Reading Journal 2024: The Sovereignty of Good

Reading Journal 2024: The Sovereignty of Good
Author: Iris Murdoch

A fascinating little book, which is really more a collection of essays brought together to form a cohesive, and often persuasive argument against modern philosophy (read: Kant, existentialism, empiricists) and for a reclamation of Platonic ideals. I don’t agree with all of it, and I do find those Platonic ideas to be problematic in their own right, but what’s most interesting about the philosophical postion Murdoch is arguing for is noting the emptiness of the modern experiment. It cries out for a kind of re-enchanting of our philopshical aims, something he finds in history.

The critique begins with a dismantling of the cult of the self. Philosophy, in its modern context and largely due to the existential problem it creates, has found itself forced to reposition an unattainable higher virtue using concrete terms. We might call this science. We might call this humanism. We might call this progress. We might call this liberty or freedoms or human rights or globalism or nationalism. Whatever it is, such virtues function as the highest order largely detached from our ability to reason either from it or towards it. The end result of any reasoned attempt to claim that an empirical process is able and content to define and locate goodness on it’s own and within the observable functions of a society or natural order has been a sharp detachment, however invisible and out of sight it sometimes tends to be, from the very thing that is required for goodness to be sovereign.

What Murdoch argues for is an essential differentiating between beauty and goodness. Beauty is that which we can observe and experience as a shadow, while goodness is the higher virtue that can only be seen dimly. To say that goodness can never truly be grasped or seen or reached or defined might seem antithetical to the modern approach, but it is in fact the very thing that allows us to locate it within the empirical process. What we observe then in beauty (and its counter, the ugly) is freed from having to bear the weight of explaining it’s own existence, and it is this act of seeing that binds us necessarily to knowledge as an intrinsically external reality. It exists, even though we cannot see it, and we can know it exists because of its relationship to a functional reality that can be observed.

The sovereignty of the good seems to push us to want to name the good. There is soenthing in our human nature that seems to drive us in this direction. But this is precisely where the interchange becomes necessary and important between the sovereign and the functional realities that guide our existence. To name the good is to make the functional sovereign, when it is in fact not. Thus goodness must remain an unattainable and unexplainable mystery. Although not a mystery in the sense of being unknowable, but a mystery in the sense of being sovereign. A mystery that has the explanatory power to justify and define and explain things like morality precisely because it is not morality and contains the power to explain its own existence.

Here I would note a divergence between Murdoch and myself. One of the places Murdoch ultimately ends his argument is in making the claim that engaging the sovereignty of the good means recognizing and accepting our functional reality. This means, somewhat ironically, acceptance of the reality that the self does not exist, and that meaning does not exist, and that the humble man knows that he is in fact nothing and that virtue is in fact pointless. It is only by accepting these things that we can become virtuous or discover and see goodness and discover the self. Here in lies the great conundrum of reasoned existence. In some sense I recognize this sort of honest assessment of reality as a strength of his argument. It is the one of the great shortcomings of much modern philosophy that it has lost sight of this essential reasoned conclusion, thus demonstrating much of modern empiricism to be operating on a fallacy, even if through a willful ignorance. At the same time though, the modern experiment does reveal an important point about this philopshical postion all the same- awareness of the truthfulness of this kind of futility, nihilism and meaninglessness, even if the philopshical exercise desires to reclaim existence, meaning and purpose from its grip, needs and requires allegiance to our illusions in order to work. We have to remain at least willfully ignorant, even if the will is equally an illusion, in order to accept goodness as sovereign over our lives. And that’s a precarious postion for philosophy to find itself in.

There is another way though, which is perhaps sought after by those looking back at the philosophers who did not seprate the philopshical aims from theological ones. Its not difficult to see the religious language of Murdoch’s argumentation. We see Truth or goodness only partly or dimly, as we see God. Goodness must be able to justify it’s own existence, as would god. We see goodness in the functional, as we see god. We seek goodness as we seek God apart from our own workings. Murdoch acknowledges as much, but sees religion as an expression or outworking of his philosophical position, not as its source. It is simply the natural outcome of not naming the good in the modern sense. It is simply langauge that would translate to good/goodness rather than god/godliness. I’m not convinced that this works, however. I don’t think the argument in this book is able to accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to afford goodness a transcendent quality. Goodness is held captive to the necessary recontextualization that effectively makes it a moving target. Goodness becomes dependent on something else to explain its existence. In some sense the concept of god operates in this way as well, but the difference is that recontextualization doesn’t redefine god, rather god is a Truth that, by its nature, must always be contextualized and re-contextualized. This is two ways of seeing dimly, seeing partially, of seeing the shadows of the true thing.

A compelling read in any case. Lots to think about here and lots to revisit and wrestle with. And most importantly, I think it is well argued and succinct and compact as a philopshical treaties.