Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
Iris Murdoch, George Steiner (Foreword by), Peter ConradiBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Best known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy. Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.
Synopsis
Best known for her novels and longer philosophical works, Iris Murdoch is also a brilliant essayist and critic. Existentialists and Mystics gathers for the first time in one volume the most influential and inspiring of her essays and shorter pieces. The selection, by Professor Peter Conradi, starts with an illuminating interview of Dame Iris Murdoch by Bryan Magee, and is organized to illustrate her training and development as a thinker, her rejection of the sterility of Anglo-American and Sartrean philosophers alike, and her journey toward Platonism and a practical mysticism. She negotiates her ideological opponents with elegance and scruple, and draws on a novelist's insight into art and literature to throw new light on philosophy.
Included are Murdoch's influential critiques of existentialism, written in the '50s, and her two Platonic dialogues on art and religion; incisive evaluations of T.S. Eliot, Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, Elias Canetti, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Camus; and key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, the concept of love, and literature's role in curing the ills of philosophy.
Observer
This is that rare achievement, a collection of writings by a great mind which is not only fascinating, but accessible. . . .Murdoch her reveals herself to be an enviably fine essayist.
Editorials
Evans
This is that rare achievement, a collection of writings by a great mind which is not only fascinating, but accessible. . . .Murdoch her reveals herself to be an enviably fine essayist.—Observer
Observer
This is that rare achievement, a collection of writings by a great mind which is not only fascinating, but accessible. . . .Murdoch her reveals herself to be an enviably fine essayist.Hilary Spurling
This book is Murdoch's key. . .readers will find much her to stimulate, entertain, and edify. No one conveys the beauty and excitement of philosophy better than Murdoch.— The Daily Telegraph
Publishers Weekly
Dame Iris Murdoch not only wrote many celebrated novels like Under the Net and A Fairly Honourable Defeat;, she also taught philosophy for many years at Oxford University, where she is now professor emeritus. The present book, intelligently organized and presented by editor Conradi, is a selection of Murdoch's occasional essays, book reviews, speeches, transcribed interviews and creative Platonic 'dialogues.' These are grouped into subjects like 'Encountering Existentialism'" (Murdoch was an early explicator of Sartre's existentialism to the British public), 'Towards a Practical Mysticism' and 'Re-Reading Plato.' As in her novels, Murdoch's philosophical musing revels in disturbing implications as the basis for interest and achievement in art. She states, 'Plato was notoriously hostile to art.... [T]he paradox is that Plato's work is great art in a sense which he does not theoretically recognise.'A number of these essays read like speeches in some ideally intelligent parliament, in which the author expects to be interrupted by cries of 'Hear, Hear!' For example, she asserts that T.S. Eliot did not like prose 'except when it is used for didactic purposes,' or that George Eliot, like Tolstoy, 'displays that god-like capacity for so respecting and loving her characters as to make them exist as free and separate beings.' Not a powerful original philosopher like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, Murdoch is nevertheless a critic with considerable rhetorical punch.