Towards an Ideal Limit: Linguistic Authority in the Work of Iris Murdoch

Abstract

Iris Murdoch began her postgraduate degree at Cambridge in 1947, the same year that Ludwig Wittgenstein retired from teaching at Trinity College to concentrate on his writing. Wittgenstein remained a significant presence on campus during Murdoch’s stay, and his ideas came to dominate the thought and conversation of the young Murdoch and her coterie. Murdoch’s interest in Wittgenstein was and remained centred on his 1921 publication, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, despite the fact that Wittgenstein had long since rejected its argument by the time Murdoch arrived in Cambridge.ⁱ The Tractatus claimed, in Wittgenstein’s words, to provide the ‘final solution to the problems of philosophy’ (4). As Murdoch explains it, Wittgenstein’s book claimed two subjects (which she facetiously refers to in her Metaphysics as two ‘godheads’): the world of fact (or what Wittgenstein calls ‘states of affairs’), which can be expressed and discussed in words and combinations of words, and another ‘which is totally independent of that world’ (Metaphysics 27). The reason that philosophy has never resolved the problems surrounding the realms of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics is, according to Wittgenstein, that they lie outside the realm of facts, and, as such, are beyond discussion, philosophical or otherwise.