I really wanted to like this book. In the "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" lecture series, John Vervaeke mentions this as one of his must-read books. I was all primed to become a modern Platonist (but a hip, ass-kicking, novel writing Platonist).

However, three months after reading, I don't remember a blessed thing from the book. It's quite frustrating actually.

Well, actually, it's coming to me a little bit now. There was something about us not just choosing from a few menu items in the head, as the existentialists might claim, but having our choices oriented by certain conditions.

To put it in another way, we're not like Robo Cops looking at a few command prompts in our decision visor.

But the truth is that most of the book is philosophical writing that leaves me cold. I'm sure it might convince someone, as there is a reader for every book, I suppose. Maybe I just wasn't the right audience for this particular work.

Religion and God have long offered a very powerful and uncomplicated framework of morality that is not only practical but also highly satisfying.

However, as society has gradually distanced itself from religion, the task of constructing a system of moral values that we can truly be content with has proven to be surprisingly difficult.

Modern philosophy endeavors to substitute this by focusing on the self and the "free will." But this approach often leads to an individualistic, relativistic, and ultimately empty concept of the "good."

Iris Murdoch, on the other hand, presents a captivating alternative. She offers an intuitive and natural starting point for building morality for the non-believer.

The book in question is structured like a sandwich, consisting of three essays. It's important to note that the crucial content lies within the "meat" of the sandwich. While the "bread" is delicious, those who are cautious about consuming extra calories can feel at ease skipping it.

Murdoch's work provides a refreshing perspective on morality in a world that is increasingly moving away from traditional religious frameworks.

Her ideas offer hope for those seeking a meaningful and fulfilling moral compass in a modern, secular society.

Overall, her work is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about morality and ethics.

When Iris Murdoch published The Sovereignty of Good, her stance on moral philosophy had undergone a significant transformation. She no longer held the same beliefs that had prevailed since the times of Kant and Hegel. The common-sense view of what she termed “the substantial self” had been undermined by beliefs about reason and history. Our behavior, in its various aspects such as the psychological, social, and religious, was no longer discussed as a unified whole. Instead, these aspects were compartmentalized, made suitable for logical or scientific inquiry, and then assigned to new intellectual disciplines like psychology, theology, sociology, and economics.

In the decades following English philosophy’s “linguistic turn,” fundamental ideas such as goodness, virtue, sin, and evil were cast aside. Morality was gradually divested of its metaphysical pretensions, and systems of ethics were devised to replace it. Murdoch found this outcome to be a dead end, which led her to leave the academy after publishing The Sovereignty of Good and spend the next few decades writing novels.

This book consists of three essays written over a decade while Murdoch was still a tutor at Oxford University. The first essay, The Idea of Perfection (TIoP), is a direct response to a book by her colleague Stuart Hampshire. As a result, it is less accessible than the other two essays, On God and Good (OGaG) and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (TSoG), where she begins to develop her own ideas.

The Sovereignty of Good commences in the middle of things. With the old religious concepts removed, philosophy was tasked with developing a new, secular vocabulary of morality. However, this was on uncertain ground. Philosophers could no longer make assumptions about social roles or psychological states of mind. Nor could they rely on our culturally-bound virtues and vices. Only the will remained as the supreme moral directive.

Philosophers regarded the will as the part of us that strives towards specific ends in explicit moments of choice. They sought the essence of morality in these “outward movements,” such as actions, decisions, obligations, and other publicly observable events. A good person, they believed, tames his will through the application of reason and directs it towards good actions or outcomes. Moral behavior was seen as following from a rational will, much like a conclusion is logically implied from its premises.

However, Murdoch argues that these philosophers were mistaken. The will cannot simply break free from its physical limitations. What we consistently think and feel will, over time, shape our behavior. If we always choose the path of least resistance, we will never develop an understanding of how our actions impact others or the patience for anything that requires more effort than a momentary choice. And when we dwell on the wrongs done to us or fixate on the small hypocrisies of others, we are naturally inclined to focus on their most insignificant offenses and lash out at them for our own satisfaction.

But if we pay attention to the real existence of other people and their needs, then, often without realizing how, we become capable of great acts of love or bravery. Outward movement morality failed to account for the connection between the will and action and did not consider how one’s psychological makeup might influence behavior. Murdoch, inspired by Freud, fills this gap with her concept of the “substantial self.” She believes it is more accurate to view ourselves as an “egocentric” system of “quasi-mechanical energy.” All the contingencies of our lives, the “residue” of our “personal history,” accumulate in the psyche, a complex mixture of jealousies, guilts, joys, compulsions, angers, and satisfactions. It is this volatile combination that, in the moment of decision, often influences our actions.

The Oxonians rejected the psyche, finding it too vague and nebulous to be philosophically rigorous. We cannot dissect and examine our emotions like a mechanical clock. And emotions often lead us astray, causing us to do things that are wrong. For example, we may instinctively be cruel to those we consider unworthy losers (such as in bullying), or when angry, we may say or do things that hurt others far more than the cause of our anger warrants.

Nevertheless, the psyche still affects our moral behavior. Murdoch acknowledges that choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways that are often unclear and depend on the state of the psyche between moments of choice. We have to accept this fact. It is not as if she is asking us to choose feelings over reason. Both are important. The will and the psyche must both embrace the idea of goodness in their own way, and philosophy can help by reconciling the two.

Some readers may be skeptical when they see Freud’s name mentioned, as his theories of the mind have been widely criticized. However, it is better to view Murdoch’s discussion of the psyche as a broad-brush portrayal. She is not providing a literal explanation of how the brain functions but rather suggesting a way of framing the situation to help us gain insight in any moral debate. This becomes clearer when considering Murdoch’s ideas on metaphor.

Metaphor is essential to morality because our moral vocabulary is highly idiosyncratic. It is not presented to us in a precise scientific language. We develop and discover it through highly personal observations of broadly manifested concepts such as truth, justice, greed, and so on. We need metaphor to talk about these things, and we do so frequently without even realizing it. For example, we describe anger as “hot” and a kind-hearted person as “warm.” We “boil over” with rage, while turning our backs on a friend in need is “acting cold.” While we could perhaps describe the same range of cowardices and courtesies in more objective language, metaphor already conveys a great deal in a few words.

During the linguistic turn, some philosophers believed we could eliminate metaphor entirely. Much of the philosophical progress in the 20th century was of this nature, stripping away the extinct idioms that had become ingrained in our language. However, purging all the historically and religiously charged words did not free us from all unjustified beliefs. It merely led us to a new set of axioms that were even more misleading due to their proclaimed neutrality. Murdoch argues that philosophers must embrace metaphor. They must clarify, and perhaps discard, the existing metaphors and come up with new ones to help us understand what it means to be a good person.

The metaphors we choose often reflect the时代 in which we live. A generation of Oxonians who had fought in the trenches carried the imagery of the machine-gun and the howitzer into their preferred metaphors of movement and action. Moral behavior was seen as a dynamic sortie by a courageous will into a dangerously unstable vortex. Good was the one who, having deduced the rational ends of destiny, deigned to inscribe them into our world.

Murdoch’s metaphors are almost the opposite. Instead of movement and action, she invites us to see and contemplate. The only motivation we need to be moral is reality itself. Goodness is the light in which reality is perceived. Once we have personally experienced virtue, however imperfectly, we are drawn to imitate or attain it. Goodness is not just a word we attach to events after the fact. It is a real, albeit somewhat ethereal, quality that pervades the world around us.

Seeing things as they truly are is not always easy. When we open our eyes, we often see what we want to see rather than what is actually there. Our minds are constantly active, creating an anxious, self-occupied, and often falsifying veil that partially obscures the world. For example, when we meet a new person, we know we shouldn’t judge them by their appearance, but we do so anyway. Without even thinking, our ego constructs an image of that person that colors our subsequent interactions. Our ego veils the true nature of the other person, and this is true of everything.

To penetrate this veil, we must focus on the world behind it, an idea Murdoch adapts from Simone Weil. Man is a unified being who sees and desires in accordance with what he sees and has some degree of control over the direction and focus of his vision. With each conscious decision in his waking hours, he can gradually invest some of his energies into understanding reality. He might redirect his thoughts, change his habits, make new resolutions, or engage in certain activities.

Some activities are worthy because they help us to increasingly understand reality. Examples include scientific research, the refinement of a craft, the learning of a language, caring for a child or an elderly person, or the appreciation of nature or art. In the sincere pursuit of these things, we relinquish our mastery over the world to observe it more closely. Where we might once have walked through a forest without being able to distinguish the sounds around us, we slowly begin to hear the birds, identify them by their songs, and understand the meaning of each call. We are led away from ourselves towards qualities and standards that exist independently of us in things that our ego cannot “take over, swallow up, deny, or make unreal.”

Let’s focus on nature or art. When we experience beauty in any form, we briefly witness something that is indestructible and incorruptible, yet coheres in a perishable medium. This reminds me of Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can live and eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Although Shakespeare’s poem is just words on a page (or pixels on a screen), and a painting is just oil and pigment on canvas, and our lover may already have a few extra pounds and the mother’s caring eyes may be tired, experiencing their beauty is to witness the resounding goodness shining through them. When this happens, our ordinary perception of the world is disrupted. The boundaries of the psyche blur and are absorbed by something much greater than itself. Murdoch describes this when she writes about the kestrel: “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.”

Murdoch concludes the last essay with some reflections on goodness, through a discussion of Plato. In Book VI of The Republic, Socrates admits to Glaucon that he cannot define goodness. The best he can do is describe it by comparing it to the sun. Although we cannot look directly at the sun, we can see things in its light and, in turn, see the sun’s reflection in them.

This is all frustratingly vague. What is goodness? The answer is rather simple. Goodness is when you hide Jews from the Nazis. Goodness is when a bird chirps in the sunshine. Goodness is when you play with a baby. Goodness is when you spend time with your friend to cheer him up. Goodness is when you return the shopping trolley to its proper place. Philosophy, as Murdoch says, is often about finding the right context in which to state the obvious.

Murdoch does, in a somewhat offhand manner, offer a kind of philosopher’s definition when she writes: “The background to morals is properly some sort of mysticism, if by this is meant a non-dogmatic essentially un-formulated faith in the reality of the Good, occasionally connected with experience.” Perhaps there is nothing we can say about what is essentially good. We just have to experience it by paying attention to reality. Morality is not a fact to be learned by rote. It is an intrinsically personal thing that each person must internalize for themselves.

This philosophical position can be difficult to defend. By admitting that goodness will always elude us, we are limiting what we can say about it. Granted, I find Murdoch’s writing a bit too subtle. Her arguments sometimes delve too deeply into the history of philosophy and rely too much on her own fluency. While her ideas are substantial, they form a complex and intricate mass that tends to obscure the relatively simple points she is making. This abstract approach to discussing goodness was no doubt intended for her peers at Oxford, but those of us at Goodreads might have preferred some more concrete examples. I would say: more kestrels, less Kant. Perhaps this is why Murdoch ultimately turned to writing fiction.

However many words are written about it, goodness is something we simply have to experience. It is inherently personal and infinitely diverse, connected as it is with “the unsystematic and inexhaustible variety of the world.” Learning to recognize it is a unique and incremental process that we never fully complete. But once we acknowledge goodness as a distant ideal, we can begin the journey. Recognizing its light as it shines throughout reality, we start to look at things with a deeper appreciation for what they are, moving towards that “distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue.”

This book ended up in a rather strange position for me.

Perhaps the subtleties escaped my understanding, or maybe it is overly influenced by the era in which it was written.

Whatever the case may be, I found its core ideas to be so self-evident that I had difficulty even perceiving them.

The existentialist/behaviorist structure that she spends much of the three essays arguing against seems to me to be a stance that is nearly extinct, and was little more than a phantom of analytical philosophy.

That being moral is a skill that one sharpens throughout life and is a journey without a final destination seems, well, almost redundant to argue.

Her attempt to create an understanding of the Good through analogy to Beauty also fell a bit short for me.

Even though I can easily agree, I think it fails to bring us closer to an 'intellectual' understanding on one hand and to advance our moral capabilities on the other.

It ultimately amounts to a hand-wave, simply showing that "well - you know the good when you see it".

Again, I am in agreement with her at every step, but I just feel like anyone who has spent 20 minutes thinking about it would also do so.

The one idea that I found to be developed in an interesting way was about realism being firmly tied to the good.

It is not the most elaborate discussion, but it is a decent tool for "checking oneself" and questioning how much fantasy is clouding one's moral judgment.

This has of course been taken much further by the post-structuralists, but I liked the particular perspective of the 'Self's ability to assess its attunement with reality through its capacity to act/contemplate the Good.

It is an attempt to find a place to firmly ground an actual access to the real, rather than allowing it to be lost in interpretation and power.

Maybe that idea in itself deserves more respect than the book as a whole, but I found it to be almost accidental (fully aware that it is not) in this strange meandering of eloquent truisms.