Philosophy & Literature - Iris Murdoch & Bryan Magee (1977)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มี.ค. 2022
- In this program, Iris Murdoch discusses philosophy and literature with Bryan Magee. This is from a 1977 series on Modern Philosophy called Men of Ideas.
#Philosophy #BryanMagee #Literature
What treasure Bryan Magee's interviews are now! 🌈🦉
He's a funny interviewer. He could have conducted a much more interesting interview if he spoke to the professor with an attitude to serve rather than to compete.
@@elizabethdarley8646 I don't think Magee sought to compete, he's fully aware of Murdoch's brilliance both as novelist and philosopher. It's his style to ask his guests challenging questions to illuminate their work for the viewer. In that respect he himself is brilliant.
@@elizabethdarley8646 Magee does not compete with any person he interviews. Simply because he is a professional philosoper and has no logical reason to do so.
Very clearly put and deep insights from Murdoch.
To Aristotle's defense, it should be noted that what has come down to us are just his lecture notes, redacted after his death by his students. He did indeed produce finished works -- Cicero said they were "liquid gold" -- but they have all been lost.
To Kant's defense, it should be noted that he could write quite well when he chose to: His essay "What is Enlightenment?" is in beautiful, limpid prose. (Maybe not up to Hume's standards, but still pretty good.) The mystery is why he chose -- and, clearly, it was indeed a choice -- to write all three of the Critiques in such a crabbed, twisted, and opaque prose. (... Maybe he felt that the ideas were so difficult that the prose needed to be so as well?)
There is no defending Hegel. And his actual thoughts were every bit as obscure as his expression of them. (He sat down to write every evening with a pitcher of wine sitting on his desk, ... and it shows.)
Lol
I love the challenge of reading the translations of Hegel . His life story inspires me.
I've never attempted Hegel but if his style is worse than Heidegger then no, thank you.
@@dejjal8683 Hegel or Heidegger? Might be a tie! ;-)
The Enlightenment essay is written in beautiful prose? No way José
Literature dwells in the world of what we are, philosophy on the other hand explores understanding there is no what we are without that we are.
In other words we people create what we are which is formed from the formless that we are. Understanding this is the key to living a life of emotional ease more of the time than we otherwise might have.
I'm surprised Camus wasn't mentioned as an artist who was both a philosopher and writer of literature and successfully blended both.
Camus was mediocre, why should anyone mention him anyway?
@@mycroftholmes7379 Aulus Aurelius says Albert Camus was mediocre. Lol
@@raspberrybob3840 existentialism as a whole is mediocre.
@@resiliencewithin different statement, also slightly odd way of phrasing it imo. but you're entitled to your opinion.
Especially as he also recieved a Nobel Prize.
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I have a crush on Iris Murdoch
Back of the line!!!
Cringe
You’re very deep
@@miloelixir8172 The last will be the first (since all is one).
Me too
she's so fascinating
I wish I could have been brainy enough to be friends with her
I'm currently re-reading her novels - some I haven't touched since the 1970s and they are more extraordinary now that I am old enough to appreciate them and they have certainly stood the test of time
she was a beautiful writer particularly about the natural world, weather and the sea and odf course people which I think were her real preoccupation and inspiration as a novelist
Well, I've just dusted off two paperbacks, "The Red and the Green" and "The Bell," both by Iris Murdoch. But lately I've felt an affinity, more, for those "dogged" and "relentless" philosophers, those "hedgehogs" (Kant, Hegel, Heidegger) who want to focus on ONE THING. That said, just the memory of my Shakespeare Studies keeps me balanced.
She is so right in cautioning against writing a novel of ideas. Musil is a case in point of how things can go wrong with this sort of literature. Her arguments were much more convincing than Magee's in relation to writing a philosophical novel.
Harold Bloom has described Proust and Kafka as exceptionally STRONG writers, and having read some of both, I can see a little what he means! Then there are those who say, once you've read Dostoevsky, the European contemporaries pale in comparison. Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," seems to me a STRONG short story! "Anna Karenina" and "Dr. Zhivago" can change your life for the better.
I'd say the difference is that the work of good novelists can be read and understood by larger audiences. That is the power of literature: they use words as a material, as something that has a flavour, the mundane everyday language plays a great role here. It seems that philosophy is more strict in this sense and it can be understood only if you clearly grasp the meaning of notions used. Reading literatures requires more intuitive thinking. For this reason, I can understand philosophical concepts quite well but have been barely able to read any philosophical work at all.
My favorite Sartre is the Roads to Freedom trilogy
What an opening! hehe
Her gaze is magnetic, and frankly I would also be scared to be fixed by it
Magee is brilliant and his last question really stunts Murdock. I love Magee's conducting style. He was brilliant too, less sure of himself than Murdock. Murdock, in the end, falls in a contradiction, denying the possibility of abstract art to be other than fantasy because it is not related to the world, in her mimetic conception of art. However, I think it is a mistake because there can be litterature that mix mimetism and fantasy, such as the Latinamerican masters, Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez... I think that Magee unveils quite well the conservative vision of literature of Murdock at the end of the interview. I think that it is not unreasonable to say nowadays that both painting and works of litterature can be a mix of world mimetism and of internal fantasy of the author. Simply put, colour and words act as the glue medium between the author and the viewer, irrespective of whether it is mimetism or fantasy. If the glue is good, then it is good art.
Her conception of fantasy does not exclude these works. Murdoch is not, in her distinction between 'imagination' and 'fantasy', referring to realism/antirealism at all. She is not talking about the presence or absence of mythic events (otherwise one wouldn't just lose Latin American Boom writers, but ... almost the entire history of literature from Homer onward) in drawing the distinction between imagination and fantasy. The 'truths' that she finds necessary to have been pursued, or to have been mediated with, for something to qualify as imagination is not "realistic events" but transcendental things about humans or universal things or mind or spirit, etc. "Fantasy" as she uses it is writing that no longer seeks something beyond itself in this way, and is instead the basically no-reason-to-exist pursuit of empty images that have lost any transcendent aim (pure aesthetics can be a transcendent aim, so that doesn't exclude avant garde experimentation either) and simply are the record of a mechanical amusement for writer and/or audience, both of whom will disappear (in 'fantasy')
To put it simply, the artwork has to point to something beautiful or powerful or true or eternal beyond itself -- its formal structure is claimed by the broader universe. Realistic and non-realistic works can do this; people's conceptions of what is realistic have changed as consciousness has changed and history has changed anyway. In her disapproved 'fantasy' the work is simply a dead structure, static, unable to communicate with other things beyond itself, a work of irrelevance, solipsistic.
I'll underline my parenthetical from above: pure formal experimentation, even something that chases areas of existence that seem inhuman or antihuman, can be imaginative because it seeks a transcendent horizon of aesthetic beauty. Representing the void and inhumanity can be transcendent imaginative horizons as well! Mimesis has to be taken in the broad sense of a history of attempts at establishing a consonance between the artwork and Nature which *includes* all the consciousness that exists within it which *includes* mythic ways of seeing and so on. Life and all the life within it, the inner life and the life of the mind and spirit.
Fantasy is writing that is unmoored from any concern with these representations, and simply functions as amusement. In terms of plot that can be a simple manipulation of tension and relaxation that produces neurological pleasure with no other aim. In terms of imagery, images that are essentially random and do not correspond to greater structures -- think bad surrealism or indeed much work in subgenres like 'fantasy' which is people turning the crank, but not the great genre works of imagination which the genred writing copies. Static, lifeless works of ego, either by intent or inability, they will crumble to dust and blow away in the wind (Conversely a purely egotistical *personality* who happens to be gifted with artistic genius can produce, without knowing they were doing so, something that is greater than themselves, that *transcends* themselves and their aim! So the important thing is whether the work is egoistic and shallow, not ultimately whether the creator is, although usually one has to follow the other, accidental artistic genius being quite rare.)
I guess in philosophy being able to write as simple as possible is good.
Wish that would be the same for contemporary physics.
You've got to love Iris's Irish accent. One of my favourite writers.
what irish accent?
@@thomasjackson5204 lol exactly!
Irish??
combining literature with philosophy, is like combining poetry and science.
Has anyone taken Hegel and written it well?
Probably the doctoral dream of many ph d cabdidates. Then her boyfriend gets pregnant and leaves her for her best friend, his tutor and the hell of it.
( at truth terrainifying)
Somewhat prosaic observations by an academic philosopher. How would Murdoch account for Plato's dialogues under her strict seperation of philosophy and literature?
I kept wondering, Who are these bad painters and novelists? A great man of letters I know of, and used to share a classroom with, once said, "I don't care for fantasy." One fall day decades ago he did come up to me and say, out of the blue, "I've just read 'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' and would recommend it." I would trust this gentleman with my life, so I think that novel would be a good one. But what about Joyce's great novels? Thomas Merton, someone I've admired, though quite a lot of "Ulysses." And a friend of forty-five years, with a Ph.d on Locke, highly recommends "Narnia Chronicles."
She would not, I am quite sure, consider any of these to fall victim to fantasy in the sense she is using it, which is not to do with the fantasy genre or antirealism but rather to do with having lost some fundamental connection to a transcendent horizon which is both the place where pure aesthetics live and the place where human community and human hearts attempt to rise toward. A fantasy in this disapproved sense is a book which reflects a private and disordered passion either of author or supposed audience, and performs for their eyes, without any transcendent aims (incidentally emotion-sparing formal experiments and the like can reflect a transcendent aesthetic aim. Robbe-Grillet at his most callous is not to be excluded from literature). Fantasy as opposed to imagination is somehow simultaneously too dependent on local conditions and unmoored from lasting ones. Whatever words are needed for mechanically tensing and relaxing a plot system in order to produce some neurological spurts of euphoria is a good example, but so is the profusion of shallow imagery seen in some of the less successful Surrealist writings and artworks (I personally consider Dalí 's career one long blunder in this way)
Well, he won her over with a sincere and well-considered series of gambits tailored for her alone, and by 7:45 she's pudding, relative to her level of uptightness. Good. He was clever and she's not an Aspie. And if you listen closely, she'll tell you what she is. I like her.
Oh wow from the intro music to the RP accents and the Clothes.. Iris, sexy beast.
it is a pleasure and a joy to listen to two brilliant minds exchanging views at this level of nuance and at this pace.
However, why talking of the author, the novelist, the philosopher... as "he" all the time?. When talking of writers of the 19th century, there were very good female writers. In this respect, this conversation is also a document of its time. I mean by it, the lack of conciousness of the historical injustice inflicted to female "authorship", in the Western tradition at least.
If you could furnish us with some examples of this injustice it would be illuminating. Which particular great minds are you referring to?
She's wearing a lovely blouse by Liberty of London.
I bet she/her and HST would really hit it off.
Yes she reminds me of Howard Stern as well
24:00
I love these interviews and they're both wonderful people but I disagree. I think the form in which philosophy is written deeply affects the argument, and writing a long philosophical work requires not just a thesis and supporting points but also choices about what kind of story you are telling and why (a narrative), and that these choices are influenced by who you are and who you talk to. I feel like their attitude is firmly Platonic as though philosophical truths are just out there and the goal of the philosopher is to hack away everything to discover them, but I find this very outdated and misguided. But then again, I'm an anthropologist.
This is extremely interesting, and I agree a lot with you. I believe Cora Diamond (who interprets Murdoch in her own Wittgenstein-inspired philosophy) thinks similarly (i.e. the kinds of arguments we make in philosophy are determined by how we describe the problem, the words we use in telling the story, how we already are positioned in the debate 'from the inside' - no alleged 'philosophical neutrality'). Are there any particular ideas in anthropology that inspired your reflection on this matter?
Wait how were Aristotle and kant bad writers ?
He doesn't mean poor or bad in a general sense nor as a reflection on the contents itself. I imagine he's referring to the more technical use of language, specifically Pragmatics and Grammar. Though these philosophers' works were undoubtedly rich in their contents and ideas. They're not noted for their style, use of words, or the way they illustrated these ideas.
Great literature; arguably art in general involves creating order among a great many; seemingly disparate complexities. Whereas in science one wants to be very clear; concise. It's essential your words must mean only one thing. Philosophy as a natural science is no different.
Another example of this I can give is that often you will find a good many writers who are exceptional in their craft but are noticeably lacking in their oratory; speaking ability.
I haven't read either but he suggested that bad writers were ones that while they had the ideas, failed to engage the reader. I guess you could say ... hard or boring styles to read. I think this is the appeal of philosophy delivered or explored through fiction or narrative.
@@TheCompleteGuitarist Well their style, especially, Aristotle is strictly scientific. Its logical writing and i understand why people may think it borish, but it's to the point. In comparison i think the essays of J.S. Mill follow the same style, i.e.concise conclusions followed by logical arguments.
Aristotle's prose was said to have been like a "river of gold" according to Cicero but unfortunately none of his proper writings survive just his dry, stuffy lecture notes 😂
She so skillfully and politely disagrees with Magee about the writer and the philosophical novel.
Why can't this type of absorbing, cerebral, philosophical discussion show be the 'norm' for BBC television? Where/when did it all go so horribly wRrroNgGg?!?! Their toxic, nauseating, unintelligent and dozy TV programmes of today are an insult and affront to humanity!!! (Oh, and by the way, I simply MUST get the name of Iris Murdoch's hairdresser!!!)
Writing +philosophy =literature
Writing - philosophy=fiction
Ni
Philosophy deals with concepts, arguments, logic. Literature deals with action, images, events, characters. Truth is to be found in great works of art, in scientific discovery, in major historical events and in the erotic encounter.
Wow I disagree about Kant being a lousy writer
Why do you agree about Aristotle
Who said he was? McGee’s intro certainly didn’t.
Wittgenstein was worse than Kant and Hegel.
Sure, dude, whatevs
Hegel is more difficult. Only an amateur would say that Wittgenstein is hard to understand.
You would know.
people who are writers think the world is governed by literature......im not sure about this. its actually governed by understanding. if you dont understand what im saying or written ...then whats the point in the language itself??
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The silly interviewer is competing with the Dame.🙄
No, he was challenging her, which is his job. This series is not a hagiography of contemporary figures but an attempt to understand their ideas and put them to a mass audience. No mean feat.
Who is this weird, creepy strange person who is interviewing this great mind?
Eh? Only the wonderful Bryan Magee, who was none of these things. I refer you to his memorial service, where many distinguished artists and politicians have nothing but love and praise for him. Please beware of your own assumptions.
"as it were"... "so to speak"... "one might see that... perhaps..." so annoying
then dont listen, you imbecile
Hahaha. Love it though. It's all meaningless gibberish but entertaining.
Delightfully British and not even slightly irritating.
"in summation'....
He was clarifying abstruse points for a TV audience, as it were.