Murdoch on Suffering and Morality

Murdoch on Suffering and Morality:

All of the following is out of The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch‘s strange, funny, frightening, enlightening and deeply probing pondering on the shapeshifting machinations of the human mind when in Love and Extremis, a sort of re-enacting of Hamlet (the Black Prince of Denmark):

...“There are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.

This is the planet where cancer reigns, where people regularly and automatically and almost without comment die like flies from floods and famine and disease, where people fight each other with hideous weapons to whose effects even nightmares cannot do justice, where men terrify and torture each other and spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear. This is where we live.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear, the endless unsatisfied anguish of a being who passionately desires only illusory goods.

If the suffering of the world were, as it could be imagined to be, less extreme, if boredom and simple worldly disappointments were our gravest trials, and if, which is harder to conceive, we grieved little at any bereavement and went to death as to sleep, our whole morality might be immensely, perhaps totally different. That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad.“...

                                                              Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999)*

*Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. 

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