read it equally as saying well in Sartre and no wonder when the child and no one makes any cakes no one will certainly no one plays cricket and no one goes to the circus so there is a kind of joylessness as well in a world that has been stripped of the ordinary to make way for the grandiosity of its of its big themes one of the ways in which that distinction between different kinds of writers think as breaks down is Samuel Beckett did play cricket I just throw that in because it's not you can't divide the world up always in a way that works neatly so given that and given we know how she's going to end up devoting most of her writing life to the writing of fiction is there a point because she was an academic philosopher not just as a student she worked as an academic philosopher she taught for quite a while and I think she was thought to be a pretty good teacher eccentric a bit bohemian not completely reliable can always be sure she would show up but when she did she was great but the move for writing fiction is it

27:13in part a conscious decision that in order to write about these questions about the good say academic philosophy and the style of it even the language of it so compared to Anscombe whose writing is technical very painstaking detailed quite hard work not at all flamboyant I don't think much humor or maybe even much irony that the choice to write fiction is a decision not to reject philosophy but to say that the things that are the subject matter of philosophy might be not best written about but sometimes better written about not as academic philosophy yes absolutely the thing about philosophy the essence of philosophy certainly in the tradition she's educated in is argument an argument here is understood in a pretty narrow sense must the ideal if you like of argument is where you have premise premise conclusion and you can just follow the logic step by step but that of course isn't the only way of arguing if arguing means something like

28:15it persuade people persuade people but not through mere manipulation there are many ways in which you can persuade people to believe something or to look at things in a certain way or adopt a certain outlook and fiction can be a very good way of doing that the other thing fiction is very good at doing which philosophy in the traditional style is not very good at doing is looking to see what it would be like to live with a certain belief it's not simply a matter of holding a certain belief and saying right here's a proposition I affirm its truth right let's move on what would it be to live in the light of one of those beliefs one of those philosophical beliefs now people like are very explicitly want to resist this idea the philosophy can be a guide can tell you how to live in fact they're always insisting on how little it can tell you about how to live at least philosophy taken entirely by itself but Murdoch points out that actually they keep telling us they're not going to tell us how to live but that sort of is a way of telling you how to live it's telling you don't live your life according to philosophy and that's that is a kind of advice and saying that

29:18large metaphysical theories have nothing at all to offer the ordinary person trying to make decisions about life because ultimately we all have to kind of make up our mind for ourselves I mean that's the line of thought she finds an heir she finds it in heir she finds it in sartre and she says in a sense they're all the same view however different their styles are being sartre articulates this in the form of novels he does not write novels he writes papers monographs but it comes to the same thing but suppose we wanted to do the French thing in the sense of find out what it's like for this belief to be embodied in the course of our human life it doesn't have to look like an existentialist novel it could look very different so she tries out a bunch of different things so I mean I should probably mention a few of these novels titles explicitly and there might be listeners wondering what they should go out and read a good place to start is probably her first novel which clearly has a bit of kuno and it has a bit of becket in it it's called under the net and it's about this young man called Jake I think it's Donahue who's a young sort of translator translate of bad

30:20commercial French novels into English and it's just a kind of picker-esque of him bumping into a bunch of zany characters and over the course of the novel very subtly I mean there's bits of a philosophy and there were characters of a safe philosophical things to each other but nearly always an economic register we're always meant to take that stuff seriously and he slowly comes to a kind of realization about himself at a way of seeing other people more honestly I mean it's a great book it's extremely funny and it starts another thing that Murdoch is very good at which is writing about dogs it's a very English thing I think it's a tradition from our esmeralto jilly Cooper where dogs or in some ways have almost more fully realized personalities than some of the human characters are you pretty sure you're not going to find that in in Star Trek but there are some others like a more serious novel so even the 50s I think I don't know if this is safe to say most people's favorite Murdoch novel is a book she wrote in the mid 50s called The Bell and it's got this great first line got something like Dora left her husband because she was afraid of him

31:20a few months later she returns to him for the same reason and so her husband is this kind of rather formidable scholar there are very many scary academics in her books you wonder where she got that from and he's been living in this kind of lay community of people who are so living next to an old medieval abbey so there's some nuns and there are these people who are trying to live a holy spiritual life but in a sort of semi-secular way and Dora this rather flighty woman who's not terribly intellectually serious or spiritual ends up in this community and many many shenanigans in Sioux when all of these very different personalities are put together in this world where religion is in the background but all of these very flawed people constantly doing the wrong thing and hating themselves for it and there are pages and pages of people just kind of a bit like Henry James people just thinking about oh my god what did I do and they're often some of the most thrilling bits of the book it's not the funny romantic misadventures it's someone just sitting down and say

32:20oh my god I completely got that wrong I fail to see things are right I was just projecting my own desires onto the world it's a great novel I warmly recommend it payday bars have a bone to pick with the other candy bars enough with the toppings and layers and stuff pay payday bars are just salty crunchy peanuts and sweet caramel delicious payday not caramel bar chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month each lasting four hours or more Botox on a botchaline mtoxin A prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine before they start it's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month it prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo prescription Botox is injected by your doctor effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms a lurcher doctor right away is difficulty swallowing speaking breathing eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition patients with these conditions before injection or at highest risk side effects may include allergic reactions neck and injection

33:21side pain fatigue and headache allergic reactions can include rash welts asthma symptoms and dizziness don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection tell your doctor your medical history muscle or nerve conditions including ALS lugaric disease myesthenia gravis or lambrd eaten syndrome and medications including botchaline mtoxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects why wait ask your doctor visit botox chronic migraine.com or call 1-800-44-Botox to learn more and in these novels I don't want to say is there an argument is there an illustration and an illumination in some sense of that idea of the good that you're talking about so as you say her characters sometimes do philosophy and they are usually mocked for it and like many novelists with her background she's quite good at mocking the academic life there's a sort of campus element to it even if it's not set on a campus but can you also say in these books that when characters reflect that they saw it wrong they they didn't just misunderstand but they had a false perspective that they are glimpsing or sensing something beyond the ego-driven world

34:28which is in philosophical terms closer to reality I mean is there that sense lying behind these books that these are characters to use Plato's term stumbling around in the cave but they're getting glimpses of the light absolutely absolutely that's probably the best way of describing what's going on in these novels it's important to say there's no book that I think that ends with one character simply coming out of the cave right out into the sun and finally seeing reality it's always going to be messy it's always going to be partial it's always going to incomplete but there are these moments epiphany isn't quite the right word because that has its own separate history it's not that you have this moment where you suddenly see oh my god everything is connected but characters are constantly undergoing conversions of one sort or another sometimes these are religious conversions conversions into religions sometimes they're conversions outer religions sometimes the conversions between religions there are great many Buddhists actually particularly in the later works you start to see a lot of interest in Asian

35:30religions Buddhism and Hinduism because these are religions which do have a picture of you're striving towards something that goes outside of ourselves something transcendent but they seem to do at least in some of their forms they seem to manage to do without a god or at least a a personal god like the one in in Christianity so the comedy of the novels I think is essential to it is that human beings will always be a little bit ridiculous in pursuing the good if you talk about it in that way yeah you will sound absurd because it is a bit absurd to talk like that but it doesn't mean there isn't a deep and important truth though another point I think worth drawing attention to so with Plato when he talks about seeing the good the good ultimately is something really utterly utterly utterly removed from from human life indeed it seems like in some moods in some places in some dialogues Plato seems to suggest that a kind of hermetic existence completely isolated existence is in some ways the ideal because the world of human life with other human beings will be a world where we are constantly subjected to temptation that will draw us back into the cave I think

36:31Murdoch doesn't have that anti human element I mean she's anti-romantic in the sense that she doesn't think it's all about us at least it doesn't she doesn't think it's it's all about me it's not about me and my individual ego but I think she's a bit more interested in the idea of community and in some ways that is a kind of ideal and some at the risk of making her sound a bit like enforster saying only connect but she's not a million miles away from that because one of the realities that she thinks the ego prevents us from seeing clearly is the reality of other people and she wants to say that kind of is what ethics boils down to ethics is just another word for what it is to realize that one is living in a world where other people are real and everything else every other question and ethics questions about you know how do you define right or wrong is about consequences or respecting humanity or virtue it all comes down to how should we live once we have acknowledged that we are not the only people around there are other people around us and indeed there's a natural world and a world of animals around us how does that constrain

37:34how one lives and how one sees things I call that the fundamental question of ethics in her own phrase actually her the word she used herself is is love and she has one of her probably most quoted aphorisms I think from I say called the sublime and the good possibly or maybe vision and choice and morality she says love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than one self is real and that she continues and says love and so art and morals is the discovery of reality and it's a really interesting triad the idea that love and art and morals are all really aiming it at the same thing and that these three things alternate to be a version of the thing that Plato wanted us to discover it's interesting when we were talking about Anscombe and you were describing the ways in which her understanding of morality came about I also found myself thinking about but thinking it was a little bit trite the enforcer only connect that Anscombe was wanting to remind the philosophers she thought of lost sight of this that it's about human connection in some

38:38level and for all their differences Murdoch and Anscombe share that love is also interesting here because as you say in her novels people fall in and out of religion but the thing they do even more than that is they fall in and out of love in all of its different senses they have sexual relationships they have affairs they have infatuations but is it the case that in the novels I'm going to ask you in a moment about the philosophical writing but in the novels there is and it makes it sound a bit pretentious by don't think it has to be there is a platonic conception of love in the sense that all of these things happen in the word you use it can be picker-esque it can be philosophical I mean some of it is philosophical you know there's something farcical about love affairs people stumbling upon other people in and out of bed and there's a lot of that in Murdoch's novels sort of 1950s 1960s 1970s way but is there again some reality behind that where these are all different versions of a thing which if you just experience these things you wouldn't see it

39:39but there's something behind it which is love in its perfect form yes and that is as you as you put it platonic I mean famously later on the symposium talks about how love or when we hear his word is eros is something we first encounter in the form of the love of the individual human being and for later this would be the beautiful boy but that's not where it's meant to stop right so because the beautiful boy is beautiful in virtue of exemplifying certain more general qualities which are not only possessed by this boy but by lots of other boys indeed lots of girls and women and trees and nature and mountains and slowly one opens out away from the in the narrow sense of the word erotic towards something that can take in wider and wider and wider features of reality until one gets on to abstract invisible bits of reality such as the beauty of a mathematical theorem or the the beauty just of an abstract ratio or proportion or equation and then all the way to the thing that is supposed to be the the ultimate object of love which is not any particular

40:40good thing but the good itself but even in in Plato you see a bit of the comedy of that I mean the end of the symposium I mean that it's been all very high-minded and we've been talking about the the nature of love and then suddenly the young sexy alcibiades those at this point it's just a young man comes and makes this quite baudy drunken speech about Socrates and says oh guy I keep flirting with him I keep promise to do so and he just won't succumb and the hardest man in Athens why won't he succumb and it is very very funny that bit of a symposium and for many years people have been slightly embarrassed about it really what do you make of this of this little passage of baudy comedy coming into this high-minded work about how one should love the good and so within Plato itself one might think there's a there's attention it's attention that he wants us to explore and who knows what side he wants us to come out on which is on the one hand the true correct ultimate object of love is not another person it's these generalities it's these abstractions and on the other hand we as human beings seem utterly incapable of actually living in that way living as if

41:46what we truly love is is an abstraction we will always love the particular person and we don't just love their good attributes we love them for the particular person that they are and I mean there's a great deal of discussion of exactly how Plato sorts this out because he clearly is so aware of both sides of this tension in Murdoch I think you can say exactly the same thing this constant aspiration to go beyond the human and this equally powerful pull back into the the baudiest most quittidian most embarrassing elements of of the human but you might want to say there is as you put it in all of that embarrassment in all of those sort of you know bedswops and it's a book called a severed head where I think every single character at some point managed to sleep with every other character including some extremely implausible and problematic combinations the same is true for a novel called a fairly honorable defeat which is where a large part of the plot is one character managing to deceive two characters that are having enough fair almost sort of against their will because they both sort of so high-mindedly think oh we must have this a fair

42:51because goodness requires it and she's making fun of that as well but she's not making fun of the of the basic aspiration behind it it's on the one hand they're seeing something really important but as a result of seeing that really big important abstraction they're failing to ask some really obvious questions did you actually write that love letter to me that didn't look much like your hand writing if one character had just asked that basic question most of that the plot of that novel probably have collapsed but that's part of the joke of it people don't ask those questions so abstractions as much as as anything else can be the enemy of of clear perception the other grand name from the history of human ideas that that brings to mind is Shakespeare as he said she grew up reading Shakespeare and that is Shakespearean as well as being platonic there is something Shakespearean about that kind of plot structure you mentioned a couple of her essay so I want to ask now about the philosophy that she did alongside the fiction the fiction is the thing that she was known for and she acquired a huge readership for it which I don't think she did for her philosophical

43:53writings a couple of things you mentioned I think you call them essays was that in so far she carried on doing philosophy was that the form that it took occasional essays were the essays to accompany the fiction were they interventions in philosophical debates given she wasn't an academic philosopher how did she do what we would recognize as philosophy alongside the fiction yes it was many of them were occasional essays were saying that one trio of essays was collected in the late 60s early 70s into a small slim volume called the sovereignty of good which contains three of her essays stroke public lectures it's not entirely unified work but the only time she actually wrote one big work of philosophy was well she if you wrote some shortage books she wrote a book about Plato and the arts why did Plato banish the artist from his ideal city but it was towards the end of her life so she began to work on this in the late 80s I think when she was asked to give a very very prestigious series of theological lectures in I believe Edinburgh called the Gifford lectures

44:58and this eventually came together as a volume of very very difficult book I should say called metaphysics as a guide to morals and that comes out I think in 1992 and quite frankly I don't feel entirely confident I've understood it it's a it's a messy book and where the messiness of it may well be illustrating one of its points right so the title tells you a little bit about something she's been saying the whole world firstly metaphysics is nothing to be embarrassed about there may well be features of reality that go beyond what we can perceive and I'm not just talking about logic we mean something like the transcendent good the kind of thing that Plato was talking about so metaphysics is fine don't be a don't go that that kind of positivist direction but what does it mean to say that metaphysics is a guide to morals well one thing it means is the thing that was already captured and has slogan about love and ethics being about acknowledging the reality of other people right once you see that reality isn't just what the solipsist thinks it is it isn't just the contents of your own

46:00mind and consciousness reality is other people reality is nature reality is goodness and once you do that you realize you can't just carry on living as if well of living as the solipsist lives living as if nothing else exists and nothing else matters but that idea was already there in in the 70s so what seems to have been added to that in the 90s is a sense that it's not really better physics as in the very loose sense the discovery of reality but metaphysics in the sense of a tradition within world philosophy certainly Western philosophy but also as I mentioned earlier she's interested in Hinduism and Buddhism at this point these are traditions which have metaphysical thought and these traditions of metaphysical thought Christianity Judaism Islam Hinduism Buddhism all have a way of telling us how we might live in light of certain metaphysical truths so with Buddhism and you think that self is a sort of fiction or if you're the type of monist Hindu who thinks that all reality is in some sense unified if you're the kind of Christian who thinks that Christ rose from

47:03the dead and that changes everything because that is delivered us from sin or made it possible for us to be delivered from sin religions have got this right once you believe one of these things you can't just carry on living as if you don't know that so if that's true for those pieces of religious metaphysics why should that not also be true for various forms of secular metaphysics some which may draw on religion or borrow from from religion but may also not may just borrow from the secular tradition of philosophy this is trying to say here that it's not an embarrassment in the way that AJ air thinks to be guided by philosophy and how you live your life and the book is a series of sketches in how that tradition of metaphysical reflection both secular and religious might actually be a guide to how an individual person lives I think it's fair to say that book got a fairly mixed reception and as you mentioned earlier retrospectively I think there has been a tendency to fold her later writings into the story of her mental decline her dementia which took hold relatively

48:04late but there were signs of it earlier on that were ignored including actually by her editors of her last novel that's right she didn't let them edit edit her which was a shame because they could see that something was was going wrong and so I don't think it's that's very true of this book because as you say it's sketchy it's difficult it's not obviously completely coherent and that may be because the philosophy is not striving for coherent I think some people think it's part of that later Murdoch writing which is a story of the decline of her thought and yet just reading about it before we recorded this episode it has fans I mean it has serious fans out there it's taken quite seriously and it's interesting because her fiction is not as fashionable or as popular as it was I don't know I don't know what the sales figures are for her books now but when I was a student you read Iris Murdoch earlier on the publication of an Iris Murdoch novel was an event she was one of the great figures in serious fiction and she was one of those people who wrote a book

49:06nearly every year so you can get some serious Iris Murdoch completed so I should say I do a spy to be one though only about 75% of the way through they're just more and more of them I mean Tire shelf my library is just there's about seven of them I have to go I think before I'm done so yes there was also I think a slight set of embarrassment there was a funny piece by the the novelist Philip Henshow who talks about how you know be awful that existentialism was sexy but the problem was most existentialist books were really hard and you could read Kamu's The Stranger but the trouble is that was your A level French set text so that wasn't all that cool and on the other hand there was Iris Murdoch it was a sort of figure in that in that tradition the trouble is your mom was reading her so that made it terribly uncool as well so she kind of connects these quite different readership so every year the University of Chichester has an Iris Murdoch conference and I say conference but unlike any other academic conference that I can think of it has a bit of the circus lychic excitement of something like what I imagine comic con

50:07would be like and I can't think of any other philosopher who inspires that sort of affection and some of these people then go on and read the philosophy and read it very very carefully and seriously so I think in some ways the fact that she was a novelist has kept her alive and every three or four years I think the new Statesman Inspectoratelle run a piece saying why we need to read Iris Murdoch or why we stop reading Iris Murdoch and I suspect actually no one has so much to go and look at the figures in public libraries she's exactly one of those people who's keeping those circulating libraries alive they're so compelling they're so much fun they're clever but they're not too clever they're ponderous and then they make fun of their own ponderousness they're really gloriously good I can't recommend them enough and how do philosophers view her the academic philosophers not the readers of her fiction who might come to the philosophy but the philosophers who might read a book like metaphysics as a guide to morals take it deadly seriously is her philosophy in any sense fashionable again I think it is and again it's been a very recent phenomenon there was I think

51:12a slight sense of embarrassment of Murdoch at least from the 80s and 90s just partly because some of the novels of the 80s were those novels have many defenders but they are very long right the 60s and 70s she writes these quite fun sparkly short novels and the 80s she writes very very long novels of six to 800 pages and people start to go off her a bit in in that decade and then the philosophy also starts to get more obscure and this is possibly because no longer being an academic philosopher she's not having the kind of resistance or pushback from academic colleagues saying Iris we don't understand what you're saying here could you be a bit clearer please and this is generally a problem I think with all of us and all of us who try to practice philosophy in other modes realize that we you know peer review is terrifically annoying in academia but it does keep you honest it does prevent you from certain kinds of mess and embarrassment that you would inflict on yourself because you know you have no one to be accountable to so it's possible that it's got something to do with that nevertheless I mean very very big a prominent male philosophers of the

52:15century will we said they got some of their key ideas from Iris Murdo Bernard Williams for instance Bern Williams was a philosopher who I mean one of his big contributions as it's sometimes seen is his emphasis on what are called thick concepts right don't keep obsessing over ripeness and wrongness and goodness and badness talk also about treachery talk about betrayal talk about beauty just use a wider range of ethical terms and that's something that he explicitly credits to a seminar where Iris Murdoch urged them to reflect on on these words as ways of thinking about how specifically goodness is manifest in the course of a life right to say someone is good is actually to say something extremely vague and abstract to say that someone is brave or a traitor is to say something really illuminating and rich so that's one idea that's I think taking hold a lot more philosophers who want to say ethics is not just about the study of these thin abstract terms John McDowell another very important figure who it's extremely keen on this idea of conversion

53:16and epiphany as a key aspect of the moral life and he says he got it from Murdoch a Hillary Putnam pretty technical American philosopher logician but he you think for many years at Harvard used to offer courses on Murdoch's sovereignty of good and saying that everything important is is to be found in this book very few of them I think took metaphysics as a guide to morals a seriously there is now slowly beginning to be a bit of a renaissance of interest in it as I speak there's probably a half a dozen reading groups of people very patiently going over the book the last time I went to an Iris Murdoch conference it was striking actually how much more work there was on it to some degree one can be cynical about it saying they've run out of things to say about all the other stuff so this is what's left but the more one reads it I think the more one realizes there's something there there are riches there it's hard to say whether it's an uneven book with really good bits or a really good book that we haven't learned to appreciate yet it may well be and I very much hope it is it is the latter that we'll eventually have a bit at which we crack it we sort of find the key to this extremely difficult book one last question in your book

54:20about the philosophers that we've been talking about you write in a way that's not a million miles away from fiction it's not a work of fiction it's a work of nonfiction but you tell their story in a way sometimes it is quite pick-a-rest sometimes it's very funny there are scenes there that could come from an Iris Murdoch novel is there an arc to the story that we've been discussing from air through Austin through Anskum Murdoch if this was a not going to say if it was a novel but you know if this was a narrative in which we start with air the sexy I mean I say sexy in the sense of famous celebrity fashionable philosopher doing philosophy as a version of science and maths and laying waste to the boring clerics and the pompous moralists and his generational Oxford teachers and who is now philosophically semi-forgotten and here are particularly Anskum and Murdoch inspiring a new generation of people to think there is rich stuff there they were the outsiders

55:24they were the women they had to fight really hard Murdoch didn't do it as an academic philosopher Anskum it was slow and painful work but in the end I'm going to ask this is the wrong way to put it I'm going to say it anyway in the end day one yes as long as we acknowledge that there are no permanent victories in philosophy so you spoke of an arc but maybe the better analogy is a way or a kind of sine way the continuous wave function there's always ups and downs and this is something that I think Murdoch herself acknowledged the first line of the sovereignty of good is something like philosophies one of the subjects that keeps having to start from the beginning so someone says time is unreal and then someone replies I had breakfast before I had lunch and she thinks both of these moves the move towards high-falutin metaphysical abstraction is one aspect of things and it's good we shouldn't be embarrassed about it and this move towards something deflationary pricking pomposity bringing things down to earth saying no come on let's get back to common sense

56:25some people might think that we've got to pick a side right you're either going to be a metaphysician or you're going to be some sort of common sense realist and I think one useful idea that we get from Murdoch tells us that these are permanent aspects of the human psyche these are permanent aspects of whatever impulse in us takes us to philosophy at all and some of it takes us to really weird counterintuitive places and other parts of it are about sort of getting us back down to earth into something closer to common sense but we shouldn't assume that at any point there will be a permanent victory where common sense prevails over metaphysics or metaphysics prevails over common sense perhaps we should think it quite a desirable thing that there are these periodic fluctuations and fortune because what they serve as is reminders that whatever is good and right about one side in these debates and controversies there is something to be said on behalf of the other side as well you might think it an essential aspect of something that philosophers like to call the principle of charity and that's something that Murdoch was a big fan of she tells this famous story about a

57:30woman whose son has married a girl she regards as common and vulgar because she's a generally well-intentioned woman she says and that's unworthy of me and I can't be so mean to her that she tries very deliberately to say what other ways can I see her and you might see her as common but actually I could see her as a refreshingly spontaneous and she thinks of that as kind of ethical discipline trying to see someone in a more positive charitable generous light and the way I've written the book I suppose is very deliberately not to take any sides whoever I'm writing about I am for those pages their passionate partisan the few pages later now I'm talking about their opponents I know their passionate partisan I'm not sure how much I succeed it but it's at least a way of writing a philosophy where one is not trying to trace the path to the final truth after which we can sort of stop doing philosophy it's just how can we look with the greatest amount of generosity at what good there is in every philosopher of the canon they all coexist and that's a lovely thing about a certain kind of narrative device is that a narrative can have a kind of simple moral structure

58:35which ends with good prevailing over evil or you could just say no one here is entirely good or evil so what we want is simply to create a world in which they can all go exist and the idea that there are no victories here is of a piece with a set of novels in which platonic ideas coexist with quite well realized dogs and neither comes out on top right the dogs don't defeat the ideas and the ideas don't defeat the dogs before we go we wanted to let you know about something new that we are launching today from ppf it's on our website ppfideers.com it is a pair of educational courses to accompany two of our podcast series one a series from a couple of years ago about the great political essays and the other is the series that we have literally just finished about the lives of 20th century philosophers these two courses are available now and they are free for anyone

59:41who would like to use them if you go to our website ppfideers.com click on courses you will see them now and what you will see is two courses built around a series of units as we're calling them each unit based around one of our podcast episodes in that series and then extensive further material to enable you to go further and deeper into the subject we begin with a recall test to see if you remember what you've just heard and then the main thing that we're adding here which is extensive further reading material also some video material to to allow you to explore the subject matter of each episode for the essays the essay itself further writing by the author in question and then criticism commentary reflection on the themes of the essay and after that we are suggesting discussion topics or essay writing topics to allow you to do your own thinking about the things that

1:00:42you have just heard about and read about these courses are available for teachers to use we know we do have teachers who use our podcast in schools colleges and universities also for students who may be studying some of these things if you're a student and you write essays and you would like to listen to that series again and read much more extensively about what makes a great essay and how great essays work and maybe even write a great essay yourself it's there for you to but it's for anyone who would like to go further into some of the subjects that we talk about on this podcast we believe in lifelong education we know we also have a lot of listeners who maybe went to university a long time ago maybe never went to university maybe are doing busy jobs in busy lives but would like the chance to do a bit more for one to a better word education along the way this is for you too these courses are available free for anyone to use and that is because of the support that we get

1:01:48from the open society foundations who do support our educational work but also the support that we get from subscribers to ppf plus and tomorrow we're putting out a bonus episode on ppf plus called podcast university which explains in much more detail the thinking behind these courses how they work but also some of my thinking about the relationship between what we do on this podcast and education in the 21st century some of my reflections on my experiences as a university teacher and then having quit that a full-time podcaster to get that episode you will need to subscribe to ppf plus you know the drill again go to our website ppfideers.com click on ppf plus it costs 50 pounds a year five pounds a month you will get all of our bonus episodes you'll get ad-free listening you'll get automatic sign up to our newsletter but it is also a way of supporting this educational work and we want to do a lot more of it we would like to create many more of

1:02:51these courses and we would like to keep them freely available we have worked really hard to make sure not only that the courses are free but the all the material that we link to is free as well we have tried to make sure that nothing is behind a paywall and so you can make use of this whoever you are and wherever you are and to do more of it we will need more support and the easiest way to support what we do is to become a subscriber to ppf plus we think you'll get other benefits to including all of those bonus episodes have a look at the courses if you know anyone you think might be interested in them a teacher a student anyone maybe it's you yourself play around with them we've tried to make them really user friendly we think they are very elegant we hope you agree and then if you would like to support what we do as well do please subscribe to ppf plus to get podcast university tomorrow's bonus episode and all of our bonus episodes past present and future

1:03:55next time in our regular slot we are starting a new series which explores themes that we've touched on a bit recently in this podcast what it means to live in an aging world that is a world in which people are living longer populations are getting older in which social and political life is increasingly geared around the interests and the preferences of the elderly we're going to be talking about the politics of an aging world the psychology the economics we're going to be talking about the changing meaning of death and we start with a conversation with the geneticist Adam Rutherford about the business of longevity do check out those courses and do join us for that this has been past present future it's football season and you can now get almost anything you need for game day delivered with

1:05:00uber eats what do we mean by almost you can't get a running back delivered but you can get baby back ribs delivered a strong defense no a strong deodorant yes the six pack of abs no six pack of beer yes get almost almost anything for game day delivered with uber eats official on demand food delivery partner of the NFL order now alcohol 21 plus and in select cities product availability varies by region see app for details for a limited time you can get a big Mac meal for just eight dollars that's a burger fries and a drink they don't call it an extra value meal for nothing get a big Mac meal only at McDonald's price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing