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Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch, 'The Sublime and the Good'

PhilosophyMind

The story behind the card

Iris Murdoch, the Irish-born writer who taught philosophy at Oxford, published twenty-six novels alongside her philosophy and thought the two jobs were closer than her colleagues allowed. The line comes from her 1959 essay 'The Sublime and the Good', and the next sentence continues: love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. Her claim is that we default to a soft version of the world in which other people are supporting characters. Noticing, properly and repeatedly, that they are not is both what good art trains and what goodness consists of.

Türkçe oku
Sevgi, insanın kendinden başka bir şeyin de gerçek olduğunu kavramasıdır ve bunu kavramak son derece zordur.
Iris Murdoch, “Yüce ve İyi”

İrlanda doğumlu Iris Murdoch, Oxford'da felsefe dersleri verdi; felsefenin yanında yirmi altı roman yazdı ve bu iki işin, meslektaşlarının kabul ettiğinden çok daha yakın olduğunu düşündü. Söz, 1959 tarihli “Yüce ve İyi” (The Sublime and the Good) adlı denemesinden; hemen ardından gelen cümle şöyledir: Sevgi, dolayısıyla sanat ve ahlak, gerçekliğin keşfidir. Murdoch'a göre hepimiz dünyayı kendi rahatımıza göre yumuşatır, başkalarını da kendi hikâyemizin yan karakterleri gibi görürüz. Onların da en az bizim kadar gerçek olduğunu tekrar tekrar ve sahiden fark etmeyi bize iyi sanat öğretir; iyilik de zaten bundan ibarettir.

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Background reading: Iris Murdoch
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