Publication details
Anagnorisis as a Guide to Morals
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Murdoch in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals discussed and analysed, among other issues, differences between the comic and tragic comparing interpretations of various philosophers, and recognized Aristotle’s ideas the most intriguing. The Ancient Greek playwrights did not believe that the same person could write both, tragedy and comedy and Plato’s Symposium ends with Socrates arguing and contradicting this issue, in a way also telling that Philosophers are closer to Truth. Plato did not consider theatre in general with much respect: according to him, drama may obstruct the highest vision due to evocation of false self-satisfaction and moreover, his disciple Aristotle described and defined tragedy, comedy and epic poetry in his Poetics and stated that the strong emotions that tragedy can produce are of purifying character. This purification was a problem for Murdoch who kept her mind occupied with this since she believed that ‘Such purification must surely be part of our general moral enterprise and should engage the interest of the moral philosopher’. Murdoch believed that ‘the tragic art form is rare’ and that the real tragedy must break the ego. She claims that a tragic hero should not die, because he/she must suffer the consequences of his/her ignorant behaviour and live with remorse. But on the other hand she also said that if there is no dead character, then it is a comedy. Murdoch was obsessed with looking for good/truth and so called ‘unselfing’ (term used by Simone Weil) in her work that she demonstrated by disentangling of lies that very often significantly change lives of characters in her fiction. Based on her philosophical views and her claiming a good novel is tragi-comic, the paper will focus on an analysis of her novel A Severed Head (1961). I will study the novel from the Aristotelian characterization of tragedy point of view, with a close look on moments of recognition that may or may not turn the character from ignorance to knowledge. |
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