Did Iris Murdoch and Jean-Paul Sartre, two titans of 20th century philosophy, have more in common than is generally thought?

It is commonly held that Sartre’s ‘existentialism’ is dead, and Murdoch is often held responsible. But was she right in her characterisation of Sartre’s philosophy?

In the Third Routledge Lecture in Philosophy on Thursday, Professor Richard Moran (pictured) from Harvard University will examine whether Murdoch’s depiction of Sartre is an accurate portrait or more of a crude caricature. The lecture, which is sponsored by Routledge, one of the Taylor & Francis Group, forms part of the Festival of Ideas.

Sartre and Murdoch were in many ways similar. They both flirted with communism. Both had exotic private lives. Both were professional philosophers. And both were prize-winning novelists working in a peculiar genre—the philosophical novel.

They met just once, in Brussels in 1945. There Sartre was hailed as a prophet and treated like a pop star. As Murdoch remarked: ‘The fundamental and attractive idea was freedom. It had long been known that God was dead and that man was self-created. Sartre produced a fresh and apt picture of this self-chosen being.”

In the English-speaking world, it was Murdoch who did much to communicate Sartre’s ideas. Her early book Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) is a pioneering study of his fiction. Although she was critical from the start, it is her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970) that features her most trenchant and well-known attack.

For Sartre, moral value is determined by arbitrary choice among items in a value-free world. This, she claims, is to assimilate morality to shopping: it gets human nature, value and the world all wrong. For Murdoch, the emphasis should be on moral vision rather than on choice: values are there in the world to be seen, not freely chosen.

Professor Moran is a leading authority on the philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and epistemology. He has himself put Sartre back on the philosophical map in Authority and Estrangement [Harvard, 2001], his striking account of how it is that we know our own minds.

The Routledge Lecture in Philosophy: Iris Murdoch and the Rejection of Existentialism is at Little Hall, Sidgwick Site, at 17:15-18:30 on 30 October.
 

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