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ANTONACCIO, MARIA and WILLIAM SCHWEIKER, eds. Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 266 pps. $ 48.00.
Those accustomed to thinking of Iris Murdoch's work in philosophy as ancillary to her fiction may be stimulated by a collection of sophisticated essays that reverses this priority. Focusing on her capacious Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals published in 1992, these essays explore her contribution to moral philosophy (remarkable at a time when metaphysics is in disrepute and when the agenda for ethics has been firmly set by the tradition of analytic philosophy extending from Kant and the utilitarians to John Rawls and R. M. Hare), her Platonism (especially as it connects her philosophy and her fiction), and her theology (in particular her substitution of a Platonic "Good" for a Christian "God"). Antonaccio and Schweiker's editorial introduction establishes Murdoch's serious standing in the world of philosophy, sometimes paying her ideas the compliment of careful and respectful disagreement.
The foremost praise she receives, from Charles Taylor and others, is for having extended the discourse of moral philosophy beyond "questions of what we ought to do" to include "questions of what it is good to be" (p. 3), beyond questions concerning obligations to include the quality of consciousness itself. But the editors note that, although she disputes the exaltation of individual freedom and will in Kant and the existentialists, she incorporates their idea that the individual is a "unique and unified center of value and significance" (p. xii). That is, Murdoch accepts the importance of responsibility while questioning the importance of choice. She pictures us not as isolate choosing beings but as held in a large framework of impersonal forces and magnetically drawn, despite habitual lapses into illusion and vanity, toward involuntary acknowledgment of the Good. In short she does not, like the analytic philosophers, separate fact from value or ethics from metaphysics, believing that morality inheres in our very perception of the world.
Several contributors remark on the odd fact that a modern moral philosopher finds Plato so enabling. As they imply, Murdoch does so by psychologizing him, by linking Plato to Freud in two important respects: first, both Plato and Freud take eros (or libido) to be the prime...