Tag: morality

Iris Murduch, “The Sublime and the Good”

From the point of view of this theory we can offer a pocket history of literature, establishing an order of merit. This pocket history
works through the idea of freedom as this idea has been treated at
different times. The history of the treatment of freedom falls into
five phases. These phases can be taken as roughly chronological, and  can also be used independently of chronology. They are as follows.
(1) Tragic freedom. This is the concept of freedom which I have
related to the concept of love: freedom as an exercise of the imagination in an unreconciled conflict of dissimilar beings. It belongs
especially to, was perhaps invented by, the Greeks. The literary
form is tragic drama. (2) Mediaeval freedom. Here the individual
is seen as a creature within a partly described hierarchy of theological reality. The literary forms are religious tales, allegories, morality
plays. (3) Kantian freedom. This belongs to the Enlightenment. The
individual is seen as a non-historical rational being moving towards
complete agreement with other rational beings. The literary forms
are rationalistic tales and allegories and novels of ideas. (4) Hegelian
freedom. This belongs mainly to the nineteenth century. The individual is now thought of as a part of a total historical society and
takes his importance from his role in that society. The literary form
is the true novel (Balzac, George Eliot, Dickens). (5) Romantic
freedom. This belongs mainly to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it has its roots earlier. The individual is seen as solitary and as having importance in and by himself. Both Hegelian and
Romantic freedom are of course developments of Kantian freedom.
Hegel makes the Kingdom of Ends into a historical society; while
the Romantic concludes from the unhistorical emptiness of Kant’s
other rational beings that in fact one may as well assume that one is
alone. (This is one line of thought leading to existentialism. Angst
is the modern version of Achtung; we now fear, not the law itself,
but its absence). The literary form is the neurotic modern novel.
This pocket history is of course only a toy, but it does I think
suggest some things which are true. It does not work altogether
chronologically for obvious reasons, since Shakespeare was not a
Greek. We may also note, and this perhaps is one of its perceptions,
that this history seems to condemn the novel to fall below the level
of tragedy. The novel fails to be tragic because, in almost every
case, it succumbs to one of the two great enemies of Love, convention and neurosis. The nineteenth century novel succumbed to convention, the modern novel succumbs to neurosis. The nineteenth
century novel is better than the twentieth century novel because
convention is the less deadly of the two; and given a society which
is in a dramatic phase of its being the mere exploration of that society will take you very far indeed. It will not however take you all
the way. We can understand Tolstoy when he says, “strip the best novels of our time of their details and what will remain?” Yet Tolstoy himself also proves that the novel can be tragic, it can rise to
that level. A recent novel which also proves it, though it is well be
low Tolstoy’s achievement, is Dr. Zhivago. In the case of Tolstoy
and Pasternak, it is, I think, not difficult to see that the quality of
their greatness should be called compassion, love: the non-violent
apprehension of difference. And with what exhilaration do we experience the absence of self in the work of Shakespeare. That is the true sublime.

“Let me now briefly and dogmatically state what I take to be, in opposition to Kant’s view, the true view of the matter. Art and morals are, with certain provisos which I shall mention in a moment, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realisation of our suprasensible destiny is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable particularity; and most particular and individual of all natural things is the mind of man. That is incidentally why tragedy is the highest art, because it is most intensely concerned with the most individual thing. Here is the true sense of that exhilaration of freedom which attends art and which has its more rarely achieved counterparts in morals. It is the apprehension of something else, something particular, as existing outside us. The enemies of art and morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual because of Hegel’s totality, because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. This is what Shelley meant when he said that egotism was the great enemy of poetry. This is so whether we are writing it or reading it. The exercise of overcoming one’s self, the expulsion of fantasy and convention, which attends for instance the reading  of King Lear is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly
which we hardly ever do, painful. It is very like Achtung. Kant was
marvellously near the mark. But he thought of freedom as the aspiration to a universal order consisting of a pre-fabricated harmony.
It was not a tragic freedom. The tragic freedom implied by love is
this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine
the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which
we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled.
We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the
confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this difference.”

—from “The Sublime and the Good” by Iris Murdoch