‘Nothing to do’: Iris Murdoch and Happiness

Abstract

This chapter examines Murdoch’s thinking on happiness and goodness, and highlights her repeated attempts to think about happiness in terms of different kinds of ‘holiday’: as a form of escape, as a temporary moral or emotional reprieve, or as a breathing space that is conducive to and essential to thinking, writing, and morality itself. I begin with a discussion of happiness, psychoanalysis, and regression in The Nice and the Good, thinking about the ethics of escapism in relation to Shakespeare and in relation to Murdoch’s post–World War II context. My account of The Philosopher’s Pupil shows the thickening of Murdoch’s concepts of happiness, understanding it in relation to Christianity, grace, and fallenness. My extended consideration of The Good Apprentice considers happiness in this text in relation to Murdoch’s philosophical writing, and her thinking on fiction, reality, and imagination. These sections also think further about happiness, ethics, and politics.