Iris Murdoch's ethical theory at the juncture of philosophy, mysticism and literature

The main source of motivation that inspired Iris Murdoch to come up with a new ethical theory is the necessity for a philosophy to give a new meaning to life in general and moral philosophy to reconstruct the societal values and make them mainstream in the face of "cultural degeneration" that has been taking place especially in Western societies in the twentieth century. Murdoch's ethical theory at the crossroads of philosophy-mysticism-literature is presented in this study which mainly argues that Murdoch's doctrine has come about as a result of religion, art and ethics being jointed like a trivet. In this context, it will be presented that Murdoch's philosophical corpus which appears to be very fragmented has, in fact, a coherent philosophical systematique in which Murdoch builds her ethical theory called "loving gaze" upon the notion of "attention". She argues that the individual living in the solipsist fantasy world can only get close to the truth and away from their world of illusion by acknowledging the 'other' through 'love' and 'attention' and because it is possible for the new morality to emerge by means of religion, it should continue to exist but be demythologised. Murdoch, who points out that philosophy and teachings of the Far East could be useful in the process of demyhologising Christianity, disregards the concept of a personalised God in her formulation that she named as "Christian Budism" and "Godless Theology", instead replaces it with Platonician Good that shares common attributes with the God of traditional theism. Good is not a God or a new variation of God, but what God symbolises. Building upon such a metaphysical ground, Murdoch's ethical theory aims to purify the self from selfish desires and achieve "inner purification" by directing it towards a transcendent Good. Therefore, the discipline that has a set of elements closely related with the notion of "ascesis" is described as the practice of "unselfing" because it leaves the door open to spiritual practices and literary genres that have been transformed into spiritual practices in the Murdoch perspective. Accordingly, one of the main components of Murdoch's ethical theory is art as a manifestation of "love", so much so that she, as she herself has witnessed as a literary person, sees literature as an ethical force and the literary genre helping her along the way is the novel as it is an "ethical form" that is the most appropriate to represent the "discursive truth".