Iris Murdoch was one of the most celebrated novelists and philosophers of the 20th century whose writing is marked by a grim assessment of the “conceptual impoverishment of modern ethical thought.”As Murdoch saw it, humans had gradually lost the ability to grasp the transcendent values that are the source of all meaning: true love, evil, grace and perfection. One solution lay in art, which Murdoch saw as a kind of “practical mysticism”: art that helps us grasp perfection, but in a way that acknowledges how far we have fallen away from it.

We will begin by reading her essay in Encounter magazine in 1961, “Against Dryness”:  a powerful criticism of the individualistic picture of human beings at the heart of our society and a criticism of the ‘dry’ literature that is ineffective in correcting this picture.

This reading group is led by Matthew Rose (Morningside) and Amogha Sahu (Columbia).