The Sovereignty of Good

Review

I found this book by asking for seminal texts on the concept of “good” or “goodness” after/while reading The Human Condition. I described my current beliefs and my problems with Arendt’s formulation of goodness (which she has little to say on in The Human Condition), and was told that my beliefs would probably line up the most with Murdoch’s text.

I think that is right. For only 120 pages, or perhaps less, I took a long time to get through this. I made highlights on most pages, sometimes whole pages, breaking only to circumvent the kindle/goodreads long highlight rule, so I could come back later and get them all. (Yes, this is a very, very, rare Kindle read for me, because I knew I’d be doing a lot of highlighting and didn’t want to transpose the whole book).

I know for sure that I will write at least three articles interacting with these ideas, because I already have them sketched or mostly formed in my head. Themes of determination, virtue, fear, and goodness as love. I find this all very compelling.

I am so interested in the idea of a secular prayer, a non-religious, only quasi-metaphysical ‘prayer-activity’ or contemplation. Murdoch addresses this as not the quasi-religious meditation that we see elsewhere, but as something else.

“Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.”

Later:

“However, in spite of what Kant was so much afraid of I think there is a place both inside and outside religion for a sort of contemplation of the Good, not just by dedicated experts but by ordinary people: an attention which is not just the planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue. This attempt, which is a turning of attention away from the particular, may be the thing that helps most when difficulties seem insoluble, and especially when feelings of guilt keep attracting the gaze back towards the self. This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted."

(bold emphasis mine)

I love this. Murdoch earlier describes love as attention and knowledge. I also like that “planning of particular good actions” to Murdoch does not invalidate their goodness. I like the frailty that Murdoch gives to this practice, this contemplation. I think the reality of humans is that while we are, or can be, resilient, we are frail and easily and oft broken. Life seems to be to be a progression of breakings and reassemblings, hoping that we can keep ourselves together throughout. Hoping that we do not seem to others too broken for love.

I think how we choose to reassemble ourselves after the breakings matters. I think it is, too, difficult and easily corrupted. It is hard not to close oneself off and embrace the cold. Murdoch contemplates love throughout and importantly in the conclusion. I am contemplating her framing of it and her connection of it to goodness, and it is too early for me to write anything about this. But, broadly, I admire her framing. It rings true to me right now.

“We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.”

I really appreciated this text. I will certainly return to this, probably again and again. I can feel these ideas bouncing around my head, and even in the unpleasant places, it is nice to feel them.

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Kindle Highlights: The Sovereignty of Good (Murdoch, Iris)

There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has > > - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 56-58 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:31:37 AM

There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts. > > - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 56-57 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:31:45 AM

Instances of the facts, as I shall boldly call them, which interest me and which seem to have been forgotten or ‘theorized away’ are the fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central concept in morals. > > - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 63-64 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:32:40 AM

We would like to know what, as moral agents, we have got to do because of logic, what we have got to do because of human nature, and what we can choose to do. > > - Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 77-79 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:36:54 AM

Moore believed that good was a supersensible reality, that it was a mysterious quality, unrepresentable and indefinable, that it was an object of knowledge and (implicitly) that to be able to see it was in some sense to have it. He thought of the good upon the analogy of the beautiful; and he was, in spite of himself, a ‘naturalist’ in that he took goodness to be a real constituent of the world. > > - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 83-86 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:39:01 AM

Good is indefinable because judgments of value depend upon the will and choice of the individual. > > - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 88-89 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:39:30 AM

The image whereby to understand morality, it is argued, is not the image of vision but the image of movement. Goodness and beauty are not analogous but sharply contrasting ideas. > > - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 91-93 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:40:44 AM

Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the > > - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 96-97 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:41:22 AM

Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the will. > > - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 96-97 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:41:31 AM

Hampshire suggests that we should abandon the image (dear to the British empiricists) of man as a detached observer, and should rather picture him as an object moving among other objects in a continual flow of intention into action. > > - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 107-109 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:44:53 AM

What is ‘real’ is potentially open to different observers. The inner or mental world is inevitably parasitic upon the outer world, it has ‘a parasitic and shadowy nature’. > > - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 114-115 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:46:30 AM

‘Thought cannot be thought, as opposed to day-dreaming or musing, unless it is directed towards a conclusion, whether in action or in judgement.’ > > - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 120-121 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 4:36:03 AM

These quotations are from Thought and Action, the later part of Chapter Two. > > - Your Highlight on page 12 | Location 129-130 | Added on Thursday, March 20, 2025 4:38:04 AM

Modern ethics analyses ‘good’, the empty action word which is the correlate of the isolated will, and tends to ignore other value terms. Our hero aims at being a ‘realist’ and regards > > - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 168-170 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:43:35 PM

Modern ethics analyses ‘good’, the empty action word which is the correlate of the isolated will, and tends to ignore other value terms. Our hero aims at being a ‘realist’ and regards sincerity as the fundamental and perhaps the only virtue. > > - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 168-170 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:43:44 PM

The general argument for abandoning it has two prongs. Briefly, > > - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 197-198 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:49:17 PM

Briefly, the argument against the cogitatio is that (a) such an entity cannot form part of the structure of a public concept, (b) such an entity cannot be introspectively discovered. That is, (a) it’s no use, (b) it isn’t there. > > - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 198-199 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:49:25 PM

What matters is whether I stop at the traffic lights, and not my colour imagery or absence of it. > > - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 211-211 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:51:55 PM

What matters is whether I stop at the traffic lights, and not my colour imagery or absence of it. I identify what my senses show me by means of the public schemata which I have learned, and in no other way can this be known by me, since knowledge involves the rigidity supplied by a public test. > > - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 211-213 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:52:16 PM

Wittgenstein in the Untersuchungen sums the situation up as follows: ‘If we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of “object and name”, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.’ > > - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 213-215 | Added on Monday, March 24, 2025 6:53:45 PM

How do I distinguish anger from jealousy? Certainly not by discriminating between two kinds of private mental data. Consider how I learned ‘anger’ and ‘jealousy’. What identifies the emotion is the presence not of a particular private object, but of some typical outward behaviour pattern. This will also imply, be it noted, that we can be mistaken > > - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 239-242 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:33:18 AM

How do I distinguish anger from jealousy? Certainly not by discriminating between two kinds of private mental data. Consider how I learned ‘anger’ and ‘jealousy’. What identifies the emotion is the presence not of a particular private object, but of some typical outward behaviour pattern. This will also imply, be it noted, that we can be mistaken in the names which we give to our own mental states. > > - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 239-242 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:33:28 AM

can describe my imagery or mention words which ‘say’ in my head. I can also give metaphorical descriptions of my states of mind. > > - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 255-256 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:35:52 AM

‘entities’. It will be true of all these that I cannot show them to other people. Of course I can to a limited extent describe them, I can describe my imagery or mention words which ‘say’ in my head. I can also give metaphorical descriptions of my states of mind. > > - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 254-256 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:36:02 AM

It will be true of all these that I cannot show them to other people. Of course I can to a limited extent describe them, I can describe my imagery or mention words which ‘say’ in my head. I can also give metaphorical descriptions of my states of mind. > > - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 255-256 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:36:10 AM

I can only ‘identify’ the inner, even for my own benefit, via my knowledge of the outer. But in any case there is no check upon the accuracy of such descriptions, and as Wittgenstein says, ‘What is this ceremony for?’ > > - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 261-263 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:39:17 AM

Here I start wondering about memory and feeling emotion. Ernaux in Simple Passion is obsessively in love with someone - where is that stored? In those few moments she identifies where he is not on her mind, how is his image and the emotional weight assigned to him stored? > > - Your Note on page 21 | Location 263 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:41:20 AM

Morality must be action since mental concepts can only be analysed genetically. > > - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 277-278 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:43:01 AM

impose, the image of personality which I have sketched above. As the ‘inner life’ is hazy, largely absent, and any way ‘not part of the mechanism’, it turns out to be logically impossible to take up an idle contemplative attitude to the good. Morality must be action since mental concepts can only be analysed genetically. > > - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 275-278 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:43:18 AM

As the ‘inner life’ is hazy, largely absent, and any way ‘not part of the mechanism’, it turns out to be logically impossible to take up an idle contemplative attitude to the good. Morality must be action since mental concepts can only be analysed genetically. > > - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 276-278 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:43:25 AM

What I am ‘objectively’ is not under my control; logic and observers decide that. What I am ‘subjectively’ is a foot-loose, solitary, substanceless will. Personality dwindles to a point of pure will. > > - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 283-285 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 4:44:16 AM

Hampshire says that ‘anything which is to count as a definite reality must be open to several observers’. But can this quasi-scientific notion of individuation through unspecified observers really be applied to a case like this? Here there is an activity but no observers; and if one were to introduce the idea of potential observers the question of their competence would still arise. > > - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 389-391 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:19:16 AM

M’s activity is hard to characterize not because it is hazy but precisely because it is moral. And with this, as I shall shortly try to explain, we are coming near to the centre of the difficulty. > > - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 391-393 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:19:29 AM

The active ‘reassessing’ and ‘redefining’ which is a main characteristic of live personality often suggests and demands a checking procedure which is a function of an individual history. Repentance may mean something different to an individual at different times in his life, and what it fully means is a part of this life and cannot be understood except in context. > > - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 437-439 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:30:49 AM

Science can instruct morality at certain points and can change its direction, but it cannot contain morality, nor ergo moral philosophy. > > - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 461-462 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:34:22 AM

Love is knowledge of the individual. > > - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 467-468 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:35:18 AM

Since we are neither angels nor animals but human individuals, our dealings with each other have this aspect; and this may be regarded as an empirical fact or, by those > > - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 471-472 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:36:17 AM

Since we are neither angels nor animals but human individuals, our dealings with each other have this aspect; and this may be regarded as an empirical fact or, by those who favour such terminology, as a synthetic a priori truth. > > - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 471-473 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:36:25 AM

We ordinarily conceive of and apprehend goodness in terms of virtues which belong to a continuous fabric of being. And it is just the historical, individual, nature of the virtues as actually exemplified which makes it difficult to learn goodness from another person. It is all very well to say that ‘to copy a right action is to act rightly’ (Hampshire, Logic and Appreciation), but what is the form which I am supposed to copy? It is a truism of recent philosophy that this operation of discerning the form is fairly easy, that rationality in this simple sense is a going concern. > > - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 496-501 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:40:40 AM

A smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instrument of corruption. > > - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 538-538 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:47:59 AM

philosophy is often a matter of finding a suitable context in which to say the obvious. > > - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 546-546 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:49:29 AM

But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist: and if there is a ‘Shakespeare of science’ his name is Aristotle. > > - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 558-561 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:52:07 AM

Says the novelist… > > - Your Note on page 41 | Location 561 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:52:37 AM

But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist: and if there is a ‘Shakespeare of science’ his name is Aristotle. I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. > > - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 558-562 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:52:53 AM

Simone Weil > > - Your Note on page 41 | Location 562 | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 11:53:13 AM

have already made the decision. This view is if anything less attractive > > - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 594-595 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:42:06 AM

This view is if anything less attractive and less realistic than the other one. Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism? Can we not give a more balanced and illuminating account of the matter? I suggest we can if we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking, of which I was speaking above. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral > > - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 594-598 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:42:19 AM

This view is if anything less attractive and less realistic than the other one. Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism? Can we not give a more balanced and illuminating account of the matter? I suggest we can if we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking, of which I was speaking above. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. > > - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 594-599 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:42:27 AM

But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. > > - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 602-604 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:44:18 AM

I would like on the whole to use the word ‘attention’ as a good word and use some more general term like ‘looking’ as the neutral word. Of course psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world, complete with systematic vocabulary. > > - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 607-609 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:45:15 AM

I would like on the whole to use the word ‘attention’ as a good word and use some more general term like ‘looking’ as the neutral word. Of course psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world, complete with systematic vocabulary. (M seeing D as pert-common-juvenile, etc.) Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion. > > - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 607-610 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:45:24 AM

goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline. > > - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 621-624 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:48:28 AM

Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. > > - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 641-642 | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:51:36 AM

As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection. Man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a personal will. He is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the direction and focus of his vision. > > - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 651-654 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:40:30 AM

One of the great merits of the moral psychology which I am proposing is that it does not contrast art and morals, but shows them to be two aspects of a single struggle. > > - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 659-661 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:42:20 AM

Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature: something which is easy to name but very hard to achieve. > > - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 667-669 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:44:22 AM

It would however be far from my intention to demote or dispense with the term ‘good’: but rather to restore to it the dignity and authority which it possessed before Moore appeared on the scene. > > - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 679-680 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:46:32 AM

This surely is the place where the concept of good lives. ‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’. These words are closely connected. And here we retrieve the deep sense of the indefinability of good, which has been given a trivial sense in recent philosophy. > > - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 682-684 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:47:10 AM

Good is indefinable not for the reasons offered by Moore’s successors, but because of the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality. > > - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 684-685 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:47:23 AM

The picture offered by, e.g., Hampshire is of course not neutral either, as he admits in parenthesis. (Thought and Action, Chapter Two.) ‘A decision has to be made between two conceptions of personality…. It may be that in a society in which a man’s theoretical opinions and religious beliefs were held to be supremely important, a man’s beliefs would be considered as much part of his responsibility as his behaviour to other men.’ > > - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 708-711 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:51:16 AM

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central. > > - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 734-735 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 10:36:51 AM

I shall argue that existentialism is not, and cannot by tinkering be made, the philosophy we need. Although it is indeed the heir of the past, it is (it seems to me) an unrealistic and over-optimistic doctrine and the purveyor of certain false values. This is more obviously true of flimsier creeds, such as ‘humanism’, with which > > - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 738-740 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 10:38:38 AM

I shall argue that existentialism is not, and cannot by tinkering be made, the philosophy we need. Although it is indeed the heir of the past, it is (it seems to me) an unrealistic and over-optimistic doctrine and the purveyor of certain false values. This is more obviously true of flimsier creeds, such as ‘humanism’, with which people might now attempt to fill the philosophical void. > > - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 738-741 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 10:38:44 AM

A moral philosophy should be inhabited. > > - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 743-743 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 10:43:53 AM

Moore, although he himself held a curious metaphysic of ‘moral facts’, set the tone when he told us that we must carefully distinguish the question ‘What things are good?’ from the question ‘What does “good” mean?’ The answer to the latter question concerned the will. Good was indefinable (naturalism was a fallacy) because any offered good could be scrutinized by any individual by a ‘stepping back’ movement. > > - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 763-767 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 6:49:07 PM

What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better? Can we make ourselves morally better? These are questions the philosopher should try to answer. We realize on reflection that we know little about good men. There are men in history who are traditionally thought of as having been good (Christ, Socrates, certain saints), but if we try to contemplate these men we find that the information about them is scanty and vague, and that, their great moments apart, it is the simplicity and directness of their diction which chiefly colours our conception of them as good. And if we consider contemporary candidates for goodness, if we know of any, we are likely to find them obscure or else on closer inspection full of frailty. Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people—inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families—but these cases are also the least illuminating. > > - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 825-832 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:03:50 PM

It is significant that the idea of goodness (and of virtue) has been largely superseded in Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness, supported perhaps by some conception of sincerity. > > - Your Highlight on page 60 | Location 832-834 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:04:18 PM

We have learned from Freud to picture ‘the mechanism’ as something highly individual and personal, which is at the same time very powerful and not easily understood by its owner. > > - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 847-848 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:07:44 PM

What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between the moments of choice. > > - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 852-854 | Added on Saturday, March 29, 2025 7:09:46 PM

Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 861-863 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:10:35 AM

I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention; and I shall go on to suggest that moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these characteristics. I shall consider them one by one, although to a large extent they interpenetrate and overlap. > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 865-868 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:12:54 AM

Requires the object of the prayer-activity to remain metaphysical and unknowable. > > - Your Note on page 62 | Location 868 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:13:53 AM

Consider being in love. Consider too the attempt to check being in love, and the need in such a case of another object to attend to. Where strong emotions of sexual love, or of hatred, resentment, or jealousy are concerned, ‘pure will’ can usually achieve little. > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 870-872 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:14:42 AM

It is small use telling oneself ‘Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just.’ > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 872-872 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:15:00 AM

It is small use telling oneself ‘Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just.’ What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. Notice > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 872-873 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:15:12 AM

It is small use telling oneself ‘Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just.’ What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 872-873 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:15:18 AM

Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing. > > - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 874-875 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:15:48 AM

It is also a psychological fact, and one of importance in moral philosophy, that we can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which are valuable: virtuous people, great art, perhaps (I will discuss this later) the idea of goodness itself. > > - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 877-880 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:16:41 AM

Human beings are naturally ‘attached’ and when an attachment seems painful or bad it is most readily displaced by another attachment, which an attempt at attention can encourage. > > - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 880-881 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:16:53 AM

The idea of an ‘order’ of virtues suggests itself, although it might of course be difficult to state this in any systematic form. For instance, if we reflect upon courage and ask why we think it to be a virtue, what kind of courage is the highest, what distinguishes courage from rashness, ferocity, self-assertion, and so on, we are bound, in our explanation, to use the names of other virtues. The best kind of courage (that which would make a man act unselfishly in a concentration camp) is steadfast, calm, temperate, intelligent, loving…. This may not in fact be exactly the right description, but it is the right sort of description. > > - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 898-902 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:35:35 AM

‘unity’. Let us now go on to consider, thirdly, the much more difficult idea of ‘transcendence’. All that has been said so far could be said without benefit of metaphysics. But now it may be asked: are you speaking of a transcendent authority or of a psychological device? > > - Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 910-912 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:39:57 AM

Is there, however, any true transcendence, or is this idea always a consoling dream projected by human need on to an empty sky? > > - Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 918-919 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:41:02 AM

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one. > > - Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 922-923 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:53:16 AM

#1 fear - telling myself fantastic stories. But how to trust rrality and not doubt your senses as fantastic? > > - Your Note on page 66 | Location 923 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:54:15 AM

We can see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world. > > - Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 926-928 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:56:33 AM

The link here is the concept of indestructibility or incorruptibility. What is truly beautiful is ‘inaccessible’ and cannot be possessed or destroyed. The statue is broken, the flower fades, the experience ceases, but something has not suffered from decay and mortality. > > - Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 930-932 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:57:44 AM

Link between transcendence and realism > > - Your Note on page 66 | Location 932 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:58:21 AM

It is as if we can see beauty itself in a way in which we cannot see goodness itself. (Plato says this at Phaedrus 250e.) > > - Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 937-938 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 7:59:14 AM

How is one to connect the realism which must involve a clear-eyed contemplation of the misery and evil of the world with a sense of an uncorrupted good without the latter idea becoming the merest consolatory dream? > > - Your Highlight on page 68 | Location 951-952 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 8:01:55 AM

Some psychologists warn us that if our standards are too high we shall become neurotic. It seems to me that the idea of love arises necessarily in this context. The idea of perfection moves, and possibly changes, us (as artist, worker, agent) because it inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy. > > - Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 968-970 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 8:25:09 AM

One may of course try to ‘incarnate’ the idea of perfection by saying to oneself ‘I want to write like Shakespeare’ or ‘I want to paint like Piero’. But of course one knows that Shakespeare and Piero, though almost gods, are not gods, and that one has got to do the thing oneself alone and differently, and that beyond the details of craft and criticism there is only the magnetic non-representable idea of the good which remains not ‘empty’ so much as mysterious. > > - Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 977-980 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 8:26:54 AM

The desire for God is certain to receive a response. My conception of God contains the certainty of its own reality. God is an object of love which uniquely excl > > - Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 988-990 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 8:37:45 AM

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“Impersonal” ? or ultra personal? > > - Your Note on page 72 | Location 1014 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 8:43:16 AM

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Cousin to Arendt’s idea of good as unaware of itself necessarily. > > - Your Note on page 79 | Location 1114 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 9:36:25 AM

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Lol wow > > - Your Note on page 79 | Location 1117 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 9:39:36 AM

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Is this what I’m doing? > > - Your Note on page 79 | Location 1124 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 9:41:23 AM

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Atom bomb > > - Your Note on page 97 | Location 1376 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 3:34:47 PM

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Insuprable = unable to be overcome. This may be true. But does the desire AND attempt to do so reflect goodness? I.e., is the strujggle towards goodness as virtuous as the thing itself? And if so, do we more highly valhe the struggle towards a thing than the thing as an innate occurrence? > > - Your Note on page 107 | Location 1525 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 4:15:50 PM

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Blinded by self - not always in an aggrandizing way IMO. > > - Your Note on page 108 | Location 1531 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 4:18:58 PM

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Fire of Plato’s allegory. > > - Your Note on page 109 | Location 1541 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 4:21:36 PM

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“Difficult and easily corrupted” and yet possibly the more important for that frailty? Frailty not as fault or weakness but as being gentle, inspiring gentleness. Invocing? Instilling? What is the right word? > > - Your Note on page 110 | Location 1557 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 4:55:08 PM

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TB - see note in Obsidian to return to this for article April 2025. > > - Your Note on page 110 | Location 1567 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 5:11:33 PM

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Yes. > > - Your Note on page 111 | Location 1577 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 5:13:26 PM

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I hope so > > - Your Note on page 112 | Location 1589 | Added on Sunday, March 30, 2025 5:15:31 PM