To see that there are many infinite kinds of good lives is to go outside oneself, beyond one's own ideals of beauty – including, of course, moral beauty – and to walk around with a humble, non-judgmental curiosity about the multitude of others who walk their paths, driven by their ideals of beauty.
Such recognition requires that great moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) it is said sacrifice – a difficult, triumphant act, which Murdoch argued against in his 1970 art book The Kingdom of Good (public library), nature and art train us differently.
A century and a half after Emerson realized that “the question of beauty takes us outside, to think about the foundations of things,” Murdoch describes what we often call beauty “as an opportunity to be 'unconscious'” – an experience readily available in our interaction with nature and our artistic reflection. You write:
Beauty is a simple and general term for what art and nature share, and which gives a clear idea of the concept of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I looked out my window in a state of anxiety and anger, indifferent to my surroundings, pondering perhaps some damage done to my reputation. Then suddenly I see a kestrel walking. In a moment everything changes. Their arrogance and wickedness disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel. And when I go back to thinking about another issue it seems less important. And then this is something we can also do on purpose: paying attention to nature to take our minds off selfish concerns.
Oliver Sacks would express this concept decades later in his observation that encountering nature on its own terms and temporal scales expands our perception by creating a “division of time scale, urgency, everyday life.” But this selflessness, Murdoch warns, cannot come from the oppression of the will, for the will is to embody the self that is the condition of true beauty; rather, it comes as a pleasant relaxation of the spirit, of our essential nature, from the shared heat of life:
Self-directed natural entertainment seems forced to me. Naturally, and more properly, we take pleasure in forgetting ourselves in the independent and meaningless existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.
This “joy of self-forgetfulness” reminds us of Jeanette Winterson's wonderfully paradoxical idea active devotion as the distraction of our joy in art and the fulcrum of art's transformative power over the self. But while there is a clear distinction between nature and art that influence each by ignoring them, Murdoch argues that what separates great art from bad and small is this power to undress the person rather than to inflate the ego – an idea that evokes Tolstoy's insistence that “the true work of art destroys, in his consciousness, the medium of acceptance of the artist.” Murdoch writes about the dissolution of the self in the face of great art:
The experience of art is more easily degraded than the experience of nature. Much art, perhaps most art, is actually a self-consoling fiction, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of its consumer's experience. However, great art exists and sometimes it has the right experience and even a shallow experience of that beauty can have its effect. Art, and by “art” from now on I mean fine art, not fantasy art, gives us pure joy in the independent existence of that which is best. Both in its genesis and in its enjoyment it is completely anti-selfish. It awakens our best powers and, to use Plato's language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this in part because of something it shares with nature: a perfection of form that invites irrational reflection and resists being absorbed into the selfish dream life of consciousness.
However, Murdoch argues, any true understanding of beauty is an acceptance of imperfection – something philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in many ways Murdoch's only intellectual heir, would argue a generation later in her critical case about emotional intelligence. Murdoch writes:
The concept of the Good… is a concept that is difficult to understand in part because it has so many false multiples, leapfrogging mediators invented by human selfishness to make the difficult work of beauty look easier and more attractive: History, God, Lucifer, Ideas of power, freedom, purpose, reward, even judgment are irrelevant. Mystics of all kinds tend to know this and try in perfect language to express the nakedness and solitude of the Good, its absolute nothingness. One might say that true morality is a kind of mysterious mystery, which has its source in a strong and inconsolable love of the good. When Plato wants to explain the Good, he uses the image of the sun. The moral traveler comes out of the cave and begins to see the real world in the sunlight, and is finally able to look at the sun itself.
[…]
We may also speak seriously of ordinary things, people, works of art, as beautiful, although we are well aware of their imperfections. Beautiful lives as it were on both sides of the barrier and we can combine the desire to achieve beauty with a practical sense of success within our limits.
With an eagle eye on the legacy of the Romantics, who married nature and art in their model of pleasure and transcendence, Murdoch returns to the idea of abstraction and the beautiful tessellation of possibility and limitation that defines our nature:
The self, the place we live in, is a place of deception. Beauty is connected to the attempt to see oneself as oneself, to see and react to the real world in the light of good consciousness. This is a non-metaphysical interpretation of the concept of transcendence that philosophers have often used in their descriptions of beauty. “Goodness is the ultimate truth” means that beauty is an attempt to pierce the veil of selfishness and join the world as it really is. It is a powerful truth about human nature that this effort cannot be completely successful.
The Kingdom of Good it is a very insightful read overall. Complete this piece with Robinson Jeffers on nature and moral beauty and Oliver Sacks on the healing power of gardens, then revisit Murdoch's art as a force against oppression, the key to good storytelling, and his unusually beautiful romances.
