Honourable Defeat Research Articles

Orthodox Christianity and War

The subject of this article is the Orthodox Christianity’s approach to war. Christians of other denomination have developed an elaborate theory of war, so-called “Just War Theory” (JWT), which has also been accepted by non-Christians and even secular thinkers regarding the nature and justification of war. A vast literature has been produced in a dire attempt to render perfect the world by insisting on the claim that war is the act of punishment for breaking the law. The result is an epistemological ease from which everything seems evident in advance including who is right and who at fault, who is and who is not favored by God. By removing from war an essential feature – that it is a form of conflict – JWT takes away the concept of reciprocity and introduces an in advance declared inequality which enables removal of uncertainty about the war’s outcome. In Orthodox Christianity, the situation is different. With still live debate whether to persevere or abandon original Christian pacifism, for Orthodox Christianity, war is always a combination of cataclysm and temptation and far less Manichean than anything present in JWT. The aim of war is peace; but, however necessary, justice is an insufficient condition for justification. The difference between “justness” and “justification” is preserved through the uncertainty whom God, at war’s end, loves more, because both victors and vanquished remain and continue to be in His grace. Losing a war, as such, does not turn the vanquished into criminals, nor does victory give the vanquisher the right of revenge for defending oneself. The latter approach to war has significant potentialities: preserving the distinction of ius ad bellum and ius in bello, preserving reciprocity, mutual respect and trust, impossibility of incrimination of war per se, the possibility of honorable defeat, etc.

In or Out? The Existential Dilemma of Homosexuals in Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honorable Defeat

A Fairly Honorable Defeat is one of Iris Murdoch’s best acclaimed novels. Critics generally regard it as a triumph of the evil over the good, as embodied in characters Julius King and Tallis Browne. It could also be read from a different perspective as a fairly honorable defeat of the heterosexual love by the homosexual love. But Simon and Axel only win a narrow victory. Their non-normative sexuality still entangles them in gender, social and moral dilemmas. A detailed and close reading of the novel shows Murdoch’s concern not only about how the existential dilemma of homosexuals has shaped their gender identity and limited their moral vision and choice, but also about the underlying social problems of power and violence. By bringing into conversation Goffman’s theory of stigma, Butler’s theory of gender performance and Foucault’s view of male friendship, the article argues that Simon and Axel have to struggle between secrecy and disclosure of their sexual identity because of the large homophobic social environment. The insecurity and anxiety engendered by their sexual identity makes it difficult for them to associate with others in sincerity. Their moral weakness and failures are largely occasioned by the social environment.

Fransız Matbuatına Göre I. Dünya Savaşı’nda Irak Cephesinde Medâyin Muharebeleri (Kûtü’l-Amâre)

İngiltere, Fransa, Almanya, İtalya gibi Avrupa devletlerinin sanayileşmenin getirdiği hammadde ve pazar arayışı, sömürgecilik faaliyetlerinin hız kazanması; Alman-İngiliz, Alman-Fransız rekabeti gibi saiklerle, 1914 yılında başlayan, Osmanlı Devleti’nin de dâhil olduğu Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nda açılan Irak cephesi Osmanlı Devleti ile İngiltere arasında çok ciddî muharebelerin cereyan ettiği bir cephe olmuştur. İngiltere, sömürgesi Hindistan’a yönelik tehditleri engellemek, kuzeyde Ruslarla birleşmek ve Irak petrollerini ele geçirmek için Basra’ya asker çıkarmıştır. General Townshend (1861-1924) komutasındaki İngilizler ile Mirliva Halil Paşa (1882-1957) komutasındaki Osmanlı askerleri arasında çarpışmalar, kadim Mezopotamya’nın en önemli şehirlerinden biri olan Medâyin bölgesinde vuku bulmuştur. Burası muharebenin güneyde açılan en önemli cephesidir. İngilizlerin Bağdat’a yaklaşmalarını engelleyen ve hatta onları Kûtü’l-Amâre’ye doğru çekilmeye zorlayan bu çatışmalar Medâyin Muharebeleri olarak kayıtlara geçmiştir. Fransız matbuatında Türklerle İngilizlerin yoğun çatışmalarına sahne olan Irak cephesiyle ilgili savaş haberlerine bakıldığında yazılanların, çoğu zaman gerçekleri yansıtmaktan uzak olduğu ve genellikle İngiliz kaynaklarına dayandığı anlaşılmaktadır. Fransız kamuoyunu yanıltmaya, yönlendirmeye ve moral vermeye matuf bu haberlerde Osmanlı ordusu ve Türkler hakkında genellikle tahkir edici ifadeler yer alırken İngilizlerden övgüyle bahsedilmesi dikkati çekmektedir. Nasıriye’nin İngilizler tarafından zapt edilmesi üzerine gazetelerde yer alan haberlerde Türklerin Karadeniz’e sıkıştığı, Kafkaslardan sürüldüğü, Fırat havzasında sürekli yenilgiye uğradığı ve ümitsiz bir şekilde Gelibolu’da direnmeye çalıştığı yönünde ifadeler kullanılmıştır. Türk ordusunun Kûtü’l-Amâre zaferini ise Türklerin başarısı olarak kaydetmek yerine muhasara altındaki İngiliz ordusuna takviye kuvvetlerin vaktinde gelmemesinin bir neticesi olarak görmüşler ve bu durumu yenilgiye mazeret olarak göstermişlerdir. Ayrıca, İngiliz askerinin muhasara esnasında gösterdiği mukavemet yüceltilmiş ve onurlu bir mağlubiyet olarak haber yapılmıştır. Bu makalede Fransız matbuatında bu cepheyle ilgili yer alan haberlerin ayrıntılı bir şekilde araştırılması planlanmaktadır. Fransız Savaş Bakanlığı’nın cepheyle ilgili resmî belgeleri de araştırmaya dâhil edilecektir.

Making Love to Apollo: The Agalmatophilia of Iris Murdoch’s Athenian Lovers in A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Making Love to Apollo: The Agalmatophilia of Iris Murdoch’s Athenian Lovers in A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Культурологічний конструкт у сприйнятті персоносфери романних текстів Айріс Мердок

The article concerns issues of culturological construct in the novels of such prominent author in British fiction as Iris Murdoch. The ekphrastic content in the reception of a personosphere in her novels is of functional significance.The interrelation of the author's position and functions of a narrator is regarded as an integral part of Iris Murdoch’s fiction in which art construct plays a specific communicative role in creation of her literary text personosphere. In the context of Murdoch’s fiction the culturological phenomenon of personosphere is rather close to the view of the paradigm, which means a structural organization of the text concerning relationships between characters.The communication of the author (Iris Murdoch) with her readers occurs indirectly, through the characters – explicit authors of her works. The characters of her novels (a writer, a linguist, a theater director, an artist etc.) raise the issues that concern Murdoch herself: the fate of an artist, the role of art and spiritual values in the environment devoid of spirituality.Murdoch’s philosophical essays (“Conceptions of Unity. Art”) and dialogues (“Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art”), which argue the causality of art to the moral improvement of the modern man, serve as a metatext for the writer’s considerations of the outlined issues.Verbal description of visual arts (paintings, sculptures) in the novels of I. Murdoch (“A Fairly Honourable Defeat”, “An Unofficial Rose”, “The Sea, the Sea”, “Jackson’s Dilemma”) is often accompanied by aesthetic assessment. Furthermore it is an embodiment of some figurative techniques (ekphrastic allusions and reminiscences), a reflection of her own artistic outlook, literary manner and style.

Quest for the Female Self-awareness in Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat

This paper is devoted to examine the reconstruction of female selfhood from the aspect of the growth of female self-consciousness in a changed and revised world through the quest for female self-awareness as an individual in Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat . Through the analysis of Iris Murdoch’s comparative characterization of the siblings Hilda and Morgan, the paper reveals that the social and economic changes in the modern world and all kinds of women’s liberation movements will necessarily lead to the improved situation of women if they have no capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile themselves as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. Compared with Morgan’s emotional perplexity, economic hardship, and male contempt, Hilda’s affluent life, happy marriage and her popularity among the male indicate Murdoch’s reluctant admission that women still live in the androcentric world where the women’s self-improvement are not widely welcome.

"Initium ut esset, creatus est homo": Iris Murdoch on Authority and Creativity

In 1970 the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch published both her thirteenth novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and her best known work of philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good. Given the proximity of these publication dates, it does not surprise that there are many points of comparison between these two works. The novel features, for instance, a character writing a work of moral philosophy not unlike Murdoch's own The Sovereignty of Good, while another character exemplifies her moral philosophy in his life.
 This article proposes a reading of the novel as a critical commentary on the philosophical work, focusing on the tension between creation and authority. While Murdoch considers humans to be first and foremost creative, she is at the same time wary of the misleading nature of any act of creation. For Murdoch, any creator and any creation—a beautiful picture as well as a watertight theory—may transmit a certain authority, and that authority may get in the way of acknowledging reality. It thus hinders the moral life, which for Murdoch should be thought of as a life of attention—to reality and ultimately to the Good—rather than a series of wilful creations and actions.
 A Fairly Honourable Defeat queries the possibility and danger of creation, through different characters as well as through images of cleanliness and messiness. Thus, the character whose book of moral philosophy is challenged and who is found wanting when putting his ideas to practice, likes ‘to get things clear’ (176). Another character, whose interferences create the novel's drama, has a self-confessed ‘passion for cleanliness and order’ (426). The saint of the story, in contrast, does not interfere unless by necessity, and resides in one of the filthiest kitchens in the history of literature. Yet, none of the main characters exemplifies a solution to the tension between creation and authority found in Murdoch's philosophy. An indication of a solution is found in a minor character, and in his creations of outrageous bunches of flowers, unusual meals, and absurd interiors. Yet, its location in a subplot suggests that this solution is not in any way final. It is concluded that any final solution should not be expected, not in the least because of the pervasive nature of the tension between creation and authority, which goes well beyond Murdoch's own authorship.

Building Trust. A Fairly Honourable Defeat

The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about the correct or most fruitful philosophical analysis of trust. The discussion has lately gained in importance due to the central role social scientists attribute to trust in their analysis of “social capital”. The following account of trust, based on the notion of holding someone responsible, is suggested in the paper:We trust someone whenWe put ourselves in a dependent position which involves the risk of being harmed (from an objective perspective);We do not monitor the trusted party; andWe do not believe the risk will actualize because we take the other party to be responsible in the sense that we hold her to normative expectations which we believe arise out of a shared perspective on the nature of our relationship and the normative expectations it gives rise to.It is argued that the above account explains often registered features of trust such as the feeling of being betrayed caused by breaches of trust, the moral dimension associated with trust, and the invisibility or near-invisibility of trust when not breached. In addition, the account is capable of explaining the common intuition that trusting behavior undertaken in order to create trust should not be understood as trust proper. The difference between risks going with such “therapeutic trust” on the one hand and trust proper on the other are illuminated. On the basis of these differences it is argued that therapeutic trust is a very different form of social capital than trust proper. Noticing this difference is important, for example, because of the practical consequences it has for efforts of building trust.In addition to philosophical analysis, the paper proceeds by discussing a literary example taken from Iris Murdoch's novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The use of the example reflects the conviction that the features of trust analyzed in the paper are best understood within a concrete narrative of a mutual quest for recognition of the partners in a trust relationship.

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (review)

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (review)

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

A dramatic retelling of four months in 1865...; A true story full of political treachery and physical adventure; Author is arguably the foremost authority on the American Civil War; In February, 1865, the end was clearly in sight for the Confederacy. Lee was defeated at Gettysburg, Grant's victory at Memphis had cut the South in two, and Sherman's brutal march through Georgia had destroyed what was left of the Southern economy. With the land shattered, people starving, and no hope left, the reality for the secessionist government was grim. An Honorable Defeat is the story of four months in 1865, during which the South surrendered, the North triumphed, and President Lincoln was assassinated, told with style and with absolute historical accuracy.

After the ‘Honourable Defeat’: The DS, Margherita and Ulivo

After the ‘Honourable Defeat’: The DS, Margherita and Ulivo

An honorable defeat: the last days of the Confederate government

An honorable defeat: the last days of the Confederate government

Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation

Part 1 The world: am I because my little dog knows - of apes and essences Me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousins, me, my brother and our cousins... - the genetic construction of sociality on discourse and the Darwin machine - the matter and the chatter of the mind. Part 2 The book: What is art for? - narrative and the Ludic reader tragedy - the ape gets serious comedy and the relaxed open-mouth display gilding the mirror - mimesis and philosophy in A fairly honourable defeat.

An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933–1945

(1995). An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933–1945. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 177-177.

Secret Germany: Claus von Stauffenberg and the mystical crusade against Hitler and An honourable defeat: a history of the German resistance to Hitler

Secret Germany: Claus von Stauffenberg and the mystical crusade against Hitler and An honourable defeat: a history of the German resistance to Hitler

Iris Murdoch and the Good Psychoanalyst

Several . . . films [Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Field of Dreams, and Star Trek V: Final Frontier, 1989] send their heroes searching for hints of God's presence in the universe, on quests for spiritual meaning. . . . And like many New Age approaches that cloak self-absorption in veneer of spirituality, the films are not really about God and faith. In every case, the religious quest masks more human concern, reconciliation with the hero's own father. (Caryn James) What seems to us so grandiose about ethics, so mysterious and, in mythical fashion, so self-evident, owes these characteristics to its connection with religion, its origins from the will of the father. (Sigmund Freud 370) Thomas McCaskerville, the Scottish psychoanalyst in Iris Murdoch's Good Apprentice (1985), meticulously ethical, constantly concerned with doing what right, always thinking of the effects of his words and actions on others, and also religious in way, practicing what Harold Bloom calls Murdoch's astringent post-Christian Platonism, kind of negative theology. Let's say that God permanent non-degradable love object, Thomas says to young Stuart Cuno. Must we not imagine something of the sort? Then, running through typical, even stereotypical, Murdochian litany, Stuart eventually says that he wants to go it alone, without god, Just to try to be good, to be for others and not oneself. . . . [The good is] all, everywhere, as if everything spoke it and showed it - and it's so deep that it's entirely me, and yet it's entirely not me too -. Steady on, says Thomas. All that sounds like God. You say there no God, then you aspire to be God yourself, you take over his attributes. Perhaps that the task of the present age (140-41). John Updike, himself religious quester in his fiction, writes that Murdoch, unable in good conscience to locate in the external cosmos where God once reigned, turns, in the paradoxical gesture of Christian humanism, toward Man himself to supply the that Man demands. . . . Murdoch's central male triangle of Harry [Cuno], Edward [Baltram, Harry's stepson], and Stuart [Harry's son] . . . does not illustrate much in the way of depth (126). However, Thomas, the artistic saint, and Jesse Baltram, the saintly artist (Edward's biological father), supply plenty, maybe too much.(1) The esthetic puzzle, Bloom writes, is whether the comic story and the spiritual kernel can be held together by Miss Murdoch's archaic stance as an authorial will. Pearl K. Bell argues that the novel peculiarly disjointed and uneven (36); Gillian Wilce calls it a moral soap opera (30). Good Apprentice, however, does include realistic, sensitive portrayal of an analyst - the first and only such portrayal in her canon - and, as in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1971), itself social and psychological comedy, and of equal rank with this one, here Murdoch creates characters and landscapes that come to life, colorful and vibrant people and settings. Further, in showing Stuart beating everyone over the head with his heavy-handed ethical message, Murdoch lampooning the didactic side of herself (undercutting her usual moral agenda), tactic that allows the surface of the novel to have light and airy feel, even as dark, mysterious forces seem to be at work. Her command of detail and her painterly descriptions invest the book with what Peter J. Conradi calls her luminous, lyrical accuracy (4). moral agenda allowed to drift and grow beneath the surface, as it often does in good literature. Ironically, by blatantly calling attention to morality with the naive character Stuart, Murdoch manages to push her own moral philosophy into the shadows awhile, where it becomes even more effective. Stuart portrayed as good person, but unintentionally clown, not saint. Thomas the saint figure, but although he presented as an almost ideal man (resembling Murdoch's father in his intelligence, steadiness, and success),(2) he nonetheless has faults as both man and analyst, which are used indirectly to criticize Freudianism once again (as Murdoch often does in both her fiction and nonfiction). …

The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will (review)

132Philosophy and Literature Méirsyas, the foolhardy mortal who challenges the god Apollo to a musical contest only to be flayed edive as the penalty for losing. The artist's painful struggle on the road to Truth parallels the moral struggle in quest of the Good. This theme, complementing the treatment of evil, finds Murdoch equally austere. Her Platonic Good is unreachable and absolute and in pursuit of it only "a fairly honourable defeat" can be hoped for, die fate ofthe Christ-like figure Tallis Browne in the novel of that tide. No wonder the novels provoke such unease. Dipple clearly shows that understanding diese works, beneath their dazzling surface, requires mastery of an abstract interpretive vocabulary: "fantasy," "demonism," "the good," "saintliness," "truth," "consolation," etc. But she rightly rejects as simplistic and "clichéd" the tag "philosophical novel." Philosophy is only one part of a rich edlusive frame which the novels invoke, including Greek myth, Christianity, Shakespeare, mysticism, and the visual arts. It would be difficult to find a better guide than Professor Dipple to these complex interlocking themes. It is a pleasure to recall die novels in her company. Admittedly, though, I write as one irresistibly compelled. University of Stirling, ScotlandPeter Lamarque The Literary Freud: Mechanisms ofDefense and the Poetic Will, edited by Joseph H. Smith, M.D.; xix & 390 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, $30.00. This fourth volume in the Psychiatry and the Humanities series explores, in the words of editor Joseph H. Smith, "the preliminary imaginative grasp of both strong science and strong poetry" (p. xv). This unusually varied collection of twelve essays by psychiatrists emd litereiry critics offers Freudian and Lacanian interpretations of important authors as well as critical readings of Freud's works. The opening piece, Harold Bloom's "Freud's Concepts ofDefense and die Poetic Will," certainly the most provocative of the essays dealing widi Freud's writings as literary texts, reads Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a "post-Romantic crisis-lyric" (p. 11), in which Freud moves from scientific empiricism to mythological speculation by viewing biological drives as psychic defenses. Bloom convincingly demonstrates diat Freud ultimately created a concept of the deadi drive equivalent to literal meaning and of the pleasure principle equivalent to figurative meaning, so that, just as die poet uses figurative language to achieve immortality, he could find in Eros "die will's revenge against time's 'it was' ... to be carried out by the mind's drive to surpass all earlier achievements" (p. 27). John T. Irwin's "Figurations of the Writer's Death: Freud and Hart Creme" argues in the same vein that Freud's repressed allusions to Mach and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, like Crane's repressed references to William Cullen Bryant and T. S. Eliot in "The Bridge," reveal die artist's attempts to protect his works from the accusation ofunoriginality and, uiereby, to survive physical death through the posthumous fame accorded to original writings. Meredith Anne Skura's "Revisions and Rereadings in Dreams and Allegories," a clearly-written and highly useful comparison of Freud's mediod of dream analysis and the literary critic's interpretation of allegory, suggests that dreams closely Reviews133 resemble allegory in the conflict they create between different layers ofmeaning. She concludes that dreams are related to allegories as metonomy is to metaphor and that, in fact, die true difference between dream and allegory resides in the allegory's sophistication. Susan Hawk Brisman and Leslie Brisman's "Lies Against Solitude: Symbolic, Imaginary and Real" sees both lyric poetry and Lacanian psychoanalysis as attempts to overcome alienation and achieve recognition from a responsive addressee. Applying Lacan's theories to the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake, they conclude diat the artist's creation ofan ideal auditor is comparable to the role oftransference in psychoanalysis and acts as die primary source ofpower in poetic discourse. William Kerrigan's "The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance" posits that the development of die Renaissance linguistic ego from Latin back to die vernacular exacdy parallels Lacan's model of normal ego development through the stade du miroir and diat die Renaissemce peculiarity of viewing the macrocosm in terms of the microcosm...

Why Should Anyone Refrain From Stealing?

This question was proposed by Max Black in the fall 1971 meeting of the Creighton Club for discussion during the spring 1972 meeting. Black said that the question was suggested to him by a dialogue in Iris Murdoch's novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat' in which a philosopher is unable to explain to his stereotypically contemporary, flower-childish son why he thinks that ripping off is censurable. Actually, the father delivers his explanation, not to the son, but to his sister-in-law's estranged husband (a caricature of the leftist bohemian who feels that stealing is wrong but is unable to convince his protege) with whom the boy has been living because father and son are estranged for the obvious reasons. Given the context from which the question emerged and, specifically, the manner in which it was posed, there is no compelling answer to it. The question-Why should I respect the property rights of the undifferentiated Other?is not so much a question as it is the expression of a complex, confused and distressingly prevalent attitude of alienation. Hence to theorize about the ground of property rights or to invoke prudential considerations based on legal sanctions is to misunderstand the essential issue and, more importantly, to compound the basic problem by further obscuring it and abetting the confusion. The economic status of the Anglo-American community is such that, for the most part, property ownership is so diffused that the bulk of our goods belong to no readily identifiable body,2 yet not so extended that the material