The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Existentialists and Mystics: Writing on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch
Thomas Hove

Iris Murdoch. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter Conradi. Penguin, 1998. 546 pp. $37.95.

This well-chosen collection of essays, reviews, and two brilliantly realized Platonic dialogues serves as forceful testimony to Iris Murdoch’s preeminence as a moral philosopher—a role which, arguably, she fills even better than that of novelist. In fact, Murdoch’s work continues to exert a strong influence on many important figures in moral philosophy, including Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams—all of who, like Murdoch, assign literature a central role in discussions of ethics. The pieces in this collection fall into the following groupings: papers taking stock of twentieth-century developments in analytic moral philosophy; critical assessments of the legacies of romanticism, existentialism, and Marxism; essays on the nature and role of the sublime in philosophy, literature, and religion; and finally, a series of longer pieces, previously collected under the titles The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (1971), The Fire and the Sun (1977), and Acastos (1986), which deal with Plato’s fundamental contributions to Western aesthetic and moral theory. In addition to Plato, whose importance in her work cannot be underestimated, Murdoch focuses repeatedly on Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kant, Sartre, and a handful of Anglo-American linguistic philosophers. She is at her best when she addresses the accomplishments and failures of modern philosophical and political movements, particularly the uneasy relations between existentialist phenomenology and socialist political thought. Even though Murdoch herself eschews the title of critic and even though her writing is less polemically charged than most recent European and American literary criticism, these essays and dialogues illuminate much more about the aesthetic, philosophical, and, yes, political significance of literature than does most of the academic criticism written in the last three decades. At its best, her critical work is worthy to stand beside Henry James’s prefaces. But their subject matter goes well beyond James’s sometimes hermetic focus on the creative process. [Thomas Hove]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Existentialists and Mystics: Writing on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch Thomas Hove Iris Murdoch. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter Conradi. Penguin, 1998. 546 pp. $37.95. This well-chosen collection of essays, reviews, and two brilliantly realized Platonic dialogues serves as forceful testimony to Iris Murdoch’s preeminence as a moral philosopher—a role which, arguably, she fills even better than that of novelist. In fact, Murdoch’s work continues to exert a strong influence on many important figures in moral philosophy, including Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams—all of who, like Murdoch, assign literature a central role in discussions of ethics. The pieces in this collection fall into the following groupings: papers taking stock of twentieth-century developments in analytic moral philosophy; critical assessments of the legacies of romanticism, existentialism, and Marxism; essays on the nature and role of the sublime in philosophy, literature, and religion; and finally, a series of longer pieces, previously collected under the titles The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (1971), The Fire and the Sun (1977), and Acastos (1986), which deal with Plato’s fundamental contributions to Western aesthetic and moral theory. In addition to Plato, whose importance in her work cannot be underestimated, Murdoch focuses repeatedly on Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kant, Sartre, and a handful of Anglo-American linguistic philosophers. She is at her best when she addresses the accomplishments and failures of modern philosophical and political movements, particularly the uneasy relations between existentialist phenomenology and socialist political thought. Even though Murdoch herself eschews the title of critic and even though her writing is less polemically charged than most recent European and American literary criticism, these essays and dialogues illuminate much more about the aesthetic, philosophical, and, yes, political significance of literature than does most of the academic criticism written in the last three decades. At its best, her critical work is worthy to stand beside Henry James’s prefaces. But their subject matter goes well beyond James’s sometimes hermetic focus on the creative process. [Thomas Hove]

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