http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol7/murdoch.html

 

“Thus, virtue consists in searching for, seeing and knowing the goodness in others, and not in discovering the permanent truth of abstract values and norms. So, according to Murdoch, the modern philosophers’ focus on human will fails to dismantle selfishness, the central dilemma of moral life, which distorts the moral agent’s perception of others. As Murdoch’s moral psychology locates egoism directly at the image-creating processes of human consciousness, this process must be disrupted: “increasing awareness of the ‘goods’ and the attempt to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing unity and interdependence of the moral world” (1997, 375). Hence, virtue consists partially in the complex movement beyond the self, toward what Murdoch calls “virtuous consciousness,” and partially in the developed capacity for love. While Murdoch believes that virtue is the movement beyond the self, nonetheless life often shows that we constantly look after ourselves, day-dreaming in seeking consolation, for, “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world” (1977, 369). Such fantasies about ourselves and the world around us, in Murdoch’s judgment, inflate the ego to the point of becoming a world unto itself preventing us from ever achieving the real knowledge of other people.

While Murdoch opposes idle fantasy she elevates creative imagination, for the faculty of imagination and our aesthetic sensibility help us to generate and rehearse possible situations in which the reality and uniqueness of others can be revealed. The disciplined, creative use of attention and imagination, as opposed to fantasy, becomes central to our aesthetic perception of others, disrupting fantasy-beliefs about them resulting in the transformation of consciousness. ¹ Given these considerations, it is not surprising that Murdoch sees unselfishness as an acquired condition through knowledge of the good because, “Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings … In the moral life the enemy is the fat, relentless ego” (1997, 341-342). For Murdoch, the fundamental moral problem is to acquire clarity of vision as the condition of virtuous consciousness. Virtue comes then through a complex process called “unselfing.” ² A shift occurs through knowledge of the good, from focusing on others’ outward conduct to cultivating one’s own inner life of virtuous consciousness, from choice to vision, from will to consciousness, from outward conduct to inward knowledge.”

The future’s fiction and the past is gone
In a flash of fishes’ scales and eyes
False memories   create playlets  we act in

We work too hard ,ignoring love’s kingdom:
The kingfisher, the  heron,  the dove’s sigh
The future’s fiction and the past is gone

Like  Felix  we will go to earth alone
No Jesuit  priest to pray before we die.
False memories  comfort, when the poet’s done

The acts we do when mindful urge love on
Create direction,  for the future pay
The future’s fiction and the past is gone

God may be a fiction to the  dumb
God may be a monster   to defy
Mixed memories   frozen  hard  our ethics stun

The eye may open like the silver sky
We see with wider vision, feel and sigh
The future’s fiction and the past is done
Our memories   create movies  we act in

 

 

 

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171013-the-people-saving-lost-words

Extract

“Seyfeddinipur has been working with London’s Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library to preserve words that would otherwise be lost. “The doomsday linguistic view is that by the end of this century, in the next 85 years, we will lose 3500 languages – half of the 7000 languages that are spoken today will fall silent,” she says. “We’re losing languages at the same speed at which the world lost its dinosaurs at the fifth mass extinction.” Although it’s a natural process – “people move somewhere, they give up their language and adapt another language, it’s the beauty of language that it’s a social tool,” she argues – it’s now happening at an unprecedented rate. “Because of globalisation and urbanisation and climate change, this process has sped up beyond what we’ve ever seen.”

Going for a song

The newly launched Endangered Poetry Project aims to tackle that loss at another level. “Languages are dying out at an astonishing rate: a language is being lost every two weeks,” says the National Poetry Librarian Chris McCabe. “And each of those languages has a poetic tradition of some sort, whether it’s written or aural – within that poetry will be all the different approaches and styles of writing poetry, as well as everything that poetry can tell us about those people: what they’re interested in; what their concerns are.””