The uses of dialogue
Renford Bambrough
ACASTOS: TWO PLATONIC DIALOGUES by Iris Murdoch
Chatto & Windus, £8.95 Nose"
Tom Stoppard says that he writes dia' logue because it is the only respectable way of contradicting oneself. Philosophers find the dialogue form serviceable because they need to present complexities that a plain prose account will always simplify or mYs' tify. The same is true of poets, playwrights and novelists. Iris Murdoch, who pursues all four callings, has written thousands of pages of dialogue designed to represent what she calls the jumble that is the world and man and woman and God and nature, but also to seek in it or beyond it the unity and order that belong to Spinoza's God-or- Nature. In A Word Child and in her play The Three Arrows she combined dialogue with character and circumstance to give vivid expression to ideas akin to those more formally stated in her philosophical essays, and especially in The Sovereignty of Good. That book was highly praised by this and other reviewers in these and other columns in 1970. She would have seemed supremely capable of writing Platonic dia- logues if she had not written any Platonic dialogues.
An unsympathetic critic might say that Miss Murdoch has written dialogues be- cause they are a respectable way of raising Philosophical issues without facing the responsibility of following them through. Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art and Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Reli- gion give some grounds for this suspicion, but the comment would be doubly unfair. The official themes and some others are grappled with more purposefully than the complaint suggests. More far-reachingly, the complaint would arise from a confusion about the means and ends of philosophy. The plaintiff would be a technically minded professional thinker, wedded to the idea of Philosophy as an academic specialism ap- ing or serving the sciences. Such a critic forgets or demeans philosophers like Heraclitus and Lichtenberg who hit nails do heads with aphorisms. He overlooks the elements of fiction and drama and poetry and paradox in more formal philosophers like Descartes and Hume and Plato. If he attends to Wittgenstein, he treats him as a slightly wayward colleague who has not learned to express himself clearly and systematically (probably for lack of a good early training in an honours degree course) or enrols him as a collaborator in the production of theories or theorems in epistemology or philosophy of language. In a word, he ignores the literature that is philosophy, and that is what makes Iris Murdoch worth reading even when she is below her best form. Yet the chief failings of the dialogues are also literary. Character is crude and circumstance not well con- trived. Apart from an incursion by the drunken Alcibiades, copied from the Sym- posium, and a physical attack by the young Plato on a fellow-symposiast, the tension is all meant to derive from Plato's impatience with the level and direction of the discus- sion and from his eventual irruption into it. Plato's thoughts are approximately Plato- nic. Otherwise there is much confusion of identity between the author, her charac- ters, the historical personages on whom some of them are based, and a few fourth pa. rries who nominally have no role in the td ialogues at all. 'Socrates' cannot be Socr- es, since too much of what he says is drawn from Wittgenstein, and from the elements in Wittgenstein's thought that are most overtly anti-Socratic, such as his Pposition to the search for definitions of common essences. Anachronism of style and allusion is as pervasive as anachronism of doctrine. The title themes are wide enough and permanent enough to deserve constant revival, but it is disconcerting in conversations set in the fifth century BC to hear almost literal allusions to Marx, the New English Bible and the holocaust, unless they are managed with the tact that conceals tact.
Worst of all, the speeches are not well written. The voices of the characters are not individualised, and they speak too much like too many of the people we all know, with their 'sort of and their 'you know' and their substitution of 'like' for `as'. This aggravates what would have been a problem without it, that most of the time the voice is not that of Plato or Socrates or Callistos Ca beautiful youth') or Timonax CA socially conscious youth') but that of Miss Murdoch herself, repeating the mes- sage that is familiar from The Sovereignty of Good and The Fire and the Sun: that art is thinking and loving is knowing, that to know the world is to love the world, that there is a Good but not a God. Even so, the upshot is sometimes hazy, and there is a sense of strain to match the belief of Acastos and his creator that religion is `perpetual work' with no time off. A Shavian introduction, though it would have been a confession of failure, would have been useful. Plato would have been able to incorporate the introduction into the dia- logue, like his myth of Er and his myth of the charioteer. The book as it stands will give many people the agreeable illusion of thinking hard about high questions. Some nails were well hammered in the parts, but few readers will be much enlightened by the wholes.
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