The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea

The chapter explores Iris Murdoch’s engagement with Buddhist worldview offered by one of her most acclaimed and philosophically sophisticated novels, whose diegetic core rehearses a number of Buddhist tenets by inscribing them within the fictional fabric of a sympathetic and simultaneously ironical postmodern aesthetics. It argues that Murdoch’s anti-dogmatic Buddhism is deeply woven into the rhetorical grain of her narrative and that, in such terms, it provides a revision of Western humanism by re-launching the Anglo-Saxon debate on moral philosophy against the predominance of Kantian rationalism and utilitarian logic at work in mainstream liberal thought, thus leading the discourse from morality – the domain of obligatory action – to the wider field of ethics, which embraces the question of good and goodness beyond the immediate realm of practical action and human well-being.