The Wages of Intellectuality … and the Fictional Wagers of Iris Murdoch

Abstract

Plato, Iris Murdoch writes in her carefully learnéd and sympathetic study of his moralistic aesthetic (The Fire and the Sun, 1977), presented the ‘most uncompromising declaration ever made by a major philosopher of the equality of the sexes. Women can even do philosophy.’ And what is it they will philosophise about? Almost everything, of course, but not least about the inadequacies of men. Murdoch’s novels do, and often do-in, philosophical claims, but almost obsessively they do, and do-in, self-deluded and self-destructive intellectual males. While quite a variety of women hardly escape the author’s contemptuous wit, there seems to be an insistent cerebral delight in catching out her male protagonists — most often English upper-middle class intellectual men with the sexual and moral perplexities of middle-age — in their comic-horrific muddles. ‘Muddlers’ (a favored term of hers) may be Murdoch’s great specialty. Yet she is in several senses a ‘philosophical’ novelist who seeks to go beyond muddle, not only in disciplined intellectual-artistic self-consciousness but in an affirmative ancient concern for the True, the Good and the Beautiful.

The original felix culpa is thought itself.

(Henry and Cato)