It all begins with the novel’s characterization. If the first protagonist, Jake, is a typical Sartrean Totalitarian Man, then the second protagonist of the book, Hugo, is undoubtedly a typical Wittgensteinian Ordinary Language Man. Murdoch not only designs for Hugo a life trajectory similar to that of Wittgenstein’s, but also confers on him a temperament that could personify the ordinary language philosophy. Hugo is gentle, honest and modest. He seems to think and talk slowly, but very profoundly when he does, with an ability to rephrase what Jake has said (either too cursory or too obscure) “in some completely simple and concrete way, which sometimes illuminated it enormously.” (UN 60) Jake and Hugo are best friends and close intellectual companions, and, according to Jake (the narrator), their acquaintance is the central theme of Under the Net. Jake is drawn to Hugo by his down-to-earth, anti-theorizing habit of thinking. Hugo never thinks along the lines of any general theory or ready-at-hand system whatsoever, therefore in his eyes “each thing is astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious.” (66) In comparison to Hugo, Jake realizes for the first time the potential defect of the way he sees things:

But it was as if [Hugo’s] very mode of being revealed to me how hopelessly my own vision of the world was blurred by generality. I felt like a man who, having vaguely thought that flowers are all much the same, goes for a walk with a botanist. Only this simile doesn’t fit Hugo either, for a botanist not only notices details but classifies. Hugo only noticed details. He never classified. It was as if his vision were sharpened to the point where even classification was impossible, for each thing was seen as absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man. (68)

The drastic difference between Jake and Hugo in their modes of thinking makes them fascinated with each other, but it also causes immense difficulty for their mutual understanding. One of the most severe misunderstandings between the two friends has to do with their views on language. Jake’s existentialist language view is embedded in the assumption that language and the world are completely separate, whereas Hugo’s ordinary language view is that language is completely about living in the world (as has been touched upon above), and herein lies the reason why Jake would come to distort Hugo’s arguments about language completely. The ideas that Jake thinks he has stolen from Hugo and put into his book, The Silencer, does not contain any of Hugo’s real opinions at all.

The misunderstanding is triggered by Hugo’s explanation of his Wittgensteinian view on people’s inner feelings. As the two friends discuss Proust’s writing, Hugo insists that “there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,” (66) because when the feeling — apprehension, for example — takes place inside a person, the only thing he could say according rigorously to the facts might just be about his quickened heartbeats. “But if one said one was apprehensive, this could only be to try to make an impression — it would be for effect, it would be a lie” (ibid.). Jake is quite shocked by Hugo’s statements, he repeatedly interrogates Hugo, if he really believes that there is no way to express one’s inner feelings (and thoughts, Jack adds), truthfully? Is verbal communication between people always false then? Suppose one tries hard to be accurate? After receiving Hugo’s negative answers each time, Jake draws a natural conclusion: “In that case one oughtn’t to talk.” (67) Now that Hugo also says “actions don’t lie” (68), Jake then very comfortably comes to the notion of abandoning language. He puts it in his The Silencer: “Actions don’t lie, words always do.” “Truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence.” “It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.” (92)

Had Jake for one moment been able to leave the comfort zone of his conceptual premises and enter the scope of Hugo’s view, he would see that language and action could essentially be the same thing. He then would never come to these crude dichotomies of language/action, truth/falsehood. Nor would he impose the conclusion of “rejecting language — embracing action” onto Hugo. Murdoch here mocks Jake’s existentialist language-life attitude with not only the stupid misunderstanding Jake has made, but also more profoundly, with the thinking process such attitude leads to, in contrast to the Wittgensteinian one right beside it. Jake’s harsh, arbitrary judgment on language that is manifested in his The Silencer is exactly the “crystalline” type of work. The logic is as such: since language cannot truthfully convey what the subject thinks and feels within him, then the subject, for the sake of protecting the authenticity of his consciousness, better speak as little as possible. Eventually such a view on language boils down to Sartre’s Cartesian solipsism. Language is first and foremost regarded as a means of inner meditation for the isolated subject; once uttered out, it is inevitably faced with the risk of degenerating into the idle talk of “das Man” (to borrow Heidegger’s terms). Consequentially the authentic inner state of the self would be contaminated by outside prejudices, which leads to the “bad faith” of the subject. It is also worth noting here, that such a solipsist language view seems to be shared by a wide range of existentialist philosophers. Heidegger, too, highlights the purity of language use, and it is no wonder that his favorable form of verbal art is poetry. When Heidegger proposes that man dwells poetically in language, he seems to view language as more of a channel for giving monologues toward Being than as the medium to communicate with other human beings.

One the other side of the picture, Hugo’s Wittgensteinian attitude toward language clearly bears resemblance to that of the “journalistic” work. He records, ponders on, and interrogates every single thing and idea meticulously, with fantastic patience. For every opinion Jake expresses, Hugo would confirm over and over again to make it precise. He is no silencer. So when Hugo says that language will produce lies when it starts to describe inner feelings, what he adopts is in fact Wittgenstein’s critique of the notions of “private language” and “inner life”. The reason in here is that the various human feelings, emotions, and consciousness should not be seen as some cryptic experience inside the individual’s spiritual life at the outset (then the individual seeks to express them with the correct words). Those terms are just like other terms in human language: they are public behaviours conducted under publicly accepted rules. Were this not the case people would never escape the labyrinth of abstract philosophical reasoning.

This is not to imply that Wittgenstein denies the human mind’s inner activities, but that the language of feelings should not be seen as some set of decontextualized tags to be stuck to some non-verbal actions: they (the language and the action) are from the beginning to the end in one. When a person cries out that he is in pain, he is in pain. The verbal signs he gives out have the same efficacy as other “natural” actions such as moaning or shaking. Those in the same language community, upon receiving such verbal signals, would know what they should do is to step up and offer help (rather than standing by and meditating whether that person is telling the truth or not — that would be another language-game under another rule). But what lies beyond the scope of the common life, i.e. the goings-on inside an individual’s mental mechanism, are beyond the limits of language and any future language philosophy; they could only be seen as mysterious processes and be left in silence. Hence Wittgenstein’s famous proposition: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. (Tractatus 3) That is also why Hugo himself sometimes seems to endorse Jake’s rejection of language — but he actually never does.

But what about Murdoch’s criticism of Wittgenstein here, and of the journalistic literature? It is indeed more difficult to see clearly Murdoch’s criticism of them in comparison to her strong negative opinions on Sartre and the crystalline literature. The affection Murdoch shows in her characterization of Hugo, and her undisguised admiration of Wittgenstein, both reveal that she accepts Wittgenstein’s position to a very large degree. However, Murdoch in Under the Net still mobilizes Jake all the time to counterbalance Hugo’s stance, indicating that she is still somehow not satisfied with him.

I would venture to say that what Murdoch feels with Wittgenstein (and with British empiricism generally) is mostly a sense of regret. A “regret” is not a “mistake”, it does not stimulate fierce attacks, yet it could also be as fatal (if not more so). A mistake, however severe, always stands a chance for correction, yet regret is often caused by lack. One has to leave for somewhere else to find the missing thing. What ordinary language philosophy lacks is exactly the thing that could be found in Jake; it is what makes him feel shocked and unacceptable when he hears that human language/understanding has to halt before people’s inner life. It might be wiser to accept the conclusion with a down-to-earth empirical posture, that our language and our thinking can only remain in silence when we come to the realm that’s beyond their limits, and not suffer for it. But this would mean the denial of the fact that there is always the impulse of imagination in the human being. This is exactly why the Ordinary Language Man also misses the real picture of the human character. Murdoch says, “To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes beyond the facts in the familiar and natural way.” (EM 199) Where the empirical thinking cannot reach the fact, there the wings of imagination could bring us closer to the height of the real. For Murdoch, it means we should not comfortably join the ordinary language philosophers in their calmness to be satisfied with the notion that truth and falsehood are only consensuses of a language community. We should aspire to something higher than that. We should keep our faith in the transcendental truth, and transcendental goodness.

Murdoch eventually chooses Jake to be the first protagonist in Under the Net even though she is less fond of him, which implies that she nonetheless thinks highly of the impulse for transcendental truth-seeking in Jake. Hugo and Jake form a pair of prototypical characters that appear repeatedly in Murdoch’s novels, namely “the saint” and “the artist”. In Under the Net Murdoch makes it explicit that, although the saint (Hugo) might be wiser and come closer to perfection, it is the artist (Jake) whose state of being is more commendable. Because only the artist can fully experience the force of Eros (in the Platonic sense), he longs to ascend to the realm of the beautiful and the good — a realm of otherness that is exterior to both one’s self and the shared human society. He keeps longing for beings that are irrevocably separate from him (Jake feels a sense of initiative towards Anna, he thinks that is a guise of love). The saint however, is far too sober and self-sufficient.

Near the end of the novel, Hugo gives a piece of advice to Jake: “Some situations can’t be unraveled… they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on.” (272) These words require the reader to digest critically. It is true that one could only blunder on to reach truth (or more like fact, in Hugo’s context), yet Jake’s impulse to “understand everything sympathetically” should not be denounced, even if it will only end in heroic defeats. In the novel, Hugo eventually suffers the same fate as Jake. He too is helplessly drawn into the chaos of love, he too has experienced the pain of longing for someone other than himself, of trying to approach the loved one’s mysterious transcendence that results in failure. This might be the most tender and most solemn of punishments that Murdoch could ever arrange for her character — the punishment from Eros.