Iris: the essential companion

Yes, you know about the film, her love of John Bayley and her lingering death. But what of Murdoch the novelist and philosopher?

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By the time Judi Dench has put them through the wringer, I expect many cinema audiences will be ready to canonise Iris Murdoch without more ado. She and her husband, John Bayley, already appear on tabloid lists of great lovers of our time, just behind Posh and Becks. Those wanting more evidence of saintliness face an uphill task, so here is a brief guide.

Consult her sour, complex, Gothic, novels. Here, characters, typically isolated in some hothouse away from any economic or cultural surrounds, appear to exist only for playing nasty erotic games with each other. Try, for instance, The Unicorn, set in a country house in Ireland, or The Bell, an exploration of a confrontation between religious faith and suppressed sexuality.

Malcolm Bradbury assembled a useful list of recurring types in Iris Murdoch's books: the Near-Saint and the Failed Priest, the Strange Enchanter and the Love-Prisoner, the Haunted Child and the Deathbed Contemplative, the Bookish Bureaucrat and the Radiant Woman.

Bradbury also caught her tone perfectly in the opening line of his parody: "Flavia says that Hugo tells her that Augustina is in love with Fred" (which meets the understandable, if pedantic, reply: "Who says whom tells her who is in love with whom?"). But a greater obstacle than the novels is the daunting fact that Iris Murdoch was a philosopher. So what did she stand for, and should we stand beside her?

The War: Her philosophy was formed against the background of the Second World War, with all its disillusion and lost ideals. During most of the war she was a member of the Communist Party, but neither that faith nor any more simple faith in western civilisation easily survived the war and its aftermath.

Café society: The existentialist hero – melodramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social – was one product of this climate. This archetypal character of Fifties writing recognises no authority, but takes responsibility for his own free acts of will and creates his own values as he goes along. He sneers, wears leather, loafs about in cafés, and smokes Gauloises. There is a more sinister Christian version, in which he does all these things with a dog-collar.

Flirting with God: From the beginning Murdoch rejected existentialism. Its freedom and its disconnected self were illusions. There had to be "something more": an independent source of standards, a beacon to guide us, a spiritual compass, a discipline. Catholicism and High Anglicanism were quick to offer themselves. She attended retreats and abbeys. Unlike many other philosophers who felt the same need, but exactly like Wittgenstein, she played footsie, but kept shy of full-scale conversion. Nevertheless, there remained the emotional need for hierarchy, transcendence, authority, and submission. She later said that "We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realise to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below". In other words, she wanted a depersonalised religion, a conception of the magnetic good that lay beyond father-figures in the sky, or their prophets on earth.

Plato, The Republic and all that: She found a vocabulary she was looking for in some modern theology, but also in Plato and in the Cambridge philosopher G E Moore. According to Moore, goodness is a supersensible, mysterious quality. It is an object of knowledge, although we can only experience it, and have no account of how we know it. Goodness is magnetic: it inevitably pulls the desires of those who touch it. From Plato, Murdoch added the metaphor of vision: knowledge of the good is internal and spiritual, a quality of consciousness, an unclouded vision. It doesn't matter so much what you do. As the later novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, illustrates, what matters is the drama of moral choice and the search for the good.

The Vile Self: How do we know when we have got it? It is not easy to tell, but we can be sure of one thing: the prime obstacle to pure vision is the dreadful self. The ego is constantly engaged in fantasy and falsity, in exercises of power and of the denial of the reality of things, and particularly the reality of other people. The self is a manipulator and a magus, a Prospero or an Oberon constantly changing its shape and form, blinding us in illusion. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Julius King, a Prospero-like figure, manipulates the weakness and vanity of those about him. This sinister puppet-master insists that goodness is dull, whereas evil "reaches far far away into the depths of the human spirit".

Purity requires transcending all that; exactly as in Christianity it involves transcending original sin. Fortunately, we have examples of success in the truthful vision of the great artist. Great art "renders innocent and transforms into truthful vision our baser energies connected with power, curiosity, envy and sex". The experience of beauty and perfection in art (and sometimes in love) is a kind of key that opens the door to a journey, and assures us of the reality of the goodness or beauty that we then must set ourselves to find. Plato banished the artists from his ideal republic, for he thought they peddled only illusion. Murdoch sees them as promising us the unmediated vision of truth and goodness. Watching kestrels is good, as well.

Seeing like Cézanne: It might sound as if Murdoch is simply following the long line of Western mystics who have contentedly chewed on Platonic metaphors of flame and sun and roses at the centre of things, visible only to the elect. But the clarity of vision she wants is not a vision of something godlike and indescribable. She describes herself as yearning for something more, like the intensity with which Cézanne sees an apple. And who can quarrel with that?

Angel or demon?: She once said that philosophy and literature are utterly distinct – the one aims to clarify and explain, and the other aims at fun. "Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing." On the other hand, she also said that "Literature is an education in how to picture and understand human situations". Ironically, while Murdoch's vision is very noir, very black-and-white, Cézanne would surely have seen more greys. Not so very much of life lies at the edges. So, alas, it is probable that her understanding largely rehearses her own life, since, certainly before her marriage, she was a manipulator, with a long string of parallel and serial affairs, incapable of truth, and seducing and betraying friends and lovers at will. "There was something evil there," lamented her spiritual teacher Donald McKinnon, who was badly singed by her. But when was that an obstacle to canonisation?

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and the author of 'Being Good', published by Oxford University Press.