The Madness of Reality

Abstract

What happens when we encounter the real? One of the central and most appealing ideas in Iris Murdoch’s ethics is her invitation to return to reality and ‘stay’ with it. Murdoch the psychologist also knows how extremely difficult it is. But why should encountering the real feel so difficult? Not only difficult; at times—perhaps essentially?—maddening. In Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), some of the sharpest minds of the past century struggle with a loss of sanity the closer they get to its sub-atomic dimension, as if encountering the finest structure of the world loosened their grip on what they used to call reality. In this paper, following Murdoch and Labatut, I identify a sense of resistance that emerges when we come to a close and still encounter with a reality that we find we cannot grasp, interpreted as a felt conflict between the self and the real. Through a series of dichotomies found in Murdoch’s philosophy (real and unreal, movement and stillness, ordinary and strange) I explore the possible reasons for this resistance, and suggest that Murdoch’s own thought, while calling for a form of intense attention to the real, is better suited at explaining forms of attention where the real is experienced through joy and the possibility of progressive understanding. The difference in affective response, I argue, has moral and metaphysical roots.