Murdoch, Iris(1919–1999)
Iris Murdoch is best known to the world as a novelist—she wrote twenty-six—but she was a tutor in philosophy at Oxford University from 1948 until 1963 and wrote several influential essays on moral philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s. Her collection of three such essays, The Sovereignty of Good (1970), remains her most influential work. Her most sustained philosophical work is Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993), a sprawling work ranging over an extraordinary range of topics and also a difficult work not enjoying the impact on philosophy of her earlier work. Murdoch also wrote on literature, religion, and art. Her thought is a unique appropriation of Platonic, Freudian, and existentialist themes.
Murdoch's thought emerged from, and against, British moral philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s (which she calls "linguistic philosophy"), perhaps best represented by Richard Hare's Language of Morals (though Murdoch does not mention Hare by name). This school of thought held that the techniques of linguistic analysis could illuminate moral concepts while remaining neutral regarding substantive moral views.
In "Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts," Murdoch rejects this distinction. "Moral philosophy can not avoid taking sides and would-be neutral philosophers merely take sides surreptitiously" (Murdoch 1970, p. 78). British philosophy, Murdoch says, suggests that the moral life does not present us with moral concerns of great depth or urgency. Its behaviorist proclivity, implying that morality resides only in outer behavior, does away with the substantial inner life of the mind and, by implication, any notion of moral vision.
Murdoch was initially attracted to Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism (she had met Sartre briefly in 1945) as a philosophy that one could actually live by and also as a philosophy that subjects individual consciousness to philosophical scrutiny. (In 1953 she published the critical but appreciative study Sartre: Romantic Rationalist.) Yet she came to feel that Sartre's moral philosophy was quite similar to linguistic philosophy in its faulty conception of moral agency and the moral life, despite the enormous differences in aspiration and mood in the two schools of philosophy. The "existentialist/behaviorist" view, as she frequently refers to the two views, sees the self as a solitary will and sees the core of moral agency as lying in the exertion of the will at the moment of choice. This solitary moral agency operates in a shared world of evaluatively neutral facts, with freedom as a central value, and confers value through choices.
Murdoch regards this conception of moral agency as entirely faulty. The moral agent perceives the world as saturated with value, and one's choosings arise almost automatically from how one antecedently perceives situations. Moral activity is not confined to outward behavior; seeing other persons in a just and accurate manner is moral activity, even if one never performs actions affecting such persons. Therefore, moral life does not sporadically occur only at moments of choice, but is pervades throughout the agent's existence, shaping the perceptions that issue in action. We erect structures of value around us, generally without recognizing that we are doing so.
Murdoch also chastises British moral philosophy for failing to focus centrally on how agents can morally improve—a task that she understood primarily as gaining a clear grasp of the moral reality outside themselves. To characterize the psychic process by which this is accomplished, Murdoch appropriates the term "attention" from Simone Weil, a French philosopher of the 1930s and 1940s who exerted a strong influence on her. By attending to the outer world, the moral agent becomes open and receptive to a reality other than oneself in a way uncontaminated by personal needs, fantasies, illusions, and the like. Murdoch sometimes speaks of attention as a kind of love and is critical of contemporary moral philosophy for leaving no room for love as a central moral notion.
Murdoch's conception of moral reality takes two somewhat distinct directions. The first is Platonic. (Plato is the philosopher Murdoch embraces most unambivalently.) On her Platonic conception, the ultimate moral reality is a transcendent Good, as she says in "On 'God' and 'Good'," a "single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention"—a description that Murdoch draws partly from religion, though she explicitly rejects traditional theism (Murdoch 1970, p. 55). Murdoch thinks of the Good as something that can be contemplated, that exerts a kind of magnetic pull, and from which moral agents can draw a moral energy to overcome selfishness. She faults linguistic philosophy for discrediting metaphysics, which she sees as required for rendering the idea of the Good intelligible, an idea she develops further in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
The second strand in Murdoch's conception of moral reality is particular other persons, especially those emotionally close to us, Murdoch's favored context for moral attention in her novels as well as her philosophy. "The fat, relentless ego" revealed by Freud, with its self-serving fantasies and illusions, presents daunting obstacles to apprehending moral reality. Murdoch is also pessimistic that by turning one's attention inward, one can identify and perhaps dispel one's particular psychic obstacles. Self-knowledge, she thinks, is largely a delusion.
Murdoch offers no systematic account of how to attain a state of attention, how to know the morally real, but she offers a few examples of things that can take us out of ourselves toward a reality external to us: art, natural beauty, prayer, a foreign language with its own logic, which cannot be distorted by personal wishes or fantasies. Her central example is art, especially literature. Good literature portrays human situations and human truth in an accessible form that provides readers a way to get outside themselves to a moral reality. Indeed, Murdoch sees the production of literature too as a moral task, a task in which authors must keep their own fantasies and illusions from distorting the creation of their characters. Murdoch's philosophy of art, inseparable from her moral philosophy, is developed in The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists and in several essays.
Murdoch contributed to moral philosophy's greater attention to moral psychology (especially moral perception) since the 1970s, and she occasionally speaks of virtue. On the whole, however, Murdoch's work does not readily fit within any of the familiar schools of contemporary moral thought, and her insights and perspective remain a largely untapped resource and a formidable challenge to moral philosophy.
Moral Psychology; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Weil, Simone.
Bibliography
Works by Murdoch
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953.
The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. A collection of all of Murdoch's nonfiction writings, including The Sovereignty of Good, but excluding Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and Sartre.
Works on Murdoch
Antonaccio, Maria. Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Antonaccio, Maria, and Schweiker, William, eds. Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996.
Blum, Lawrence. Moral Perception and Particularity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Several essays related to Murdoch's moral philosophy.
Broackes, Justin, ed. Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Holland, Margaret. "Touching the Weights: Moral Perception and Attention." International Philosophical Quarterly 38 (3) (1998): 299–312.
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