자아의 환상과 위안, 사랑의 정확한 시선: Iris Murdoch (1970), The Sovereignty of Good

Murdoch, I. (1970 초판/2014 Routledge Great Minds Edition). The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge.
아이리스 머독. 이병익 옮김. (2020). 선의 군림. 이숲.
 
# 멋지시다고 생각해온 선생님이 '인생 책을 찾은 것 같다'고 하시며 번역자를 초청하여 모임을 주선하셨다. 참석하기로 했다. 시험공부와 논문 준비를 멈추고 이틀 동안 머독을 읽었다.
   문장이 유려하면서도 내용이 깊이가 있어서 잘 이해하지 못하고 놓친 부분이 많은 것 같다. 주요 비판 대상으로 삼는 당대 분석철학과 실존주의 사상, 그리고 다채롭게 해석하며 인용하는 고전적 철학자들에 대한 나의 이해가 얕고, 중요하게 다루는 예술에 대한 체험도 내게는 부족하다. 하지만 어렴풋하게라도 내가 의미 있게 받아들인 내용을 노트한다.
 
 
외적인 행동은 변함이 없지만, 내면에서 도덕적인 시선의 변화가 있는 경우를 생각해보자. 며느리(D)에 대한 자신의 부정적인 시선을 고치려 애쓰는 시어머니(M)가 있다. 자신이 편견과 비교심에 사로잡혀 있음을 반성하면서, 며느리가 사실은 "시끄러운 것이 아니라 쾌활한, 성가시리만큼 유치한 것이 아니라 유쾌하게 천진한..." 것이라고 보고자 한다. 그는 대상을 있는 그대로 정확하게 보려고 노력하며, 이는 동시에 사랑과 공정함의 시선으로 보려고 노력하는 것이다. 자아의 편견과 환상, 자기위안, 이기심의 베일에 가려 잘 보이지 않는 실재하는 세상을 향해 시선을 옮기는 것이다. 어떤 외적인 행동보다도 이러한 탈-자아의 시각이 도덕에 근본적이다.

What M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly. (p. 22) ... When M is just and loving she sees D as she really is. (p. 36)

We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue. (p. 82)

In intellectual disciplines and in the enjoyment of art and nature we discover value in our ability to forget self, to be realistic, to perceive justly. We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real. (p. 88)

 
초월이란 이렇게 자아를 넘어선 객관적 세상을, 그리고 궁극적으로는 선을 바라보는 것이다.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful. (p. 91)

I think there is a place both inside and outside religion for a sort of contemplation of the Good, not just by dedicated experts but by ordinary people: an attention which is not just the planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue. This attempt, which is a turning of attention away from the particular, may be the thing that helps most when difficulties seem insoluble, and especially when feelings of guilt keep attracting the gaze back towards the self. This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted. (pp. 98-99)

 
도덕철학은 자아가 쉼 없이 작동하는 이기적인 에너지라는 사실에서 출발하여, 이러한 자아로부터의 정화와 전회가 어떻게 가능한지 물어야 한다.

The problem is to accommodate inside moral philosophy, and suggest methods of dealing with the fact that so much of human conduct is moved by mechanical energy of an egocentric kind. In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego. Moral philosophy is properly, and in the past has sometimes been, the discussion of this ego and of the techniques (if any) for its defeat. (p. 51)

... one of the main problems of moral philosophy might be formulated thus: are there any techniques for the purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish, in such a way that when moments of choice arrive we shall be sure of acting rightly? (p. 53)

 
자연과 예술의 아름다움은 자기초월을 가능하게 한다. 많은 예술은 자기위안적 환상이지만 훌륭한 예술은 우리 자신을 넘어서서 독립적으로 실재하는, 객관적인 세상을 보여준다.

I shall start by speaking of what is perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for ‘unselfing’, and that is what is popularly called beauty. ... Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience arid change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. (p. 82)

A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced. More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees. (p. 83)

A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, ... (p. 83)

To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic’. (p. 63)

What is learnt here is something about the real quality of human nature, when it is envisaged, in the artist’s just and compassionate vision, with a clarity which does not belong to the self-centred rush of ordinary life. (pp. 63-64)

Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same quality of detachment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except the things which are seen. Beauty is that which attracts this particular sort of unselfish attention. It is obvious here what is the role, for the artist or spectator, of exactness and good vision: unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention. It is also clear that in moral situations a similar exactness is called for. I would suggest that the authority of the Good seems to us something necessary because the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self. (p. 64)

 
예술은 인생과 세상의 덧없음과 덕의 불가분한 관계를 보여준다.

These arts, especially literature and painting, show us the peculiar sense in which the concept of virtue is tied on to the human condition. They show us the absolute pointlessness of virtue while exhibiting its supreme importance; the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue. The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe. (p. 84)

... human life is chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, and also of comedy, and of painting to show us suffering without a thrill and death without a consolation. Or if there is any consolation it is the austere consolation of a beauty which teaches that nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous. (p. 85)

 
자유란 환상으로부터의 해방이다. 사랑, 달리 말해 실재를 보는 시선이다.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called ‘will’ or ‘willing’ belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love. (p. 65)

97 Freedom is, I think, a mixed concept. The true half of it is simply a name of an aspect of virtue concerned especially with the clarification of vision and the domination of selfish impulse. The false and more popular half is a name for the self-assertive movements of deluded selfish will which because of our ignorance we take to be something autonomous. (p. 97)

 
자아에 대한 탐구는 중요하지 않다. 그 환상의 메커니즘을 탐구하는 것이 아니라 그것을 넘어선 실재에 대한 애착이 우리를 해방한다.
# 동의. 자기 심리를 분석하는 작업들은 자아를 벗어나기 위해 필요한 경우에만 활용하면 될 수단적인 것이다.

In such a picture sincerity and self-knowledge, those popular merits, seem less important. It is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power. ‘Self-knowledge’, in the sense of a minute understanding of one’s own machinery, seems to me, except at a fairly simple level, usually a delusion. (pp. 65-66)