Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse by Niklas Forsberg Bloomsbur y, hb, £54.00

What happens to ‘religious experience’ when our wor ds fail to articulate it adequately? Does it cease to be ‘r eligious’? Is it possible to speak of it as an ‘experience’ at all? In the modern era, some have suggested that the r ole and language of art is to express the ineffability of r eligious experience. Yet, if words (like love, good, per fection, or vision) used to describe or indeed cr eate ar t idle, then does the capacity to produce and criticize ar t lose its meaning? In Language Lost and Found, Niklas Forsberg is alive to this problem and helps the reader to see in the novels of Iris Mur doch the limitation and inter rogation of philosophical discourse.

Forsberg explores whether literatur e should be thought of as a vehicle for more significant ideas. In this view, the medium is less important than the message; indeed, the medium rarely comes into view.

Forsberg shows how many r eaders of Mur doch have misinterpreted her work in just this way and have failed to see something ver y impor tant to Murdoch: her view of ar t and love. Forsber g uncovers how, for Murdoch, words like ‘love’ and ‘good’ are not disposable, and the meaning of their concepts ar e resistant to our grasp.

Why are these wor ds so r esistant to our understanding of them? Forsberg argues that Murdoch’s claim is that the r esistance we encounter in meaning these words in the way we wish to mean them is an indication that we have lost an appr opriate use for them in moder nity — the meaning of our wor ds change as we do. So how do we r ecover an ancient foreign language that we do not know how to teach ourselves to speak? Murdoch’s response is to recover our possibility for self-reflection and self-understanding as a way of over coming our linguistic disability (some might describe it as an effect of original sin).

One place Murdoch turns is to the question of the autonomy and authenticity of art’s capability to represent reality back to us. Forsberg argues that in her novels, Murdoch tries to reflect back to us a pictur e of our life with language rather than pr esent an alternative that we ought to take up.

Murdoch’s pedagogical task is to help her r eaders ask themselves whether they are in command of their own speech and concepts — or is the r esistance we encounter indicative of our having lost control of our life and language? Forsberg exper tly develops the ‘book as mirror’ analogy in Murdoch’s work by tracing it back to the pedagogy of Søren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her e Forsber g shows how Murdoch’s pedagogy has a moral bearing: ‘a text communicates indir ectly (in the r elevant sense) when it shows something decisive about its reader and demands something of her … a presentation of something familiar that may jolt us (or fail to do so) out of a par ticular form of illusion’ (pp. 6-7).

It may not be too dif ficult to see how readers interested in Christian theology could benefit fr om reading Forsber g’s excellent book. For instance, the Christian tradition claims to safeguar d the revelation of the Word, and yet Forsberg’s book may generate a question about the difficulty of the theological task of staying in contr ol of what r evelation means for us today.

Forsberg’s point, (bor rowed fr om Mur doch, Kierkegaard, and W ittgenstein) is that failur e or achievement of a wor d’s meaning often coincides with the way we lead our life — a str uggle of the divided self that can be traced back to St Paul (Romans 7:14f f). Generally speaking, readers interested in the topic of moral per fection in theology, philosophy, and literature will benefit greatly from Forsberg’s fine book.

Joshua Furnal