IRIS MURDOCH TODAY
Iris Murdoch’s
Practical Metaphysics
A Guide to her Early Writings
Lesley Jamieson
Iris Murdoch Today
Series Editors
Miles Leeson
Iris Murdoch Research Centre
University of Chichester
Chichester, West Sussex, UK
Frances White
Iris Murdoch Research Centre
University of Chichester
Chichester, West Sussex, UK
The aim of this series is to publish the best scholarly work in Murdoch
studies by bringing together those working at the forefront of the field.
Authors and editors of volumes in the series are internationally-recognised
scholars in philosophy, literature, theology, and related humanities and
interdisciplinary subjects. Including both monographs and contributed
volumes, the series is scholarly rigorous and opens up new ways of reading
Murdoch, and new ways to read the work of others with Murdoch in
mind. The series is designed to appeal not only to Murdoch experts, but
also to scholars with a more general interest in the subjects under
discussion.
Lesley Jamieson
Iris Murdoch’s
Practical Metaphysics
A Guide to her Early Writings
Lesley Jamieson
Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value
University of Pardubice
Pardubice, Czechia
ISSN 2731-331X ISSN 2731-3328 (electronic)
Iris Murdoch Today
ISBN 978-3-031-36079-4 ISBN 978-3-031-36080-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0
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In loving memory of my Grandma Bernice
Acknowledgements
This book began its life at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario where
I first encountered Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings. I’d seen her
name in passing before, but it wasn’t until Jacquelyn Maxwell suggested
that we read one of her essays for a reading group meeting that I actually
read one of her papers. I’d never encountered anything like it before, and
soon after revised my doctoral research plan. Jacquelyn and I went on to
host a dedicated Murdoch reading group, slowly making our way through
the contents of Existentialists and Mystics alongside a rotating cast of fac-
ulty members, graduate students, and independent scholars. I’m grateful
to everyone who participated, but especially to Michael Vossen, Kate
Lawson, Sue Donaldson, Nancy Salay, Brennen Harwood, Christine
Sypnowich, and David Bakhurst.
The last of that list is the person I perhaps owe the most to. David
Bakhurst was my doctoral supervisor at Queen’s. It is a fact that no one
has read as much of my writing as he has, and I’m very grateful for his
patience with wading through so many ponderous and typo-filled early
drafts. His comments characteristically encourage one to exercise greater
intellectual honesty, read others with sympathy and respect for insight
(even if one ultimately finds much to disagree with), and to look for the
real-world significance of philosophical questions that might look rarefied
at first glance.
During and after my time at Queen’s, I had the good fortune to partici-
pate in Rachael Wiseman and Clare Mac Cumhaill’s (Women) In
Parenthesis. This research project is dedicated to recovering the neglected
history of Iris Murdoch and three of her Oxford peers (Mary Midgley,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot in the years prior to and during
the Second World War. Clare and Rachael’s work has been a profound
source of inspiration and brought about a major shift in how I think about
the relationship between philosophical ideas and the historical contexts
they develop in. It helped me to move away from seeing Murdoch as just
a defender of philosophical positions and see her as a student, a friend, an
activist, and a writer, and to investigate the connection between these
aspects of her person, the historical period she lived through, and the
philosophical texts she penned.
This book would not have taken the shape it has were it not for the
supportive network of scholars I’ve met through the Iris Murdoch Society
(IMS). Miles Leeson and Frances White work tirelessly to foster public
and scholarly interest in Iris Murdoch’s literary and philosophical works,
and have organized venues for us to share our work and meet one another.
I benefited tremendously from the useful feedback I received on my work
at their Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference at St. Anne’s College, Oxford
in 2019. Through IMS, I was also able to take part in the online Iris
Murdoch Reading Group organized by Mark Hopwood—a source of
sorely needed intellectual community during some of the loneliest days of
the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, this past year I’ve called Pardubice in the Czech Republic my
home, and have had the good fortune to work alongside the scholars of
the Centre for Ethics as Study of Human Value (CE) at the University of
Pardubice. CE is a unique place; it brings together a diverse set of scholars
who are united by a commitment to making philosophy answerable to the
real complexities of human life. Before arriving, I was already inspired by
the work that the CE researchers have produced, particularly Niklas
Forsberg, Nora Hämäläinen, and Silvia Caprioglio Panizza. I hope that
my “practical” reading of Iris Murdoch’s philosophy lives up to the
CE ethos.
This publication was supported within the project of Operational
Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE),
“Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No.
CZ.02.1.01/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European
Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.
Additionally, my doctoral research was supported by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Contents
1 Approaching
Murdoch’s Early Philosophy 1
Bibliography 11
2 Having
a Mind on the Borders of Philosophy, Literature,
and Politics 13
Introduction: Murdoch and the Changing of the Guard 13
What Was Clarificatory Philosophy? 19
Philosophy and the Public Good 25
Clarification and Poetic Language 31
Murdoch and the Post-War Consensus 35
Bibliography 38
3 Behaviourism
and Human Separateness 41
Introduction 41
Three Sorts of Behaviourism: Method, Revision, and
Re-Evaluation 43
Murdoch’s Ambivalence Towards Behaviourism 53
Recounting How We Think Towards Understanding 57
A Renewed Vocabulary for Thinking 63
Regulative Ideas and Practical Guidance 70
Bibliography 73
ix
x Contents
4 The
Disorientation of Love and the Decline of Literature 75
Introduction 75
The Influence of Kantian Aesthetics 78
Kant on the Sublime 84
Sartre and the Modern Novel 86
The Shakespeare Principle in Action 94
Freedom as Love—And Its Enemies 102
Conclusion 115
Bibliography 118
5 The
Limits of Modern Moral Philosophy121
Introduction 121
Ethical Non-Naturalism and the Development of the Current
View 123
Moral Difference and Moral Learning 132
Consistency, Reality, and Metaphors of Vision 143
Bibliography 151
6 Moral
Philosophy, Moralism, and the Socialist Imagination153
Introduction 153
Moral Vision and Moral Philosophy 156
Two Accounts of the Danger of Conceptual Loss 161
The Socialist Imagination Under Threat 168
Dogmatism, Communism, and the New Left 178
Bibliography 186
7 A Prelude to The Sovereignty of Good?187
Introduction 187
Methodological Continuities from “Thinking and Language” to
The Sovereignty of Good 192
The Limits of Transcendental Arguments 200
Bibliography 208
Index211
CHAPTER 1
Approaching Murdoch’s Early Philosophy
There are few who would read Murdoch’s philosophy and deny that she
has a unique philosophical voice. For some, it is too unique. During my
doctoral studies, I once attended a reading group meeting where we dis-
cussed “The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts”; a first-time
reader couldn’t stop himself from interjecting, “well these things are very
nice to assert—and she certainly paints a compelling picture—but where
are the arguments?” He wasn’t being wilfully obtuse—this scholar simply
had a set of expectations for what a philosophical text should do and try
to achieve in order to convince by rational means rather than to merely
persuade. By his lights, it would be insulting to Murdoch to handle her
writings with kid gloves rather than assessing them by these standards.
Due respect means reading someone’s work in such a way that it might be
found wanting. The lights in question are ideals of analytic philosophy—
Tony Milligan offers a useful simplification of these in “Iris Murdoch and
the Borders of Analytic Philosophy” (2012), writing:
[G]ood philosophy presents a clear, disambiguated thesis; it does so with a
minimum of rhetoric; it presents one or more valid arguments for the thesis,
and then considers (in a charitable manner) and responds to, the relevant
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
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Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0_1
2 L. JAMIESON
objections to the arguments and/or objections to the disclosed and undis-
closed premises from which they draw.1
To this, we might add that analytic philosophers are typically committed
to following where the reasons lead them rather than allowing one’s per-
sonal sensibilities or prior commitments to direct one’s intellectual path. A
text that falls short of these standards can pull a reader up short, leading
them to ask the dreaded question: “Should this really be called philosophy
at all, rather than, say, literature?” Calling a philosopher ‘literary’ can be a
way of denying that what they do should properly be called philosophy at
all—“wasn’t the late Heidegger more of a poet?” “Who even knows what
to call Derrida …”.
The professor of my anecdote was neither the first nor last to have their
hackles raised by Murdoch. Hannah Marije Altorf has discussed this phe-
nomenon at length, recalling an incident where she was (informally) told
that according to philosophers in the UK in the early 2000s, Murdoch’s
‘philosophy’ was not really philosophy at all.2 This observation is corrobo-
rated by the sorry state that scholarship on her philosophical writings was
in prior to that time. The first monograph on the topic—Iris Murdoch and
the Search for Human Goodness, edited by Maria Antonaccio and William
Schweiker—only came out in 1996. This was 26 years after the publica-
tion of The Sovereignty of Good (1970). In his introduction to a compre-
hensive collection of essays on Murdoch’s philosophy published in 2012,
Justin Broackes remarks, “There are people who suspect now, I think, that
Murdoch was either not quite a serious and substantial philosopher or not
quite a professional, recognized by her fellows.”3 While Murdoch’s rela-
tionship to her contemporaries seems to have been largely cordial, their
remarks about her don’t give the impression that they saw her as a fellow
analytic philosopher. Ved Mehta records Stuart Hampshire describing her
as “elusive” before noting that he (Mehta) thinks of her as “much more an
intuitive person than an analytic one.”4 In a more oblique form of criti-
cism, when asked about her by Mehta, R. M. Hare describes her simply as
1
Tony Milligan, “Iris Murdoch and the Borders of Analytic Philosophy”, in Ratio, 25(2)
(2012), 167.
2
Hannah Marije Altorf, “Iris Murdoch and Common Sense Or, What is it Like to be a
Woman in Philosophy”, in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 87 (2020), 201–220.
3
Justin Broackes, “Introduction”, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 6.
4
Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Fly-Bottle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 91.
1 APPROACHING MURDOCH’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY 3
an exegete of existentialist philosophy who had “read the big books” of
existentialism—completely passing over the fact that she had penned mul-
tiple critical discussions of his own position in moral philosophy (universal
prescriptivism).5
Times have changed since the early 2000s and Murdoch’s philosophical
writings are now read more widely by analytic philosophers. There is,
however, something troubling about the way that her work is sometimes
treated that suggests that she is still being held to the same standard that
triggered the “where are the arguments” response from my former col-
league. That is to say, there is sometimes the uncomfortable appearance
that Murdoch is being saved from her own excesses; that sympathetic
scholars are preventing responses like my colleague’s by showing that
beneath the “compelling pictures” and the awkward displays of ethical and
political commitment, Murdoch’s work contains real arguments (or at
least fine materials for constructing them). There are two forms that this
rehabilitation project has taken. The first concedes that Murdoch’s writ-
ings are profoundly insightful but unclear; it attempts to extract her most
insightful remarks and reassemble them in a form more palatable to ana-
lytic moral philosophers. The second insists that Murdoch’s ‘unclarity’ is
only apparent; if we look at her work in the right way—synoptically—we
can see her using legitimate argumentative methods to defend a familiar
sort of position.
The first of these two rehabilitation strategies is taken up by Kieran
Setiya. He accounts for the limited influence Murdoch’s work has had on
analytic moral philosophy in terms of “difficulties internal to Murdoch’s
work.” He writes:
Her writing can be opaque, her views obscure. It is not easy to identify argu-
ments, if she has them, or clear objections to opposing views … if Murdoch
is to speak more audibly to contemporary philosophers, so that she cannot
be ignored, her ideas must be reframed as interventions in existing disputes,
her arguments must be recovered and her conclusions made clear.6
Setiya treats this problem by assembling Murdoch’s insightful remarks
into argumentative forms that speak to contemporary debates about what
5
Mehta, The Fly and the Fly-Bottle, 51.
6
Kieran Setiya, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good”, in Philosopher’s Imprint 13(9)
(2013), 1.
4 L. JAMIESON
distinguishes two persons who seemingly share in their view of a situation
and yet differ in their motivation to do the right thing. By distilling her
“odd mix of empirical psychology, moral exhortation, and speculative
metaphysics” into a theory of moral concepts and perception, Setiya offers
a novel, Murdoch-inspired defense of internalism in a form that is “audi-
ble” to analytic moral philosophers.7
Jessy Jordan exemplifies the second tack. He reviews her corpus in its
entirety and shows how segments of individual works contribute to a
larger overall argument for a species of moral realism. In an early formula-
tion of this, he traces a “three-act structure” across her career. The first act
takes place during the 1950s; it is “deconstructive”, comprised of genea-
logical arguments that establish an “Anti-Enlightenment narrative”,
intended lay bare “the deeply influential, widely pervasive, and uniquely
problematic intellectual, spiritual, and moral shift that occurred in the
modern period through a coordination of historical, social, and concep-
tual analysis”.8 Jordan’s understanding of Murdoch’s use of the history of
philosophy is influenced by Charles Taylor, who claims that we need to
recover the history of philosophical positions that have attained the status
of unquestionable common sense. By doing so, we can recognize their
contingency, seeing that these positions were formed at a particular
moment in history and that we can reassess their credentials while also
noticing that the position used to have live competition. We engage in
recollection so that we might recover these alternative positions from the
dustbin of history and restore the practices they once informed.9 When
Jordan describes Murdoch as a genealogist, he is picturing her as crafting
“a historical narrative designed to subvert a dominant philosophical con-
sensus, thereby liberating one to consider an alternative philosophical
picture”.10 The other “acts” reconstruct on the grounds cleared by her
genealogical deconstructions. In his later analysis of Murdoch’s methods,
Jordan claims that in the 1960s “second act” of her career, Murdoch
introduces a rich set of phenomenological observations as she discusses
Plato, attention, and the Good. These observations, when read in light of
Setiya, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good”, 2.
7
Jessy Jordan, Iris Murdoch’s Genealogy of the Modern Self: Retrieving Consciousness Beyond
8
the Linguistic Turn (PhD Dissertation: Baylor University, 2008).
9
Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and its History”, in Philosophy in History: Essays in the
Historiography of Philosophy eds. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 22.
10
Jordan, Iris Murdoch’s Genealogy of the Modern Self, vii.
1 APPROACHING MURDOCH’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY 5
how she discusses the ontological argument in her “third act”, contribute
to a transcendental argument for the necessity of the good to human cog-
nition.11 On this reading, we should understand Murdoch’s earliest forays
in academic philosophy as preambles to a defense of moral realism.
We have then two ways of responding to the “where are the argu-
ments” question. Either there are none (but there are ample materials that
can be used to construct one), or there is one (but it doesn’t fully reside
in any one paper, which contain only sub-arguments). I have no serious
objection to philosophers treating Murdoch’s work as a repository of
insight and source of inspiration as they participate in contemporary
debates about internalism, particularism, realism, and the like (although
this should always be done cautiously). Speaking about her 1950s contem-
poraries, Murdoch herself warns, “There has been of late something of a
tendency to read back into the great metaphysicians our own logical for-
mulae, and to treat them as if they were trying ineptly to do what we have
done successfully.”12 While Murdoch would probably reject the label
“great metaphysician”, the issue she flags here is clearly relevant. By taking
a particular image of philosophical clarity and rigour for granted, we’re left
with the appearance that Murdoch tried and failed to live up to that stan-
dard. It elides the fact that these ideals are open to contestation and rein-
terpretation, and that Murdoch might be fruitfully read as exemplifying an
alternative conception of the aims and methods proper to philosophical
exploration. Rather than bemoaning that Murdoch crosses the lines
between persuasion and argument, between literature and philosophy, and
between moral philosophy and moralizing, we might try to see how the
apparently problematic aspects of her writing come together into a vision
of philosophy that questions how these lines are typically drawn.
The synoptic approach avoids accusing Murdoch of obscurity, but ulti-
mately suffers from the same problem as the first. That is to say, Jordan
presents Murdoch’s work as perfectly rigorous, defending a form of moral
realism through genealogical and transcendental arguments; however, by
zooming out and adopting the synoptic view, he elides the very aspects of
her writing that lead philosophers to accuse her of excessive literariness or
moralizing. Her works may be replete with metaphors, analogies, and
11
Jessy Jordan, “On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical
Method”, in European Journal of Philosophy 30(1) (2022), 394–410.
12
Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi
(New York: Penguin, 1998), 73.
6 L. JAMIESON
compelling pictures, and she may draw regular linkages between philoso-
phy and the ills of post-war literature and politics, but the synoptic view
makes these aspects of her writing look like stylistic quirks, at best ancillary
to her more fundamental philosophical aim: displaying the universal
(moral) structure of human consciousness. It may even be that they detract
from the project that Jordan identifies at the synoptic level; commentary
on this topic is outside the scope of his exegetical project.13
Giving Murdoch’s use of literary language the window-dressing treat-
ment should strike us as peculiar, given how she characterizes the activity
of moral philosophy. It is, in her words, a practice of analysing and describ-
ing our own morality and that of others that involves “the making of
models and pictures of what different kinds of men are like”, often by
making poetic use of language.14 Philosophers don’t incidentally work
with imagery—picture-making is a central activity, albeit one that philoso-
phers sometimes engage in without fully understanding what they are
doing. In her early manuscript on Sartre’s fiction and philosophy, she
notes that it is replete with deeply imagistic depictions of the “human
condition” that succeed only in representing the preoccupations of a par-
ticular sort of Sartrean psychology: persons with especially metaphysical
temperaments who worry about the imperfect fit between abstract con-
cepts and the flux and ambiguity of concrete existence, with how dissimi-
lar the contingent occurrence of events is from the necessity of the
succession of notes defined by a song. This is only one possible response;
for Gabriel Marcel, the same messiness and overabundance appears glori-
ous rather than nauseating. There’s nonetheless something worthwhile in
representing the structure of one perspective from among a diversity of
outlooks.15 On Murdoch’s view, Sartre’s imagery-laden writing—replete
with metaphors of the “viscous, the fluid, the paste-like”—make this way
of being human and relating to a world available to his readers. What we
do when we engage in metaphysical reflection is to develop tools for self-
interpretation that make use of “concepts, images, explanatory schema,
and metaphors to describe reality and human existence”. As Maria
13
Tony Milligan also cautions against treating Murdoch’s literariness as something that can
be separated from what she is doing as a philosopher, arguing that the metaphors she employs
are not incidental and cannot be elided or translated into more literal language without alter-
ing her meaning. See Tony Milligan, “Iris Murdoch and the Borders of Analytic Philosophy”,
in Ratio 25(2) (2012), 164–176.
14
Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 74.
15
Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 49.
1 APPROACHING MURDOCH’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY 7
Antonaccio puts it, “In her view, metaphysics is not (as some analytic phi-
losophers would hold) a logically neutral attempt to explain the nature of
reality, but a ‘figurative’ activity of creating myths, concepts, and images
to describe and illuminate human moral existence.”16
Furthermore, this activity cannot always be separated from moralizing
and persuasion. Murdoch warns us that the attempt to explain our own
morality and others’ is likely to produce pictures that are “half a descrip-
tion and half a persuasion”. We are not just persuaded to go on to affirm
a set of would-be facts when we engage with these self-portraits—we are
persuaded to become something. Murdoch writes, “man is a creature who
makes pictures of himself and them comes to resemble the picture”.17
While it is not clear what kind of mechanism is operative in this process of
coming-to-resemble, it suggests that the picture-making disciplines (of
which philosophy seems to be one) have the power to influence our wider
culture. Murdoch does not think that the picture of human freedom (as
unconstrained choice), world (as a realm of neutral empirical facts), and
morality (as responsible self-determination) that dominated post-war phi-
losophy were practically inert; they “crystallised”—strengthened and
organized—more diffuse cultural attitudes into influential self-
understandings.18 As Silvia Caprioglio Panizza puts it, “our background
ideas about what is the case, what is real, the structure of reality and self,
are not just idle abstractions—and when they are, they are either postures,
or not applicable to everyday life—but inform everything we think and do,
inseparably from moral sensibility, thought, and action.”19 There is an
internal relationship between metaphysical ideas and the nuts and bolts of
how we live our lives.20
Taking Murdoch seriously as a maker of metaphysical pictures might
mean taking her seriously as a kind of moralizer who participated in the
complex processes whereby human beings come to resemble this or that
image of themselves. When Nora Hämäläinen reflects on Murdoch’s use
of poetic language, she highlights the role that such images play in helping
us to develop into better people. When teaching students to become bet-
ter singers, instructors will sometimes present them with metaphorical
16
Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 22.
17
Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 75.
18
Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, in Existentialists and Mystics
ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 270.
19
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention (New York: Routledge, 2022), 63.
20
Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 74–75.
8 L. JAMIESON
descriptions of the body and the movement of air; we don’t relate to our
breathing as a process of activating this or that collection of muscles within
ourselves and guidance in those terms would not be helpful to trainee
singers. Instructors will sometimes tell their students to picture their tor-
sos as hollow barrels they must completely fill with air or to imagine the
stream of air they breathe out as they sing as a washing line, smooth and
even until they come to clothespin-consonants that demand sharp articu-
lation.21 When Murdoch offers us imagistic descriptions of metaphysical
phenomena, we might think of it along these lines: as part of the training
of our moral capacities. Following Plato, she seeks to craft “an imaginary
of human development in knowledge and virtue”.22 Murdoch’s use of
imagery was not, on Hämäläinen’s view, accidental or ancillary to what she
was attempting to do in her writings. Metaphysical pictures don’t just
describe us; for better or for worse, they guide us.
There is a tension between this interpretation of Murdoch and the syn-
optic, transcendental reading. According to Jordan, the aim of a transcen-
dental argument is to show us that what philosophers treat as dubious is in
fact necessary to what thought and experience are for us. Murdoch does
not establish how things are in some mind-independent reality; rather, her
career culminates in the claim that the concept of the Good is presupposed
in human cognition as such and cannot be seriously doubted. “Good is
something necessary to human experience, thought, and belief (e.g., it
cannot be thought away), not that there is a mind-independent reality in
some Platonic ‘elsewhere’, similar to the Christian ‘elsewhere’”.23 Doubts
about the reality of value are akin to doubts about the existence of an
external material world or causal relations. The activity of moral think-
ing—thinking as if there were real worldly structures of better and worse,
of important and unimportant, of good and bad—is ubiquitous and ines-
capable. It is immutable in human life as such insofar as human beings
think at all. What a philosopher does in bringing this to our attention
cannot affect its status as a structure of consciousness. If her work offers
practical guidance, it looks like it’s guidance away from anti-realist theo-
ries of value.
21
Nora Hämäläinen, “What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist? – Iris Murdoch,
Metaphysics and Metaphor”, in Philosophical Papers 43(2) (2014), 222.
22
Hämäläinen, “What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist”, 223.
23
Jordan, “On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method”, 404.
1 APPROACHING MURDOCH’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY 9
The transcendental reading may be true to aspects of Murdoch’s later
thought—this is a question I will return to at the close of this book—but
it misses something of the content and mood of her early writings which
are preoccupied by troubling historical changes and the mutability of par-
ticular human practices. Content-wise, Murdoch’s 1950s writings cover a
number of topics that are much more particular than, and not clearly con-
cerned with, the necessarily value-laden structure of human consciousness.
In “Thinking and Language” and “Nostalgia for the Particular”, she
engages with Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle’s “behaviouristic” analyses of
mental concepts like “thought” and “inner experience”. Papers like “The
Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” and “Against Dryness” discuss
trends in twentieth-century literature, literary criticism, and aesthetics and
describe what she takes to be the moral virtues of great novelists and play-
wrights of past centuries and the shortcomings of formalistic criteria of
aesthetic value. One of her least discussed papers, “A House of Theory”,
identifies connections between the rise of an anti-metaphysical and scien-
tistic empiricism and the decline of socialism in post-war Britain.
These papers centre on very specific practices—the depiction of human
beings in prose fiction, the production of socialist pamphlets—which
don’t share in the supposed immutability of evaluative consciousness as
such. We might necessarily occupy worlds of value, but we do not neces-
sarily regard other human beings as worthy of our interest and tolerance
as the messy, eccentric, and inexhaustibly particular individuals that they
are. Murdoch certainly did not think that twentieth-century novelists
wrote their characters as if they were valuable in this way. It may be a mis-
take to claim that human beings are or could be simply in touch with a
world of evaluatively neutral empirical facts to which moral tags are later
applied, but we do not necessarily think our understanding of the world
would be enhanced by developing a richer vocabulary of evaluative politi-
cal concepts. Murdoch lamented that post-war socialist writers did not
concern themselves with that sort of concept. Even if Jordan is right to
think that, for Murdoch, no philosophical position can alter the evaluative
structure of human consciousness, she believed that particular moral activ-
ities are mutable and had withered in the post-war period. In her early
writings, Murdoch is preoccupied by the decline of the socialist imagina-
tion and of modern literature.
By abandoning the synoptic view, we can zoom in on Murdoch’s St.
Anne’s writings and appreciate aspects of her approach to philosophy that
have thus far been obscured by focusing only on the role they play in
10 L. JAMIESON
laying the groundwork for her later writings. We can closely examine how
she employed literary language in this work with an eye to seeing the con-
tribution it made to her more localized projects, rather than treating it as
mere window-dressing. We can notice the particularities of the literary,
moral, and political practices that she discusses, rather than subsuming
them under the general heading of Good-presupposing consciousness;
and we can make sense of how what and how she wrote was connected to
her post-war political and cultural obsessions. Doing so, we will be able to
see what she did in her early career as an attempt to exploit the advantages
her unique talents and perspective as a philosopher: the fact that she had a
mind on the borders of philosophy, literature, and politics.
From the earliest days of her professional career as a philosopher,
Murdoch was alive to the dangers that her path would be fraught with.
She worried about whether she would be able to rise to the occasion. In a
letter penned while she was a Sarah Smithson fellow at Newnham College,
Cambridge in 1947, she confided the following: “The question is, can I
really exploit the advantages (instead of as hitherto simply suffer from the
disadvantages) of having a mind on the borders of philosophy, literature,
and politics—all bloody doubtful.”24 Neither the synoptic nor the salvag-
ing approaches to Murdoch’s work enable us to see this as a central prob-
lematic animating her early forays into philosophy. A first step to remedying
this is to reflect on the context in which she wrote that letter and who she
was when she wrote it: respectively, the postwar ascendance of ‘clarifica-
tory’ or ‘linguistic’ philosophy in Britain, and a young philosopher edu-
cated during a unique moment in history. Murdoch’s philosophical
education took place at Somerville College from 1939 to 1942 at a time
when British philosophy was especially heterogenous and questions about
the nature of philosophical clarity, the public role of the philosopher, and
the methods proper to these aims received diverse answers. By telling the
story of Murdoch’s intellectual development in a way that incorporates
both the dissident British philosophers she learned from before and dur-
ing the war, the existentialist philosophers who inspired her after it, and
the changing disciplinary norms that attended the postwar period, we can
see her early writings in a new light. They were neither an insightful exer-
cise in obscurantism nor reducible to a small piece in the development of
24
Iris Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 17 October 1947, in Living on Paper:
Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015), 67.
1 APPROACHING MURDOCH’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY 11
a career-spanning defense of moral realism. Murdoch’s early career pro-
duced a self-contained, rigorous, and clear set of papers that spoke both to
live questions in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and moral philosophy
and to a live question about the practice of philosophy itself. To see this,
we must avoid taking the meaning of concepts like ‘clarity’ for granted.
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