A friend of mine cooked recipes from your wonderful novel The Sea, The Sea. Can we learn anything about philosophy by cooking eggs (badly?)
Dear Victor
Most certainly! Cooking an egg, or eggs, with care and invention, as Charles Arrowby does, is a task which demands attention and unselfing, which Iris Murdoch believed is necessary for us to overcome our ‘fat relentless egos’. And a disaster in the kitchen, such as broken crockery or a burnt saucepan, is akin to the Kantian sublime! Such culinary catastrophe can induce an experience of cosmic misery, or a rueful aesthetic pleasure, and we say, “THIS IS TOO MUCH”
Very best wishes, Lucy Bolton
Lucy Bolton
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Website
The philosophy of Iris Murdoch has shown me a radical form of visual ethics. Her writing on morality, vision, attention and goodness has enabled me to propose a way of looking and understanding cinema that makes a major intervention in the field of film philosophy. Iris Murdoch wrote that film is a major art, and her thinking on attention to art as moral training has profoundly affected my insight into how cinema works as popular moral philosophy.
