Just a note this morning:
I have been reading the excellent novels of Iris Murdoch. They are shot through with her post-God attempt to find a moral ideal, a conception of the Good that will be tenable in the contemporary world. The themes? Well, love, sex, God and death of course! What else is worth talking about? It reminds me that the best moral thinking these days is done by novelists. The narrative form is such an advantage.
I have read thus far:
The Bell
Bruno's Dream
A Severed Head (read it ages ago)
The Time of the Angels
and I am reading
The Black Prince.
Next: Henry and Cato
and then -
The Sea, The Sea.
The Perfect You?
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Once we have an idea of what reality is, could be or will be, there are
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2 comments:
And she can be very funny: in A Severed Head and The Black Prince, for example.
Iris also wrote a philosphical tome, from memory, before she succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. The novel does give a canvas for moral exploration; but I wonder at the results. Do novels represent experiments where different moral responses can be tested? Or do they hold up options in a formally a-moral manner? Is American Psycho a practical textbook?
I'm not really a novel reader, myself (despite the encouragment to do so at a Creation Science seminar in Brisbane in 1976: Life Literature and World View), but the little I have read typically comes up to a moral epistemological wall formed by the implicit materialism that rides on axiomatic acceptance of evolutionary theory. The connundrum is that, all said and done, all bets are off in the soup of random material interaction, where there is no final significance or moral gradation to anything. Yet, no sane person lives as thought life can be so characterised.
Theistic evolution fails to straddle the chasm because it attempts to make an unnatural graft of contrary ontological frameworks: one where God is a basic belief, and the other where not-God is a basic belief.
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