It was a dual, almost paradoxical experience of both feeling that something I already know was getting articulated with a level of detail that I am myself incapable of—a level of detail I wasn’t even aware was possible—while also feeling provoked by it.
It is interesting how something can both feel like a clearer picture of what you already know and also a provocation. When an idea that I have had comes back to me in higher resolution, I notice that a lot of the details of how I’ve thought about it fail to add up. I recognize these as my thoughts, but also I see that they show me to be confused.
[W]e can imagine there is a limit where our actions can’t be further improved, and that limit is the Good.
The world has endless detail, variety, and nuance. Any attempt to define the right thing to do in the abstract (saying, for instance, that we should aim for human flourishing) will fail to take reality’s details into account. But when Murdoch says that the aim is to move toward the Good, she isn’t proposing an abstract goal; she’s saying that our aim should be to see reality as clearly as possible. If we can just see reality clearly, we will know what is Good in this specific situation.
[A]s Jane Psmith puts it, “the ‘authentic you’ is an incoherent half-formed ball of mutually contradictory desires and lizard-brain instinct.” (Murdoch calls the authentic you “a tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams.”)
She parts ways with the romantics and the existentialists in that she doesn’t believe in the notion that value comes from within.3 She doesn’t believe that things are good because we like them; she thinks that what is Good is independent of who we are; it is possible for us to feel good about the wrong thing. Hence, we cannot trust our inner voice; we need to figure out if it is right.