Getting the measure of Murdoch's Good

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S Y M P O S I U M : 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y O F IR IS M U R D O C H ' S T H E S O V E R E I G N T Y O F G O O D
'soul -picture' 'typical outward behavior pattern' 'to copy a right action is to act rightly' ' ' I t is the traditional inspiration of the philosopher, but also his traditional vice, to believe that all is one

Murdoch On God and Good
unattainable, try as the historical individual imperfectly may. This activity is not parasitic on the outside. It is serious.
You have to do it for yourself, if not by yourself.
Here is the passage: None of what I am saying here is particularly new: similar things have been said by philosophers from Plato onward; and appear as commonplaces of the Christian ethic, whose centre is an individual. To come nearer home in the Platonic tradition, the present dispute is reminiscent of the old arguments about abstract and concrete universals. My view might be put by saying: moral terms must be treated as concrete universals. And if someone at this point were to say, well, why stop at moral concepts, why not claim that all universals are concrete, I would reply, why not indeed? Why not consider red as an ideal end-point, as a concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love? (p. 29) In this paper, I hardly talk about love, something that is so central to Murdoch's alternative .
Instead, I say something about her easy-to-miss appeal to the concrete universal, a notion now almost banished from contemporary discussion For there is reason to think that Murdoch's conception of the concrete universal is inflected more by British Idealism than by Hegel directly, although this inflection is not explicit ("I am not, in spite of the philosophical backing which I might here resort to, suggesting anything in the least esoteric", p. 30)-and this difference is philosophically significant. But, as I show, it is also inflected by Wittgenstein in ways I try to illustrate in the middle part of the paper. Following Murdoch's tendency, method even, I draw an analogy. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein's discussion of the Standard Metre in the Philosophical Investigations helps us to get the measure of what Murdoch is up to with her talk of concrete universality and ultimately too of the Good, more a concern of the other two papers that make up Sovereignty: 'On God and 'Good and 'The Sovereignty of the Good over Other Concepts' as well her of 1992 masterpiece Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. I then introduce a hopefully not terminal problem for my exegesis and so for the analogy: Murdoch is not wholly sympathetic to all aspects of Wittgenstein's programme.
In the last part of the paper, I offer a way around this problem by picking up a different Wittgensteinean strand.
This could have been lifted from Murdoch's own work, but instead I appeal to Chapter  MacKinnon and Murdoch's intellectual relationship, and I can only hint at overlaps here, a strategy that is justified I think by the content of my argument and by the passage above, around which the whole paper spins. 4 2 | SOME QUESTIONS Three questions immediately arise on reading the passage above. Which old arguments ? How near to home ?
Why moral terms? Start with the first.
Murdoch is referring to the problem of individuality, although this might not at once be clear from its textual setting (I will return to this issue in Section 4 when I pick up her reference to the "Christian" ethic). This problem concerns what makes something individual an individual, a unified entity distinct from other individuals. Two distinct roses could instantiate all the same properties-both might be red, have variegated petals, the 'same' damask scent and so on; they might be qualitatively identical in all respects. What makes them distinct over and above the properties they instantiate?
Two classes of solution have been proposed: non-qualitative and qualitative. individual, I reply, can possibly know what he is, and the idea that all his reality falls within his knowledge is even ridiculous…But, as he really is, to know perfectly his own nature would be, with that nature, to pass in knowledge endlessly beyond himself. For example, a red-haired man who knew himself utterly would and must, starting from within, go on to know everyone else who has red hair, and he would not know himself until he knew them…Nothing in the whole and in the end can be external, and everything less than the Universe is an abstraction from the whole, an abstraction more or less empty, and the more empty the less self-dependent. Relations and qualities are abstractions, and depend for their being always on a whole, a whole which they inadequately express, and which remains always less or more in the background. (Bradley 1908, pp. 580-581) 9 I say a little about the distinction between internal and external relations as far as Murdoch's epistemology goes in closing, although I say nothing at all about the fragile status of individuals in Bradley's whole, which tends to monism. 10 For now, I will make a distinction that Stern borrows from Bosanquet and that is, I think, a handy gloss. 11 I picture it below (again leaving aside all consideration of the ontology of the relations represented). The British Idealists conceived of the concrete universal as the universal in the form of a world rather than in the form of a class. Where the universal has the form of a world (Figures 1 and 2), individuals exemplifying it are interrelated and mutually interdependent. 12 So, to answer the question "How 'near to home'? , " it is likely that Murdoch is thinking of the British Idealists.
While she certainly counts Hegel as a Platonic thinker-in the passage, recall it is the Platonic tradition she has in mind-she criticizes his dialectical system as "omnivorous" and in a way that would hardly seem apt to illustrate the treatment of concepts that she is recommending: Hegel's Reason proceeds by a continuous discarding of possibilities; doubts, ambiguities, alternatives, ramblings of any kind are officially not permitted and cannot be left 'lying around'. Seen in this way, the process seems not an increasingly widening, increasingly well-lighted all-embracing prospect, but rather an entry into some dark narrowing almost mechanical confinement…. (MGM, p. 227) 13 The British Idealist alternative, in contrast, might well be thought to have an embracive aura, at least as insofar as the universal is understood to form a world. And perhaps Murdoch is even thinking in particular of Bradley. We know that she writes about Bradley in her journals in 1945 and 1948 and then again in 1951, when she reminds herself to reread Bradley and see his attack on simple ideas. In Oxford, in the summer term of 1952, she gives as yet untraceable lectures entitled "Some Problems in Bradley," and she mentions that she is considering writing a book on him The concrete universal in the form of a class-individual roses each instantiate the substantial universal rose in their own determinate way (i.e., through particularization of abstract universals, e.g., colour) F I G U R E 2 The concrete universal rose in the form of a world-individual roses are interrelated. Individual colours are concrete not abstract in two letters to Raymond Queneau dated that year. 14 Tantalizingly, there are even literal audible rings between IP and Ethical Studies (although I do not suggest any conceptual attunement), particularly essay VI on Ideal Morality : Morality is an endless process and therefore a self-contradiction; and being such it does not remain standing by itself, but feels the impulse to transcend its existing reality. It is a self-contradiction in this way: it demands for what cannot be. (1962, p. 312) Scholarly work is needed to unearth these connections and echoes in full. In particular, we might draw on her journal writings as well as her 1992 comments on Bradley and wonder. How did Murdoch read Hegel and Bradley? Did she read the former through the latter? Given Bradley's tendency towards monism, what dimensions of his scheme might have survived the caution sounded in her epigraph (she herself notes that she is monist by temperament [GG, p. 50]-perhaps the epigraph is also a reminder to herself)? Finally, suppose Murdoch did prefer Bradley to Hegel (as the present paper assumes), would she have been justified in doing so? As all these questions overrun any capacity I presently have 15 to answer them (and until Murdoch's Bradley lectures turn up), I return only to Murdoch's rhetorical "why not indeed?" Murdoch wants, but does not argue for, the thought that all terms might be treated as concrete universals, including colour terms. I think it does not take much imagination to appreciate how the painter's grasp of red should be progressive and sustained by continuous, detailed conscious reflection on and attention to red in the world, an example she develops in the sentences following our passage. The child's 'red' belongs to buses and post boxes, blood and apples. But what is 'red' for the great painter? His concept (she elsewhere mentions Cezanne) is deeply complicated and highly elaborated, an increasingly widening , all-embracing prospect tied up, surely, with all the hues and light and shade and in substances of all kinds in all conditions and in living things and much more besides.
The great artist treats red as an individual object to be infinitely learned and his or her own grasp of it as infinitely perfectible. But 'red' is an abstract universal for Hegel. Now, earlier I noted some biographical detail relevant to the thought that Murdoch's concrete universal is in the form of an all-embracing world (not in the form of a class), but these dates are significant for another reason. This is the period when Murdoch is first exposed to Wittgenstein's thought. Fragments of the Philosophical Investigations are passed to her by Elizabeth Anscombe. In 1948, she records reading it in a letter to a friend ("it is like nothing on sea or land"). 16 And she helps Anscombe with aspects of the translation, which appears in 1953. John Haldane has written of Peter Geach that his precocious and ardent study of McTaggart (and particularly McTaggart's treatment of community) may have prepared him for Wittgenstein's later work. 17 It is tempting to wonder whether Murdoch's study of Bradley might not have imaginatively shaped her reception of Wittgenstein. 18 And with that in mind, we can finally ask, although briefly (see Wiseman, this volume), why moral terms?
The emphasis on language is of course symptomatic of the general linguistic turn that animates mid-century analytic philosophy, but the import is peculiarly Wittgensteinean. Although words stay the same (and recall, this may mislead us), the concepts those words express, when used by a historical individual, deepen over the course of a life and acquire structure. But on this view, concepts are personal-the concept that an individual's use of a word expresses on an occasion is a function of the user's history. This understanding of concepts and words then-namely, as expressive of concepts that are personal-contrasts with the genetic analysis of meaning, behaviourist in spirit, where words lock onto typical outward patterns. But it also diverges from an Ordinary Language approach to meaning, understood as an impersonal reservoir or network that anyone can dip into (p. 29). However, meaning is rarely ordinary for Murdoch; what everyday words mean becomes increasingly personal as an individual language user's life unfolds.

| AN ANALOGY: THE STANDARD METRE
To draw out the respect in which Murdoch's idealist-inflected notion of concrete universality is also involves an increasing revelation of degrees of excellence and often a revelation of there being in fact little that is very good and nothing that is perfect. Increasing understanding of human conduct operates in a similar way. We come to perceive scales, distances, standards, and may incline to see as less than excellent what previously we were prepared to 'let by'. The idea of perfection works thus within a field of study, producing an increasing sense of direction […] The idea of perfection is also a natural producer of order. In its light we come to see that A, which superficially resembles B, is really better than B. And this can occur, indeed must occur, without our having the sovereign idea in any sense 'taped'. In fact, it is in its nature that we cannot get it taped. This is the true sense of the 'indefin- Both the idea of perfection and the Good are noted here. Absolute good has the attribute of being perfect. The idea of perfection moves us in the direction of the idea perfected. I say more about the relation between the idea of perfection and the Good (as I understand it) below. For now, reconsider Murdoch's incredulity at Hampshire's supposition that to copy a right action is to act rightly .
There ought to be profound difficulties here by Murdoch's reckoning. I need to know which action is right (this is an epistemic problem, which human psychology makes immensely, if not intractably, difficult thinks Murdoch-'What is the form that I am supposed to copy?) I need to know what particular course I should take at a context (a pragmatic problem which is augmented by specificities of space and time and by politics). And both difficulties are at once compounded when an unrealistic concept empiricism is replaced by a treatment of concepts as private concrete universals, where a historical individual, not a Kantian agent, attempts to copy that which they settle on, with difficulty, as "right" (or good). For instance, suppose I want to write like Shakespeare. To borrow Murdoch's way of framing things, that is all very well to say. Copying cannot be in question here: "beyond the details of craft and criticism there is only the magnetic non-representable idea of the good which remains not 'empty' so much as mysterious. And thus too in the sphere of human conduct"; "one has got to do the thing oneself alone and differently" (p. 63) 19 The analogy I want to develop takes off from a certain indefinability that pertains also to the Standard Metre.
Wittgenstein remarks of that peculiar, individual thing: There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is a metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the Standard Metre in Paris. But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre rule Section 50, 1953 p. 25).
As Diamond (2001)  (Philosophical Investigations, might be thought. Kripke disagrees: "This seems a very 'extraordinary property', actually" (Kripke, 1980, p. 54). (What relevance this lengthy quotation serves will hopefully become plain later): Part of the problem which is bothering Wittgenstein is, of course, that this stick serves as a standard of length and so we can't attribute length to it. Be this as it may (well, it may not be), is the statement 'stick S is one meter long', a necessary truth? Of course, its length might vary in time. We could make the definition more precise by stipulating that one meter is to be the length of S at time t 0 . Is it then a necessary truth that stick S is one meter long at time t 0 ? Someone who thinks that everything one knows a priori is necessary might think: 'This is the definition of a meter. By definition, stick S is one meter long at t 0 . That's a necessary truth.' But there seems to me no reason so to conclude, even for a man who uses the stated definition of 'one meter'. For he's using this definition not to give the meaning of what he called the 'meter', but to fix the reference.
[…] There is a certain length which he wants to mark out. He marks it out by an accidental property, namely that there is a stick of that length. Someone else might mark out the same reference by another accidental property. But in any case, even though he uses this to fix the reference of his standard of length, a meter, he can still say, if heat had been applied to this stick S at t 0 , then at t 0 stick S would not have been one meter long. (Kripke, 1980) Now, for Diamond, Kripke takes two missteps here, at least so far as Wittgenstein exegesis goes. First, he misunderstands Wittgenstein's point concerning the Standard's peculiar role in the language game of measuring with a metre rule. But he also makes an attendant mistake about the intelligibility of the notion of identity when applied to length. Consider this: There is something odd about the person who in response to the question puts their hand on their head and says ! Why so?
On the one hand, they seem to have a notion of length as intransitive-as something that can be made sense of without appeal to a metric, that is in comparison with some other thing. Rather, they seem to suppose that their length is the length of the space they fill, something which has a 'length' tout court. On the other hand, they recognize that length is a peculiarly transitive notion. Things are reckoned to have length only in relation to other things, with which, along that dimension, they can be compared, a dimension that thereby becomes available. The oddness of the present case then is that the self-measuring subject is using his or herself as his or her own Standard, but this 'Standard' cannot play a role in the game of measuring, which involves comparing lengths of different, other things.
It is plain that Kripke has an intransitive conception of length in mind. He supposes that we use a rod to fix a length at time t, which we thereafter designate as the Standard Metre. It is a priori that the Standard Metre is a metre, although it only contingently had that length-we could have chosen another rod. But again, what the oddness of the above case shows is that we cannot choose just anything. This is because the Standard Metre only has "life" in the context of certain practices that themselves have a form-practices of measuring, comparing, sizing up etc. Manifold other artefacts articulate these materially and must themselves be mastered-pencils, protractors, fences, lasers.
And countless other practices intersect with these practices and artefacts and sustain them and make them intelligible. But critically, the same is true of the concept "length." On this view, the concept 'length' has no life independent of these practices. So, there is no intransitive notion that regions of empty space (say) can be said to have, as a property, tout court. And yet, the intransitive conception is crucial for Kripke. I return to intransitivity below. For now, I sketch the analogy I have in mind (sketch being a fair designation I hope-the link is presented only schematically).  On the Wittgensteinean alternative, in contrast, the emphasis is not on individual things (which could be one way or another) or on classes of things but on the forms of life in which those things participate and which thereby come to constitute the form of a world. In the case of the Standard Metre, there are forms of life that are intelligible in light of it and that can go on because of it. So, there is, in this respect, an interrelation between the diverse acts of measuring, lining and sizing up and so on that make up the world-form, which the Standard Metre sustains. That is, there is an interrelation between the child in the playground lining up sticks, the baker weighing flour and the astronomer and her telescope. On this view, other material metre sticks, where they exist, are related to the Standard and have a length not because they form a class but because they are interrelated through the forms of life that the Standard Metre sustains and the practices in which they participate and make possible. Now, Murdoch insists that it is important to measure and compare things to know just how good they are. But unlike the length of something that can easily be measured, at least by one who participates in the form of life where such a practice is sustained, it is often (although not always) difficult to tell if something is good (Which form am I supposed to copy?). Certainly, goodness cannot be verified. But here, our ideas of perfection can move us in some direction of assessment and of measurement, Murdoch thinks. At the same time, recall that these ideas themselves deepen and become elaborated with the progress of a life-I have a different image of courage at 40 than I had at 20. But accordingly, the acts that and people who fall under that description ought not to be conceived to form a class; they do not resemble. 20 Rather, I come to see them as related as my idea of courage deepens. And I come to see that quality (courage) as related to others (honesty), and I see those qualities and their manifestations against the backgrounds in which they appear, which I also come to appreciate in ever-increasing particularity and detail (what looked like reticence was honesty). My concern, that is, widens, ramifies and complicates; it becomes detailed. But it also modulates. For as part of this ever-widening process, some connections are sundered as reassessment prompts redescription (what looked courageous was foolhardy). And this shifting is endless and ongoing. And for Murdoch, where the movement is towards knowledge of what is real, the achievement is moral.
There is a great deal more to say here-I have simplified to a very large degree. Indeed, I have oversimplified.
But I want to keep the analogy itself uncomplicated and schematic for now. This is because it is easy to at once raise a problem for my exegesis and analogy-at least so far as the Wittgensteinean dimensions of Murdoch's concrete universal are concerned.

| A DIFFICULTY
I have suggested that the idea of perfection acts as a standard, one's grasp of which, and evolution towards, shifts and alters and can be deepened over the progress of a life. Good reigns sovereign here because, just as the Standard Metre gives life to diverse but inter-related practices (weighing, sizing up etc. etc.), the Good 'gives life' to "all our struggles for truth and virtue" (MGM, p. 38). Murdoch's analogy with the sun is naturally invited here. It is distant and separate. Things go on in its light and because of it. We know "more or less where the sun is" (GG, p. 70), but we cannot look at it. Likewise with Murdoch's Good. It cannot be defined or represented, but "we are not usually in doubt about the direction in which the Good lies" (SGC, p. 97). To be good, to act well, can be an object of intention, even where one does not know "what form to copy"; "Good is the focus of attention when an intent to be virtuous coexists (as perhaps it almost always does) with some unclarity of vision" (GG, p. 70). Absolute good is perfect for Murdoch. It is the pinnacle of our idea of perfection. But just as there are many different ways to measureexemplified in different ways by particular historical individuals at particular places and with whatever is to handthere are many different ways of being good, for example, courageous, kind, insightful, creative, generous and so on. 21 All of these ways are differently realized at different times and places by different individuals living their own lives. But as our grasp of moral concepts deepens, regulated by the idea of the individual concept perfected-that is, the idea of courage-we can come to see, although dimly and with difficulty, those differing ways as themselves interrelated manifestations of the same virtue or quality and those in turn as interrelated manifestations of the Good.

' '
Good as absolute, above courage and generosity and all the plural virtues is to be seen as unshadowed and separate, a pure source, the principle which creatively relates the virtues to each other in our moral lives. In the iconoclastic pilgrimage, …we experience the distance which separates us from perfection and are led to place our idea of it in a figurative sense outside the turmoil of existent being. (MGM, p. 507) I cannot say anything about Murdoch's epistemology here, but it seems she takes our knowledge of the transcendence of the Good to be certain. This is coupled with a view of human psychology, which makes the iconoclastic pilgrimage she describes difficult. Indeed, the very fact of this process is proof for Murdoch of the existence of the Good. where Murdoch articulates what she thinks the task of moral philosophy is. She writes "man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture" ("Metaphysics and Ethics , " E&M, p. 75). This, she thinks, is the process that moral philosophy needs to describe and to analyse. And it is surely what her own critique of Wittgenstein amounts to. The philosophical picture Wittgenstein paints, when taken up a certain way-by the analytic behaviourist existentialist for whom consciousness is "empty" and the will is all-risks the loss of certain concepts: those of the Good, love, consciousness and attention. But this loss amounts not just to a way of describing the world, but as Mark Hopwood insightfully comments, "the loss of a way of being in it , " a loss that is of moral concern (2019, p. 255). And this is because, if I am on the right track, the way in which a person comes to resemble the pictures he makes and valourizes is not best understood as a matter copying those pictures. It is by coming to see the world in light of them; it is by seeing the world in terms of what the picture relates. Wittgenstein's philosophical picture, the way it was taken up by many mid-century Oxford philosophers, relates things in a way that obfuscates certain details and so precipitates their loss.
But this way of reading Murdoch's criticism suggests a different way of elucidating the analogy-one that I think rescues the centrality of the historical individual from the "cage" or apparent rigidity and inflexibility of forms of life.

| A SUGGESTION
To return to the passage that this paper treats, the reader might now see that I myself have missed out a detail.
When Murdoch comments that nothing she is saying is new, she notes that similar things are commonplaces of "the Christian ethic, whose centre is an individual." In what way might Christ, an individual, be considered "a centre"?
It might be thought that moral exemplars are historical individuals that are central to an ethic insofar as they are to be copied or imitated-to wit, they are anointed as the standard to copy. would not exaggerate to say that the painter had made an experience possible for the percipient…he brings out the inwardness of the scene by enabling us so to see it…he does so not simply by eliciting the richness of what he views but rather by offering his vision as a supremely effective judgment on the civilisation whose fruits are there displayed before his eyes" (my emphasis, 1974, p. 161) On this conception, the artwork, displaying the artist's way of looking, his vision, makes possible an experience for the percipient that would not otherwise have been possible.
His second example concerns Christ, the centre of the Christian ethic. Christ is not treated as a moral exemplar; his life is not considered an illustration of a principle to be copied. Instead, it is presented as making possible a certain life.
While the artist makes possible a way of seeing, contemplation of the life of Christ (by those, who as he puts it, "receive" the tale of the life of Jesus as a means of coming to see the world in a certain way) "thrusts on human notice," a pattern that is only made available through the action of the individual "through whom in history it is achieved" (p. 163).
Murdoch's analysis is secular, but her treatment of the legacy of Wittgenstein, as well as of repeated notice of our picture-making tendencies, and in particular, where philosophy is concerned, metaphysics as "image-play" (SGC, p. 77), resonates with this conception in ways I can only gesture at here. Pictures, theories and models make possible for us certain kinds of experiences, as well certain kinds of lives. And they do this not because they illustrate principles to be copied, nor even because of what they show, but because of what they relate. The "great surprising variety of the world" can be made intelligible and can be seen in light of them-for it is thrust upon our notice by the form of work, itself an achievement of a historical individual (or, as it might be, a collective of individuals). This partly explains Murdoch's preference for realism in art and her contention, which I cannot broach here, that both great art and morality have a common source in a capacity to direct attention to reality, a capacity that, for Murdoch, is love. But pictures also obfuscate and diminish-that which is thrust upon our notice is so thrust at the expense of detail elsewhere, detail that is fine-grained, particular, impossible to depict. And that is why, as Murdoch puts it, we must grow by looking. We always apprehend more than we understand-the detail of our experience is rich and always particular, which is why our ideas are infinitely perfectible. In the case of Wittgenstein's extraordinary creative achievement, the way in which his philosophical picture relates-or seems to-especially where this picture is realized as a method in philosophy, risks, for Murdoch, the loss of a central feature of our moral lives and humanity: the inner. At the same time, Murdoch follows Wittgenstein. Look, don't think.
6 | MURDOCH'S REALISM I have offered a very early, and tentative, approach to reading Murdoch's conception of the concrete universal, although perhaps only to raise more questions than I can answer. To continue that trend, I want to say something in closing about Murdoch's realism that will, I hope, at least unify some of the still distinct threads running unconnected through the paper.
If I am on the right track, Murdoch's take on the concrete universal is inflected by both Wittgenstein and British Idealism. As the latter is Hegelian, we ought not to be surprised to find fragments of the original also animating Murdoch's thought, itself notoriously omnivorous-and it is here of course that the ideas of history and progress have a home. However, I have suggested, without defending the thought, that concepts are akin to noemata for Murdoch-they are ways of looking that can be perfected. Here, formal objects, including philosophical theories, the lives of individuals and Art, have a special generative role to play, not because they illustrate principles to copy but because of the ways in which they make the world intelligible in light of them and the forms of life and experience they sustain or make possible.
Earlier, I left aside all discussion of the nature of the relations that connect the idealist concrete universal. For Murdoch, however, if the image of her philosophy that I am projecting is to have traction and is to make sense within her wider ethical picture and moral philosophy, at least some of the relations that our elaborated concepts picture or represent must be external. We are distinct and separated from other individuals and things. We are spatiotemporally limited, and our experience is likewise. We encounter but a small fraction of the world, ever contingent and subject to change. Our situation is tragic. 24 But to this extent, perhaps there are aspects of the Kripkean treatment of the metre stick that we would do well to recover.
Recall that, for Kripke, it is contingent which rod we choose as our standard. Likewise, for Murdoch, it is largely contingent which picture (noemata) we choose to put and by whose lights we choose to live our lives individually and collectively. Some pictures are false-they are valourized by a false love, or they are the emanations of a false and corrupting system (capitalism for instance; there are glimmers of Murdochian Marxism throughout Sovereignty). In such cases, the lives that such false pictures make possible can at best only make room for false forms of transcendence. "False conceptions are often generalized, stereotyped and unconnected. True conceptions combine just modes of judgment and ability to connect with an increased perception of detail" (SGC, p. 96).
At the same time, Murdoch takes it that we really do have an intransitive conception of the Good. And this is where she agrees with G.E. Moore. The Good is sovereign. We are certain of its existence and primitively oriented in its direction. Despite our fallen, easily corruptible human nature, despite our limited ideas, infinitely perfectible, we feel its magnetic pull. This is metaphysics: "there is more than this"; "the spark is real" (GG, p. 73). 25 blance. The concept of a game (for instance) might be treated as a concrete universal insofar as all its concrete manifestations cannot be reduced to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, although they all resemble in some way. It is true that the metre stick analogy does not line up so favourably with this alternative as it might be thought that a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for being a metre stick is to resemble the standard in Paris. The way I pitched the analogy with the metre stick is, however, different. On a class conception, which admittedly is somewhat artefactual (and here, the game conception is, I think, to be preferred), it is allowed that different metre sticks are individual metre sticks insofar as they are particularizations of the universal, metre stick, which is essentially concrete. But my analogy was meant to emphasize rather a conception of a universal in the form of a world, albeit read through a Wittgensteinean lens. So understood, the idea of a game is treated as what sustains and makes possible a huge range of interlocking practices and the associated skills, and indeed virtues and moral concepts associated with those practices. On this view, while there is no family resemblance between a child playing tiddlywinks, an octogenarian checking the racing results in a local newspaper and an adolescent's dejection at not being selected for a squad because of a tendency to cheat, those events, episodes and histories are related. A different way of approaching this same thought is to consider what areas of human life would vanish with the loss of the concept of a game. It is hardly imaginable. What a game is, amounts to, on this view, is not limited to a clustering of various activities whose particular instantiations might intelligibly fall (including metaphorically) under the description "game".
21 It might be argued that there are not many different ways to measure. Yes, I can measure metres in many different contexts, but insofar as I am measuring in metres, there is not variability here. My point, however, concerns measuring practices, which are multifarious and which can be more or less expert. The thought is that the idea of a standard sustains the intelligibility of these that are interrelated because of the standard-"in light of it". 23 Or online here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-totes-meer-dead-sea-n05717 24 See especially "The Sublime and the Good" and "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited" in E&M.
25 I thank Bob Stern for his extraordinary intellectual generosity; both Andr Muller and Andrew Bowyer for sharing their work on Donald MacKinnon with me, which I think promises to unlock so much in Murdoch; Dayna Millar for helping me with material in the Murdoch archives (I am so grateful); my colleagues Joe Saunders and Jeremy Dunham and everyone who participated in the Durham Concrete Universal Workshop; the organizers and audience at the Murdoch Centenary Conference in Kingston, Canada, and particularly David Bakhurst, Lesley Jamieson and Jacqueline Maxwell; and especially Rachael Wiseman for insightful conversation on all of this over many years.