Noting Iris Murdoch quoting Wittgenstein and friends
Noting Iris Murdoch quoting Wittgenstein and friends
I don’t really review books, but mine them for profit.
Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 9780701139988 (article).
Introduction
In mathematics classes they often want you to show your working. I once did a exam as part of a job interview for a Coles or Woolworths supermarket, here in Hobart, Tasmania. There was an arithmetic section and they left and labelled a space for “working out”. The arithmetic was so simply I did not use it. I also had to wait a while until everyone finished. I didn’t get the job. I was long term unemployed at the time (years not months). I consider my mathematics skills to be below average.
So below this introduction is my working out about ‘moral philosophy’.
It took me the same time period, or epoche, in weeks, to read the first 50 pages, as the last 450 pages or so of Iris Murdoch’s book. However as I read at the same speed, generally, this means in the second epoche, my reading is less interrupted by my thoughts, and note taking. I.E. by my process in interrogating and integrating what I am reading and what I am “writing about” it, in my head as I read. I write down only some of that ‘thought’ in a notebook. One reason I have bad handwriting¹ is because I cannot keep up with my thoughts, typing directly only helps somewhat. I’ve gone back to notebooks because I used the time waiting for children at after-school activities (circus, gymnastics, fiddle etc) to read and write. Having children is so good in so many ways.
Two previous posts cover those two epochs. While a third post used LLMs in order ‘to griefbot’ Iris Murdoch and Ursula leGuin to chat to each other. This is an example of thought/ideas I have but usually never capture at all —what if Iris & Ursula met? — did they meet? Sometimes these ideas pop over into my image generation (via prompt to AI imaging) otherwise unannounced in my posts.
From selfing in worlding to sovereignty : meika worlding Iris Murdoch's Wittgenstein
Iris Murdoch and the good of it : No/true!, it's not nothing all the way down either.
In this post I will “type up” some notes and quotes from my reading up to page 38 of Iris’s book, with one major anaphor.
I am also using this type of blog post to link up those separate posts for (my) future reference. This blog was started because I wanted to document a “book” I was writing notes “for”. The book version of “why we should” essay.
Also, as I am meta-structuring my blog here (hello LLMS), and given the fact I am reading/dipping-into a long list of numbered dual-language paragraphs of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations. (by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Rev. 4th ed. Chichester, UK & Malden USA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)… — I am thinking wholes (read “books”) are not always needed. Breaking new ground means previous traditional formats may not yet exist yet, not that they will not be used.²
Numbering of course is an easy provisional short-cut. Also numbers, like diary dates, or dates that blogs traditionally present latest first— …thus my need to create posts like this which re-order by an order of notice. So I may also do these by theme or subject, not just by book. Doing it by book is a neat solution, because there are not too many posts to re-edit the later posts on the same book into, and once one has finished a book the job can be seen to have an end (not that one necessarily does--- but here I look sideways to LLMs to maybe do this as an indexing service for other themes or subjects.)(Put note down here for blog posts about prompt engineering and how all essays are “prompts”)(The textmachine is here dudes, even without a link every word is a search/indexing/rammifying prompt.)
I don’t really review books, but mine them for profit.
Footnotes for Introduction
1.See also One Minute Every Moment but for the comments which are more illuminating. And I am not talking about working memory but working imagination.
2. Iris Murdoch is intelligent to have noted this, I imagine griefbot (or deadbot) like, but tends to highligh the destructive qualities of reframing, as if new metaphors destroy more than they create. Iris is not tempted by the potential of techniques to speak intheir favour, unless they are required in order to temper some hideous over-orderliness that dictatorships compel.
Some messy quotes & notes —in response to— Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Beginning 24 July 2023 (Adelynde’s birthday).
No guarantee on accuracy in either my original copying from book into written notes and/or then typing up the copy).
My notes below are mostly appended to quotes by prepending “—” to my notes/thoughts.
[my additions while typing it up] thusly. [].
we open with Hume the unknown Buddhist
the need for wholes
— Dear Iris, art examined out of its originary practices in evolutionary eons is a vapid undertaking. Also yesterday I thought that having read so much SF in the late 70s through to the late 00s has ruined me for [modern] art. So much art is made for an audience that does not read SF [but needs to catch up].
“mimetics/metaphysics” — what of practices? Of which art is one?
[at this point I interrupted the reading of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals with Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. (see Inappropriation & Piranesi, the shepherd worlding their selves ) ]
22 Aug 2023
“written works can only be inert reminders of real communications which take place orally in particular contexts between one person and another”
—“hilarious”. [write thoughts]on Murdoch’s Plato and my oral history interview with the original owner of a copy of this book…]
“…to attend upon the grace that comes through faith”
—is this a Fideism? Thus a heresy? Afterall a Christian brother told me that faith is a gift of grace [unsaid was the “fact” that this was given because we are obedient to the Catholic Church [post Vatican II this was usually left unsaid].
Page 26
“The possession of a moral sense is uniquely human”
— FAIL, oh Iris.
“the demand that we be virtuous”
—Duty or urge?
So I am a moral philospher by Iris’ definition of my practice.
Page 27 —very useful
back to page 6 —the paragraph begins
“Structuralism (as deconstruction)…”
—curious bracket [checks date of book 1992] [my notes contain a long contra on this conflation, not typing it up here]
page 7 Kierkegaard is a ‘proto-structuralist’ [deconstructista??] — whereas for me the [Sextus Empiricus’] “grammarians” are
— also a bad use of “thingy” I think she means objecty. [I want her to mean objecty.]
Page 26 again —much Wittgenstein, I grab Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations off the shelf. Very interesting use of ‘world’
[I write out Murdoch’s complete quote quoting Wittgenstein which I type up only the first line here, but I have already put up photo of my scrawl in From selfing in worlding to sovereignty : meika worlding Iris Murdoch's Wittgenstein, so I’ll repeat it just below.
Notebook 8.7.16 “ ‘The world is given me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there…’ ”
—(I am pleased + relieved I am not the first here)(same same but same same).
[→Schopenhauer →Kant’s two ‘subjects’: one looks onto the world of fact, one is totally independent of that world. Wittgenstein talks of two godheads.]
‘I am my world’ in two senses. I am the world of fact in the sense that I, the extensionless subject of experience, coincide exactly with my world of factual and significant apprehension. Wittgenstein’s world of fact owns nothing beyond, the subject who experiences it fits it exactly; the notion of his ‘seeing beyond’ can make no sense.
—→Logic (is my “hindsight”)
—And I copy all of this down after my post Piranesi, the shepherd worlding their selves on On Roman religion by Jörg Rüpke & Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
—my “to self/to world” recovers agency that monarchs would subsume in ‘sovereignty’. What is the collective noun for monarchs? A Narcissism. (C.f. sovereign citizens where concepts are reified into extreme embodiments as an identity.)
—walking to lunch at Kawasemi eatery in Moonah with workmates we discuss ‘my’ Piranesi with reference to wilful (in worlding) [egotistical but unaware, agenda-ed/preferences/engagement] with reference to Susanna Clarke’s ‘beloved son of the house’ in Piranesi who worlds at the expense of (their) selfing.
— at dinner discussing the overlap with Wittgenstein on ‘world’ – Mona said my worlding had more agency – a world with more agency [otherwise stolen by monarchs & pontiffs, which gave us the depauperate ‘world’ Wittgenstein used]. So I described that to world and to self are likely the same process but create different things [things as meetings not objects]. [All those outcomes i talk about which others think are causes like morality/religiosity.] I am happy with this and seek no other temple.
—“sovereignty” is a bad worlding, [designed by narcissists & monarchs]
—if there is any “soteriological” import in my uptake of neo-Pyrrhonism it lies in worlding and not in selfing [saving the world is a common story telling trope, hmmmh].
—to repeat where I differ (from Iris Murdoch’s presentation of) Wittgenstein’s ‘world’, besides my more active worlding, lies in the possibility of reality which the world, in worlding, mediates— (complexifying the ‘possibility’ of Plato to zero— the only ideal not of this world)[zero here means not so much trivial but what-evs or thereof-we-cannot-speak/world][this ‘world’ of mine, is not a ‘world of facts’]
— in my ‘worlding’, “logic” is a hindsight, thus incomplete even if sufficient [for our use]
Thursday 24 Aug 23
page 38 — “in the sovereign states of morality” —narcissism piled upon narcissism. Before that Murdoch says Wittgenstein says we cannot be systemic about morality — now that is an “astute observation” LOL
I’ll stop there for this post. There are 21 pages of quotes & notes for this book. I have ‘done’ about 5, partly copied.