Review by Booklist Review
In his foreword to the first-ever collection of Murdoch's essays, George Steiner writes that for Murdoch, "philosophy and literature have been strictly inseparable." So true, and attributable, in part, to Murdoch's temperament and intellect, but also to the fact that both fiction and philosophy are the fruits of clear and inspired thinking and writing. Murdoch explores this theme in essays titled "Thinking and Language" and "Against Dryness," and as an integral element in many of her authoritative and spine-straightening ruminations on the connections between aesthetics and morality. A cosmopolitan thinker as fluent in poetry as in ethics, Murdoch considers the writings of Plato, Kant, Hume, Sartre, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil with assiduous concentration. Editor Peter Conradi has taken pains to organize Murdoch's essays, an interview, two radio broadcasts, plays, lectures, and reviews to "illustrate her particular philosophical journey," and there is, indeed, a palpable progression of thought as Murdoch's skepticism toward existentialism leads her to seek higher moral ground in the contemplation of mysticism and the essential mystery of love. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dame Iris Murdoch not only wrote many celebrated novels like Under the Net and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, she also taught philosophy for many years at Oxford University, where she is now professor emerita. The present book, intelligently organized and presented by editor Conradi, is a selection of Murdoch's occasional essays, book reviews, speeches, transcribed interviews and creative Platonic "dialogues." These are grouped into subjects like "Encountering Existentialism" (Murdoch was an early explicator of Sartre's existentialism to the British public), "Towards a Practical Mysticism" and "Re-Reading Plato." Murdoch was drawn to Plato via the tormented French philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote on the Greek philosopher. As in her novels, Murdoch's philosophical musing revels in disturbing implications as the basis for interest and achievement in art. She states, "Plato was notoriously hostile to art.... [T]he paradox is that Plato's work is great art in a sense which he does not theoretically recognise." A number of these essays read like speeches in some ideally intelligent parliament, in which the author expects to be interrupted by cries of "Hear, Hear!" For example, she asserts that T.S. Eliot did not like prose "except when it is used for didactic purposes," or that George Eliot, like Tolstoy, "displays that godlike capacity for so respecting and loving her characters as to make them exist as free and separate beings." Not a powerful original philosopher like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, Murdoch is nevertheless a critic with considerable rhetorical punch. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Most readers think of Murdoch first as a novelist, but as this excellent anthology makes clear, she is an outstanding philosopher as well. After World War II, she established herself as an authority on existentialism, though she did not herself accept this doctrine, viewing it as stressing human autonomy to an undue degree. She locates a similar failing in much contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Instead, she thinks of values as objective: human beings contemplate them rather than create them. Her philosophy culminates in a nontheistic mysticism bearing strong affinities to Plato. The best introduction available to an important and unusual thinker; for all academic and most public libraries.David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Gathered here are essays by philosopher-novelist Murdoch, whose cool, clear thoughts on goodness and beauty offer sanctuary to all weary refugees from moral relativism. The selections, edited by Conradi (Humanities/Kingston Univ., England) and vibrantly introduced by George Steiner, span the years between 1950 and 1986, and include academic papers, radio talks, book reviews, lectures, a BBC interview, and one long essay, ""The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,"" issued as a book in 1977. Murdoch, a professional philosopher (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1993) and author of more than 25 novels, reflects here on the moral dimensions of literature and the contrasting ethical visions of Platonic, existential, and British analytic philosophy. The existentialists of the title represent a style of moral decision-making, best illustrated by Jean-Paul Sartre, that centers on self-conscious free will; decisions within a mystical consciousness, like Plato's, flow naturally out of moral ideas, like goodness and beauty, that have enduringly focused its attention. Murdoch appreciates Sartre for employing fiction so successfully in his philosophic demonstration of self-determination, but her sympathies lie finally with Platonists and mystics, whose attentive gaze on reality reveals transcendent value. Literature (which can embody philosophic ideas) and philosophy (which is more sensual and metaphorical, and so more literary, than it lets on) are both means of extending the same gaze. Murdoch has her blind spots. Behind her dismissive remarks on literary theory and fantasy lies the long tradition of critical reflection on philosophy and art inaugurated by the early German Romantics, Schlegel, Schelling, and Novalis--arguably the ancestors of deconstructive thought today--whose names never occur in these essays. Her case for the moral truthfulness of literature needs the challenge of this less overtly moralistic tradition in esthetics. Murdoch smooths the rocky path between ethics and art, but apart from the eternal Plato, many of the choices of representative philosophers in these aging essays--Same, Smart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle, among others--now seem quaintly dated. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
