In Our Time - Iris Murdoch

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999). In her lifetime she was most celebrated for her novels such as The Bell and The Black Prince, but these are now sharing the spotlight with her philosophy. Responding to the horrors of the Second World War, she argued that morality was not subjective or a matter of taste, as many of her contemporaries held, but was objective, and good was a fact we could recognize. To tell good from bad, though, we would need to see the world as it really is, not as we want to see it, and her novels are full of characters who are not yet enlightened enough to do that.WithAnil Gomes Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of OxfordAnne Rowe Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester and Emeritus Research Fellow with the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston UniversityAndMiles Leeson Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre and Reader in English Literature at the University of ChichesterProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Iris Murdoch, 1919 to 1999, was seen in her lifetime as a novelist, who was also a philosopher. But it's her philosophy that is now gilding her reputation.

Reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, she argued that morality was not subjective, a matter of taste, but objective and good was a fact we could recognize. To do that, though, we would need to see the world as it really is, not as we want to see it, and her novels are full of characters who are not yet that enlightened. With me to discuss Iris Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, are Annel Gohmes, fellow and tutor in philosophy at Trinity College University of Oxford, Anne Roe, visiting professor at the University of Chichester, an Emeritus Research Fellow

with the Irish Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University and Miles Leeson, director of the Irish Murdoch Research Centre and reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester. Miles Leeson. What do we need to know about Irish Murdoch's early life?

Well, I think we need to know that she was born in Blessington Street in Dublin in July 1919. And she comes very much from a Anglo-Irish, middle-class, Protestant background. Her father being from a Presbyterian stock. Her parents were Hughes, a civil servant at that point, just coming out of the war, and Rini, an aspiring opera singer. So she's born in Ireland, but she doesn't stay there particularly

long. Perhaps within a few weeks, it's a little bit unclear. She moves to England. Certainly the family moved to England before she's won. First, they move to Acton, and then they move later to Chiswick, where she spends the majority of her childhood. And it's a very happy childhood. She grows up as an only child in what she later referred to. to as a perfect Trinity of love. And it's interesting that her family didn't have much contact with anybody outside the family. There wasn't any major socialising with the rest of the Irish diaspora in London at all. And because of this, I think her parents give her an awful lot of time to develop, especially intellectually.

And she starts to write from very early age, probably seven or eight years old. And that's really inspired by her father, who reads to her every evening, Treasure Island, Kim, kidnapped, Alice in Wonderland. These are some of the really important works for her. She grows up, and these are reflected in her later fiction as well. And her parents are really forward thinking, I think, quite liberal. They sent her to the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925, and after that she wins a place to at that point, very liberal badminton school in Bristol in 1932.

She wins a funded place there. She's very keen on sport, and she writes a lot of the reports for the cricket and the hockey. and also at that point in time she's still writing her own creative work, particularly poetry. And later in her school life, just before she goes up to Oxford, W.H. Orden comes to visit the school. And she convinces him to write an introduction to a poetry pamphlet,

I suppose, that she's producing with other schools in the Bristol area. And I think that's a really important marker for her as her first real publication at the age of just 18. You mention Oxford. She wins a scholarship to Oxford. she has a wonderful... Can you tell us about her experience at Oxford? Yeah, sure.

She wins an open exhibition to Somerville in 1938 and she really throws herself into study and also much else besides. I mean, she joins the Irish society. She always sees herself as part of the Irish community in England, indeed throughout her life. She joins the Communist Party. She says it's the first thing I did

when I went to Oxford was to join the Communist Party. And that continued right the way through Oxford and indeed into her later life when she moves to London. She's taking mods and grates. This means that she has to know Latin and Greek and learn about ancient history. Ancient history, philosophy, a real intense three years for her.

But she's throwing herself into relationships as well. There are plenty of romances during her undergraduate years. And she also becomes friends with Mary Midgley, Philip of Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, who now are seen as the wartime quartet of female philosophers. She said that in her first term she got six proposals of marriage. Have you investigated that? Yes, whether that's slightly hyperbole on her behalf,

but she certainly had numerous relationships running concurrently, and indeed did throughout her life probably right the way into the 1970s. She was often in relationships earlier on in Oxford, primarily with men, but later on with men and with women. Thank you. Anne, Anne Roe, what do we learn about Iris Medea from her letters? I believe there are about 4,000 or more. Can you tell us what you most dig our scan? But can you tell us what mainly comes out of them? Well, they were clearly the tools of her trade.

I mean, she spent about four hours a day, every day. She answered every letter she received. What's interesting, it's an asymmetrical letter run. she destroyed all the letters that she received, but she certainly relied on her own communication with all her friends, her lovers, her students, which she would build in. But the characters are never identifiable.

She always transformed the information that she generated from her letters through the imagination. Sorry, if you're saying she's using this as raw material. I think she does. I think she does. But not in any cynical way. She's interested in people. She's fascinated in people. She wants to know what makes people tick. And then when she's working out the characterisation in her novels, she thinks about that. She goes back to that.

She wants to make these characters real. What themes you see in the letters that she carried into her novels? Her moral philosophy, as it seeps into the novels, it was not only forged in the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge, but in her own life. experiences. It was a philosophy that dealt with real feelings and she very much wanted to get her own experience in there. And another point about these letters is there's a huge amount of ventriloquism going on there. She's play-acting. This isn't Iris Murdoch writing some of these letters. She gets into character. She role plays. She tries out certain roles and this comes across very clearly in some letters that she wrote to her fiancée, that she was a man she was

engaged to her for a very short time, Wallace Rodson. She takes over the role as the heroine of a romantic novel. She writes to him saying, well, I've just washed my hair, darling, and I want to sit around all day and read Woman's Own. Well, she wasn't going to do that, but she was trying out these different personas on these friends and lovers. and then she would move them into the fiction. Thank you very much. Anil Goems, what were the prevailing ideas on morality that Aris Murdoch would have encountered at Oxford

when she returned to teach there? Murdoch's views are formed in opposition to a picture of morality that was dominant in Oxford both when she arrived as a student and then when she returned as a fellow at St. Anne's. And it's a view on which moral judgments don't describe the world. So think about an ordinary judgment like London buses are red. If I tell you that London buses are red, I'm telling you something about the way the world is. And if what I've said is true, it's true because of the colour of the buses in London.

I'm describing the nature of the world. And the picture of morality which was dominant when she was a student and when she arrived back as a fellow was one on which moral judgments are just not like that. They don't describe how things are in the world. So let's say I make a moral judgment. Let's say I say that breaking promises is wrong. I'm not making a judgment about how things are in the world. If I tell you that London buses are red, I'm telling you about the world. But if I say the moral that breaking promises is wrong,

that's not the sort of thing that could be true or false. It's not a description about the way the world is. So the idea was we can purge our metaphysics of these kind of weird properties like wrongness. And instead we should think about wrongness or rightness as the kind of values we choose about the world. So if you break a promise, we can't say it's wrong because you might have a very good reason to break a promise and that reason might be stronger than keeping the promise. Sure. So let's take something which we think is always wrong. Let's say I say that torturing innocent children is always wrong. The idea is even that is not a claim about the nature of the

world. All I'm doing is really expressing my disapproval of torturing innocent children. you could have you could agree with me on all the facts about the world but you could choose a different set of values so really this picture of morality draws a really sharp line between the facts and the values the values and the moral judgments we have are an expression of our emotions our approval our disapproval the values that we choose but they're not a reflection of how things are in the world iris morgue found that sort of line of inquiry very unpopular what we're was going on that she didn't dislike and turned away from? I mean, I suspect that one aspect of her dislike of that picture

stems from her experience in the Second World War. There's a really telling interview from later in her life where she calls this way of thinking about morality as a pre-Hitler way of thinking about morality. So Murdoch had worked in the Treasury during the war and later with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. So she was working with displaced persons across Europe. And she'd seen at first hand some of the damage and devastation that had been wrought across Europe.

And news about the Holocaust was kind of slowly coming out. And that meant there was a real question for philosophers at the time, which was, how can ethics deal with the magnitude of what they've seen? Can we really say there's no truth of the matter about morality that the Nazis have all the facts right? It's just that they made different choices about which values they held as opposed to us. and would it be more natural to say that there was genuine evil in the world? So in some ways Murdoch found this picture of morality shallow or complacent in light of what they'd seen in Europe. And she took her own line from that.

What did encourage her in her reading or meeting people to have the strength or the determination to take a line against that? A number of other philosophers, Miles mentioned Philip Afoot and Elizabeth Anscom and Mary Midgley. They came out of this experience with a commitment to the island. idea that there must be such a thing as getting it right or wrong in morality, that you could do better or worse in morality in your moral thinking about the world. And she was drawing on all these different thinkers that she was reading at the time. Part of it was drawing on the training she'd had in ancient philosophy, so going back to Plato. But she was also reading the existentialists, reading Sartre, and she was reading her contemporaries in Oxford, R.M. Hare and Wittgenstein in Cambridge.

And it was through engaging with all these people that she was slowly trying to find a way to hold on to what she thought of as a really important insight that there was such a thing as getting it right in morality. Thank you. Miles Leeson. Her first novel was under the net. What markers did she lay down then?

It was very successful, serifically well-reviewed, about this young man who comes to London trying to find himself, trying to become the sort of London-Sy Sartre. He fails all over the place, but in the end he ends up of what he wants to be, which is a writer. But can you tell us what she was laying down as a writer and as a novelist and as a philosopher? I think, first of all, it's worth saying that this is not her first novel.

She writes probably at least three prior to this, but we presume that they've been destroyed. Her first published novel is Under the Net. Very much a European novel, taking a lot of inspiration from her friend, the French author Ramon Kuno, who she dedicates the novel too and takes a lot of a lot from his novel Piero Monomé. There's also, I think we can see quite strong influences

from Beckett's early fiction, particularly Murphy, and Sartre as well, although by this point she's kind of moved very much away from strong desire to move down the existentialist line. So it's the story of Jake Donaghy he was quite a picaresque figure, he's quite flawed, and yet

he's not quite an anti-hero either. And what he's doing in his life, is searching for stability, and he's certainly not keen on the notion of contingency within the world. What do you mean by the contingency of the world? The contingency of the world, the messiness, or she would refer to it as the thinginess of the world, that the actions and reactions of other people within the world

do not fit into how we would like them to act. And quite often it's Jake wanting other characters within the novel, how he wishes them to act, that actually causes a lot of his difficulties. So there's a square dance of relationships and love between four characters in the novel. There's Jake who's in love with Anna, but she's in love with Hugo, who's a film director, but he's in love with Sadie, who's the film star, but she's in love with Jake. And this kind of interpersonal relationship, I think, really drives the novel on one side,

whereas on the other side is quite definitely based on a kind of a, working out of philosophy. There's a one of the characters called Dave Gelman is certainly based on a follow of Wittgenstein and there are kind of quite long tracks in the novel where Jake and Dave and also Jake and Hugo are discussing life and discussing a particular philosophical concerns. So I think it's right to see that particular novel certainly as a philosophical novel. So there's plenty of conflicts within herself in the letters. She's debilitating depressed. That comes through when Jake Donahue in Under the Net goes to stay in his friend's flat where he simply cannot engage with the world. There's a confessional letter to David Hicks

about her own dangerous lack of willpower. And she talks about this quadrilateral tale where she has a relationship with Thomas Baller, who was the lover of her friend, Philippa Foot and she was involved with M.R.D. Foot, but she has this relationship and hurts Philippa Foot badly. This remorse that she carries with her for the rest of her life is one of the major. This gave her one of her great themes in the novels was the remorse she experienced because of her own behaviour to somebody, to two people who she deeply loved. Thank you very much. Can we leave five novels on, Anne wrote, in 1958 and The Bell, which was very well received. What strength does Iris Murdoch display in that novel The Bell?

It was this novel that confirmed her, according to the spectator, as the former's novelist of her generation. Now, what's his great strength? Gripping storytelling. The way she constructs this novel is extraordinary. there are a few central characters whose inner life we go to into a great detail. This is Michael Mead, Dora Greenfield and Toby Gash. And then there are a section of peripheral characters that you just get dialogue and action. You only see the effects of what these central characters,

how they affect these other characters, but you don't get any inner life. And so what she does is she turns the readers, into the moral philosophers. They have to work out what's going on in the minds of these peripheral characters. So this gives a great sense of engagement in the novels. They're page turners. By the time she was writing the bell, she was writing in magazine. She was giving television and radio interviews about social issues that were close to her heart.

And one of them was about legalization of homosexuality. Now, she centers one of the main characters, characters, Michael Meade in this novel. He is an openly homosexual character. And this is written nine years before the decriminalisation in 1967. I'll come back to the bell in a minute. Meanwhile, Anil, could you tell us, in this novel it seems for me, the way she does it, she's giving us a very clear idea of her version

of the way we would think about the world. This picks up on what we were talking about earlier. Murdoch is a realist about morality. She thinks there is such a thing as going to get right in morality. And, I mean, another way to put that point is she thinks that morality is discovered and not created. So what you find in the philosophy that she's writing at this time is this real rejection of the idea that there's a distinction between a cold, hard world of scientific facts and a world of moral judgments. So she thinks that the world itself contains such things as the kindness of a stranger or the pettiness of someone once working with. And these are the kind of things that show up in the bell as well.

I mean, she thinks that people can be good and people can be evil, and these are as much facts about the world as the fact that London buses are read. So you just can't separate out morality from the world. But in a way, she thinks we can't appreciate this fact. We can't really understand the fact that goodness is real until we begin to appreciate the moral significance of vision. So what does you mean about that? You're going to tell us, aren't you?

Yes. I mean, most moral theory is about how to act, right? So we start with someone in some situation, and then we say, what should this person do in this situation? And that's a kind of way of thinking about morality as a kind of algorithm or flowchart. You just input all the right variables, and then it spits out an answer which tells you what to do. Whereas Murdoch thinks those questions just come too late in the game. What we do is often downstream from how we see the world. So we need to back up and think a bit about what it is to see the world properly.

And if you get the seeing right, then the day. doing will take care of itself. So throughout her philosophy, what she's trying to do is bring back the moral significance of vision. We have to figure out what the right way to see the world is. When you look properly, you can see how things really are. I mean, in some ways, just like a good tailor can look at you and size you up and tell you what kind of size trousers you should be wearing, and the good person can just look at the situation and see what the right thing to do is. Miles, most recent, can we go back to the the bell. There's a scene where

Dora is at the National Gallery one of the key characters in the book, one of the two key characters in the book, and becomes transported by one of the paintings. Why is that important? I think it's important for what Murdoch is trying to say about art, and not just about

art, but about something outside of the self. It connects with what Annal was saying about fact and value, about how we value others. And it's about this idea of paying attention. Now, this is something that Murdoch borrows from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Veix, Simone Vei, and she builds it into quite a number of her novels.

And in the Bell in particular, this scene that comes in about two-thirds of the way through in Chapter 14 is a really important turning point for the novel, I think. So Dora, our central character, is back in London. She's gone back to London from Inba Court, which is the religious house in Gloucestershire that she's been staying at for a while with her husband. And she's gone back to London to be with her lover, Noel, because the relationship with her husband, Paul, is so difficult. While she's there, Paul rings her at Noel's flat,

and she hears this blackbird singing. And this apprehension of nature is a really important one for Murdoch, not just in the bell, but throughout her novels and indeed in her philosophy as well. It's not dissimilar to an image of a kestrel that we get in her later philosophical work, the sovereignty of good. And so she hears this beautiful, naturalistic,

sound coming through the telephone and she knows that she's got to make a change in her life. So she leaves the flat and goes to the National Gallery. And at that point in time, she sees these paintings there as something that's real, something that's unchanging and something that's good, that's been produced from a good place. And she's wandering through the gallery. And she finds herself in front of Gainsborough's portrait of his two daughters. And at that point, as you say, she's transported. She has a moment of transcendence, if you like. And the Gainsborough a portrait, almost becomes like a secular icon for her. And she falls on her knees in a moment of secular prayer, if you like. And she realizes at that point that she needs to return to Imba.

She needs to face Paul. And she needs to change her life, turn her life around. And of course, at that point in time, the events of the novel speed up quite a lot and we move back. We find ourselves swimming in the lake and finding things below the surface. One of the things that Dora looks at in the painting is the faces of the two little girls. They're two beautiful shining faces of the two children. And they have been painted with such love by their father that she understands in those images what real love means. And there is such care and concern and love for these children

that Dora realizes in that minute that she does not love either of these men in her life. and she is going to become more independent. So this idea of love and what true love means comes into it and what she's hoping, I think, what Murdoch is hoping, when readers are watching or thinking about Dora, looking at this painting, that the ego is cracked. Dora's ego is cracked at that minute

and she sees the realization of an otherness completely outside herself. This painting has got nothing to do with her own problems and her own situation. is what causes her to fall on her knees. So just for that moment, I think Murdoch thinks if she can engage her readers in the novel, in the same way that Dora has been engaged by this painting, that the reader's ego will be cracked. And moral change will actually take place. And this is how she's wanted her literature, her novels to operate on her readers, so that they would engage so deeply that moral change just might take place as it has done with Dora in the painting.

Thank you. Anil, can you, let's develop this. The idea about the idea of love in her philosophy, which is often interpreted as, or is it you tell me, as erotic sexual obsession? In some ways, love is the glue that binds the whole of her moral philosophy together. So go back to that idea we were talking about that for Murdoch, moral life is about trying to see properly. She that there are barriers that stop us from seeing properly. And first and foremost among them is the fat, relentless ego. That's her term for the way in which our dear self gets in the way. We always brood on our own selfish concerns.

And that stops us from seeing other people. So maybe I'm so wrapped up in my own affairs that I fail to notice that you're suffering in some way. And the role of morality, the kind of difficult part of morality, is to break through that ego and come to recognize the reality. of other people. She's got this lovely term unselfing, which she picks up from the Buddhist tradition to describe that process by which we break through the ego and come to see another person for who they are. So Miles's example of Dora in front of the painting in the National Gallery or the natural beauty case of looking at the kestrel outside of the window. These are cases where we're taken outside ourselves

and put face to face with something which is beyond us and greater than us and pulls us away from our selfish concerns and looks out at something else in the world. And she thinks this process is love. So love, there's a lovely phrase in one of the essays where she says, love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than one self is real. So the idea is that love is that difficult realization that there's more to the world than my own selfish concerns. So what you get is this picture where love can play this role in breaking through our selfish concerns. It's not the kind of erotic love which can blind us. We sometimes talk about love being blind and the novels are full of people for whom love can act as a barrier to seeing other people. But true love,

proper love, is a way in which we see people properly. So you get this picture of morality on which goodness is a real part of the world, but it's difficult to see. And the only way we can see it is by finding the right ways to think about the world. And that involves getting this love for other people and for other things that pull us beyond our selfish concerns so we can actually recognize the goodness which is real and out there. How does she describe and how does we know that we're seeing people properly or not? Your word properly. There are so many examples she gives us. So let's see if this one helps with the idea. One of her most famous examples is of her mother and her daughter-in-law. And she says, imagine that the mother finds her daughter-in-law tiresome and juvenile.

Maybe she thinks her son is married beneath him or something. But then she begins to reflect on her attitude and she comes to realize that maybe she's been snobbish or narrow-minded. She thinks these are difficult, difficult processes. There's no guarantee that we'll get to the right answer. But if maybe after reflection you come to realize that the daughter-in-law is not juveniles, she's just refreshingly joyous or full of energy, this is a process about trying to find the right terms in which to see her daughter. That's the kind of thing which she thinks is a moral achievement. So in a way, moral life for Murdoch is not about trying to come up with an algorithm that tell you what to do. It's about looking carefully at others and trying to figure out, am I really

seeing them as they are, or is it my concern about what the neighbours will say, or my own selfish concerns which are making me see them in this kind of way? None of this is easy, but through hard work we can come to get the right kind of description to really understand who other people are. Thank you, Miles. Is there any way to briefly describe the relationship, if any, between her novels and her philosophy. Because Iris Merle didn't like that connection being made very much, did she?

She didn't, no, she saw the two parts of her life as pretty separate. Indeed, she hived off her time writing philosophy in the early morning and then fiction in the later part of the day. So she had that kind of distinction always going on in her mind. And in an interview, as you say,

she's fairly consistent throughout her life that she's not a philosophical novelist. She says that philosophy is there to clarify literature is there to mystify. And she says, well, if some philosophy creeps into the novels, it's because I'm a philosopher. If I knew how to sail a ship, I'd put sailing ships in there. But as Anilist has taken us through, a lot of these images and ideas and concerns that she has that she puts into the novels are really similar to what's going on in the philosophy. So attention to the other, the destructiveness of the ego and the need to kind of get over the ego,

if you were, crack the ego. The necessity for a new vocation. in which we might conceptualise love and goodness. All of these things, all these ideas appear in the novels as well. And there's also the point that there are chunks of philosophy that come up wholesale in the novels. She leaves it up to us as readers to be the moral philosophers and to work out what's really going on. So she's not a philosophical novelist like Sartreys, for example, and she certainly had no desire to write like that. But I think her overriding obsessions that we've been discussing really do come out on the page. And throughout her fictional career as well, there are certain obsessions that come back time and again. Thank you. Anne. There's a band of moral philosophers in the novels. Many of the moral philosophers who appear there have works entitled exactly or very close to the same as Iris Murdoch's novels. Generally, moral philosophers don't fare very well in the novels. Their moral philosophy is either ineffectual. It can actually damage or it can be dangerous. And by the time, you get to the 1980s and you have John Robert Rosanov appearing in the novels,

he cannot reconcile the fact that he feels a sexual attraction for his granddaughter with his role as a moral philosopher and he dies by suicide. You know, she's very, very critical in a way, or inviting her readers to be very cautious about the way that the moral philosophers in her novels are delivering their message to the planet, so to speak. There's also such a lightness in a lot of the novels as well. There's a lot of comedy present, and that comedy is quite often there to puncture the egos of various characters. Particularly, I think we should laugh, and I think we do, at her first person male narrators,

whether that's Charles Araby in the Sea of the Sea or Jake Donahue in Under the Net, for example. There are particular scenes and moments where their pomposity, and in some regards their ridiculousness, you're thinking about Charles. Is punctured by Iris, you know, having them in comedic moments, whether that's falling over or dropping something or in the perception of somebody, in the perception of another character, we're given one vision that they're having, but we know as readers that there's something very different else going on in reality.

So that gap between reality and the fantasy that we've been talking about is quite often brought together and made comedic by modern. look in great many of the novels. Anne, you know an enormous amount about her letters. She was very prolific as a novelist and a great letter writer, as we've discussed. Are there examples in her letters which you think this is what then appeared in that novel? They're enacted in the novels, as Miles was saying. She rarely puts them into the mouth.

There's never any didactic wagging finger as you get in George Eliot's novels. the moral philosophy comes through the descriptions of the inner life of her characters. She sees that her picture of the soul is this play out between high eros and low eros, the desire for God. What does you mean by that? High eros. I mean Freud is low eros and Plato's high eros. Yes, yes.

The desire for God, the desire for goodness, the desire to be the best sort of person that we could be on the one level. But we're constantly, the characters are constantly being driven. dragged down by the desire for sex, the desire for control, the desire for power. And this links back to what Anil was saying about the desire to see the world. We want to see the world, but our fantasy life constantly gets in the way. So we only see what we want to see and we interpret the way people act and where people behave towards us in the way that we want to interpret it. And this blocks us, this stops us from becoming good. So it's the moral philosophy is enacted over and over again just in the way, in the plots of the novels and the way that

people are trying to engage with each other and usually failing. There's often a clue in the writing of the novel when she wants to move in and say something quite profound that links with her moral philosophy, she moves into poetry. And when the lyricism, the characters begin to speak lyrically and philosophically, then it's a trigger to the reader that some truth about human nature is being revealed in the novels. Anil, what do you think her strengths are as a philosopher? What fascinates you about her now? I mean, in some ways this picks up on the things that Anne was just talking about. One of the things which I think is really fascinating about Murdoch is the way she writes as a participant in moral life. She writes as someone who is living and feeling,

through the problems which she writes about. When she talks about the distractions and problems of the fat relentless ego, she's clearly drawing on experiences from her own life. And in a way, it's interesting to read that because it really marks a difference from the way in which so many moral philosophers think of what they're doing. A lot of moral philosophy has written in this cold, detached style, as if one's an observer reporting and describing morality, almost like an anthropologist, this kind of human institution and we're reporting on it from the outside. A lot of moral philosophers think of their role as describing morality, but the role of moral philosophy is not to offer you advice.

If you want advice, go to a priest or go to an advice columnist. Don't go to a moral philosopher. But that's not Murdoch's view. She's really writing as someone who wants to make us morally better, and that kind of gives her writing this real energy. I mean, in some ways, I'm tempted to say that what's fascinating about Murdoch's philosophy is that it almost works as a kind of self-help book. I mean, that's going to make it sound like a...

I'm disparaging it slightly. But there's a way in which thinking of Murdoch is engaged in self-help, is a way of tying her back to that ancient Greek philosophy that she loved so much, because there was this way of thinking about philosophy in the ancient world as a kind of medical art for the soul as a way of making people morally better. So Socrates in Plato's dialogues goes around Athens, talking to young men, having conversations with them. He wants to do philosophy with them because he thinks philosophy can make.

you more virtuous, it makes you a more virtuous person. And Murdoch shares that conception. It's kind of Plato more than anyone else who shapes her views of philosophy. And like Plato, she thinks that philosophy can actually make us better and she wants to know how can we become good. And there's just something deeply fascinating about that way of thinking about what philosophy might achieve, that philosophy could be a kind of self-help that makes us look inside ourselves and identify the barriers to seeing properly. Like her novels, the questions

which she asked in her philosophy are ones which were meant to put to ourselves. They're meant to shake us up in a certain way and force us to think and new about what we're doing. Miles, listen, we know that Iris and Murdoch lived with Alzheimer's in her later years. I don't want to dwell on this, but she did and she went right. Can you just mention how that is reflected in her writing? Well, I think we can see in her writing, certainly towards the end, that it does become a little bit more spare, a little bit more sparse. So from the mid-1970s onwards, the novels do grow in length,

although I think the concerns and themes that she's been developing all the way through, really, since the mid-50s are very much all still present. But as you say, as we come into the 90s, she writes a couple of very long novels, particularly The Green Knight in 1993. But then the novel that follows that, her final novel, Jackson's Dilemma, is probably the shortest novel since the 1950s. And when it came out, people were quite, reviewers are very confused about this

and what's going on with Iris Murdoch. It's a very pared down novel. It wasn't well reviewed. And now that we can see that there are signs of her dementia present. But I don't think it should be read just as a novel of a novelist in decline at all. It certainly works.

There are a few loose ends to the narrative. And I think certainly as the titular character, Jackson waves goodbye at the end of the novel, Murdoch is almost taking leave of her life's work as well. But all the themes about obsession and guilt and remorse that Anne and Anil have been picking up on are all present in Jackson's dilemma. They're just there in a kind of, there are elements of the themes being repeated and concerns with nature and with life and with death as well. Anne Rowe, perhaps it's too well to say, but what do you think will endure of Irish Murdoch's novels? Her novels are more important for the 21st century in some ways than they were to the 20th century.

Because they're shapeshifters. I mean, we know so much more now about her and society has changed in the 21st century. So I think that many questions that are pertinent to society today are much more highlighted now because she was very, the novels are prescient. She understood things that we didn't understand then. For example, gender fluidity. There's a very telling letter written in 1967 to George Chrysler. And she says, I can't divide friendship from love or love from sex.

I'm probably not at all normal sexually. I'm not a lesbian in spite of one or two events on that front. I'm certainly strongly interested in men, but I don't think I really want normal heterosexual. relationships with them. I think I'm sexually rather odd, which is a male homosexual in female guys. Once you know that, you can go back to the novels and you see characters in the background of the novel who you don't take very much notice of, but when you know that, you can see them and you see how gender fluid they are. There's a character in the book in the

Brotherhood, Emma, he's a male character. And he cross-dresses. He comes downstairs wearing ladies' clothes. And it doesn't seem particularly significant then. But now you can see that she was saying something quite profound about people who suppress their gender and sexuality. And that the characters, she's often made fun of calling characters by gender-neutral names, what she's doing us is giving us a hint to an aspect of their personality that they may not even be aware of themselves. I think she thought that many more people had an element of gender,

complexity, gender difference in them, or gender fluidity. Anna will be towards the end now. Her ideas were unfashionable in her lifetime. But to pick up from things that Anne has been saying, in what ways are her ideas increasing relevant now? It's a good question. And in some ways contemporary philosophy is yet to really come to a reckoning with her legacy. She was unfashionable and although she's becoming more fashionable

in philosophy, there's no sense yet in which she is part of the philosophical canon. So let me try and make the case for why I think she is relevant to philosophy. One of the things she emphasises throughout her philosophical writings is the whole that pictures and narratives and metaphors play in the way we think about the world. So another lovely line from one of the essays, she says that man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. We tell ourselves stories and then somehow we end up imitating them and that's a way in which we navigate the world. And go back to that picture of morality that she found when she arrived in Oxford.

That was a picture of morality on which the natural world is devoid of meaning. It's stripped of morality. It's the kind of scientific view of the natural world, one which a lot of people think just comes from the scientific revolutions which gave birth to the modern world. I mean, in some ways that's a picture of the natural world which still dominates our contemporary culture. And Murdoch wants us to reject that way of thinking about the world,

but not because she thinks there's a god somewhere who puts meaning on the world. She rejects a picture because she thinks the world contains other people, complicated, ordinary people of the sort you find in her novels. And once you have the people in the world, you have goodness in the world. And although it's dim and difficult to see, we can work hard and try and break through ourselves as she goes, to come to be guided by the light of goodness. And in some ways, that's a very different picture of the world,

a much more humane picture. And that's the legacy that she really leaves philosophy and why, to my mind, she's one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, what she gives us as a very different way of thinking about the world and our relation to it. And then she gives us this challenge, I suppose, to think about whether that's a way of thinking of the world that we can really live up to.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Anil Gomes, thank you, Anne Mrow, and Mars Leeson, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, we'll be discussing corals. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Anne, and what didn't you get time to say that you wanted to say?

Well, I think something about the focus on mental health issues in the novels that I think are much more in the frame today that people will pick up on that they didn't. There's a lovely quote from Anne Cavage in Lundsen Soldiers and she says, she felt for the first time in a life afraid of her own mind, afraid of some independent, cancerous life of its own, which seemed to be developing.

There's so many suicides in the novels caused by biting remorse, guilt, shame, rejection. There's loads of deal. dysfunctional families in the novels. Bad parenting. In the San Council, you have a set of brother and sister who slit their eyelids

so that they can cry tears of blood. Their parents have got no idea that they're even suffering. They're just so too busy, wrapped up in their own love lives. I mean, one way to connect that to some of the ideas of the philosophy we were talking about.

So we talked about this idea that it's the fat, relentless ego, which stops us from seeing other people for who they are. That's her phrase, isn't it? That's her phrase. It's such a lovely phrase that it's hard not to use it over and over again. Back with her ego, yeah.

One of the ways of which the ego stops us from seeing others is through fantasy. She thinks that we're apt to construct our own worlds and that gets in the way of our seeing others properly. And even though, as Miles pointed out, she was insistent in her interviews that her novels were a different beast from her philosophy, still something like this idea is present in The Black Prince or the Sea, see the idea that you have characters who can't see other people because they're wrapped up in their own erotic fantasies. So the way in which we construct fantasies and that stops us from

seeing other people is a really important part of the philosophy which gets played out in a number of novels, I think. Juvenile delinquency, Leo Peshkoff in the time of the angels, they're desperate, lost young men, desperate for love and direction. So she was really, really, really, really, queued up with the inner lives of characters who are not in the mainstream of the novels, the upper middle upper middle class, Oxford, people who are out there having affairs with each other. In the margins of the novels, there are characters from many different social backgrounds suffering in quite different ways. Miles was talking about these quadrilateral relationships that come in to,

many of the novels, including a severed head particularly. But these are characters who are lost in the background of society and sometimes lost in the background of Iris Murdoch's novels, and they need more attention. And I think in the 21st century, they will get more attention. And one of the things that Anne said right at the start was she was just interested in other people. She was interested in what made other people tick.

And in a way, that gives a strength to both the novels and the philosophy, because one thing she wants to do in the philosophy is pay attention to the reality of moral life. She wants us to... So she has these lovely characters which pass by in the philosophy. So she mentions at one point a concentration camp guard

who's a kindly father at home. And you think this could almost be a character in a novel, but she's using it to make a very different point. She's very interested in, she mentions mothers with large families. Real people and real people's lives are important to her in the philosophy.

And I take it that comes from this novel of having a keen eye for other people. Do you think the concentration camp guard, who's kind to his children, does she find something to admire in him? It's a really important question because in the ancient philosophical tradition, in the ancient Greek tradition, there was this idea that if you had one virtue, you had them all. So you couldn't just be a specialized creature that was brave in one situation, but actually mean in another situation. And so she talks about a concentration camp guard who's a kindly father at home as a way of saying

well we're actually not like that we're much more specialised creatures we can be virtuous in some situations but not in others but what does she really think of the value of him of his position do she says she think we have to accept that does she think

but to think that there's anything to be said for it would strike many people including me is you know no way to go It's fascinating, isn't it? She actually can't quite bring herself to say that all of this is all right. And she says, actually, I bet if you looked closer, you'd find out he's not such a good father at home. So she wants to say that there's a sense in which, even though on the surface, it looks like she's saying you can be virtuous in one bit of your life and not in another, actually she's really holding on to that ancient Greek idea that if you're a concentration camp guard, if you look a bit closer about your relationships with your family, they're going to show the same kind of failings that you show. in being the concentration camp guard. And this is a real question for her

when it comes to great art as well. How much can we separate out the greatness of the art, the kind of virtues involved in making a great piece of art from the virtues of a person? And in some way she thinks they come together that to be a good artist

requires you to be honest, to have a certain kind of integrity, to see the world properly. So she's very much... That isn't true, is it? It's not true when you look at... I mean, you just have to take... You pick up, cherry pick as many examples as you want, but let's start with Wagner.

He's the easiest. And violent is anti-Semitic and some of T.S. Ellis, the dirge, part of the wasteland that wasn't published. Violent anti-Semitism, but the wonderful artist. What did we do about that? It's a huge and important question. And her options are either to say that actually when you look closer at the artwork, you'll find there are flaws in it. Or maybe they're not quite such bad people after all.

It's a part of her view which just seems so difficult to. accept nowadays. I mean, in a way it ties up with this idea that it's love which is always enabling us to see properly. For a lot of people, you feel that that really can't be right. Love is blind. Love is what makes you not see the flaws in the people around you and your loved ones. How could love be a way of seeing properly? But she thinks, no, if you love something, that's a way of seeing it properly. And if you're virtuous... Wagner loves his wife enough to write music for her and about it. Bagner loves the Tristan is all the subjects,

then somehow, and that's full of love, and that makes it, what does it make? It's a real difficulty, isn't it? In her philosophy, what would that make him? A good man? A virtuous man? I mean, the fact is that I think a lot of his music

is wonderful. So, on the other hand, I know like almost like you do, more than I do, and most the listeners do, that he was a vile man. So where do we go from there in her philosophy? she's going to have to distinguish the different kinds of love and say well is that real love is that the kind of love which she thinks off as the one which pulls us outwards to see the world as it really is there are so many examples of people who are creating art who are actually wrapped up in fantasies and really the work which they're producing is not from love in the sense of the kind of love which breaks through the selfish ego but it's just another kind of fantasy it's another way of trying to control of the people and not recognize their existence. So I don't think she gives us any easy answer for these kind of cases.

What she does is leave us with the right kind of question to ask, which is, what should we say about the motivations for them engaging in these artworks? What should we say about the love which they were channeling when they created these artworks? Was it the pure kind of love which breaks through the selfish ego? Or was it kind of selfish fantasy, something which block them from seeing the reality of others? And it might be she's wrong about what to say about the particular cases. but that seems to me a good question to ask about these people. Anybody else want to come in?

Would have been nice to have said something about her neo-theology and her faith. Yes. Yeah. I mean, she was really worried about the decline in religious faith that accompanied Western liberalism and the discrediting of Christianity that was going on. She had two really great fears about that. The disbelief in God wouldn't quench the desire

for God. And she feared the growth of cults and extremism, extreme versions of the Islamic faith. And she thought that philosophy and politics just might be impotent against that kind of strength of belief. She tried to replace God by goodness, didn't she? She did. She replaced the idea of goodness, the platonic good. But she worried about where people would turn for moral guidance. And this comes up in the time of the angels. This is the big book about the decline of faith and the problems that might arise from it. Carol Fisher, the priest with no God there, is her first picture of real evil. So where would people find absolution and comfort?

All these ideas are played out. There's a series of priests and religious figures in the novel. And she's trying to work out, I think, a workable code of practice, a neo-theology that could replace conventional faith. faith. So she does what you've just said, replaced the idea of a personal God with Plato's God, and she calls that a transcendent real object of attention. She wanted to keep the historical figure of Christ. She liked it, Christ. She thought that we could look on Christ and the life and the teachings of Christ, but not see him in any kind of supernatural sense, but just simply see him

as a good man. Christ makes a guest appearance in one of the novels, Nans of soldiers in 1980. And he completely demyithologises himself. He appears in the kitchen, a nun, a former nun, Anne Cavage walks into the kitchen in the middle of the night and she meets Christ there. And she begs him to give her help and guidance. And he says, do not, I'm not a magician. Don't look to me. Do it all yourself. You have to do it yourself. Do good. Refrain from wrong. And I think this applies to herself as well. Towards the end, when she was writing that novel, she worried about herself being seen as some kind of cult figure,

some kind of magician who could deliver in the novel, some kind of magical cure to the ills of society. I mean, she wanted to demythologise Christianity. She said she's got no time for a God the Father figure. But the personhood of Christ is something that she wanted to hold on to. She wanted to hold on to religious art, religious music. She wanted to see Christ as the Buddha of the West. And certainly in the 1970s, she turns towards Buddhism

as a workable religious, a religious, a spiritual, for spiritual guidance, a spiritual path that doesn't need any particular, any form of godhead, but just has this notion, as Anne was saying, about, you know, the work is up to you. It's for you to do. It's for you to, and as we mentioned earlier, this talk about unselfing, that one unselfs oneself in order to move up towards goodness. She said up many ladders, man can climb. And she certainly saw various religious traditions

in the West and in the East as offering alternatives for moving towards goodness. Well, thank you all very much. of disconcerting environments that feel unnervingly real. So, if you like original horror, put your headphones on, close your eyes, and meet yourself in the dead house. Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.