The Sovereignty of Good Quotes

“It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. 'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. Kant's conclusive exposure of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, his analysis of the limitations of speculative reason, together with his eloquent portrayal of the dgnity of rational man, has had results which might possibly dismay him. How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundelgung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d'etre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure. He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer. It is a kind of goodness by proxy. Most of all it exhibits to us the connection, in human beings, of clear realistic vision with compassion. The realism of a great artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“I can decide what to say but not what the words mean which I have said. I can decide what to do but I am not master of the significance of my act.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people - inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families - but these cases are also the least illuminating.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“The bad self is prepared to suffer but not to obey until the two selves are friends and obedience has become reasonably easy or at least amusing. In reality the good self is very small indeed, and most of what appears good is not. The truly good is not a friendly tyrant to the bad, it is its deadly foe. Even suffering can play a demonic role here, and the ideas of guilt and punishment can be the most subtle tool of the ingenious self. The idea of suffering confuses the mind and in certain contexts (the context of ‘sincere self-examination’ for instance) can masquerade as a purification.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“The notion that 'it all somehow must make sense', or 'there is a best decision here', preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Voor zowel het collectieve als het individuele heil van de mensheid is de kunst ongetwijfeld belangrijker dan de filosofie, en de literatuur is het belangrijkst van al.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“It is frequently difficult in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one's own temperament, against one's own personal fears. (It is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Self is as hard to see justly as other things, and when clear vision has been achieved, self is a correspondingly smaller and less interesting object.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“There are false suns, easier to gaze upon and far more comforting than the true one.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Philosophy of mind is the background to moral philosophy; and insofar as modern ethics tends to constitute a sort of Newspeak which makes certain values non-expressible, the reasons for this are to be sought in current philosophy of mind and in the fascinating power of a certain picture of the soul. One suspects that philosophy of mind has not in fact been performing the task … of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgement in the guise of a theory of human nature.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Words may mislead us (...) since words are often stable while concepts alter (...)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Wittgenstein has created a void into which neo-Kantianism, existentialism, utilitarianism have made haste to enter.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Love is the general name of the quality of attachment, and it is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors. But when it is even partially refined, it is the energy and passion of the soul in its search for good, the force that joins us to good, and joins us to the world through good. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious, avaricious tentacles of the self.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Philosophers merely do explicitly and systematically, and often with art, what the ordinary person does by instinct.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good