Iris Murdoch: Moral Philosophy and the Novel
While writing an essay on the use of the novel in teaching philosophy, I began to reread some Iris Murdoch novels as well as her philosophical essays. The more I read, the more I wanted to write specifically about Murdoch. Her novels, while thoroughly entertaining and superbly crafted, are always deeply serious and uplifting; uplifting both in the sense that one feels somehow instructed and improved through reading them, and in that one feels more hopeful about human beings and about the future. She escapes the easy roads of cynicism and pessimism (which I find in so many otherwise excellent novelists), but not by sentimentalizing or romanticizing the human condition. Murdoch is convinced that one task of the artist (and especially the novelist) is to disclose the human condition in its current historical configuration--to bring lived-life out of concealment.
I want to say in this essay just why I think Murdoch is such an important ethical theorist and philosopher. Since I mean this for an audience sufficiently broad that I cannot presuppose an intimate knowledge of either Murdoch’s essays or her novels, I will attempt a brief overview that will at the same time indicate some of why I think she is such an important writer. In order to present and discuss her ethical theory, I will also have to present her general worldview and her aesthetic theory.
Murdoch believes that there is a real world out there! In these days of rampant relativism in which not only truth and moral rightness are depicted as hopelessly relative, but when some even take ‘the real world’ to be simply a construction of ours (so that attempts to arrive at the truth are seen as anachronistic drivel), Murdoch’s ‘realism’ deserves attention. Although a good and sympathetic critic of both existentialism and current analytic philosophy, Murdoch often refers back to Plato at crucial moments in the development of both her epistemology and her ethics. For her, there is a real world, objective and quite apart from us, and the task of both the philosopher and the artist is to reveal that world to us. (It is also the task of the chemist/biologist/psychologist/etc.) However, the real world (or things-as-they-are-in-themselves, or Being, or, if you prefer, simply the That) eludes us because of the sort of beings that we are. We are selfish, and not only in a way that makes us more-or-less morally blind, but in a way that makes us more-or-less blind to the objective world as a whole. We are fascinated with the world-out-there, but in such a way that our fascination blinds us to much of what is really there, for our fascination is overwhelmingly I-centered. Much of what we call thinking or studying or doing art is really a kind of daydreaming--telling ourselves I-centered stories about what is going on. “It is a task to see the world as it is.” {The Sovereignty of Good, p. 91; hence forward referred to simply as TSG}
Murdoch claims that we are selfish beings (naturally but not necessarily) and we attempt to see the world through blinders that are both selfish and culturally determined. Furthermore, there is no human-independent purpose for human existence; the world is not teleological (no matter how much we wish it were). Her stress on the purposelessness of human existence is similar to that of the existentialist philosophers, although she is critical of other major themes in existentialism, especially Sartrean value-theory. “I assume that human beings are naturally selfish and that human life has no external point or telos.” {TSG, p. 78} One consequence of this non-teleological view is a belief in the reality of death. One of many anxieties that cause us to create a falsifying veil partially concealing the world from us is our fear of death, one of many ways in which concerns for self prevent us from seeing things as they are. Unlike many of the existentialists (and I am thinking especially of early Sartre and Camus), Murdoch does not confuse lack of a telos with meaninglessness or nihilism; human beings have purposes and meanings, it is the universe that does not. “There are properly many patterns and purposes within life, but there is no general and as it were externally guaranteed pattern or purpose of the kind for which philosophers and theologians used to search. We are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance.” {TSG, p. 79}
Murdoch does not argue for either the claim that human beings are selfish or that human existence is non-teleological. These she calls assumptions or assertions, but not ones that are simply the products of “the despair of our own age”; rather they are products of “the advance of science over a long period.” Adding to our anxiety over death is the chancy nature of human life. ‘Chance’ not here being used as a synonym for contra-causal, but as a way of insisting on the non-teleological nature of our lives. Randomness (again, in the sense of non-purpose) is a real feature of human existence: our best intentions may be thwarted by a fall on the ice; we are not ‘meant’ to die, but neither are we ‘meant’ to live. “.....the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self.”
Often when one encounters such insistence on non-teleology (which gets called purposelessness), the view projected seems to be bleak and dreary and pessimistic. Not so for Murdoch! For while death and randomness are real, so is good. Here, Murdoch parts company with (most) existentialists. She was one of the first analytic philosophers who was sympathetic to Sartre (and to existentialism generally), but she also pointed out very clearly the hopeless relativism involved in the Sartrean claim that value is literally created by choice. {See her excellent early work on Sartre, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist} While she does not take up specifically Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” which, I think, requires him to locate value in the choosing subject rather than in objective features of the world, it is obvious that Murdoch believes that right acts are right (though she prefers to talk of ‘good’ rather than ‘right’) because of the way the world is, not because of any state of mind of the agent. “The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality.” {TSG, p. 90}
Let me now attempt an outline of Murdoch’s ethical theory; one needs to remember, however, that for Murdoch the attempt to spell out a theory of good is always incomplete (because, agreeing with G.E. Moore, good is simple and unanalyzable), and philosophical (discursive) essay is not sufficient for doing ethical theory even in its necessarily incomplete form. Art, especially the novel, is necessary (not merely convenient or a short-cut) for doing ethics. (More of these two points later. She spells both out very clearly in TSG.)
Murdoch is convinced that both existentialism and contemporary analytic philosophy err in seeing goodness (ethics) as essentially a function of will. It is not choice or ‘freedom’ that makes human beings moral beings; nor is goodness tied up in any necessary way with “the examined life” (and here, she is taking on Plato’s claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living”). Contrary to Plato’s claim that the worth of a life must be connected to self-examination, most of Murdoch’s examples of good human beings are relatively ‘simple’ and not particularly self-reflective people. The key to morality is attention to others, as opposed to (the natural) gaze that returns to the self. Note here that this gaze towards self is not always what we ordinarily mean by being selfish. Guilt can return the gaze to the self, as can rage or resentment or even grief. Murdoch loves to present her readers with characters who are otherwise good (or could be), but who are blinded by guilt, rage, fear, resentment, lust, etc. and who build up habits engendered by the particular blindness. Both good (attention) and bad (inattention) become habitual, and habits are hard to break or to incrementally build.
Murdoch approaches this rather difficult and complex subject of attention through an analogy with art. The (good) artist learns by degrees to attend to her/his subject, and to attend in such a way that self is lost, is absorbed into the focused attention. (The good biologist likewise must attend away from self and towards the object of study.) The artist, qua artist, is attempting to disclose or reveal her subject, and this requires incredible attention away from self. But this is no easy task, for “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.” {TSG, p. 84} “Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.” {TSG, p. 86}
The not-self attention characteristic of good art is attained not through heroic acts of will, and likewise the good act is not achieved through such moments of free-will, but, rather, through a slow process of learning to attend to others, which is learning to really look. The good act arises naturally out of that incremental and preparatory attention, not from any sudden decision to act against inclination (as philosophers seem to suggest). “A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality.” {TSG, p. 91} In one of her rare disagreements with Plato (who was suspicious of art as honeyed words that seduce and entertain instead of revealing), Murdoch insists that the task of the good artist is not simply to create beauty or to entertain, but to reveal truth; it is not simply “...a diversion or a side-issue. It is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen.” {TSG, p. 88} The moral philosopher and the moral person are, therefore, looking for a particular sort of truth, one that requires attention away from self and towards (the real needs of) others.
Murdoch insists that both existentialists and analytic philosophers have focused too much on will and freedom, rather than on careful attention to the way the world is (specifically the way other people are rather than on how they appear to us in terms of our own goals and projects). “The area of its [the psyche’s] vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self.” {TSG, pps. 78-9} So morality is much more a function of truth (of how the world and others really are) than it is a matter of will, and it requires attention rather than heroism.
Again, contra existentialism and positivistic theories of value, good is not merely subjective and certainly is not brought into existence via the individual’s choice. “The ordinary person does not, unless corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates values by his choices.” {TSG, p. 97} Rather, “...value concepts are....patently tied on to the world, they are stretched as it were between the truth-seeking mind and the world, they are not moving about on their own as adjuncts of the personal will.” {TSG, p. 90} If I may enlarge on this slightly, good is not a function of will or consciousness, but of what human beings really are. Human beings bleed; they are mortal; they require sustenance in order to live; they fear death and enslavement and the heel of the oppressor. Morality is objective rather than subjective because it depends on what is the case, on what human beings really are, not on what we believe to be the case or what we choose to value. (And I don’t mean to restrict this to our moral/immoral behavior to humans. It is because cats feel pain that it is morally wrong, not good, to torture them. And even if we see cats as devils, our so seeing them will not magically make our torture of them good. Just as our seeing black people, or women, or Jews as somehow not human does not make them not human. Morality is determined by what beings are, not what we believe them to be.)
Let me sum this up by taking a quote from Murdoch (somewhat out of context): “My work is a progressive revelation of something that exists independent of me.” {TSG, p. 89} Murdoch understands that it is no accident that Sartre (despite his promises) never produced an ethic; morality is tied up necessarily with what we are as human beings (our essence), and in denying that we are essentially anything (but rather freedoms creating ourselves), Sartre undercuts the very possibility of an objective, non-relative ethic.
It would be easy to misconstrue Murdoch’s assessment of art and her disagreement with Plato from reading just what I have said so far. Certainly, she is not claiming that art by and large is revealing. Indeed, “A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of the consumer’s consciousness.” {TSG, p. 85} Her emphasis is on what art ought to be, and clearly what she intends her art to be. Murdoch would agree that Plato is right in supposing that most consumers of art are seeking diversion through fantasy, and that most (so-called) artists are pandering to that taste. Speaking of Sartre with admiration (in spite of her disagreements with his value-theory), Murdoch says: “A driving force in all of his writing is his serious desire to change the life of the reader.” {SRR, p. ix} The task is to bring the receiver of art closer to an apprehension of how things really are, and “....anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.” {TSG, p. 84} The artist reveals what is in order to change the life, the actions, of the receiver.
It should be clear that I admire Murdoch for her belief in truth, for her conviction that the artist (and the philosopher) has an obligation to seek and attempt to reveal truth, and for her conviction that morality is in some very real sense objective--that value is not created by choice nor merely an expression of approval or interest, but rather a function of how things really are and not simply our view (or opinion) of how things are. I also happen to agree with her that it is egocentrism that leads us to deny death; we seem quite agreed that grasshoppers and deer and flowers really die. But instead of seeing and reveling in the fact that we are a part of that great chain of being and that living beings die (that being a part of their natures), we want to insist that human beings (especially I) somehow escape this universal condition of living things. I also believe that she is right to stress the non-teleological nature of human existence. For even if there were some such telos, it is certainly hidden from us (though there are innumerable, and mutually exclusive, claimants to the throne), and we must live our lives as if it is we humans who have purposes and goals and not some grand human-independent telos. Like Marx, Murdoch believes that human history is not in the hands of some god or gods, but (at least to some extent) in human hands.
I agree with Murdoch’s worldview and with her severe injunction to the artist-philosopher. But why pick her out among artists. Why stress her novels and essays? In line with many central nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers (Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Dewey, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) Murdoch insists that human beings are historical creatures; that we are beings who live in time. And yet with all of this emphasis on historicity, much philosophical essay retains its abstract and essentially timeless, history-less tone. Heidegger lists being-in-time as one of the existentialia of dasein (one of the universal and necessary features of what it is to be human), and yet Being and Time is in most ways as abstract and oblivious to history as is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Murdoch is convinced that if one wants finally to describe the human condition, one must (at least sometimes) describe lived-life. Likewise, if one wants to characterize morality and moral dilemmas, one must locate them in the context of human beings living and relating with one another. There is a place for abstract ethical theory (discursive essay), but it cannot be complete or totally convincing or transformative. Both to be truthful about what constitutes morality and to instruct and transform humans, one must turn to art, and especially to the novel.
Murdoch obviously admires Wittgenstein and analytic philosophers who carry on a tradition he began. She, too, thinks that philosophy has a descriptive task (although not even description is purely analytic and neutral, and when it pretends to be, it simply suppresses value judgments). In order really to describe the human condition, one must include the richness and context of lived-life. Furthermore, only a part of the human condition is concerned with reasons and arguments. Only a part of truth is revealed discursively (as Murdoch believes the artist has always, at least implicitly, known). “The novelist proper is, in his way, a sort of phenomenologist. He has always implicitly understood, what the philosopher has grasped less clearly, that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once for all. The novelist has had his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do or must be presumed to do. He has as a natural gift that blessed freedom from rationalism which the academic thinker achieves, if at all, by a precarious discipline. He has always been, what the very latest philosophers claim to be, a describer rather than an explainer; and in consequence he has often anticipated the philosopher’s discoveries....The novel is a picture of, and a comment on, the human condition, a typical product of the era to which belong also the writings of Nietzsche, the psychology of Freud, and the philosophy of Sartre. It is also a type of writing which is more important, in the sense of being more influential, than any of the last mentioned.” (emphasis mine)
Murdoch is important because she selfconsciously uses the novel to do philosophy. Partly, of course, because she realizes that she will reach a much wider audience. (How many people would have heard of Murdoch simply as an Oxford teacher and philosopher and writer of philosophical essay?) But also because she realizes the limitation of essay. Novels can describe the human condition in a way that essay cannot. When it comes to doing moral philosophy, this is even more clearly the case. The artist is comfortable with metaphor in a way that the philosopher is not; the philosopher views metaphor as a failure to be clear and precise; s/he uses metaphor (if ever) as a kind of last-gasp attempt. Certainly, most philosophers see the story (for example) as inferior to discursive essay. Murdoch views metaphor as essential rather than make-shift. Preparing the way to discuss Plato’s cave metaphor as a way of elucidating ‘good’, Murdoch says: “Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision. Philosophy is general, and moral philosophy in particular, has in the past often concerned itself with what it took to be our most important images, clarifying existing ones and developing new ones....However, it seems to me impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts themselves without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be analyzed into non-metaphorical components without loss of substance.” {TSG, p. 77}
Murdoch agrees with Moore that ‘good’ is unanalyzable (not simply in natural terms, but in any terms at all). Good can be talked about and displayed; metaphors and stories are the vehicles for doing so. We will not be able to sum up human excellence or good in this huge and chancy world (in which we are most often blinded by self), but the artist can point us towards it. We can be shown why guilt cannot lead to good, for guilt (we can be shown) returns the gaze to the self (see The Good Apprentice); we can be shown that intelligence, even brilliance, is neither necessary nor sufficient to goodness. The philosopher in The Philosopher’s Pupil is full of specialized knowledge (even about ethical theory), but so self-absorbed that he is literally unable to focus on anyone around him (even those whom he ‘loves’ and ‘cares about’). A simple servant in the same tale is quite obviously good, and not because of what she knows about ethical theory, or even because of self-examination, but because she has learned (via cultivation of habits) to really see those around her, to attend to them without filtering their needs and concerns through her own.
I do not intend here to go through each novel analyzing how Murdoch’s story about the good emerges. Such a task, besides presupposing the reader’s knowledge of the novels (or giving way much more of them than I care to for those who have yet to read them) would be counter to Murdoch’s aims. The novel achieves its purpose (if at all) as it stands, as a description of lived human lives replete with moral dilemmas. “The great artists reveal the detail of the world.” {TSG, p. 96} The context, as much as attention to moral principles, provides the clues to the right response. Is abortion right? The abstract answer (even with careful essay to back it up) will not be complete or sufficient, but once we see the context provided in The Italian Girl, we are helped along, pointed in the right direction. We see how the characters systematically fail to see the young girl’s condition, see her real needs, because they are blinded by the views of her that they want to have, the views of her that are distorted by the veil of their own cares and concerns. Is love essential to morality? In novel after novel Murdoch entertains us with ludicrous and laughable ‘love’ triangles (see especially The Sacred and Profane Love Machine), as she points out just how and why what gets called romantic love is not love at all. While love-as-attention is essential to morality, most of what passes for love is simple selfishness that does not see the loved one at all. (And if it does not see the loved as s/he is, then it is not really love.) “...human love is normally too profoundly possessive and also too ‘mechanical’ to be a place of vision.” {TSG, p. 75}
What we call falling in love is very real, and those of us who reject even the possibility may be in for a shock. It could happen to us suddenly and without much regard for those with whom we are already involved. Denying that it could happen tends to make us much more vulnerable if/when it does. Murdoch is convinced that we can recognize the power of what we call falling in love, of being suddenly smitten, without acting on it. Indeed, we may be more able not to act (impulsively and irresponsibly) on this sort of ‘love’ if we see it both for what it is and for what it is not. No one is better than Murdoch at exposing the frivolity as well as the destructiveness of sexual/romantic pursuits, but always the disclosure of humans at their most petty and selfish has a point beyond cynical amusement, for we are being simultaneously ‘instructed’ on power we have (via the cultivation of habits and of attention) to set aside lust/love in favor of seeing and responding to others. Murdoch delightfully attacks the myth that we must follow our genitals (calling it our heart) rather than our minds and (not-self) attending. “The love that brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking.” {TSG, p. 91}
Because human beings “are far more complicated and enigmatic and ambiguous than languages or mathematical concepts, and selfishness operates in a much more devious and frenzied manner in our relations to them,” we must approach moral philosophy obliquely. People must be taught how to keep their attention fixed on real situations rather than on returning surreptitiously to self. We must see lived-life portraits of the humble person so that we may see that humility “...is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement,....it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.” {TSG, p. 95} The novel can show us how goodness “is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience,” and that freedom “...is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self.” Of course we can simply say all of these things, but descriptions of real lives allow these truths to shine forth and be absorbed.
Perhaps I am not a better person for having read Iris Murdoch, but if I am not, it is no fault of hers. I sense as I read her that parts of myself are coming out of concealment, that I am being made fun of with an intent to improve (and with a gentle reminder that I am not alone). I read her essays before I read her novels, but only the second after-novel-reading seemed really to strike home, and then returning again (from essays) to her novels, I was struck with the illumination the novels bring to her theory. I am sure she would say that is as it should be. Murdoch insists that “The only thing which is of real importance is the ability to see it all clearly and respond to it justly which is inseparable from virtue.” I admire her unremitting allegiance to truth and moral instruction and her ability to do so in a manner that is unpretentious and genuinely entertaining. Her husband and life-partner, John Bailey, says that Iris is the most humble person he has ever known. I’m sure he is using that word in the sense that she uses it, not as a peculiar habit of self-effacement, but as selfless respect for reality, and as one of the most difficult and central of all the virtues.
I want to say in this essay just why I think Murdoch is such an important ethical theorist and philosopher. Since I mean this for an audience sufficiently broad that I cannot presuppose an intimate knowledge of either Murdoch’s essays or her novels, I will attempt a brief overview that will at the same time indicate some of why I think she is such an important writer. In order to present and discuss her ethical theory, I will also have to present her general worldview and her aesthetic theory.
Murdoch believes that there is a real world out there! In these days of rampant relativism in which not only truth and moral rightness are depicted as hopelessly relative, but when some even take ‘the real world’ to be simply a construction of ours (so that attempts to arrive at the truth are seen as anachronistic drivel), Murdoch’s ‘realism’ deserves attention. Although a good and sympathetic critic of both existentialism and current analytic philosophy, Murdoch often refers back to Plato at crucial moments in the development of both her epistemology and her ethics. For her, there is a real world, objective and quite apart from us, and the task of both the philosopher and the artist is to reveal that world to us. (It is also the task of the chemist/biologist/psychologist/etc.) However, the real world (or things-as-they-are-in-themselves, or Being, or, if you prefer, simply the That) eludes us because of the sort of beings that we are. We are selfish, and not only in a way that makes us more-or-less morally blind, but in a way that makes us more-or-less blind to the objective world as a whole. We are fascinated with the world-out-there, but in such a way that our fascination blinds us to much of what is really there, for our fascination is overwhelmingly I-centered. Much of what we call thinking or studying or doing art is really a kind of daydreaming--telling ourselves I-centered stories about what is going on. “It is a task to see the world as it is.” {The Sovereignty of Good, p. 91; hence forward referred to simply as TSG}
Murdoch claims that we are selfish beings (naturally but not necessarily) and we attempt to see the world through blinders that are both selfish and culturally determined. Furthermore, there is no human-independent purpose for human existence; the world is not teleological (no matter how much we wish it were). Her stress on the purposelessness of human existence is similar to that of the existentialist philosophers, although she is critical of other major themes in existentialism, especially Sartrean value-theory. “I assume that human beings are naturally selfish and that human life has no external point or telos.” {TSG, p. 78} One consequence of this non-teleological view is a belief in the reality of death. One of many anxieties that cause us to create a falsifying veil partially concealing the world from us is our fear of death, one of many ways in which concerns for self prevent us from seeing things as they are. Unlike many of the existentialists (and I am thinking especially of early Sartre and Camus), Murdoch does not confuse lack of a telos with meaninglessness or nihilism; human beings have purposes and meanings, it is the universe that does not. “There are properly many patterns and purposes within life, but there is no general and as it were externally guaranteed pattern or purpose of the kind for which philosophers and theologians used to search. We are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance.” {TSG, p. 79}
Murdoch does not argue for either the claim that human beings are selfish or that human existence is non-teleological. These she calls assumptions or assertions, but not ones that are simply the products of “the despair of our own age”; rather they are products of “the advance of science over a long period.” Adding to our anxiety over death is the chancy nature of human life. ‘Chance’ not here being used as a synonym for contra-causal, but as a way of insisting on the non-teleological nature of our lives. Randomness (again, in the sense of non-purpose) is a real feature of human existence: our best intentions may be thwarted by a fall on the ice; we are not ‘meant’ to die, but neither are we ‘meant’ to live. “.....the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self.”
Often when one encounters such insistence on non-teleology (which gets called purposelessness), the view projected seems to be bleak and dreary and pessimistic. Not so for Murdoch! For while death and randomness are real, so is good. Here, Murdoch parts company with (most) existentialists. She was one of the first analytic philosophers who was sympathetic to Sartre (and to existentialism generally), but she also pointed out very clearly the hopeless relativism involved in the Sartrean claim that value is literally created by choice. {See her excellent early work on Sartre, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist} While she does not take up specifically Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” which, I think, requires him to locate value in the choosing subject rather than in objective features of the world, it is obvious that Murdoch believes that right acts are right (though she prefers to talk of ‘good’ rather than ‘right’) because of the way the world is, not because of any state of mind of the agent. “The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality.” {TSG, p. 90}
Let me now attempt an outline of Murdoch’s ethical theory; one needs to remember, however, that for Murdoch the attempt to spell out a theory of good is always incomplete (because, agreeing with G.E. Moore, good is simple and unanalyzable), and philosophical (discursive) essay is not sufficient for doing ethical theory even in its necessarily incomplete form. Art, especially the novel, is necessary (not merely convenient or a short-cut) for doing ethics. (More of these two points later. She spells both out very clearly in TSG.)
Murdoch is convinced that both existentialism and contemporary analytic philosophy err in seeing goodness (ethics) as essentially a function of will. It is not choice or ‘freedom’ that makes human beings moral beings; nor is goodness tied up in any necessary way with “the examined life” (and here, she is taking on Plato’s claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living”). Contrary to Plato’s claim that the worth of a life must be connected to self-examination, most of Murdoch’s examples of good human beings are relatively ‘simple’ and not particularly self-reflective people. The key to morality is attention to others, as opposed to (the natural) gaze that returns to the self. Note here that this gaze towards self is not always what we ordinarily mean by being selfish. Guilt can return the gaze to the self, as can rage or resentment or even grief. Murdoch loves to present her readers with characters who are otherwise good (or could be), but who are blinded by guilt, rage, fear, resentment, lust, etc. and who build up habits engendered by the particular blindness. Both good (attention) and bad (inattention) become habitual, and habits are hard to break or to incrementally build.
Murdoch approaches this rather difficult and complex subject of attention through an analogy with art. The (good) artist learns by degrees to attend to her/his subject, and to attend in such a way that self is lost, is absorbed into the focused attention. (The good biologist likewise must attend away from self and towards the object of study.) The artist, qua artist, is attempting to disclose or reveal her subject, and this requires incredible attention away from self. But this is no easy task, for “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.” {TSG, p. 84} “Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.” {TSG, p. 86}
The not-self attention characteristic of good art is attained not through heroic acts of will, and likewise the good act is not achieved through such moments of free-will, but, rather, through a slow process of learning to attend to others, which is learning to really look. The good act arises naturally out of that incremental and preparatory attention, not from any sudden decision to act against inclination (as philosophers seem to suggest). “A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality.” {TSG, p. 91} In one of her rare disagreements with Plato (who was suspicious of art as honeyed words that seduce and entertain instead of revealing), Murdoch insists that the task of the good artist is not simply to create beauty or to entertain, but to reveal truth; it is not simply “...a diversion or a side-issue. It is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen.” {TSG, p. 88} The moral philosopher and the moral person are, therefore, looking for a particular sort of truth, one that requires attention away from self and towards (the real needs of) others.
Murdoch insists that both existentialists and analytic philosophers have focused too much on will and freedom, rather than on careful attention to the way the world is (specifically the way other people are rather than on how they appear to us in terms of our own goals and projects). “The area of its [the psyche’s] vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self.” {TSG, pps. 78-9} So morality is much more a function of truth (of how the world and others really are) than it is a matter of will, and it requires attention rather than heroism.
Again, contra existentialism and positivistic theories of value, good is not merely subjective and certainly is not brought into existence via the individual’s choice. “The ordinary person does not, unless corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates values by his choices.” {TSG, p. 97} Rather, “...value concepts are....patently tied on to the world, they are stretched as it were between the truth-seeking mind and the world, they are not moving about on their own as adjuncts of the personal will.” {TSG, p. 90} If I may enlarge on this slightly, good is not a function of will or consciousness, but of what human beings really are. Human beings bleed; they are mortal; they require sustenance in order to live; they fear death and enslavement and the heel of the oppressor. Morality is objective rather than subjective because it depends on what is the case, on what human beings really are, not on what we believe to be the case or what we choose to value. (And I don’t mean to restrict this to our moral/immoral behavior to humans. It is because cats feel pain that it is morally wrong, not good, to torture them. And even if we see cats as devils, our so seeing them will not magically make our torture of them good. Just as our seeing black people, or women, or Jews as somehow not human does not make them not human. Morality is determined by what beings are, not what we believe them to be.)
Let me sum this up by taking a quote from Murdoch (somewhat out of context): “My work is a progressive revelation of something that exists independent of me.” {TSG, p. 89} Murdoch understands that it is no accident that Sartre (despite his promises) never produced an ethic; morality is tied up necessarily with what we are as human beings (our essence), and in denying that we are essentially anything (but rather freedoms creating ourselves), Sartre undercuts the very possibility of an objective, non-relative ethic.
It would be easy to misconstrue Murdoch’s assessment of art and her disagreement with Plato from reading just what I have said so far. Certainly, she is not claiming that art by and large is revealing. Indeed, “A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of the consumer’s consciousness.” {TSG, p. 85} Her emphasis is on what art ought to be, and clearly what she intends her art to be. Murdoch would agree that Plato is right in supposing that most consumers of art are seeking diversion through fantasy, and that most (so-called) artists are pandering to that taste. Speaking of Sartre with admiration (in spite of her disagreements with his value-theory), Murdoch says: “A driving force in all of his writing is his serious desire to change the life of the reader.” {SRR, p. ix} The task is to bring the receiver of art closer to an apprehension of how things really are, and “....anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.” {TSG, p. 84} The artist reveals what is in order to change the life, the actions, of the receiver.
It should be clear that I admire Murdoch for her belief in truth, for her conviction that the artist (and the philosopher) has an obligation to seek and attempt to reveal truth, and for her conviction that morality is in some very real sense objective--that value is not created by choice nor merely an expression of approval or interest, but rather a function of how things really are and not simply our view (or opinion) of how things are. I also happen to agree with her that it is egocentrism that leads us to deny death; we seem quite agreed that grasshoppers and deer and flowers really die. But instead of seeing and reveling in the fact that we are a part of that great chain of being and that living beings die (that being a part of their natures), we want to insist that human beings (especially I) somehow escape this universal condition of living things. I also believe that she is right to stress the non-teleological nature of human existence. For even if there were some such telos, it is certainly hidden from us (though there are innumerable, and mutually exclusive, claimants to the throne), and we must live our lives as if it is we humans who have purposes and goals and not some grand human-independent telos. Like Marx, Murdoch believes that human history is not in the hands of some god or gods, but (at least to some extent) in human hands.
I agree with Murdoch’s worldview and with her severe injunction to the artist-philosopher. But why pick her out among artists. Why stress her novels and essays? In line with many central nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers (Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Dewey, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) Murdoch insists that human beings are historical creatures; that we are beings who live in time. And yet with all of this emphasis on historicity, much philosophical essay retains its abstract and essentially timeless, history-less tone. Heidegger lists being-in-time as one of the existentialia of dasein (one of the universal and necessary features of what it is to be human), and yet Being and Time is in most ways as abstract and oblivious to history as is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Murdoch is convinced that if one wants finally to describe the human condition, one must (at least sometimes) describe lived-life. Likewise, if one wants to characterize morality and moral dilemmas, one must locate them in the context of human beings living and relating with one another. There is a place for abstract ethical theory (discursive essay), but it cannot be complete or totally convincing or transformative. Both to be truthful about what constitutes morality and to instruct and transform humans, one must turn to art, and especially to the novel.
Murdoch obviously admires Wittgenstein and analytic philosophers who carry on a tradition he began. She, too, thinks that philosophy has a descriptive task (although not even description is purely analytic and neutral, and when it pretends to be, it simply suppresses value judgments). In order really to describe the human condition, one must include the richness and context of lived-life. Furthermore, only a part of the human condition is concerned with reasons and arguments. Only a part of truth is revealed discursively (as Murdoch believes the artist has always, at least implicitly, known). “The novelist proper is, in his way, a sort of phenomenologist. He has always implicitly understood, what the philosopher has grasped less clearly, that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once for all. The novelist has had his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do or must be presumed to do. He has as a natural gift that blessed freedom from rationalism which the academic thinker achieves, if at all, by a precarious discipline. He has always been, what the very latest philosophers claim to be, a describer rather than an explainer; and in consequence he has often anticipated the philosopher’s discoveries....The novel is a picture of, and a comment on, the human condition, a typical product of the era to which belong also the writings of Nietzsche, the psychology of Freud, and the philosophy of Sartre. It is also a type of writing which is more important, in the sense of being more influential, than any of the last mentioned.” (emphasis mine)
Murdoch is important because she selfconsciously uses the novel to do philosophy. Partly, of course, because she realizes that she will reach a much wider audience. (How many people would have heard of Murdoch simply as an Oxford teacher and philosopher and writer of philosophical essay?) But also because she realizes the limitation of essay. Novels can describe the human condition in a way that essay cannot. When it comes to doing moral philosophy, this is even more clearly the case. The artist is comfortable with metaphor in a way that the philosopher is not; the philosopher views metaphor as a failure to be clear and precise; s/he uses metaphor (if ever) as a kind of last-gasp attempt. Certainly, most philosophers see the story (for example) as inferior to discursive essay. Murdoch views metaphor as essential rather than make-shift. Preparing the way to discuss Plato’s cave metaphor as a way of elucidating ‘good’, Murdoch says: “Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision. Philosophy is general, and moral philosophy in particular, has in the past often concerned itself with what it took to be our most important images, clarifying existing ones and developing new ones....However, it seems to me impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts themselves without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be analyzed into non-metaphorical components without loss of substance.” {TSG, p. 77}
Murdoch agrees with Moore that ‘good’ is unanalyzable (not simply in natural terms, but in any terms at all). Good can be talked about and displayed; metaphors and stories are the vehicles for doing so. We will not be able to sum up human excellence or good in this huge and chancy world (in which we are most often blinded by self), but the artist can point us towards it. We can be shown why guilt cannot lead to good, for guilt (we can be shown) returns the gaze to the self (see The Good Apprentice); we can be shown that intelligence, even brilliance, is neither necessary nor sufficient to goodness. The philosopher in The Philosopher’s Pupil is full of specialized knowledge (even about ethical theory), but so self-absorbed that he is literally unable to focus on anyone around him (even those whom he ‘loves’ and ‘cares about’). A simple servant in the same tale is quite obviously good, and not because of what she knows about ethical theory, or even because of self-examination, but because she has learned (via cultivation of habits) to really see those around her, to attend to them without filtering their needs and concerns through her own.
I do not intend here to go through each novel analyzing how Murdoch’s story about the good emerges. Such a task, besides presupposing the reader’s knowledge of the novels (or giving way much more of them than I care to for those who have yet to read them) would be counter to Murdoch’s aims. The novel achieves its purpose (if at all) as it stands, as a description of lived human lives replete with moral dilemmas. “The great artists reveal the detail of the world.” {TSG, p. 96} The context, as much as attention to moral principles, provides the clues to the right response. Is abortion right? The abstract answer (even with careful essay to back it up) will not be complete or sufficient, but once we see the context provided in The Italian Girl, we are helped along, pointed in the right direction. We see how the characters systematically fail to see the young girl’s condition, see her real needs, because they are blinded by the views of her that they want to have, the views of her that are distorted by the veil of their own cares and concerns. Is love essential to morality? In novel after novel Murdoch entertains us with ludicrous and laughable ‘love’ triangles (see especially The Sacred and Profane Love Machine), as she points out just how and why what gets called romantic love is not love at all. While love-as-attention is essential to morality, most of what passes for love is simple selfishness that does not see the loved one at all. (And if it does not see the loved as s/he is, then it is not really love.) “...human love is normally too profoundly possessive and also too ‘mechanical’ to be a place of vision.” {TSG, p. 75}
What we call falling in love is very real, and those of us who reject even the possibility may be in for a shock. It could happen to us suddenly and without much regard for those with whom we are already involved. Denying that it could happen tends to make us much more vulnerable if/when it does. Murdoch is convinced that we can recognize the power of what we call falling in love, of being suddenly smitten, without acting on it. Indeed, we may be more able not to act (impulsively and irresponsibly) on this sort of ‘love’ if we see it both for what it is and for what it is not. No one is better than Murdoch at exposing the frivolity as well as the destructiveness of sexual/romantic pursuits, but always the disclosure of humans at their most petty and selfish has a point beyond cynical amusement, for we are being simultaneously ‘instructed’ on power we have (via the cultivation of habits and of attention) to set aside lust/love in favor of seeing and responding to others. Murdoch delightfully attacks the myth that we must follow our genitals (calling it our heart) rather than our minds and (not-self) attending. “The love that brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking.” {TSG, p. 91}
Because human beings “are far more complicated and enigmatic and ambiguous than languages or mathematical concepts, and selfishness operates in a much more devious and frenzied manner in our relations to them,” we must approach moral philosophy obliquely. People must be taught how to keep their attention fixed on real situations rather than on returning surreptitiously to self. We must see lived-life portraits of the humble person so that we may see that humility “...is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement,....it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.” {TSG, p. 95} The novel can show us how goodness “is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience,” and that freedom “...is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self.” Of course we can simply say all of these things, but descriptions of real lives allow these truths to shine forth and be absorbed.
Perhaps I am not a better person for having read Iris Murdoch, but if I am not, it is no fault of hers. I sense as I read her that parts of myself are coming out of concealment, that I am being made fun of with an intent to improve (and with a gentle reminder that I am not alone). I read her essays before I read her novels, but only the second after-novel-reading seemed really to strike home, and then returning again (from essays) to her novels, I was struck with the illumination the novels bring to her theory. I am sure she would say that is as it should be. Murdoch insists that “The only thing which is of real importance is the ability to see it all clearly and respond to it justly which is inseparable from virtue.” I admire her unremitting allegiance to truth and moral instruction and her ability to do so in a manner that is unpretentious and genuinely entertaining. Her husband and life-partner, John Bailey, says that Iris is the most humble person he has ever known. I’m sure he is using that word in the sense that she uses it, not as a peculiar habit of self-effacement, but as selfless respect for reality, and as one of the most difficult and central of all the virtues.
posted by Larry @ 7:57 PM
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