VIRTUOUS LIVING - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Thirdly, Murdoch affirmed “a reflexive relation between consciousness and languagein the face of contemporary claims for the primacy of language over consciousness”(see Antonaccio 2001:313). As a staunch defender of the autonomy of the individual,“she worried that the tendency to dissolve consciousness into language wouldconcurrently degrade the status of the individual as a responsible moral agent” (seeAntonaccio 2001:316). 46 Just as we need to retrieve agent-centred Virtue Ethics, so dowe need a language that describes such human experience. Murdoch’s point is takenmost especially when it applies to the importance of story-telling as a means torediscover and reflect on the self’s moral path. Note that the individual who composesthe story is central to the narrative and not the other way round. Does this reflexiveapproach to morality place Murdoch in the existentialist camp?Although Murdoch is not an outspoken existentialist, her attitude remains ambivalent.For example, she espoused the insights of philosophers of existentialism such as Jean-Paul Sartre, “underlying liberal assumptions about the value of the individual and ofthat individual’s freedom, even though she believed that Sartre’s philosophy failed toprovide the conceptual resource necessary to support those values” (see Antonaccio2001:318). It is noted that Murdoch was drawn to this existentialist morality andpolitical passion that accompanied the “… ‘ethics of resistance’ against political andsocial tyranny” (Antonaccio 2001:318). Murdoch observed in her book Metaphysicsas a Guide to Morals (1987) that Sartre had a “vision’ of “the heroic consciousness,the individual self, inalienably and ineluctably free, challengingly confronting thegiven, in the form of existing society, history, tradition, and other people” (seeAntonaccio 2001:318). This “vision” was dominant in most of Europe followingWorld War II and caused Murdoch to be “preoccupied with the problem of freedomas it pertained to the irreducibility of the individual and its refusal to be submerged inany form of totality” (Antonaccio 2001:318). These contextual influences led toMurdoch’s rejection of community-based morality that might rationally suffocate theindividual’s conscience. Of course, she did not realise that this rejection was a result46 The paradigm shift in language from being mediatory between persons to creating persons is afeature of the postmodern era and is sometimes called the “linguistic turn”. Benhabib (1992) hasargued that the focus is no longer on the epistemic subject or on the private contents of itsconsciousness, but on the public, signifying activities of collection of subjects (Benhabib 1992:208).Murdoch and Taylor maintain that such consideration of language reduces the individual to an“effect” rather than a participant who creates language and experiences. The individual is effectivelydecentred and subjected to the linguistic system (see Antonaccio 2001:316).139