Gathered here are essays by philosopher-novelist Murdoch, whose cool, clear thoughts on goodness and beauty offer sanctuary to all weary refugees from moral relativism. The selections, edited by Conradi (Humanities/Kingston Univ., England) and vibrantly introduced by George Steiner, span the years between 1950 and 1986, and include academic papers, radio talks, book reviews, lectures, a BBC interview, and one long essay, ``The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,'' issued as a book in 1977. Murdoch, a professional philosopher (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1993) and author of more than 25 novels, reflects here on the moral dimensions of literature and the contrasting ethical visions of Platonic, existential, and British analytic philosophy. The existentialists of the title represent a style of moral decision-making, best illustrated by Jean-Paul Sartre, that centers on self-conscious free will; decisions within a mystical consciousness, like Plato's, flow naturally out of moral ideas, like goodness and beauty, that have enduringly focused its attention. Murdoch appreciates Sartre for employing fiction so successfully in his philosophic demonstration of self-determination, but her sympathies lie finally with Platonists and mystics, whose attentive gaze on reality reveals transcendent value. Literature (which can embody philosophic ideas) and philosophy (which is more sensual and metaphorical, and so more literary, than it lets on) are both means of extending the same gaze. Murdoch has her blind spots. Behind her dismissive remarks on literary theory and fantasy lies the long tradition of critical reflection on philosophy and art inaugurated by the early German Romantics, Schlegel, Schelling, and Novalis—arguably the ancestors of deconstructive thought today—whose names never occur in these essays. Her case for the moral truthfulness of literature needs the challenge of this less overtly moralistic tradition in esthetics. Murdoch smooths the rocky path between ethics and art, but apart from the eternal Plato, many of the choices of representative philosophers in these aging essays—Sartre, Stuart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle, among others—now seem quaintly dated.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7139-9225-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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