A Terribly Serious Adventure by Nikhil Krishnan

Author:Nikhil Krishnan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Swimming

Exposing the mistakes of cocky young Englishmen could hardly be the stuff of an entire philosophy. Those errors could be put down to the faults of the individuals concerned, or of their youth, or the malformations of the Oxford syllabus. The sensible-to-a-fault manner of Foot’s writings rather tended to encourage this: the methods were fine – they were just being misapplied. In Anscombe, rather more seemed to be at stake than in some parish council squabble, but it was too easy to see her thunderous cadences as merely churchy, just what the cocky young men expected from a Catholic who didn’t see that the whole thing was nonsense, really. If one didn’t believe in hell, how easy it was to think Anscombe had nothing to tell one.

Iris Murdoch, who returned to Oxford in 1948 a fellow of St Anne’s College, made disengagement harder. Like George Eliot before her, she unsettled the usual triad of ‘God, immortality, duty’. As Eliot had famously put it, ‘how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third’.1 Which was one way of saying at least that duty seemed no less absolute for no longer having God for its sanction and immortality for its reward. But ‘duty’ was not Murdoch’s word; it belonged too much to a picture she ultimately wanted to reject, of ethics as action, decision, choice, will. In some form, the association of ethics with action went back to Aristotle; but go back one generation more, and the analogies were different. In Plato, action was the merest icing; the real ethical moment came when one saw aright, saw oneself, saw other people, saw the natural world in the light of the sun and not of the flickering fires of the cave in which we are captive. And the sun was a symbol not of God – ‘inconceivable’ – but of the good: peremptory and absolute.

This was a real turn. The undergraduate Murdoch had thought Plato an old reactionary, with nothing to say that Marx (or Freud or Sartre or some other trendy creature from the Continent) had not long superseded. She was unusual among her Oxford contemporaries in having actually read ‘the continentals’, the long tomes and the novellas.2 Her attachment to the Continent was the first of many things to distinguish her from her colleagues.

Throughout the war, Murdoch had longed to be elsewhere than in the civil service. After the war, whenever that would be, she hoped to teach philosophy and to write novels. She had rued, even at Oxford, the ‘second-handness’ of her knowledge of much of life.3 She was, in her clumsy way, being useful in London, but if she was going to be bored, she would rather have been bored doing menial things somewhere more dangerous. When she learnt of the existence of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA),4 she immediately wanted to work there instead.

She was listening, like everybody else, to live radio broadcasts of reports of the Normandy landings in

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