I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In her essay The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (1970), philosopher Iris Murdoch argues that good art provides an entryway into virtue, a way of getting out of our selfish, purposeless existences:
These arts, especially literature and painting, show us the peculiar sense in which the concept of virtue is tied to the human condition. They show us the absolute pointlessness of virtue while exhibiting its supreme importance; the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue. The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.
Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize: the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and it reveals it together with a sense of unity and form. This form often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art, since they are the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish daydream.
Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. We are presented with a truthful image of the human condition in a form that can be steadily contemplated; indeed, this is the only context in which many of us are capable of contemplating it at all.
Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer. It is a kind of goodness by proxy. Most of all, it exhibits to us the connection, in human beings, of clear, realistic vision with compassion. The realism of a great artist is not a photographic realism; it is essentially both pity and justice.
To Murdoch, virtue may appear pointless, just as art does. It doesn’t get us anywhere. It doesn’t serve our selfish objectives. In their pointlessness we can find their value: virtue and art are ends in themselves. They are deeply human and morally meaningful.
Good art resists fantasy, the way we can get lost in our own constructed experiences of the world. It forces us to see the world not as we are or as we wish it to be but rather as it is. It provides a vehicle by which we can practice seeing clearly and feeling a sense of justice. It enlarges our sensibility, offering a model for objectivity cultivated through attention to the outside world.
When Murdoch says great art is both “pity and justice” this means it has the ability to express both compassion and clear seeing. Pity involves empathy and a shared suffering with another. Justice requires and calls upon truthfulness: a honest rendering of human experience without flattery or sentimentality. Great art doesn’t show you only what you want to see. It shows you what is.
More from Murdoch: Imagination vs. fantasy in love