On 'Good'

Being home for Thanksgiving means a couple of things:
1) Too much free time pre-Thanksgiving (nobody has free time to hang out)
2) Digging up old books to kill time (after already killing 10 - 13 hrs/day by sleeping)

I stumbled upon a book by Iris Murdoch. "The Sovereignty of Good." From when I actually had free time to read philosophy books for fun. I started reading bits and pieces (parts I earmarked for whatever reason). What I find interesting (from a snippets I read today) is her specific identification of the concept of 'Love' as a philosophical entity. She mentions that many philosophers deter from the concept of 'love' as containing any notions of morality. Now that I think about it, she has a point. She mentions Kant and Plato - from what I have read of Kant, love isn't a focus of morality. And from Plato's Symposium, love is depicted not as a moral stronghold but more a form of weakness.

Some things Murdoch writes about this topic:

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. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good.

Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like. The acceptance of death is an acceptance of our own nothingness which is an automatic spur to our concern with what is not ourselves...Humility is a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern. 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. In fact any other name for Good must be a partial name; but names of virtues suggest directions of thought, and this direction seems to me a better one than that suggested by more popular concepts such as freedom and courage. The humble man because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue and its unique value and the endless extent of its demand...The humble man perceives the distance between suffering and death. And although he is not by definition the good man perhaps he is the kind of man who is most likely of all to become good.

When I first read some of these lines from Murdoch, I got some sort of religious feeling out of them. But they really aren't religious at all. Murdoch does devote a whole chapter to differentiating 'Good' and 'God.' She does propound many moral/ethical ideals that organized religion devotes itself to, but spirituality and 'Good' are universal entities that do not inherently have ties to religion - those fetters are mere social constructs formulated by centuries of the anxiety that is inherent in human existence.

She articulates, far better than I could ever do, what I think all people should strive toward: becoming 'good,' which necessitates, according to Murdoch, the refinement of love. What does it mean to 'refine' love, and how would one go about doing so? Earlier on in her work she mentions how this 'refinement' can occur, I think.

She writes,

We ought to know what we are doing. We should aim at total knowledge of our situation and a clear conceptualization of all our possibilities. Thought and intention must be directed towards definite overt issues or else they are merely day-dream.

I like the active-stance that she takes with regard to philosophy. Although I'm iffy on the idea of attaining 'total' knowledge, even of our own situations, it is what should be aimed for. Although she doesn't directly relate these two ideas (refining love and a consciousness of our situation), I think ultimately, if one were to refine love and thereby attain 'goodness,' one must gain complete consciousness of one's situation, and not only that, but be able to remove that newfound consciousness from the notion of 'self' in order to even have the possibility of understanding or becoming 'good.'

Re-reading Murdoch always produces different feelings depending on where I am in 'life' I guess. I read her first in early 2006, and then again n 2007, and now, approaching 2009, and every time, I was able to apply her words differently to whatever current state of being I was experiencing. I guess right now, I'm thinking about what I want to accomplish in life. Beyond the nuances and the specificities of my goals and desires (career goals, etc.), ultimately, I want to come as close as I can to refining 'love' and becoming 'good.' Keeping that 'bigger picture' mentality is helpful at times, especially during perceived detours in life.

On a lighter note, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!