Is the truth unbearable?
Dear Killian
To answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would imply that we know what the truth will turn out to be, and of what we will turn out to be capable. I suspect – to echo what Murdoch says of virtue – that it is impossible to limit and foresee what truth will require of us, or what response we might yet muster.
Denis
Denis McManus
University of Southampton, UK
Website
I particularly admire Iris Murdoch’s refusal to allow her thinking to become detached from the reality of our predicament. Ironically, this leads her to commit to concepts that she knows others will find fanciful, but which she believes cannot be abandoned without blinding ourselves to something real, the most obvious example being the Good, ‘the least corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our reflections upon the moral life’ ('The Sovereignty of the Good', p. 13).
