THE LANGUAGES OF PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND ART IN THE WRITINGS OF IRIS MURDOCH

This thesis develops a complex theoretical model for conceptualizing the relationships among philosophy, religion, and art and, then, examines the philosophical writings and the novels of Iris Murdoch from this perspective. The theoretical model in its most general form is based on the premiss that philosophy, religion, and art can be thought of as conventionally defined linguistic fields analogous to Wittgensteinian language-games. Relations among the linguistic fields are, in turn, analysed as exclusive ("Disparate" Model), inclusive ("Reductionist" Model), or interactional ("Dialectical" and "Tensional" Models), the latter pair being most appropriate for figurative language, the former pair for non-figurative language. The Dialectical and Tensional Models are assimilated, respectively, to Roman Jakobson's theory of metaphor and metonymy as the fundamental poles of language. Emphasis falls upon the continuum between the dialectical-metaphoric and the tensional-metonymic poles as the area in which creative, imaginative activities, such as the writing of novels or deliberation upon ethical problems, takes place. Iris Murdoch's theories of "crystalline" and "journalistic," "open" and "closed" novels and the related ways of thinking are coordinated with this continuum as a paradigm. Moreover, a creative tension is revealed in her philosophical writings between a resisted impetus towards totalizing explanations and the experience of the inherent contingency of philosophical thought. Thus, there is in Murdoch's philosophy, as in her creative prose, an exploration of the dynamics between the dialectical-metaphoric pole of thought and language and the tensional-metonymic pole, with an increasing, though never finally realized tendency towards the tensional-metonymic pole. Detailed analyses of Murdoch's aesthetic and ethical thought and of a wide selection of her novels illustrate this thesis.