The Nice and the Good Read Free

good’ or ‘that is bad’ – has no verifiable status and is therefore strictly nonsensical or, as Wittgenstein would prefer, unsayable. This unsayability is indeed the very condition of ethics. ‘This running up against the limits of language is ethics … In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter’. 3 The philosopher’s most eloquent statements are, consequently, what he does not say. ‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here [in the Tractatus ] plus all that I have not written’, Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig Ficker in 1919:
    ‘And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’. 4
    The indefinability, ineffability and mysteriousness of the Good – the fact that it lies “beyond”, is uninteresting, invisible, will-less and not there to be “experienced” – is a topic to which, in her philosophical writings, Iris Murdoch reverts again and again. It creates something of a problem for the writer, however. If you cannot speak of the Good, how are you supposed to write moral books? The problem is rather different depending on whether you look at it as a moral philosopher or a moral novelist. Basically, the philosopher won’t and the novelist can’t. Enjoined to speak truth, the moral philosopher is bound not to utter falsehood or nonsense and so can only, when it comes to the unsayable, lapse into silence. The moral novelist, however, is not so enjoined. On the contrary, she is busy saying the unsayable. She has made her business that special realm of discourse in which propositions are neither true nor false because they are fiction. This is a most dangerous realm, as Plato warned, for, liberated from strict truth-content, words can do anything you like. The writer is free – as free to create the bad as the good, the false as the true. As Murdoch wrote in her long essay on Plato’s aesthetics, ‘we are able meaningfully and plausibly to say what is not the case: to fantasise, speculate, tell lies, and write stories … for truth to exist falsehood must be able to exist too’ ( The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists , 1976). As far as philosophy is concerned, all art is morally compromised and fiction in particular suffers an irredeemable taint.
    As a philosopher Murdoch is enough of a puritan and a Platonist to share this view. But as a novelist she doesn’t hold back. She is down there in the world with her characters – the unsaintly ones, that is – right in the thick of it, saying the unsayable, getting her hands dirty, and getting fascinatedly caught up in the web of words, irresistibly intrigued, charmed – tempted is perhaps the word – by all that is most false. Moreover, she shares her medium with her characters who are busy doing exactly what she is doing – dreaming up plots, setting things in motion, manipulating others, acting parts, making things happen, ordering people around. In the embroiled and complicated histories of those characters who use language and the structures of art for their own worthy or unworthy ends, the novelist looks critically, quizzically at her own procedures. Her vision of the corrupting power of words reflects necessarilyupon her own practice. There’s a sense in which she is no better than her characters, no closer than they are to speaking or realising the Good. She is on a level with them – the level of ego, art, and lies which makes for so busy, justified, sentimental, just plain interesting a world. Down there in the human muddle of compromise and untruths she is able equally to create good and