Reading Iris Murdoch’s

Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals
Edited by
Nora Hämäläinen · Gillian Dooley
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals
 Nora Hämäläinen · Gillian Dooley
Editors

Reading Iris
Murdoch’s Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals
Editors
Nora Hämäläinen Gillian Dooley
University of Pardubice Flinders University
Pardubice, Czech Republic Adelaide, SA, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-18966-2 ISBN 978-3-030-18967-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9

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To the memory of Kate Larson 1961–2018
 Acknowledgements

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.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European
Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

vii
 Contents

1 Reading Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals:

An Introduction 1
Nora Hämäläinen and Gillian Dooley

2 The Gifford-Driven Genesis and Subliminal Stylistic

Construction of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 17
Frances White

3 Unity and Art in a Mood of Scepticism

(MGM Chapter 1) 33
Niklas Forsberg

4 Murdoch’s Question of the Work of Art: The Dialogue

Between Western and Japanese Conceptions of Unity
(MGM Chapters 1 and 8) 51
Fiona Tomkinson

5 Fact and Value (MGM Chapter 2) 67

Craig Taylor

6 Schopenhauer and the Mystical Solution of the Riddle

(MGM Chapter 3) 79
Mariëtte Willemsen

ix
x    Contents

7 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: The Debate Between

Literature and Philosophy 93
Gillian Dooley

8 Disciplines of Attention: Iris Murdoch on

Consciousness, Criticism, and Thought
(MGM Chapters 6–8) 107
David J. Fine

9 Iris Murdoch as Educator 125

Megan Jane Laverty

10 ‘I Think I Disagree’: Murdoch on Wittgenstein

and Inner Life (MGM Chapter 9) 145
Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

11 ‘We Are Fantasising Imaginative Animals’

(MGM Chapter 11) 163
Hannah Marije Altorf

12 The Metaphysics of Morals and Politics

(MGM Chapter 12) 179
Gary Browning

13 Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Argument

(MGM Chapter 13) 195
Andrew Gleeson

14 Vision and Encounter in Moral Thinking

(MGM Chapter 15) 209
Christopher Cordner

15 The Urge to Write: Of Murdoch on Plato’s Demiurge 227

David Robjant
 Contents    xi

16 Fields of Force: Murdoch on Axioms, Duties,

and Eros (MGM Chapter 17) 243
Mark Hopwood

17 Which Void? (MGM Chapter 18) 261

Nora Hämäläinen

Index 277
 Notes on Contributors

Hannah Marije Altorf is Reader in Philosophy at St. Mary’s University,

Strawberry Hill, London. She has written on the philosophical and lit-
erary works of Iris Murdoch and on different forms of philosophical
dialogue. She is the author of Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining
(Continuum, 2008) and together with Mariëtte Willemsen she translated
The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch (Boom, 2003).
Gary Browning is Professor of Political Philosophy at Oxford Brookes
University and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences. He has written a number of books including Why
Iris Murdoch Matters: Making Sense of Experience in Modern Times
(Bloomsbury, 2018), A History of Modern Political Thought: The Question
of Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 2014), Plato and Hegel: Two
Modes of Philosophizing About Politics (Routledge, 2012), and Global
Theory from Kant to Hardt and Negri (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen is Associate Professor in
Philosophy at the University of Southern Denmark. She has published
widely on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and ethics, especially
Wittgensteinian ethics and virtue ethics.
Christopher Cordner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Melbourne. His main area of philosophical interest is ethics,
including its classical Greek and Judaeo-Christian heritage, and its overlap
with art and aesthetics. He is currently writing a book on simple goodness.

xiii
xiv    Notes on Contributors

Gillian Dooley is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders

University in South Australia. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch,
Jane Austen, V. S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee. She is the editor of From
a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch
(2003) and Never Mind About the Bourgeoisie: The Correspondence
Between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin (2014).
David J. Fine is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton.
His research explores secularisation and ethics in twentieth-century British
literature, and he has published most recently on the fiction of Catholic
converts.
Niklas Forsberg is Senior Researcher and Head of research at the
Centre for Ethics at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, and
the author of Language Lost and Found: Iris Murdoch and the Limits of
Philosophical Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is currently working on
a monograph on J. L. Austin’s philosophy.
Andrew Gleeson has taught Philosophy at the University of Adelaide and
the Flinders University of South Australia. His main interests are in moral
philosophy and philosophy of religion. He is the author of A Frightening
Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Nora Hämäläinen is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Ethics,
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic and the author of Literature
and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Descriptive Ethics: What Does
Moral Philosophy Know About Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Mark Hopwood is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The University
of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. He has published papers on a range of
topics in moral philosophy including love, beauty, narcissism, hypocrisy
and the nature of moral reasoning.
Megan Jane Laverty is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Education
at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of Iris Murdoch’s
Ethics: A Consideration of Her Romantic Vision (Bloomsbury, 2007).
David Robjant wrote: ‘Who killed Arnold Baffin?: Iris Murdoch and
philosophy by literature’, in Philosophy and Literature; ‘What use is litera-
ture to political philosophy? Or the funny thing about Socrates’s nose’ in
Philosophy and Literature; ‘The earthy realism of Plato’s metaphysics, or:
What shall we do with Iris Murdoch?’ in Philosophical Investigations.
 Notes on Contributors    xv

Craig Taylor is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Flinders University.

He is the author of Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002) Moralism: A Study of a Vice (Routledge, 2012) and
numerous scholarly articles in the area of moral philosophy. He is a
co-editor of Hume and the Enlightenment (Pickering and Chatto, 2009),
A Sense for Humanity: The Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita (Monash
Publishing, 2012) and Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora
Diamond (Routledge, forthcoming, 2019).
Fiona Tomkinson is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of
Humanities, Nagoya University (since 2017). She previously lectured
at Yeditepe University (1997–2017). She holds a B.A. and M.A. in
English Language and Literature from Oxford University and an M.A.
and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University. She has numerous
publications in the fields of literature and philosophy, including many
articles on Murdoch, such as ‘Between violence and contemplation: Iris
Murdoch’s Coleridge’ (Poetica Spring, 2016). She is currently research-
ing Murdoch’s use of Japanese literature and myth, and the influence
of Buddhism, Shintoism and shamanism on the work of Murdoch,
Lawrence Durrell and Ted Hughes.
Frances White is Visiting Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the
Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, editor of
the Iris Murdoch Review, and Writer in Residence at Kingston University
Writing School. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch; her Becoming
Iris Murdoch (2014) won the Kingston University Press Short Biography
Competition.
Mariëtte Willemsen is Head of Studies of the Humanities Department
at Amsterdam University College and senior lecturer in Philosophy.
She teaches courses in Ethics and Modern Philosophy, with a focus on
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Together with Hannah Marije Altorf she
translated Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch (Over God en
het Goede. Amsterdam: Boom, 2003).
 CHAPTER 1

Reading Metaphysics as a Guide

to Morals: An Introduction

Nora Hämäläinen and Gillian Dooley

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (hereafter MGM) was Iris Murdoch’s

major philosophical testament and a highly original and ambitious
attempt to talk about our time. Based on her Gifford Lectures in 1982,
it was reworked over a ten-year period before its publication in 1992.
Her manuscripts as well as her correspondence from the period attest
that this was not an altogether easy process, as Frances White reveals in
the second chapter of this book. Her ambition was to do serious philo-
sophical work, and yet to speak in a way accessible to the ordinary edu-
cated person about the cultural and moral predicament of largely liberal
modernity: perhaps a nearly impossible task in the academic and com-
partmentalised context of late twentieth-century anglophone philosophy.
It is perhaps precisely the broader ambition that gives MGM ­lasting
philosophical relevance and opens up dimensions as yet unexplored.
Murdoch’s earlier work resonates with contemporary turns in ­ ethics
towards ‘vision’ rather than ‘choice’, to virtues, to love and other

N. Hämäläinen (*)
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
G. Dooley
Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 1

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_1
2 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

emotions, to the relevance of literature and art for morality. These

themes are also present, and further developed, in MGM, but are com-
plemented by a profound exploration of our condition as spiritual crea-
tures in a secular world and as creatures who cannot avoid holding
metaphysical views even in a post-metaphysical age. The book makes
distinctive contributions to questions of ethics, the possibility of met-
aphysics in the contemporary world, spiritual life without god, the
nature and relevance of philosophy, questions of style and sensibility in
intellectual work, and the nature of evil in a secular world, among other
things.
Many of these topics in Murdoch’s work have been discussed by
scholars in the past 20 years, but the influence of MGM has been sig-
nificantly smaller than that of her previous work, partly because many
readers find the book difficult and messy. The nature of the difficulty
is, however, hard to pin down. It has something to do with the scarcity
of metatextual instructions for reading, and the unfinished and circling
character of many of the chapters of the book. But it also has to do with
the ways in which her take on its different subject matters, and indeed on
philosophy overall, differs from what most readers expect her to deliver.
Stanley Cavell (1981, 10) notes that in some cases you must ‘let the
object or the work of your interest teach you how to consider it’. MGM
is undoubtedly one of these works.
Though well received by theologians, who appreciate her sustained
engagement with the question of faith in secular modernity, MGM has
not been a great favourite among Murdoch’s large readership of literary
scholars and writers. The slighting attitude to the book sometimes gets
what to a philosophical reader looks like a comic twist, as when Andrew
Wilson, in his keynote talk at an Iris Murdoch conference at Chichester
in 2017, aired the suspicion that the effort of writing of the book ‘broke’
Murdoch, that is, prevented her from developing as a literary writer in
her last years; as if it were indeed obvious that more or stronger novels
would have been preferable to MGM. Part of the difficulty is related to
the form: chapters do not always open up as systematic arguments. But
this should perhaps bother the philosophers more than the literary schol-
ars; the latter’s problems may rather be due to the difficulty of getting
a good grasp of what she is up to, a difficulty they certainly share with
many philosophical readers too. This is where the present volume comes
in, offering paths through different topics and chapters in the book, in
thoughtful company.
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 3

In this introductory essay we attend to a few themes that we believe

will be useful for readers of MGM and this book: some central topics of
MGM, the formal and textual aspects of her writing, and the continuing
relevance of the book for contemporary philosophy as well as humanist
and social scientific thought more widely. At the end, we provide a short
tour through the essays included here.

Philosophical Ambitions
Murdoch’s philosophical ambition in the book is nothing less than a
comprehensive view of the human situation at the time of writing: a his-
torical situation of gains and losses, distinctive matters of concern, things
we can ‘no longer believe in’, things we take for granted, fundamental
commitments, inspirational images, and root metaphors.
It shows deep commitment to the idea, shared by younger contem-
poraries like Charles Taylor, that a deep and complex, historically aware
understanding of our present is a prerequisite for an intelligent norma-
tive conception of our moral lives. As she puts it at the end of MGM:
‘We live in the present, this strange familiar yet mysterious continuum
which is so difficult to describe. This is what is nearest and it matters
what kind of place it is’ (MGM, 495).
It matters, indeed, in more than one way. It does so for us as people:
for our lives, for how the world of our present opens up for us, what it
allows us to do or be, what options it gives for us in practical, moral,
existential and spiritual terms. But it also matters for us as philosophers,
scholars, social scientists, and theologians who try to get a more objec-
tive view of some contemporary phenomenon. In these capacities our
challenge is double: to inhabit our present and yet also understand it as
well as we can, in medias res, without the cooling benefit of hindsight.
In a letter to the French author Raymond Queneau in 1947 Murdoch
writes, ‘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’ (Horner and Rowe 2015,
99). The advantages of this mind lie in its capacity to read her own pres-
ent, and the multiple pasts embedded in that present, without reducing
experience to its historicity.
In the introductory chapter to MGM she talks about our think-
ing taking place against a horizon that goes back to the Greeks (or so
we are taught), and about the claims made ‘(for instance by Nietzsche,
4 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

Heidegger and Derrida)’ (MGM, 2) that this horizon has been sponged
away. She does not quite buy the common story of a modern, disen-
chanted world, devoid of metaphysics. But she doesn’t have a ready
alternative account either: MGM is framed as an investigation of this
situation.
Sometimes art is better and quicker than philosophy at picking up
what is happening to us. As she puts it in the oft-cited interview with
Bryan Magee: ‘Our consciousness changes, and the change may appear
in art before it receives its commentary in a theory, though the theory
may also subsequently affect the art’ (Murdoch 1997, 22). In MGM
both literature and visual arts have a continuous strong presence in a
variety of roles: as objects of contemplation, as sources of insight, sites
of existential and phenomenological discovery, as clues to the historical
formation of our conceptions of ourselves and our world.
What is also useful for a reader to appreciate, is how Murdoch’s lit-
erary sensibility is at work in the book. It is not so much a matter of
the ‘literariness’ of the text itself, but of her style of handling her plural
subject matters. While writing something well recognisable as somewhat
essayistic philosophical prose, she reads her present as a novelist, ­seeking
out moods, modalities, metaphors and complexities. She is taking the
pulse of her present as much as making claims about it. This exploratory
emphasis may also be seen as a key to what is interestingly ‘political’ in
her thought: not her normative political views (which changed over the
course of her life), nor any normative political theory (she did not pres-
ent one), but her critical interest in, and ways of looking at the interplay
of worldviews, mythologies, forms of personhood, moralities and societal
visions, in philosophy, art and society at large.

Religion
In his essay ‘Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy’, Taylor describes
two transfers in Murdoch’s philosophy: ‘We were trapped in the c­ orral
of morality. Murdoch led us out not only to the broad fields of ­ethics
but also beyond that again to the almost untracked forests of the
unconditional’ (Taylor 1996, 5).
Answering to a latent need in late twentieth-century anglophone
moral philosophy, the move from the corral to the field, from morality
(action and obligation) to ethics (the good life) has absorbed a large part
of the philosophers’ attention to Murdoch. Connecting the narrower
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 5

issues of what we owe to each other to the Socratic question of ‘how

one ought to live’, to what we find or should find worthy, important or
beautiful; to the inflections of moral personhood, and so on, she served
as an inspiration for thinkers like Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre,
Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Raimond Gaita, and their students and
followers, as well as for the boom of philosophical Murdoch scholarship
in the twenty-first century.
The path to the forests of the unconditional, though central for
MGM, has for the philosophers been less interesting, partly due to the
secular tonality of contemporary philosophy and the lack of a relevant
frame in which to place her thought on these issues. Though they are as
convinced as Murdoch of the idea that ‘God does not and cannot exist’,
they have been less concerned than she was with the spiritual needs and
propensities of their contemporaries. For theologians like Hauerwas,
Schweiker and Antonaccio the further move seems to be at the centre of
their interest in Murdoch. Taylor thinks that she is genuinely out in the
wilderness:

The forest is virtually untracked. Or rather, there are old tracks; they
appear on maps that have been handed down to us. But when you get in
there, it is very hard to find them. So we need people to make new trails.
That is, in effect what Iris Murdoch has done. (Taylor 1996, 18)

He points out two things that he finds particularly useful in Murdoch’s

contribution. The first is the way she addresses the shift from a theistic
world to one where what we used to refer to as God appears lost or dif-
ficult to access. What she shows above all, is that ‘the forest’ is still there,
and that we can and sometimes perhaps must enter it.
The other point has to do with plurality. ‘Even in so-called ages of
faith’, people find different articulations of the higher useful, appeal-
ing and true. Especially those who have a strong calling to the spiritual
life, are likely to make their own ways. This plurality, and the unity in
or behind it, are central for Murdoch’s engagement with ‘the forest’
(Taylor 1996, 19).
Faced with the spiritual flatness of modern secular moral and
existential thought Murdoch insists that ‘we need a theology which can
continue without God’ (MGM, 511). Stanley Hauerwas has expressed
the belief that ‘she wants to replace Christianity because she has a bet-
ter alternative’ (Hauerwas 1996, 196), a watered-down Buddhist
6 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

Christianity of some sort, based on a rejection of the dogmatic dimen-

sions of the latter. But this may not quite capture the seriousness of her
sense that God has slipped out of our world: it is not as if she could
choose some form of ‘ordinary’ Christianity instead. In the face of
what she sees as an impossibility of doctrinal faith, she searches out the
Christian tradition, along with other forms of spiritual thought and expe-
rience. Not only have good and evil, pace Nietzsche, survived secularisa-
tion. Also, the concept of sin, prayer, the humility of selfless attention,
and the affirmation of something higher in the ontological proof can, she
believes, be retained, to enrich our understanding of ourselves as moral
beings.
The effect of her ventures into the forest is not one of making ethics
more absolute and categorical, but rather one of making it more compli-
cated, giving it more psychological depth and social and historical res-
onances. In the midst of these, she develops the picture of the human
being as directed toward a unifying idea of the Good.
This does not, however, quite amount to anything we would nec-
essarily want to call a secular theology. Her thinking about the human
being’s striving for the Good is also helpfully read in a context of mod-
ern thought on perfectionist cultivation of the self and of philosophy as
a transformative practice, as we find it in the work of Michel Foucault,
Pierre Hadot, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell among others.1

Metaphysics
The issue of metaphysics in MGM is far from exhausted by Murdoch’s
concern for the role of religion. The questions of God and the
transcendent are surely a part of it, because how we deal with them
has crucial implications for what we understand the world to be funda-
mentally like; what kinds of things we take to be real, and what kinds of
things, correlatively, unreal; what we consider fundamental and deriva-
tive; what can be ‘true’ and what cannot, etc. But there is more.
Murdoch’s big question about metaphysics and morals, at work from
her early essays to MGM, is how our conceptions of ‘the real’ affect
our moral orientation, and vice versa. Metaphysics thus does not enter
with the concerns for a transcendent good. All thinking, even in a dis-
enchanted world, and even in twentieth-century anti-metaphysical phi-
losophy, rests on metaphysical assumptions. A naturalist metaphysics is
a metaphysics too. Although such metaphysics, and a worldview based
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 7

on it, has been widely considered morally neutral, it has moral and other
evaluative commitments built in from the start. It is also, like any met-
aphysical view, contingent and arbitrary in relation to the experienced
reality it conditions. It is far from the only way of making sense of a
world where secular morality and natural science define much of our
understanding of what there is.
Moreover, it is perhaps not even a good description the world in
which most of us live. Like the ‘modern settlement’ that Bruno Latour
(1993) talks about, which wrongly postulates an impermeable wall
between nature and culture, the naturalist metaphysics which excludes
the good as something real is in Murdoch’s view based on a misunder-
standing of ‘where we are’. Latour seeks to show that we have never
lived according to this modern settlement. Murdoch insists that the
good, as something absolute, is very much a real part of the lived reality
of ordinary people (MGM, 412), and that they are not mistaken in hold-
ing this view.
Heeding the central role of Kant for Murdoch in MGM, one might be
led to think of her as concerned with universal conditions of possibility
for human morality and knowledge. This is the interpretive line taken by
Antonaccio (2000) in her pioneering work, and many others have, until
recently, followed her cue.
We suggest a reading of MGM more in line with R.G. Collingwood’s
suggestion in An essay on metaphysics: ‘Metaphysics has always been a
historical science; but metaphysicians have not always been fully aware
of the fact’. The ‘absolute presuppositions’ that metaphysical questions
deal with are by necessity historical ones: what people in given times and
places have taken for granted, relied on, in their understanding of the
world (Collingwood 1998, 58, 60). Twentieth-century philosophers
have in his view scorned metaphysics because they have mistaken it for
something else: the postulation of universal structures. The metaphysics
he considers fit for his time is a descriptive metaphysics or a metaphys-
ics of experience, an inquiry into historically specific absolute presuppo-
sitions; our own or someone else’s. This kind of descriptive work is also
the core of the metaphysics of MGM.
Like Michel Foucault, as he lays it out in his 1984 essay ‘What is
enlightenment?’, Murdoch is thus more concerned with historical a pri-
oris than with allegedly universal ones. As observed by Gary Browning,
‘Throughout her works, she engages with the historicity of the present and
reflects upon the past from which it has emerged’ (Browning 2018, 2).
8 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

The forms of our thought; its images, tensions, connections and lacunae,
questions and answers, are all subject to time.
But the descriptive story is certainly not the whole story in Murdoch’s
case. She finds philosophy necessarily involved in both a descriptive and,
in a broad sense, a normative endeavour. It does not only describe what
is: through its choices of words and emphases, it makes positive sugges-
tions as to how we could or perhaps should see things.
Murdoch’s descriptive work in metaphysics is thus combined, not
quite with a normative, but with a self-consciously constructive meta-
physical effort. For her, this is not a matter of formulating a ­metaphysical
system (she certainly thinks that kind of metaphysics is impossible for
the modern thinker), but of giving an affirmative account of the human
being as irreducibly placed between good and evil, striving for the good.
This constructive metaphysics is to be seen as fundamentally and neces-
sarily premised on a robust descriptive understanding of where we stand
metaphysically, morally, existentially and epistemically. There is no point
in postulating a God if we no longer can believe in him. But the world
we can see—that makes sense to us—offers different, often metaphorical,
options of articulation, and we need to work with these.
Both the descriptive and the constructive metaphysics is for Murdoch
a thoroughly pictorial business: of discovering the metaphysical images
we live by and making use of images that carry our understanding for-
ward in helpful ways.
Many of Murdoch’s engagements with other philosophers reflect this
concern for the pictorial aspects of both philosophy and ‘vernacular’
thinking. Five of the 18 chapters of MGM are explicitly built around par-
ticular philosophers (in one case a pair) and many of those which do not,
still have a particular philosopher’s contribution as their central material.
Her readings are engaged, personal and often troubled, much concerned
with the directions and tendencies of the philosophers’ pictorial and
metaphorical thinking. There is her familiar suspicion that Wittgenstein,
in spite of himself, is hostile to the ‘inner life’; the idea that Derrida is
locked in a cage of language; the warmth and stickiness of Buber’s
I-Thou. A familiar experience, expressed for example by Anne-Marie
Søndergaard Christensen and Christopher Cordner in their essays, is that
her readings can be unfair or off key, and yet, at the same time, interest-
ing in how they pick up a tendency, a colouring, that is indeed there.
Borrowing from Frances White, who in her essay talks about
Murdoch’s ‘subliminal language’, meaning her casual but revelatory
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 9

use of expressions such as ‘of course’, it might be helpful to think about

Murdoch as, in many cases, a subliminal reader, reading only partly for
argument, and as much for spirit, direction, mood, underlying beliefs
and tendencies. This is another dimension of the literary sensibility we
talked about before: at work in reading her contemporaries and prede-
cessors as well as her present.

Textual Features
The epigraph of MGM is from Paul Valéry, poet and intellectual: ‘Une
difficulté est une lumière. Une difficulté insurmontable est un soleil’.
Confronting difficulty is thus Murdoch’s abiding preoccupation in this
work, and the nexus between difficulty and illumination is posed as cen-
tral metaphor. She later, in the chapter on the Ontological Proof, glosses
Valéry’s image: ‘Valéry speaks of the sunlight which rewards him who
steadily contemplates the insuperable difficulty. What is awaited is an
illuminating experience, a presence: a case of human consciousness at its
most highly textured’ (MGM, 419). The context here is a discussion of
prayer, and of ‘the artist who, rejecting easy false mediocre forms and
hoping for the right thing, the best thing, waits’, and of the broader
application of this to ‘work and human relations’ (MGM, 418–419).
The paradox inherent in the Valéry image, combining the ideas of insur-
mountability and illumination, seems to be resolved in Murdoch’s for-
mulation of a ‘reward’ for steady contemplation.
But one might also imagine that Valéry, writing in France in 1942,
had in mind something less comforting: the light cast by unbearable and
intractable circumstances which could be as much a torment as a reward.
Pickering describes his approach:

A slippery, eminently refractory discourse replaces time-honoured literary

devices and genres. In their place Valéry proposes a view of the literary
work as a field for experimentation and potentialization, the dwelling-place
of the mind as it constantly strains towards the limits of its capacity.
(Pickering 1988, 51)

Although Valéry’s circumstances when writing Mauvaises pensées under

the Vichy regime differed markedly from Murdoch’s life in Oxford half
a century later, and his epigrammatic, hard-edged style is quite different
from hers, there is something in her method that echoes his, as Pickering
10 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

describes it. While Murdoch’s contemplation of the manifold difficul-

ties of her subject in MGM is typically characterised by patience rather
than torment, and could hardly be called ‘slippery’, the usual conven-
tions of discursive writing—introductions, conclusions, topic sentences—
without being totally absent, are de-emphasised. Her approach and style
tend to be calm and undramatic, one substantial sentence following the
last, forming solid paragraphs, rarely less than half a page long and usu-
ally considerably longer. Long quotations are inserted with the briefest
of introductions, if any. Many of these features of MGM would be chal-
lenged by contemporary editors, who insist that authors shape their work
for maximum readability.
However, in MGM the patient reader needs to look not for the excite-
ments of a virtuosic or shapely prose style, but to appreciate the steady
progress of an intelligent mind confronting difficult material, following
the myriad pathways laid down by her predecessors and putting them
into conversation with each other, allowing their difficulties to light her
way forward through the maze: ‘a mind straining towards the limits of its
capacity’, as Pickering writes. Instructively, Murdoch writes that

Wittgenstein accuses Schopenhauer of evading what is ‘deep’.

Schopenhauer may thus ‘give up’, but he recognises his obstacle, rushes off
at a tangent, tries to wander round it, talks, even chats, about it, and can
instruct us in this way too. (An insuperable difficulty may or may not be a
sun, but it gives some light.) (MGM, 251)

This passage appears well into in Chapter 8, the second on

‘Consciousness and thought’, and within a few pages Murdoch has
referred not only to Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein and (obliquely)
to Valéry, but to Plato, Arthur Koestler, Rilke, Simone Weil, Berkeley,
Hume, Derrida, Zen Buddhism and more, bringing all these diverse
thinkers and ways of thinking into dialogue with each other. Perhaps
Wittgenstein would disapprove of her methodology too. But the attrac-
tions and virtues of MGM are inseparable from its questing, exploratory,
conversational style, which insists only on the importance of trusting that
which can be precarious, illusory and insurmountably difficult.
It is significant that this Valéry phrase is also quoted towards the end
of Murdoch’s 1987 novel The Book and the Brotherhood, when Gerard
Hernshaw is contemplating ‘the book that he had to write’ in response
to the book of the title, the work published by the sinister Marxist David
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 11

Crimond (Murdoch 1987, 574). Several contributors to this volume

(White, Tomkinson, Browning) discuss the links between MGM and The
Book and the Brotherhood, which Murdoch was working on concurrently.
Gerard thinks,

Well, more often no doubt an insuperable difficulty is an insuperable

difficulty. … Perhaps indeed all that awaited him was a long and final
­
­failure, a dreary fruitless toil, wasting his energy and his remaining time to
produce something that was worthless. (Murdoch 1987, 575)

It is indeed difficult to avoid making the link between the book Gerard
is contemplating, and the book Murdoch was writing. Gerard, although
a fictional character embedded in a narrative situation, is engaged here
in very much the same kind of debate which is often staged in MGM:
‘Yes, I’ll attempt the book, but it’s a life sentence, and not only may it
be no good, but I may never know whether it is or not’ (Murdoch 1987,
584). It is clear from external sources that she approached the task in a
similarly dogged and determined fashion: in May 1986, she wrote to her
friend the Marxist philosopher Brian Medlin that she was ‘writing some
philosophy which may be hopelessly bad’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 7).
Medlin, though he inevitably disagreed with much that she wrote, found
MGM ‘a marvellously exciting book’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 183),
and its subsequent readers, while often expressing similar reservations,
share his excitement and admiration.

MGM for the Next Century?

Among philosophers and philosophically oriented scholars who have
written about Murdoch in the past few decades, there has been a strong
consensus about the contemporary import and freshness of her work.
When engaging her 1950s critique of modern anglophone moral philos-
ophy, many have felt that what she says is in many ways as relevant for
philosophy in the early twenty-first century. In spite of the emergence
of virtue ethics and moral psychology, for which her friends Philippa
Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe have been key figures; notwithstanding
the renewed interest the interface between moral philosophy and litera-
ture; regardless of Murdoch’s complex influence on the following gener-
ation, especially through The sovereignty of good, these philosophers have
found themselves struggling against a moral philosophy too narrowly
12 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

oriented to action, choice, rationality and overt principles. In this strug-

gle Murdoch has been a most insightful ally and will most likely continue
to be so.
But how about MGM? It is far less clear that her thinking in this late
work has been or will be put to work for critical reconsiderations of
moral philosophy. A closer look at its different topics and engagements
will, in any case, place us in a better position to assess its affordances.
On the theme of religion our contemporaries are likely to find her
both wrong and right. The ‘impossibility’ of theistic religion that seemed
given in a setting of late twentieth-century European modernity, among
Oxbridge dons and London intellectuals, may not appear quite as con-
vincing any more. With a growing presence of Islam in the west; with a
continued societal impact of Christian movements in America as well as
in Europe; and with a deeper understanding of the plural faces of moder-
nity in different parts of the world, we might have reason to think that
modernity is after all not secular in the sense envisioned by Murdoch.
People, also in our time, can believe many things, and make sense of the
world in quite different ways.
The ambitious effort to speak about a whole ‘age’ in a single book is a
hazardous one, always risking insipid simplification. Isaiah Berlin (2013),
drawing on a Greek proverb from the poet Archilochus, makes the dis-
tinction between intellectual foxes (who know many small things) and
hedgehogs (who know one big thing). Murdoch, in MGM more than
ever, is very much a fox who likes dressing up as hedgehog, enjoying
thus the benefits of both temperaments. This is never clearer than in
MGM and makes the book more durable than any well-rounded, definite
account of ‘her times’ would be.
The purpose of this volume is to invite old and new readers to fol-
low her tracks. It is scholarly in the sense that it gathers researchers who
are well conversant with her work and asks them to engage seriously
with her text. But it is not a collection of regular research papers. To
achieve its diplomatic mission of making MGM more easily approach-
able, we have given it a quite particular design. The book consists of
chapters where different authors do relatively close readings of differ-
ent chapters, themes or sets of chapters in MGM. Some of the book’s
central themes are easily approached by attention to individual chapters
of MGM, while other themes, such as her interest in education and in
Plato’s Timaeus, are scattered throughout MGM. Thus, we have made
room for chapters on individual chapters of MGM as well as on larger
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 13

themes, complemented by chapters which attend to Murdoch’s overall

style. The chapters are written for a broad audience of scholars, students
and intellectuals with an interest in Murdoch’s work, including philoso-
phers, theologians, literary scholars and social scientists.
In Chapter 2, Frances White traces the beginnings of MGM a decade
earlier in the 1982 Edinburgh-based Gifford lecture series on Natural
Theology. White also makes visible the rhetorical effect of expressions in
Murdoch’s prose style that are so characteristic and common as to be
hidden in plain sight. These unconscious verbal habits reveal aspects of
Murdoch’s beliefs and her relationship both with her readers and with
her subject matter.
Niklas Forsberg then continues with a discussion of the first chapter
of MGM, elucidating how the for many readers puzzling opening of the
book introduces its central topic: conceptions of unity and disunity in
philosophy, art and life. Murdoch is here fuelled by the sense that phi-
losophers often fail to understand the proper roles of unity and disunity
in thinking, and that a better grasp, with important theoretical and met-
aphysical implications, can be obtained by looking at these themes in a
broader perspective.
Chapter 4 also concerns Murdoch’s first chapter on ‘Conceptions of
unity. Art’. Fiona Tomkinson draws connections between Murdoch’s
idea of the unity of the work of art in this chapter and her discussion
of Japanese aesthetics and the thought of Katsuki Sekida in Chapter 8,
‘Consciousness and thought II’.
Craig Taylor, in Chapter 5, tackles one of the most insuperable diffi-
culties in Murdoch’s work, one which she concentrates on in her second
chapter, ‘Fact and Value’. He explores how Murdoch, while dismissive
of the philosophical tendency to exclude value from the natural world,
also sees a more interesting and laudable motif in some philosophers’
insistence on separating fact and value: the desire to keep value pure and
untainted by contingent facts.
The next two chapters both concern Schopenhauer. First, Mariëtte
Willemsen looks at Murdoch’s sometimes apparently contradictory view
of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, concluding that she finds a way of recon-
ciling his empiricism with his mysticism. Gillian Dooley then takes a lit-
erary approach to MGM, following on from Frances White’s chapter by
looking at the rhetorical features of Murdoch’s prose and her depiction
of philosophers as characters, in particular how her stylistic sympathy
with Schopenhauer affects her reading of his work.
14 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

David Fine continues the focus on literature with a discussion of

chapters 6 and 8, ‘Consciousness and Thought’ I and II, and chapter 7,
‘Derrida and structuralism’. He discusses Murdoch’s uneasy relationship
with Derrida and her ideas about the nature and importance of literary
criticism, connecting her work to the present day post-critical trend in
literary studies.
In Chapter 9, Megan Laverty brings to the fore the many ways
in which, without being the explicit subject of a chapter in MGM,
Murdoch’s concern with education permeates her philosophy, in her dis-
cussions of other philosophers as well as her moral vision for a life of
continuous truth-seeking.
In Chapter 10, Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen tackles one
of Murdoch’s most important philosophical relationships, that with
Wittgenstein, as it is expounded in Chapter 9 of MGM. She argues that
Murdoch’s misunderstanding of some aspects of Wittgenstein’s approach
to the inner life led to an ambivalent attitude which prevented her from
realising certain similarities in their thinking.
Hannah Marije Altorf then looks at a central concern of Murdoch’s
philosophy: the importance of imagination, which appears as the subject
of Chapter 11 of MGM. Altorf also considers formal aspects of the book
and how they affect the reader’s approach, placing the idea of imagina-
tion (and its troubling companion, fantasy) in the broader context of
Murdoch’s thought.
In Chapter 12, Gary Browning takes up the question of Murdoch
as a political thinker, as she comes to the fore in Chapter 12 of MGM,
‘Morals and politics’. He investigates her distinction between a perfec-
tionist morality for the private sphere, and an anti-utopian morality for
the public sphere, focused on practical negotiations and the protection of
individual rights. Browning also looks beyond MGM to Murdoch’s nov-
els, such as The Book and the Brotherhood, to confirm his reading.
Andrew Gleeson’s chapter concentrates on MGM Chapter 13, ‘The
ontological proof’, a controversial and difficult philosophical topic that
has occasioned much discussion over the centuries. Gleeson shows how
Murdoch reinterprets the ‘proof’ for the purposes of secular morality but
criticises her for representing moral goodness (in analogy with God) as
unnecessarily distant and intangible.
Chapter 14 is concerned with MGM Chapter 15, ‘Martin Buber
and God’. In his discussion of Murdoch’s disagreements with Buber’s
 1 READING METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS: AN INTRODUCTION 15

religious thought, Christopher Cordner includes a detailed consideration

of Murdoch’s pervasive and pivotal metaphor of vision and her defence
of this imagery against Buber’s preference for that of ‘encounter and
dialogue’.
In the next chapter, David Robjant critiques Murdoch’s interpretation
of Plato’s Timaeus as it appears throughout MGM as well as in earlier
philosophical works. He sees two contradictory strands in her discussion,
one arising from an argument with Gilbert Ryle about the theory of
forms, and the other an allegory of the demiurge as artist.
Mark Hopwood then takes on one of the shortest chapters in MGM,
‘Axioms, duties and Eros’. He disputes the interpretation of many com-
mentators who see Murdoch as a prescriptive moralist, arguing instead
that she is primarily concerned with describing the nature of morality.
This chapter underlines Murdoch’s commitment to plural vocabularies
for conceptualising our moral lives.
Finally, in Chapter 17, Nora Hämäläinen looks into the Void, another
very short chapter which follows on from the discussion of axioms,
duties and Eros in Chapter 17 of MGM. In this chapter, Murdoch con-
fronts the darkest aspects of human experience. Hämäläinen shows how
Simone Weil acts as her guide in this grim territory, and discusses the
implications of the contrast between their worldviews, one secular and
one religious.
This collection of themes reflects the interest of a specific group of
writers and some special concerns of the editors. Many good chapters of
MGM are here left without treatments of their own, and many overarch-
ing or dispersed topics of the book are left for future exploration. If any-
thing, we hope that the reading of this book can inspire further writing
and new dialogues with Murdoch’s late work.
One text in particular is missing here: it was to be called ‘The inverted
sublime’ and to take its cue from chapters 4, ‘Comic and tragic’ and
11, ‘Imagination’. The Swedish novelist, philosopher and passionate
Murdochian Kate Larson (b. 1961) who was about to write it died,
much too young, in June 2018. We dedicate this book to her memory.

Note
1. 
For a discussion on Murdoch, Hadot, and Foucault, see Antonaccio
(2012), for discussion of Murdoch and Cavell, see Forsberg (2017).
16 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN AND G. DOOLEY

References
Antonaccio, M. 2000. Picturing the human: The moral thought of Iris Murdoch.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Antonaccio, M. 2012. A philosophy to live by. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berlin, I. 2013. The hedgehog and the fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, 2nd
ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Browning, G. 2018. Why Iris Murdoch matters. New York: Bloomsbury.
Cavell, S. 1981. Pursuits of happiness: The Hollywood comedy of remarriage.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Collingwood, R.G. 1998. An essay on metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dooley, G., and G. Nerlich (eds.). 2014. Never mind about the bourgeoisie: The
correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin 1976–1995. Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Forsberg, N. 2017. M and D and me: Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell on per-
fectionism and self-transformation. Iride: Philosophy and Public Discussion
81 (2): 361–372.
Foucault, M. 1984. What is enlightenment? In The Foucault reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hauerwas, S. 1996. Murdochian muddles: Can we get through them if God
does not exist. In Iris Murdoch and the search for human goodness, ed. Maria
Antonaccio and William Schweiker, 190–208. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Horner, A., and A. Rowe (eds.). 2015. Living on paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch
1934–1995. London: Chatto & Windus.
Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Murdoch, Iris. 1987. The book and the brotherhood. London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, Iris. 1997. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and litera-
ture, ed. Peter Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus.
Pickering, R. 1988. Writing under Vichy: Valéry’s Mauvaises pensées et autres.
Modern Language Review 83 (1): 40–55.
Taylor, C. 1996. Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy. In Iris Murdoch and the
search for human goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker,
3–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 CHAPTER 2

The Gifford-Driven Genesis and Subliminal

Stylistic Construction of Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals

Frances White

From the Gifford Lectures

to Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Iris Murdoch’s journal entry for 25 June 1978 reads flatly, ‘Asked to
give Gifford Lectures. Rain’ (Murdoch Journals, KUAS202/1/13).
One would think she would be thrilled to be in the illustrious company
of Gabriel Marcel, who, she noted in a letter to Hal Lidderdale in late
Spring 1948, ‘is to give the Gifford Lectures’ (Horner and Rowe 2015,
109), and of her own mentor Donald MacKinnon. But her journals and
letters show no delight. Quite the reverse. Indeed, it would be fair to say
that Murdoch and the Gifford Lectureship did not get on. An uneasy
relationship is evident on both sides. The ordeal was worsened for her by
being postponed from Spring 1982 to late autumn because John Bayley
broke his ankle and she would not leave him. To Philippa Foot on 20th
April 1982 she wrote: ‘As to those Giffords I am very pessimistic, and
also pressed about the whole thing. If it hadn’t been for John’s mishap,

F. White (*)
University of Chichester, Chichester, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 17

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_2
18 F. WHITE

the whole beastly thing would be over, I would have done it in a crazy
impetuous way! Now I see, as I laboriously rewrite, how hopelessly bad,
indeed partly senseless it is!’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 490). As the time
approached Murdoch felt increasingly oppressed, writing to Brigid
Brophy on 28th September, ‘I go to Scotland about Oct 24. I dread the
whole business’, to Naomi Lebowitz in early October, ‘I have to go to
Edinburgh (to lecture) in two weeks and hate the idea – I just have to
keep thinking that it will be a relief when it’s over’, and to Foot again
on the 17th October, ‘I go to Edinburgh next week, curse it, except
that the sooner it starts the sooner it will be over’. When she returned
she told Foot, ‘I am still experiencing relief that the Gifford Lectures
are over, and that I don’t have to think about philosophy’ (Horner and
Rowe 2015, 494–497).
It was not a happy experience for her. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner
note her ‘bitter disappointment’ as she ‘found it difficult to articulate her
philosophical thoughts. She did not perform well’ (Horner and Rowe
2015, 469–470). Her biographer, Peter Conradi, remarks that Murdoch
‘wrote and rewrote the Gifford Lectures repeatedly, but found it hard to
bring her thoughts together, and the audience, partly of good ladies from
Morningside, shrank during the fortnight it took to deliver them’; hence
in 1982 ‘a letter praising her Gifford Lectures which had profoundly dis-
pirited her, was “one she had hoped for”’ (Conradi 2001, 565–566).
The gestation of the lectures can be glimpsed through Murdoch’s
journals. She habitually writes in the left-hand margin ‘N’ for an idea for
a novel, ‘Po’ for a poem, and ‘Pl’ for a play: now ‘G’ begins to appear for
thoughts which will feed into her Gifford Lectures. Examples are:

• G Good/bad cf noble/disgusting. Justice cuts across is an idea of

another sort (9 July 1978).
• Giffords. How God Enters Philosophy? (22 July 1978).
• G Q of turning the wheel you can touch. Eg civil rights in China.
Cf Plato’s justice. Do your own job (8 October 1979). (Murdoch
Journals, KUAS202/1/13)

And on 6 April 1982, despairingly, ‘Giffords. It is so difficult to say just

what one has thought and understood and no more’ (Murdoch Journals,
KUAS202/1/14).
One problematical aspect of the film Iris is that the intellectual life
is not visible: just having Judi Dench writing at a desk fails to convey
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 19

what thinking is like (Eyre 2001). But working in the archive offers a
visual impact of the life of Murdoch’s mind, pulsating, creating, furi-
ously THINKING. Murdoch thought a great deal about thinking, as did
Heidegger (Wass heißt denken?) and in her novels she demonstrates the
difficulty of real thinking. Early on there is an amusing but sharp com-
ment in The Flight from the Enchanter, ‘“I think it must be difficult to
think,” said Annette seriously. “Whenever I try to think I just day-dream”’
(Murdoch 1956, 126). The late ‘baggy-monsters’, written contemporane-
ously with Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM), revolve
around characters tormented by thinking. John Robert Rosanov in The
Philosopher’s Pupil ‘could feel the billion electric circuits of his frenzied
brain, and how his mind slipped and strained like a poor overloaded horse’
(Murdoch 1983, 135), and Crimond in The Book and the Brotherhood
(1987) says ‘we must think – and that’s what’s such hell, philosophy is
hell, it’s contrary to nature, it hurts so much, one must make a shot at the
whole thing and that means failing too, not really being able to connect,
and not pretending that things fit when they don’t – and keeping hold of
the things that don’t fit, keeping them whole and clear in their almost-fit-
tingness – oh God, it’s so hard –’ (Murdoch 1987, 299–300), and, most
succinctly, ‘Thinking is agony’ (Murdoch 1987, 294), whilst Gerard
Hernshaw, having read Crimond’s book tells Rose Curtland, ‘I must write
my own book. I can see how to do it now. It will mean a vast amount of
reading, and thinking till one screams –’ (Murdoch 1987, 566).
Murdoch experienced this mental strain personally: reading the lec-
ture drafts is to watch her toiling. As with Murdoch’s letters the left-
hand margin is wide and gets wider as the lines go down the page
forming a diagonal wedge-shape. In that margin she adds thoughts for
later inclusion in the main text. In the margin beside this passage—‘The
active, even effortful, contemplation of a harmonising organised quasi-
thing expressive of feeling and thought: an elegant summing up of
something understood’—which is trying to find the words to explain
what a work of art is and what it means to apprehend and appreci-
ate it, Murdoch writes the comment, ‘It is very familiar but not easy
to describe’. She went over and over her work writing comments and
instructions to herself. She evinces anxiety about repetition and accuracy
and passages are hatched out, lines drawn through sentences, sometimes
straight, sometimes in a zigzag. There are frequent exhortations to her-
self to ‘CLARIFY!’ Other such marginal instructions and exhortations to
herself include:
20 F. WHITE

• ‘Curtail all this’

• ‘my italics or N’s italics’
• ‘/New para’
• ‘ref and check for quotation’
• ‘Def of Gnosis, check. DESCRIBE GNOSIS!’
• ‘Add’ and ‘Check’
• ‘Cut this stuff?’ on page which has been totally hatched out
• ‘Translation of Noesis?’
• ‘put earlier’
• ‘fuse with above’
• ‘blend into’
• ‘Notes for Plan: check all in’
• ‘Is LW’s “stoicism” explained/explored elsewhere inside Gifford lec
area?’
• ‘cd cut para’
• ‘Expand’
• ‘Improve’
• ‘Is this argument ok?’
• ‘Rewrite this bit – working out example more clearly.’ ‘Work in.’
• ‘Check Greek for all quotes here’
• ‘Cut some? Rewrite 541-544 CONDENSING & clarifying the points,
leaving the queries clearer. Cut the colour case or explain it’
• ‘CUT THIS PLATO STUFF?’ (Murdoch Journals, KUAS202/6)

Reading both these drafts of the Gifford Lectures and the subsequent
MGM is to see an intellect at work, wrestling with the expression of
ideas.
As Murdoch’s lectures metamorphose into the book, changes occur.
‘See IM on M&D in Sovereignty of Good’ is written in the draft. But
she does not quote herself in the final text of MGM. The audience at the
Gifford Lectures was composed of professional philosophers and theolo-
gians. When she comes to rewrite the material for publication Murdoch
aims at a less specialist readership, the intelligent and educated but not
professionally academic ‘common reader’. She was again despondent
about her work on it, telling Lebowitz ‘I am … trying to finish a ver-
sion of some old mouldy philosophy lectures (no good)’ (Horner and
Rowe 2015, 564). The endings of the first two drafts are different from
each other and the ending of MGM very different again from either,
seemingly aimed at a different audience. The close of the first draft is
defensive:
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 21

my argument such as it is, is coming to an end, and perhaps has not been
really an argument at all, but just a development and criticism of certain
images (metaphysics is after all a form of art) and a sense of interrelated
considerations. And of course as one comes to the end, one cannot help
feeling that there was, in all this travelling and in all these encircling move-
ments, an objective, a quarry, which was certainly once there, but now
seems somehow to have escaped. (Murdoch Journals, KUAS202/6)

This image also appears in The Philosopher’s Pupil: ‘He pursued quarries
into thickets, into corners, into nets, and at the end found nothing there.
Such were his own images of his terrible addictive trade’ (Murdoch
1983, 135). The close of the second draft focuses on art:

We need free and various art, ubiquitous art, a free literature, poets,
story-tellers and a general practice of lucid eloquent technical prose. Art
is the creation of the idiosyncratic individual of whom it is the mirror and
preserver and guarantor. (Murdoch Journals, KUAS202/6)

But choosing to close MGM with words from Psalm 139 places the focus
on her neo-theology:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I flee from thy presence? If
I ascend into heaven thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold thou
art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost
parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall
hold me. (MGM, 512)

Conradi notes that ‘the official historian of the Gifford Lectures

wrote a sceptical report on Iris’s performance’ (Conradi 2001, 566)
and Murdoch’s somewhat adversarial relationship with the Gifford
Lectureship was revived a decade later when MGM was published.
Scottish academics attended seminars at St Andrews to discuss the
work: Murdoch declined to attend or to comment on the papers sub-
sequently published as a Theology in Scotland, Occasional Paper, Iris
Murdoch’s Giffords: A Study of the 1982 Gifford Lectures. Robert Gillies’
Introduction has a querulous tone as Murdoch has clearly given offence:
‘the book lacks many of the social decencies which usually grace pub-
lished Gifford Lectures. There are no frontispiece acknowledgements to
the Gifford Bequest, neither for host university courtesies nor yet for the
honour of being invited to present the Lectures’. Yet he has the grace to
22 F. WHITE

admit the powerful impact of MGM, saying that the book ‘is a testing
read even for the most trained and acute mind. It contains a vast, expan-
sive scholarship embracing art, literature, history, theology and of course,
philosophy. No one in that St Andrews seminar series was unaffected by
the experience of encounter with this majestic volume’ (Gillies 1995, 5).
Michael Partridge’s Introductory Comments are discerning: ‘The work is
… constantly fed by the perceptiveness, sensitivity and experience of the
novelist, immersed in the details of our lives. The writing is lucid …. one
has the impression of an elaborate dialogue’ not only with philosophers
but also ‘with more ordinary anonymous people (who also have their
experience and reflections). In representing these last, her long faithful
work as a creative novelist is effectively drawn on’ (Gillies 1995, 11).
He identifies the change in tone from the Gifford drafts, which read like
lectures, expounding, explaining, making statements, to MGM in which
Murdoch conjures up the sympathetic reader rather than the critical lec-
ture audience by an increase in the use of ‘we’, drawing us to her. This is
evident immediately in the opening sentences: ‘we see’, ‘we intuit’, ‘we
seem to know’, ‘we grasp’, ‘we assume’, ‘we could not infer’, ‘we fear’,
‘we want to transform’, ‘what we cannot dominate’, ‘we are now being
told’, and ‘us laymen’ which places her alongside the reader.

‘Perfectly Persuasive’:
Iris Murdoch’s Subliminal Lexicon
I turn now to Murdoch and words, to her choice and use of words. My
interest in what I call Murdoch’s ‘subliminal lexicon’ arose when, read-
ing essays from Existentialists and Mystics, my eye was caught, and my
mind arrested, by two passages. The first, from ‘The idea of perfection’
is this:

I would suggest that, at the level of serious common sense and of an ordi-
nary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals, it is perfectly
obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal
quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world … but with a refined and
honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment
and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of
opening one’s eyes but of a perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.
(Murdoch 1997, 330)
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 23

And the second, from ‘The sovereignty of good over other concepts’ is this:

How can we make ourselves better? is a question that moral philosophers

should attempt to answer. … the answer will come partly at least in the
form of explanatory and persuasive metaphors. (Murdoch 1997, 364)

Two words in these passages jumped out of the page at me: ‘perfectly’,
used twice in the first quotation, and ‘persuasive’ from the second.
I found myself thinking how ‘perfectly persuasive’ she is, and then ­realised
that these are two words you come across frequently in Murdoch’s writ-
ing. My initial marginalia read: ‘Watch out for tell-tale word “­ perfectly”:
it conveys Murdoch’s impatience with “nonsense”, theoretical/
abstract thinking’. And then:

Note word ‘persuasive’ and cf. her use of ‘perfectly’: Murdoch is a rheto-
rician in style who cajoles and persuades by argument and passion, rather
than convincing by solid factual logic. Her philosophy has an artist’s rather
than a scientist’s turn of mind. She believes in the ultimate truth of her
convictions and has a moral seriousness and urgency of tone.

This marginal note of mine is not a new thought but rather a truism of
Murdoch criticism. But what I found myself wanting to know was how is
it done? How does her rhetoric work? What are her habits of speech and
tricks of style which convey this passion, this seriousness and urgency? So
I started to look.
You do not have to look far. You can start almost anywhere in
Murdoch’s oeuvre and soon stumble upon the same vocabulary, the
quintessential Murdochian lexicon. I am not here concerned with the
‘big’ obvious carefully selected words which give names to the concepts
she believes to be important. Such words include good, truth, love, art,
imagination, value, thought, consciousness, language, metaphor, imagery
… the list could go on—it is the common coinage of Murdoch’s philos-
ophy and is scrutinised by professional philosophers. Maria Antonaccio’s
Picturing the Human is an excellent example of this form of Murdoch
studies. But what I am interested in here is the ‘small’ words, the
‘in-between’ words, which are part of the sentences which discuss and
link these big words and concepts. I will investigate these small words
and the work they do, but before that I want to unpack the phrase
‘subliminal lexicon’. The Oxford English Dictionary (1979) defines
24 F. WHITE

‘subliminal’ as ‘Below the threshold of sensation or consciousness: said

of states supposed to exist but not strong enough to be recognized’.
I think the lexicon (word list) I want to focus attention on may be said
to be ‘subliminal’ in two ways. First, although there is no doubt that
Murdoch is a highly conscious wordsmith who thought carefully about
words, I suspect that Murdoch herself was at least partially unconscious
of these ‘small’ words and the extent to which she uses them. I think
they lay below the threshold of her consciousness. The second way may
simply mean that I am slow on the uptake. They seemed to lie below
the threshold of this individual reader’s consciousness, and it was not
until I had read and reread (and, importantly, written out) so much of
Murdoch’s work that the impact of these small words rose above that
threshold and became strong enough for me to recognise it. I will get
to the particularity of these small words shortly, but I want to make a
few other points first which feed into my sense of their importance. I am
confining my observations to this single, though substantial, text, MGM
for clarity’s sake, but they are relevant to her entire oeuvre.
These are things which have been brought to the surface of my atten-
tion (that subliminal metaphor again) by other Murdoch readers and
critics. Stephen Mulhall’s illuminating review of Murdoch’s magnum
opus, ‘Constructing a hall of reflection’, mentions that ‘the elements
of its moral vision are … endlessly reiterated’ (Mulhall 1997, 219).
Reiteration, repetition: that is one vital factor in the Murdoch effect.
Peter Conradi remarks on ‘the voice of this book [which] often feels like
someone talking to us, or even thinking out loud’ (Conradi 1992, 2).
This second factor is the contrived informality, the private and personal
musing tone which gives the sense of communion with the mind of the
author. Conradi’s comment also makes room for a sense that Murdoch
is talking to herself as well as to her reader. We are made privy to the
workings out of her thought. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker
describe MGM as a ‘brilliant, erudite but sprawling work that proceeds
reflectively’ and characterise it as ‘a “guide” for a journey’ (Antonaccio
and Schweiker 1996, xv). One may be reminded of Murdoch’s star-
tling description of Plato’s Republic as a ‘spiritual guidebook’ (MGM,
388). This ‘spiritual’ element is a third factor. Murdoch intuitively
links the moral with the spiritual and says, ‘The word “spiritual” …
seems to me to be at home in the moral sphere’ (MGM, 495). She is
concerned with ‘the continuous daily moral work of the soul fight-
ing its way’ (MGM, 356)—not a common focus of philosophy in the
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 25

twentieth century—and her writing has an exhortative and admonitory

tone which crosses the border generally set between the cold dryness of
the scholar and the warm passion of the preceptor. Murdoch views the
‘border-line’, ‘this blurred edge’ as ‘often a good place to be’ (MGM,
295), and like Schopenhauer, she ‘dodges between metaphysics and
common-sense’ (MGM, 298). Border-crossing is a feature of her sui
generis style as she uneasily acknowledges: ‘In pursuing these reflections
one … find[s] oneself poised between uttering nonsense and laboriously
saying the obvious’ (MGM, 265). She is certainly afraid of neither and
exhibits a rare freedom to speak her own mind. Murdoch is a moralist
with a mission, a passionate belief in the existence and importance of a
‘vast extra-linguistic reality’ (MGM, 228), of ‘value’ and of the ‘holy’,
concepts which she fears the loss of in contemporary thinking.
In ‘The Preacher’s Tone: Mentors and Moralists’, Priscilla Martin
highlights the indubitable element of instruction in Murdoch’s phi-
losophy, the headmistressy tone, found in such sentences as this: ‘The
persistence of these young persons is an example to us all’ (MGM,
354). Martin notes Murdoch’s admiration for her own headmistress at
Badminton, the famous BMB (Beatrice Mary Baker) who was not afraid
to tell people how to live. Nor is Murdoch. She has a natural certainty in
the essential truth of what she is saying which brooks no argument. She
desires to be absolute in her opinions and harks back on four occasions
to the abrupt assurance and commonsensical approach of ‘that excellent
philosopher’, Dr. Johnson, who declared that ‘it just does’ and ‘there’s
an end on’t’, phrases which she quotes with wistful approval (MGM, 55,
233–234, and 274). Murdoch’s likeness to Johnson is clear in the qual-
ity which leads Mark Patrick Hederman to describe her as a ‘no-non-
sense referee’ in the world of ‘muscular masculine thought’ (Hederman
2001, 154) and her vocabulary, like Johnson’s, is robust. There is evident
patience in the way in which, in MGM, Murdoch describes and analyses
the western philosophical tradition and grapples with the threat to all she
holds dear which she sees as posed by contemporary developments in phi-
losophy. But this patience in the structure of her book is underwritten
by the subliminal lexicon which reveals her Johnsonian exasperation with
‘nonsense’. This for Murdoch comes under various headings, signalled by
such small words as ‘romantic’ (MGM, 76, 90, 121, 126, 129, 133, 290,
352, 354, 371, 443, and 499), ‘authentic’ (MGM, 200, 204, 352, 377
and 444), ‘heroic’ (MGM, 76, 159, 182, 186, 204, 268, 352, 377, 458,
and 486) and, smallest of all, ‘plausible’ (MGM, 151, 185, and 227).
26 F. WHITE

The big ‘alarm’ words are, of course, ‘existentialism’ ‘deconstruction’,

‘structuralism’, ‘language games’, and … ‘Derrida’!—her bête noire of
bêtes noires in this book.
Before turning our attention to the ‘perfectly persuasive’ vocabulary
Murdoch employs to engage readers with her thought and draw them
into complicit agreement with her own values and opinions, we must
look at the importance of word choice, and Murdoch’s own awareness of
this. Literary criticism of many kinds focuses on the particularity of indi-
vidual words. Avril Horner’s ‘The “wondrous necessary man”: Canetti,
The Unicorn and The Changeling’ considers a preoccupation with certain
keywords in Murdoch’s The Unicorn and Middleton’s The Changeling,
which alerts us to parallels between these two texts. Murdoch her-
self is acutely aware of the power of language, its use and misuse. She is
opposed to ‘jargon’ (MGM, 167, 172, 291, and 296), fears the danger
of slogans (MGM, 364–365) and wants to ‘preserve and cherish a strong
truth-bearing everyday language, not marred or corrupted by technical
discourse or scientific codes’ (MGM, 164). She highlights the words used
by other writers: ‘notice in the Phaedrus passage the four adjectives, per-
fect, simple, calm and happy’ she tells us (MGM, 15) and it troubles her
that Kant ‘was not concerned with … the middle-range mediating moral
vocabulary’ (MGM, 268, her italics) which is of such vital concern in her
own moral philosophy. Words and morals are inextricably interlinked in
Murdoch’s view. She says that ‘we develop an evaluative (moral) vocabu-
lary which is in constant use’ (MGM, 327) and ‘we must protect the pre-
cision of … secondary moral words, exercising them and keeping them
fit’ (MGM, 327). What we say affects what we think and how we act. The
small words count as well as the big ones: ‘Not only “true” and “good”,
but the vast numbers of secondary more specialised moral terms, are for
us instruments of discrimination and mentors of desire’ (MGM, 385).
‘Stern words deserving respect’, as Murdoch says of Don Cupitt’s writing
(MGM, 127).
Murdoch’s subliminal lexicon aims (whether consciously or uncon-
sciously) to teach the reader to discriminate, and it acts as a mentor of
desire. It is time to lay out the lexicon which lies submerged in the text
of MGM. What are these words which we can discern? They are perfectly
ordinary familiar everyday words, like … ‘ordinary’ (112 uses found in
MGM), ‘familiar’ (29 uses) and ‘everyday’ (16 uses). If we take just the
first of these words, it will become apparent why my original conception
of this project was overambitious and naïve. Those 112 uses of ‘ordinary’
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 27

include the following concepts: ordinary ‘being’, ordinary ‘life’, ordinary

‘value perception’, ordinary ‘sense of value’, ordinary ‘evaluative meth-
ods of thought’, ordinary ‘language’ (this is used both as a ­philosophical
term ‘ordinary-language’ as used by Ayer and others and as a simple
description of common lay non-philosophical language), ordinary ‘naïve
attitudes’, ordinary ‘frailty’, ordinary ‘citizen’, ordinary ‘talk’, o
­ rdinary
‘simple compassion’, ordinary ‘people’, ordinary ‘usage’, ordinary
‘experienced world’, ordinary ‘unenlightened self’, ordinary ‘sense of a
transcendent (extra-linguistic) real world’, ordinary ‘individuals’, ordi-
nary ‘conceptions of ourselves’, ordinary ‘lay self-understanding’, ordi-
nary ‘sophisticated observers’, ordinary ‘situation’, ordinary ‘egoistic
consciousness‘, ordinary ‘experience’, ordinary ‘failure of description’,
ordinary ‘apprehension of’ ordinary ‘man’, ordinary ‘virtue’, ordinary
‘concept of truth’, ‘ordinary human beings’, ordinary ‘experience’,
ordinary ‘distinction between true and false’, ordinary ‘moral motives’
and so on and so on. Just a third of the way through my list of references
I am forced to stop.
Some point to this exercise must be discerned. It might, notwith-
standing Murdoch’s displeasure, be a Derridean point. He specialised
in investigating the persistent use of a word by writers, and in decon-
structing texts by way of their subliminal vocabulary. But I do not think
that Murdoch deliberately sets out to manipulate the minds of her
readers through her use of language. She is open and simply truthful
in what she says. Further, such overworking of a single word leads to
an erosion of meaningfulness: when we gaze upon the list of ‘ordinary’
things above, it begins to seem that ‘ordinary’ is merely a ‘tag’ signi-
fying approval (‘ordinary concepts of truth’ = concepts of truth upheld
by Murdoch) or even just possession (‘ordinary experience’ = Murdoch’s
experience). Does ‘ordinary’ really add anything to the words it qual-
ifies? I do not think Murdoch was always aware of using it, so is it no
more than a stylistic tic, such as has been noted (and parodied) in her
fictional writing (see Malcolm Bradbury on her use of ‘sort of’)? Similar
charges might be levelled at her use of ‘everyday’. All the following are
given the tag ‘everyday’ at various point in MGM: everyday ‘feeling for
truth’, everyday ‘life’, everyday ‘experience’, everyday ‘awareness’, every-
day ‘use of metaphor’, everyday ‘problem’, everyday ‘moral life’, every-
day ‘advice’, everyday ‘moral activity’, and everyday ‘existence’. In this
case, though, there is clearly a passionate philosophical stance being
taken by Murdoch, which is anti-Heideggerian. (Late Heidegger is
28 F. WHITE

nearly as much of a bête noire as Derrida.) She recognises a Nietzschean

tone of ‘hubris’ and ‘hatred’ in ‘Heidegger’s “heroic” contempt for
Alltäglichkeit (everydayness)’ (MGM, 182). And I think she is right in
so doing. (Note the negative tag ‘heroic’ in that sentence.) Emphasis on
the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’ is not just a stylistic tic in Murdoch’s
writing: it points to the locus of morality in her philosophy. These laden
words appear in pairs and groupings. Murdoch speaks of ‘ordinary every-
day truth’ (MGM, 490, her italics), and of ‘everyday language’ (MGM,
459). Taken together, reiterated and repeated, paired and regrouped,
they are knotted to form a patterned network throughout the text, of
subliminally imprinted value and passion. (What I am trying to do here is
to slip under her net.) When Murdoch instinctively uses these words she
wants the reader to believe her, to follow her, to agree with her: she is
aiming to persuade.
There are words that Murdoch uses as a sort of iconic mantra: ‘calm’
(18 appearances in MGM), and ‘simple’ (10) which derive from her
mentor, Plato; ‘lucid’ (8), and ‘space’ (19) which are part of her con-
struction of a ‘huge hall of reflection’ for her reader, ‘full of light and
space and fresh air, in which ideas and intuitions can be unsystematically
nurtured’ (MGM, 422). We could discuss her happy unselfconscious and
unfashionable use of the imperative case: ‘must’ (16 uses), ‘should’ (7)
and ‘ought’ (5). We could consider her consciously defiant use of ‘better’
(13): ‘The pilgrim will not only produce a better series of acts, he will
have (down to the last details) a better series of mental states. He can lit-
erally see better’ (MGM, 177): ‘A language is enlarged, improved (value
judgement), by truthful utterance’, she declares (MGM, 281). One
could analyse her use of ‘natural(ly)’ and ‘obvious(ly)’, certain(ly)’ and
‘certainty’, of ‘recognise’, ‘know’ and ‘great’—Murdoch has no problem
with the concept of a canon, her work is free with references to great
art, great philosophers, great writers, great poets. It would be interest-
ing to trace the shifts she makes between ‘we’, ‘I’ and ‘one’, sometimes
with great self-awareness: ‘It strikes one (me)’ (MGM, 285) she admits at
one point, and ‘It is clearly (in my view)’ (MGM, 383) she concedes at
another. Her lack of embarrassment with the words ‘instinct’ and ‘intui-
tion’ and ‘experience’ sets her apart from many other philosophers, felic-
itously in my opinion. And of course, we should explore the ubiquitous
appearance in her writing of ‘of course’, which scores highly in the word
lists I have made with a quite extraordinary 89 appearances. This is a
habit of speech, but it also betokens both an impatience with those who
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 29

wilfully refute the truth, and an earnestness of desire to carry conviction

in her argument.
For Murdoch is not playing games in her moral philosophy as she
accuses Derrida of doing to damaging effect. Truth, value, holiness,
goodness, art, matter to her, indeed it matters to her that things mat-
ter—something she thinks has been lost with structuralism and its
successors. She unashamedly believes in spiritual pilgrimage, ‘unself-
ing’, moral improvement. She includes in her philosophical lexicon
theological terms, ‘grace’ (12 uses in MGM), redemption (8), salva-
tion (35). She unfashionably retains the concept of the soul (16). She
fears the ‘loss’ (36) of many things: ‘confidence’ (MGM, 194), ‘sov-
ereignty’ (MGM, 210), ‘concepts’ (MGM, 364), ‘ordinary everyday
truth’, the ‘particular’, the ‘contingent’ and the ‘individual’ (MGM,
490), ‘discrimination’ and the ‘sense of value’ (MGM, 503). She para-
doxically grieves over the loss of ‘God’ (MGM, 448), and overtly over
the decline of the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version
of the Bible (MGM, 460). She cleaves to the concepts of ‘experience’
and ‘holiness’, ending this ragbag of a book, an analogy of the ‘ragbag
mind’ (Hegel’s image, MGM, 237) which she both discusses and man-
ifests in its pages, with an appeal to ‘those matters of “ultimate con-
cern”, our experience of the unconditioned and our continued sense
of what is holy’ (MGM, 512). The final sentence, as we saw above, is
intriguingly from Psalm 139.
Is all this counting-and-listing of words much used by Murdoch any
more than a round-the-houses way of showing that there is in MGM
what Bran Nicol has neatly termed a ‘polemical impulse’ (Nicol 2004,
159) and that in this book she reveals what Terry Eagleton identifies as
‘her unconscious ideological prejudices’? (Eagleton 2003, 261). Maybe
not. But I think there is rich material in this kind of linguistic dissection
of the text which could feed into critical exegesis of Murdoch’s philo-
sophical and theological stances. Further, I believe it to be a significant
element in the response she draws from her readers, something to which
she was not indifferent. She writes of the differences in philosophical
style between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein:

Schopenhauer’s relationship to his reader is relaxed, amiable, confiding,

that of a kindly teacher or fellow seeker. He tells stories and makes jokes.
Wittgenstein does not relate to a reader, he passes by leaving a task behind.
(MGM, 79–80)
30 F. WHITE

‘Here one is inclined to say (I am inclined to say)’ (MGM, 69–70), to

use her own words, that Murdoch does indeed leave a task behind, noth-
ing less than ‘the battle against natural egoism’ (MGM, 260) which she
calls ‘unselfing’, but she shares Schopenhauer’s ‘relaxed, amiable, con-
fiding manner’, a manner partially created by her casual use of words.
Hilda Spear comments that Murdoch ‘reaffirms’, ‘questions’, ‘offers’ and
is ‘never dogmatic’ toward her reader (Spear 2007, 112) and Hederman
says: ‘This book was written for everyone. It is … generous and
plain-spoken’ (Hederman 2001, 78). Mulhall considers ‘the book’s lack
of systematicity … a function of its author’s conception of her relation to
her readers’ (Mulhall 1997, 238). I want to suggest that the vocabulary
employed in MGM performs a similar function.
Writing this account of Murdoch’s lexicon puts me in a dilemma,
because it is in danger of becoming something of a pastiche of MGM,
making it seem as if I lack respect for Murdoch and for the academic
endeavour of literary analysis. Neither is the case. Murdoch is for me, as
for many others, as much a spiritual mentor as an object of study and I
find MGM a great book full of charms. I particularly like the gradually
built-up vignettes of Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein whom Murdoch
loved in such different ways, and the marvellous image of the ratchet to
describe the experience of thinking philosophically (MGM, 23). She is
a powerful influence and I find myself perfectly persuaded of the truth-
fulness of her writing. Whatever her listeners did or did not make of the
Gifford Lectures that cost her so much peace of mind, readers of the
book they metamorphosed into over a decade of painfully hard work can
reap much richness from this compendium of distilled reading, thinking,
and ultimately, wisdom.

References
Antonaccio, M., and W. Schweiker (eds.). 1996. Iris Murdoch and the search for
human goodness. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Conradi, P.J. 1992. A major new book of philosophy. Iris Murdoch Newsletter 6:
1–2.
Conradi, P.J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A life. London: HarperCollins.
Eagleton, T. 2003. Figures of dissent. London and New York: Verso.
Eyre, R., dir. 2001. Iris. DVD, Miramax. UK.
Gillies, R.A. (ed.). 1995. Iris Murdoch’s Giffords: A study of the 1982 Gifford
lectures—Theology in Scotland. Occasional Paper No. 1.
 2 THE GIFFORD-DRIVEN GENESIS AND … 31

Hederman, M.P. 2001. The haunted inkwell. Dublin: Columba Press.

Horner, A., and A. Rowe (eds.). 2015. Living on paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch
1934–1995. London: Chatto & Windus.
Mulhall, S. 1997. Constructing a hall of reflection: Perfectionist edification in
Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a guide to morals. Philosophy 72 (280): 219–239.
Murdoch, I. 1956. The flight from the enchanter. London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1983. The philosopher’s pupil. London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1987. The book and the brotherhood. London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1997. Existentialists and mystics, ed. Peter J. Conradi. London:
Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. KUAS202. Journals, poetry notebooks and other items. London:
Kingston University Archives and Special Collections.
Nicol, B. 2004. Iris Murdoch: The retrospective fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Spear, H. 2007. Iris Murdoch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 3

Unity and Art in a Mood of Scepticism

(MGM Chapter 1)

Niklas Forsberg

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

Needs No Introduction
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM) begins in a peculiar
way. There is no introduction. There is no explicit problem formulation,
it does not present a clear thesis that the book is supposed to argue for,
and there is not a single question mark in sight in its opening pages. It
may even seem as if the book is lacking a clear introductory discussion
that explains what will be discussed and in what order. There is no clear
definition of either metaphysics or morals, even though the title tells us
that the one is supposed to be a guide to the other. There is only a friendly
nod to Elizabeth Anscombe and an elusive motto before it takes off. Iris
Murdoch just begins—stating things, seemingly talking for all of us.

The idea of a self-contained unity or limited whole is a ­fundamental

instinctive concept. We see parts of things, we intuit whole things.
We seem to know a great deal on the basis of very little. Oblivious of

N. Forsberg (*)
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic

© The Author(s) 2019 33

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_3
34 N. FORSBERG

philosophical problems and paucity of evidence we grasp ourselves as uni-

ties, continuous bodies and continuous minds. We assume the continuity
of space and time. (MGM, 1)

Murdoch gives the impression of saying something that we all should be

familiar with, at least at some level. But are we? I assume that we rarely
go about thinking about the ‘idea of a self-contained unity or a lim-
ited whole’, as if this was something we all are concerned with almost
by instinct. (‘Oh, what marvellous fur that puppy has! I wonder how
to think about it in terms of a self-contained unity or a limited whole!’)
Similarly, it seems odd to say that we normally think of ourselves as see-
ing ‘parts of things’, but intuiting ‘whole things’. Who, really, would say:
‘Hey, there goes Edna, with her continuous body and her continuous
mind, carrying her saxophone of which I only can see parts but that
I nevertheless think of as a whole saxophone – and, amazingly, I know
this (that I see this continuous body and continuous mind carrying the
whole saxophone) based on so little evidence!’ No one, I assume. No
one, but an academic philosopher in an academic setting.
Murdoch’s opening sentences move in a distinctively ­ philosophical
register, and they do so for a reason. The rhetoric of Murdoch’s prose
signals that the separations that she highlights (between parts and
wholes, seeing and intuition), as well as the effort to establish of a bond
between evidence and knowledge, are philosophical constructs of a pecu-
liar kind. That is, Murdoch starts by implicitly showing that ‘Philosophy
is to some extent a foreign tongue’ (MGM, 192). Of course, if a philoso-
pher asks: ‘Do you normally think of Edna as assemblages of body parts
and mental events or as a whole?’ it may seem very natural to respond
by saying that I see/think of her as a whole. The naturalness with which
one may be inclined to reach for that answer is similar to the sort of firm
sense of merely stating the obvious that G. E. Moore gave voice to when
he waved his hands and said:

I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By hold-
ing up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right
hand, ‘Here is one hand,’ and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the
left, ‘and here is another.’ (Moore, 145f.)

But Moore’s hand-waving is an answer to a question posed in a distinc-

tively philosophical setting; Moore is trying to show the hollowness of a
specific understanding of certain forms of idealistic doctrines. Murdoch
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 35

is trying to mark out how our ordinary forms of perception and

cognition are distorted and misunderstood in philosophical discourse—
and she aims to do that without downplaying what is real and true in the
philosophical temptation (to think that unity is only real if we can solidify
it theoretically) itself.
Thus, it is not false to say that we intuit unities; they are parts of our
ordinary non-philosophical understanding. So, of course we can say we
do without speaking nonsense. But Murdoch wants to take us back from
assemblages of body parts and mental events to Edna herself, while at
the same time investigating the philosophical impulse to split her up
into parts and that impulse’s supposed naturalness, as well as the follow-
ing effort to glue her together again theoretically. That is why she says
that unity and limited wholes are clear to us when we are ‘[o]blivious of
philosophical problems’ (MGM, 1). So philosophical problems seem to
arise as forms of departures from a lived form of intelligibility—and the
real kind of unity can only be found where its philosophically problem-
atic formulation is no longer present. But it may require a great deal of
philosophical work to get there.
Thus, when Murdoch—a few lines further down—says, ‘The urge
to prove that where we intuit unity there really is unity is a deep emo-
tional motive to philosophy, to art, to thinking itself. Intellect is naturally
one-making’ (MGM, 1), she is not saying that the task of this book is to
present a philosophical theory or system that explains how we can go
from parts to wholes in a philosophically abstract manner. Rather, she
is suggesting that we need to take this specifically philosophical impulse
as seriously as we possibly can, without taking the separations and epis-
temological views that underpin the impulse for granted. She wants to
investigate the motive itself, not present yet another doctrinal response
to it. Indeed, for her, it is quite clear that the philosophical effort to
‘evaluate, understand, classify, place in order of merit’ and to unearth a
‘wider unified system’ (MGM, 1), is an urge that should be scrutinised
rather than taken for granted. In an oft-quoted passage, Murdoch says
that ‘There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards
the building of theories, and a move back again towards the consider-
ation of simple and obvious facts’ (Murdoch 1999, 299). The first is a
move away from reality, a move that is rooted in a well-motivated fear of
‘plurality, diffusion, senseless accident, chaos’ (MGM, 1). This is thus the
particularly philosophical effort to find ways to overcome various forms
of plurality, particularity, and contextuality by means of abstraction and
36 N. FORSBERG

generalisation—that is, in an effort to raise above life itself. The other

movement is the homecoming where we return to the ground, to the
‘muddle’, to use a Murdochian turn of phrase (see e.g. MGM, 8), to
life itself. It is immensely important to realise that Murdoch claims that
‘both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to it’ (Murdoch 1999,
299; see also MGM, 197, 211). The theoretical and systematising effort
is merely the first step, but good philosophising requires the second
movement too, the move back.
It is true that many people and most philosophers think of the first of
the aforementioned movements—that of theory construction and gen-
eralising endeavours—as the philosophical movement. It is equally clear
that most contemporary philosophers think that ‘metaphysics’ just is the
‘one-making’ endeavour that aims to lay down requirements for what
the really real is, systematically and in the abstract, and this is something
that belongs exclusively to one of the two movements of philosophy that
Murdoch describes. Therefore, one may be led to think a book whose
title makes evident that we are now venturing upon an inquiry into met-
aphysics, and how that metaphysics guides morals, must be a book that
aims to lead us from the particular, historical, social and contextual to the
general by means of a kind of theorising that in some way brings forth
the one-making principle. That would constitute a fundamental misun-
derstanding of MGM.
In fact, what the first pages of the book really tell us is almost the
reverse: we fear plurality and diffusion, with good reason, and the
philosophical one-making impulse comes in as a response to that fear.
This impulse is not to be taken lightly. But the philosophical aspira-
tion easily leads us to think that general distinctions such as particular/
general, temporary/eternal, parts/wholes (and to add one more that
will become really important later on in the book: fact/value), are
always applicable and hence to be overcome by metaphysical and the-
oretical speculation. To accept such divisions as given would be to try
to domesticate the ways in which the ‘intellect is naturally one-­making’
(MGM, 1), and to fall back into a blind reliance on distinctions and
epistemological assumptions that she aims to contest. That ‘intel-
lect is naturally one-making’ does not mean that philosophy is the only
one-making endeavour—and one of Murdoch’s main concerns is that
philosophy, in particular, tends to misunderstand what real, functional,
one-making efforts are like.
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 37

What Is Metaphysics?
How, then, are we to think about the terms ‘metaphysics’ and ‘morals’
here, if the idea of abstract generalising, over-historical principles and
a-temporal ideals are not what Murdoch means by ‘metaphysics’? And
what, then, could ‘morals’ mean if we are to refrain from any such princi-
ples and ideals? What notion of guidance are we to insert between these
two concepts? And if Murdoch is so critical of the idea that philosophy
can ‘prove that where we intuit unity there really is unity’ (MGM, 1),
then why does she embark on this over-500-page journey into the ways
in which metaphysics is a guide to morals?
As Murdoch sees it, our present intellectual culture seems to have
resigned from the task of thinking clearly about unity and generality.
Now, she says, we seem to live in a time in which a ‘mood of scepticism’
(MGM, 7) is predominant, which is characterised by ‘the “pluralisation”
or “demythologisation” of history, art, religion, science’ (MGM, 2).
The predominant sceptical mood that Murdoch discerns can be seen
as a form of backlash to, or the flipside of the coin of, misguided sys-
tematic and scientistic efforts to lay down the true fundamentals of all
one-making efforts. ‘Since one cannot find one overarching principle of
unity, there is none to be found!’; ‘If one cannot pinpoint the meaning
of concepts, there is only an endless multitude of linguistic ­possibilities
to immerse oneself in’. This ‘either/or’ structure is itself, Murdoch
suggests, too easy to employ, and on many occasions not true to the
facts. One central reason why this is a false dilemma is a fundamental
neglect of historicity. That unities exist does not mean that they are
eternal. That historical changes occur does not mean that there are no
unities. Of course, we misunderstand historicity too, if we think of that
as yet another ‘either/or’: either unity is ahistorical, or there are only
historically conditioned temporary resting points.

Philosophy and science and theology have always been to some degree
iconoclastic; and the ‘everyday outlook’ or ‘natural standpoint’ undergoes
historical change. How much it changes many voices now tell us, how little
it changes can be learnt from reading Homer. (MGM, 2)

Murdoch’s emphasis on the historical means to suggest that all our

beliefs are formed from within a horizon, and that such horizons change.
But this does not mean that our beliefs are ungrounded or merely
38 N. FORSBERG

temporary hypotheses (i.e. a limited set of beliefs that we hold for a

limited number or reasons). Horizons are broad and in the background,
and change slowly in hardly perceptible ways. The scepticism that
characterises our times is one in which the understanding and apprecia-
tion of a shared (yet often hardly perceptible) horizon has been ‘sponged
away’, as Murdoch describes it, quoting Jacques Derrida (MGM, 2). In
particular, the dominant mood of scepticism that Murdoch thinks that
we now live in is one in which the idea that there is nothing beyond us,
beyond our language, thrives.
On the kind of traditional view of what metaphysics is, which
Murdoch contests, philosophical explorations can be performed in a
somewhat detached manner. It is often assumed that the philosopher can
stand back from the world and observe it, more or less neutrally, ponder
the facts of it calmly, and then retreat to his or her desk and construct
a manual for how to proceed in thinking and acting at a second stage.
That would be one way in which one may think about how metaphysics
guides morals. We may call this form of thinking about how metaphysics
may guide morals ‘top-down’.
Murdoch, however, does not think that there is such an ideal vantage
point and underlines, in contrast, the ways in which our perceptions of
our world always already are coloured. Murdoch claims that ‘moral-
ity is and ought to be connected with our whole being’ (MGM, 495).
This means that morality is practically everywhere, always, to a higher
or lower degree of course, and that ‘moral life is not intermittent or spe-
cialized, it is not a peculiar separate area of our existence’ (MGM, 495).
And in a very famous and oft-quoted parenthetical passage—written
in a style that is characteristic of Murdoch that sometimes lends itself
to slogan-like one-liners, which in turn often invite simplification and
misunderstanding—Murdoch asks and answers: ‘(“But are you saying
that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly)’ (MGM, 495).
The qualification ‘Yes, roughly’ is important, for it would be an immense
simplification to say that everything, always is a moral concern. What is
true is that there is no separate sphere of morality and no morality-free
zone, which means that morality and clarity about moral issues are to be
sought for pretty much everywhere (see MGM, 26).
To formulate Murdoch’s understanding of how metaphysics guides
morals, one may say that her view is not that philosophy should forge,
or construct, a metaphysics that we can employ as a guide. Rather, she
is urging us to unearth the metaphysics that already guides us, even if
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 39

we are unaware of this guidance.1 We must begin by trying to make

clear who and what we are, and how we have become who and what
we are. We must dig where we stand. The direction of thought must be
‘ground-up’. ‘Who and what we are’ is a rather large thing, not possible
to discern by means of looking only at minute details of concrete situa-
tions. One thing that Murdoch’s view of how metaphysics guides morals
entails is that we will misunderstand morality fundamentally if we focus
too much on concrete moral acts and their relation to ideals or virtues
whose sense we have determined beforehand.

Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background con-
dition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of
vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the
world as it is. A philosophy which leaves duty without 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. We act rightly
‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out of the quality of
our usual attachments and the kind of energy and discernment which we
have available. And to this the whole activity of our consciousness is rele-
vant. (Murdoch 1999, 375)

Murdoch’s view is that we are always guided by metaphysics in the

sense that it constitutes the horizon within which all our claims—moral,
factual—make sense and carry the kinds of weights they do.
At this point, one must acknowledge how immensely complex
Murdoch’s relation to virtue and virtue ethics is. Of course, to the extent
that ‘virtue ethics’ is merely an overarching broad characterisation of all
kinds of philosophies that put emphasis on the development of character,
Murdoch could be said to belong to that group. However, as soon as
one tries to invest that emphasis on character development with a more
substantial view of what the virtues are and of how they are supposed
to be action guiding, Murdoch parts way with that tradition (at least in
its contemporary neo-Aristotelean dispensation).2 To the extent that vir-
tue ethics tries to narrow down morality to a single principle, Murdoch’s
view is diametrically opposed. And to the extent that virtue ethics seeks
to establish and explicate the sense of the supposedly relevant virtues,
Murdoch will have some serious reservations: ‘I don’t think that the
moral life can in this sense be reduced to a unity. On the other hand
I do not think it can be satisfactorily characterised by an enumeration of
varying “goods” and virtues’ (MGM, 492).
40 N. FORSBERG

Now, Murdoch’s prioritising of vision over choice and worldview

over action does not mean that hers is a view according to which we
are, as it were, victims of our situatedness, thrown into a world that is
not ours, destined and determined to follow the linguistic structure
that conditions our meaningful thought and each of our individual uses
of language. Such a view is rather one of the positions that Murdoch
feels the pressure of (that is, feels that there’s something to it), but
which she nevertheless finds deeply problematic. The view of language
(where it is presented as ‘a cage’) is one that she attributes to Derrida
and to Wittgenstein, through readings of their respective views which
are, to be fair, contestable. But, even if one finds Murdoch’s readings
of Derrida and Wittgenstein problematic, one should keep in mind that
her aim is not to do exegesis but to point out and reflect over trends of
thought that are formative and capture something essential of ‘the spirit
of our times’, the Zeitgeist—that is, exactly the ways in which certain
ideas gain currency and tend to inform us, and guide us, more or less
unconsciously.
The idea that we are preconditioned by our linguistic belonging is
itself a philosophical, metaphysical idea, and it becomes important to
Murdoch, not (merely or even primarily) because it is a well-argued
philosophical claim that deserves to have its pros and cons scrutinised,
but because it partakes in forming our self-understanding. It presents a
unified image of the human being and her condition.
This means that thinking seriously about ‘metaphysics’, as Murdoch
conceives it, does not merely mean thinking about how various images
inform us and make possible various thoughts, actions, habits. Pictures
of who and what we are, are also, constantly, created. And it is equally
important to bring into view the ways in which we partake in forming
various images of unity: ‘The world is not given to us on a plate, it is
given to us as a creative task’ (MGM, 215). Thus, Murdoch is required
to look at, and reflect upon, explicit metaphysical systems put forth by
traditional philosophers, historians, psychological theories, a­ nthropology,
religion, sociology, and indeed, everyday lives of ordinary people. It is,
perhaps, no surprise then, that art (and perhaps literature especially)
plays a central role here, since ‘art does register or picture, sometimes
prophetically, the movement of the Zeitgeist. The way we grasp the world
changes, and the artist knows first, like the animals whose behaviour
foretells an earthquake’ (MGM, 4).
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 41

If morality is everywhere and if metaphysics is everywhere; and if

metaphysical imageries are both forming us (by having formed the kind
of Zeitgeist we happen to be thrown into) and are formed by us (by
the kinds of views and theories and images of ourselves that we form),
then a study of how metaphysics guides morals will necessarily have a
very complex structure (if it is to remain true to the facts); n
­ ecessarily
criss-crossing between different fields of discourse and different loca-
tions on our history’s axis. And if this is the book’s subject, it follows
that it demands a specific form. For this reason, I think Stephen Mulhall
is right to say that the apparently disorganised structure of the book is
well-motivated and true to the themes under discussion. If the book
challenges top-down approaches to metaphysics and ideas of unity,
it cannot assume that form itself. The work needs to ‘take on exactly
the appearance of disorganization or disunity …, in order to contest
the legitimacy of the ideal of organization or unity that generates this
appearance’ (Mulhall, 221).

Images of Art
Since we now know that Murdoch wants to elucidate how images
of ourselves have shaped, shape, and might come to shape us and our
world, it is no wonder that the concept of art plays a crucial role. This is
so, not only because art itself (often) is a form of image making; which
means that studying the concept of art must entail an enrichment of
one’s own understanding of how images are made and how they may
guide us. Neither does art become important solely because it sometimes
‘foretells an earthquake’. Inquiring into our different concepts of the
artwork also unearths various forms of understandings of what unity is.
In Murdoch’s view, ‘the traditional concept’ (MGM, 2) of the artwork
builds on the idea that an artwork only becomes an artwork by present-
ing a unified picture. Traditional art, as Murdoch conceives it, ‘involves
the idea of a sustained experienced mental synthesis’ (MGM, 2).
The idea of unity is here presented in a somewhat phenomenological
register. It is not so—not merely anyway—that the artwork itself, physi-
cally as it were, brings things together. Unity is also formed by our expe-
rience of it, by how we perceive it. Seeing (or hearing, or reading) an
artwork, is experiencing a limited unified whole. Again, this is grounded
in ordinary experience. When we hear a symphony, we do not hear a
42 N. FORSBERG

great number of notes played simultaneously, creating sound waves that

are in accordance with our musical habits and expectations (or challenge
them); we hear a symphony. Unity is what we hear. When we view a
painting, we do not see a number of colours arranged so as to form a
recognisable pattern; we see a landscape or a bowl of fruit or a woman
with a saxophone. Unity is what we see. At this phenomenological, expe-
riential, level, synthesis is natural, whereas the separation of that unity
into dispersed atoms whose relations to each other need to be explained
is unnatural. It requires a specific attitude (philosophical for example) to
break up the unity into parts and claim that the separate entities are what
the thing itself really is made of. That form of philosophical analysis—of
breaking unities apart to their constituent members—is thus a very the-
oretical form of metaphysics, which builds on a specific (moral) stance
where we detach ourselves from natural forms of perception, under-
standing and engagement. We may come to learn and understand why
somebody may feel inclined to perform such acts of dissembling; but that
would only be to follow the first of philosophy’s two movements men-
tioned above. The return is not performed. In philosophical analysis, we
may struggle to see parts. In real life (that to which Murdoch aims to
return us), we see wholes. This minute reflection on how we experience
an artwork also sheds light on what an experience is and what attending
to an object is ‘in ordinary life, unshadowed by philosophy’ (MGM, 3).
Thus, Murdoch contends: ‘This ability to sustain and experience imagined
syntheses has importance in other areas where we make use of analogous
or related conceptions of authoritative limited wholes’ (MGM, 3).
Of course, Murdoch’s talk about ‘the traditional concept’ of the
artwork is way too simplistic. There are, after all, many such concepts.
But Murdoch is intentionally painting with broad brush strokes, trying
to shed light on a specific idea of unity that has been pervasive in most
of them—at least up until quite recently. One may describe Murdoch’s
strategy here as one of bringing into view two seemingly opposing views
of the work of art that had reigned up until the rise of esoteric varie-
ties of modernism. One is a concept of art that we loosely might label
‘Platonic’ since it is organised around the concept of mimesis. The other
can be called ‘Kantian’ since its organising principle is the idea of the
artwork as an autonomous whole, not to be judged by virtue of how it
corresponds to the world out of frame.
Central to the Platonic conception is the idea of mimesis. The difficult
aspect of this notion is, obviously, its representational character. Art
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 43

is supposed to be measured by determining how well it represents, or

captures, our reality. This is one of the reasons why Plato had to down-
grade poetry. Art, he claimed, is a ‘third remove from truth’—where
each step taken in the chain ‘idea → thing → image’ is a representation,
and thus a step away from the really real (the idea). Art is this reduced
to a representation of a representation (Plato, the Republic, Book X, see
MGM, 12f.). The idea of mimesis, as here understood, entails that there
is a ‘transcendent reality’ (MGM, 6) beyond all representational spheres
that all representations aim for. Even though Murdoch is quite adamant
when it comes to holding on to the idea that a work of art is about some-
thing outside itself, a transcendent reality, she is nevertheless critical of
Plato, arguing that he goes wrong by contrasting mimesis with anamne-
sis (recollection, anamnesis—‘“memory” of what we did not know we
knew’, Murdoch 1999, 12), and for thinking that art has nothing to do
with anamnesis. Plato is thereby led to believe that art always is less real
than what it represents and that it ‘caters for the lowest part of the soul’,
or ‘the bad unconscious’ (MGM, 12). Plato thus has two reservations
against art which are tied together in intricate ways. One is epistemolog-
ical, one moral. Even though Murdoch thinks Plato’s epistemological rea-
son is unfair to the facts, she still holds on to parts of the moral reason.
Murdoch, just like Plato, recognises art’s ability to corrupt our thinking,
for precisely the same reasons that Plato warns us. Art is, in Murdoch’s
view too, a powerful thing, and precisely because it is a powerful thing it
may lead us away from clear thinking and unreserved appreciation for what
feels right. We may become, as she says, ‘lazy spectators’ (MGM, 13).

Art is most pernicious when it poses as a spiritual achievement and inhibits

serious reflection and self-criticism. Enjoyment of art is soothing, and may
persuade us that we ‘understand’ (life, people, morality) and need to make
no further efforts. The great artists always make us feel that we have arrived;
we are home. We feel that we are already wise and good. (MGM, 13)

One can discern this Platonic inheritance in Murdoch most obviously in

her somewhat comical disdain for television, and her worry about how
creativity is threatened by new inventions such as the word processor (see
e.g. MGM, 13, 19f., 210). But it also comes into view in a much more
profound way when Murdoch distinguishes good art from bad, and
imagination from fantasy. In her view, bad art feeds our fantasies and our
egoistic desires precisely by leading us to assume that we already know
44 N. FORSBERG

what the good is, that our own understanding of the world and our oth-
ers is correct, and which thereby leaves out the absolutely central call for
self-critical examination.
In Murdoch’s reading, ‘Plato’s attack on art must be seen in the con-
text of his whole moral philosophy’ (MGM, 14). For even though Plato
claims that art appeals to the lower part of the soul, by presenting ready-
made images of goodness or evil that prevent us from thinking things
through for ourselves, and even though he claims that art is lacking in
epistemological closeness to truth, he nevertheless presents us with an
image of the magnetism of truth; a truth that imagery guides us towards.
Love (Eros) and beauty are central here. We are pulled towards the truth
by unified images. Always. Crucially, however, there is no final point here.
Ideas of the good are like the sun. They shine a light, but we cannot stare
into it without going blind, and the whole idea of ‘going there’ is bluntly
absurd since we would burn long before we get there. This is why there
is no knowledge of ‘the good’. This is why images of virtue may guide us,
even though there is little sense in believing that virtue has been realised.
All we have are images that shine light on our world. There’s no room, in
Murdoch’s work, for what one might call a ‘real idea(l)’. Rather:

The good life is thus a process of clarification, a movement towards selfless

lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are objects of love. Platonic
morality is not coldly intellectual, it involves the whole man and attaches
value to the most ‘concrete’ of everyday preoccupations and acts. (MGM, 14)

An ideal image shines light on our own words, concepts and conceptions,
and we thereby can scrutinise them and see more clearly. If we are faithful
enough to this task, and selfless enough to be honest in it, then improve-
ment will come to be by means of acknowledgments of one’s own imper-
fections, a reorientation of one’s vision. And, since differences in moral
vision are conceptual differences (Murdoch 1999, 84; see also Forsberg
2018), moral progress includes, centrally, a willingness to test, expand,
and reconsider the concepts one lives by. Thus, there is no idea to be real-
ised, and the value of art is not to be found in how well it represents the
world in the photographic sense of one-to-one correspondence. Art and
love are two concepts that are extremely close to each other in Murdoch.
Incidentally, these brief reflections on Murdoch’s inheritance of Plato
already give us a central clue about how to understand how Murdoch’s
novels relate to her philosophy. Given that she often lets her characters
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 45

‘speak philosophically’ using sentences and images that bear some resem-
blance to her own philosophical thoughts, one might become tempted
to think that she uses the novels as vehicles for her own philosophy.
Nothing could be more wrong.3 Her novels, like all good art (assum-
ing that she struggled to write good art, not necessarily claiming that
she succeeded, or that she thought that she had succeeded in doing so)
present unified wholes that are about our world in the sense that they
portray what our life is (or may be) like. And by doing so, they give clear
images of various lives, ideals and concepts. That’s it. All (good) novels
do this. But at no point do they make claims of this sort:

Think like this!

Act like this!
Here’s a colourful image of my philosophy – go imitate it!

If they succeeded in doing things like these, they would be a poor form
of literature by Murdoch’s own standards: blocking the central task of
self-examination, feeding our egos by making us believe that we have the
real world framed, betraying the idea that the Good is always beyond our
reach and that virtue is not something that can be explicated and then
copied. The images that art present should put us to work, not rest. Art
is neither a copy, nor a proxy. Thus, learning from literature is not a mat-
ter of imitating it, but a matter of being called to think.

The notion of copying the model itself would be a ‘category mistake’, since
the model is not a particular thing, like a particular command or picture;
imitatio Christi does not work by simply suggesting that everyone should
give away his money, or wondering how Christ would vote. (MGM, 11)

Whereas the Platonic concept of art placed mimesis at its centre,

leading Plato to discredit its representational value, the Kantian image
of art is precisely driven by disconnecting the artwork from stale ques-
tions about representation. The artwork now becomes autonomous and
the question about representation or reference simply falls out of play.
For Kant, the artwork must be understood in terms of ‘independence,
of self-containedness’ (Murdoch 1999, 219) and this is one point that
clearly appeals to Murdoch—even though she will need to part ways with
Kant too at some point.
46 N. FORSBERG

As Kant seeks to lay bare the conditions of possibility of knowledge

in general, the central discovery he makes is that ‘intuitions without
concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty’ (Kant, A51/
B75). We may speak of intuition (or experience) and concepts (or under-
standing) as two independent ‘things’ in some sense, and so as two
independent sources of knowledge. A judgement (a conceptualisation) is
of something else (the thing that we experience). But if there is to be
anything worth calling ‘knowledge’ these two must be in harmony with
each other. In Kant’s view, empiricism and rationalism are two sceptical
varieties of a failure to see this. A judgement (a conceptualisation) is of
something else (the thing that we experience).
Art holds a special place in Kant’s thought precisely because of its
‘self-containedness’. An artwork is what it is about, is about what it is. It
is its own idea. Therefore, it does not point outside itself to any empirical
objects, and it is not to be measured by means of how well it mimics the
real world. It creates its own. To put it as simply as possible: an artwork
is a work where the word is its own concept, the expression is its own
content, and there is no distinction to be drawn between ideality and
exemplarity. A beautiful work of art is one that realises its own idea well.
A failed work of art does not. So the beauty of the artwork is not at all to
be measured by means of how well it represents something else (or if it
‘looks appealing’ or not).
One can easily see what Murdoch finds attractive here, for Kant offers
a way to explicate the unity of a work of art in terms that circumvent the
Platonic worry of art being merely a representation of a representation.
Murdoch, however, is worried that the Kantian idea of the autonomous
work of art will entail that the true connection between the work of art
and the world is lost entirely. That the work of art is about us and our
world and has ‘conceptual content’ are ideas that Murdoch will never let
go of, even if she countersigns the Kantian idea of the work of art as
self-contained and not to be measured by means of simplistic representa-
tional standards.
Murdoch’s brief investigations into the two dominating trends of
thought regarding the concept of the artwork can now be unpacked
rather easily. An artwork is a limited whole; it presents a unified image
of who and what we are that is to be measured as a self-contained whole
(and not in terms of naïve photographic images of ‘aboutness’ as strict
reference or representation). Art does not function as images of the good
or the bad, the virtues or the sins, that we should mimic (or distance
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 47

ourselves from), but as images that should make us think and rethink
ourselves and our concepts. By forcing us to do that, artworks are also,
necessarily, about us and our world. And this is why Murdoch finds such
a close link between love and art as she does: they are individualities that
pull us up, unified wholes that force us to pay attention to a world out-
side ourselves and which thereby call us to engage in self-criticism (see
MGM, 16f. and Murdoch 1999). They are unified wholes that make
claims about how things hang together, and ask if we can see the unity
they present. If they truly were cut off from the world—that is, if they
really were internal affairs without any connections to the everyday lives
and struggles of ordinary people—the threat is not merely esotericism.
Truth itself is threatened.

Art in a Mood of Scepticism

This is exactly the threat that she discerns in the contemporary s­ceptical
mood. Murdoch thinks that the traditional idea of a ‘work of art’ is
‘under attack’, as she says (MGM, 2), from ways of thinking influenced
by the contemporary sceptical mood in which art is ‘demythologised’
(MGM, 17). At bottom, the demythologisation of art that really worries
Murdoch is the thought that language is a form of play in which signs
are not in touch with either us or the world, and that language truly
refers to nothing else than language.

Structuralism may also be seen in its more popular manifestations as a new

sensibility in art, an attack on traditional art forms, where it operates both
as an exercise in, and an image of, demythologisation, the removal of the
transcendent: a removal which analyses (deconstructs) the familiar con-
cepts of individual object, individual person, individual meaning, those old
and cherished ‘limited wholes’. (MGM, 5)

What is truly worrying in the mood of scepticism for Murdoch is thus

not merely that we will end up with artworks that are only about other
artworks, or works of art that question their own concept of what an
artwork is, but that we will stop seeing artworks as openings to ‘an
imagined world which is both like and unlike the “real” world, but
which relates to it intimately’ (MGM, 205). What we risk here is not
merely a diminished sense of the importance of works of art. Rather,
‘the fundamental value which is lost, made obscure, made not to be,
48 N. FORSBERG

by structuralist theory, is truth, language as truthful, where “truthful”

means faithful to, engaging intelligently and responsibly with, a reality
which is beyond us’ (MGM, 214). When Murdoch is speaking about
‘what is beyond us’ here, she is indeed speaking about metaphysics. That
is, ‘the transcendental network, the border, wherein the interests and
passions which unite us to the world are progressively woven into illusion
or reality, a continuous working of consciousness’ (MGM, 215). Thus,
Murdoch’s worry is that a metaphysical image of language is seeping
into public consciousness in a way that will partake in forming who and
what we are; and this metaphysical image will render the idea that we are
responsible to a world outside us empty. Metaphysicians are destroying
metaphysics by misunderstanding metaphysics.
In a way, the problem with ‘structuralism’ (as Murdoch understands
it) is precisely that metaphysical requirements are laid down ‘top-
down’—while the real structures that guide us are made obscure. The
theoretical failure to ‘prove that where we intuit unity there really is
unity’ (MGM, 1) does not show that there is no unity at all. ‘We must
check philosophical theories against what we know of human nature
(and hold on to that phrase too) and feed philosophy with our ordinary
(non-theorised, non-jargoned) views of it’ (MGM, 216). If we fail this
task, the journey home is still to be done, and thinking has only just
begun.

Acknowledgements My thanks to the editors for helpful and valuable

comments. 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.
0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development
Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

Notes
1. For a helpful and clarifying discussion of how Murdoch’s conception of
metaphysics differs from more traditional and theoretical variations, see
Hämäläinen (2013).
2. This is a point well-argued both in Robjant (2012) and in McLean (2000).
3. I have argued so more extensively in Forsberg (2013).
 3 UNITY AND ART IN A MOOD OF SCEPTICISM (MGM CHAPTER 1) 49

References
Forsberg, N. 2013. Language lost and found: On Iris Murdoch and the limits of
philosophical discourse. New York: Bloomsbury.
Forsberg, N. 2018. Taking the linguistic method seriously: On Iris Murdoch on
language and linguistic philosophy. In Murdoch on truth and love, ed. Gary
Browning, 109–132. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hämäläinen, N. 2013. What is metaphysics in Metaphysics as a guide to morals?
SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 1–20.
Kant, I. 2007 [1781, 1787]. Critique of pure reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith, 2nd ed. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
McLean, M. 2000. On muffling Murdoch. Ratio 13: 191–198.
Moore, G.E. 1959. Philosophical papers. London: Allen & Unwin.
Mulhall, S. 1997. Constructing a hall of reflection: Perfectionist edification in
Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a guide to morals. Philosophy 72: 219–239.
Murdoch, I. 1999. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and litera-
ture, ed. Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin.
Murdoch, I. 2003. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Vintage.
Robjant, D. 2012. Review of Iris Murdoch, philosopher, ed. Justin Broackes.
European Journal of Philosophy 20 (4): 621–635.
 CHAPTER 4

Murdoch’s Question of the Work

of Art: The Dialogue Between Western
and Japanese Conceptions of Unity
(MGM Chapters 1 and 8)

Fiona Tomkinson

Introduction
In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch 2003, henceforth MGM),
Murdoch returns again and again to the question of art—in its widest
sense—and to its relationship to life and to ethics. This question is not one
which can be neatly compartmentalised or marginalised. It is not a mere
footnote either to metaphysics or to morals, but is an integral part of the
philosophical project which she undertakes in the work. Nor is her con-
sideration of art solely concerned with its impact on our conceptions of
morality, or with the likelihood of putting our moral theories into practice.

This article is part of a study ‘The influence of Eastern religion on selected

British authors’ which has received grants from the JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-aid
for Scientific Research (C) Grant no. 19K00416.

F. Tomkinson (*)
Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

© The Author(s) 2019 51

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_4
52 F. TOMKINSON

She does, indeed, make her contribution to the age-old debate as to the way
in which, say, our reading of literature, our response to music, or our con-
templation of visual art, can impact on our moral and spiritual life, but her
engagement with the question of art does not end there. I hope to show
how she goes beyond this by analysing the relationship between art and her
conception of the Good. For Murdoch, art and our creation or perception
of it are not merely instantiations of the good; rather her discussion of these
questions is the key to her account of what actually constitutes the Good. It
impacts not only on how we see and experience meaning and value in life,
but on the meaning and value which we assign to life as a whole.
I shall not attempt here to discuss her comments on aesthetics and
the artwork in their entirety, but shall focus on two related aspects of
her exploration of the relationship between art and philosophy. The first
is the ‘fictional genesis’ of MGM itself in her 1987 novel, The Book and
the Brotherhood, in a passage which, I shall argue, expresses the experience
of a vision of artistic unity. This ‘fictional genesis’ is not a genesis in the
chronological sense, since the project of MGM was conceived before the
composition of The Book and the Brotherhood, and was already being put
into execution in the 1982 Gifford Lectures (as Frances White’s chapter
in this volume shows), but a genesis in the sense of her providing us with
a fictional moment which symbolises her first recognition of her own phil-
osophical task. The second aspect is the theoretical treatment of the ques-
tion of the unity of the artwork within the text itself. I shall discuss this
mainly with reference to two passages: the explicit discussion of the ques-
tion in Chapter 1 (MGM, 1–25), ‘The unity of the artwork’, and the sub-
section of Chapter 8 (MGM, 235–246) in which she implicitly resumes her
consideration of the question through her discussion of Japanese aesthetics
and philosophy, in particular through her engagement with the concept of
pure cognition in the thought of the Zen master, Katsuki Sekida.
Murdoch’s reading of Sekida is a crucial step—more so than she her-
self makes explicit—in her confrontation of the attacks by contemporary
philosophical discourse on the meaning of the artwork and the recogni-
tion of the human individual. She begins her book with a meditation on
artistic unity within the Western tradition and upon the threats posed to
it by recent critical and artistic movements which promote an aesthetics
of fragmentation and erode traditional certainties concerning the status of
the artwork. She does not immediately present us with a solution to this
problem, but her solution will emerge both through her re-examination of
Western metaphysics and through her rediscovery of a lost sense of unity
through her engagement with Eastern thought. The implicit dialogue
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 53

which she sets up between Western and Eastern conceptions of artis-

tic unity sheds further light on the major philosophical issues with which
she grapples in the work; indeed, her position is a synthesis of Sekida’s
thought with her reinterpretation of the Western tradition. Her under-
standing of what Sekida calls pure cognition connects with what her
ethical vision takes from Plato and from Anselm, more specifically, with
the way in which she understands participation in the Platonic Form of
the Good and the way in which she turns Anselm’s ontological argument
for the existence of God into an argument for the existence of the Good.

The ‘Fictional Genesis’ of Metaphysics as a Guide

to Morals in The Book and the Brotherhood

It is well-known that Murdoch liked to insist on the complete sep-

aration between her novels and her philosophical work (notably in her
1978 BBC interview on ‘Philosophy and literature’ with Bryan Magee
[reprinted in Murdoch 1997]), but nevertheless the novels frequently
reference her philosophical preoccupations and show characters grap-
pling with them as they attempt to make sense of their lives. In the case
of The Book and the Brotherhood, the link is especially close. One of the
hints that she was conscious of dealing with the same issues in both
works is the repetition in MGM of a quotation from Heraclitus refer-
enced in The Book and the Brotherhood, where the saintly schoolmaster
Jenkin Riderhood, in response to his friend Gerard Hernshaw’s com-
ment ‘I hate God’, remarks, ‘“He who alone is wise wants and does not
want to be called Zeus.” Heraclitus wasn’t altogether a disaster, you
know’ (Murdoch 1987, 127–128). In Chapter Two of MGM, the full
significance of this fragment is spelled out, and the attentive reader can
also pick up on the fact that Jenkin’s misquotation is being corrected:

Heraclitus tells us that ‘The One who alone is wise does not want and
wants to be called Zeus’ (Fr. 32). This is indeed the problem. We yearn for
the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in
picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then real-
ise to be just contingent particulars, just things among other things here
below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and
pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable,
and as such in danger of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the
divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it. No wonder ‘that which alone
is wise’ is in two minds about how to proceed. (The order of the wishes
54 F. TOMKINSON

may be significant; fundamentally it does not want, but is forced by the

frailties of human nature into wanting.) (MGM, 56)

The question of how to strike the balance here—of how to retain ‘reli-
gion’ and ethics without traditional concepts of God, indeed without
the concept of God at all, is at the heart of MGM, and also recurs again
and again in Murdoch’s novels. In The Book and the Brotherhood, this
question is tied up more closely than usual with the political. The plot
centres around the question of whether a group of liberal middle-class
friends in the grip of mid-life crises can be justified in retaining the values
which they hold dear. Jenkin quotes W. H. Auden to Gerard as a sum-
mary of their dilemma: ‘What by nature and by training we have loved,
has little strength remaining, though we would gladly give the Oxford
Colleges, Big Ben, and all the birds in Wicken Fen, it has no wish to
live’ (Murdoch 1987, 127). Though Gerard rejects this idea and claims
that Jenkin himself does not really subscribe to it, it can be considered
to constitute the underlying mood of the novel. It is against this back-
ground of a crisis in values that the ‘book’ of the novel’s title is com-
posed. We are never given any extract from the book or summary of its
contents, but we are given to understand that it is a work intended to
refute most of the humanist values cherished by bourgeois liberals. It is
written by the maverick nihilist-Marxist, David Crimond, a charismatic
and sinister character, described by Gerard as a ‘terrorist’ (Murdoch
1987, 126). Crimond, after being funded in his writing for years by ‘the
Brotherhood’, a group of well-meaning former socialist friends (that is,
both former friends and former socialists) from his Oxford University
days, returns the favour by seducing, and then years later, re-seducing
Jean Cambus, a member of the group and wife of another of its mem-
bers, and, to crown it all, when his book is finally completed, lures her
into a suicide pact in which they will drive their cars towards a fatal crash
along a Roman road. Jean fortunately escapes by choosing to swerve at
the last moment; Crimond then abandons her, makes an unsuccessful
attempt to seduce her best friend, Rose, and goes on to challenge her
husband, Duncan, to a duel in the process of which he will inadvertently
bring about the death of the innocent Jenkin.
Crimond’s intellectual position is never described in full, but it is
referred to as ‘a fashionable amalgam, senseless but dangerous – a
kind of Taoism with a dash of modern physics, then labelled Marxism’
(Murdoch 1987, 26) We may deduce from this that his tenets include
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 55

a critique of conceptions of unity—the dash of modern physics proba-

bly means to emphasise a reductionist view which sees the universe in
terms of the interaction of small particles, whilst the Taoism emphasises
the non-discrete nature of the human personality and the non-existence
of anything corresponding to the traditional Western concept of soul. We
also know that he holds the view that society is doomed. It is somewhat
unclear what, if any, solution for the future of humanity is proposed as an
alternative. Indeed, Crimond is represented in terms of pure negation:
he is identified with the Second person of the Hindu Trinity, Shiva, and
this suggests that the role of Vishnu, renewer and preserver, should fall
to someone else. Throughout the plot, the themes of the Marxist cri-
tique of liberal humanist values are intertwined with themes of suicide
and abortion, each constituting an attack on humanist life-affirming val-
ues from a different angle and presenting the misery of the planet as a
challenge both to the desire to continue or perpetuate human life, and to
the defence of ethical absolutes. That this intertwining is not accidental
can be seen from a passage in MGM, which in the context of an analysis
of popular structuralism and deconstruction and its tendency to replace
authors, characters and narratives with their linguistic components,
deplores how quasi-scientific terminology and technology may take the
place of human beings:

We, who still in spite of everything live in a Greek light, have yet to see
how far science and its satellite theories can actually alter our human
world. Intelligent tyrants reflect on this; and Marxism, for all its utilitarian
virtues, carried this hypothesis, unclarified and semi-conscious within itself.
Could it seem before long naive to believe in the value and being of indi-
vidual consciousness, even in that which is oneself? (MGM, 159)

The task of negating the negation by refuting Crimond—the role of

Vishnu—falls to Gerard, a character who, like his creator, has long been
devoted to a quasi-Platonic idealism, and at the end of the penultimate
chapter, he dedicates himself to this task. Gerard has also had his fill of
human suffering, despite his relatively comfortable middle-class back-
ground. He has suffered a number of bereavements, including the recent
losses of his father and Jenkin, and that of Sinclair, the homosexual love
of his student days, but his first traumatic loss, and possibly the one
which marked him the most deeply, is the loss of his childhood pet, a
parrot called Grey, who was got rid of by his family when he was away at
56 F. TOMKINSON

school. It is the thought of Grey which gives rise to the epiphanic vision
of the book which he is to write:

The thought that Grey might have starved to death was so terrible to
Gerard that he suddenly sat bolt upright, and there flowed into him, as
into a clear vessel, a sudden sense of all the agony and helpless suffering of
created things.
He fell asleep and dreamt that he was standing on that mountainside
holding an open book upon whose pages was written Dominus Illuminatio
mea – and from far far above an angel was descending in the form of a
great grey parrot with clever loving eyes and the parrot perched upon
the book and spread out its grey and scarlet wings and the parrot was the
book. (Murdoch 1987, 585)

The book is also, I think, MGM—thus presented as a book written con-

tra Crimond, contra Marxism and linguistic idealism, but also written
in response to the predicament of suffering and as a consequence of
trauma—and, finally, as the use of the motto of the University of Oxford
suggests, it is presented as something which seeks to mysteriously com-
bine scholarly learning and divine illumination, the word and the world.
We are also given a number of hints from Gerard’s characterisation as a
kind of Platonist, that Plato will be a major presence in the work. The
discussion of Japanese aesthetics in MGM is also prefigured by the pres-
ence in Gerard’s house of ‘nineteenth-century Japanese paintings, shad-
owy exquisite things with sparse smudgy lines and dashes of colour,
representing birds, dogs, insects, trees, frogs, tortoises, monkeys, frail
girls, casual men, mountains, rivers, the moon’ (Murdoch 1987, 193).
What, then, is the essence of this book?

Plato, Anselm and Murdoch’s Philosophical Project

To summarise Murdoch’s project as briefly as possible, it is an attempt to
speak of meaning and of goodness without recourse to traditional reli-
gious faith in a personal deity or an afterlife, and to assert the need for
a theology which can continue without God—she anticipates the ques-
tion as to why we do not content ourselves with calling this an ethics,
by saying that one may do so if one wishes, but it should be an eth-
ics which should treat of ‘our continued sense of what is holy’ (MGM,
512) which we find in that which is beyond ourselves (nature, great art,
other human beings) and with which we strive to bring ourselves into a
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 57

correct relation. In practical terms, this translates into a belief in a revival

of Aristotelian virtue ethics, an advocacy of practical participation in
goodness through small acts of attentiveness and mindfulness, through
resistance to tyranny, through the creation of art and through love. She
is well aware that erotic love can be blind and selfish, and that saintliness
can degenerate into masochism. Indeed, the novels document numerous
cases of the complications of love and of the spiritual quest which can
also be read as a litany of the demonic and egotistical qualities of Eros.
As she remarks in Chapter Ten of MGM, ‘Eros is a great artist, not a
pure being’ (MGM, 343). She confronts the question of the void and of
suffering, and yet nevertheless defends the value of a purified Eros and a
belief in an absolute Form of Good in the sense of Plato.
It might be a common initial response of the layperson to ask whether
metaphysics is really doing anything here? What exactly is this mystical
parrot of Gerard’s dream-vision, which like Hegel’s owl of Athena takes
flight in the dusk? For those of us familiar with the tradition of British
television comedy, might it not resemble the parrot in a famous Monty
Python sketch, in which a man played by John Cleese comes into a pet
shop with a dead parrot, which the man behind the counter assures him
is only sleeping, when in fact, it is deceased, it has ceased to exist? Do
we really have the right to use the term metaphysics when we have given
up applying it to the study of supernatural beings? Is not Murdoch,
in defending the practice of a metaphysics redefined as a study of the
essence or essences of reality in the context of belief in a purely physi-
cal world, performing the function of the pet-shop owner who nails the
dead parrot to its perch? And what, might it be asked, in practical terms
do we get out of all this? To reference Monty Python once more, do
Murdoch’s moral injunctions amount to much more than the answer to
the question of ‘The Meaning of Life’ handed out in an envelope in the
1983 film of the same name? That is: ‘Try and be nice to people, avoid
eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in,
and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds
and nations’ (Jones 1983). Do we really need to wade through over five
hundred pages of metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical discussion to get to
this point? Should we not rather say with the Louis MacNeice (2007) of
‘London Rain’, that we need no metaphysics to sanction what we do?
In response to these imagined objections, I would like to focus on
what I see as both the crux and the culmination of Murdoch’s argument
58 F. TOMKINSON

as stated towards the conclusion of the work, where she states that she
wishes ‘to use Plato’s images as a sort of Ontological Proof of the neces-
sity of Good’ (MGM, 511).
The phrase ‘the necessity of Good’ implies not only an injunction to
be good, but an acknowledgment that there is good in life and that life
can be seen as a good. But how are we to understand her bringing in
of the ontological proof? What she seems to suggest is that the exist-
ence of the Idea of Good in the mind proves the existence of the Good
as something which transcends the mind—a move which many people
might well find problematic regardless of their personal belief concerning
the existence of goodness. The Kantian and Humean objections to the
ontological proof of God’s existence apply equally to the demonstration
of the existence of anything outside the mind by the fact that it can be
thought of. Murdoch was well aware of these objections, which she ref-
erences in Chapter 13 of the work. (MGM, 391–430) She also remarks
upon the circularity of the argument at the end of Chapter 2, saying of
the concept of God that ‘unless you have it in the picture at the start
you cannot get it in later by extraneous means’ (MGM, 57). Why then
does she adopt the argument, which might be thought of as the deadest
of all dead parrots in the metaphysical tradition—and what exactly does
she mean by a sort of ontological proof here? This might seem a des-
perately vague term to use in a philosophical text. She clearly does not
mean a new version of the ontological argument as we might refer to
Anselm’s version or to Gödel’s, since she makes no attempt to advance
one. My claim is that her meaning only becomes clear in the context of
her discussion of aesthetics. The first part of this discussion in Chapter 1
gives us a clearer awareness of what she means by Plato’s images, and
the second, the discussion of Japanese aesthetics in Chapter 8, will,
I shall argue, clarify what she means by the sort of ontological proof.
In Chapter 1, ‘Conceptions of Unity’, Murdoch argues that the idea
of self-contained unity is ‘a fundamental instinctive concept’; that we fear
‘plurality, diffusion, senseless accident, chaos’ (MGM, 1), but as philo-
sophical idealism is replaced with the hermeneutics of suspicion (to use a
phrase of Ricoeur’s not adopted by Murdoch herself) we are now faced
with a pluralisation or demythologisation of art and the ‘sponging away’,
in Nietzsche’s phrase, of a horizon within which we have dwelt since the
time of the ancient Greeks. The result is deconstructive approaches to
literary criticism and cults of the ephemeral or incomplete.
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 59

Freudian theory in particular is to be held responsible, since despite

the fact that, on the level of therapy, it aims for a reintegration of the
personality, on the level of metaphysics, it is iconoclastic in its reduction-
ist ‘explanation by sex’ and its dismissal of religion as illusion. Moreover,
art, for Freud, is a kind of ‘fore-pleasure’ which suggest that all art
aspires to the condition of pornography. Murdoch asks, ‘What now
becomes of the dignity and innocence of the work of art?’ (MGM, 21).
Yet she finds a ray of hope in the point at which Plato and Freud coin-
cide, in Freud’s identification of the concept of the libido with Plato’s
Eros—she believes that the Platonic distinction between high and low
Eros can be rediscovered in Freud’s concept of the redeployment of
energy—a transformation which she sees as our life-problem. She then
takes the connection further in seeing in Plato’s theory of recollection
or anamnesis the ancestor of the Freudian unconscious, even though
the memory of pure Forms of goodness and beauty, put forward in the
Meno to account for the origin of virtue, are, she confesses, very differ-
ent from anything that we find in Freud’s ‘glimpses of infantile sexual-
ity’ (MGM, 23). She also sees a demythologised concept of anamnesis in
the concept of ‘live remembrance’ in Plato’s Seventh Letter and in the
Kantian solitary moral private agent ‘continually doing it all, over and
over, for himself’ (MGM, 23). She concludes the chapter with a descrip-
tion of the moral life in the Platonic understanding as an orientation of
Eros towards the Form of the Good in which the artist as virtuous truth-
seeker may also participate, a movement:

not, by an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom, but

patiently and continuously a change of one’s whole being in all its contin-
gent detail … There are innumerable points at which we have to detach
ourselves, to change our orientation, to redirect our desire and refresh
and purify our energy, to keep on looking in the right direction: to attend
upon the grace that comes through faith. (MGM, 25)

Although ‘grace’ and ‘faith’ sound like—and in a sense still are—Chris-

tian concepts, we are still very much in an ancient Greek light at the
end of this chapter, though her original point of departure, the concept
of the unity of the artwork itself, has disappeared from view. Art can
be redeemed within Plato’s system, if not in Plato’s opinion, but it is
redeemed as a kind of techne, as virtuous practice.
60 F. TOMKINSON

In her following discussion of Japanese aesthetics, not only is the con-

cept of virtuous practice elaborated upon, but the concept of unity is
reintroduced in a different guise. Murdoch takes as her point of depar-
ture Katsuki Sekida’s critique of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s
eidetic reduction, or rather his insistence on its distinction from the pure
consciousness sought after in Zen practice. For Husserl, the ego is sus-
pended as an intellectual exercise allowing us to attain the pure phenom-
enon. (Thus, we come to understand, for example, that the essence of a
triangle is not being blue or pink, but having three sides.) Sekida remarks
that this is done in the head without too much difficulty, whereas for
the Zen practitioner, the suspending of the personal ego involves the dis-
cipline of zazen, which is not a simple change of mental attitude, but
a discipline of body and mind—we root out the emotionally and intel-
lectually habituated consciousness so that a pure state of cognition may
emerge (MGM, 240). As a pointer in the direction of what is meant by a
pure cognition, Murdoch gives us a quotation used by Sekida from what
she calls a Japanese poem by Nansen, a poem which was perhaps in her
mind when she wrote of the mountains and rivers in Gerard’s Japanese
paintings:

Hearing, seeing, touching and knowing are not one and one;
Mountains and rivers should not be viewed in the mirror.
The frosty sky, the setting moon – at midnight
With whom will the serene waters of the lake reflect the shadows in
the cold? (MGM, 242)

Murdoch presents Sekida’s position here briefly as follows: in pure cog-

nition there is no separation of the subject and object—subjectivity and
objectivity only arise in the second stage of the recognition of pure cog-
nition; we should not say as the idealist does that the external world is
nothing but the projection of the subjective mirror of our mind.
If we turn to the work of Sekida quoted, Zen Training, we find
that the poem is not, in fact, by Nansen: Murdoch probably made this
error by skimming the relevant passage in Chapter 14 when she returned
to reference it. The poem is actually given as a work by Setcho, the
author of the Hekigan Roku (or Blue Cliff Record), commenting on
the story ‘Nansen Views the Flower’. In this story, the high government
official Rikko Taifu, speaking with the Zen master Nansen Osho, says,
‘Jo Hoshi said, “Heaven and earth and I are of the same root. All things
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 61

and I are of the same substance.” Isn’t that fantastic!’ (Sekida 2005,
173). Nansen responds by asking Rikko if, like the Tathagata, he can see
Buddha nature with his naked eyes, and when Rikko confesses that he
can only see a peony, Nansen replies by pointing to a flower and saying,
‘People of these days see this flower as though they were in a dream’
(Sekida 2005, 175). For Sekida, seeing the Buddha nature in a flower
is equivalent to the state of kensho in which the freshness of perception
is renewed as the practitioner returns from deep meditation, from the
state of absolute samadhi in which consciousness almost disappears.
Reading a little further in Sekida, we also see that the explication of the
poem is grounded in the theory of mind underlying Zen practice. He
divides the action of consciousness into the activity of three nen, the
first corresponding to what Husserl calls ‘perception’, the second to
the reflecting action of consciousness and the third to a further step in
self-consciousness involving recollection and memory. Pure cognition
comes from the meeting of the first nen and the object (Sekida 2005,
170). However, the activity of the first nen is suppressed by and needs
to be liberated from the third nen (Sekida 2005, 190). In absolute sam-
adhi, all three nen disappear, but the first nen is the last to disappear and
the first to return as we emerge from this state, so that stimuli rush in all
their unlimited profusion: ‘In the kensho experience it is this strength of
impressions that brings before you the objects of the external world with
fresh and inspiring originality’ (Sekida 2005, 179).
We can assume that Murdoch was bearing in mind the background
in Zen thinking given by Sekida as she composed this chapter, but it is
significant that she chooses to emphasise not the Zen phenomenology of
mind per se, but the link between pure cognition and the Japanese aes-
thetic: for her, the throw-away simplicity and pointless ‘thereness’ of Zen
art makes comprehensible the notion of achieving a pure cognitive state
(MGM, 245) and the haiku points at some aspect of the visible world in
such a way as to suggest that inner and outer are one, without losing or
subjectivising the world:

Emphasis is laid by Zen, partly in its instruction through art, upon the
small contingent details of ordinary life and the natural world. Buddhism
teaches love and respect for all things … The enlightened man returns to,
that is, discovers, the world. He begins by thinking that rivers are merely
rivers and mountains are merely mountains, proceeds to the view that riv-
ers are not rivers and mountains are not mountains, and later achieves the
62 F. TOMKINSON

deep understanding that rivers are really rivers and mountains are really
mountains. (MGM, 244)

Murdoch then goes on to give an account of the unselfing achieved in

pure cognition as a place where morality and aesthetics meet—and illus-
trates this process with examples from Adorno, Rilke and Simone Weil.
One quotation from Rilke in particular comes close to Sekida’s concept
of pure cognition. Rilke describes a self-portrait by Cézanne as being
made ‘with the credulity and extrinsic interest of a dog which sees itself
in the mirror and thinks: there is another dog’ (MGM, 246).
How, then, does this relate to the preoccupations of Murdoch with
aesthetic unity in Chapter 1? I believe that we are given a significant clue
in the comparison she makes between Sekida and Plato in Chapter Six
of MGM, where Sekida’s critique of Husserl is said to have the charac-
teristics of a double movement, which we also find in Plato, away from
the private and personal and then back again (MGM, 174). In Sekida,
we have first pure cognition and then the recognition of pure cognition
(a kind of return to the personal); in Plato, as with the other ancient
Greek philosophers, we have the world, not the Cartesian cogito, as start-
ing point (the first stage of the movement), but his insistence on the fun-
damental importance of the speaking individual, shown by his distrust of
writing in the Phaedrus, and his concern with personal salvation ‘as per-
sonal vision and change of being’ (MGM, 174) in the Phaedrus and the
Symposium bring us back to the individual again.

Reading Plato and Anselm Through Sekida

I would like to take this one stage further—to think the unthought or
perhaps the incompletely explicated—of Murdoch by applying the back-
and-forth movement which we see in Sekida to the Platonic forms and to
the ontological proof. For Murdoch, ethics can only begin by taking the
existence of the Good as a starting point. In the terms of Platonic philos-
ophy, this ultimately amounts to a participation (methexis) in the Form of
the Good, in the sense not merely of mimesis (copying) but of parousia
(presence)—the good itself must be actually present. Indeed, in a certain
sense, there can be in this case no mimesis without parousia. A copy of
the good is not like a copy of a chair in a painting. (Faking goodness
is something else.) If we really have made a copy of the good, then the
good is present.
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 63

But there is a way in which we can have an abstract idea of the good
within us, in the same way that an atheist might have an idea of God
simply as an imagined entity considered to be non-existent (and whose
existence might be desired, or not desired, or to the existence of which
he or she might even be indifferent). Good would then be something
of which we might be aware as a hypothetical entity, but which we feel
we have not tasted, as when someone says, ‘I have never tasted happi-
ness in all my life’, though in order to say so they must have at least
some faint notion of what happiness is. This brings to mind Sekida’s
quotation of the mountains which should not be viewed in the mir-
ror. Such an abstract conception of goodness can function as a starting
point, as a felt lack which might transmute itself into its opposite, but it
is insufficient. The mountains are in the mirror. But perhaps it is also not
enough to experience goodness as immanence without feeling that it is
also transcendent. (This brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the
bracketing of the question of existence in Husserl; our eidetic reduction
of something considered real can never be the same as something con-
sidered to be non-existent/imaginary [Merleau-Ponty 1960].) We can
experience the Good, but believe it is confined to our own mind. The
mountains are still in the mirror. It is only the awareness of goodness as
participation in something which is transcendent that brings the moun-
tains out of the mirror, though the mirror is not shattered, and we may
in fact continue to see the mountains reflected in multiple mirrors.
How does this movement relate to the ontological proof? Just as
Anselm begins by believing rather than by understanding, and so has
already within himself a concept of God which includes the belief in
His Existence, so the Form of the Good must be initially experienced
as something transcendent in a move which involves something like
Sekida’s pure cognition. (We have here the restoration of both a pure
interiority and a pure exteriority—both of which have been under threat
by linguistic idealism and deconstruction.) Reflection on the concept
only comes as a second stage. There is a circularity here, but it is a her-
meneutic, not a vicious circularity.
How the initial step towards participation in the Form of the
Good/the first stage of the ontological argument can be made is a differ-
ent question, to which I do not here propose to give a definitive answer,
but I would suggest that there are a number of paths, some of which
Murdoch has marked out for us in her discussion of the deployment of
Eros. Sometimes it may be less a question of stepping than of finding
64 F. TOMKINSON

ourselves thrown into this sense of participation in the transcendent,

like Murdoch’s character Effingham in The Unicorn (Murdoch, 1963),
whose near-death experience results in an automatic experience of love
for the universe beyond the self and a vision of something which seems
to correspond to the Platonic Form of the Good. Although these feelings
cannot be sustained at the same level, they can, Murdoch suggests, per-
meate the life which follows. This roughly corresponds to the tenth stage
of Zen training described by Sekida, which he calls ‘In town with help-
ing hands’ (Sekida 2005, 230–231). Once the initial step has been taken,
what may follow is a living in a faith in the existence of Good, not in
the sense of adherence to a particular religious dogma, but in a manner
somewhat akin to Merleau-Ponty’s description of perceptual faith—our
belief in the reality of the visual world—as that in which we necessarily
live despite our familiarity with all the arguments of scepticism. We see
the mountains outside the mirror and reach out to touch them.
It is such a moment which, I believe, Murdoch, perhaps basing the
description on a personal experience of her own, is attributing to Gerard
Hernshaw in the visionary dream-state in which parrot and book, repre-
senting the living world and the written word which mirrors it, merge.
Despite the apparently abstract and theoretical nature of MGM, it is a
work which calls on the reader to take a similar step as a precondition for
embarking on the life of virtue: to come out of the cave—our own ver-
sion of the cave of Plato’s Republic Book X where we depend on reflec-
tions—and to access the Form of the Good and the ‘sort of ontological
proof’ through pure cognition.
Going a little further than Murdoch, I would claim that in so doing,
we shall also, in each moment, create a unified artwork at the intersec-
tion of exteriority and interiority. Also going a little further than what is
explicitly stated, I would conclude that in MGM, if it is the philosophers
of the Western tradition (Plato, Anselm and Kant) who point the way
towards virtue, it is the Zen master who leads us there by the hand.

References
Jones, T., Dir. 1983. Monty Python’s the meaning of life. New York, UK:
Universal Pictures.
MacNeice, L. 2007. Collected poems, ed. Peter McDonald. London: Faber &
Faber.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1960. Le philosophe et son ombre. In Signes, 201–228.
Paris: Gallimard.
 4 MURDOCH’S QUESTION OF THE WORK OF ART … 65

Murdoch, I. 1987. The book and the brotherhood. London: Vintage Classics.
Murdoch, I. 1997. Existentialists and mystics, ed. Peter J. Conradi. London:
Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 2003. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Vintage Classics.
Sekida, K. 2005. Zen training methods and philosophy. Boston and London:
Shambala Classics.
 CHAPTER 5

Fact and Value (MGM Chapter 2)

Craig Taylor

Followers of debates in contemporary moral philosophy about whether

moral judgements can be true are likely to be surprised, even disap-
pointed, with the discussion of fact and value offered here.1 This chapter
is not in any sense a contribution to recent debate about whether there
are any moral, or more generally evaluative, facts. While Murdoch holds
in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch 1992, henceforth MGM)
that one cannot derive values from facts, so long as we understand facts as
simply empirical facts and the province of science, she is quick to add that
the ‘concept of “fact” is complex’, by which she means to point to how
‘values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world’
(MGM, 26, her italics).2 For Murdoch the place of value in our lives and
in our understanding of the world is ubiquitous; as she says, ‘forms of
evaluation haunt our simplest decisions’ (MGM, 26). More to the point,
Murdoch’s discussion of the distinction between fact and value, includ-
ing her insistence that value cannot be derived from facts, is grounded
in the idea that value is supremely important in our lives. As Murdoch
sees it, those that have thought hardest about the distinction between fact
and value have been concerned as she puts it ‘to keep [value] pure and
untainted, not derived from or mixed with empirical facts’ (MGM, 25).

C. Taylor (*)
Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 67

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_5
68 C. TAYLOR

Two philosophers she focuses on here are Immanuel Kant and Ludwig
Wittgenstein (influenced Murdoch thinks by Arthur Schopenhauer).
Our problem, as Murdoch sees it, is that in the segregation of
(empirical) fact from value, particularly given the advance and success
of science, value can appear to be a rather small and insignificant thing,
even nothing at all. Some people, or at least some of those philosophers
participating in current debates about fact and value, might be quite
happy to accept that last conclusion. What, they may ask, is the prob-
lem?3 Murdoch, though, is addressing herself to those who see that there
is a problem here, and a very fundamental one at that, going to the heart
of our understanding of ourselves and the world. Those familiar with
Kant and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus might immediately under-
stand why Murdoch should focus on them.
To start with Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus ethics is placed outside
the world. To understand this idea, we need to consider Wittgenstein’s
so-called ‘picture theory’ of meaning. According to this theory, ‘The
Limits of My Language mean the Limits of My World’, where ‘the world
is the totality of facts not of things’, and ‘the totality of propositions is
language’ (Wittgenstein 1961, §5.6, §1.1, §4.001). Propositions indi-
cate ways in which the world could be, in Wittgenstein’s terms, ‘the
existence and non-existences of states of affairs’ (Wittgenstein 1961,
§4.1), but in our talk about ethics we refer to no possible states of affairs,
there is nothing that such utterances might picture in the way that prop-
ositions provide a (possible) picture of the world, a way in which the
world, as I just noted, could be. In other worlds, with respect to our eth-
ical utterances there is nothing in the world that they refer to, they are,
again in Wittgenstein’s terms, nonsense; they have no sense so are not
genuine propositions. As Wittgenstein says there are no ‘propositions of
ethics’ (Wittgenstein 1961, §6.42).
However, that is not an end to the matter. As Wittgenstein imme-
diately adds ‘propositions can express nothing that is higher’. Noting
that Wittgenstein’s remarks here at the end of the Tractatus concern-
ing ethics have often ‘been treated as an arcane idiosyncratic tailpiece’,4
Murdoch suggests they are in fact of crucial importance for Wittgenstein.
Here Murdoch refers to a letter from Wittgenstein to Ludwig Fricker
where he explains that he had wanted to add a sentence in the preface
to the Tractatus to the effect that the book’s point is an ethical one,
that there are two parts to the work, the one written and the other not,
where ‘this second part is the important one’ (qtd. in Waismann 1979,
 5 FACT AND VALUE (MGM CHAPTER 2) 69

68). That while what others have said about ethics is ‘just gassing’, he,
Wittgenstein, has ‘put everything in its place by being silent about it’
(cited MGM, 29). But isn’t that to admit that ethics, the whole realm
of value, really is nothing? Not quite, as Wittgenstein also says ‘There
are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They Make Themselves
Manifest. They are what is mystical’ (Wittgenstein 1961, §6.522). It
is only that value does not enter into the world so as to in any sense
change the facts. Value, as Murdoch puts it in this picture ‘resides rather
in an attitude or style in one’s acceptance of all the facts’ (MGM, 28). To
explain Wittgenstein’s point here I need first to turn to Kant.
Kant, too, wants to remove value from the world, or at least what
was for him the phenomenal world. However, he would have rejected
the moral stoicism, as Murdoch puts it, indicated above by Wittgenstein.
Crucial for Kant is the distinction between the noumenal and phenome-
nal worlds: the world as it is in itself, the real, and the world as it appears
to us, respectively. While value is for Kant no part of the phenomenal or
empirical world (that world is determined purely by cause and effect),
value, that which is higher, does enter that world, in Murdoch’s won-
derful image, as a ‘laser beam’ with practical reason, our sense of duty
and the moral law understood as a universal principle of practical rea-
son (Kant’s categorical imperative). Somehow our will as rational beings,
Kant’s ‘good will’, does bring about change in the world, though as
Murdoch notes how all this works is never made very clear by Kant.
The important point for us is just to notice that there has clearly been
some break between Kant and Wittgenstein—and for Murdoch it seems
we can attribute this to Schopenhauer and his influence on the young
Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.
Key here is the notion of the will, or the problem of the will.
Schopenhauer accepts Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and
noumenal worlds. But our wills are for Schopenhauer a manifestation of
what he calls the ‘Will to Live’, which is, as Murdoch puts it, ‘the funda-
mental reality and basis of our world as a ruthless powerful cosmic force’.
We experience the world ‘as objectivised ideas of the Will. The Will to
Live, to exist, takes care of the continuation of the species and general
ordering of entities’ (MGM, 32). The result is that our most basic motive
is that of egoism, so that each pursues his own interest heedless of others
to the mutual misery of all—or at least for the most part; Schopenhauer
does posit the further—rarer, weaker—motive of compassion ­according
to which ‘another’s weal and woe … become directly my motive’
70 C. TAYLOR

(Schopenhauer 1965, 146). But more generally, according to this rather

dismal picture, escape from suffering and evil depends, as Murdoch says,
on the ‘total denial of the Will’ (MGM, 32)—something Schopenhauer
was pessimistic about our achieving but that Wittgenstein can entertain,
as we have noted, as a stoical acceptance of the world. So the will, then,
for Wittgenstein, becomes just an attitude of acceptance of all the facts
which one cannot, by any act of will, change. What changes is just the
world as a whole; it, as Wittgenstein says, ‘waxes and wanes as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from the world of the
unhappy man’ (Wittgenstein 1961, §6.43).
Crucial for Murdoch in these remarks by Wittgenstein is his ‘image
of the limited whole’, and the importance of this imagery in ‘met-
aphysical and religious thinking’ (MGM, 37). By the idea of a limited
whole Wittgenstein suggests our contemplation of particular things,
for example Wittgenstein says a stove, ‘in such a way as they have the
whole world as a background’; not our contemplation of an object, as
one thing among other things, but rather ‘contemplating the stove [such
that] it was my world and everything else colourless by contrast with it’
(Wittgenstein 1979, 83e). For Wittgenstein a work of art or a good life
are limited wholes in this sense; there is a way recognising them as not
one thing within the world but a world unto themselves.
The image of a limited whole is, as Murdoch goes on to suggest,
deployed in the ‘quest for satisfying sovereign imagery which is to indi-
cate a very, or absolutely, important reality’. But, as she adds and as I
have observed before, ‘philosophers divide between those that do, and
those who do not, think morality is such a reality’ (MGM, 37). I started
by noting Murdoch’s suggestion that those who have thought hardest
about the distinction between fact and value have done so out of a sense
of the absolute importance of the reality of value and a corresponding
desire to keep value pure and untainted by empirical facts. However,
it does not follow that if a philosopher distinguishes between fact and
value he or she will necessarily think that morality is such an impor-
tant reality. Thus, as Murdoch notes, David Hume separates fact from
value, although he, unlike Kant or Wittgenstein, ‘portrays morality in a
way that is important, but not supremely so’ (MGM, 37).5 With Hume
Murdoch places A. J. Ayer. Ayer, according to Murdoch, misreads
Wittgenstein’s silence about value, taking this silence and the distinction
about fact and value it indicates so as to ‘remove value’ from the realm of
the real (MGM, 43).
 5 FACT AND VALUE (MGM CHAPTER 2) 71

Ayer’s mistake with respect to Wittgenstein is, in Murdoch’s view, of

a piece with that of many other thinkers with respect to Plato and his
explanatory myths. In being silent about value, by placing it somehow
outside the world, Wittgenstein is not saying that value is nothing. In a
similar manner, Plato’s myths and allegories are not just useful fictions;
yes, they are myths and allegories, but they indicate or point to some-
thing real. As Murdoch puts it, for Wittgenstein as with Plato, ‘the “pic-
turesque” structure indicates something beyond it; it is not to be taken
literally’ (MGM, 43). (Value, the Good, is not literally a myth, that is to
say, unreal.) As against someone like Ayer, the philosophers that most
occupy Murdoch in this chapter take seriously the problem that the
dichotomy between fact and value tends to undermine our sense of value
as something not only real but supremely important. Murdoch sees these
philosophers as aware of the way both the unreality and reality of value
are dependent on metaphysical pictures. Value needs to be in the picture
of the real from the start: it cannot be ‘put in’ later, for example as an
empirical discovery. As Murdoch says here, and this remark seems key
to understanding her account of fact and value, ‘That is in the nature
(or magic) of metaphysics’ (MGM, 43); it is the nature of metaphysics to
present pictures of what we take to be an important reality beyond the
empirical facts.
In different ways, however, Murdoch thinks all these pictures fail to
satisfy us, do not meet the deep human need, as she puts it, on account
of which we turn to them. Thus, against Wittgenstein for example, ‘we
want to be comforted by our thoughts [about morality] and are reluc-
tant to admit that we can say nothing about it’ (MGM, 44). Or as
Murdoch says against G. E. Moore, he was right to argue that we can-
not define good naturalistically in terms of empirical properties, but in
defining the good instead in terms of some simply non-natural property
‘he diminished his concept of good’ (MGM, 46).6 Or turning to the later
Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, where the ‘metaphysi-
cal, pictorial, method of the Tractatus’ has been abandoned, Murdoch
experiences a sense of loss with the way Wittgenstein there deals with
questions concerning ‘meaning and “mental contents”’, like sensations
(MGM, 49). Why for Murdoch this sense of loss? Concerning mental
contents like sensations Wittgenstein claims only to ‘reject the gram-
mar that tries to force itself on us here’ (Wittgenstein 1968, §304), such
that ‘if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the
model of “object and designation” the object [the sensation] drops out
72 C. TAYLOR

of consideration as irrelevant’ (Wittgenstein 1968, §293). But we still

lose, Murdoch suggests, ‘some sort of inner thing’ (MGM, 49). The
passages in the Investigations to which Murdoch is rather too obliquely
referring to here raise difficult philosophical problems and concerns that
I cannot clarify in this chapter.7 But what readers of Murdoch’s other
philosophical works, particularly The Sovereignty of Good, may recognise
here, once again, is her insistence that we are able to justify a sense of
an inner life—and change within that inner life and the (moral) vision
of the world that goes with it (think here of Murdoch’s famous example
of M and her daughter in law D [Murdoch 1985])—as something real
and distinct from outward action.
A related motive for the separation of fact and value that Murdoch
discusses and I have touched upon, but which deserves further elucida-
tion, is the desire, felt by the philosophers she has been most concerned
with, to liberate the will as ‘the carrier of value … from the ordinary
factual world’ (MGM, 52). Kant, as we have seen, achieves this by set-
ting the real, noumenal will free from the apparent, phenomenal, world
where our actions are causally determined. Wittgenstein, on the other
hand, and again as we have seen, removes will from the factual world
by counting it as an attitude to the whole world, ideally an attitude of
acceptance of all the facts. It is in terms of this attitude that we can rec-
ognise that the world changes as a whole; as Wittgenstein says, ‘The
world of the happy man is a different one to the unhappy man’. This
later view of the will has a certain attraction for Murdoch, which is evi-
dent in various of her philosophical writings, particularly where she dis-
cusses certain ideas of Simone Weil, notably Weil’s idea of ‘attention’
understood by Murdoch as ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon a par-
ticular reality’ (Murdoch 1985, 34). As Murdoch states in this chapter,

Weil says that will does not lead to moral improvement, but should be con-
nected only with strict obligations. Moral change comes from an attention to
the world whose natural result is a decrease in egoism through an increased
sense of the reality of … other people … but also things. (MGM, 52)

But as Murdoch goes on, while Weil connects the will with duty in this
way, for Wittgenstein and for Schopenhauer before him the will as far as
the individual agent is concerned may seem ‘a kind of fiction’ (MGM, 53).
Murdoch’s remarks are here again very compressed. Crucial is her ref-
erence to Schopenhauer’s explanation of compassion which I mentioned
 5 FACT AND VALUE (MGM CHAPTER 2) 73

earlier. Schopenhauer’s problem is to explain how ‘it is possible for

another’s weal and woe to move my will immediately, that is to say, in
exactly the same way in which it is usually moved only by my own weal
and woe?’ For this to be the case, Schopenhauer thinks, I must ‘feel his
woe just as I ordinarily feel my own’, which in turn ‘requires that I am
in some way identified with him … that this entire difference between
me and everyone else, which is the basis of my egoism, is eliminated,
to a certain extent at least’ (Schopenhauer 1965, 143–144). Duty as we
understand it with Kant—which appears as an element of our phenom-
enal, empirical lives—has no place then in Schopenhauer’s account of
morality; as he says, the ‘conception that underlies egoism [as the sole
source of human motivation] is empirically considered strictly justified’
(Schopenhauer 1965, 205). But this denial of the will cannot be right,
Murdoch contends, since it denies our everyday experience of morality;
as she says ‘a realistic view of morality cannot dispense with [duty]; duty
is for most people the most obvious form of moral experience’. Thus,
we approach another divide in morality such that ‘the good life becomes
increasingly selfless through increased awareness … of the world beyond
self. But meanwhile requirements and claims [duty] … demand to be
met’ (MGM, 53). As Murdoch adds, the concept of duty does not neces-
sarily require the will here—with many duties she notes Hume’s idea of
habit and custom are enough—nevertheless, with those duties that ‘are
abstract in relation to our nature’, so that ‘we do not identify with them
… there may be a place for the concept of the will as a name for the
strain which is then felt’ (MGM, 53).
Murdoch’s interest in the fact–value distinction in this chapter is
not, as I said, in the difficulty of defending the idea that there are any
moral facts as that is usually understood in contemporary analytic phi-
losophy. Rather, it has to do with defending morality as something deep,
fundamental to human nature, the most important thing’ (MGM, 54)
in a world where the realm of fact is increasingly given over to science.
Solutions to this problem, Murdoch suggests, involve the notion that
‘if we reflect about moral value, we cannot properly avoid certain pic-
tures of the world’ (MGM, 55). This indicates for Murdoch one aspect
of the turn of philosophers to metaphysics; the pictures she has in mind
here serve to meet our need that morality be provided with deep foun-
dations, foundations certainly deeper than the pronouncements of sci-
ence. Here again Kant is instructive. Kant said that Hume woke him
from his ‘dogmatic slumber’, as Murdoch goes on to suggest, really to
74 C. TAYLOR

defend science from the ‘vague (sloppy) psychological accounts’ of both

science and morality that Hume offered (MGM, 40). But, of course, in
placing science on the first side of the phenomena–noumena distinction
Kant provides the kind of system, the kind of foundation, in which eth-
ics (grounded in our noumenal selves, rational, free) is safe from science.
What Kant is really doing here is an example of what Murdoch means
when she says concerning such pictures, such foundations, that ‘it is
often felt, there is something essential; and this essential thing must be
built into the explanation from the start, or else it tends to fly away and
become problematic and remote and extremely difficult to integrate’
(MGM, 55).
But the problem then is, as she immediately adds, that ‘if it is built
in at the start, the thinker may be accused of an unwarrantable act of
faith or intuition’ (MGM, 55). So continuing with Kant, he ‘finds it per-
fectly clear and primary that we all recognise the absolute call of duty’
(MGM, 56), that according to him is our freedom. Yet what greater act
of faith could there be? In the end, Kant recognised this act of faith.
As Murdoch, like many others, have noted, when Kant attempts in his
Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals ‘to establish these ideas on a
more profound basis he admits the circularity of the argument’ (MGM,
56). So as Kant says in the Groundwork,

In this we must frankly admit there is shown a kind of circle, from which,
as it seems, there is no way of escape. In the order of efficient causes, we
take ourselves to be free so that we may conceive of ourselves to be under
moral laws in the order of ends; and we then proceed to think of ourselves
as subject to moral laws on the grounds that we have described the will as
free. (Kant 1964, 118)

In conclusion, for Murdoch the problems with, or tensions within, dif-

ferent versions of the fact–value dichotomy—understood in her terms
as attempts to present a convincing picture of the world in which
value is registered as something real and of fundamental importance—
corresponds to deep human need, one that is fundamental to our nature.
Noting how close here philosophy and theology can come to each other,
Murdoch sums up our problem with a final picture, which is also a reli-
gious one. I quote Murdoch at some length,
 5 FACT AND VALUE (MGM CHAPTER 2) 75

Heraclitus tells us that ‘The One who alone is wise does not want and does
want to be called by the name of Zeus.’ This is indeed the problem. We
yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and
pure, but picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we
then realise to be contingent particulars, just things among others here
below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and
pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable,
and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. (MGM, 56)

While Murdoch focuses in this chapter mostly on Kant and Wittgenstein,

hovering in the background is of course Plato. As I noted earlier, for
Murdoch ‘values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our
world’. And for Plato, to see the world as it really is just is to see it in the
light of the Good, as the allegory of the Cave indicates. Which will per-
haps seem to many again an extreme act of faith.
So, is that all one can say on the dichotomy between fact and
value? I think not, and at this point I want to return to Wittgenstein;
not the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, but of the Investigations. While
Wittgenstein did not himself write in a substantial and extended way
on morality or value more generally, the distinctly non-metaphysical
approach to philosophical questions and problems in the Investigations,
along with other of his later writings, has been applied very fruitfully to
morality by others.8 In particular some have seen in the Investigations,
in a distinctly non-metaphysical way, the articulation of a conception of
human life and of what it is to be human that is conditioned by a sense
of our participation in a shared form of life that is already partly consti-
tuted by moral ideas or concepts. It is perhaps in this way that value—as
Murdoch has argued from her early papers such as ‘Vision and choice
in morality’ (Murdoch 1956) all the way to MGM—pervades our under-
standing of the world.
One philosopher who has shone particular light on the above idea
is Cora Diamond. In discussing fact and value in relation to Murdoch,
Diamond explains what she takes to be Murdoch’s view here in terms of
a two-stage argument. Stage one is to note that ‘Value [for Murdoch] is
not the object of some branch of thought or discourse’. For any given
branch of thought—Diamond’s example is historical understanding—it
must be the case that ‘there … be some practice or practices of c­ oming
to understand facts belonging to the particular subject matter’. Value is,
76 C. TAYLOR

by contrast, ubiquitous: in so far as morality has no particular subject

matter in this sense ‘morals … are not facts’ (Diamond 1996, 106–107).
But this is not to concede that value is nothing, that it is unreal. In stage
two of the argument Diamond turns to the particular, moralised, form
of visual attention that Murdoch, as we have seen, takes from Weil. As
Diamond says,

if we consider the taking in of the visual world with a kind of wonder and
freshness of perception … which can simply marvel at a shade of blue or at
the twistedness of a tree trunk, which can take in the goodness and beauty
of the world, then we do indeed have a model of moral awareness of real-
ity. (Diamond 1996, 108)

Morality is ubiquitous in that with human experience of any situation

whatsoever it ‘can shape our vision of what the situation is’ (Diamond
1996, 108). Here is, in Diamond’s reading of Murdoch, a kind of dis-
tinction between fact and value, but one that does not foreclose our
experience of value as real. Though now one might ask: is this really so
far from the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, who could write, ‘The world
of the happy man is a different one from the world of the unhappy man’?
There is I suspect much more one could say, but only at much greater
length, on the influence of Wittgenstein in particular on Murdoch’s
thinking. As it is, Murdoch’s argument in ‘Fact and Value’ traverses both
a wide and difficult philosophical territory and I have only been able to
draw out, and hopefully illuminate, some of that territory in this chapter.

Notes
1. As an example of such debates see Hooker (1996).
2. By ‘colour’ here Murdoch does not mean to suggest, cf. David Hume, that
value is merely projected by us onto the world. I will return to this point at
the end.
3. At the same time though, some such philosophers might think there are
certain practical problems with eliminating morality, say, related to morali-
ty’s value in motivating cooperative behaviour. See for example Garner and
Joyce (2019).
4. Though not always. See here for example what have become known as
resolute (or therapeutic) readings of the Tractatus by among others Cora
Diamond and James Conant. For example, see Diamond’s ‘Throwing Away
the Ladder: How to Read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Diamond (1995).
 5 FACT AND VALUE (MGM CHAPTER 2) 77

5. Given my account of Murdoch here, it appears that she must have thought
that Hume did not in the end think very hard about this distinction.
6. What Murdoch is referring to here is Moore’s naturalistic fallacy. Moore
asks us to consider any simple analysable natural property that we might
wish to identify with ‘good’; take, he suggests, with utilitarianism in his
sights, ‘pleasurable’. Moore suggests that it is ‘an open question’ whether
anything that possess that property is good, from which he concludes that
the word ‘good’ cannot simply mean ‘pleasurable’, and Moore’s point is
then that this result holds for any simple natural property. Nevertheless,
as we understand the word ‘good’, this must, Moore thinks, refer to some
property, which he concludes must be a simple non-natural property which
we perceive through moral intuition, which is a mode of recognition apart
from empirical modes of perception.
7. I should add though that I am not sure Murdoch herself ever came to
terms with, or to a thorough understanding of, Wittgenstein’s treatment
of mental contents in those passages in the Investigations.
8. To give just a few recent examples: Diamond (1995), Gaita (2004), and
Crary (2007, 2016).

References
Crary, A. 2007. Beyond moral judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Crary, A. 2016. Inside ethics: On the demands of moral thought. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Diamond, C. 1995. The realistic spirit: Wittgenstein, philosophy and the mind.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Diamond, C. 1996. ‘We are perpetually moralists’: Iris Murdoch, fact, and value.
In Iris Murdoch and the search for human goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and
William Schweiker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gaita, R. 2004. Good and evil: An absolute conception, 2nd ed. London:
Routledge.
Garner, E., and R. Joyce, eds. 2019. The end of morality: Taking moral abolition-
ism seriously. London: Routledge.
Hooker, B. (ed.). 1996. Truth in ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kant, I. 1964. Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals, trans. H.J. Paton. New
York: Harper & Row.
Murdoch, I. 1956. Vision and choice in morality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, Supplementary 30: 32–58.
Murdoch, I. 1985. The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
78 C. TAYLOR

Schopenhauer, A. 1965. On the basis of morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne.

Indianapolis: Bobbs Merill.
Waismann, F. 1979. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. 1961. Tractatus logico-philosopicus. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, L. 1968. Philosophical investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. 1979. Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
and ed. G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
 CHAPTER 6

Schopenhauer and the Mystical Solution

of the Riddle (MGM Chapter 3)

Mariëtte Willemsen

Introduction
Arthur Schopenhauer is one of the philosophical heroes in Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM). It is especially in the third
chapter of the book that Murdoch converses with him, developing her
own stance in dialogue with this nineteenth-century German philoso-
pher whose main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, she read in
the 1909 translation from Haldane and Kemp, The World as Will and
Idea.1 While the third chapter includes the lengthiest reflection on
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, there are many other passages in which she
refers to him, often adding characterisations that reveal both her admira-
tion and her critique.
A first thing to note is that Murdoch distances herself from the tra-
dition that considers Schopenhauer an outright pessimistic thinker:
‘People call Schopenhauer pessimistic. Not at all. He is as cheerful as
Hume whom he admires and in some ways resembles’ (MGM, 123).
On the other hand, she acknowledges his grim side, thus nuancing the

M. Willemsen (*)
Amsterdam University College, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

© The Author(s) 2019 79

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_6
80 M. WILLEMSEN

‘not at all’, when she writes that his ‘empiricist gaiety is in tension with
his nihilistic hatred of the ordinary world’ (MGM, 70). In a different
context, she characterises him as ‘muddled and relaxed’. She calls him
a ‘great empiricist’ with an ‘omnivorous’ mind and an ‘eye for detail’
(MGM, 69, 73, 252, 255). Early in MGM she talks about the ‘outra-
geous simplicity’ of Schopenhauer’s picture of the world (MGM, 32).
Related to this, she agrees with Wittgenstein, though not wholeheart-
edly, that Schopenhauer lacks depth (MGM, 252, 255). She is amused
by Schopenhauer’s ‘awkward (valuable) frankness’, finds him some-
what blunt, and sees it as a merit ‘that he is prepared to exhibit his
puzzlement and to ramble’ (MGM, 250–251). The pithiest passage on
Schopenhauer, and one that could be read as a synthesis of all the previ-
ous characterisations is offered in the tenth chapter, ‘Notes on duty and
will’. Here she describes him ‘as an example of empiricist know-all, con-
fused metaphysician, and simple-hearted moralist’, and a couple of lines
later she completes this description by calling him a ‘cheerful pessimist’
(MGM, 297–298).
This blend of esteem and reservation is certainly helpful to introduce
Murdoch’s evaluation of Schopenhauer. However, to understand the
influence of the cheerful pessimist’s thought on Murdoch’s own philos-
ophy a careful analysis of the more substantial passages on Schopenhauer
is needed. They can be found in the second, third, eighth, and tenth
chapters of MGM, with the third chapter fully dedicated to his philos-
ophy. In this chapter, Murdoch offers a multi-faceted exploration of
Schopenhauer’s philosophical theory. She not only relates to both vol-
umes of The World as Will and Idea but also to the 1840 essay On the
Basis of Morality, manifesting a thorough knowledge of Schopenhauer’s
metaphysics, and more specifically of his ethical stance.
Murdoch’s treatise on Schopenhauer is complicated by her allusions
to many other philosophers who seem only loosely connected to the
overall discussion. It is understandable that Murdoch weaves in Plato
and Kant, since Schopenhauer himself is heavily influenced by these phi-
losophers. It is more difficult to comprehend the role of Wittgenstein
in the chapter, and even more so to grasp the references to Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Derrida.
One of the most interesting ideas in the chapter is that Murdoch con-
siders The World as Will and Idea a religious, mystical book. She explains
this in the second half of the Schopenhauer chapter, in which she men-
tions Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, Plato, Schopenhauer, and
 6 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE MYSTICAL SOLUTION … 81

Wittgenstein, and Julian of Norwich, and Eckhart in an attempt to clarify

the notion of the mystical. In my view, these episodes provide the key to
a deeper understanding of the chapter’s structure and content. Based on
a close reading of both these two passages and of ‘A note on the riddle’,
the short section that is appended to the Schopenhauer chapter, I will
argue that the concept of the mystical is central to Murdoch’s reading
of Schopenhauer and to her critical affinity with Schopenhauer’s notion
of compassion. Of course, an elucidation of the concept of the mystical
will be part of the investigation. It is my aim to show that examining
the concept of the mystical will not only help to understand connections
between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the early Wittgenstein, but will
also contribute to an insight into Murdoch’s own solution of the riddle
of the world.
I will start off with a summary of Murdoch’s introduction to
Schopenhauer in the second chapter of MGM. Next, I will outline the
first half of the third chapter, ‘Schopenhauer’, highlighting crucial par-
agraphs and sentences, and on occasion turning to Chapter 10, ‘Notes
on will and duty’, for more explanation. Then, in section “Mystic
Freedom”, I will focus on the mystical. For a deeper understanding of
the concept of the mystical references to Chapter 8, ‘Consciousness
and thought II’ will prove helpful. Also in section “Mystic Freedom”,
Murdoch’s note on Wittgenstein’s famous riddle will be related to
Schopenhauer’s mysticism. Finally, in the conclusion, I will return to
Murdoch’s portrayal of Schopenhauer as cheerful empiricist wiseacre,
wondering how, in light of Murdoch’s enquiry, his apparently shallow
empiricism can be attuned to his seemingly deep mysticism.

‘A Brief Account’
Murdoch introduces the philosophy of Schopenhauer in the chap-
ter on Fact and Value, in the context of an examination of (the early)
Wittgenstein. In this ‘brief account’ she sketches the distinction that per-
vades Schopenhauer’s philosophy: the cosmic Will versus the world as we
perceive it. She sketches how, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, ‘the horrors
of the human scene result from the selfish wills of individuals as mani-
festations of the Will to Live’. According to Schopenhauer, she explains,
the will rules the world, and human individual wills are ‘necessarily self-
ish’. There are, nevertheless, escape routes. We can overcome selfishness,
at least temporarily, via the contemplation of works of art, or through
82 M. WILLEMSEN

moments of compassion. A permanent liberation from pain and suffering

is reserved for ‘exceptional individuals’, who through ‘extreme ascetism’
may reach a denial of the will. In her description of this final, exceptional
stage, Murdoch brings in the concept of the mystical: ‘This “dying to the
world” is, according to Schopenhauer, a mystical spiritual condition which
cannot be described’ (MGM, 32–33, italics mine). Apparently Murdoch
is referring to §68 of the first volume of WWI, since it is here, near the
end of the fourth and final, ethical part of the book, that Schopenhauer
talks about the denial of the will and the ‘Christian Saints and Mystics’
(Schopenhauer 2011, 499), notably Meister Eckhart. The concept of
the mystical is almost absent from the first three books of WWI, in which
Schopenhauer, respectively, unfolds his epistemology, ontology and aes-
thetics.2 It is only after Schopenhauer’s explanation of the value and the
limits of compassion (in §67), in the fourth ethical part of WWI, that the
mystical can enter the scene as the final way to reach permanent libera-
tion. Although the concept is not explicitly addressed in the first three
books of WWI, it will be argued below, in section “Mystic Freedom”,
that one can recognise degrees of the mystic in Schopenhauer’s thought,
parallel to what Murdoch will call ‘a gradation of … awareness’ (MGM,
251); one can mount from a kind of intuitive perception, through con-
templation, and via compassion to mystical experience in the strict sense
of the word.
After her indeed brief account Murdoch explains how the early
Wittgenstein was influenced by Schopenhauer. In a very dense passage
she hints at what she sees as connections between the two thinkers: they
both have a concept of the mystical; they both reject Kant’s Categorical
Imperative and his concept of duty; they both postulate a world of facts;
they both embrace some sort of determinism. The passage leads to an
intriguing sentence, that can be seen as a helpful stepping stone to the
full chapter on Schopenhauer: ‘The segregation of the factual world
allows in both cases a stoical morality which verges towards mysticism’
(MGM, 33). This sentence triggers many questions. How separate are
Schopenhauer’s two worlds really? And is the distinction between Will
and Idea comparable to the one between value and fact, as Murdoch
seems to suggest? To what extent can Schopenhauer be seen as a stoical
thinker, given his critique of Stoicism especially in §16 of WWI, where
he accuses the Stoa of an über-rational type of ethics? And how does a
stoical attitude border a mystical approach?
 6 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE MYSTICAL SOLUTION … 83

Murdoch’s introduction of Schopenhauer, embedded and entan-

gled in a treatise on Wittgenstein and the distinction between fact
and value, paves the way for the full chapter on Schopenhauer. Here
she will return to the notions addressed in her brief account, espe-
cially contemplation, compassion, duty, stoicism and mysticism. And
again (the early) Wittgenstein will play a major role in Murdoch’s
investigation.

Nasty Determinism
In the first paragraph of the chapter on Schopenhauer Murdoch lists the
three central notions of WWI: ‘Will’, ‘Idea’ (translation Haldane and
Kemp) or ‘(Re)presentation’ (newer translations), and ‘Platonic Idea’
(Haldane and Kemp), or ‘Idea’ (newer translations).3 Murdoch uses the
Haldane and Kemp translation, although she is aware of the fact that
their translation of two of the three keywords is confusing. However,
I will use the term ‘Representation’ for the German ‘Vorstellung’ and
‘Idea’ for ‘Idee’, because Schopenhauer’s ‘Idee’, though borrowed from
Plato, is not a Platonic Idea, since it is not a transcendent Form but a
kind of glue between Will and Representation. Murdoch explains how
in Schopenhauer’s system the undivided, cosmic Will to live objecti-
fies itself in the world of Representations, the world as we perceive it,
with the Ideas as an intermediate stage. These ideas are ‘universal con-
cepts or models of which particular [representations] are instantiations’
(MGM, 58). The status of Schopenhauer’s ideas is a topic of heated
debate in Schopenhauer studies.4 Murdoch too questions the position of
ideas in Schopenhauer’s system, asking how they relate to the particu-
lar representations. And more in general she is critical of Schopenhauer,
already this early in the chapter, because she finds the metaphysical
structure he offers incoherent (MGM, 58). Still, there are many things
in Schopenhauer’s system that Murdoch finds attractive, as can be read
from the paragraphs that follow.
The chapter on Schopenhauer is dense in content, and freely, associa-
tively structured. Before focusing on the pivotal passage on the mystical
let’s see if we can get a sense of the structure of the chapter. What are the
main ideas Murdoch presents in conversation with Schopenhauer? And
how does she develop her argument? Are there specific claims and, if so,
how does she support them?
84 M. WILLEMSEN

If I am counting correctly, the twenty pages of this chapter include

sixteen longish paragraphs before the two-page note on the riddle.5 In
this section, the first nine paragraphs will be summarised and discussed.
This synopsis will lead up to an analysis of the mystical, related to the
second half of the chapter on Schopenhauer.
After the opening paragraph, discussed above, Murdoch first pays
attention to Schopenhauer’s theory of art, as one of the routes to escape
from the nasty will with its ‘perpetual struggle’. She explains how,
according to Schopenhauer, through contemplation of art ‘the walls of
the ego fall’. Artists see beyond the particular and go beyond their self-
ishness: they have access to ideas, to what is universal. Murdoch com-
ments that this contemplative theory of art may give insight into certain
forms of visual art, but that quite often art is engaged in ‘the busy
contingent rather than the still icon’. She furthermore explains that in
Schopenhauer’s aesthetics music has a special status, because it doesn’t
relate to ideas but immediately to the will and its emotions, with the
melody finding satisfaction in its return to the keynote. And also here she
adds that this theory doesn’t apply to all kinds of music, especially not to
modern music (MGM, 59–60).
Then follows a paragraph in which she starts to offer more fundamen-
tal critique. A first point of critique is that Schopenhauer doesn’t seem
to allow moral progress. We find some temporary relief through art,
but this doesn’t help us to reach a higher stage. A second point of cri-
tique is that one could wonder why we would need art at all to move
away from the ego. As to these points of critique Murdoch sides with
Plato, who is, according to Murdoch, a believer in (moral) progress
and who is critical about the role of aesthetics. Furthermore, it seems
that in Schopenhauer’s system, unlike Kant’s philosophy, freedom is not
available. The determinism of the will is pervasive, whereas in Kant’s
philosophy there is a realm of freedom co-existent with a realm of neces-
sity: ‘Schopenhauer’s Will is, with Nietzsche’s, and that of the later
Heidegger, one of the nastiest’ (MGM, 60–61).6 These critical notes
imply that Murdoch is even more of a disciple of Plato and Kant than
Schopenhauer himself.
In the fourth paragraph of the chapter, Murdoch moves from a dis-
cussion of Schopenhauer’s view on temporary liberation to that on a
complete escape from selfishness. She describes how Schopenhauer
proposes radical asceticism: ‘a salvation by dying to the world’. This is
a stage beyond virtue, and thus beyond morality—and again Murdoch
 6 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE MYSTICAL SOLUTION … 85

prefers Plato, since Plato suggests a return to the world of the cave and
the appearances, whereas the ‘extreme ascetic’ gives up his existence,
for (literally) nothing. Although Murdoch seems to be intrigued by the
ascetic ‘completely selfless person’, she asks herself ‘must we live with
so austere a picture, as if we are to be utterly damned or utterly saved?’
(MGM, 61–62).
One might think that Schopenhauer’s dualism of Will and
Representation is similar to Plato’s distinction between reality and
appearance. Murdoch challenges this similarity in the fifth paragraph of
the chapter. In Plato we do not find a ‘blind, merciless Will’. Instead we
find the form of the Good, ‘whose magnetic influence’, says Murdoch,
‘reaches to all’ (MGM, 63). This is an important point for Murdoch.
Unlike Plato, and also unlike Kant, says Murdoch, Schopenhauer doesn’t
describe morality as something that is central in human life. This should
be understood in the following way. ‘Dying to the world’ is an act via
which the ascetic withdraws from life. Thus the ascetic can and will no
longer play any moral role in existence. If asceticism is, as it seems, the
highest possible thing or no-thing to do, then the role of morality is of
subordinate importance.
It seems that Schopenhauer himself is aware of the disputable place
of morality in the system he unfolds in WWI. In a later essay, The Basis
of Morality, to which Murdoch turns in the second half of the fifth par-
agraph, he offers a moral theory more to her liking, based on a simple
slogan: ‘Hurt no one, rather help everyone as much as you can’. Here,
says Murdoch, we recognise the two cardinal virtues of justice and com-
passion, of which the latter is the more fundamental one.7 According to
Schopenhauer compassion is grounded in nature: we tend to sympathise
with other beings, and to participate in their suffering. This is a phenom-
enon that cannot be explained any further, it is a metaphysical given, and
thus not in itself a problem of ethics. Schopenhauer contrasts his notion
of compassion with the Kantian concepts of duty and conscience, which
he rejects because they are dogmatic and dependent on religious com-
mandments (MGM, 63–64).
Schopenhauer’s endorsement of compassion goes hand in hand with
a rejection of duty. Although Murdoch finds Schopenhauer’s notion of
compassion attractive, she does not agree with his accompanying dislike
of Kant’s ethics. In a strong passage in Chapter 10 of MGM she explains
why we cannot dispense of duty. She explains that we need certain rules,
supported by explanations, especially early in our lives: ‘Do not lie, do no
86 M. WILLEMSEN

steal, be helpful, be kind’. But also later on, she continues, we sometimes
find ourselves in situations where we hear a voice saying ‘Don’t do it’,
comparable to Socrates’ daemon, who told him what not to do. Murdoch
beautifully talks about the ‘quiet pressure of duty’ and concludes that
this concept ‘is indispensable, though it cannot stand alone’ (MGM,
302–303). In terms of ethical normative theories, it could be argued
that Murdoch defends a combination of virtue-ethics (compassion) and
Kantian deontology (duty).
In the sixth, seventh, and eighth paragraphs Murdoch continues com-
paring Schopenhauer to Plato and Kant, and repeats many of the things
said earlier. It is especially Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will and its
determinism that is attacked. Murdoch finds Schopenhauer’s resulting
view that ‘guilt and merit lie in what we are, not in what we do’ con-
fused, and his idea that ‘freedom is simply the recognition of necessity’
not persuasive. Again, she prefers the Kantian approach, in which there
is the possibility of rising above determinism, over this amor fati, stoical
type of attitude. Nevertheless, it seems that even in Schopenhauer’s phi-
losophy we can sometimes ‘move a little against the Will’, through acts
of compassion, including kind acts towards animals (MGM, 65–67).
Finally, before transitioning to the concept of the mystical, Murdoch
describes the role of sexual love in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. She
explains how, according to Schopenhauer, both non-human and human
animals are driven by the egoistic Will, for the benefit of the species.
To recapitulate, Murdoch makes several related claims in her discus-
sion of Schopenhauer. Firstly, ethics needs to make room for moral pro-
gress. Secondly, an ascetic withdrawal from the world, different from
returning to the cave, puts an end to morality. Thirdly, not all the moral
work can be done by compassion; the concept of duty is indispensable.
We will now have to see if and how these three claims are connected to
the concept of the mystical.

Mystic Freedom
In the second half of the chapter on Schopenhauer, Murdoch revis-
its the last sections of WWI, already discussed earlier. How should we
understand the final stage of nothingness, the ‘dying to the world’? It
seems that we ‘lack concepts with which to express or describe this state’,
although we do know that we are nearing liberation: ‘Any “release” must
be thought of in terms of mysticism’ (MGM, 68–69). The question is,
 6 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE MYSTICAL SOLUTION … 87

of course, what mysticism is. Murdoch herself gives a definition: ‘a mys-

tic is a good person whose knowledge of the divine and practice of the
selfless life has transcended the level of idols and images’ (MGM, 73).
She arrives at this definition after an intense and sometimes difficult to
follow, almost stammering exploration of religious and mystical ideas. As
a starting point, she refers to what Buddha said to his disciples: ‘throw
everything away and become beggars’.8 It is here that she adds that
Wittgenstein actually obeyed this imperative, whereas Schopenhauer
could not live up to these ascetic standards. She also quotes how
Schopenhauer refers to Meister Eckhart’s mysticism and his appeal to
‘seek not God outside himself’.9 This appeal, says Murdoch, is on the
one hand a warning ‘against idolatry’. On the other hand, if we withdraw
into the self, we run the risk of reinforcing our egoism (MGM, 69–70).
The latter remark can be read as a restatement of Murdoch’s problems
with a ‘dying to the world’ that does not go hand in hand with moral
responsibility towards the world, or, with the platonic imagery so often
used by Murdoch, with a return to the cave.
Now, how are we supposed to understand Schopenhauer’s mysti-
cism? And to what extent does Murdoch embrace this? It seems there is
a certain sympathy from Murdoch, when she talks about Schopenhauer’s
‘on-the-way-mysticism’, praising his tenderness for animals and love of
nature (MGM, 70). This ‘on-the-way-mysticism’, I would say, is in fact
the same as compassion. In On the Basis of Morality we can read that
Schopenhauer sees compassion as ‘a piece of mysticism put into prac-
tice’ (MGM, 278).10 We could even go one step further in this direction,
moving back from absolute mysticism, via practical compassion, through
contemplation to perception. There is a wonderful section near the end
of the first, epistemological book of WWI I in which Schopenhauer
explains, via a visual ‘proof’ of the proposition of Pythagoras, that per-
ception is ‘the primary source of all evidence’ (Schopenhauer 2011,
§15). A long, logical Euclidean proof may be possible, but without
visual, direct insight, Schopenhauer claims, there is no real understand-
ing of the theorem. Like the mystic and like the artist or the compassion-
ate person, a perceiving being has immediate awareness of the object of
his attention, without the intervention of concepts.
To my knowledge Murdoch does not refer to §15 of The World as
Will and Idea. In Chapter 8 of MGM, ‘Consciousness and Thought II’,
she does, however, quote a long passage from WWI I §9, a related sec-
tion, in which Schopenhauer explains how, in language, we depend on
88 M. WILLEMSEN

concepts: ‘It is reason which speaks to reason, keeping within its own
province’ (MGM, 252). Although Schopenhauer himself, and any author
for that matter, depends on language and on concepts, one of the main
aims of his philosophical project is to explain, be it in concepts, the
importance of perception, of direct awareness. In this sense he is, indeed,
a ‘great empiricist’ (MGM, 252). His ‘eye for detail’ is consistent with his
hunger to be in immediate perceptual touch with the world (MGM, 69).
It is a small step from this type of mystical empiricism to
Wittgenstein’s famous riddle, mentioned near the end of the Tractatus
(Wittgenstein 1961, 6.4312; 6.5). Murdoch cleverly connects
Wittgenstein to Schopenhauer, referring to a passage in the appendix
to Volume 1 of WWI, where Schopenhauer writes: ‘The world and our
existence presents itself necessarily as a riddle’ (qtd. in MGM, 78), and
of course thinking of Wittgenstein’s notes on the mystical and the inef-
fable (Tractatus 6.44; 7). Murdoch’s point here is, that Schopenhauer
and Wittgenstein are talking about the same riddle. According to
Schopenhauer, this riddle—the meaning of our existence, the meta-
physical truth—can only be solved ‘through the proper connection of
outer with inner experience’ (MGM, 79). This unification is a mystical
solution, comparable to the silence of Wittgenstein’s last words in the
Tractatus.11

Conclusion
At the end of her chapter on Schopenhauer Murdoch writes: ‘In spite of
his metaphysics and his mysticism, Schopenhauer may in general appear
as a genial empiricist’ (MGM, 77). There are good reasons to replace the
‘in spite of’ by ‘in line with’, since it can be argued that Schopenhauer’s
mysticism is grounded in his empiricism. In this sense, Schopenhauer’s
solution to the riddle of the world is down to earth, or indeed ‘cheerful’
and ‘simple’, in the way some mystical thinkers were joyful and unpre-
tentious. One could think of Julian of Norwich, mentioned by Murdoch,
and her simple Christian dictum ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well’.12
If we think back to Murdoch’s three claims, summarised at the end
of the third section of this essay, we can conclude that Murdoch is closer
to Schopenhauer than one might think at first sight. Indeed, as already
quoted, Schopenhauer ‘moves a little against the Will’ (MGM, 65), or
even more than a little, by means of his practical mysticism, such as his
 6 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE MYSTICAL SOLUTION … 89

kindness to animals and his embracing of compassion. There is thus

room for moral progress after all, and in this sense Schopenhauer’s deter-
minism is de-nastified. Furthermore, although WWI ends in Nirvana,
the general message of the book seems to be in tune with an attitude of
empiricist openness to the world. However, in Murdoch’s moral philos-
ophy the concept of duty, at least as an educational tool or as a Socratic
daemon, should be part of the picture, whereas Schopenhauer’s philoso-
phy rigidly rejects any commandments.

Notes
1. To avoid confusion, I will be using the same translation as Murdoch.
I will refer to the two volumes of The World as Will and Idea as WWI
I and WWI II. The first volume was originally published in 1818.
Schopenhauer added a second volume, with supplements to the first vol-
ume, in 1844.
2. There is a reference to the ‘great Mystic Angelus Silesius’ in §25, the sec-
ond book of WWI I, the section in which Schopenhauer introduces the
Platonic Idea, preparing his aesthetic theory, and to Anacreon and, again,
to Silesius in §51, near the end of the third book of WWI I, in relation
to poetry. The other eight uses of ‘mystic’ and ‘mystics’ can be found in
book 4 of WWI I, all but one in §68.
3. Both the 1957 (Dover) translation by Payne and the 2010 (Cambridge)
translation by Norman and Welchman opt for The World as Will and
Representation, whereas Carus and Aquila (Longman, 2011) go for The
World as Will and Presentation.
4. See White (2016) for an explanation and critique of Schopenhauer’s con-
cept of ideas, including a list of sources that express ‘surprise or puzzle-
ment’ in regard to ideas (145).
5. Each new paragraph is indented, even after a quote, arguably with the
exception of the paragraph beginning with ‘So, is it all a game and a jest?’
on p. 71, and the one beginning with ‘Elsewhere … Heidegger connects
…’ on p. 73.
6. It goes beyond the scope of this article to analyse the paragraphs on
Nietzsche and Heidegger near the end of the chapter on Schopenhauer
(Murdoch 1993, 74–77). Suffice it to say that Murdoch explains the nas-
tiness of the will in their respective philosophies.
7. The German original is ‘Mitleid’. This term could be translated with
‘pity’. However, there are good reasons to opt for ‘compassion’, to avoid
the negative connotations of pity. See Cartwright (2016, 257).
90 M. WILLEMSEN

8. Murdoch does not always clearly refer to her sources. The passage on
Buddha can be found in WWI II, section 48 (Schopenhauer 2012, 447).
This chapter correlates to §68 of WWI I.
9. Schopenhauer (2012, section 48, 421).
10. See Steven Neely (2016, 112–116) for an insightful exploration of
Schopenhauer’s mysticism. Neely underlines the importance of intuitive
perception in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and mentions his ‘practical
mysticism’ (115).
11. Schroeder (2016), in his article on Schopenhauer’s influence on
Wittgenstein, argues that Wittgenstein’s notes on the riddle and the mys-
tical are ‘of little philosophical value’. He points, however, to interesting
connections between the two thinkers, especially concerning idealism and
solipsism. There is, as can be seen from Schroeder’s article, discussion
about the exact influence of Schopenhauer on Wittgenstein. However, for
the current article it suffices to say that Murdoch sees clear connections
between the two thinkers, especially concerning the ‘riddle’.
12. Murdoch refers to this fourteenth-century English mystical thinker sev-
eral times in MGM, and more extensively and approvingly on pp. 463
and 486.

References
Cartwright, D.E. 2016. Schopenhauer on the value of compassion. In A com-
panion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 249–265. Maldon, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Murdoch, I. 1993. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Neely, S.G. 2016. The consistency of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. In A com-
panion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 105–119. Maldon, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Schopenhauer, A. 2011. The world as will and idea (Volume 1 of 3), trans.,
Haldane and Kemp, 1909. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. https://www.
gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-pdf.pdf. Accessed December 31, 2018.
Schopenhauer, A. 2012. The world as will and idea (Volume 3 of 3), trans.,
Haldane and Kemp, 1909. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/40868/40868-pdf.pdf. Accessed December 31, 2018.
Schopenhauer, A. 2014. The basis of morality, trans., Arthur Brodrick Bullock,
1903. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/
44929/44929-h/44929-h.htm. Accessed December 31, 2018.
 6 SCHOPENHAUER AND THE MYSTICAL SOLUTION … 91

Schroeder, S. 2016. Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein. In A com-

panion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 367–384. Maldon, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
White, Frank C. 2016. Schopenhauer and Platonic ideas. In A compan-
ion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele, 133–146. Maldon, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. 1961. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F.
McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
 CHAPTER 7

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: The

Debate Between Literature and Philosophy

Gillian Dooley

Iris Murdoch, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM),

writes about art, and specifically literature, as a consumer or reader,
rather than a novelist. Apart from one passing reference to ‘my first
novel, Under the Net’ (MGM, 187), a reader who (improbably) knows
nothing about her career as a novelist would be none the wiser from
reading this book. She talks in the third person plural about ‘fiction writ-
ers’ wrestling with the difficulties of representation, while ‘we the read-
ers appreciate and judge their solution’ (MGM, 146); and invites us ‘to
look at what novelists do … They have constantly to invent methods of
conveying states of mind … Artists are famous for not knowing how it is
done, or for perhaps rightly feeling that at their best they do not know
what they are up to’ (MGM, 169). She speaks as an informed reader, one
who has thought seriously, and probably read, about the creation of fic-
tion, but except on that one occasion she never speaks as a novelist in her
own right.
The reason she gives for pausing at this point in her philosophical
argument to contemplate the process of writing fiction is the possibility

G. Dooley (*)
Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 93

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_7
94 G. DOOLEY

that ‘the best model for all thought is the creative imagination’ (MGM,
169). If this were true, would this place the creation of works of philoso-
phy, such as MGM, on a lower plane than the great novels? Where would
that leave the reader of MGM? Is it an invitation to abandon this book,
leaving the subsequent 340 pages unread, because one’s time would be
better spent reading Tolstoy and Austen or even Murdoch’s own novels?
Or could one profit by directing a novel-reader’s appreciation and judge-
ment towards the creative imagination on display in works of philosophy
like this and assessing their success at exhibiting ‘personal morality in a
non-abstract manner as the stuff of consciousness’ (MGM, 169)?
To try and understand the attitude Murdoch herself would have to
such an enterprise, I look to Murdoch’s (1977) discussion of literature
and philosophy with Bryan Magee. In this interview, he challenges her
to explain, as a practitioner of both types of writing, exactly where the
differences (and similarities) lie. She draws a clear distinction between
them, seeing them as different on a very basic level: ‘Literature is
(mostly) “works of art”. Works of philosophy are quite different things.
Very occasionally a work of philosophy may also be a work of art, such
as the Symposium, but these are exceptional cases’ (Murdoch 1997, 5).
Furthermore, while

philosophers often construct huge schemes involving a lot of com-

plicated imagery, [a] philosopher is likely to be suspicious of aesthetic
motives in himself and critical of the instinctive side of his imagination.
Whereas any artist must be at least half in love with his unconscious
mind, which after all provides his motive force and does a great deal of
his work. (Murdoch 1997, 7)

The ambiguity and playfulness inherent in a work of art must be sup-

pressed in philosophical writing, she says: unlike the novelist or poet,
the philosopher must leave no ‘space for his reader to play in’ (Murdoch
1997, 5). Her austere description of a philosopher’s craft—or perhaps
it is an injunction to philosophers to ‘avoid rhetoric and idle decora-
tion’ (Murdoch 1997, 4)—is a severe challenge to a literary critic, who
is trained to read with an appreciation of decoration, even sometimes
‘idle’ decoration, and certainly with an ear for rhetoric. For such readers,
rhetoric has no negative connotations: brought up on Wayne Booth’s
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), we find it difficult to accept that any
 7 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS … 95

writing consisting of more than the baldest labelling can avoid rhetoric.
Niklas Forsberg writes,

The philosophical significance of literature is certainly not its capacity to

illustrate or exemplify philosophy; its strength is that it is the other of phi-
losophy: a contrast fluid. Of course, there is philosophy ‘in’ it, in all litera-
ture. But then again, philosophy is everywhere. (Forsberg 2013, 12)

I agree, but I would add that literature, and its companion vehicle,
rhetoric, is also everywhere. As Forsberg says, ‘literature and (good)
philosophy both speak the same language: ours’ (Forsberg 2013, 13).
Anthony J. Cascardi, further, writes that ‘the issues of greatest concern
in the sometimes vexed relations between literature and philosophy are
rarely ones that can be settled by defining them as wholly different kinds
of writing’ (Cascardi 2014, 2). Murdoch herself had conceded, in The
Fire and the Sun, that ‘although aesthetic form has essential elements of
trickery and magic, yet form in art, as form in philosophy, is designed to
communicate and reveal’ (Murdoch 1977, 78).
Is it possible that my difficulty is merely with Murdoch’s use of the
term? Chris Baldick, in his 1990 dictionary of literary terms, defines
rhetoric as ‘the deliberate exploitation of eloquence for the most persua-
sive effect in public speaking or in writing’. He goes on to say that ‘the
usual modern sense of the term implies empty and ineffectual grandness
in public speech’, while ‘modern critics sometimes refer to the rhetorical
dimensions of a literary work, meaning those aspects of the work that
persuade or otherwise guide the responses of readers’ (Baldick 1990,
189). No doubt her objection to rhetoric in philosophy would be to the
use of deliberate persuasiveness. However, she certainly uses rhetoric in
Baldick’s first sense in her philosophical writing. I open MGM at ran-
dom and find her ‘shadowy sketch’ of the ‘structuralist Utopia’, in which
she talks about ‘an old tired tradition, heavy with unavailing thoughts
… an exasperated weariness with the old metaphysical world … and its
grand self-conscious conceited art’ (MGM, 214). And so it proceeds,
a lively, one might almost say playful, caricature of a movement with
which Murdoch clearly has little sympathy, freely using all the rhetorical
means at her disposal to ‘guide the responses of readers’. Does this make
MGM, or this passage and others like it, bad philosophy?1 Is it an allow-
able exception to the ‘certain cold clear recognisable voice’ in which a
96 G. DOOLEY

philosopher should usually speak? (Murdoch 1997, 5). Or is it ­inherent

in the nature even of philosophical writing that what is consciously sup-
pressed should sometimes escape and show itself? Murdoch herself
writes, ‘a metaphysic or Weltanschauung may be felt to omit something
which then peripherally and disturbingly haunts it, or else disappears to
be rediscovered later’ (MGM, 84). Could this be true not only of the
kind of concepts with which she is concerned here, such as ‘a detailed
picture of virtue’ or ‘a view of “consciousness” and “the self”’ (MGM,
84), but also of rhetorical features? Indeed, she admits that ‘the element
of metaphor is unavoidable in philosophy, especially in moral philosophy;
it is simply more or less evident’ (MGM, 177)—in the same way as in the
Magee interview she had discussed ‘huge schemes’ constructed by phi-
losophers ‘involving a lot of complicated imagery’ (Murdoch 1997, 7).
How is it possible to ‘avoid rhetoric’ in a discourse in which ‘metaphor is
unavoidable’? Can there be a metaphor without rhetoric? Peter Conradi,
ever alert to nuance, points out that the voice in MGM is interesting in
itself; and that:

it often feels like someone talking to us, even thinking out loud. Like her
admired Schopenhauer, Murdoch exhibits puzzlement and has the courage
to embark on excursions and diversions, to repeat, to stray, to make odd
connexions. (Conradi 2001, 356)

Murdoch was clearly trying to sort these problems out herself in her
discussion of Wittgenstein and his vexed relations with language. She
writes, ‘language is full of art forms, full of values … It may be said
that if one lets everything in it isn’t philosophy. Surely one must have
a “system”?’ (MGM, 281–282). In this same passage, she writes how
‘with a free and apt use of metaphor, with swift intuitive i­magination,
Wittgenstein describes the experience of thinking’ (MGM, 283).
Although she stays with the ‘old quarrel’ and insists that ‘philosophy is
definitely not poetry’, she ends this section with the assertion, or con-
cession, that ‘even in philosophy, language is not a cage’ (MGM, 283).
She cannot accept what she sees as Wittgenstein’s attempt to set up a
system which ‘pointedly excludes the individual peculiarity of speaking
humans’, and she shows how Wittgenstein’s own use of language under-
mines his ‘frozen logical example’ (MGM, 281) by its own individuality
and particularity. Stephen Mulhall writes that
 7 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS … 97

part of attending to the particularity of individual metaphysicians is attend-

ing to their individuality – which means acknowledging what distinguishes
them from other metaphysicians as well as acknowledging what connects
them with those engaged in the same activity. (Mulhall 1997, 236)

The voice of a philosopher cannot be discounted any more than the

voice of a literary writer: any attempt to ignore voice, context, point of
view, and other literary qualities of a philosophical text will result in an
impoverished and limited reading. The same is, of course, true of literary
critics like myself, and I freely admit to deploying rhetorical devices in
my own writing.
In a discussion of Plato’s Republic, Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm
­discuss the terms of the ‘ancient quarrel’ that Murdoch refers to above,
that between literature and philosophy. They claim that ‘every reader of
The Republic knows, [that] Socrates’ claims are … ironically undercut by
Plato’. They go on to say,

It quickly becomes apparent that even in The Republic, Socrates cannot in

fact do away with the form of discourse that has been marked out as ‘liter-
ature’. While his Philosopher Kings must ascend from the cave, to which
mere mortals are condemned, to witness the light of truth, they must then
descend back from the light into the cave, and communicate the truth
through representation. Philosophers, it would appear, are thus always
already in some sense poets: they must create the myths and metaphors
through which the good and the true can be narrated and understood.
Socrates, it turns out, does not therefore reject literature: he merely wishes
to domesticate it. (Hayes and Wilm 2017, 9–10)

It is notable that in this passage these authors attribute the myth of the
cave to Socrates—a character in Plato’s Republic—rather than Plato him-
self. I am not convinced that ‘every reader of The Republic’ is aware that
Socrates is not merely a mouthpiece for Plato’s views. This quotation
comes from an introduction to a book on the philosophical tendencies
in the novelist J. M. Coetzee’s literary works, and the authors, Hayes
and Wilm, are both literary scholars. They are therefore perhaps more
attuned than some to the literary features of works of philosophy, and
the inevitability of rhetorical devices and figures of speech in discur-
sive prose as well as in narrative. Although there is lively critical debate
about the rhetorical status of The Republic, there are surely still many
98 G. DOOLEY

who read it as a work transparently expounding the views of Plato, using

Socrates as his mouthpiece. This is perhaps confirmed by the warning,
in the chapter on the ancient quarrel in the Cambridge Introduction to
Literature and Philosophy, that:

one must be alert to inconsistences among the voices, take care not to
assume that Socrates is always a reliable spokesperson, and understand that
not all the views attributed to him are necessarily those of Plato. There
are times when it may be necessary to take what Socrates says ironically.
(Cascardi 2014, 26)

Far from ‘every reader of the Republic’ knowing that Socrates’s views
are ironically undercut, it is assumed that the readers of the Cambridge
Introduction need to be warned and instructed how to—or how not to—
read the Republic and Plato‘s other dialogues. In fact, David Robjant
warns that ‘it is not obvious that treating Socrates as Plato’s satirical
voice is any nearer to getting at authorial intention “in the story” than is
treating Socrates as Plato’s utopian voice’ (Robjant 2015, 1).
So although in the 1977 discussion with Magee, Murdoch allows that
the Symposium is both a work of philosophy and ‘work of art’, she claims
that it is highly unusual in being both, and that philosophy should be cool
and rational and unsullied by rhetoric, despite often being reliant on
imagery. In MGM, published 15 years later, she writes that ‘metaphor is
unavoidable’ and that ‘language is not a cage’. Further, she proposes that
‘the best model for all thought is the creative imagination’ (MGM, 169).
And in her own work of philosophy (MGM), as we have seen, she uses
metaphors and rhetorical devices, and discusses their use by other phi-
losophers. She told Simon Price in 1984 that she was ‘trying to write
a book based on [the Gifford Lectures] which will be a very Platonist
book’—and criticised those who dismiss Plato’s work because it is ‘all so
poetic that it can’t really be saying anything serious’ (Price 2003, 152).
Her correspondence with Australian philosopher Brian Medlin shows
that the ‘old quarrel’ was a constant preoccupation: in an undated letter
early in the 1990s she wrote, ‘That you are a poet emerges from your
writing. (And it is certainly philosophy.)’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 82);
and then, in May 1991, she expressed the wish that ‘philosophy and
poetry (Plato said there was an old feud between them) [may] c­ o-exist
peacefully & creatively’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 103). As George
Steiner writes,
 7 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS … 99

The Platonic challenge will justly confront the creative imagination so long
as philosophy and literature co-exist. That co-existence remains charged
with the informing tension of the unfinished. Nowhere more so than in
the achievement of Iris Murdoch. (Murdoch 1997, xviii)

Miles Leeson sees it as a major challenge in Murdoch’s oeuvre ‘to make

the distinction between two different forms of writing and allow them
to enhance each other, or rule out any such influence’ (Leeson 2010,
9). I would not wish to deny the distinction, and would certainly never
rule out their influence on each other. Steiner’s notion of the ‘informing
tension’ is an important insight. In Forsberg’s compelling analysis of The
Black Prince, he asks whether,

perhaps the resonating indecision [is] precisely what we should pay atten-
tion to. After all, texts that lack conclusions often do so for a reason. They
leave something for the reader to do, and they mean to leave something
for the reader to do. (Forsberg 2013, 182)

Similarly, I am not sure that Murdoch ever made up her mind one way
or another about philosophy and literature, and that this inability, or
unwillingness, to decide who to side with in the ‘old quarrel’ remained
a source of creative friction. Maria Antonaccio writes that ‘movement
between metaphysics and empiricism … structures MGM’ and that
there is ‘a parallel tension in Murdoch’s theory of the novel, the ten-
sion between form and contingency’ (Antonaccio 1996, 112–113).
Many other writers have commented on the tensions—usually seen as
creative—between form and content, between philosophy and literature,
in MGM and in Murdoch’s work more broadly.2 It seems likely that her
insistence on the clear distinction between literature and philosophy was
at least in part a protective strategy to discourage the reading of her nov-
els in a philosophical light, because she preferred not to be thought of as
a philosophical novelist. As Bran Nicol writes,

Time and again in interviews she patiently maintained that while her novels
did contain philosophical discussions they were certainly not ‘philosophical
novels’, nor did she set out deliberately to dramatize in fiction the philo-
sophical questions that interested her. (Nicol 2001, 580)
100 G. DOOLEY

This strategy has never been entirely effective and such readings of her
novels abound: hardly surprising when she continually introduced phil-
osophical dilemmas and philosophically inclined characters in her fiction.
One might argue that whether she deliberately did so is irrelevant to criti-
cal practice: once a book is published, the author must let the reader judge.
Be that as it may, I am not aware that she ever tried to discourage the con-
trary tendency—to read her philosophy as literature—perhaps because it
has not been such a common practice among her critics and readers.
There is of course a danger in assessing a work on criteria irrelevant to
its aims, and I do not intend to read MGM in the same way as I would
read a novel. However, as I have shown, there are aspects of this book
that seem to invite a literary reading—that is, reading for tone, character
and rhetoric—reading not so much for what is said, as for how it is said.
Antonaccio observes that in MGM, Murdoch ‘has produced a kind of
metaphysics which, not unlike a novel, incorporates some of the acciden-
tal, aimless and humorous character of human life within an essentially
loose-textured but coherent form’ (Antonaccio 1996, 136). In fiction,
we expect a lot of things to be shown to us, rather than told; we expect
events as well as ideas; perhaps it could be said that we read metonym-
ically rather than metaphorically. A philosopher will use metaphors and
examples to illustrate an argument, while a novelist will tell a story in
its particulars, using any number of rhetorical techniques, and usually
leaving the ‘point’ of the story for the reader to fathom. An essential
difference, especially in novels of Murdoch’s generation and tradition,
is the prevalence of free indirect discourse—the fact that contemporary
novelists, as she herself says, ‘won’t … describe his characters from the
outside; he will describe them from consciousness, or if he suddenly
describes them from the outside, this will be an obvious literary device’
(Murdoch 1978, 535). But fiction is not the only kind of literature, and
not all literature needs to have a narrative element. Leaving aside the
obvious example of poetry, creative non-fiction prose is a branch of lit-
erature, including essays with no narrative element. Where to draw the
line between ‘creative non-fiction’ and philosophy may not be as clear
as it at first seems. According to Cascardi, ‘to say they are different kinds
of writing or different discourses says both too much and too little’
(Cascardi 2014, 3). Leeson wonders in passing whether the chapter on
Schopenhauer in MGM might be better thought of as an ‘essay’ (Leeson
2010, 124), suggesting an open-ended, relaxed kind of composition
rather than a tightly-structured and closely argued philosophical text.
And Murdoch herself says,
 7 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS … 101

that though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both
truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities,
explanations. Literature, like other arts, involves exploration, classification,
discrimination, organised vision. Of course good literature does not look
like ‘analysis’ because what the imagination produces is sensuous, fused,
reified, mysterious, ambiguous, particular. Art is cognition in another
mode. (Murdoch 1997, 11)

Towards the end of MGM Murdoch writes, ‘in thinking about the work
of the great metaphysicians one has to seek a balance between “faithful-
ness to the text” and a tendency to invent one’s own metaphysician’, and
she speaks of her own ‘danger of inventing my own Plato’ (MGM, 510).
My impression is that she reads with a novelist’s sensitivity—or at least a
novel-reader’s sensitivity—to the personality of each philosopher whose
work she is discussing, and the context in which he or she is writing.
This is more pronounced in respect of some philosophers that of oth-
ers. She might be in danger of inventing her own Plato, but does not
seem inspired to do so with others, like Kant and Hegel. Wittgenstein,
on the other hand, is described in various imaginative ways: at the time
of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is ‘a brave young man’ who
‘offers a strong impression of his own moral style’ (MGM, 54). In the
Investigations, ‘there is a sort of strained anguish … thought being con-
stantly stretched to its limit’ (MGM, 274). She had met Wittgenstein
personally, and in her May 1991 letter to Medlin she says, mischievously,
‘The idea of “reading him as poetry” would annoy him very much’
(Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 104).
The philosopher who brings out the novelist in MGM even more
than Wittgenstein is Schopenhauer. Murdoch compares the two, in tell-
ing terms, using the extended string of adjectives so characteristic of her
descriptive prose: ‘Schopenhauer represents what Wittgenstein shudders
from: an insatiable omnivorous muddled cheerful often casual volubil-
ity’ (MGM, 79). One could almost see this same dynamic in the con-
trast between Jake and Hugo in Under the Net, or even more clearly
in Arnold Baffin and Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince. As George
Steiner writes in his Foreword to Existentialists and Mystics, ‘The
game of recognition is tempting’ (Murdoch 1997, x). However, I am
not intending to pursue that ‘game’; merely to point out some affini-
ties between the character-drawing in MGM and that in her novels. As
Steiner points out, ‘the strangeness, the solitude, the psychological and
social risks inherent in the “examined life” are central to her imagined
102 G. DOOLEY

world’ (Murdoch 1997, xi), and I believe that, having assembled

throughout her career a large cast of Dramatis Personae many of whom
are engaged in that kind of life, she could hardly help seeing some of her
philosophical forbears in rather the same way when it came to writing
about them at length—and, Antonaccio writes, ‘it matters in literature,
morals, and politics, how we portray the human person’ (Antonaccio
1996, 117).
Schopenhauer, as Conradi points out, is one of Murdoch’s ‘heroes’
in MGM, along with Kant and Plato. He is barely mentioned in her
previous philosophical works, only appearing four times in the writings
collected in Existentialists and Mystics (apart from her discussion of him
with Magee, quoted above, and Steiner’s Foreword). Most of these ref-
erences to him in the earlier philosophy are parenthetical or dismissive.
However, for reasons I will leave others to fathom, this changes with
MGM. Schopenhauer has a chapter to himself and is referred to passim
throughout the book. Murdoch notices not just his ideas, with which she
is often enough at variance, and which she has described elsewhere as
‘somewhat confused and incoherent’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 203),
but his voice—his ‘relation to his reader is relaxed, amicable, confiding,
that of a kindly teacher or fellow seeker. He tells stories and makes jokes’
(MGM, 79). Conradi’s description of Murdoch’s voice in MGM quoted
above, specifically making the connection between Schopenhauer and
Murdoch as writers, is couched in remarkably similar terms. By contrast,
Murdoch writes, ‘Wittgenstein does not relate to a reader … Even the
imagined interlocutor in the Investigations, the “someone” who “might
say”, is isolated from us inside the text’ (MGM, 80). This distinction
between the two writers is important enough to Murdoch for her to end
her Schopenhauer chapter (or essay) with it.
Although I can describe, see, and feel many technical differences
between the voice and point of view of MGM on the one hand and
Murdoch’s novels on the other, there is a parallel between my a­ ffective
responses to the two forms, exemplified by two passages in MGM and
her puzzling 1989 novel The Message to the Planet. In The Message
to the Planet, I believe, there are unwritten tensions and contradic-
tions embedded in the primary plot, and these are connected with the
character of Alfred Ludens. As I argue in my 2014 article, Ludens is
‘officially’ heterosexual but the narrative is full of hints of homoeroti-
cism in his feelings towards several male characters.3 Much of the novel
is taken up with description of the actions of Ludens, who is singularly
 7 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS … 103

unperceptive about his own feelings and motivations, which makes the
novel in many ways frustrating to read. I have been unable to decide
whether Murdoch intended these contradictions in Ludens’ character, or
whether there was some more complex reason for this effect. However,
there is a secondary plot in this novel, concerning Franca, the wife of
Ludens’ friend Jack, and in the passage where she is first introduced the
novel suddenly opens, like a flower. After the rather perfunctory opening
section, combining exposition and conversation, containing much past
tense and passive voice, we are taken into the present-tense conscious-
ness of Franca: ‘Franca had seen the pale white moon in the evening,
and now again pale white in the early morning’ (Murdoch 1990, 22).
Every time I read this transition I am again struck by the contrast, and
the difference in registers continues throughout the novel as the two
plot lines alternate. The effect of this change is to capture the reader’s
interest—the reader’s attention—more completely than the opening
section. The importance of attention in Murdoch’s moral philosophy
can hardly be overstated. Although it is usually discussed as an essential
part of a moral agent’s capacity to deal justly with the world and with
other people, rather than a literary effect, it is surely also important to
acknowledge the effect skilful writing has on the nature and intensity of
a reader’s attention to the text. Murdoch talks about literature as ‘a dis-
ciplined technique for arousing certain emotions’. The challenge, for the
artist, is to harness that technique in the service of ‘truth-seeking and
truth-revealing’: ‘Art is close dangerous play with unconscious forces’
(Murdoch 1997, 10–11).
Though the reading experience is different in many ways between
the two forms, fiction and philosophical prose, I did find on reading
MGM that the early chapters were intellectually interesting but somehow
dutiful, the prose hard-won and therefore slow to read. The transition
in this case was not so abrupt: however, I was not far into Chapter 3,
the Schopenhauer chapter, when I perceived a change. Murdoch often
disagrees with Schopenhauer, and finds fault with his arguments, but
she writes about him with a kind of engaged affection, ascribing to
him qualities such as ‘felicitous daring’ (MGM, 59) and ‘irrepressible
empiricist gaiety’ (MGM, 70); ‘he cannot resist rambling, he constantly
makes jokes’ (MGM, 76) and ‘finds the ordinary world full of interesting
wonders’ (MGM, 77).
These phrases that she uses to characterise Schopenhauer have none
of the poetry, the distillation of feeling in image, that characterises her
104 G. DOOLEY

introduction of Franca, although she perhaps comes close when she

writes that he is ‘fascinated by the world and its bright diversity’ (MGM,
62). As a novelist, Murdoch is not usually thought of as particularly
poetic in her style, but the extent to which she uses imagery and poetic
diction in her novels is foregrounded in Carol Sommer’s unique book
Cartography for Girls, in which Murdoch’s sentences are removed from
their functional context as part of a narrative structure and reassembled
in a kind of random poetic assemblage. However, though technically
the two styles of writing are quite different, and of course their aims are
quite different, the way Murdoch describes Schopenhauer also engages
the reader’s attention: she does not often use the ‘cold clear’ voice she
recommends (Murdoch 1997, 5). It is more like literature: ‘reified, mys-
terious, ambiguous, particular’ (Murdoch 1997, 11). It does more than
present and discuss Schopenhauer’s ideas. Although it is not the kind of
imaginative assumption of a person’s subjectivity which often happens
with fictional characters, when we are drawn to empathise with a particu-
lar character whose point of view is inhabited by the writer, it is a way of
recruiting sympathy for him, and directing the reader’s attention to him,
on account not of what he says, but of his personality and character—of
who he is.

Antonaccio writes that the actual experience of reading MGM confronts

us not so much with a systematic metaphysical treatise as with a transcript
of a brilliant thinker’s stream of consciousness, full of detailed reflection
and analysis, but also dense with seemingly random associations, humorous
asides, and profound insights. (Antonaccio 1996, 135)

While Antonaccio’s use of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ is perhaps

misleading here, bringing to mind a quite specifically modernist aesthetic
Murdoch would certainly eschew in her philosophy, if not in her fiction,
I think this passage conveys well the richness and density of Murdoch’s
philosophical writing, with its suggestion of ‘seemingly random associa-
tions’. Murdoch wrote, of ‘the truth, terrible, delightful, funny, whose
strong lively presence we recognise in great writers’, affirming that ‘it
is impossible to banish morality from this picture’, and that an ‘impor-
tant part of human learning is an ability to generate and to judge and
understand the imagery which helps us to interpret the world’ (MGM,
215). The vivid imagery she often uses herself is full of colour and vital-
ity, often enlivened by strings of rhetorical questions, some of which she
 7 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS … 105

answers, while leaving others unanswered. As she says of Schopenhauer,

she ‘is prepared to exhibit [her] puzzlement and to ramble’ (MGM,
251). She apologises, when discussing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations, for ‘rushing in where angels fear to tread’ (MGM, 277),
but these are the passages where she, like Schopenhauer, abandons cau-
tion and ventures to the ‘border-line of what is expressible, [which] is
very blurred’. Perhaps this is, like art, another kind of ‘close dangerous
play with unconscious forces’ (Murdoch 1997, 10–11), but Murdoch
affirms that ‘out at this edge’, beyond the domain of the angels, ‘is often
a good place to be’ (MGM, 295).

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Nora Hämäläinen, Frances White, David

Robjant for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes
1. In May 1986, she told Brian Medlin that she was ‘writing some philosophy
which may be hopelessly bad. It is an addiction’. And five years later: ‘I’m
not really a philosopher anyway’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 7, 104).
2. See for example Nicol (2001) and Mulhall (1997).
3. See Dooley (2014).

References
Antonaccio, M. 1996. Form and contingency in Iris Murdoch’s ethics. In Iris
Murdoch and the search for human goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William
Schweiker, 110–137. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baldick, C. 1990. The concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Cascardi, A.J. 2014. The Cambridge introduction to literature and philosophy.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Conradi, P. 2001. The saint and the artist: A study of the fiction of Iris Murdoch.
London: HarperCollins.
Dooley, G. 2014. The pursuit of love in Iris Murdoch’s The message to the planet.
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 61 (3): 167–176.
Dooley, G., and G. Nerlich (eds.). 2014. Never mind about the bourgeoisie: The
correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin 1976–1995. Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Forsberg, N. 2013. Language lost and found: On Iris Murdoch and the limits of
philosophical discourse. New York: Bloomsbury.
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Hayes, P., and J. Wilm (eds.). 2017. Beyond the ancient quarrel: Literature, phi-
losophy and J.M. Coetzee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leeson, M. 2010. Iris Murdoch: philosophical novelist. London: Continuum.
Mulhall, S. 1997. Constructing a hall of reflection: Perfectionist edification in
Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a guide to morals. Philosophy 72: 219–239.
Murdoch, I. 1977. The fire and the sun: Why Plato banished the artists. New York:
Viking.
Murdoch, I. 1978. ‘Iris Murdoch on natural novelists and unnatural philoso-
phers.’ [Interview with Bryan Magee.] The Listener 27 April: 533–535.
Murdoch, I. 1990. The message to the planet. London: Penguin.
Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1997. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and litera-
ture, ed. Peter Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus.
Nicol, B. 2001. Philosophy’s dangerous pupil: Murdoch and Derrida. Modern
Fiction Studies 47 (2): 580–601.
Price, S. 2003. Iris Murdoch: An interview with Simon Price. In From a tiny cor-
ner in the house of fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley,
148–154. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Robjant, D. 2015. What use is literature to political philosophy? Or the funny
thing about Socrates’s nose. Philosophy and Literature 39 (2): 322–337.
Sommer, C. 2016. Cartography for girls: An A–Z of orientations identified within
the novels of Iris Murdoch. York: Information as Material.
 CHAPTER 8

Disciplines of Attention: Iris Murdoch

on Consciousness, Criticism, and Thought
(MGM Chapters 6–8)

David J. Fine

Scholars in philosophy and religious studies have done much to clarify

Iris Murdoch’s account of consciousness and moral vision. I aim, with
this analysis of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM), to
bring Murdoch’s concept of consciousness to literary studies. In par­
ticular, I examine the significance of literary criticism in Chapters 6–8.
This focus situates Murdoch’s concern with language and helps explain
the division of ‘Consciousness and thought’ into two non-­consecutive
chapters. In the intervening chapter, ‘Derrida and structuralism’,
Murdoch censures a relation to art characterised by detachment and sus-
picion, and this interruption not only signals criticism’s importance to
the larger argument but also stresses structuralism’s neglect of individual
consciousness. Pointedly, Murdoch rejects the theory-driven approaches
to literature that emerge from structuralism. She condemns critical the-
ory’s elitism and endorses, instead, an attentive encounter with art and
others. Murdoch envisions a practice that moves beyond critique, and

D. J. Fine (*)
University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA

© The Author(s) 2019 107

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_8
108 D. J. FINE

she does so in defence of both the individual’s inner life and art’s moral
efficacy.
My reading foregrounds Murdoch’s engagement with literary crit-
icism for two reasons. I aim, firstly, to clarify the role criticism plays
within the overarching argument of MGM and, secondly, to situate
Murdoch’s position within recent debates in literary studies. These
debates centre on critique, a reading practice characterised by the her-
meneutics of suspicion, and assess its predominance in the field. To this
end, I explore Murdoch’s depiction of consciousness, explaining its con-
nection to an individual’s moral capacity and showing how structural-
ism erodes its base. In the second section, I address this tension more
fully by way of literary criticism. Art proves central to these three chap-
ters, and from them I isolate both Murdoch’s rebuke of structuralism
and her picture of the good critic. The latter drives the concluding sec-
tion’s exploration of Murdoch’s continued relevance, which emerges, I
argue, from her sense of attention. As she suggests at the conclusion of
‘Consciousness and thought II’, ‘we all, not only can but have to, experi-
ence and deal with a transcendent reality, the resistant otherness of other
persons, other things, history, the natural world, the cosmos, and this
involves perpetual effort’ (MGM, 268). This chapter dilates on the shape
this effort takes in literary studies in order to clarify the relationship
between criticism and consciousness.

Consciousness: Inner Life

The moral claims of MGM rest, to a large extent, on Murdoch’s depic-
tion of consciousness. As this opening section demonstrates, Murdoch
thinks carefully through—and accounts for—the torrent of considerations,
desires, rationalisations, fantasies, and judgments that constitutes self-being
and frames the challenge of ethics. Modern shifts in both the analytic and
continental traditions of philosophy have, however, bracketed—if not
sponged away—the subject’s inner life. This eclipse of interiority threat-
ens philosophers’ ability not only to describe moral activity adequately
but also, and most alarmingly, to recognise the individual as such. For
Murdoch, one must begin with the perception of real individuals, and
her metaphysics hinges on the link between a person and his conscious-
ness. As she makes plain, ‘I want there to be a discussable problem of con-
sciousness because I want to talk about consciousness or self-being as the
fundamental mode or form of moral being’ (MGM, 171). It is therefore
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 109

essential, at the outset, to elucidate the scope of this problem and to

define the challenge structuralism poses to self-being.
Philosophers have struggled to register inner life, but Murdoch
upholds the centrality of consciousness for two related reasons. Firstly,
a concept of consciousness, however hard to pin down, witnesses one’s
unique selfhood. ‘Our present moment, our experiences, our flow of
consciousness, our indelible moral sense,’ Murdoch asks, ‘are not all
these essentially linked together and do they not imply the individual?’
(MGM, 153). Secondly, it allows one to discuss the moral refinement
that occurs within consciousness. The work of morality begins in this
inner space and gives shape to the unique, contingent individual. She
recalls how

the layman lives at peace with ‘consciousness’, with all its obscure impli-
cations of ‘ownership’ and ‘presence’. It is what is most his own, he is
responsible for it, even though it may seem to include so much that is not
momentary or personal or private or clearly visible. (MGM, 173)

Moral philosophy must heed, then, ‘our dense familiar inner stuff, pri-
vate and personal, with a quality and value of its own, something which
we can scrutinize and control’ (MGM, 153). Murdoch retains this every-
day sense of consciousness—‘its vague ordinary-language meaning as an
awareness of self as continuous being’ (MGM, 148)—and it grounds her
ethics.
The conscious mind does not, however, naturally envision the
world with clarity and grace. On the contrary, human beings adopt
self-protective illusions that block reality. Murdoch shows how effort-
lessly the egoism that arises from consciousness clouds awareness.
Therefore, one must work to see clearly. This labour functions as the
keystone of morality, since accurate perception depends on egoism’s
reduction. One must cultivate habits of attention and look outside the
ego-soaked morass. In this sense, ‘consciousness is a form of moral activ-
ity: what we attend to, how we attend, whether we attend’ (MGM, 167).
Moral philosophy’s questions—of what to do and when—make sense,
for Murdoch, only in relation to inner life. Ethical action necessitates
good consciousness, because morality rests on one’s ability to perceive
the world beyond self-preoccupation. People do not choose in a vacuum
or act in a laboratory; rather, they struggle to see clearly, and only then
might they do good things in the world. This world remains drenched
110 D. J. FINE

in value, and the individual’s stream of consciousness—‘surely if we are

searching for “being” this is it’ (MGM, 173)—interacts with this outer
realm. One is, thankfully, able to speak of this stream’s quality in terms
of better and worse. Indeed, one must.
This portrayal of consciousness and the articulation of its place in
moral life rank among Murdoch’s chief contributions to philosophy.
She first makes this case in a series of influential papers in the 1950s.
With MGM, the argument’s context shifts, however, from existentialism
to deconstruction. These conceptual systems have much in common,
according to Murdoch, but deconstruction presents a graver threat with
its ‘anti-individualistic determinism’ (MGM, 157). Deconstruction—
which she classifies, along with poststructuralism, modernism, and post-
modernism, as ‘structuralism’1—poses an acute risk to ethics, because,
on its account, human beings become subject to the texts they only
apparently author. Murdoch’s objection concerns language, specifically
how structuralism depicts subjectivity in relation to speech. On this post-
modern scene, people ‘are not masters of language, we are ourselves,
as utterers, simply parts of language, we do not and cannot really know
what we are saying, or possess any intelligible “present” which is “our
own”’ (MGM, 153). The structure subsumes the individual: the system
of signs effects the subject who speaks words not quite her own. The self
is here an illusion, the product of false consciousness.
The meaning of consciousness thus shifts from an individual’s cog-
nitive capacity—over which she has some control—to the historical
consciousness of Hegel and Marx. Consciousness, in this latter sense,
belongs to the social group or to the historical epoch: it refers, in ordi-
nary speech, to an awareness of systemic injustice. Here, Murdoch does
not denigrate recognition of social injustice; instead, she highlights
the tendency of this overriding social consciousness to obviate individ-
ual particularity and moral agency. This shift is not all that surprising.
As she notes, ‘Marxists regarded the bourgeois concept of the individ-
ual as moribund’, and Derrida picks up where Marx left off. ‘Language
and feeling and value (and thoughts and emotions, etc.) are henceforth,’
Murdoch explains, ‘not “owned” by “private persons” in the old famil-
iar sense.’ Talk of inner life reeks of the retrograde; hence, the ‘“meta-
physics of presence” is to be rejected: the notion that “the present” is
what it seems to be as a reality in the consciousness and experience of the
individual’ (MGM, 151). False consciousness now fills the subject’s mind
as he becomes a container for larger, ideological forces. Structuralists, in
turn, employ the jargon of their specialists to diagnose this condition.
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 111

Murdoch dismisses this position vis-à-vis language and defends its

ordinary users. She rejects structuralism precisely because it pathologises
inner life and thus obfuscates the moral effort that takes place continu-
ously within consciousness. For Murdoch, structuralism begins with an
inadequate, counterintuitive formulation of the subject, and this starting
point distorts the individual’s ability to attend to the world. In fact, one
finds, among these thinkers,

that further steps have been taken which purport to deny our ordinary
sense of a transcendent (extra-linguistic) real world ‘out there’; indeed
there is no ‘out there’ since language, not world, transcends us, we are
‘made’ by language, and are not the free independent ordinary individuals
we imagined we were. (MGM, 151)

The world’s quiddity, which surpasses the ego, dissolves in the language
that people once, naïvely, took to describe it. The individual follows suit,
since that ‘old concept of the self as a unified active consciousness, liv-
ing between appearance and reality (the traditional field of the novel), is
being dislodged by psychoanalytical psychologists and “literary” decon-
struction’ (MGM, 162). Murdoch makes it clear that literary critics have,
after Derrida, had the greatest success extending the structuralist vision
(MGM, 151).
This theoretical account, still influential in literary studies, appears
rather macabre: agency lessens, and reality thins. What makes it so attrac-
tive? Murdoch’s discussion of consciousness, I believe, provides a clue:
structuralism appeals to the academic ego. The individual and her free-
dom fade, but a new elite emerges. ‘People who cannot think, who fail
to think, who choose not to think, are pictured,’ Murdoch explains, ‘as
being sunk in a dark muddled consciousness, composed of feelings and
associations and fragmentary awareness. Such people live by unreflective
conventions, they are afraid of action and change and free creative think-
ing.’ These ordinary folks—unlike the liberated critical theorists—suffer
from bad faith and take the world as it comes. Here, structuralism echoes
Marxist critique of class relations but with a twist. ‘Structuralist thinking
contains’, according to Murdoch, ‘an aestheticized version of this con-
cept, only the ordinary people (the new “proletariat”) are now inert (like
the old dull bourgeoisie) and the “battlefront” is the linguistic front line,
the playground of creative poeticized writers and thinkers’ (MGM, 156).
Unlike their forebears, these revolutionaries take to the classroom and
launch their critique.
112 D. J. FINE

It is not difficult to see why this picture charms deep thinkers. As

Murdoch demonstrates, structuralism responds to the sluggishness of
political change and to real limitations of human agency. Its practitioners
analyse texts, then, to reveal what casual readers miss: namely, the forces
that maintain the status quo. They employ critique, a mode of reading
grounded in the hermeneutics of suspicion, and unveil impediments to
social change.2 This purportedly radical stance has, though, real implica-
tions for moral and political life. One witnesses, in structuralism,

fact actually becoming value, as quasi-scientific technical modes of dis-

course (psychoanalysis, anthropology, semiology, grammatology, etc.) are
treated as ultimate truths, and contrasted with a conceptually vague ‘ordi-
nary language’ composed of conventional assumptions and illusions, and
which if solemnly uttered by some non-technical thinker is inevitably in
bad faith. (MGM, 162)

Everyday truth-seeking falls from view as critics expose the counterintui-

tive. Structuralists thereby exalt the unconventional.
Murdoch includes a passage from The Golden Bowl in ‘Consciousness
and thought I’ to shift focus. With a turn to literature, she shows the
centrality of consciousness to moral growth by way of Maggie Verver,
who comes to see the world outside self. Murdoch enacts a particu-
lar form of criticism, one that prioritises attention. While she develops
this thinking in the following chapter, her brief analysis of Henry James
highlights the place of consciousness in art and morality. Consciousness
remains, for Murdoch, tied to the individual, cognitive effort one takes—
or fails to take—in order to see situations and people clearly. ‘Knowledge
informs the moral quality of the world,’ and, for this reason, she insists
that

the selfish self-interestedly casual or callous man sees a different world from
that which the careful scrupulous benevolent just man sees; and the largely
explicable ambiguity of the word ‘see’ here conveys the essence of the con-
cept of the moral. (MGM, 177)

As Murdoch’s metaphor of vision suggests, literature’s moral value

resides not only in its nuanced illustration of consciousness but also in
the opportunity it gives readers to see a new.
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 113

Criticism: Art Object

Thus far, I have sketched Murdoch’s depiction of consciousness and
shown how it informs her assessment of structuralism. In what follows,
I deepen this account by way of criticism and art. I aim, in this section,
to identify the issue Murdoch takes with structuralist methodology and
to juxtapose it with her critical practice, which she grounds in attentive
truth-seeking. After all, Murdoch’s rejection of structuralism stems, in
large part, from how these thinkers interpret literary texts. They arrive at
literature with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in tow and locate its mean-
ing in the hidden, atypical, and deep. I will suggest that Murdoch posits
three main objections to this approach: (1) critical texts displace litera-
ture; (2) critics become a scientific elite; and (3) language’s truth-­seeking
function disappears. Murdoch rejects these trends and emphasises,
instead, the individual’s encounter with art. She demonstrates this aes-
thetic experience’s value for ethics and argues that, in their writing and
teaching, critics must respect the individual and support his truth-
seeking practice.
Murdoch closes ‘Derrida and structuralism’ with a poignant
reminder:

the limits of my language which are the limits of my world fade away
on every side into areas of fighting for concepts, for understanding, for
expression, for control, of which the search for the mot juste may serve
as an image. Everyone, every moral being, that is every human being, is
involved in this fight, it is not reserved for philosophers, artists and scien-
tists. (MGM, 216)

Clumsily, all human beings use words to grasp at a reality that eludes
them. ‘Language’, therefore,

must not be separated from individual consciousness and treated as (for

the many) a handy impersonal network and (for the few) an adventure
playground. Language, consciousness and world are bound together, the
(essential) aspiration of language to truth is an aspect of consciousness as a
work of evaluation. (MGM, 216)

Structuralism wrongly reserves meaning for a select group. A feeling of lib-

erty rewards its practitioners, who have insiders’ access to the system, while
114 D. J. FINE

determinism clouds uncritical minds. Murdoch condemns this elitism,

which isolates language’s free players from its damned pawns.
Structuralism’s relationship to literary texts drives Murdoch to this
conclusion. She characterises deconstruction as ‘Linguistic Determinism,
since it presents a picture of the individual as submerged in language,
rather than as an autonomous user of language’ (MGM, 185). The indi-
vidual dissolves into a network of signs, which the critic’s reading dis-
closes. Suggestively, structuralists use ‘text’ to describe both literature
and the critical product, and this conflation merits pause. As Murdoch
explains, ‘“text”, as a technical term, conveniently allows the critic to
bracket himself with the imaginative writer. The novel and the criticism
of it are both “texts”, the latter being potentially the true one.’ From
there, criticism easily displaces literature: the former does not ­ suffer
from the bad faith that the astute critic shows to reside in the latter. In
this sense, ‘the work of criticism is the real work of art’ (MGM, 206).
Structuralist readings reveal something important about larger sys-
tems, but, as a result, they downplay, if not all but obfuscate, the space
between art and other. Literature and its readers are both products:
writer, book, and reader all hold places in the linguistic system and
merge into its whole. The critic, rather than artist, displays this reality.
This prioritisation of structuralist texts forecloses what literature
might do to discipline individual vision. Art’s moral potential fades. ‘In
effect,’ Murdoch claims,

structuralism is anti-religious, the idea of ‘God’ being connected with old

‘logocentric’ ideas of divinely established pre-linguistic meanings. It is also
non-moral, since it erases the idea of truthfulness and the common-sense
idea of freedom which goes with it. (MGM, 200)

Literature confesses historical wrongs; it plays, and it perpetuates, too. It

does not, however, provide a picture of reality, at least not in the way it
once did. Critics do the real work of revealing things as they, counterin-
tuitively, are. This disclosure permits, then, ‘a certain proud “authentic-
ity”’, one which ‘is to be achieved by those who are no longer duped by
outmoded ideas’ (MGM, 200). The critic gains prestige and power as a
sort of seer, one who knows just how dark the times are. He henceforth
demystifies. His pointed critique reveals the unpleasant facts of social
existence—no God, no truth, no love—from which ordinary people take
flight into religious superstitions and political delusions.
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 115

This focus on the counterintuitive encourages scholars to set them-

selves apart. With pressure to publish widely and assess quantitatively,
Murdoch notes how the ‘belief that literature is an easy subject may
lead academics to defend themselves by becoming specialists who know
everything about one period, or indeed one writer, and nothing about
anything else’. This pressure does not stop with specialisation. ‘It may
also,’ Murdoch suggests, ‘lead them to embrace an obscure and difficult
theory which looks like a science, which other people do not understand,
and which provides the consoling feeling of having a special private
expertise, and so being just as good as a physicist or a biologist’ (MGM,
207). Professional anxiety easily leads critics to master an arcane insider
tongue and to assume a scientific, medicalised stance, where literature
becomes something to dissect. To establish legitimacy, humanists flee the
murky world of value and transform into clinicians of fact. ‘Paradoxically,
the motives, or ideals, of structuralism have,’ Murdoch insists, ‘as their
nemesis or accompaniment the wish to establish oneself as a member of
an elite’ (MGM, 207–208). This technocratic exclusivity consoles the
chosen few.
As texts displace literature and humanists turn scientist, language’s
relation to truth alters. Things are not what they appear:

the ideal deconstructionist is more like a scientist who shows that things
are absolutely not what they seem (they really are made of atoms). He will
tell us that the literary object, as we have hitherto understood it, is pure
phenomenon, below which lies something quite different from what its
naïve creator believed and intended, or what the naïve reader imagines he
perceives. (MGM, 190)

Critics disclose the text’s non-obvious, highly specialised significance.

The theoretical agenda subsumes the artwork, showing its meaning to
exist elsewhere. Literature’s significance now lies apart from the common
reader. Indeed, structuralism reserves art for specialists, who have the
training to analyse it properly, because, in unskilled hands, it disseminates
false consciousness. ‘Our whole concept of what literature is’, Murdoch
writes, ‘is here in question. This quest for the hidden deep (primal-
language) meaning of the text (to use the jargon) is now said to be the
main and essential part of the critic’s task’ (MGM, 189). Critics study
literature to expose covert meanings rather than to respect something at
once independent and beautiful.
116 D. J. FINE

Murdoch admits that readings driven by critique may, at times, prove

valuable (MGM, 189). She worries, though, that structuralism’s primacy
will invalidate other reading methods. As an all-encompassing explana-
tion, structuralism tends to wrangle everything into its corral of seeing:
its picture of linguistic subjection might easily dominate all criticism.
This ubiquity risks the loss of particularity and individuality, since, ‘as in
other metaphysical “totalities,” system obliterates a necessary recogni-
tion of the contingent’ (MGM, 194). Structuralism fails to see that which
resists or troubles its picture. Critics fit the world into their structure:
‘they in effect “disappear” what is individual and contingent by equat-
ing reality with integration in system, and degrees of reality with degrees
of integration, and by implying that “ultimately” or “really” there is
only one system’ (MGM, 196). Suspicious readers overlook the jum-
bled bits and locate proof for the thesis that they bring to the text. This
approach distorts human beings’ relation to truth, because it neglects the
particular.
Structuralism undercuts truth’s value within the humanities. As
Murdoch explains, the ‘fundamental value which is lost, obscured, made
not to be, by structuralist theory, is truth, language as truthful, where
“truthful” means faithful to, engaging intelligently and responsibly with,
a reality which is beyond us’ (MGM, 214). Art provides people with the
chance to attend to that ‘which is beyond’ their egos. Aesthetic encoun-
ters serve, in Murdoch’s philosophy, as an exemplum of what people
do all the time: they look, and they interpret. One works—on a contin-
uum of illusion and truth—to clarify one’s consciousness: to get things
right. Good readers interact with a reality that resists both annihilation
by ego and encapsulation by system. Critics should help rather than hin-
der this process, because criticism is akin to consciousness: it too strives
after an accurate interpretation. As such, literary criticism must retain
truth-seeking as one of its prime virtues. Language, Murdoch explains,
‘performs its essential task, through its ability to be truthful; and its
truthfulness is a function of the struggle of individuals creatively to
adjust language to contingent conditions outside it’ (MGM, 216). This
work weaves human beings into the world, one they share—by virtue of
language—with others.
Good art gets one closer to reality than bad art, which, for Murdoch,
peddles in consolatory fantasy. Still, art and truth remain in close rela-
tion, and criticism should evaluate both truth and falsehood. ‘The often
difficult explanation of the truth of great art is,’ Murdoch suggests, ‘a
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 117

proper task of criticism. The concept of language-using must imply that

of an individual person as a presence, that is, it must imply responsibil-
ity and the possibility of truth, upon which the possibility of falsehood
depends’ (MGM, 211). The good critic brings a love of literature to
her vocation, along ‘with a sophisticated liberal-minded judgment and
a refined sense of value’ (MGM, 207). She minds the gap between the
art object and the eyes that view it. In this manner, she foregrounds the
struggle to see the poem—and, mutatis mutandis, the world—as it is.
This labour of patient attention is, of course, less exciting than critical
theory. Murdoch describes how an ‘attractive esoteric theory, incompre-
hensible to laymen, may be felt to be more lively and amusing than the
vaguer, less easily stated objectives of traditional critics’ (MGM, 207),
but the ordinary tasks of literary criticism remain. The analysis of met-
aphor, the scan of verse, the consideration of character: these skills exer-
cise one’s moral capacity.
Although many people fail to recognise it, ‘the study of literature is
something difficult.’ It requires a generosity of spirit and generality of
knowledge too often absent. ‘A good teacher of literature (and a good
literary critic) not only understands poetry (which not many people do)
and other literary forms, but is a historian, a linguist, a connoisseur of
other arts, and a sophisticated student of human nature. He is in the
best sense’, Murdoch adds, ‘a jack of all trades’ (MGM, 207). Good crit-
ics specialise but use their understanding to connect with a big, messy
planet. They accept ‘that statements are made, propositions are uttered,
by individual incarnate persons in particular extra-linguistic situations,
and it is in the whole of this larger context that our familiar and essential
concepts of truth and truthfulness live and work’ (MGM, 194). Literary
studies must accept art’s unassailable relation to reality and acknowl-
edge criticism’s moral call. In practice, this work might look more like
patiently seeing with others than displaying expertise to peers, but, in any
case, the good critic desires truth and teaches others how to admire—
justly and lovingly—the world’s beautiful recalcitrance.3

Thought: Just Vision

I have withheld discussion of the contemporary scene, because
I am arguing that it is only after the interruption of ‘Derrida and
structuralism’ that the full relevance of ‘Consciousness and thought’
becomes clear. In Chapter 7, Murdoch’s interlude with the theorists
118 D. J. FINE

not only reaffirms the centrality of consciousness to moral vision but

also shows how quickly things go awry if one obstructs criticism’s rela-
tion to truth-seeking. This valuation resonates, in important ways, with
the postcritical turn in the humanities. In fact, Murdoch’s assessment
of structuralism anticipates this conversation. She does not, however,
offer a solution; instead, she brings clarity to the problem of a suspi-
cious approach to literature. Put plainly, critique refuses the ordinary.
This refusal feeds into perceptions, however misguided, of the human-
ities’ irrelevance. For this reason, I conclude with Murdoch’s sense of
attention and articulate what it offers to literary studies today. Current
debates about critique do merit attention, which, for Murdoch, means
waiting—avoiding the temptation to theorise away the difficulty—and
really looking in order to get a clear view of the problem.4
Murdoch’s engagement with literary theory is not without its crit-
ics. In his review of MGM, Terry Eagleton argues that its account of
Derrida functions as ‘a kind of composite bugbear or handy straw tar-
get for all that Murdoch finds nightmarish about modernity’. He
describes Murdoch’s approach as, in fact, ‘the kind of slipshod confla-
tion of one’s bêtes noires which no academic would tolerate in a first-
year undergraduate’s essay’ (Eagleton 2003, 260). Bran Nicol reaches a
similar conclusion, confirming that ‘what we know as structuralism does
not encompass poststructuralism, deconstruction, modernism, and post-
modernism as she claims it does.’ On his view, Murdoch wrongly char-
acterises Derrida as a structuralist and thus misreads his philosophy. Her
reading, ultimately, ‘seems to play into the hands of those who regard
Murdoch as a theoretical dinosaur, still harping on about “truth” and
“greatness” as if literary criticism and philosophy remained rooted in
the Oxbridge Commons Rooms of the 1950s’ (Nicol 2001, 588–589).
Whether demon or caricature, Murdoch’s Derrida has alienated many lit-
erary critics.
It is not surprising, given the publication of ‘Derrida and
structuralism’ at the height of the critical theory boom, that this chapter
has received harsh and sustained critique. Still, Niklas Forsberg rightly
cautions against a quick dismissal of Murdoch based on her engagement
with other philosophers (Forsberg 2013, 64). She does paint with broad
strokes, but, as Stephen Mulhall has argued, Murdoch’s style comple-
ments her ethics. For Mulhall, MGM ‘works hard to avoid presenting
the texts it discusses in ways which falsify their unity or their multiplicity’
(Mulhall 1997, 235). This tactic ensures that the concepts and systems
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 119

examined remain, in Mulhall’s words, ‘limited wholes’ (Mulhall 1997,

232). Here, one might take Murdoch’s structuralism as a case in point.
She not only illuminates the similarities among poststructuralism, decon-
struction, modernism, and postmodernism but also maintains—indeed
emphasises—their differences, thereby impeding closure. The list of
terms that she yokes together with ‘structuralism’ is, I would suggest,
meant to be jarring. She then pulls on a thread of similarity—largely dis-
guised by the ‘post’ prefixes—and unpacks the moral implications of a
shared heritage, one anchored in Ferdinand de Saussure (MGM, 235).5
As they explore critique’s limitations, contemporary scholars make a
similar move. In her work, Rita Felski has criticised suspicion’s ‘perva-
sive presence as mood and method’ (Felski 2015, 1), one that cuts across
critical schools. For her part, Toril Moi identifies as ‘post-Saussurean’
‘anyone in literary studies who draws on Saussure’s linguistics, particu-
larly after World War II. The term includes both structuralists and post-
structuralists’ (Moi 2017, 16). Moi’s classification links poststructuralism
with structuralism, and Felski captures their predominant orientation
toward literature. Increasingly, scholars agree that critique’s different
strands—feminism, deconstruction, New Historicism—share a family
resemblance. In his assessment of critique’s legacy, John Michael claims
that

despite their differences in vocabulary and purpose, each of these

approaches subscribes to a sense of textuality that Derrida himself charac-
terised in the opening sentence of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, one of deconstruc-
tion’s founding texts, ‘A Text is not a text unless it hides from the first
comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its
game.’ (Michael 2017, 253)

In this tradition, language has something to hide. As a result, it endlessly

rewards suspicion.
One might say that critique is the voguish term for what Murdoch
wanted to call structuralism. Her misgivings certainly find their contem-
porary analogues. In their introduction to Critique and Postcritique,
Felski and Elizabeth Anker identify characteristics of critique—a diag-
nostic stance that privileges expertise and detachment, a heroic flight
from everyday life, and ‘a paranoid vision that translates every possible
phenomenon into yet another sign of the ubiquity of ideology or dis-
ciplinary power’ (Anker and Felski 2017, 15)—that echo Murdoch’s
120 D. J. FINE

appraisal. Of course, critique evades the problem with Murdoch’s struc-

turalism, because, as an umbrella term, critique speaks to a variety of
traditions with less confusion. Still, Murdoch’s criticism of structuralism
anticipates these debates by twenty years. In 1992, she firmly rejects a
view of literary studies, ‘where the codified many may be thought of as
sunk in a deep ocean while the (aesthetically, intellectually) enlightened
few disport themselves upon the surface, rising up into the sunshine
while still belonging to the sea. (Like dolphins perhaps.)’ (MGM, 267).
Her metaphor clarifies the problem: structuralism obscures the difficult
yet quotidian labour of attention—necessary to all literary criticism—and
instead legitimates a playful spirit of rising-above.
For good reason, Murdoch opens ‘Consciousness and thought II’
with a meditation on attention. Unlike structuralist theorising, atten-
tion necessitates looking at the particular and waiting to know. One
must withhold cognition, for a time, in order to see clearly; after all, ‘one
must see what is happening, what is there, in order to be able to see what
ought to be done’ (MGM, 218). One heeds a reality that exceeds ego,
pausing and, notably, not thinking. ‘A discipline of meditation wherein
the mind is alert but emptied of self enables this form of awareness,’
Murdoch explains, ‘and the disciplined practice of various skills may pro-
mote a similar unselfing, or “décréation” to use Simone Weil’s vocabu-
lary. Attend “without thinking about”’. Good critics look at literature
without devouring its reality. They notice its independence. ‘This is
“good for us”’, Murdoch insists, ‘because it involves respect, because it
is an exercise in cleansing the mind of selfish preoccupation, because it is
an experience of what truth is like’ (MGM, 245). Disciplined attention
respects literature’s separateness. One relates—by seeing and waiting—to
an unassimilable difference. This encounter with beautiful contingency
silences self-absorption and burns away egoistic haze.
Critique’s detachment isolates critics, however, from the labour of
attention that might refine their literary attachments. Structuralism’s
rejection of the ordinary elevates critics above not only the populace
but also, and more significantly, moral struggle.6 Murdoch shows how
the traditions arising from the hermeneutics of suspicion break the tie
between consciousness and morality. Firstly, in the switch of false for
individual consciousness, structuralism nullifies the process of moral
clarification that the study of art might effect. Secondly, in its elevation
of professional over ordinary users of language, structuralism absolves
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 121

scholars from the need for attention, which means that, in effect, their
moral vision persists unchecked. These two shifts have disrupted art’s
moral capacity and undermined inner life. It follows that the attention
demanded by the postcritical turn—attention that would involve both
clarification of critics’ moral vision and (potential) change to their con-
ceptual systems—requires the very concept of consciousness that critique
has diluted.7
To reinforce the centrality of consciousness to moral vision, Murdoch
returns to literature. She insists that readers, ordinarily, ‘have no diffi-
culty in understanding novelists, and it is natural here to speak of
awarenesses, perceivings, experiences, consciousness, and of someone’s
“world”’ (MGM, 264). Narrative literature illustrates, according to
Murdoch, ‘the importance and omnipresence of a reflective experimental
background to moral decision and action, and with this the omnipres-
ence of value (an opposition between good and bad) in human activity’
(MGM, 259). Readers come to this sense naturally, and Murdoch’s per-
fectionist morality rests on the purification of this stream of conscious-
ness. ‘We understand,’ she claims, ‘what a bad texture of consciousness
is like, equally we understand what a good one is like, and what sort of
changes lead from one to the other. Consider what novelists can do, and
how variously and successfully they can do it’ (MGM, 261). Moral phi-
losophy must speak to this inner space and ‘focus attention upon the
experiential stream as a cognitive background to activity’ (MGM, 267).
As she reconsiders Chapter 6’s arguments after Chapter 7’s theorising,
Murdoch offers, in Chapter 8, what one might call a postcritical view.
When Murdoch revisits The Golden Bowl in ‘Consciousness and
thought II’, she witnesses what literature does. Novelists depict indi-
viduals’ streams of consciousness with subtlety, showing that the ‘place,
where we are at home, which we seem to leave and then return to, which
is the fundamental seat of our freedom, has moral colour, moral sensi-
bility’. In an ordinary way, novelists highlight, for common and pro-
fessional readers alike, inner life’s moral significance. ‘The concept of
consciousness, the stream of consciousness, is animated by indicating a
moral dimension’ (MGM, 260), and all human beings share in Maggie
Verver’s struggle to see. Literary critics are no exception: they, too,
must really look at particulars and avoid the temptation to flee com-
plexity through abstraction. They must invite moral and conceptual
change, which means they must pay attention to their inner life. This
122 D. J. FINE

invitation holds true for the postcritical, where one must see, purged
of professional and personal egoism, the situation as it is. After critique,
literary critics have this work before them: in the distance between self
and other, in the space between fiction and truth, in that interruption
between consciousness and thought.

Notes
1. My use of ‘structuralism’ retains Murdoch’s capacious sense of the term. I
unpack what I take to be its contemporary significance in the third section.
2. Throughout this chapter, I draw upon Rita Felski’s sense of critique, which
she outlines in her influential The Limits of Critique (2015).
3. This chapter is no exception. I am grateful for the editors’ thoughtful feed-
back on earlier drafts. In addition, I must thank Emily Shreve and Jenna
Lay for their tireless eyes.
4. Toril Moi’s insightful work on attention, from the perspective of ordi-
nary language philosophy, has influenced this formulation (Moi 2017,
226–231).
5. Nicol acknowledges that ‘a general “Saussurian” worldview’ unites the var-
ious components of Murdoch’s structuralism (Nicol 2001, 589).
6. Heather Love has helpfully traced the elitism and class bias of critique
(Love 2017, 365). Her examination of critics’ ensuing detachment is par-
ticularly relevant here (Love 2017, 367).
7. Here, I evoke Forsberg’s argument for Murdoch’s difficulty, especially
the need ‘to overcome one’s own limitations and distortions’ (Forsberg
2013, 217).

References
Anker, E.S., and R. Felski. 2017. Introduction. In Critique and postcritique, ed.
Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, 1–28. Durham: Duke University Press.
Eagleton, T. 2003. Iris Murdoch. In Figures of dissent, 259–262. London: Verso.
Felski, R. 2015. The limits of critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Forsberg, N. 2013. Language lost and found: On Iris Murdoch and the limits of
philosophical discourse. New York: Bloomsbury.
Love, H. 2017. Critique is ordinary. PMLA 132 (2): 364–370.
Michael, J. 2017. Tragedy and translation: A future for critique in a secular age.
In Critique and postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, 252–278.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Moi, T. 2017. Revolution of the ordinary: Literary studies after Wittgenstein,
Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 8 DISCIPLINES OF ATTENTION: IRIS MURDOCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS … 123

Mulhall, S. 1997. Constructing a hall of reflection: Perfectionist edification

in Iris Murdoch’s metaphysics as a guide to morals. Philosophy 72 (280):
219–239.
Murdoch, I. 1993. Metaphysics as a guide to morals. (Abbreviated MGM.) New
York: Penguin Books.
Nicol, B. 2001. Philosophy’s dangerous pupil: Murdoch and Derrida. Modern
Fiction Studies 47 (3): 580–601.
 CHAPTER 9

Iris Murdoch as Educator

Megan Jane Laverty

Good – learnt through everything, as Plato thought. A light shining every-

where. But to be learnt, through all learning. That’s what I think anyway.
(Iris Murdoch to Suguna Ramanathan, in Horner and Rowe 2015, 505)

Introduction: The Progressing Life of a Person

Rarely is Iris Murdoch considered a philosopher of education.1 And yet,
there are references to education-as-formation in almost every chapter of
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM), and it is a unifying
theme of her entire philosophical and literary oeuvre. Murdoch took her
college teaching seriously (at St. Anne’s and Royal College of Art). She
thought extensively about what and how children should be taught,2 and
her novels are replete with schools and school teachers. In Murdoch’s
fiction, the school teacher is often a ‘figure of good’, as in the case of
Jenkin Riderhood in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987). Murdoch’s

M. J. Laverty (*)
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2019 125

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_9
126 M. J. LAVERTY

interest in education, and her view that all education is essentially moral
education—in this as in much else, her orientation is Platonic—inform
her readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein, as
well as her analysis of art and literature.
Some philosophers of education have recognised Murdoch’s concept
of attention as a moral necessity of teaching and learning.3 Others have
defended the value of her Neo-Platonism for the theory and practice
of moral education in schools.4 However, few have addressed the cen-
tral and vital role of education in Murdoch’s thought. In this chapter,
I seek to redress this omission by offering a more adequate account of
Murdoch’s interest in ordinary activities that involve what she terms
‘truth-seeking’ or ‘purification’ (MGM, 243), which I shall show are fun-
damentally educational experiences. Such activities include craftsmanship,
scientific work, learning a second language, artistic endeavours, mathe-
matical study, gardening and prayer. I argue that Murdoch’s interpreta-
tion of these activities sheds light on elementary features of our moral
lives and what is involved in becoming morally better. In both contexts,
there exists a standard that inspires and purifies desire; the process brings
about continuous and holistic change; it results in a greater imaginative
grasp of reality; and the world is revealed as an occasion of wonder and
joy. In short, these shared elements serve to illuminate moral progress
and clarify Murdoch’s view that individuals should perform activities at
which they can improve.
The touchstone of Murdoch’s philosophy is the progressively chang-
ing quality of consciousness which consists of ‘active “reassessing” and
“redefining”’ (Murdoch 1997, 320). According to Murdoch, we are all
always in a process of change, constantly ‘deploying and directing our
energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it’ (MGM, 495).
Her choice of terms—‘refining or blunting’, ‘purifying or corrupt-
ing’—reveals that she thinks this change is characterised by ‘a process
of deepening or complicating, a process of learning, a progress’ (MGM,
31). Murdoch illuminates this progress by comparing it to being a trav-
eller ‘upon a “road”’ (MGM, 462). Her recurring image of pilgrimage
conjures an image of life as a spiritual journey ‘inspired by intimations
of reality which lie beyond what can be easily seen’ (MGM, 399). The
pilgrim walks along a well-trodden path, seeking not simply the desti-
nation—although the destination is not unimportant—but a transfor-
mation made possible by undertaking the journey itself. In the words of
poet Anne Carson, the pilgrim undertakes such a journey ‘in the belief
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 127

that a question can travel into an answer’ (Carson 1995, 122–123).

Impelled by a deepening desire for the good, the pilgrim is drawn into
the gap between the ‘imperfect hurly-burly’ (MGM, 399) of ordinary
life, and a vision of how life should be lived.
Murdoch uses this notion of life as a spiritual pilgrimage to summarise
Plato’s philosophy:

Life is a spiritual pilgrimage inspired by the disturbing magnetism of truth,

involving ipso facto a purification of energy and desire in the light of a vision
of what is good. The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a
movement toward selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are
objects of love. Platonic morality is not coldly intellectual, it involves the
whole man and attaches value to the most ‘concrete’ of everyday preoc-
cupations and acts. It concerns the continuous detail of human activity,
wherein we discriminate between appearance and reality, good and bad,
true and false, and check or strengthen our desires. (MGM, 14; see also 11)

This passage, which could easily serve as a summary of Murdoch’s

philosophy, underscores key aspects of her thought that I highlight
in this essay. In the following section, I explain Murdoch’s conviction
that morality is ‘connected with the whole of our being’ (MGM, 495)
as implied by her belief in the progressively changing quality of con-
sciousness, which I consider the hallmark of Murdoch’s perfectionism.
If consciousness is progressive, then it follows that all of life’s moments,
even the mundane ones, are pedagogical. They propel us to distin-
guish between appearance and reality, allowing us to become more or
less truthful and good.
The view that life is a form of education in itself informs Murdoch’s
interest in such pedagogical activities as learning a second language,
practising meditation, and studying mathematics. In the essay’s third sec-
tion, I examine Murdoch’s analysis of these activities—which she refers
to elsewhere as ‘intellectual and craft studies’ (MGM, 242)—and her
argument that they force ‘a concept of the good upon us’ (MGM, 415).
Murdoch considers these activities to be among the experiences that
offer a kind of proof for the existence of the Good—she considers them
analogues (and instances) of ‘the progressing life of a person’ (Murdoch
1997, 320; see also Diamond 1996). Bearing this in mind, I suggest that
Murdoch’s analysis of these activities can prove philosophically instruc-
tive, particularly against the background difficulty of having to theorise
128 M. J. LAVERTY

about moral progress. In Murdoch’s view, this difficulty accounts for

Plato’s use of myths and the failure of Freudian psychoanalysis to estab-
lish itself as a science (Murdoch 1997, 341–343).5 It also accounts for
her interest in literature.6 It is literature’s focus on characters that make
novels ideally suited to reveal the progressive quality of consciousness.
It does not follow from this, however, that novels have a monopoly on
moral truth—nor does philosophy, for that matter.
Further, according to Murdoch, conventional models of learning
are not the only activities that lead to truth and goodness. Although
Murdoch understands intellectual and artistic studies as analogues
(and instances) of moral progress, she does not think that the ability to
learn or a formal education is what makes individuals morally better—
hence her esteem of the virtuous peasant (MGM, 324). In this chapter
I expand upon Murdoch’s thought that we are most like spiritual pil-
grims when engaged in artistic and intellectual activities, but I wish to
emphasise that throughout her work, Murdoch appropriately and per-
ceptively acknowledges the profound disanalogies: these activities are
undertaken in a life; we set them as tasks for ourselves and life cannot
(and should not) be approached as a task; moral perfection is manifestly
distinct from artistic or intellectual perfection; and the ‘measure’ of
an individual is incommensurate with that of a philosopher, pianist or
scientist.

The Pilgrim’s Progress

Murdoch never wavered in her conviction that consciousness ‘is a form
of moral activity’ (MGM, 167), characterised by ‘a deep continuous
working of values, a continuous present and presence of perceptions, intu-
itions, images, feelings, desires, aversions, attachments’ (MGM, 215,
italics hers). Cora Diamond endorses this ‘extremely central theme’ in
Murdoch’s philosophy (Diamond 1996, 82). In an article engaging with
Diamond’s scholarship, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock objects to the claim’s
‘militant or postmodernist flavour’ and likens it to the claim that ‘all our
thoughts and actions are political’ which she rejects as ‘ideological rum-
bling’. According to Moyal-Sharrock, while such claims are trivially true,
in the sense that ‘anything can be read into anything if one is intent on
it’, they are offensive to our common sense. She takes it is as a given
that ‘we distinguish between the sentences: “The neighbor was brutally
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 129

murdered” and “I’m making pea soup”’ in moral terms (Moyal-Sharrock

2012, 234, italics hers).7 The sentence ‘I’m making pea soup’ is intended
to reveal that most of our thoughts and activities are far too mundane
to be of moral consequence. For Moyal-Sharrock, the moral import
of making pea soup derives from a certain context, as in the case of an
individual continuing to prepare it directly after being informed of her
neighbour’s murder.
Murdoch anticipated something like Moyal-Sharrock’s criticism
as early as 1970 (Murdoch 1997, 328), and in MGM she explicitly
and repeatedly states that the evaluative character of consciousness
‘need not imply that all states of consciousness are evaluating or can
be evaluated’ (MGM, 167). She does not deny that we make scien-
tific or commonsense statements. To this end, she acknowledges that
‘the proposition that “the cat is on the mat” is true, indicates a fact, if
the cat is on the mat’ (MGM, 26). Similarly, propositions can express
aesthetic evaluations, as, for example, when we admire a person’s ele-
gant bearing, take delight in a charming flower, or marvel at an impos-
ing cathedral. Taking up the question of aesthetic consciousness, also
in response to Diamond’s scholarship, Sabina Lovibond argues that
we need not adopt a morality-centred answer to the question of what
makes life valuable. She interprets Wittgenstein (of the Notebooks, at
least) as characterising the good human life by its contemplative, rather
than explicitly moral, character. In such a life, we look upon the world
with ‘a happy eye’, experiencing it ‘as if it were a felicitous compo-
sition’. We can thus live a good life ‘from simply being in the world’
(Lovibond 2007, 308, italics hers).
Murdoch acknowledges aesthetic consciousness of the kind Lovibond
describes—we only need to think of her kestrel example (Murdoch 1997,
369). Unlike Lovibond, however, she does not countenance that aes-
thetics may constitute an alternative to morals in regard to what gives
life meaning. Neither does she suggest that aesthetic, commonsense and
scientific concepts be conflated with moral concepts. Rather, Murdoch
argues that progress within any of these concepts involves learning.8
Learning a concept is not a discrete activity and neither does it result
from the sheer effort of will. We do not simply pick and choose our
concepts or how we are to go about understanding them. The labour
involved in deepening and refining our conceptual understanding is dif-
fuse. This is because a concept is less like ‘a ring’ and more like an orien-
tation or way of ‘grasping’ experience (Murdoch 1997, 40). Individuals
130 M. J. LAVERTY

are always conceiving reality, even in moments when they are not think-
ing or deliberating about it. While conceptual labour might be diffuse,
we know that learning is possible in light of how it transforms vision and
brings reality into view. Inspired by real and increasingly well-discerned
standards of perfection—whether commonsensical, scientific or aes-
thetic—we make progress in our understanding and appreciation of what
is perfect.
Thus, learning confers a moral significance upon progressively chang-
ing consciousness, regardless of whether it results in new or modified
action. Consciousness becomes more, or less, discerning as a result
of its own activity. Moreover, as consciousness becomes more truth-
ful, the individual’s understanding—indeed, his or her entire orienta-
tion to the world—moves further away from appearance toward reality.
Egoistic vision and energy (Eros) is purified and made more spiritual.
As Murdoch explains, ‘what we attend to, how we attend, whether we
attend’ matters because our experiences—whether situations, things,
people or activities—are not available to us under generic descriptions
(MGM, 167). Rather, their descriptions reflect our unique, contempo-
raneous position in the world, as well as our orientation to it, in terms
of what we desire and value. To quote Diamond, we do not ‘inhabit the
same perceptible, describable world’ because our understanding of sit-
uations, people and things is always ‘irreducibly evaluative’ (Diamond
1996, 85).
Whether we attend, how we attend and what we attend to matters,
because these acts of attention have a formative impact on the changing
quality of consciousness. The problem is that we cannot precisely predict
what the formative impact of these efforts will be. Our ability to manage
and direct the progressive process is so limited that Murdoch compares
it to breathing (MGM, 458). As with breathing, the progressive process
is continuous, and so much a part of the background that it is hard to
know what effect, if any, our mental states and behaviours will have on
the quality of our consciousness now and in the future. Simone Weil
conveys this idea when she writes about what it is like to labour over a
geometry problem for an hour and be no closer to a solution:

We have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in

another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling
it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul …
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 131

Moreover, it may very likely be felt in some department of the intelligence

in no way connected with mathematics. Perhaps he who made the unsuc-
cessful effort will one day be able to grasp the beauty of a line of Racine
more vividly on account of it. (Weil 1951, 58)

Everything, including cooking pea soup and working on a geometry

problem, informs the changing quality of consciousness, even if we can-
not determine that formative influence. For this reason, Murdoch con-
cludes that morality has to do with ‘all apprehensions of others, all lonely
reveries, all uses of time’ (MGM, 177). The import of how we occupy
ourselves in these moments will only become apparent with time and
experience.
Consciousness is characterised not only by qualitative change, but
also by a ‘searching for coherence (“making sense of things”)’ (MGM,
195). In Murdoch’s account of this search for meaning, she is—despite
being a novelist—surprisingly silent on the subject of the narrative unity
of a life.9 Instead, she derives her conception of unity from art, which
includes listening to a symphony, reading a poem, or admiring a paint-
ing. Stories count as artistic wholes but are not privileged. I suggest that
Murdoch, like her fellow perfectionist, Stanley Cavell, believes that the
endlessness of the task requires us, as a matter of principle, to remain
open to new and imaginative ways of unifying consciousness and under-
standing life (Crary 2014). Moreover, she is attuned to the fact that
any apprehension of absolute value is going to unify life qualitatively (as
opposed to episodically): life’s meaning is less a matter of what we do
and more a matter of the values that get expressed in the pattern of our
doings.
While Murdoch thinks that we cannot do without such limited
wholes, she cautions us against seeking refuge in them. According to
Murdoch, some of our unifying pictures or stories ‘arrest our progress’
because they are too dramatic or consoling—‘tragic’ ‘is another comfort
word’ (MGM, 456, 458). No life is so bleak that it prohibits learning.
Despite the moral failings—ignorance, injustice, and evil—Murdoch
concludes that life is subject to ‘the remarkable continued return to the
idea of goodness as unique and absolute’ (MGM, 427). Inspired by real
standards of perfection, we make real progress. In the final analysis, the
experience of learning teaches us—we finite, flawed, erotic creatures—
the necessity and sovereignty of the Good.
132 M. J. LAVERTY

Education as the Finding, Founding,

and Funding of Values

Murdoch understands better than most philosophers that humans find

the promise of a progressive understanding or genuine growth deeply
alluring. As finite, flawed, erotic creatures, we yearn to voyage and to
return home, to seek new frontiers and to find refuge, to innovate and to
conserve, to give birth to children and to mourn the dead. These univer-
sal, abiding and multi-faceted yearnings disclose values that are authori-
tative, necessary and transformative. These values are determinations of
an inexhaustible reality that calls upon us to respond in appropriate ways.
The progressive nature of our understanding and our lives—the fact that
both can become deeper, more nuanced, and more refined—undermines
the view that such values are merely subjective, arbitrary, hypotheti-
cal or contingent. For Murdoch, we cannot imagine life without such
values: they cannot be ‘thought away’ from human existence (MGM,
427). This is not because we have been taught to believe in them—as we
might have been taught to believe in God—but because without them
we would be unable to make sense of our experience—unable to make
even the most trivial decisions that beset us daily, let alone the large and
life-altering decisions that inevitably confront us.
Put differently, what is found to be most perfect is found to exist
necessarily—thus, Murdoch refers to certainty as the alternative face
of necessity. We discern our experiences more clearly as we deepen our
appreciation of the values that claim us. These values are found to be
‘fundamental, essential and necessary’ because they uniquely foster ‘our
sense of reality’ (MGM, 430, 399). In such contexts, judgments of
appreciation and approbation arise, not as ‘expressive attitudes’, but as
‘themselves a grasp of reality’ (MGM, 418). Values enhance our grasp of
reality in two principal ways. First, they allow aspects of our experience
to ‘show up’ in ways that were previously unavailable to us: we see subtle
variations in colour, the solitary silhouette of a tree, the wistful expres-
sion on a dog’s face, or a child’s intense consternation. In the words of
Murdoch, ‘the selfish self-interestedly casual or callous man sees a differ-
ent world from that which the careful scrupulous just man sees’ (MGM,
177, emphasis hers). Second, and not unrelated, these values illuminate
our own failings and faults in a manner that opens the way for the work
of overcoming and fixing them. Our growth is a constant source of
new knowledge and understanding because we are continually coming
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 133

to recognise the unimportance of what we once deemed important

(MGM, 430).
This process of becoming progressively more conscious of what is
worth desiring is a fundamental aspect of our intellectual and artistic
activities. We discover that, just as there is a more elegant solution to
a mathematical problem, there is a better way to cope with a troubled
relationship. Eventually we understand that life itself can be lived well or
badly and that we can become better or worse individuals (MGM, 438).
Nor is our yearning to make meaningful progress in our lives separate
from our yearning to make music, study history, take photographs, paint
pictures, perform plays, sail ships, build houses or write literature. The
standards belonging to such activities inspire love and, because love can-
not be willed, these standards are experienced as real and binding. For
example, philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky evocatively describes the
experience of our philosophic spirit encountering an authentic philo-
sophical gesture:

our hearts leap to our chests, the tears come to our eyes, we are prone to
think we are crazy and we would like often enough to set the whole thing
down, to turn or tear ourselves away. But we are done for, claimed: we
belong to what we have scented – unquenchably, uncompromisingly, and
indeed sometimes unhappily – until we die. (Zwicky 2015, 286)

To pursue how Zwicky invests a familiar moment with dramatic signif-

icance, we only need to consider our desire to set apart certain books,
music or art as truly great because we believe that they, above others, are
‘revelatory’ (Gaita 2001, 9). Zwicky conveys the spellbinding power of
such artistic and intellectual achievements by dramatising the magnetic
force that philosophical excellence has on the consciousness of a philoso-
pher. Zwicky’s description also reveals how this magnetism might moti-
vate a philosopher to undertake the long and arduous task of learning
how to do it better: seeking to eliminate what is bad or faulty to allow
for the integration of only the good elements (Zwicky 2015, 287–289).
Artistic and intellectual activities exercise a magnetic pull on our con-
sciousness and desires because they constitute innumerable forms of what
is truly good. The magnetism of these activities makes us willing to per-
severe: we struggle to learn piano or painting, despite the slow progress,
and the demanding nature, of the task, because the imagined goodness
of this activity has a powerful hold on our consciousness. Motivated by
134 M. J. LAVERTY

love of the activity and its perceived value, the individual undertakes it,
becoming more practised over time. It is by such means that the indi-
vidual acquires aptitude and understanding and is transformed by the
experience. Murdoch refers to this entire process as a ‘love of perfection’
(MGM, 438) and argues that the activities we pursue reward us for our
dedication and discipline by affording us new insights, new powers, and
significant breakthroughs.
Murdoch illustrates this educative process with her analysis of the
slave boy in Plato’s dialogue Meno. The dialogue opens with the title
character, Meno, posing a set of questions: ‘Can you tell me, Socrates –
is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice? Or
is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural apti-
tude or something else?’ (Plato 1972, 115/70a). Socrates responds with
the proposal that they first answer the logically prior question regarding
the nature of virtue. At a certain point in the inquiry, Meno begins to
show signs of frustration and appears as though he might abandon the
conversation. In an effort to entertain and instruct Meno (and perhaps
also to shame him), Socrates guides Meno’s slave to discover the solution
to a geometrical problem by asking him a series of leading questions. Of
the slave’s learning, Murdoch writes:

The slave solving the geometrical problem is orienting himself towards,

bringing his attention to bear upon, something dark and alien, on which
light then falls, and which he ‘makes his own’. He ‘sees’ an object invisible
but grasped as ‘there’, he is able to concentrate and attend. (To attend is
also to wait.) These familiar metaphors are important. It is then as if he
always knew it and was remembering it. The process of discovery is to be
thought of as accompanied or motivated by a passion or a desire which is
increased and purified in the process … This is something which we can all
recognise and which can be illustrated in many different kinds of activity.
(MGM, 400)

The terms of Murdoch’s analysis are eminently pedagogical. Solving

the geometrical problem involves struggle: the slave must make himself
concentrate and attend. This is particularly difficult because the object
of his attention is ‘something dark and alien’. He needs to concentrate
without being apprised of what he needs to concentrate on. The slave
must wait for the solution to dawn upon him as the problem comes into
view. Ideally, his desire to solve the geometrical problem is increased,
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 135

intensified and purified as his process of discovery progresses. Finally,

echoing Plato, Murdoch claims that once the discovery has been made, it
is as if the slave always knew it and only needed it to be recalled.
Such ‘certainties’ or ‘recollections’ are not, as Murdoch points out,
‘solitary revelations’ (MGM, 400). They occur against the background
of a shared disciplinary practice. This is important, because sustained
involvement in geometry, for example, increases the student’s confi-
dence in his or her own judgments. The student grows to trust his or
her own thinking about geometry precisely because that thinking has
been disciplined by the sustained and self-corrective practice of having to
undertake the work of solving geometry problems. Admittedly, learning
geometry involves ‘learning all sorts of strange tricks, but fundamentally
it is learning how to make a formal utterance of a perceived truth and
render it splendidly worthy of a trained purified attention without fal-
sifying it in the process’ (MGM, 458–459). Here, Murdoch is speaking
of art, not geometry, but Murdoch’s assessment is also applicable in this
context because the kinds of activities that Murdoch considers educa-
tive or truth-seeking need not be overtly artistic, intellectual or removed
from everyday life (MGM, 195).
Put simply, a truth-seeking activity is any activity that admits of being
perfected, and the effort, discipline, and dedication involved in perfect-
ing the activity serve to perfect those individuals engaged in it. To learn
an instrument is to learn to play that instrument well; to learn philoso-
phy is to learn how to philosophise well. Experts and novices alike dis-
cern a gap between the way that they undertake an activity and the way
in which it ought to be undertaken. To discern that gap is to want to
close it, to strive to perfect the activity. These activities provide a sense of
direction and of how we might move in that direction: of what we need
to improve. Our engagement in them reveals that ‘we are changed by
love and pursuit of what we only partly see and understand’ (MGM, 22).
Learning to become skilful in such an activity is also rewarded by what
R.F. Holland describes as ‘an indefinite progression of the work, with the
possibility of advancement and the growth of comprehension and the
natural joy that attends the exercise of a human faculty’ (Holland 1980,
56). This long-term feature of truth-seeking activities is illustrated dra-
matically in the following passage from Simone Weil’s essay on reading:

For the sailor, for the experienced captain, his boat has become in a sense
an extension of his own body; it is an instrument by which to read the
136 M. J. LAVERTY

tempest, and he reads it very differently than a passenger does. Where the
passenger reads chaos and unlimited danger, the captain reads necessities,
limited dangers, resources for escaping, and an obligation to be coura-
geous and honorable. (Weil 2015, 26)10

The captain in Weil’s example trusts his reading of the situation because
over time his progressive understanding has proved increasingly trust-
worthy. Moreover, he appreciates that his reality will continue to yield
up its secrets the longer he sails. Truth and progress are the rewards for
trained effort (MGM, 400).
Drawing upon the scholarship of Talbot Brewer, we might attribute
the indefinite nature of progress in truth-seeking activities to their dia-
lectical nature (Brewer 2009; see also Cordner 2015 and Laverty 2015).
According to Brewer, individuals engage in dialectical activities ‘on the
strength of an as-yet-indistinct intimation of their intrinsic value’. Such
activities have ‘a self-unveiling character’ in that their constitutive ideals
and internal goods are progressively clarified by means of the learner’s
ongoing engagement in them. Thus, that engagement is characterised by
a dialectic of searching and finding. And, if the constitutive ideals and
internal goods are ‘complex and elusive enough’, then ‘this dialectical
process can be reiterated indefinitely’ (Brewer 2009, 37). Nothing about
our progressive achievements ‘annihilates the task’ because the fulfil-
ment of one constitutive ideal in turn reveals another, more demanding
one. For Holland, this dialectical progression ‘relates to betterment, not
in the sophistical sense, but in the absolute sense of getting better and
being better’ (Holland 1980, 57–58): betterment in the sophistical sense
connotes advancement in relation to someone else or to getting ahead in
the world, whereas betterment in the absolute sense connotes achieve-
ment that is determined internal to the activity or practice and that can
be indefinitely reiterated.
Murdoch gives the example of learning Russian, having studied it for
much of her adult life. When learning Russian, she is ‘confronted by an
authoritative structure which commands [her] respect. The task is diffi-
cult, and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable.’ The
language exists independently and is something that her ‘consciousness
cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal’ (Murdoch 1997,
373). It presents her with an arduous task which, if she is to persevere
and make progress, requires piety, honesty, and humility. The reward is a
‘knowledge of reality’ that finds expression in a vocabulary of secondary
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 137

normative terms—colourful, elegant, facile, sloppy, delicate, tender,

noble, delightful, parsimonious and forceful—that Murdoch can then
use to describe and defend her love and progressive understanding of
Russian language and literature (see Higgins 2018, 139–145). As her
understanding progresses, she becomes a more adept speaker and reader;
she is more discriminating in her choice of Russian words and more dis-
cerning in her appreciation of their meaning.
Truth-seeking activities imply mastery—a concept that has a long his-
tory in education. Murdoch, like Weil, focuses on the role of attentiveness
or ‘attentive waiting’ (MGM, 323) to accentuate that while someone (like
herself) might yearn to be fluent in Russian, the progress that she makes is
not deliberate or willed.11 Although truth-seeking activities require disci-
pline and practice, improvement is at best ‘piecemeal’ and does not occur
at our behest. Our efforts simply prepare us for the occasion of being
taught. Mastery arrives—it is bestowed upon us as an occasion of grace—
and is never made final. Because mastery comes to us from ‘the outside’,
it makes us feel that our human endeavours have been given ‘supernatu-
ral assistance’ (Murdoch 1997, 334). Mastery invites humility not because
there is more to do and to know, although this is indeed true, but because
it establishes the necessary existence of that which is not of the self: the
hypothetical (everything about us) is temporarily eclipsed by the categori-
cal (a reality that transcends us). It is a mistake to think that Murdoch val-
ues truth-seeking activities because we lose ourselves in practising them;
rather, her interest is inspired by the fact that incremental improvements
in knowledge, technique and expertise persuade us of, and return us to, a
reality that is experienced as absolutely good. Although a masterly artistic
performance must come to a close, its spellbinding beauty endures.
Progress in a truth-seeking activity implies attentiveness which Zwicky
illustratively defines as ‘an egoless availability’ (Zwicky 2015, 292). To
acquire mastery is not to zero in on a target; rather, it comes from a
place of quiet silence or internal stillness. This ready receptivity allows
values to ‘show up’ as stretched between the truth-seeking mind and
the world. Reality is made radiant with a beauty that invites us to feel at
home in a world uniquely sustained by love.12 Education does not just
wake us up to the world: it bids us to ‘be at home in [it] … despite the
ill’ (Holland 1980, 59). To be at home in the world despite the ill is to
find refuge (MGM, 8)—a condition of absolute safety. It is to feel held
by the world’s absolute goodness and is, according to Murdoch, ‘a pure
untainted source of spiritual power’ (MGM, 430).
138 M. J. LAVERTY

Wittgenstein refers to the feeling of absolute safety as an e­thical

stance which he contrasts with a ‘relative stance’ (Wittgenstein 1965,
5). According to him, whereas the relative stance can be justified
empirically—examples include ‘This man is a good runner’ and ‘This
is the right way to Granchester’ (Wittgenstein 1965, 6), the ethical
stance is not a matter of empirical fact. Other instances of the ethical
stance include ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ (Wittgenstein
1965, 8; Murdoch 1997, 269) and ‘I have found in you my soulmate’.
Empirically speaking, no one is absolutely safe nor can they imagine the
world not existing. Nonetheless we find the ethical stance intelligible. It
encapsulates our desire both to go beyond anything we might say or do
in our lives with concepts, and to reflect upon the whole of life’s mean-
ing with the very same concepts. In Wittgenstein’s terms, Murdoch
argues that truth-seeking activities invite the ethical stance.
For the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and the twentieth-century neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, the pur-
suit of science—botany in the case of Rousseau and chemistry in the case
of Sacks—contributed to a deep sense of the world as absolutely good,
allowing each of them to feel at home in it, despite the persecution,
war, strife, corruption and isolation that they saw around them. Their
passion for science filled them with wonder, excitement, joy, fulfilment,
and gratitude. Within the context of their scientific pursuits, they were
able to experience the constancy of the new: for Rousseau, there were
new places to visit and new plants to identify; for Sacks, there were new
chemicals to experiment with in new ways. Another appeal of these sci-
entific persuits was the sense that beyond the familiarity and variety of
nature, they were making contact with ‘a dark, hidden world of myste-
rious laws and phenomena’ (Sacks 1999, 58). By studying plants and
elements, Rousseau and Sacks would occasionally discover ‘the rea-
son and purpose of their varied structures’ (Rousseau 1992, 115). This
gave them many happy moments, and filled them with gratitude—what
Rousseau called the ‘admiration of the hand that allows me to enjoy all
this’ (Rousseau 1992, 115).
Activities like these intimate a sense of the sacredness of life but need
not be accompanied by any metaphysical commitments. The cellist, com-
poser, and conductor Pablo Casals, echoes and exemplifies the idea.

For the past eight years I have started each day in the same manner. It is
not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 139

the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues by Bach. I cannot think
of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is
not its only meaning for me. It is a re-discovery of the world of which
I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder
of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.
The music is never the same for me, never. Each day it is something new,
fantastic and unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle! (Casals
1970, 17)13

Casals describes Bach’s music as miraculous because despite having

played the preludes and fugues for eight years, his experience of the
music is always new. There is no accounting for the newness of the music
and rediscovery of the world that accompanies it. We expect the routine,
no matter how pleasant, to produce ennui. It simply should not be the
case that the same music played each day by Casals for eight years turns
out to be ‘never the same’. Yet, the more Casals plays these preludes and
fugues, the more remarkable and life-giving they become. The more
time and energy dedicated to mastering such an art, the more the activ-
ity opens the world up, not only to our understanding but also to our
appreciation of what is absolutely valuable and we experience this appre-
ciation as wonder and joy.
It must not be overlooked that Casals was a professional cellist who
started each day by playing the piano; Murdoch was a contemporary
author and a philosopher who dedicated part of her adult life to learn-
ing Russian; Sacks was a neuroscientist with a love of chemistry; and
Rousseau discovered botany in his twilight years. It is impossible to
know in advance the truth-seeking activities that will inspire us and how
they will live on in our futures. It is also true that our truth-seeking
activities can idle (Murdoch 1997, 334). In such moments, we pursue
these activities (speaking, writing, cooking, sailing, or playing the piano)
practically, failing to attune ourselves to their truth-seeking or perfection-
ist dimensions. In these moments, we must be reminded that no matter
how accustomed to, or expert in, an activity we have become, new pos-
sibilities for growth reside in the gap between what is and what could
be the case. Once back on the path of truth- or perfection-seeking, the
activity resumes as a journey toward understanding of self and the world.
The activity then once again informs our broader conception and love of
what it means to do anything well, including, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, what it means to live well.
140 M. J. LAVERTY

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have addressed the central and vital role of education in
Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. Against the backdrop of her (Platonic) idea
of life as a spiritual pilgrimage, I have considered two essential aspects of
her thinking. First, I interpreted her belief in the omnipresence of moral-
ity as an implication of her perfectionism. Second, I considered activities
that Murdoch thinks provide a kind of proof for the necessity and sov-
ereignty of the Good. My analysis suggested that a fuller understanding
of these activities can prove philosophically instructive. With an infinite
set of activities that might be classified as truth-seeking, individuals are
capable of pursuing many of them at once: their learnings can take place
on plural paths. In fact, our lives are made up of many, various and com-
plex combinations of these very activities. There is thus an isomorphism
between the singular life each of us leads and the individual activities that
comprise it. Such activities deepen the meaning of our lives and move us
toward a sense of the absolute.

Acknowledgements Thanks to René Arcilla, Diana Barnes, Gillian Dooley,

Maughn Rollins Gregory, Nora Hämäläinen, David T. Hansen, Rachel Longa,
and Laurance J. Splitter for discussion and helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes
1. One exception is Evans (2009).
2. See Murdoch (1993, 1998) and Dooley (2003).
3. See Buchmann (1989), McDonough (2000) and Olsson (2018).
4. See Jonas (2016) and Nakazawa (2018).
5. Freudian psychoanalysis figures more prominently in Metaphysics as Guide
to Morals than in The Sovereignty of Good which indicates that Murdoch
grew to appreciate Freud’s affinity with Plato. In MGM, she refers to
Freud more than once as a ‘self-styled modern disciple of Plato’ (MGM,
20).
6. For discussion of Murdoch on philosophy and literature, see Forsberg
(2013, 2015) and Hämäläinen (2015, 133–184).
7. See also Cordner and Gleeson (2016).
8. See Laverty (2007, 2009) and Forsberg (2013, 2017).
9. See Gaita (1991, 134–136), MacIntyre (2007) and Brewer (2009).
10. See also Yoda (2017).
11. For discussion of Murdoch on attention, see Cordner (2009, 2016) and
Forsberg (2017).
 9 IRIS MURDOCH AS EDUCATOR 141

12. See Gaita (2001, 199–200), Holland (1980) and Zwicky (2015).

13. For discussion of this passage, see Holland (1980, 59–60), Gaita (1991,
214–215).

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Sacks, O. 1999. Brilliant light: A chemical boyhood. New Yorker, 20 December.
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Weil, S. 1951. Reflections on the right use of school studies with a view to the
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G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Weil, S. 2015. Simone Weil: Later philosophical writings, trans. Eric O. Springsted
and Lawrence E. Schmidt. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1965. A lecture on ethics. The Philosophical Review 74
(1): 3–12.
Yoda, K. 2017. An approach to Simone Weil’s philosophy of education through
the notion of reading. Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (6): 663–682.
Zwicky, Jan. 2015. Alcibiades’ love. In Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and
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M. McGhee, 283–298. Wiley Blackwell.
 CHAPTER 10

‘I Think I Disagree’: Murdoch

on Wittgenstein and Inner Life
(MGM Chapter 9)

Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

Introduction
After receiving a copy of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth
MGM) from Iris Murdoch, her friend Brian Medlin writes back: ‘your
beautiful big book arrived a few days ago and I have been dipping
into [it?] with pleasure. So far I think I disagree with what you say in
“Wittgenstein and the Inner Life,” but I’ll have to make sure that I’ve
understood you aright (so there!) before I launch into a complaint’
(Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 174). Reading Murdoch’s chapter, many
may tend to be of the same opinion as Medlin without being able to
pinpoint precisely what Murdoch gets wrong in her treatment of
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy—it is telling that Medlin never returns
to the question in his later letters. The aim of this chapter is to untan-
gle Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein’s investigations of the inner,
and I will argue that one important problem with this reading is that

A.-M. S. Christensen (*)

Syddansk Universitet, Odense, Denmark

© The Author(s) 2019 145

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_10
146 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

it is ambivalent. On the one hand, Murdoch explicitly notes how

Wittgenstein is concerned with ‘what philosophers, and laymen, wrongly
picture or imagine’ (MGM, 288), and that he aims to dissolve precon-
ceived, but illusory ideas of the inner. On the other hand, she treats
several of Wittgenstein’s investigations as if they are in fact constructive
pieces of philosophy aimed to change our conception of the inner, espe-
cially in her remarks on Wittgenstein’s example of sensation S and his
notion of lifeform, which leads her to the conclusion that ‘Wittgenstein
has been forcing upon us a certain picture of experience as a kind of illu-
sion, thereby discrediting the density and the real existence of inner
thinking (“inner life”)’ (MGM, 279).
In the following, I will trace Murdoch’s involvement with
Wittgenstein’s philosophy and reconstruct her reasons for this conclu-
sion, which, among other things, include her acceptance of Saul Kripke’s
sceptical reading of the rule-following considerations, and I will show
that she is wrong to read Wittgenstein’s therapeutic involvement with
certain philosophical mistakes as substantial, philosophical theses. In
closing, I will argue that if Murdoch had not misread the Investigation
in certain ways, she may have found Wittgenstein to be, if not a com-
panion, then an ally in her own endeavour to restore and re-direct phil-
osophical interest in how the inner can play a transformative role in
relation to language and moral life.

Preparations and Anticipations

In order to identify what worries Brian Medlin and many other readers
of Murdoch’s treatment of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in MGM, I
will begin by considering some of the remarks on Wittgenstein’s philoso-
phy that precede the discussion in Chapter 9. In several places, Murdoch
discusses Wittgenstein’s first work, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, espe-
cially his remarks on ethics and the idea ‘that ethics cannot be put into
words’ (Wittgenstein 1961, 6.421), and she expresses some sympathy
for what she sees as Wittgenstein’s attempt to ‘segregate value in order
to keep it pure and untainted’ (MGM, 25), that is, to indicate the area
of value by being silent about it, even if Murdoch ultimately sees this
attempt as misguided, resting on a mistaken acceptance of a philosophi-
cal separation of fact and value.1 More important for an understanding of
Chapter 9 is what Murdoch writes about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy,
and I think it may prove instructive to consider three distinctive and rep-
resentative remarks on the Philosophical investigations:
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 147

One of the emotions likely to be aroused by reading the Investigations

is a sense of loss. … What we ‘lose’ in the Investigations is some sort of
inner thing. As we pursue Wittgenstein’s arguments, and do his ‘exercises’,
about ‘following a rule’ and how meaning is not a ‘mental process’, we
may (rightly) become convinced (for instance) that we do not need mental
samples to recognise chairs, or memory images to have memories. But we
may also end up feeling that we cannot now justify the reality or identity of
our most important thoughts and most precious awarenesses. We are los-
ing the detail. (MGM, 49)
These forms of arguments in removing old Cartesian errors, may indeed
seem to render problematic the common-sense conception of the individ-
ual self as a moral centre or substance. [We] feel that we have lost some-
thing: our dense familiar inner stuff, private and personal, with a quality
and a value of its own, something which we can scrutinise and control.
(MGM, 153).
‘Do not try to analyse your own inner experience’ (Investigations II, xi,
204) may be seen also as a suggestion that one should not attach too
much significance to (probably egoistic and senseless) inner chat. Silence
becomes the inner as well as the outer person … It is one thing to pres-
ent sound anti-Cartesian critical arguments about sense data, momentary
inner certainties, or the role of memory images in remembering; it is quite
another to sweep aside as irrelevant a whole area of our private reflections,
which we may regard as the very substance of our soul and our being, as
somehow unreal, otiose, without relevant quality or value. (MGM, 157)

There is a lot to take note of in these quotes, but I will try to focus on
the two most obvious points. One such point is that Murdoch here uses
a (for a philosopher at least) highly emotional language; the remarks are
pervaded with a sense of loss, of alarm and worry, and a fear of over-
looking or even eliminating a tremendously important element in human
life, and through her remarks flows a current of frustration with or even
resentment towards Wittgenstein for not seeing the dangers that his
way of doing philosophy pose to our inner lives. Something important
is at stake for Murdoch, and this leads us to the second point, namely
her ambivalent or conflicted attitude towards Wittgenstein’s later writ-
ings. Wittgenstein’s work is presented as constructive and necessary, but
also as disappointing and even dangerous, as if Wittgenstein, in work-
ing to alleviate Cartesian influences on our thinking about the inner, also
does something else which endangers invaluable features of our inner
lives. Even if Murdoch does not initially see Wittgenstein as opposed to
the inner, she does see him as negligent, irresponsible and blind to the
148 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

workings of his writings in a way that is both philosophically and morally

reproachable.
We may find it surprising that Murdoch does not take a more straight-
forward, critical stance in relation to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy
because what she thinks it endangers is, according to the above quotes,
really no small matter; it is nothing less than ‘the reality or identity of
our most important thoughts and most precious awarenesses’, ‘the
detail’, ‘the individual self as a moral centre or substance’, ‘our private
reflections’, in sum, ‘the very substance of our soul and our being’.
These are serious allegations, but are they really appropriate? This ques-
tion is difficult to answer, especially because Murdoch does very little to
situate her critique, she does for example not engage in any close read-
ings of the Investigations. It is therefore not entirely obvious how she
thinks Wittgenstein’s reflections of the inner can lead us astray.
One way to trace the source of Murdoch’s worries is to look at the
one sentence that she does quote from the Investigations: ‘Do not try to
analyse your own inner experience.’ Murdoch presents this quote to sup-
port the idea that Wittgenstein rejects representations of the inner that
lead us into mistakes in philosophy, but she then adds that it may also
be seen as warning against placing too much significance on ‘inner chat’.
Furthermore, when she re-quotes the sentence again in Chapter 9, she
offers an even stronger interpretation: ‘This sounds more like moral or
religious advice: do not spend time scrutinising your conscience’ (MGM,
270), adding, later in the chapter, ‘Perhaps Wittgenstein was pointing to
the necessity, at least the desirability, of an inner silence’ (MGM, 282).
We may speculate that Murdoch transfers the Tractarian emphasis on
silence to her reading of the Investigations, but the question is whether
this transferral is justified with regard to this particular sentence.
The quoted sentence is taken from what was originally published as
the second half of the Investigations, in the latest edition renamed the
Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment, and it occurs in a section where
Wittgenstein discusses an example of a person who describes her particu-
lar impression of a picture. Wittgenstein writes, ‘So a perfectly specific
description was given.—Was it seeing, or was it a thought?’, to which he
notes, ‘Don’t try to analyse the experience within yourself’ (Wittgenstein
2009, PPF §187–188, 215; italics mine). The central question is what
use the sentence quoted by Murdoch has in this context. It ­certainly
appears as if it is an integrated part of this specific investigation of
experiences of pictures, warning us that the answer to the preceding
­
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 149

question is not to be found within a particular mental experience. This

interpretation of the sentence is supported by the new and improved
translation of the Investigations (which, of course, was not available to
Murdoch), where the German ‘das Erlebnis’ is translated as ‘the expe-
rience’, showing that the phrase straightforwardly refers to the specific
experience of the person of the example and does not imply anything
general, either positive or negative, about Wittgenstein’s view of the
significance of attending to inner experience, in contrast to Elizabeth
Anscombe’s original translation, where ‘das Erlebnis’ became ‘your
own inner experience’. At least in this instance, Brian Medlin’s reserva-
tions towards Murdoch’s readings of Wittgenstein seem to be justified.
However, we still have not discovered the reasons for Murdoch’s gen-
eral mistrust of Wittgenstein’s treatment of the inner, and the aim of the
investigation of Chapter 9 will therefore be to identify these reasons.

Wittgenstein and the Inner Life

At the start of Chapter 9, Murdoch provides a framework for her reading
of Wittgenstein’s work: ‘Modern philosophy, in parting company with
Descartes, has also rightly disposed of various metaphysical entities pos-
tulated by previous philosophers’ she writes, adding, ‘Yet for instance,
when reading Wittgenstein, we may worry about “inner life”. Can there
not be too fierce a removal of entities deemed to be unnecessary and
unknowable?’ (MGM, 269–270). In the attempt to identify how the
Investigations may involve a ‘too fierce removal’ of inner life, I will focus
on two topics, Murdoch’s discussion of the example of sensation S and
her understanding of Wittgenstein’s notion of lifeform, largely influ-
enced by Saul Kripke.
In §258 of the Investigations, Wittgenstein imagines an example
where he (and not Wittgenstein’s S man’, as Murdoch writes) writes the
sign ‘S’ every time he has a particular sensation. What makes this exam-
ple special is that Wittgenstein’s writing of the sign is guided only by his
inward attention to the isolated experience of sensation S; as the exam-
ple is made out, he therefore cannot refer to a definition or any other
form of criteria in order to determine whether he uses the sign ‘S’ cor-
rectly. Sensation S is, in this way, essentially private, and, according to
Wittgenstein, this means that in the example, ‘I have no criterion of cor-
rectness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem correct to me
is correct. And that only means that here we can’t talk about “correct”’
150 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

(Wittgenstein 2009, §258). Wittgenstein thus challenges philosophical

ideas of essentially private inner entities and ostensive definitions, and the
possibility of establishing a meaningful sign that does not have any con-
nections to our actions, practices, or other uses of language.
Murdoch reacts quite strongly to this example, remarking that
‘Wittgenstein’s S man is a prisoner of Wittgenstein’s relentless thinking,
part of a general attack upon the (his) concepts of “private language”
and “inner process”’ (MGM, 273). In arguing for this conclusion,
Murdoch describes the example as ‘a tailormade situation designed to
show the emptiness of the inner when not evidently connected with the
outer’, and she objects that:

in real life, the owner of S would be an individual living in time.

Wittgenstein’s example suggests but a perfunctory interrogation. The
truth or falsehood of the claim is not allowed into the picture, which
would include an immense number of details about character and situa-
tion. (MGM, 273)

Leaving aside the fact that the owner of S, Wittgenstein, was at some
point a living individual, it seems safe to say that Wittgenstein would
completely agree with Murdoch’s description. This is the point of his
example, this is what it is meant to capture: the futility involved in philo-
sophical attempts to refer to sensations without relying on the ‘immense
number of details’ that would allow for meaningful talk of such sensa-
tions. Wittgenstein’s is not attacking sensation S, he is trying to show
that sensation S is a philosophical fiction that has nothing to do with
our experiences of sensations, because these experiences presuppose and
connect to numerous details in our ordinary lives which also breathe life
into the way we talk about sensations in ordinary language. Wittgenstein
is making the grammatical point that we cannot make sense of philo-
sophical pictures of sensations as absolutely private, isolated inner enti-
ties; he is not, as Murdoch seems to think, making the substantial or
positive point that we never have any personal or individual sensations.
Murdoch’s remark is in fact not an objection to Wittgenstein’s treatment
of the example of sensation S, but rather support for the very point of his
example: that S is not really anything, precisely because it does not con-
nect to anything in our ordinary lives.
Murdoch actually allows that Wittgenstein’s investigations are not
intended as an attack directed against the inner as such. She asks, ‘Surely
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 151

Wittgenstein’s attack on the inner-outer-thing dualism concerns a philo-

sophical mistake and is not intended by him to suggest there is no such
thing as private reflection, or to support a behaviourist ethics?’ (MGM,
270), and she notes that ‘indeed Wittgenstein at moments declares he
is not analysing it [the intense lively privacy of the individual “inner
life”] away. Only pointing out “grammatical mistakes”’ (MGM, 278).
Nonetheless, Murdoch still holds that the way Wittgenstein pursues
and develops his philosophical aim subjects the inner to an unjustified
form of regimentation, and she substantiates this worry by an objec-
tion to Wittgenstein’s point in presenting the example of sensation S:
‘Wittgenstein’s image of “outer criteria” seems, in his use of it, unbear-
ably narrow; and, one feels, motivated by a desire to restrict and curtail
the jumbled field of our inner musings’ (MGM, 275). Murdoch expands
on this critique one page later, writing:

The vast concept of ‘experience’ subsists as something inward (perhaps

images or toothache) but dependent upon, situated by, a public outer,
which has consequences … Truth is not exhibited by an account of an
inner process (all right) but by criteria of truthfulness. How is truthfulness
tested? How is memory tested? By consequences! (MGM, 276)

There is a lot to be untangled here. Murdoch is right that Wittgenstein

uses the example of sensation S, as well as numerous others, to make the
point that references to sensations stand in need of outer criteria or ‘out-
ward criteria’ as Wittgenstein’s original German ‘äusserer Kriterien’ is
best translated. But how are we to understand this point? In Murdoch’s
interpretation, it means that all criteria of truthfulness that can be applied
to the inner ultimately refer to ‘consequences!’
To a certain extent, this is in line with the way that Wittgenstein
describes uses of criteria, for example in this short discussion of confes-
sions, where he notes that

the importance of the true confession does not reside in its being a correct
and certain report of some process. It resides, rather, in the special conse-
quences which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed
by the special criteria of truthfulness. (Wittgenstein 2009, PPF §319, 234)

Whether we live up to criteria, of meaning, of truth or of truthfulness

for example, is, according to Wittgenstein, judged by consequences.
152 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

However, the consequence requirement does not mean that we can only
take something to be meaningful or truthful if it has observable, outer
consequences. We can imagine a case, where I confess to a friend that
I have harboured hidden feelings of envy and resentment towards her
through all our years of friendship, for example because of her unmis-
takeable talent or her privileged background, and that I now promise
to work to change these feelings. What would confirm the truthfulness
of this confession? It may of course be confirmed by observable conse-
quences, that I for example come to express more support in relation to
her successes in life. However, it is also possible that the confession will
not have any ‘outer’ consequences, that it will not make any observa-
ble difference. Maybe I am a skilled hypocrite, or maybe I have flawless
manners that have previously made it possible for me to behave beauti-
fully towards my friend, and because of this, my way of behaving towards
her will not change. Still, if the confession is truthful, it will have what
we may call inner consequences: I will stop indulging in my feelings
of resentment, I will practise feeling happy about my friend’s achieve-
ments etc. The point is that, within a Wittgensteinian framework, such
inner doings also count as consequences that show the truthfulness of
my confession because they are in principle assessible for others. I can
relate them to my friend for example if she later asks whether my feelings
towards her have changed.
What Wittgenstein is objecting to in his discussion of sensation S is
that the very possibility of using outward criteria and of looking for the
consequences of the use of the sign ‘S’ is ruled out beforehand. It is in
this sense that questions of meaning and truth depend on a relation to a
public outer. Wittgenstein is not saying that we can only ascribe meaning
and truth to something that does in fact have overt, observable, outer
consequences, and the Wittgensteinian example of the confession is in
fact quite close to one of Murdoch’s most discussed examples. This is
the case of M and D, where a woman, M, who initially dislikes and dis-
dains her daughter-in-law, D, comes to see that the fault lies not with D,
but with her own perception of and her feelings towards D and there-
fore decides to change these. M ‘observes D or at least reflects deliber-
ately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters’ (Murdoch 2001,
17), but without this change having any influence on her behaviour
towards D which has been impeccable from the beginning. Nothing that
Wittgenstein writes excludes the possibility of such an example, because
even if the change in M’s vision of D is inner and personal, it is not
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 153

private in principle (as sensation S). It is related to many other aspects of

M’s life, and if she wants, M may later talk to others about this change.

The ‘Great Clarity’ of Kripke

So, we return to the question: Why does Murdoch think that the rich-
ness and the reality of the inner is threatened by Wittgenstein’s writings?
I think that part of the reason is Murdoch’s acceptance of the interpre-
tation of the rule-following investigations presented in Saul Kripke’s
influential book, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which she
found had ‘discussed with greater clarity the matter with which I have
been engaged’ (MGM, 283). The focal point of Kripke’s interpretation
of the Investigation is §201, where Wittgenstein writes:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule,

because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule.
The answer was: if every course of action can be brought into accord with
the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there
would be neither accord nor conflict here.

Kripke reads §201 as presenting a genuine sceptical paradox arising from

the insight that neither subjective, inner ‘facts’ about particular humans
nor objective, outer ‘facts’ such as forms of platonic rules can serve as
criteria of correct rule-following and ultimately of correct language
use. Importantly, Murdoch also understands Wittgenstein as engaged
in a fight against a fundamental form of scepticism and remarks on the
Investigations: ‘The question is, as Kripke points out, very like that posed
by Hume. How can we be sure that the future will resemble the past?’
(MGM, 284).
On Kripke’s reading, Wittgenstein is worried that the (apparent)
sceptical conclusion of §201 endangers the very possibility of mean-
ing and language, and he therefore offers a ‘solution’ to the paradox.
On Kripke’s reconstruction, the solution is to adopt a model accord-
ing to which the question of meaningful use will have to be dealt with
on two different levels, one that concerns the individual and one that
concerns the linguistic community. According to Kripke, the scep-
tical paradox means that, at the level of the individual, it is impossible
to distinguish between what seems right and what is right. In this way,
the problem identified by Wittgenstein in relation to the use of the sign
154 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

‘S’ for sensation S is in fact completely general, and Kripke thus sees
Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language as really a sub-part of the
rule-following investigations. If we look at language use from the per-
spective of the individual, we have no criteria of correct use; the individ-
ual is in fact simply doing what she is ‘inclined to’ (Kripke 1982, 88). We
should therefore give up the idea that we can ever talk about meaning in
relation to isolated individuals.
According to Kripke, we should instead change our perspective to
that of the linguistic community. From a third-person perspective, we
can establish or rather reconstruct a criterion of correct rule-following,
namely that the individual acts in a way that accords with the actions of
other competent users of her language, that is, we regard an individual
as a competent language user if her observable behaviours and uses of
language are consistent with the behaviours and uses of other members
of her language community under suitable circumstances. However,
if an individual uses a concept in a way that is statistically deviant and
‘no longer conforms to what the community would do in these circum-
stances, the community can no longer attribute the concept to him’
(Kripke 1982, 95). On this view, the notion of correct language use sim-
ply rests on the possibility of the shared reactions of a group of people,
and the criteria for meaningful language use are fundamentally reduced
to just one, namely that of consistency with the actions of the majority of
members of one’s linguistic community. Moreover, as this criterion does
not involve references to a shared reality or our inner lives, no criterion
of correctness can be applied in relation to the collective behaviour of the
linguistic community. In Crispin Wright’s succinct phrasing, ‘the com-
munity does not go right or wrong, rather it just goes’ (qtd in McDowell
1998, 268).2
What is important in the present context is that Murdoch seems to
accept Kripke’s ‘community view of language’ as the right way to under-
stand Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria of meaningful language use, and
she also uses Kripke’s understanding of language community as a guide
to understand Wittgenstein’s notion of lifeform. Before the section on
Kripke, she notes that ‘Wittgenstein’s Lebensformen are introduced
as fundamental (logical?) judges of the possibility of meaning’ (MGM,
276), and she asks, ‘Is the substratum, what is ultimate, a reliance upon
“general agreement” in a community as an arbiter of sense?’ (MGM,
280–281). Later, she picks up on this idea and notes that Wittgenstein
‘returns to the idea of Lebensformen as something absolutely fundamental
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 155

… A “community” here suggest an enclosure, a dominant group of

judges, or a thoroughly reliable general will’ (MGM, 285). This interpre-
tation of lifeform as the ‘arbiter of sense’ and ‘dominant group of judges’
provokes Murdoch, morally and philosophically. What if the community
is despotic, she asks, what if the statistical dissenters, the nonconform-
ists, are the truly free, artistic renewers of language? Does this view of
lifeform allow for the role and the value of the individual? By reading
Kripke, Murdoch comes to believe that Wittgenstein is engaged in a
fight against scepticism that makes him jeopardise the importance of the
individual and of truth. As she writes, ‘how does all this leave us, the
individuals, where does it leave our thought-stream, our private reflec-
tions, where does it leave truth, if our foundations are so shaky and our
judgements so shadowy?’ (MGM, 272).
My point is that Murdoch is reacting, not to the writings of the
Investigations, but to the ‘great clarity’ of the writings of Kripke. Many
interpreters have objected against the idea that Kripke’s community
view represents an adequate reading or even an adequate reconstruc-
tion of the central parts of the Investigations, and that there is something
wrong with this reading is indicated by the fact that the presentation
of the apparent sceptical conclusion of §201 is immediately followed
by a sentence beginning, ‘That there is a misunderstanding here …’3
Wittgenstein is not addressing a real sceptical challenge, rather, he is
showing how scepticism may arise from certain philosophically mistaken
ways to approach rule-following and language. In §201, he is diagnos-
ing a specific type of philosophical mistake, namely that of seeing basic
rule-following as dependent on interpretations, and what he goes on to
do, is to offer an alternative picture according to which rule-following
and criteria for meaningful language use is considered dependent on, but
not reducible to ‘agreement … in judgments’, ‘the common behaviour of
mankind’ (Wittgenstein 2009, §242, §206).
For the later Wittgenstein, any adequate understanding of language
must take into account an understanding of the common human life-
form consisting of basic human ways of acting, what he sometimes calls
‘the natural history’ of human beings, the fact that ‘Commanding,
questioning, storytelling, chatting are as much a part of our natural his-
tory as walking, eating, drinking, playing’ (Wittgenstein 2009, §25).
Wittgenstein certainly does not reduce criteria for correct language use
to the verdict of ‘a dominant group of judges’ within a community; he
rather holds that the criteria for correct language use will have to be
156 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

settled in each particular instance of use. In fact, the notion of lifeform

is not meant to do any positive work in explaining correct language use;
as an object of comparison (cf. Wittgenstein 2009, §130), this notion
is meant to do work in relation to particular philosophical problems,
reminding us of certain basic facts about humans (for example that they
act and react alike in many ways) that can help us dissolve certain tempt-
ing confusions such as the sceptical confusion that we need ‘a some-
thing’, for example a community of judges, to secure the meaningfulness
of language. The role of Wittgenstein’s notion of lifeform is in fact very
different from the role of the linguistic community in Kripke’s interpreta-
tions of rule-following, and it is also very different from the understand-
ing of ‘Lebensformen’ criticised by Murdoch, for example in her ongoing
critique that Wittgenstein’s notions of lifeform and language game are
not sufficiently well-defined and explained to serve as a foundation of lan-
guage. What Murdoch is missing is that Wittgenstein does not in any way
intend these notions to serve as a foundation of language or meaning,
and this shows that the target of Murdoch’s worries about the dominance
of the community and the elimination of the importance of the individual
is fuelled by Kripke’s writings rather than by Wittgenstein’s.

‘The Wildest Strangest Most Individualistic

Regions of Human Existence’
What I have argued above is that Murdoch probably would have been
in a much better position to understand Wittgenstein’s treatment of the
inner, if she had not turned to Kripke as a guide to the Investigations.
In this last section, I do, however, also argue that there is another rea-
son why Murdoch comes to see herself in opposition to Wittgenstein’s
work, a reason that is internal to her own thought and connected to
the difference between her philosophical interests and the interests of
Wittgenstein. One of the aspects of language that Wittgenstein wants
to bring to the fore in the Investigations is the shared background of
action, activity and practice that makes up the human lifeform. In con-
trast, Murdoch’s primary interest in MGM is to bring out how a person’s
inner life is shaped by a unique web of values, attitudes and emotional
responses that influences and shapes not just that person’s actions and
judgements, but also her experience of reality. Murdoch is interested in
the aspects of experience which are individual and personal, but which at
the same time also have a potential to develop our moral attention.
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 157

In the middle of Chapter 9, Murdoch states this aim by saying that

experience ‘directs us towards the messiness of ordinary life and its mys-
teries’, and she continues, ‘At the borderline of thought and language
we … have to wait and attempt to formulate for ourselves and convey to
others our experience of what is initially beyond and hidden. We look out
into the abyss, into the mystery, intuiting what is not ourselves’ (MGM,
283). Wittgenstein’s interest in language’s embeddedness in a back-
ground of shared human interests and ways of acting makes him atten-
tive to some of our simplest and most common language-games, while
Murdoch’s interest in what appears at the border of individual experience
makes her explore the possibilities of truly individuated experience and
expression, the places where ‘the “goings-on” of language recede from
“clear cases” into the wildest strangest most individualistic regions of
human existence’ (MGM, 285–286).
The individualistic aspects of experience and language are important to
Murdoch because of her two-sided, but also fundamentally individualis-
tic, view of moral vision and development. From Simone Weil, Murdoch
gets the idea that the possibility of moral change is intimately connected
to the quality of our attention towards the reality of what surrounds us
(cf. MGM, 52). This form of attention depends on an effort to truly to
attend to ‘what is there’ and to hold on to a fundamental (but in phi-
losophy all too often neglected) truth about moral life, namely that ‘in
order to be able to see what ought to be done, one should see the faces
of strangers as well as friends’ (MGM, 218). Still, Murdoch is not saying
that attention grants us something like a direct access to our moral reality,
because, according to her, there is no form of seeing that is not shaped
by imagination; when we see a situation, we have already ‘imagined
it in a certain way’ (MGM, 314). For Murdoch, there is a ‘moral sense
of “see” which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination
and moral effort’ (Murdoch 1992, 36), and in this way she thinks that
‘Perception itself is a mode of evaluation’ (MGM, 315). What we see will
on the one hand often be influenced by our egoism and self-serving fan-
tasy, which means that we must work to minimise the distorting influence
of the self, to cast away our egoistic drives and fantasies and engage in
what Murdoch calls ‘unselfing’. However, if we succeed in this process of
unselfing, attention on the other hand also depends on our experiences,
concepts and abilities to imaginatively and creatively explore and expand
our understanding of the world in an effort to come closer to an ade-
quate understanding of what is really there (cf. MGM, 320–323). In this
158 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

way, the act of attending is a creative task that carries a great potential of
moral transformation.
A consequence of Murdoch’s view of attention is that experience
and the inner are never neutral, they are always to some extent morally
coloured. ‘Our ordinary consciousness is a deep continuous working
of values, a continuous present and presence of perceptions, intuitions,
images, feeling, desires, aversions, attachments. It is a matter of what
we “see things as”, what we let, or make, ourselves think about’ (MGM,
215). On this view of experience as the result of a creative and moral
attention to the world, experience is essentially individuated and per-
sonal, but it is also, at least if we manage to do the work of unselfing, a
source of insight into the good.
Murdoch thus works to unfold a view of individual experience that
for her connects to Plato’s idea about the reality of goodness, the idea
that, despite all our failings and frailties, ‘We know about good and evil’
(MGM, 15). Experience may move or unsettle us, for example through
the feelings of happiness in face of goodness or of acute unease in the
face of wrongdoing. However, one consequence of this view is that
we can never be completely sure that others see the reality in the same
way as we do, that they have the same experience of moral importance.
As Cora Diamond remarks, Murdoch’s view is here in opposition to a
(standard) philosophical view of reasons as public because Murdoch
thinks that there can be ‘great difficulty in one person’s communicat-
ing reasons to someone else; reasons for her are not essentially public’
(Diamond 2010, 67). From the idea that personally shaped and mor-
ally coloured experience of the world may be a possible source of insight
into the good follows the possibility that such insight may not be readily
expressible in public terms.
Again and again, Murdoch returns to the problems of finding the
right expression for new moral insights, and she talks about these as
mysteries, as ‘muddled and complex’, as something we see but ‘can-
not say’ (MGM, 280, 283). The question is how we best describe these
problems? Do they arise because moral insights are essentially inner and
private, in principle inaccessible for others? Or do they arise because we
have not yet fully developed the concepts that can give such insights a
fully determinate form, because the attainment of moral insight and the
development of concepts are two sides of the same coin?
Actually, Murdoch seems to take both views. Firstly, in her dealings
with Wittgenstein, she seems to be occupied with securing a private
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 159

inner sphere, as when she writes that ‘Our whole moral-aesthetic intel-
lectual creativity abounds in private insoluble difficulties, mysterious
half-understood mental configurations’ (MGM, 280; italics mine). It is
hard to know what to make of this idea, how to ascribe such essentially
private and half-understood insights a role in our lives. Maybe this is
what Murdoch ought to have taken with her from her engagement the
example of sensation S, that to picture something as essentially private is
not to secure it from the corrupting influences of the community, but to
picture it in a way where it cannot play a role in our lives, where it really
is not anything at all. Murdoch seems to be caught in a picture of the
inner and outer as two isolated realms, because of a worry that if we give
up this picture the inner will be overflown and obliviated by the outer,
and she is here in conflict with Wittgenstein’s point that this picture is
unsustainable as a general understanding of the inner and the other.
Murdoch does, however, not always use the picture of two realms in
order to show the importance of the inner, because she also describes
the role of personal experience as that of de-stabilising our moral con-
cepts and forcing us to engage in the development of new ones. In
fact, much of Murdoch’s work centres around the problem of develop-
ing concepts which can adequately express our moral difficulties, and
which may help us reconcile our personal values with what is real and
establish a moral world in which we actually want to live. Here, lan-
guage ‘performs its essential task, through its ability to be truthful; and
its truthfulness is a function of the struggle of individuals creatively to
adjust language to contingent conditions outside it’ (MGM, 216). For
Murdoch, in Diamond’s words, ‘moral concepts in a sense “set up” a
world: they show what sorts of thing there are, what it means to rec-
ognize them, what it is to live in a world with such things’ (Diamond
2010, 62). On this view, the problems with expressing our personally
shaped moral insights arise because we have to work with concepts that
are too narrow, poor or misdirected to allow us to fully see and express
our moral experiences, or because we are in a process of developing con-
cepts that will allow us to do so. That is, the reason why the individual or
personal aspects of inner life are often difficult to express is because they
concern moral insights that are still in the making, still finding their form
in language.4
Murdoch’s understanding of language as a site of moral change does
not invite the temptation of seeing the inner as isolated from the outer.
Instead, it suggests a model where inner and outer are two different
160 A.-M. S. CHRISTENSEN

aspects of moral life, where our moral lives are considered as a unity
of a personal inner entangled with a public outer, and where language
is the place for our continuous development of or setting up of our
moral world. This model is not in any way in conflict with the writings
of the Investigations; in fact, if Murdoch had seen the full potential of
Wittgenstein’s later work, she could have come to consider him an ally
in the attempt to show how we in language can work to develop ade-
quate moral concepts in a dynamic interplay between our personal moral
insights and the reality of ‘what is there’.

Notes
1. See e.g. MGM, 30–43. For a different understanding of ethics in the
Tractatus, see Christensen (2011).
2. In the article, McDowell shows how Wright reads Wittgenstein in a way
that parallels Kripke’s reading.
3. For influential criticisms of Kripke’s community view as a reading of
Wittgenstein, besides that of McDowell, see Baker and Hacker (1984) and
Goldfarb (2014).
4. See also Murdoch (1956).

References
Baker, G.P., and P.M.S. Hacker. 1984. Critical study: On misunderstanding
Wittgenstein: Kripke’s private language argument. Synthese 58 (3): 407–450.
Christensen, A.-M.S. 2011. Wittgenstein and ethics. In Oxford handbook of
Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn, 776–817. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Diamond, C. 2010. Murdoch the explorer. Philosophical Topics 38 (1): 51–85.
Dooley, G., and G. Nerlich (eds.). 2014. Never mind about the bourgeoisie:
The correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin 1976–1995.
Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Goldfarb, W. 2014. Kripke on Wittgenstein on rules. In Rule-following and
meaning, ed. Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright, 92–107. London:
Routledge.
Kripke, S. 1982. Wittgenstein on rules and private language. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
McDowell, J. 1998. Wittgenstein on following a rule. In Mind, value, and real-
ity, 221–262, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Murdoch, I. 1956. Vision and choice in morality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 30: 32–58.
 10 ‘I THINK I DISAGREE’: MURDOCH ON WITTGENSTEIN … 161

Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals. (Abbreviated MGM.)

London: Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. 2001. The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and
B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical investigations/Philosophische
Untersuchungen, 4th ed., ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
 CHAPTER 11

‘We Are Fantasising Imaginative Animals’

(MGM Chapter 11)

Hannah Marije Altorf

Reading Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

I first read Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM) twenty
years ago. I had just finished my doctoraal (more or less the equivalent of
an MA or an MPhil) at the University of Nijmegen and had been given
the title doctorandus, ‘he who has to become a doctor’. I was looking for
a way to do exactly that and MGM fascinated me, even though, or per-
haps because, I understood very little of what I was reading.
MGM starts in medias res, in the midst of things. The work is in this
respect not all that different from Murdoch’s novels, which often start
in the middle of conversations or death bed confessions.1 In her phil-
osophical work, this approach has brought discerning thoughts, as well
as puzzlement. Take for instance the beginning of ‘On “God” and
“Good”’, one of the three essays in The Sovereignty of Good (1970):
‘To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at
the same time to attempt to discover the truth’ (Murdoch 1997, 337).
This is an inspiring, but not a common understanding of philosophy.
Yet, Murdoch never makes clear why this is so or why it needs stating

H. M. Altorf (*)
St. Mary’s University, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 163

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_11
164 H. M. ALTORF

at the beginning of the essay, though she returns to the importance of

temperament briefly.2 To start a work in such a way suggests both inti-
macy and urgency. It is as if we as readers enter an ongoing conversation,
not unlike Plato’s Symposium, just at the moment when Murdoch starts
speaking. Yet, unlike in The Symposium, there is a sense of urgency to the
conversation. There is no time to lose.
MGM lacks many of the framing elements found in other works of
philosophy. There is no acknowledgement that this text is based on
Murdoch’s 1982 Gifford Lectures. There is no preface with thanks to
friends and colleagues for their contributions or to a spouse for put-
ting up with long periods of withdrawal to one’s study. No introduc-
tion places the book in the context of recent discussions and scholarship.
Instead, the contents page, the dedication to Elizabeth Anscombe and an
epigraph in French by Paul Valéry (about which more later) are imme­
diately followed by Chapter 1: ‘Concepts of Unity. Art’, of which the
first sentence reads: ‘The idea of a self-contained unity or limited whole
is a fundamental instinctive concept’ (MGM, 1).
‘The idea of a self-contained unity or limited whole is a fundamen-
tal instinctive concept.’ I have read this sentence many times and it still
baffles me. Why start thus? Why start with unity, or more precisely with
‘the idea of a self-contained unity or limited whole’ (and, by the way,
are these the same)? What is ‘a fundamental instinctive concept’ and can
an idea be a concept? The consequent sentences provide some insight.
Murdoch writes: ‘We see parts of things, we intuit whole things. We
seem to know a great deal on the basis of very little’ (MGM, 1). This
makes more sense. I only see the front of the faces of the people oppo-
site me in the British Library, but I assume there is a back to them and
even a complete human being, sitting on a chair. When I look down at
my laptop and look up again, I assume that the faces I saw before are
the same as those I see now and that they have not been exchanged for
seemingly identical, but in reality different faces. I see parts of things,
I intuit whole things. I seem to know a great deal on the basis of very lit-
tle. However, it is still not clear to me why Murdoch starts with this idea
and whether it is indeed a fundamental instinctive concept or, even, what
a fundamental instinctive concept is.
I don’t remember why I kept reading twenty years ago. Perhaps
I was then much better at knowing a great deal on the basis of very
little. I may have been inspired, or warned, by the epigraph, the quote
from Valéry: ‘Une difficulté est une lumière. Une difficulté insurmontable
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 165

est un soleil.’ The quote returns halfway through the book, where
Murdoch writes, though without mentioning Valéry: ‘(An insuperable
difficulty may or may not be the sun, but it gives some light.)’ (MGM,
251).3 I suspect that twenty years ago, I intuited what I perceive more
clearly now: MGM is the work of an exceptionally erudite and origi-
nal philosopher. As readers we witness her thinking. We are aware of a
close engagement with thinkers and arguments, even when we are also
likely to miss several references, because they are without acknowledge-
ment and not part of our knowledge or vocabulary. Murdoch assumes
intimate knowledge of texts and ideas and she does not always make
explicit what is quotation, what her own thought and what the thought
of someone else.
All the same, there have been times when I lost heart, reading the
same sentences over and over again and not being able to make much
sense of them. I once discussed with my students what an editor could
have done. (Nothing meaningful, we suspected, without changing the
text beyond recognition.) Readers have experienced the book as ‘a bewil-
deringly dense and impenetrable confluence of several seemingly distinct
ways of addressing its central concerns’, as Stephen Mulhall writes. ‘To
put it more bluntly: the trouble with Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is
that in general its sentences, its individual chapters and its overall struc-
ture appear to be extremely disorganized’ (Mulhall 1997, 219–220).
These comments are not without justification. Yet, I do not hold, as
Mulhall does, that ‘these formal aspects … are … a carefully calculated
achievement’ (Mulhall 1997, 220). Instead, I understand MGM as a
radical attempt to retain and rethink ideas and concepts about what it
is to be human. As in attempts of a similar radical nature, structure and
clarity have occasionally yielded to sheer audacity and novelty of think-
ing. MGM is not the first book in the history of philosophy that has baf-
fled its contemporaries.4 What is more, Murdoch has always been keenly
aware of ideas that challenge or counter her line of argument. She knows
them intimately and is almost too eager to acknowledge these, at times
without spelling them out. MGM thus reads like a dialogue, in which
speakers eagerly interrupt each other.5 Lastly, Murdoch does not write
for purely academic purposes, as is for instance evident at the end of ‘On
“God” and “Good”’, where she writes: ‘For both the collective and the
individual salvation of the human race, art is doubtless more important
than philosophy, and literature most important of all’ (Murdoch 1997,
362). If this sounds over the top, that is because it is deliberately so.
166 H. M. ALTORF

Murdoch wants to save our souls—even those souls who feel queasy
about being called ‘souls’ and, I suspect, Murdoch would be one of
them. Yet, ultimately, salvation trumps queasiness.
Reading MGM can be a struggle at times. Though I am not
convinced this is on purpose, I don’t think Murdoch would have wanted
it otherwise. Struggle is an essential part of her moral philosophy and
more than once she confesses to struggling herself.6 Any introduction to
MGM should perhaps not promise any more than this, in language that is
no more religious than that used in the work: one will struggle and may
be saved. Such struggling also characterises imagination. As will become
clear, it can be a struggle to use one’s imagination well. What is more,
Murdoch struggles with the notion throughout the chapter. She fears it
is empty, even when she judges it essential (MGM, 322).
This does not mean, of course, that readers are without resources
(as Murdoch would probably affirm, see MGM, 329, 335). It helps to
acknowledge that one is witnessing a thinker struggling to address
urgent problems. It helps also to read Murdoch’s earlier work, espe-
cially The Sovereignty of Good, as a prolegomena to MGM. It helps not
to expect framing. Having reread most of MGM over the last year or so,
I find myself returning to one of the earliest introductions to the work.
In Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness Maria Antonaccio
and William Schweiker distinguish two guiding images: that of moral pil-
grimage and the hall of reflection. Murdoch understands life as a journey
or moral pilgrimage, in some ways similar to Plato’s allegory of the Cave.
Her writing can be a guide on this journey, but not in any straightfor-
ward sense. The other image, that of the hall of reflection, is taken from
the work itself. MGM can indeed be compared to ‘a huge hall of reflec-
tion full of light and space and fresh air, in which ideas and intuitions can
be unsystematically nurtured’ (Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996, xv).7
To read MGM is then to take part in a conversation, ‘in which ideas
and intuitions can be unsystematically nurtured’. We are unlikely to sur-
mount all difficulties. Perhaps we should not even try to, as we expe-
rience that some light may come from insurmountable difficulties.
With these thoughts in mind I now turn to the chapter. What follows
is intended as a guide to reading and it will be helpful to have the book
at hand. I start with a general commentary on the text and then discuss
the chapter in three sections: one on Kant, one on Plato and the last on
‘soul-talk’.
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 167

‘Imagining Is Doing, It Is a Sort

of Personal Exploring’8

Murdoch starts the chapter on imagination again in medias res. She

writes: ‘Kant … establishes imagination as a mediator between sense
perception and concepts, something between sense and thought.’
Reflections on Kant’s notion of imagination take up the first nine
pages of the chapter (MGM, 308–316). The significance of Kant for
Murdoch’s understanding of imagination is confirmed by his reappear-
ance throughout the remainder of the chapter, as he appears throughout
MGM.9
The chapter falls roughly into two parts, which are separated by an
asterisk on page 325. The first part consists of two larger sections dis-
cussing Kant and Plato. The second part consists of several sections,
which are less easily characterised, because a range of different topics is
discussed. My focus will be on the first half of the chapter and I shall
repeat some of the findings from an earlier discussion of this chapter.10
The significance of the earlier part is twofold. It confirms the impor-
tance of imagination for Murdoch’s thinking and it does so by showing
how her notion of imagination, as well as the distinction between imag-
ination and fantasy, are firmly grounded in her reading of philosophy,
especially Kant and Plato. The distinction between imagination and fan-
tasy is not new, but in her earlier writing it appears without much philo-
sophical context. There, it is explained by referring to art and literature
rather than philosophy.11 The sections on Kant and Plato in Chapter 11
of MGM show Murdoch, in contrast, as a close and creative reader of
philosophical classics. The distinction between imagination and fantasy
is experienced when contemplating art and has been developed through
close reading of major thinkers from the history of philosophy.
In addition to the rough structural device that Murdoch introduces
by separating sections, I would like to suggest two more. The first is
perhaps best characterised as ‘refrain’. Throughout MGM Murdoch
keeps returning to phrases and images. In Chapter 11 one finds, for
instance, what is at least the third appearance of the enlightened man
in Zen Buddhism who ‘begins by thinking that rivers are merely rivers
and mountains are merely mountains, proceeds to the view that rivers
are not rivers and mountains are not mountains, and later achieves the
deep understandings that rivers are really rivers and mountains are really
168 H. M. ALTORF

mountains’ (MGM, 244; see also 325, 189). Another prominent refrain,
specifically in Chapter 11, is ‘Perception itself is a mode of evaluation’
(MGM, 315, 328, 329, 334; see also 25–26.) The repetition of the latter
in particular signifies its importance in understanding Murdoch’s notion
of imagination. I shall return to this later.
The other structural device is to read the different parts of this chapter
as it were ‘backwards’. Murdoch’s reflections at the end of the different
sections help understand what precedes. In Chapter 11 I perceived four
such instances: near the end of the first part of the chapter (MGM, 323),
at the end of the discussion of Plato (MGM, 321), at the end of the dis-
cussion of Kant (MGM, 316) and at the end of the chapter (MGM, 346).
The latter two are more clearly defined than the first two.

‘Kant Was Marvellously Near the Mark’12

I start the discussion of Kant at the end of the first part, where Murdoch
confirms the importance of imagination and fantasy, writing: ‘We are fan-
tasising imaginative animals’ (MGM, 323). While this statement is likely
to jump out more to someone who is familiar with Murdoch’s earlier
work and with the scholarship, it also draws attention to itself by the way
it is formulated.13 It is, after all, a direct play on the classical understand-
ing of human beings as ‘rational animals’. Moreover, it immediately fol-
lows a set of challenging questions: ‘What do you do with your mind
when you are in prison? Or bereaved or suffering irremediable injus-
tice, or crippled by awful guilt? What you are able to do with it then will
depend very much on what you were doing with it before’ (MGM, 323).
These questions reinforce that for Murdoch the notions of imagina-
tion and fantasy are not so much isolated objects of study as they are
as part of her moral philosophy and its emphasis on the inner life. To
see how Murdoch came to write ‘we are fantasising imaginative animals’,
I turn two pages back. Here, Murdoch introduces the notions of imagi-
nation and fantasy:

To mark the distances involved we need for purposes of discussion, two

words for two concepts: a distinction between egoistic fantasy and liber-
ated truth-seeking creative imagination. Can there not be high evil fanta-
sising forms of creative imaginative activity? A search for candidates will,
I think, tend to reinforce at least the usefulness of a distinction between
‘fantasy’ as mechanical, egoistic, untruthful, and ‘imagination’ as truthful
and free. (MGM, 321, italics hers)
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 169

This quotation clearly displays Murdoch’s dialogical writing style. She

immediately questions the distinction she introduces. (‘Can there not
be high evil fantasising forms of creative imaginative activity?’) She also
makes clear that the distinction between imagination and fantasy is
made ‘for purposes of discussion’. It is ‘useful’.14 It is less likely to be
found in reality as such or even in art. Thus, even Shakespeare, who for
Murdoch is the standard of great art, merges imagination and fantasy.15
The distinction between imagination and fantasy is, moreover, moral.
Imagination is truthful, free. Fantasy is untruthful, egoistic. ‘Imagination
suggests the searching, joining, light-seeking, semi-figurative nature of
the mind’s work, which prepares and forms the consciousness for action’
(MGM, 323).
As I argued before, the distinction between imagination and fantasy
is not new. What is new is that it appears in conversations with Kant
and Plato.16 MGM shows the importance of these two thinkers for
Murdoch’s understanding of imagination. Kant allows Murdoch to argue
that imagination permeates all our activities, whereas Plato offers a dis-
tinction between better and worse imagination, or between imagination
and fantasy. Murdoch’s argument is best reconstructed by now turning
to the end of the section on Kant. Here Murdoch writes:

How flexible can a deep concept be? is a founding question of philosophy.

Kant, in his precision, is careful not to demand too much of the concept of
imagination. He distinguishes the empirical imagination, which spontane-
ously yet ‘mechanically’ prepares a sensuous manifold for subjection to the
synthetic a priori and empirical concepts of the understanding, but which
is not independently creative or aesthetically sensible, from the aesthetic
imagination which is spontaneous and free and able to create a ‘second
nature’. But are ‘fine art’ and ‘genius’ as described by Kant really such a
small corner of human faculty and experience? The concept of genius itself
emerges from an appreciation of the deep and omnipresent operation of
imagination in human life. (MGM, 316)

The quotation displays Murdoch’s approach in reading Kant. What

she writes is not an exposition of his thought, but critical and creative
engagement. She notices Kant’s careful balancing of the flexibility of a
concept against precision, but also makes clear that it is not hers.17 The
quotation also introduces three important stages in Murdoch’s discus-
sion of Kant: the empirical imagination, the aesthetic imagination and
the notion of genius. I shall briefly discuss each here.18
170 H. M. ALTORF

In the discussion of the empirical imagination, it becomes obvious

that this form of imagination already appeared at the beginning of
MGM, though it was not named there as such. It is the empirical imag-
ination, which allows us to ‘know a great deal on the basis of very little’
(MGM, 1). We imagine a whole human being when we only perceive a
face and we imagine them to exist over time, even when we don’t per-
ceive them continuously.
In Chapter 11 the empirical imagination is described as ‘a mediator
between sense perception and concepts, something between sense and
thought.’ It ‘spontaneously yet “mechanically” prepares a sensuous
manifold for subjection to … concepts of the understanding’ (MGM,
308, 316). The sensuous manifold, i.e. what is supplied by the senses,
is brought into an image, to which then concepts can be applied. Thus,
the empirical imagination is essential in the process that allows me to
perceive the chair on which I am sitting as such and as distinguished
from the desk. Without imagination we cannot perceive. This aspect of
the empirical imagination Murdoch adopts eagerly. She is less interested
in other aspects of the Kantian notion, though my reading of the first
lines of MGM above suggests that she is aware of these. Her distance
from Kant is perhaps most obvious when when she writes: ‘One might
almost say that “imagination” is the name of the transcendental problem,
or is used as a convenient blanket to cover it up. Kant had to invent the
idea’ (MGM, 310).19
In the discussion that follows the differences between Kant and
Murdoch become more pronounced, as Murdoch will try to read the
aesthetic imagination and the notion of genius back into the empirical
imagination.20 Their differences were already suggested by the quotation
marks around ‘mechanical’, even when Murdoch agrees with Kant that
imagination is central to perception. Her reading is also revealed by her
use of the image of ‘barrier’, which she intends to lower to a ‘threshold’
or transform into ‘lungs’ (MGM, 309, 315). My reading focuses on the
notion of genius, as the quotation at the end of the section indicates that
that is where Murdoch’s interest lies.21 ‘Genius invents its own “rules” or
modes … Kant’s “genius” is a spontaneous faculty which its owner can-
not explain, and whose products offer no general rules for imitators …
The imagination produces something unique’ (MGM, 313). Is it possible
to read this kind of creative imagination back into the empirical imagi-
nation? Are we in perception creating and recreating as if without rules?
Should we be? Murdoch seems to suggest as much when she writes,
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 171

‘This idea can go very far, farther perhaps than its author intended’
(MGM, 314). At this point, the refrain ‘Perception itself is a mode of
evaluation’ appears for the first time in this chapter (MGM, 315).
Reading this ‘superior’ form of imagination into the empirical imagina-
tion, which Kant so carefully tried to keep separate, Murdoch suggests
that we are or should be geniuses even when only looking at the world.
Moreover, for her this is nothing unusual: ‘We have to “talk” and our
talk will be largely “imaginative” (we are all artists)’ (MGM, 315).
Murdoch then returns to the image of a barrier:

The point is, to put it picturesquely, that the ‘transcendental barrier’ is a

huge wide various band (it resembles a transformer such as the lungs in
being rather like a sponge) largely penetrable by the creative activity of
individuals (though of course we are culturally marked ‘children of our
time’ etc.), and this creativity is the place where the concept of imagination
must be placed and defined. (MGM, 315)22

The barrier has now become a ‘huge wide various band’, resembling ‘a
transformer such as the lungs in being rather like a sponge’. May not
the empirical imagination be also ‘independently creative or aesthetically
sensible’? We are all artists, even when we ‘tell our day’, ‘rearrange [our]
possessions’ or are ‘looking out of the window’ (MGM, 37, 334, 329).
With this thought Murdoch turns to Plato.

‘Plato Is a Great Artist Attacking What He Sees

as Bad and Dangerous in Art’23

Whereas Murdoch’s reading of Kant allows her to argue that creative

imagination pervades all perception, Plato lets her distinguish between
lower and higher forms of imagination. Murdoch compares their notion
of imagination as follows:

So it appears that Plato, like Kant, offers two views of the imagination. For
Plato the lower level, which for Kant is necessary automatic synthesis, is
seen in human terms as the production of base illusions, or perhaps simply
of the ordinary unimaginative egoistic screen of our conceptualising. Plato,
teaching by images and myths, also acknowledges high imagination as cre-
ative stirring spirit, attempting to express and embody what is perfectly
good, but extremely remote… (MGM, 320)
172 H. M. ALTORF

Plato introduces hierarchy. There are lower and higher forms of imag-
ination.24 The lowest form Murdoch compares to Kant’s ‘necessary
automatic synthesis’, which is ‘seen in human terms’, which the text sug-
gests to mean a moral light. It is ‘base’ and ‘egoistic’. It is best com-
pared to ‘the lowest condition in the Cave … [Plato] connects egoistic
fantasy and lack of moral sense with inability to reflect. Mere uninspired
reproductive art … would then be at the bottom of the scale … One
might take the Republic (597) passage about the painter as indicating art
which was bad because thoughtless’ (MGM, 317). Fantasy is character-
ised by lack: ‘lack of moral sense … inability … uninspired … thought-
less’.25 The highest form of imagination, in contrast, is active: ‘High
imagination is passionately creative’ (MGM, 319). This creative imag-
ination is directed towards the reality of others and ultimately to the
Good.
These different understandings of imagination tumble somewhat
through one another in this section. It is not as easy to discern a line of
argument here as it was in the section on Kant. Murdoch starts with a
discussion of the Romantics. As I have argued elsewhere, this is a later
addition to the text and it does not seem to have changed what follows
(MGM, 316–317; Altorf 2008, 81–82). Murdoch next explores the dis-
tinction between fantasy and imagination. What complicates the writing
is Murdoch’s ultimate dissatisfaction with imagery and imagination—
even with good or high imagination. Her ideal of moral pilgrimage is a
constant destruction of imagery until there is none left:

Moral improvement, as we learn from the Republic, involves a progres-

sive destruction of false images. Image-making or image-apprehending is
always an imperfect activity … Images should not be resting-places, but
pointers toward higher truth … the highest activities of the mind … are
imageless. (MGM, 317–318)26

It seems at times as if Murdoch is more interested in this latter, image-

less stage than in any form of imagination. This preference detracts from
both the distinction between imagination and fantasy and the under-
standing of us as ‘fantasising imaginative animals’ (MGM, 323). Have
we discussed the useful distinction between imagination and fantasy, its
grounding in Murdoch’s reading of Kant and Plato, only to have it taken
away from us as a ‘ladder to be thrown away’? (MGM, 323). It is at this
stage that I turn to the second part of Chapter 11.
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 173

‘Soul-Talk’
I start again at the end of the section. Murdoch writes:

The inner needs the outer and the outer needs the inner. In these pictures
I have tried to ‘exhibit’ the inner; and resist tendencies which give value
and effective function only to the outer (thought of as ‘moral acts’ or lin-
guistic activity), or regard the ‘inner life’ as fantasy and dream, lacking
identity and definition, even as a fake illusionary concept. (MGM, 348)

Murdoch sums up the chapter as an attempt to emphasise the inner

against those forms of moral philosophy which merely regard the outer.
That this preference is not without difficulty becomes clear in the use
of quotation marks around ‘inner life’. As in much of her earlier writ-
ing Murdoch is here taking issue with dominant forms of moral philoso-
phy (‘behaviourist … existentialist … structuralist … utilitarian’ (MGM,
348)), which are not interested in the inner and even deny its existence.
As she writes of utilitarianism: ‘Such nullification of the inner may also
have a home in utilitarian moral thinking, where it receives understand-
able lay support from those who hold that ‘soul-talk’ is a luxury in a
world where action to relieve suffering is our main duty’ (MGM, 348).27
The term ‘soul-talk’ directs us to a central concern in Murdoch’s
reflections on imagination. What is more, Murdoch’s response to this
dismissal of the inner can be understood as itself an exhibition of ‘soul-
talk’. Consider how she starts this section: ‘So we may talk and think,
constantly examining and altering our sense of the order and interde-
pendence of our values’ (MGM, 326; see also 325). The second half of
Chapter 11 is conversationalist and as a genuine conversation it is con-
stantly altering direction. We are reminded of the ‘huge hall of reflection’
and indeed this image returns near the end:

What is needful is inner space, in which other things can lodge and move
and be considered; we withdraw ourselves and let other things be. Any art-
ist or thinker will appreciate this picture of inner space … a private and
personal space-time. We might think here of spatio-temporal rhythm;
a good person might be recognised by this rhythm. An obsessed egoist,
almost everyone sometimes, destroys the space and air about him and is
uncomfortable to be with. We have a sense of the ‘space’ of others. An
unselfish person enlarges the space and the world. (MGM, 347)
174 H. M. ALTORF

The second part of Chapter 11 can thus be understood as a space-

enlarging exercise, in which we contemplate ‘whether, on the whole,
Mary or Martha led a better life’ or whether we ‘should also feel socially
responsible about what in our society people always or never see … Urban
poverty can impose relentlessly ugly surroundings’ (MGM, 332, 329). We
are urged to contemplate ‘Christ upon the cross’ or at ‘birth, complete
with shepherds, kings, angels, the ox and the ass’, as well as the eucharist
and St Paul (MGM, 328, 335, 342, 346). We are admonished to ‘teach
meditation in schools’ and we are told the Tibetan story of the mother
who asks her son to bring back a religious relic from the city. The son
brings back a dog’s tooth from the road, which, when venerated, ‘begins
miraculously to glow with light’ (MGM, 337–338).
The word ‘soul-talk’ reinforces the importance of religion in this sec-
ond part of Chapter 11. Indeed, many of the images Murdoch offers are
religious, in particular Christian and sometimes Buddhist.28 Murdoch
‘assumes that religion is not only a particular dogma or mode of faith
and worship, but can exist, and indeed exists, undogmatically as for
instance in Buddhism, and potentially everywhere, forming a deep part
of morality’ (MGM, 336). Twice she refers to a quotation from the
letter to the Philippians: ‘When St Paul tells us to think about whatso-
ever things are honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report, he believes
rightly that we know how to perform this feat of imagination’ (MGM,
328).29 She continues: ‘How do we know how to do it? Oddly enough
we do. (We can distinguish too between doing it in a vague feeble way
and attempting to do it better.)’ (MGM, 328–329). In her continued
reflections there is another appearance of one of the refrains: ‘With St
Paul’s admonition in mind, I think that what we literally see is impor-
tant. Perception is both evaluation and inspiration, even at the level of
“just seeing”’ (MGM, 329).
In comparison to her often ‘rather depressing’ view of human
beings,30 Murdoch is here surprisingly confident about our ability to use
our imagination ‘to think about whatsoever things are honest, just, pure,
lovely and of good report’. Moreover, she is convinced that we all have
‘a collection of such things’ (MGM, 335). At the same time, she is con-
cerned about the possibility that we may lose this ability and the images.
For her, this possibility is closely linked to the disappearance of religion,
of religious experience and of our ability to recognise religious experi-
ences as such. She expresses this concern almost as an introduction to
this chapter (MGM, 307; see also 341). Thus, where the first part of this
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 175

chapter argues that we are fantasising imaginative animals, the discussion

of images in the second part aims to create or retain images which can
both ‘dislodge … rat-like fantasies or old stale thoughts’, and to serve
as ‘moral illuminations or pictures which remain vividly in the mem-
ory, playing a protective or guiding role … refuges, lights, visions, deep
sources, pure sources, protections, stronghold, footholds, icons, start-
ing-points, sacraments, pearls of great price’ (MGM, 332–333, 335).
This chapter thus ends on a hopeful note. We have the ability to dis-
tinguish between good and bad imagination and we have the images to
protect and guide us. Yet, Murdoch chooses her images mostly from
classical art or Christianity and it is debatable whether we still worry
about Martha and Mary or even know who they are. As Murdoch
acknowledges, ‘of course we are culturally marked “children of our
time”’ (MGM, 315). Even if we do not share the intimacy that Murdoch
has with the thinkers and artists she quotes and mentions, the urgency of
her appeal remains. We are imaginative fantasising animals. As imagina-
tion and fantasy pervade our thoughts and our conversations, we need to
create and retain good images. Perhaps this is the unsurmountable diffi-
culty that she reminds us of by quoting Valéry.

Notes
1. Murdoch’s twentieth novel, Nuns and Soldiers (1980), starts with the
exclamation ‘Wittgenstein –’, which turns out to be a deathbed confes-
sion of sorts.
2. ‘It is frequently difficult in philosophy to tell whether one is saying some-
thing reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting
a barrier, special to one’s own temperament, against one’s own personal
fears’ (Murdoch 1997, 359).
3. See also MGM, 419: ‘Valéry speaks of the sunlight which rewards him
who steadily contemplates the insuperable difficulty.’
4. A comparison with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason suggests itself.
5. See Altorf (2008, 26, 62, 91–92, 116).
6. See here a comment in brackets in ‘The Idea of Perfection’: ‘(There is
curiously little place in the other picture for the idea of struggle.)’
(Murdoch 1997, 317; see also Murdoch 1997, 359 quoted in n.3.)
7. Compare MGM, 422 and 296 and The Fire and the Sun (Murdoch 1997,
461). Murdoch uses this image more than once, but in the earlier quote
in MGM the image is used for ‘western philosophy since the Greeks’ and
in The Fire and the Sun it is used for literature.
176 H. M. ALTORF

8. Murdoch (1997, 199; emphasis hers).

9. Kant and Plato are the only entries in the index to have passim behind
their names. Murdoch’s reading of Kant especially has received con-
siderable attention in recent years. See for instance Merritt (2017) and
Hopwood (2018).
10. See Altorf (2008, Chapter 4).
11. See for instance Murdoch (1997, 11, 215–216, 374).
12. Murdoch (1997, 216).
13. See here especially Midgley’s review of MGM: ‘[Murdoch’s] counter-
theme, if written on a plumstone, would be the importance of the inner,
imaginative life—of reflexion, of contemplation, seen as a capacity for
watching, discovering, reflecting on and attending properly to what is real
in our own lives and in the lives of others—and the need to talk about
these things’ (Midgley 1993, 334, quoting MGM 294, 177).
14. See also the interview with Magee (Murdoch 1997, 11).
15. See for instance the tongue-in-cheek remarks in ‘The Sublime and the
Good’: ‘let us start by saying that Shakespeare is the greatest of all artists’
and ‘Now Shakespeare is great art, and Shakespeare is not play, so Kant
must be wrong’ (Murdoch 1997, 205, 211).
16. In the first part of Chapter 11 Hume and Coleridge are mentioned as
well, but as I have argued elsewhere the comments on their work are
later additions to MGM and do not affect the argument (Altorf 2008, 75,
81–82, 129n.13 and 14; cp. Murdoch 1986).
17. In this respect Murdoch is exceptional. See Michèle Le Doeuff on the
prominence of women in the history of philosophy, where they are better
represented than in other fields of philosophy: ‘Who better than a woman
to show fidelity, respect and remembrance? … Everyone knows that the
more of a philosopher one is, the more distorted one’s reading of other
philosophers’ (Le Doeuff 2002, 125).
18. For a longer discussion and a fuller explanation of Kantian terminology
(including synthetic a priori and transcendental) see Altorf (2008) and
Warnock (1976).
19. Murdoch is especially critical of the circumscribed role Kant attributes
to the empirical imagination. She is not the first or the only one. See
Friedrich Nietzsche’s more venomous criticism in Beyond Good and Evil
(see Altorf 2008, 76; Nietzsche 1988, 11).
20. ‘Is it misleading simply to read the conscious activity back into the uncon-
scious (transcendental) activity?’ (MGM, 308–309).
21. For a discussion of Murdoch’s understanding of the beautiful and the sub-
lime see Altorf (2008).
22. See also Altorf (2008, 80).
23. MGM, 13.
 11 ‘WE ARE FANTASISING IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS’ (MGM CHAPTER 11) 177

24. See also: ‘We can make sense of a scale or series with egoistic fantasies
at one end and creative imagination, culminating in genius at the other’
(MGM, 320).
25. See also MGM, 158, 341, 364; Altorf (2008, 83).
26. See also, ‘The spiritual life is a long disciplined destruction of false images
and false goods until (in some sense which we cannot understand) the
imagining mind achieves an end of images and shadows’ (MGM, 320).
27. See also Murdoch (1997, 307): ‘That is, (a) it’s no use, (b) it isn’t there.’
28. Judaism and Islam are mentioned only to note their avoidance of imagery
(MGM, 329).
29. See also MGM, 335; Murdoch (1997, 345).
30. ‘Human beings are naturally selfish … The psyche is a historically deter-
mined individual relentlessly looking after itself … One of its main pas-
times is day-dreaming … It constantly seeks consolation … Even its
loving is more often than not an assertion of self’ (Murdoch 1997, 364).

References
Antonaccio, M., and W. Schweiker (eds.). 1996. Iris Murdoch and the search for
human goodness. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Altorf, M. 2008. Iris Murdoch and the art of imagining. London: Continuum.
Hopwood, M. 2018. ‘The extremely difficult realization that something other
than oneself is real’: Iris Murdoch on love and moral agency. European
Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 477–501.
Le Doeuff, M. 2002. The philosophical imaginary. London: Continuum.
Merritt, M.M. 2017. Love, respect, and individuals: Murdoch as a guide to
Kantian ethics. European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1844–1863.
Midgley, M. 1993. Review of metaphysics as a guide to morals. Philosophical
Investigations 16 (4): 333–341.
Mulhall, S. 1997. Constructing a hall of reflection: Perfectionist edification in
Iris Murdoch’s metaphysics as a guide to morals. Philosophy 72 (280): 219–239.
Murdoch, I. 1986. Ethics and imagination. Irish Theological Quarterly 52 (1–2):
81–95.
Murdoch, I. 1993. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Murdoch, I. 1997. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and litera-
ture. London: Chatto & Windus.
Nietzsche, F. 1988. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Kritische Studienausgabe 5.
Herausgegeben von G. Colli und M. Montinari. Berlin, New York: Walter de
Gruyter.
Warnock, M. 1976. Imagination. London: Faber and Faber.
 CHAPTER 12

The Metaphysics of Morals and Politics

(MGM Chapter 12)

Gary Browning

Introduction
Murdoch’s metaphysics is dialectical and historical. It is dialectical in
that it establishes a series of internal relations between forms of experi-
ence. The personal and the public, the disordered and the ordered and
unity and plurality are mutually related constituents of her relational per-
spective. Past and present function in a similar way. The object of met-
aphysical understanding is present experience, which at the same time
presumes a past from which it has emerged. The historicity of the pres-
ent entails the time-bound operations of metaphysics. Whereas classi-
cal metaphysics as practised by, say, Plato or Spinoza, may be taken as
purporting to provide a rational first-order guide to the nature of real-
ity, Murdoch’s metaphysics operates by making sense of the relations
obtaining between known items within or intimated by our experience.
The questions of metaphysics, for Murdoch, arise out of reflection upon
contemporary experience and its form develops historically as metaphysi-
cians engage critically with contemporary questions and the work of past

G. Browning (*)
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 179

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_12
180 G. BROWNING

metaphysicians. Murdoch takes metaphysics to be holistic in its review

of how partial forms of experience are only fully intelligible in terms of
their location within the whole. Metaphysics identifies the contributions
of religion, art, morality to its own integrative understanding of expe-
rience. They register the order and unities within experience that met-
aphysics explains holistically. Like all aspects of experience, religion, art
and morals change over time. In modern times, supranatural claims are
renounced in favour of what can be known within experience.
Modernity is a time of demythologisation and it forms the context for
present philosophical exploration of meaning. Hence the supernatural
elements of religion are not to be sustained in the light of the prevail-
ing rationalist temper and a critical philosophical perspective sets limits
to a religious perspective as well as identifying its significance. Likewise
art is understood critically by philosophy so that its sentimental and
consolatory forms are dismissed, but its awareness of underlying uni-
ties is respected. Murdoch’s metaphysics is not a world-denying Neo-
Platonism, in which the ideal is divorced from the apparently real. Her
reading of Plato allows for a modern sensibility that links speculation on
the absolutely good to the nature of experience as a whole and takes the
ideal to be a projection from and reflection back upon the actual. Theory
and practice, imperfection and perfection and past and present are mutu-
ally implicated in an integrative metaphysics.1
Murdoch was aware of the delicacy of her metaphysical thinking.
She takes on board a thoroughly modern perspective, in which the lim-
its of knowledge are recognised and empirical understanding is valued.
Simultaneously she draws upon Platonic metaphysics to resume an ambi-
tious conception of philosophy’s role in framing a broad metaphysical
picture of a multidimensional but unitary reality. Murdoch’s last pub-
lished philosophical text, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) (hereaf-
ter MGM) focuses upon morality and metaphysics, showing how they are
mutually related. Metaphysics descries unity and order, which allows for
a moral perspective that goes beyond the individual ego. Morality attests
to a vision of goodness that unites the self with others. Morality and met-
aphysics are here informed by a modern sensibility in that Murdoch high-
lights the processes of demythologisation that frame the ways in which
we understand ourselves in modern times. Science, technology and a
stripped-down notion of philosophy set the tone for a modern rational
instrumentalism, whereby orienting schemes of metaphysics tend to
be excluded. In responding to this context Murdoch enlists a form of
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 181

Platonism, which is framed so as to meet and to supersede the philosoph-

ical temper of the moment. Murdoch’s Platonism is stripped of any asso-
ciations with otherworldliness. Plato is invoked to provide a sense of the
unity and truth which are the goals of philosophical understanding and
which can anchor the pursuit of moral perfection. Truth and unity are
perceived through art, religious practice and moral engagement, though
the working towards truth and goodness is never to be completed.
Murdoch’s metaphysics invokes preceding philosophers in establishing
a way of seeing the world in which metaphysics is not abandoned but
is undertaken so as to work with a demythologised present in recognis-
ing aspects of experience that perceive unity and goodness. Metaphysical
exploration, for Murdoch, is not a matter of supramundane insight but a
historically situated activity that reveals the dialectical interplay between
forms of experience and how they constitute a whole that is meaning-
ful. Murdoch’s reading of public and private morality, of the political and
the personal, exhibits how she operates in providing metaphysical insight
by perceiving the relatedness of aspects of experience. Personal moral-
ity depends upon public morality just as the point of the public world is
to allow individual exploration of the personal. Public forms of moral-
ity are also shaped in part by personal exploration of experience just as
the goodness of public life demands respect on the part of individual citi-
zens. The moral perfectionism of personal morality underlines a commit-
ment to the order and goodness of experience just as awareness of the
calamities that have befallen the public world admits evidence of man-
ifest political imperfection. Order and disorder, goodness and evil, and
the public and private are intertwined within experience and the point
of Murdoch’s metaphysics is to show how they can be seen as working
together. Murdoch had registered the distinctness of and connections
between the political and moral worlds in her ‘A postscript to ‘On “God”
and “Good”’’ (2011) in which she declares, ‘The idea of excellence has
then a different operation in morals from its operation in politics, since a
final acceptance of imperfection and incompleteness is built into politics
in a way in which it is not built into morals’ (Murdoch 2011, 8).

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

Murdoch analyses relations between the personal and the political
spheres in Chapter 12 of MGM, ‘Morals and politics’. It highlights the
limits of the public sphere and the perfectionism of personal morality.
182 G. BROWNING

The meaning of the one sphere depends upon its relation to the other.
In her early novels and philosophical essays Murdoch had entertained
diffuse hopes for a socialist renewal. Jake Donoghue in Under the Net
(1954) is confused about politics but remains a socialist. The Bell (1958)
rehearses the aspirations and demise of a spiritual community that sets
up a co-operative form of life. In her essay ‘A house of theory’ (1958)
she recognises how demythologisation in contemporary culture erodes
belief in metaphysics, religion, visionary morals and radical political ide-
ology. Hence, after the Second World War socialism faces challenges,
notably due to a quiescent working class, apparent material affluence and
a gathering sense that radical ideological theories are untenable in the
modern world (Murdoch 1997, 182). In her ‘A postscript to ‘On “God”
and “Good”’’ (2011) she recognises how politics is distinct from morals
due to the imperfections of the public sphere (Murdoch 2011, 8). By the
time she writes MGM, Murdoch herself is thoroughly disillusioned with
political utopianism. She is alert to the historical evidence that points to
the horrors of misguided utopianism. The repressiveness of current and
recent socialist regimes, such as Communist China, underpins her dis-
taste for radical socialism and her concern to protect the rights of the
individual against the state (MGM, 354–357). Her suspicion of totalitar-
ianism is reflected in her novels, where survivors of repressive regimes,
such as vulnerable Willy Kost in The Nice and the Good (2000) serve as
haunting reminders of its dangers. Likewise her letters and journals attest
to her recognition of the wreckage of human life that she had witnessed
in the aftermath of European dictatorships and the Second World War.2
In ‘Morals and politics’ Murdoch turns decisively away from radi-
calism and utopian projects. She looks to the wisdom of past political
philosophers such as the British empiricists who focus upon the limited
but significant task of the state in providing security for individuals. This
imperative to protect the individual is acknowledged to involve a distinc-
tion between the private and the public. She recognises this distinction
to be central to classic liberal thought. She observes, ‘Liberal political
thought posits a certain fundamental distinction between the person as
citizen and the person as moral-spiritual individual’ (MGM, 357). While
accepting the imprecision of the terms of the distinction, she is willing to
invoke it so as to limit the power of the state. She remarks, ‘Society and
so the state cannot be perfected, although perfection is a proper ideal or
magnet for the individual as a moral agent’ (MGM, 356). The distinction
between the private and the public and the prioritisation of individual
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 183

freedom are held by Murdoch to be distinctively modern. She recognises

how Plato did not recognise the value of individual freedom and notes
that Plato’s ideal commonwealth of the Republic sets the common good
above that of individual satisfaction (see Browning 1991).
Murdoch’s observation that the distinction between the private and
the public is both relatively new and less than clear cut is accurate and
is rehearsed by many political theorists.3 In On Liberty J. S. Mill identi-
fies the rationale for governmental activity and its limit to be that of pre-
venting harm to other individuals (Mill 1989, 10). Mill values individual
liberty and he rules out governmental regulation of an individual’s con-
duct when other individuals are not affected. Hence Mill distinguishes
between self-regarding and other-regarding actions as determining the
sphere of liberty to which individuals are entitled (Mill 1989, 34). This
distinction is very difficult to specify precisely. All actions in some sense
affect others, just as their inspiration is not merely private. Murdoch rec-
ognises the indeterminacy involved in separating a private sphere from a
public one but maintains a difference between the two in order to pro-
tect an individual from violence, coercion and the dangers of an overly
powerful state. She sees security to be vital for individual well-being and
urges that politics must be regulated by fundamental moral norms. This
proposed mode of regulation is distinct from personal morality even if
regulatory norms are affected by the latter. She accepts a distinction that
is useful even if it is hard to specify in precise terms. She distinguishes
between a public political world that is to be governed by highly gen-
eral axioms prescribing rights and rules, and a personal sphere of moral
aspiration to which an individual is to be committed. Personal moral life
is perfectionist. An individual is to aspire to do the right thing. Personal
morality is a spiritual journey, where the self develops via its moral
encounters with others and aims for perfection. Public regulation attends
to the imperfect political world where individuals are liable to suffer. It
is not perfectionist but rather guards against manifest imperfections by
protecting the basic requirements for a decent life. Murdoch observes,
‘Society, and so the state, cannot be perfected, although perfection is a
proper ideal or magnet for the individual or moral agent’ (MGM, 356).
Murdoch’s distinction between private and public morality does not
amount to an absolute separation between two spheres and is not sanc-
tioned by unassailable philosophical argument. It is a pragmatic way of
drawing a line that works to protect individuals and to guard against
the excesses of state intrusion into individual lives. It is a product of
184 G. BROWNING

reflection upon modern political history. She is critical, however, of the

Hegelian project of identifying an overall pattern to the development
of history, and of Hegel’s Marxist successors who posit an end to his-
tory and justify political actions in terms of this endgame (MGM, 370).
Murdoch is against any totalising political judgements that abstract from
a messy contingent world in which rights are to supersede any projected
end state. Her political priority is to protect individual rights. She argues,
‘The idea of Utopia is a danger in politics, it hints at a rectification of a
primal fault, a perfect unity, it is impatient of contingency. The assertion
of contingency, the rights of the object, the rights of the individual, these
are connected’ (MGM, 378).
In establishing the limits that have to be respected in considering pol-
itics and in her critique of Hegel and Marx, Murdoch invokes Adorno’s
neo-Hegelian critique of Hegel. Adorno reacts against the Hegelian
tradition by critiquing totalising forms of thought. In contrast to
Hegel’s reading of the inter-relations between subject and object in his
Phenomenology of Spirit, Adorno admits the independence of the object.
He rejects a finalising dialectic that is to yield a final solution to the exi-
gencies of experience. Adorno allows for a negative and continuing open
dialectical interplay between subject and object. Murdoch comments
approvingly,

This dialectical give-and-take mutually necessary relation between subject

and object is not to be understood in a Hegelian manner as taking place
within any sovereign determining totality, whether Hegel’s absolute, or a
Marxist idea of history as a story with a happy ending. (MGM, 370)

Adorno’s approach recognises contingent events that cannot be encap-

sulated in a tight theoretical scheme. Yet he also allows for inter-­
relations between the elements that are to be theorised. Murdoch sympathy
for Adorno sheds light on her thought. She avoids totalising political
thought by recognising a distinction between the personal and the pub-
lic. They allow for differing objectives. In taking her cue from Adorno,
however, Murdoch allows for interaction between the public and the
private. Public laws are to protect and serve the individual. Perfectionist
personal morality depends upon protection of the self from public imper-
fections. Again, personal moral thinking can contribute to the public
agenda by framing ideas on how the welfare of individuals can be best
secured by public provision. Murdoch envisages a mutual dependence or
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 185

a kind of dialectic between the public and the private, though their
separation is to be highlighted so as to prioritise the protection of the
individual. Murdoch observes, ‘The idea of a separation (between the
public and the private) is better here than that of dialectic or tension
within a totality: it both emphasises a very (general) liberal) political
value, and also helps to make sense of political scenes’ (MGM, 367).
While personal morality is perfectionist, the public sphere is not
set on achieving an ideal that might not be realisable. It is flexible and
accommodates to the needs of the moment and deals with imperfections
and deficiencies that require practical remedies. The dangers to indi-
vidual welfare that follow from lax or ill-conceived regulation prioritise
the maintenance of fundamental axioms that set up clear and firm rules
to mediate the transactions of individuals. The rules of the game require
to be set so as to protect fundamental needs. Murdoch urges that the
public sphere is to be regulated by axioms securing basic requirements
for a decent life, for example the human rights of life and liberty should
be protected. These rights need to be secured from interference by gov-
ernments as well by individuals. The rights are to be derived from expe-
rience and history, reflecting what has proven to be fundamental to the
ordinary pursuit of individual purposes. They demand public respect that
is unconditional and unmediated, so these axioms are not to be system-
atised for that would detract from their immediacy. Public awareness of
their absolute significance is dissipated if they are made to fit within an
overarching theoretical formula. Murdoch observes, ‘They are barriers
of principle which are not reducible to a system’ (MGM, 565). Rights
also issue from considered reflection upon a historical changing world.
They specify what is thought to be necessary in the public realm from
time to time. Hence they are contestable, and they will vary across time
and space, even if many of them, such as the right to life, will persist.
Their historical piecemeal articulation means that they are not to be seen
as the positive enactments of a supervening and universal natural law.
Rather they evolve as political experience evolves and throws up issues
that demand attention in the light of changing cultural moods and cir-
cumstances. There is no precise specification of the ways in which they
will evolve. According to Michael Oakeshott, a friend of Murdoch’s,
there are no absolutes in considering political action (Oakeshott 1962).
No ideology can provide for the subtlety of circumstances and we must
look to traditions and what they imitate rather than ideological systems.
Murdoch recounts a variety of ways in which the agenda for politics
186 G. BROWNING

develops, noting the activities of feminist movements, and of single issue

groups canvassing the rights of animals and the planet (MGM, 369).
Deeply felt personal moral beliefs, for instance ecological concern for the
planet and animal rights, might at one time seem individual eccentricities
but, at another point in time might well be absorbed into the norms of
the public culture. Murdoch is light on detail in specifying how issues are
to be handled by political institutions and more specifically on how sub-
stantive aspects of socio-economic policy will be negotiated. Her highly
generic account of how axioms are put on to the political agenda by
groups is elliptical, but it intimates that she envisages a plural and demo-
cratic process by which norms and issues are debated and canvassed.
Murdoch provides no clear-cut recipe for putting axioms on the polit-
ical agenda and she recognises the contestable nature of public axioms.
Their contestability, however, does not imply that obedience to them
is optional. Public order and security depends upon their command of
widespread support. Their efficacy depends upon their capacity to elicit
obedience, and obedience derives from their moral approval on the part
of citizens. Public morality is not entirely separate from personal moral-
ity in that individuals agree to public norms in the light of their moral
beliefs. The public and the personal are linked dialectically by the for-
mation and effective operation of axioms. Personal moral commitments
inspire the adoption of axioms and reinforce community solidarity
and the maintenance of laws and rights. There are, however, tensions
between the public and the personal. While the axioms underpinning
the operation of the public sphere demand support and obedience from
citizens, on occasions the personal moral commitments of individuals
will clash with public rules. Murdoch imagines moral commitments to
be more than merely subjective preferences that can be put aside easily;
they form part of an individual’s spiritual life. A clash between personal
principle and public law raises the prospect of civil disobedience on the
part of an individual to register their disagreement with the law and to
canvas its overthrow. For Murdoch, civil disobedience is acceptable, even
necessary, but should be practised sparingly, because there is value in
the maintenance of a law insofar as it provides order. Murdoch allows
civil disobedience but she takes it to be exceptional and problematic. In
undertaking civil disobedience in a democratic society where laws and
policies reflect public opinion, an individual must be prepared to argue
the case in public debate. If the debate does not lead to a change in the
law then disobedience may be legitimate but the individual who refuses
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 187

to obey the law must accept punishment for an offence. Disobedience is

not to be generalised because it may weaken the force of public order,
which allows for the very development of personal wide-ranging moral
commitments that lie behind the civil disobedience.
Murdoch’s account of basic axioms in the public sphere is relatively
thin on the detail of how particular axioms are to be decided upon. But
it should not be thought that Murdoch is conservative in her empha-
sis upon order and basic rights. She allows for the possibility of inter-
national rights superseding a merely national perspective. Moreover, in
MGM and in her unpublished ‘Manuscript on Heidegger’ Murdoch spe-
cifically points to the provision of women’s rights (MGM, 361; Murdoch
1993, 58). Lovibond, though, has argued that Murdoch’s novels insin-
uate a resistance on her part to the full moral and intellectual auton-
omy of women that is also reflected in her moral philosophy (Lovibond
2011, 7). In a review of Lovibond’s Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy,
Hämäläinen has countered by observing, ‘one may suggest that her nov-
els describe what is, rather than what should be’ (Hämäläinen 2011).
Murdoch’s philosophical views cannot be simply read off from her
novels. They reflect the social world so that it is no surprise that in her
novels there is a differential treatment of men and women and that men
have higher social status and dominate women routinely in the course
of Murdoch’s narratives. This privileging of the social position of men,
however, does not entail that Murdoch’s attitude to women is clear cut.
Dooley has observed how Murdoch’s later novels show a more crit-
ical attitude to male adultery (Dooley 2009). Moreover, Murdoch’s
first-person male narrators do not determine how the novels are to be
read. These men tend to be unreliable narrators and the bourgeois family
structure, in which men dominate, is critiqued within the narratives.
In assessing the role of women in Murdoch’s novels Johnson
observes,

Iris Murdoch’s novels pose in new and tantalising ways the question of
what it means to write as a woman, to read as a woman. They disconcert
and fascinate both female and male readers by continually questioning gen-
der identity and transgressing gender boundaries. (Johnson 1987, 1)

The attitudes towards women of Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea
(1978) and Hilary Burde in A Word Child (1975) are patronising and
patriarchal, but as Johnson signals, these attitudes are expressed ironically
188 G. BROWNING

within self-subverting first person narratives. Murdoch’s deconstruction

of male domination is of a piece with her critique of bourgeois family
structures that are shown to exert sustained damage to children. A Fairly
Honourable Defeat (1970) represents a devastating critique of the smug,
self-satisfied bourgeois family and offers depictions of male attitudes,
maintained by Julius King and Rupert Foster that incarnate the demonic
and the vain. Simon and Axel, a homosexual couple, manage to achieve
a workable relationship but it is outside of traditional male sexual mores
and Tallis appears to be good but his saintliness is outside the norm of
male attitudes. Murdoch in ‘Morals and politics’ recognises that axioms
establishing sexual equalities are disturbing forms of male power and are
likely to be further developed in the future, while her novels pose ques-
tions for the prevalent inequalities between men and women. She does
not, however, spell out a clear commitment to feminism.

Murdoch’s Novels, Morals and Politics

Murdoch’s reading of the relations between morals and politics in MGM
allows for inter-relations between the two. A number of her novels also
trace relations between morals and politics. Murdoch’s novels do not
simply rehearse philosophical doctrines but deal with issues and circum-
stances phenomenologically that she reflects upon in her philosophi-
cal work. Hence novels such as The Nice and the Good (1968) and An
Accidental Man (1971) show characters grappling with tensions between
the spheres of morals and politics that are focused upon in her late study
of the two spheres in MGM. What they show is that characters can feel
and appreciate the distinct duties of the moral and political spheres. An
individual cannot simply deny an obligation to support his state at a time
of war and yet equally he or she has to consider the moral obligations of
how others are to be treated. Likewise the state demands that public offi-
cials are to be held to account and yet a particular recognition of one’s
duties to another might be seen as requiring us to relax our concern to
hold a public official to account.
The distinction between personal and public forms of morality
underlies Murdoch’s most expressly political novel, The Nice and the
Good. Its principal protagonist, John Ducane has to choose between
his political and moral obligations. At the request of his head of depart-
ment, Octavian Gray and the Prime Minister, Ducane, a legal advisor
to a government department, leads an inquiry into the death of one
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 189

of its members, Radeechy. At the same time, Ducane is developing a

Platonic relationship with Kate Gray, Octavian’s wife, who lives on their
Trescombe estate in Dorset. Ducane enjoys the ‘niceness’ of his rela-
tions with Kate, which counterpoint the edginess of his relations with
his girlfriend, Jessica, whose insecurity inhibits him from acting on his
resolution to end their affair. Kate is warm and expansive in entertaining
her friends, Mary Clothier and Paula Biranne, and their children, while
enjoying her relaxed relationship with Ducane. She avoids demanding
emotions and close observation of herself and others. Her reflecting on
her relationship to Ducane is exemplary. ‘How lovely it is, thought Kate,
to be able to fall in love with one’s old friends. It’s one of the pleasures
of being middle-aged. Not that I’m really in love, but it’s just like being
in love with all the pain taken away’ (Murdoch [1968] 2000, 124).
Kate’s self-absorption counterpoints Ducane’s close attention to
others. He is prepared to offer and receive love, and is affected by the
depraved forces contaminating the political world that his investigative
work into the affairs of the department has revealed. His own moral sen-
sitivity is heightened in risking his life to save Pierce, Mary’s son. In so
doing he realises his love for Mary, which contrasts with the ersatz pain-
less ‘nice’ love that is imagined by Kate. He takes his love for Mary to
indicate fundamental goodness in the world, to which he should devote
himself. His state of mind is captured in the following observation:
‘Her mode of being gave him a moral, even a metaphysical, confidence
in the world, in the reality of goodness’ (Murdoch [1968] 2000, 332).
Ducane’s insight into goodness inspires him to set up the reunion of
Paula and her husband, Richard Biranne, who is implicated in the death
of Radeechy. Due to his moral commitment to help Paula, he refrains
from including any damaging reference to Biranne in his official report on
the death. Ducane’s selfless assistance to Paula reflects his sense of good-
ness and his personal perfectionist moral commitment. A commitment
to the good demands that an individual acts according to a standard of
goodness that is distinct from self-interest in its recognition of relational
commitments to others. At the same time, Ducane’s moral perfection-
ism that requires his commitment to help Paula and her husband repre-
sents a dereliction of his political duty to his department and to the Prime
Minister. His political duty is to provide an inclusive report, which might
re-establish public confidence in the political establishment and the norms
of society. Politics is above all about security and demands that citizens
trust in government and its personnel. Ducane’s neglect of his political
190 G. BROWNING

duty is justified by the personal virtue of his action, but the tension
between his moral and political duties leads him to resign from his post.
Ducane’s resignation over his failure to produce the full facts in his
report contrasts with the relaxed attitude of his head of department,
Octavian Gray. At the close of the novel the latter accepts the thinness of
Ducane’s report, because the Radeechy affair is of receding significance.
Politics operates by doing what is pragmatically necessary. Trust in public
officials is required but if there is no threat to trust then standards can be
relaxed. Octavian, like Kate, is nice and bourgeois rather than commit-
ted to perfectionist moral ideals. He is temperamentally suited to being
a political actor. He is concerned with what works rather than with the
good. He is not overly troubled by the demands of personal morality
and, as is characteristic of top civil servants, he can be economical with
the truth. With a similar worldliness he also conceals his affair with a sec-
retary, just as Kate can renew her social life in the absence of Ducane.
Ducane’s uneasiness at his failure to discharge his political obligation
points to Murdoch’s recognition of the delicate balance between polit-
ical and personal moral obligations. Politics, in MGM, is not a utopian
project (MGM, 356). It is about establishing and maintaining the rules
of the game, which provide security in the public world. The Nice and
the Good shows a related recognition of the differing spheres of morality
and politics. Ducane, in his personal life, can be virtuous in pursuing the
good but he is also aware of the need to provide security in the public
sphere. The value of the world is to be respected but it does not tran-
scend the perfectionist obligation of cultivating goodness.
The tension between the political and the personal, which under-
pins Murdoch’s reading of moral and political life, surfaces in another
Murdoch novel, An Accidental Man which explores a case of civil dis-
obedience. In the novel Ludwig Leferrier, a young American historian,
opts to remain in England rather than to return to the United States
to serve his state in the Vietnam war. If he returns home Ludwig faces
arrest for avoiding the draft, while if he remains in England he can take
up a lecturing post and marry Gracie Tisbourne. Ludwig’s parents disap-
prove of their son’s projected marriage and regard avoidance of the draft
a being politically dishonourable. They urge him to return home and not
to betray political principles. Ludwig is opposed to the Vietnam War on
moral grounds and hence considers his decision to remain in England to
be morally justified. By the end of the novel, however, and in response
to his changing attitude to the marriage and to his moral and political
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 191

dilemma he decides to return to the United States and to face the

consequences. Clearly there are opposing arguments about what Ludwig
should do. The Vietnam War excited opposition on many grounds.
Indeed Murdoch in her postscript to ‘On “God” and “Good”’ maintains
the rightness of opposition to the war (Murdoch 2011, 8). Ludwig’s
dilemma is complex and shaped by a number of contingent experiential
considerations. His life in the UK appears attractive, he is in love and
doubts the cause for which the United States is fighting.
A super power fighting for indeterminate reasons and in contro-
versial and largely ineffective ways appears to be unworthy of support.
And yet a state requires a commitment from its citizens to maintain its
basic rules which may be said to include its right to wage war. In the
novel Murdoch does not take sides on the issue, and records the ten-
sion within Ludwig as he battles with his love for Gracie and his strained
relations with his parents and also the more general tension between the
personal and the political on a leading issue of the politics of the day.
Ultimately the novel shows a character facing up to the consequences of
civil disobedience, and being prepared to face punishment and popular
disapproval, just as in MGM she allows civil disobedience just as long as
individuals accept civil punishment for their transgressions against the
law.

Conclusion
Throughout her career Murdoch tracked political events and was deeply
interested in morality. A number of her novels show characters wrestling
with political dilemmas. Jake Donoghue in Under the Net mixes with
political radicals, feels the emotional pull of socialism but cannot articu-
late a reasoned commitment to its creed. Gerard Hernshaw in The Book
and the Brotherhood (1987) eschews radical utopianism for the security of
a moderate political regime that supports parliamentary democracy. Both
Ludwig Leferrier in An Accidental Man and John Ducane in The Nice
and the Good have insight into the importance of the political sphere and
respect what it offers. Yet they also recognise the force of personal moral-
ity. Leferrier’s conscience is stirred by what he takes to be an unjust war
and he continues throughout the novel to maintain a principled opposi-
tion to the Vietnam War, but by its close he returns to the United States
to accept punishment for his civil disobedience. His action respects a
political duty to his state, just as John Ducane’s resignation from his
192 G. BROWNING

public post recognises that he owes a loyalty to the public sphere

notwithstanding the strength of his moral conviction in aiding a friend in a
way that runs counter to official duty.
Murdoch’s analysis of morals and politics in MGM distinguishes per-
sonal morality from public morality and she imagines that the political
priority is to protect the individual citizen from harm while the object
of personal morality is to pursue an ideal perfection. The dangers of the
political arena are rehearsed in a number of her novels, and are intimated
in the radical utopianism of Crimond in The Book and the Brotherhood
that ignores the needs of ordinary individuals (see Browning 2018a). Yet
Murdoch also sees connections between the public and the personal in
that personal morality depends upon an ordered public world if it is to
be undertaken successfully. Hence Ducane recognises the force of pub-
lic authority while he operates so as to limit what he says in an official
report. Likewise political rules and ideas can be questioned and devel-
oped via individual morality. A willingness to question American involve-
ment in Vietnam and to practise civil disobedience on the issue is a
theme of An Accidental Man, and while the novel does not prescribe any
lessons to the reader, the practice of civil disobedience is presented as a
plausible response to a political situation if respect is also shown to pre-
vailing political authority.
Murdoch’s metaphysics operates in order to make sense of experi-
ence by showing how forms of life and aspects of experience relate to
one another. In her analysis of politics and morality in MGM she shows
how perfectionist moral aspirations are both supported by the security
that is provided by political order but are also necessarily distinct from
the imperfect and pragmatic world of politics. Political perfectionism is to
be guarded against, given the tendency for political radicalism to generate
injustice and violence, and yet the political world is also to be valued and
respected as a means of securing order and justice. She recognises that
metaphysics cannot provide an absolute set of principles for the political
world just as moral life is to be determined by individuals situated in spe-
cific situations and making particular judgements. While Murdoch’s sense
that the axioms of the political world are not absolute represents a rea-
sonable reading of the changeable historical world in which politics take
place, her account is elliptical in that it does not provide a rich descrip-
tion of how changes of axioms might take place. She entertains the idea
of international rights and governance without specifying how it might
operate and she does not expand upon her recognition of women’s
 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND POLITICS (MGM CHAPTER 12) 193

rights to provide an indication of what further women’s rights might be

required. Murdoch’s account of the metaphysics of morals and politics is
elliptical, but it does locate politics and morals on the map of experience
so as to guide judgements on what is appropriate in both arenas.

Notes
1. For a discussion of Murdoch’s reading of Plato, see Browning (2018b,
178–190).
2. Murdoch’s journals are held in Kingston University Library, and a collec-
tion of her letters was published in Horner and Rowe (2015).
3. For analysis of the complicated relations between the individual and soci-
ety, see Browning (1999, 2005, 2016) and Berlin (1969).

References
Berlin, I. 1969. Four essays on liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Browning, G. 1991. Hegel and Plato: Two modes of philosophising about politics.
New York: Garland Press.
Browning, G. 1999. Hegel and the history of political philosophy. Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Browning, G. 2005. A globalist ideology of post-Marxism? Hardt and Negri’s
Empire. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8 (2):
193–208.
Browning, G. 2016. A history of modern political thought—The question of inter-
pretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Browning, G. (ed.). 2018a. Murdoch on truth and love. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Browning, G. 2018b. Why Iris Murdoch matters. London: Bloomsbury.
Dooley, G. 2009. Iris Murdoch’s novels of male adultery: The sandcastle, An
unofficial rose, The sacred and profane love machine and The message to the
planet. English Studies 90 (4): 421–434.
Hämäläinen, N. 2011. Review of Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, gender and phi-
losophy. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 12 (10): n.p.
Horner, A., and A. Rowe (eds.). 2015. Living on paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch
1934–1995. London: Chatto & Windus.
Johnson, D. 1987. Iris Murdoch. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Lovibond, S. 2011. Iris Murdoch, gender and philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge.
Mill, J.S. 1989. On liberty and other writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Murdoch, I. [1968] 2000. The nice and the good. London Vintage.
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Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals. (Abbreviated MGM.)

London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1993. Heidegger manuscript. KUAS6/5/1/4. Kingston University
Archives and Special Collections, London.
Murdoch, I. 1997. A house of theory. In Existentialists and mystics: Writings on
philosophy and literature, 171–186. London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 2011. A postscript to ‘on “God” and “good”’. Iris Murdoch Review
1 (3): 6–8.
Murdoch, I. Unpublished. Journals, poetry notebooks and other items.
KUAS202. Kingston University Archives and Special Collections, London.
Oakeshott, M. 1962. Rationalism in politics and other essays. London and New
York: Methuen.
 CHAPTER 13

Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Argument

(MGM Chapter 13)

Andrew Gleeson

[The] Ontological Proof is mysterious because it does not address itself to

the intelligence, but to love.
Simone Weil, quoted in MGM three times (401, 425, 504–505)

Iris Murdoch has long sought to replace God with Good. Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM) contains a reiteration and ampli-
fication of this theme. Modern science and enlightenment, she argues,
displacing religion, have forced a wedge between fact and value that has
left us with a picture of ourselves as lonely Cartesian souls and existen-
tialist wills, adrift in an alienating mechanical world. Value survives in
deracinated remnants, as a function of practical reason, or as a calculus
of pleasures, or as the product of ungrounded choice. Murdoch believes
this self-conception is untrue to an indispensable reality of human life,
a transcendent and perfect Platonic Good which remains our unac-
knowledged life-blood. Her ambition is to recover this as a serious
philosophical idea, and perhaps beyond that to put it at the centre of a
‘de-mythologised’ form of Christianity.1

A. Gleeson (*)
Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 195

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_13
196 A. GLEESON

In MGM she develops a moral form of the ontological argument (OA)

to show how the Good is an essential reality of our lives and thought: a
proper conception of the ordinary moral value we experience is a con-
ception of something we can be assured is real, and that reality in some
way indicates an ideal, perfect form of itself, the transcendent Good. The
argument, normally considered an entertaining conundrum or ‘charming
joke’ (Murdoch quoting Schopenhauer, MGM, 392) worth little serious
philosophical attention, is thus at the very heart of Murdoch’s moral phi-
losophy. Consequently it provides a vantage point from which I try to
identify a possible lop-sided tendency in Murdoch’s thought, one that
places more emphasis on inspiring ideals than on implacable demands.2
I argue that her version of the argument is handicapped by concentrating
on a vision of moral experience which emphasises a slow, calm, contem-
plative progress towards the attracting ideal of the Good. I contend this
does not fully capture the strong sense of the inescapability of morality
that the moral OA requires. I suggest a modified form of the argument
that focuses on our sense of human life as something sacred or inviolable,
a sense constituted by the non-negotiable demands other human being
make on us not to violate them (in actions like murder, rape, betrayal,
etc.). By contrast to the Good as a distant ideal beckoning us forward in
a pilgrimage towards ever more wisdom and virtue, the preciousness of
human life and its moral demands are the commonplace, proximate sub-
stance of our daily lives, albeit so familiar we barely think of them until
confronted by their violation.
In the first section I outline Murdoch’s moral OA. In the second
I introduce three objections and offer replies to them. Two replies are in
a spirit I think Murdoch would approve of. The third represents a depar-
ture from the main direction of her thinking. Here I develop the moral
OA in a form concentring on the preciousness of human life. In the last
section I sketch a sense of perfection suitable for my version of the moral
OA, and consider the argument’s dialectical value.

I
Murdoch’s main discussion of the OA is in Chapter 13 of MGM. She
distinguishes, conventionally, between two versions.
The first (MGM, 393) argues that a perfect being must exist since a
being perfect in every respect other than existing would be less great, less
perfect, than a being with the same qualities but which does exist. This is
 13 IRIS MURDOCH’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (MGM CHAPTER 13) 197

the version of the argument vulnerable to Kant’s famous objection that

existence is not a property. My thought of a perfect island is not made
a thought of a better island if I think of it as existing as opposed to not
existing.
The second version (MGM, 394–395) argues that the concept of God
is the concept of a perfect being which necessarily exists, and so long as
that concept is coherent we cannot but think of God as existing: to think
of him as not existing, or indeed as existing only contingently, is not to
think of him at all. So either he cannot exist (because the concept of God
is incoherent) or he exists necessarily.
Murdoch does not endorse the argument as proving the existence
of God. Instead she construes the second version of the OA as a moral
argument. We should read it as proving the reality of ‘some uniquely
necessary status for moral value as something (uniquely) impossible to be
thought away from human experience, and … if conceived of, known as
real’ (MGM, 396).
But how do we move from conception to reality? Murdoch’s answer
is an appeal to Plato, whose philosophy she insists is the context we need
to understand the OA. We acquire adequate moral concepts by the kind
of learning from moral experience which Plato described and which
Murdoch recapitulates (MGM, 404–406, 408–412). One of the things
we learn, an essential element of the moral conceptions we form, is their
necessity, their inescapability in human life. So this is an argument from
experience which gives substance to the concept of something which is
necessary to human existence. Summarising the argument with reference
to God (but we can substitute ‘moral value’, as she wants us to) she says,
‘God either exists necessarily or is impossible. All our experience shows
that he exists’ (MGM, 405). This nicely encapsulates the conceptual and
the experiential elements of the argument.
But this only gets us so far. What the argument to this point estab-
lishes is the inescapable reality of the quotidian moral phenomena of
ordinary, daily life. Another stage is necessary to take us from these
very imperfect phenomena—or bundling them together in the singular,
from moral value—to the ideal, perfect Good. These two stages are not
completely distinct, a fact partly reflected in the (perhaps unavoidable)
un-clarity (in both Plato and Murdoch) over just how the perfect is dis-
cerned in the imperfect. In a sea of images, sometimes it seems like infer-
ence, sometimes new concept formation, sometimes intuition (MGM,
400), sometimes remembrance (the Meno, MGM, 400), sometimes
198 A. GLEESON

aspect-perception, sometimes the faith and hope that loving attention,

patiently abided with, will not be disappointed, a faith in something
‘apprehended as there which is not yet known’ and which ‘comes to us
out of the dark of non-being, as a reward for loving attention’ (MGM,
505, original emphasis)—a kind of creation ex nihilo. I cannot pursue
these fascinating and profound images here. But at the minimum it is
clear that in our moral experience we discover ‘degrees of goodness’
(MGM, 396) which (at least) intimate to us the ideal, perfect Good.
Moral understanding, for her, does not consist in the grasp (theoreti-
cal or practical) of a moral theory, or even moral principles, applied to a
world of value-free fact. We confront a world already charged with value.
We perceive that value if we can—to use a term Murdoch inherited from
Simone Weil—attend to (look at) that world purified of the egocentric
fantasy which typically holds us in thrall. That purification is a progres-
sive shedding of comforting illusions as our understanding and acqui-
sition of goodness and wisdom is gradually enhanced, achieving both
greater depth and greater ‘unity’. This is not the unity of a completed
theory such as we might get in science, but that most visibly expressed in
great art. A lot of life-experience may be necessary to conceive of moral
value properly. If my conception is shallow, banal and philistine, then
that conception will not entail the reality of moral value. The conception
may not need to be perfect, but it will need some significant maturity
before the claim that what I am conceiving of is something I know to be
so will become plausible.

II
But no matter how cultivated my conception, could it not all be illusion?
It may be true that moral value cannot be thought away from human
experience. It may be true that this conditions our concept of what it is
to be human. But (the objection can go) none of that shows that moral
experience is experience of something real. Perhaps some kind of giant
illusion is built into our essential nature (as many philosophers have sup-
posed, not just about morality). It may be true that ‘if you can conceive
of this entity you are ipso facto certain that what you are thinking of is
real’ (MGM, 395, emphasis hers)—but what you are certain of is one
thing and what is actually so can be another.
Murdoch has written: ‘Moral concepts do not move about within
a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different
 13 IRIS MURDOCH’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (MGM CHAPTER 13) 199

purposes, a different world’ (Murdoch 1996, 28, emphasis hers). This

suggests her possible sympathy for an answer to this worry that I can only
sketch in desperate and dogmatic brevity. The gist is that once a moral
judgement has satisfied all the criteria internal to morality itself (and
any factual assumptions are correct) then no room remains for coherent
doubt about its truth. There are no criteria external to morality by which
our most basic moral criteria (which, ultimately, means our most basic
moral reactions and attitudes—like, for example, our horror and disgust
at torturing children for fun) can be appraised as correct or incorrect.
Thus, once we have made our moral judgements, there are no further
‘ontological’ questions about the reality of properties attributed by those
judgements; if the judgement is to be challenged it must be on moral
grounds. The same goes for physical (scientific) judgements, aesthetic
judgements, mental judgements, and so on. Each domain has its own
‘internal’ criteria for correctness, but there are no domain-transcendent
criteria. If this is right there is no reason to doubt that judgements cor-
rect by morality’s own criteria are judgements about something real.
This metaphysically ‘quietist’ line of thought gets powerful resistance
from the objection that if we admit the reality of moral properties then
we admit the reality of things offensive to science (unless they can be
shown to reduce to, or supervene on, scientifically kosher properties).
Quietism can, I think, disarm this objection too. There are many things
in the world not accountable for in scientific terms. But this does not
mean that there are ‘weird’ non-natural things offensive to science, or
indeed to a scientific naturalism. There are moral things, aesthetic things,
mental things and so on. It is only the assumption that there is just one
kind of reality, and so that physical and moral claims must be answerable
to the same criteria, which creates a conflict and a sense of a threat to sci-
ence. Moral ideals and moral properties are non-natural in the sense that
they are not physical, but not in the sense that they threaten the closed-
ness of the physical universe or the completeness of science. Such notions
make sense only within the scientific perspective and its criteria for cor-
rectness. There is no such thing as the world being open or closed, or
an account of it being complete or incomplete, simpliciter, without spec-
ifying a context (physical, mental, moral, etc.)—for without a context
there are no criteria to give the assertions sense. The idea of the uni-
verse ‘in itself’, independently of any perspective or gestalt and its inter-
nal criteria, is incoherent. A physical or a moral description of the world
is already a description of the world ‘in itself’. (Indeed, what would a
200 A. GLEESON

description of the world be that was not a description of it ‘in itself’?)

Beware moving from the truism that every description is relative to some
set of criteria to the conclusion that they are only descriptions of ‘appear-
ances’ and not reality, not the world ‘in itself’. To demand descriptions
of the world that are from no perspective is to demand descriptions for
which there are no criteria as to their correctness or incorrectness, and they
are not descriptions at all. Notice too that quietism is not idealism—
properties (physical or moral) are ‘there’ whether we see them or not.
In both cases, we cannot make things true just by wanting, wishing or
willing them to be so. Given a set of criteria, the world determines what
is true, not us.
It might be thought that even if this quietist line of thought suc-
ceeds for actual, instantiated moral properties, there remains a distinct
problem for Murdoch’s ideal Good. Put pithily, the problem says that
if something is merely ideal, if it transcends what is instantiated in the
actual world, then it is not real. The objection equivocates over the
word ‘ideal’. The word is sometimes contrasted (usually by philoso-
phers) with ‘real’ or ‘actual’. But in street speech to talk of an ‘ideal’
is typically to talk of a goal or aim, of something someway distant but
highly desirable, optimal or supreme. This need not imply any doubt
of its reality. Modern thought tends to conflate the actual and the real.
They are treated as close to synonyms. But an ancient tradition, to which
Murdoch subscribes (MGM, 406–407) sees the ideal as, if anything, more
real than the actual, i.e. the instantiated. An actual poem is only as real,
qua poem, as it approaches exhibiting those qualities which constitute
excellence in poetry, the qualities which make an attempt at poetry most
fully poetic. Similarly, goodness (in a person, in an action) is more real
the better it is, and only the perfect Good is fully real (is, if you like, fully
what it essentially is). The less and more real are both available to us, the
one in the typically confused and obscure flux of immediate experience,
the other as a distant object of contemplation: ‘[Good] is real as an idea,
and is also incarnate in knowledge and work and love’ (MGM, 508).
There is no confusion in this so long as we do not think that the ideal
is real in the sense of something we can lay our hands on as I can on my
tennis racquet. And again, if it is feared this introduces weird non-natural
properties into the world, then quietism comes to the rescue.
If something along these overall rough lines in the last two paragraphs
is defensible then the philosophical sceptic’s objection to Murdoch’s
moral OA can be met: absent any other obstacles, she can make the
 13 IRIS MURDOCH’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (MGM CHAPTER 13) 201

move from a moral value being (properly) conceived of, to its being real
(and not merely thought of as real).
There is however a third line of objection to Murdoch’s moral OA
that is harder to deal with. The problem concerns the characteristic
emphasis in her description of the moral life. That emphasis is on the
attraction of the distant ideal. Hers is a morality of gradual growth in
virtue and wisdom by attention to this ideal as we partially perceive it
in good actions, good people and, especially (not just good but) great
art. Obviously this is a very important part of morality. I am sure it is
indispensable. But for the purpose of the indispensability claim made by
her moral OA is this the right theme to stress? Many of us are barely
responsive to the higher ideals of the moral life. We get by in a rather
thoughtless and mediocre way, rationalising our timid and conventional
lives. Too many of us never confront our demons or push beyond our
‘comfort zone’, and perhaps rarely even think of such things. We remain
lazily the captive, in Murdoch’s striking phrase, of our ‘consoling fanta-
sies’. Yet we need not be moral monsters, much less be unrecognisable
as human. For pedestrian purposes that suffice for most life contexts we
count as ‘decent’ (or at least not indecent) people. We do not and would
not murder, rape, pillage, betray, lie, steal, break promises and so on. To
reiterate, I do think that attention to the ideal, and ultimately to some-
thing like Murdoch’s perfect Good, is fundamental and indispensable.
But I do suggest that it is not what in moral life is most urgent, non-ne-
gotiable, absolute and resistant to compromise and temporising, and so
not what is most suitable as the main meaning of indispensable ‘moral
value’ in the moral OA.
So what is most indispensable? Here is a remarkable fact of great rel-
evance to morality that goes strangely overlooked: in the last 24 hours
none of us has committed a murder, rape or any of the grave evils listed
above (so I do my readers the compliment of assuming). That we have
not done so is no accident, no mere good fortune. It is not that we may
not have been angry enough at someone to punch them in the face, frus-
trated enough by stress at work or home not to have treated someone
unjustly, or worn down enough by the disappointment and sorrow of life
to have contemplated self-harm—open the time period wide enough and
nearly all of us will have had such violent or nasty impulses sometimes.
Yet very few of us ever act on them (and most of those who do are in
jail). This is not due to mere habit, which is only too easily perturbed
by the course of events. It is not because we are saints, or unusually
202 A. GLEESON

thoughtful people. But nor is it just a matter of self-interest, the fear of

getting caught. We do not do these things because we cannot do them.
That ‘cannot’ is of course moral, not physical. No physical constraint
stays our hand against our brother and sister. It is a constraint partly of
sympathy and partly of conscience. It is our inchoate, practical recogni-
tion that to do such things is a terrible violation of something sacred:
other human beings.3 In submitting to this necessity we recognise one
kind of absolute moral requirement: that there are certain ways we must
not treat other people. So what is most indispensable is our robust sense
that the evils listed above—murder, rape, etc.—are things we morally
cannot do, that there is a certain minimal piety owed to other human
beings as human beings that entails that these things cannot be done,
that these things are outrageous violations of something sacred, precious,
inviolable: human beings.
Most of the time we are blithely unaware of this moral necessity,
which we automatically (usually with no sense of forbearance) abide by
every moment of a civilised life. When it does come to consciousness,
the reflective person may form the conception of this usually uncon-
scious and inarticulate moral necessity, which can serve as the premise
of the moral OA, a conception of something definitively indispensable
from human life. There is nothing genuinely akin to this in the case of
the attraction to the perfect Good. Murdoch often speaks of the ubiquity
of value in her sense. Ubiquitous it may be (so is moral necessity) but
indispensable it is not. As I have already said, many lives that we can take
no great exception to are lived with barely a thought of ideals, let alone
of the perfect ideal. The pursuit of them—also often unconscious—read-
ily wanes and expires in a way that our unthinking adhesion to the moral
necessities does not (or if it does, produces highly disturbing emotions).
Other human beings and the largely unconscious moral force they exert
upon us are a far more palpable presence in our lives that the Good.
We become aware of moral necessity on those occasions when it
comes to the surface in temptation (and our conscience looms up to
warn us) or, more dramatically, in violation—in those transgressions
we commit against others (our lies, betrayals, evasions or worse, when
shame, guilt and remorse consume us) or that we witness performed by
others (occasioning our shock and indignation). And when it does come
to the surface, at least in very serious cases like murder, the mark it leaves
on nearly every life—or would leave if it happened—is profound and
often unconsolable. I may know nothing of the importunate vagabond
 13 IRIS MURDOCH’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (MGM CHAPTER 13) 203

who, when I angrily shove him out of my way, falls in the river and
drowns—but in my desolate remorse I know that his life was of absolute
significance, and that the wrong I have done him is forgivable only by
him and pardonable only by God. (That remorse is not the product of
any attention to the vagabond. If anything it is the product of my inat-
tention to him, and if I attend to him now, it is a product of the remorse.
Or better, perhaps remorse is a form of attention—but what I attend to
is the only too close him, not the remote Good.) Sometimes the Good
breaks in dramatically upon a human life—in cases of encounter with
great saintliness or beauty, as I have said—but for most of us the effect
passes quickly, dissolved back into the busyness of life. Only for relatively
rare people do (or would) such experiences make a lasting and deep dif-
ference: the priest or doctor called to a vocation of service, the artist to
one of creating beauty. Admittedly Murdoch does talk of obedience and
submission—but it is obedience to something at least akin to a calling,
and failure to obey is not like failure to refrain from violation of others.
Jesus said ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven
is perfect’, but Christians do not treat failure at this, or even failure seri-
ously to pursue it, the way they treat murder, rape, etc.
Moral necessities do not arise from cultivated attention to ideals, but
from very basic inter-personal reactive attitudes (sympathy, remorse,
indignation: partly innate, partly socialised) that are certainly definitive
of human life in distinction from animal life. These attitudes are objects
of reflection, but they do not begin from reflection, contemplation or
attention. They rule our lives from a position usually beneath the sur-
face. At moments of, and in lives inured in, inattention, they may burst
to the surface, sudden, unbidden, unwelcome. They take us by the neck,
and force us to attend—but what we attend to is not a good example
or a distant ideal, but just the reality of the human being in front of us.
Perhaps then we may turn our attention to ideals.4
I think we can see Murdoch’s accent on the more peaceful aspect of
moral life, and perhaps even a shying away from the more dramatic, in
her criticism of Norman Malcolm. Malcolm was one of the first philos-
ophers in the twentieth century to develop the second form of Anselm’s
original argument (Malcolm 1960). Murdoch criticises his reliance on
Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game, but I shall not address that
here. She also takes him to task for suggesting the concept of God is
critically conditioned by the experience of overwhelming guilt, and that
from that ‘storm in the soul’ there arises ‘the conception of a forgiving
204 A. GLEESON

mercy that is limitless, beyond all measure’ (qtd. in MGM, 416–417).

Murdoch is right to push back against any suggestion that ‘people who
lead quiet orderly lives are less spiritual than those who are errant and
tormented’. And equally right to suspect that sometimes a harping on sin
betrays the histrionic thought that ‘extreme sin deserves extreme grace’
(MGM, 417, emphasis hers). I assume she would say similar things to the
idea that Malcolm’s guilt (if not his forgiveness) applies to morality as
well as God. But she goes too far, I think, when she writes:

if there is any sort of proof from experience via meaning, should not
the relevant phenomena be, not esoteric, but of great generality? … If the
meaning of ‘God‘can be learnt from experience might we not expect the
lesson to be everywhere visible? (417)

It may be true (as she says at MGM, 430) that many of our best lives
are fairly ordinary, unspectacular examples, people whose lives lack dra-
matic highs and lows. But it remains essential to our moral nature that,
as Wittgenstein remarked, we are capable (all of us) of damning ourselves.
That possibility, the possibility of such highs and such lows, is a standing
condition of our moral lives. How those of us with quiet, orderly lives
would react if we murdered someone is an essential index of our moral
humanity—it marks us off from the psychopath: unlike him, we cannot
murder people. This is hardly esoteric. In truth, the most pedestrian of
lives has something dark within it that the moral necessities protect it from.
It is true that the Christian teaching of original sin relates to a con-
dition of ‘fallen-ness’ that encompasses all of our frailty, including our
neglect of ideals, not only those occasions where we commit egregious
violations of other people. But that does not mean that such violations do
not hold a central place in the sense of sin—that sense (I take it to be the
guilt to which Malcolm refers) would not be what it is, would not have
the gravity it does, without the standing possibility, for all of us, of such
violations, and of our responses to them of remorse, indignation, etc.:
‘Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.’ The sense of sin is
intertwined with the sense of human life as sacred. Divine love and divine
judgement are a package deal. Modern non-Christians do not speak of
God or original sin, but we have not (or not yet) lost the responses of
remorse and indignation that (together with love, grief and compassion)
constitute our sense of human life as something uniquely precious (and
that still ultimately animate the language of ‘human rights’).
 13 IRIS MURDOCH’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (MGM CHAPTER 13) 205

III
The OA has always been associated with the notion of perfection, and
that notion is of course at the centre of Murdoch’s thought: the Good is
a perfect Good. In that respect, her focus fits the OA. By contrast perfec-
tion seems to be lacking from the notion of absolute demand that I have
argued should be front and centre in a moral OA. In this last section I
want to sketch a sense of perfection suitable for my conception of abso-
lute demand, and then relate it to Murdoch’s perfect Good.
Murdoch’s perfection of the Good is expressly a form of moral perfec-
tion, always remembering that this comprehends moral perception and
wisdom, and not merely overt conduct. The notion of perfection I want
here is very different. John Legend sings:

Cause all of me
Loves all of you
Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections. (Legend and Gadd 2013)

All your perfect imperfections. Love can make the imperfect perfect. Not
as a moral agent, or as a physical specimen, but as something infinitely
precious, something the lover will give his very life for. Thus does the
mother see her child, the lover their sweetheart. Here we are perfected
by a love that is blind to the imperfections of body and character that
usually dazzle us in our worldly preoccupations, where these things are
what matter most. Of course those things are sometimes important (a
threatening illness) but they cannot be the things that, in Christian lan-
guage, ‘save’ us, i.e. save us from the risk of falling out of the human
family, the family of those who are inviolable because they can (unlike an
animal or an inanimate object) be violated.
In like way, when we recognise the inviolability of human beings in
remorse or indignation or compassion we see them as perfect in the same
sense. We see them as having a momentous importance (one making
absolute moral demands on us) that owes nothing at all to the imperfec-
tions (or for that matter the perfections) of body, character, personality,
etc. The disabled, the insane, the wicked, the wretched of the earth—
we, brothers and sisters, are all sacred. Murdoch’s version of the moral
OA invites us to conceive of a perfect Good. If we form that conception
properly, we can rest assured that we are conceiving of something real.
206 A. GLEESON

My version invites us to conceive of human beings as perfect in the sense

of sacred. And when that conception is properly formed it too is a con-
ception of something real.
Finally, there is of course a question about the dialectical utility of the
OA. Murdoch’s discussion of it notes Anselm’s prayer in which he con-
fesses to God that ‘I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but
I believe in order to understand’, and she comments on the ‘limitation
upon the claims of the Proof’ these words indicate (MGM, 392). The
proof ‘may be seen as a clarified or academic summary of what is already
known, rather than as an argument to be put to an outsider. It may be
seen too as a proof which a man can only give to himself’ (MGM, 392).
The argument moves from the proper concept of moral value to moral
value being real, from thought to reality. But as we have seen, the success
of that move depends upon the moral experience which forms our con-
cepts. Someone with little or twisted experience will not have the proper
concept and the argument will fail (they are not thinking of the right
thing). So the persuasiveness of the argument depends crucially on the
maturity of a person’s moral conceptions. The argument is impotent to
move a psychopath. It is only a person already in some degree sensitive
to moral value—to the extent they have formed mature concepts—to
whom the argument will appeal. To appreciate the force of the argument
is to feel the demands of morality and the attraction of the Good. But to
form mature concepts seems to require (normally at least) some belief in
them—a real (non-philosophical) sceptic will just give up too early. And
that seems to mean that a person with mature concepts already accepts
the conclusion of the argument, at least for some part of morals.
Should we say then that the argument is futile for those who do not
already accept the conclusion, and superfluous for those who do? That
is too stark. In-between are people tempted by a kind of moral amne-
sia; tempted to forget or betray what in their heart they know; tempted
to lose faith in the argument’s thesis, and the promise of moral experi-
ence, that ‘the “object” of our best thoughts, must be something real …
something fundamental, essential and necessary’ (MGM, 430). I like to
think this is the fool (all of us, sometimes) whom Anselm had in mind
when he originated his famous argument. The argument may not ratioc-
inatively convince—box us into a corner with logic—but it may recall us
to our senses, remind us of what we know (Murdoch’s allusions to the
Meno) and of the importance of not loosening our grasp of it, not even
when we are offered all the powers of this world. Murdoch may adapt
 13 IRIS MURDOCH’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (MGM CHAPTER 13) 207

Anselm’s use of the Fourteenth Psalm: ‘The fool hath said in his heart,
There is no Good’ (Anselm 1968, 3).
What stirs inside us at that rebuke? What awakens in our heart?
Murdoch says it is the Platonic Eros, not the Good but ‘a spirit which
moves toward good’ (MGM, 428), a ‘spiritual energy, desire, intellect, love’
(MGM, 496). Could this be the love that Weil speaks of when she says that
the OA is addressed to love? The argument recalls us to direct our lov-
ing attention to what is good. And that includes what is sacred, inviolable,
what is, in my sense, perfect. ‘We know of perfection as we look upon what
is imperfect’ (MGM, 427, emphasis hers). But perhaps sometimes, when
we look into a human face, we look directly upon what is perfect.

Acknowledgements I am grateful for earlier comments on this paper by Nora

Hämäläinen, and to discussions with David Cockburn and Christopher Cordner.

Notes
1. For a perceptive discussion of this ambition see Mulhall (2007).
2. Maria Antonaccio identifies one of Murdoch’s great contributions to moral
philosophy in the twentieth century as ‘the expansion of the domain of
ethics beyond the confines of obligatory action’ (Antonaccio 2007, 15).
Antonaccio is right and it was a mighty contribution. Nevertheless this
paper suggests she tilted things too far in her own distinctive direction.
It is important to remember though that the notion of interhuman moral
demands that I put at the centre of my argument is very different in a
number of ways from the standard philosophical understanding of obli-
gation. For instance, it does not rest on familiar naturalistic assumptions.
The rejection of naturalism is one among many things I have learned from
Murdoch (and others).
3. The impossibility is not, I think, a literal one (if I do A, then it was not
true that I morally could not do A). I take it to mean something roughly
like this: if I were to do that, I would suffer a life-blighting remorse (so
that if I do it, then it can still be true that it was morally impossible for
me): ‘Oh, my God! What have I done?’ For a classic discussion of moral
necessity (sometimes called moral incapacity or impossibility) see Williams
(1993).
4. Murdoch does sometimes mention Kant’s categorical imperative (e.g.
MGM, 406, 412) and this might be taken as adverting to his stern sense of
duty, and thus to the moral necessities I have stressed. But in fact she tends
to treat the categorical imperative as Kant’s substitute for the Good. It is
to occupy the same distant and ideal place.
208 A. GLEESON

References
Antonaccio, M. 2007. Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy and the-
ology. In Iris Murdoch: A reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe, 15–22. Houndmills
and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Legend, J., and T. Gadd. 2013. All of me [song]. Online. YouTube https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=450p7goxZqg.
Malcolm, N. 1960. Anselm’s ontological arguments. Philosophical Review 69 (1):
41–62.
Mulhall, S. 2007. ‘All the world must be “religious”’: Iris Murdoch’s onto-
logical arguments. In Iris Murdoch: A reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe, 23–34.
Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1996. The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge.
St. Anselm. 1968. St. Anselm’s ontological argument. In The ontological argu-
ment: From St. Anselm to contemporary philosophers, ed. Alvin Plantinga, 3–30.
London: Macmillan.
Williams, B. 1993. Moral incapacity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. New
Series, 93: 59–70.
 CHAPTER 14

Vision and Encounter in Moral Thinking

(MGM Chapter 15)

Christopher Cordner

The relation of religion and God to morals was a recurring concern of

Iris Murdoch’s. In an early essay she wrote:

I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single transcendent perfect non-
representable and necessarily real object of attention; and I shall go on to
suggest that moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept
which has all these characteristics. (Murdoch 1997, 344, italics hers)

This ‘central concept’ is indebted to Plato’s Form of the Good. In

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM) Murdoch remained
committed to replacing a traditional idea of God with a roughly Platonic
idea of Good:

Morality and demythologised religion are concerned with what is abso-

lute, with unconditioned structure, with what cannot be ‘thought away’
out of human life, what Plato expressed in the concept of the Form of
the Good, and Kant in the categorical imperative. What is in question

C. Cordner (*)
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 209

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_14
210 C. CORDNER

here is something unique, of which the traditional idea of God was

an image or metaphor, and to which it has certainly been an effective
pointer. (MGM, 412)

As she also puts it a little later: ‘This “Good” is not the old God in dis-
guise, but rather what the old God symbolized’ (MGM, 428).
In Chapter 15 of MGM, Murdoch’s concern with how god and religion
relate to morals is brought to bear on Buber’s conception of God. (That
concern also brings into play a second theme of the chapter, which I
will indicate in a moment.) Murdoch sees Buber as presaging a revival
of what she calls a traditional idea of God. She says that his conception
of God as the eternal Thou is just ‘the old father God in disguise’. So,
in critiquing this conception she is helping to spell out her reasons for
rejecting ‘the old God’.1 Does Murdoch think anything of God might
survive this rejection? She briefly ponders what ‘the demythologisation
of religion’—‘something absolutely necessary in this age’ (MGM, 460)—
might have to offer here. She moots various ways in which demythol-
ogised religion might take shape. One would be ‘the transformation of
Christianity into a religion like Buddhism, with no God and no literally
divine Christ, but with a mystical Christ’, though she adds that this ‘may
be, if possible at all, a long task’ (MGM, 458). But she does not develop
this hint, or any other suggestion along these lines. Her view seems to be
that anything offered by demythologised religion could amount to little
more than an imaginative spur to our acknowledging and responding to
the unconditional authority of morals.
Buber’s key idea is that the fundamental moral relation is an I-Thou2
relation (Buber 1970). He contrasts the two ‘word pairs’ I-Thou and
I-It, holding these to constitute the two fundamental human orienta-
tions to reality. Buber says: ‘When I confront a human being as my Thou
and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among
things nor does he consist of things’ (Buber 1970, 59). The I-Thou rela-
tion is enacted between human beings, but it is also ultimately realised in
the meeting between a human being and God, where God is the Person
whose loving presence we can encounter with certainty in meditation
and prayer. Buber speaks of God as ‘the eternal Thou’ and says that ‘in
religious reality … unlimited Being becomes, as absolute person my part-
ner’ (Buber 1953, 45). One theme of Murdoch’s chapter on Buber is
her explanation of why ‘I do not believe in Buber’s I-Thou God, or in
his fundamental key idea of dialogue’ (MGM, 464).
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 211

Before sketching that explanation, let me identify the second theme

of Murdoch’s chapter. It is introduced at the chapter’s start, even before
any mention of God:

Like Heidegger, [Buber] thinks of Plato as having made a mistake, the

substitution of eidos for phusis as the basis of metaphysics, of visible form
for natural growth, of vision for movement or flow. I quote here a pas-
sage where Buber tells us that, influenced by Plato, European philoso-
phy has tended to picture spirituality as looking upward, rather than as a
movement or making of contact here below. ‘The Greeks established the
hegemony of sight over the other senses, making the optical world into
the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered.’
They also gave an optical character to philosophy, ‘the character of the
contemplation of particular objects … The object of this visual thought is
the universal as existence or as a reality higher than existence. Philosophy
is grounded on the presupposition that one sees the absolute in universals’
(Buber 1953, 56). As I have argued in other contexts, the view expressed
in the last two sentences represents a misunderstanding of Plato’s doc-
trine.3 (MGM, 461)

Murdoch’s second theme concerns her reasons for rejecting Buber’s

critique of the ‘hegemony of sight over the other senses’ first in Greek
thinking and then in western philosophy and thought thereafter.
Murdoch ascribes to Buber the view that this ‘hegemony’ mistakenly
makes ‘the optical world into the world’. While she thinks Buber mis-
characterises ‘Plato’s doctrine’, Murdoch does not dispute its emphasis
on vision, an emphasis she herself shares: ‘The activity and imagery of
vision is at the centre of human consciousness’ (MGM, 461). Murdoch
defends ‘visual metaphysics’ against Buber’s criticisms of it, and rejects
his partly Jewish- influenced alternative to such a metaphysics.
Murdoch evidently takes the two themes of her reflections on
Buber—her critique of Buber’s I-Thou God and her rejection of Buber’s
alternatives to ‘visual’ metaphysics—to be intertwined. But their links
need some teasing out. We can get clearer about them by first sketching
Murdoch’s reasons for rejecting Buber’s I-Thou God.
She seems to have two reasons. One of them might be called meta-
physical. Murdoch refers approvingly to Kant as thinking that ‘any God
we could meet or see would be a demon, a mere idol’ (MGM, 441). A
God who could be met or seen would ipso facto be within our world and
212 C. CORDNER

so would lack the absolute transcendence of God. Here Murdoch moots

a sort of reverse-ontological argument: ‘Any existing God would be less
than God. An existent God would be an Idol or a Demon … God does
not and cannot exist’ (MGM, 508). The very idea of God’s absolute
transcendence makes impossible his real existence. (Why does the same
not apply to ‘the Good’, whose transcendent reality Murdoch, along
with Plato, insists upon? Because the reality of the Good is the reality of
an Idea not of a Person.)4
Murdoch’s second reason for rejecting Buber’s I-Thou God is a moral
one. About Kant she writes, again approvingly: ‘Even looking at Christ
can be dangerous, Kant tells us. … The consoling, forgiving figure may
weaken the moral fibre and serve as a substitute for moral will … That
way lies weakness and illegitimate consolation’ (MGM, 441). She says
something similar about Buber’s God as eternal Thou:

If in the darkness of prayer I meet a person may this not be myself in some
disguise – and why not? I am indeed, to use Buber’s terms, constantly a
‘thou’ to myself as well as an ‘it’ … The tutoiement between me and myself
can be various, and good or bad. (MGM, 468)

And again:

Seen in a Kantian context, the I-Thou concept can seem (by contrast)
thrilling and dramatic, readily compromised by various self-regarding con-
solations. It holds out a promise of experience and ever-available company.
(MGM, 470)

These are two of several places in MGM where Murdoch emphasises the
moral dangers of the consolations of religion. (She also speaks of the falsi-
fying consolations of all but the very best art.)5
So, any conception of a personal God, a God who interacts with us,
who can love us and forgive us and to whom we might pray, is necessarily
an illusion. Such a God cannot exist. Moreover, by bringing God near
to us, so to speak, the very idea of such a personal God carries the seri-
ous danger of our immersing ourselves in ‘various self-regarding conso-
lations’, which will disable us from properly attending and responding to
morality’s absolute demands upon us.
It is this moral reason Murdoch gives for resisting ‘traditional’ ideas
of God—including Buber’s version of the idea—that constitutes the link
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 213

to the second theme of her reflections on Buber: her defence of Platonic

‘vision metaphysics’ against Buber’s criticisms of it and his alternative to it.
The link is indicated in her referring (in two passages I quoted earlier) to

what Plato expressed in the concept of the Form of the Good, and Kant in
the categorical imperative. What is in question here is something unique,
of which the traditional idea of God was an image or metaphor, and to
which it has certainly been an effective pointer. (MGM, 412)
This ‘Good’ is not the old God in disguise, but rather what the old God
symbolised (MGM, 428).

Although ‘God does not and cannot exist … what led us to conceive
of him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured’ (MGM,
508). And what is thus ‘constantly experienced and pictured’ is the abso-
lute, unshakeable, necessarily compelling reality of the Good, similarly
thematised by Plato and Kant.
Our orientation to this reality is for all-too-human everyday reasons
constantly assailed. Murdoch thinks that the centrality of ‘the activity and
imagery of vision’ in human existence helps sustain in us an appreciation
of the absolute beyondness of the Good, of the Good’s being a reality
distant and apart from us. By contrast, Buberian imagery of hearing—as
also the imagery of touch, of encounter, of dialogue—blurs or compro-
mises that appreciation.
In this context, it is Murdoch’s defence of the centrality of vision,
along with her criticisms of Buber-type objections to it, that I want to
explore from here on.6 The views Murdoch develops in this connection
are articulated in self-conscious emulation of Plato. (In this respect there
is direct continuity with her earlier work.) Here is Murdoch near the
beginning of her chapter on Buber:

The activity and imagery of vision is at the centre of human existence,

wherein we are conscious of ourselves as both inward and outward, dis-
tanced and surrounded … The visual is an image of distance and non-pos-
session. This idea of space and quietness, thinking, seeing, attending,
keeping still, not seizing, is important in all education … Reflection, rev-
erence, respect … Seeing is essentially separate from touching, and should
enlighten and inspire appropriate movement. There are proper times for
looking, and, after looking, for touching. Speaking of morality in terms of
cognition, the imagery of vision, which is everywhere in our speech, seems
natural. Sight is the dominant sense, our world, source of deep imagery,
214 C. CORDNER

is a visual world … We speak of the veil of appearance. We know when we

are being satisfied with superficial, illusory, lying pictures which distort and
conceal reality … By looking at something, by stopping to look at it, we
do not selfishly appropriate it, we understand it and let it be … Looking
can be a kind of intelligent reverence. Moral thinking, serious thinking, is
clarification (visual image). The good, just, man is lucid. (MGM, 461–462)

This Murdochian credo about the visual is my main text for commentary
in what follows. We can begin by agreeing with Murdoch that ‘in terms
of cognition’ the ‘imagery of vision … is everywhere in our speech’. We
say ‘I see’, meaning ‘I understand, I get it’; we ‘look into’ something we
want to know about; we ‘get a better perspective’ on some situation, or
a ‘clearer view’ of it; we are ‘blinded’ by anger or selfishness; we ‘focus’
our attention on the matter; we ‘overlook’ an important detail; and so
on and so on.
But not only is such vision imagery pervasive in our speech and life.
Murdoch believes it is also profoundly morally important. In the passage
above, she describes various ways in which she sees this imagery help-
ing sustain our orientation to the (absolute and transcendent) Good:
‘The visual is an image of distance and non-possession … By looking at
something, by stopping to look at it, we do not selfishly appropriate it, we
understand it and let it be’; and so on.
Relatedly, the visual imports ideas of continual improvement, even
perfectibility: clarity, lucidity, refinement, sharpness, increased detail and
‘resolution’ of vision, the possibility of ever-renewed attention and effort
in our continuing attempts to understand the world, ourselves, and other
people. The ‘dominant metaphor’ of vision in western cultural history is
thus linked with the cultural emergence of a highly refined conception of
truth as at once difficult, elusive and inescapably important.
Another related point—only hinted at here, but made explicitly in
Murdoch’s earlier work—is that we often see more than we can articu-
late: ‘Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we
clearly understand and grow by looking’ (Murdoch 1997, 324). That very
gap between vision and articulation can then itself press us towards fur-
ther and better articulation. This thought is compatible with holding, as
indeed was held by Plato from whom Murdoch draws these ideas, that the
‘highest’ cannot be articulated but only ‘seen’, with the eye of the soul.
Let these merits and fruits of visual imagery be granted. Still I think
they do not justify Murdoch’s privileging of the visual. First of all, they
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 215

do not show that images drawing on other sensory modes are either
misleading or unnecessary. Perhaps we can also greatly benefit from,
and perhaps we need, images from various such modes. Perhaps confin-
ing ourselves to vision imagery seriously limits us ‘in terms of cognition’,
leading us to miss other important ways of making sense of our world
and ourselves. I shall come back to suggest that this is indeed so.
Secondly, some of the terms in which Murdoch characterises those
merits and fruits of visual imagery are already tendentious. She says that
the visual is an image of distance and non-possession, and so of letting
things be, and letting us appreciate them in their own right, without our
‘reaching out to grasp and appropriate them’ (MGM, 463). Well, the
visual can be such an image, and looking can be ‘a kind of intelligent
reverence’. But these things are not necessarily so. Looking (‘the visual’)
can also be lustful, or coldly objectifying, or possessive, or envious, or
aggressive and hateful—‘if looks could kill!’ Moreover, even when the
visual is an image of distance and non-possession, this need not import
or even suggest ‘reflection, reverence, respect’. Recognition of distance
(from) and non-possession of something or someone can be manifested
in attitudes of casual disregard, not caring, inhuman detachment, or even
readiness to ride roughshod over it or her.
Within a sense of the possibilities just mentioned, a Judaic concern
about idolatry of the visual image can find its place. The Judaic pro-
hibition on images reflecting just this concern evidently plays a role
in Buber’s resistance to the ‘hegemony of sight’ in Greek thought.
Murdoch mentions the prohibition:

The deep Judaeo-Christian idea that God is essentially invisible is in ten-

sion with the natural ubiquity of the visual image. Is vision discredited
because of the Second Commandment? ‘No images’ means no visible
or visual images. Looking at something we may turn it to stone – or be
turned to stone ourselves. (MGM, 463)

But Murdoch seems to mention this possibility only to ignore it. She
appears to regard her own question as merely rhetorical: i.e. she takes it
that the moral credit of visual images is not cancelled by the possibility of
their being used idolatrously. If so, I would agree with her. But then why
not grant similar licence to images in other sensory modes? Murdoch
dwells on the dangers of ideas of (non-visual) encounter with God: ‘If
in the darkness of prayer I meet a person may this not be myself in some
216 C. CORDNER

disguise’; ‘the I-Thou concept can be seen as (by contrast) thrilling and
dramatic, readily compromised by various self-regarding consolations’.
These are indeed real dangers attached to the use of images of encoun-
ter, ‘meeting’, speaking and hearing. But why should these dangers of
abuse be taken, as Murdoch seems clear to take them, as immediately
morally discrediting the images of hearing and encounter themselves in
comparison with images of vision, when the danger of idolatry of visual
images is not taken to discredit visual imagery itself? Why is the danger
of (say) mistaking for God’s voice what is only a projection of my own
voice (or of my society’s) inherently more problematic than the danger
of idolatrous worship of visual images? It is not easy to see what is meant
to warrant Murdoch’s different responses here.
It is instructive here to ponder this passage from Murdoch’s chapter:

acting rightly toward another person does not necessarily, in fact more
often does not, involve face-to-face encounters. There is here a contrast
of styles which can be comprehensively illustrated in everyday terms. One
man does good by stealth, attends carefully to the situation of others, sees
their needs, helps them without close involvement, even anonymously,
admonishes indirectly, by implication and example, shuns close encounter.
Only in rare situations would it be a duty, or indeed possible, to achieve
complete mutual understanding. Another man prefers to draw people close
to him, to have confessions, frank meetings, warmth and friendship, to
give support by voice and presence. No doubt the afflicted human race
needs both of these philanthropists. There is an essential area of coldness
in morality, as there is an essential area of warmth. Seen in a Kantian con-
text, the I-Thou concept can seem (by contrast) thrilling and dramatic,
readily compromised by various self-regarding consolations. It holds out a
promise of experience and ever-available company. (MGM, 470)

On the face of it this passage seems aimed at doing justice to the ‘con-
trast of styles’ between a Kantian/Platonic conception of ethics and a
Buberian conception. But the appearance is deceptive, in several ways.
First, the suggestion that it is always optional, a matter merely of moral
‘style’, whether one does good anonymously or not, is surely mistaken.
Sometimes it may be optional, but very often the moral requirements of
the situation will settle the matter: ‘She needs to know that it was Bill
who helped her!’; ‘I can’t help him properly without finding out from
him how he sees the situation.’ Secondly, Murdoch writes as if the only
alternative to doing good anonymously is to prefer to ‘draw people close
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 217

to’ oneself, to ‘have confessions’ and ‘warmth’. But why should recognition
of the importance, sometimes, of speaking face-to-face, or of ‘being
there’ for someone, require the sticky schwärmerei suggested by these
terms of Murdoch’s? One can recognise and act on the need to ‘be
there’ for someone, or the need to listen and respond to someone,
without seeking to draw them close, or to have confessions, or even to
be ‘warm’. What is needed may instead be dispassionate candour, or
vigorous firmness, or a cool, respectful steadiness of response. In these
and many other possible ways, appreciation of the kind of presence to
another that is morally needed can require one precisely to avoid going
for warmth, or doing what is naturally suggested by the phrase ‘drawing
the other close’ to one. Even if encounter necessarily involves some kind
of closeness, this might avoid ‘coldness’ not by being warm but instead
by being (say) gentle but firm.
Why, also, should it be supposed that responding non-anonymously
to another on some occasion is morally permissible only if ‘complete
mutual understanding’ can be achieved? Why not just a serious attempt
to understand, in the respect relevant to what is at issue, by speaking
honestly with another?
Moreover, no doubt the ‘I-Thou concept’—which seems to be what
Murdoch takes herself to be illustrating with these references—is some-
times ‘applied’ or enacted in a ‘thrilling and dramatic’ way, and/or ‘com-
promised by various self-regarding consolations’ and/or regarded as
‘holding out a promise of experience and ever-available company’. But I
see no reason to suppose that someone who recognises and responds to
the moral need for an encounter with another must thereby embroil him-
self in such cosily self-regarding delusions.
There may be specific moral dangers attendant on ‘encounter’ that
are absent from anonymous helping—and different specific dangers
for different sorts of encounter and with different people. But so there
will be specific moral dangers attendant on helping people by stealth or
anonymously too—to mention just one example, the danger of a self-
congratulatory pleasure at the very thought of one’s moral purity in
doing the thing anonymously! Any mode of response carries attendant
dangers and risks; and the risks have to be faced and negotiated in the
course of enacting the response the situation calls for.
Here it is worth noting a shift in the context of Murdoch’s reflections
on vision, between her earlier philosophy and MGM. In several of those
justly celebrated early essays, the contrast was between vision, on the
218 C. CORDNER

one hand, and ‘movement of the will’ on the other. There the point of
invoking vision was to emphasise moral insight, knowledge, understand-
ing, registering of the reality of the Good, by contrast with movement of
the will—deciding, choosing, acting. There was no need, in the context
of that contrast, to emphasise vision over (say) hearing or indeed vari-
ous other possible ways or modes of ‘morally knowing’. And there was
no attempt there to privilege images of vision over those of hearing or
touch or encounter by reference to formal qualities of visual images—for
example that they were uniquely well-fitted for enshrining ‘distance’ and
‘non-possession’. ‘Looking’ was used as a neutral term while ‘attention’
was reserved for ‘just and loving’ looking. Moreover, in that connection
neither looking nor attending needed to be distinctly visual.
In the context of that governing contrast between vision and
choice/will, ‘looking’ was being used in the already-extended everyday
sense which also ranges over understanding via hearing, touch, encounter
and so on. Attention can just as readily be manifested in someone’s being
‘all ears’, for example—in her listening well—as in her looking better or
more closely. Nothing in the context of Murdoch’s invoking of vision,
by contrast with movement of the will, was at odds with her recognising
this.7 In the strand of MGM we are here concerned with, though, the
emphasis on vision is no longer contrasted with an emphasis on move-
ment (choosing, deciding, acting). The contrast now is of the visual, on
the one hand, with hearing, encounter, dialogue, touch (and so on), on
the other.8 (So criticisms of Murdoch’s privileging of vision in the pres-
ent connection do not undermine her earlier critique of ‘the movement
picture’.)
Here are some reflections aimed at bringing out something of what
is missed by side-lining imagery of touch and holding, specifically, or
even by just subordinating these to the visual. About touching and its
relation to seeing, Murdoch writes: ‘Seeing is essentially separate from
touching, and should enlighten and inspire appropriate movement.
There are proper times for looking, and, after looking, for touching.’
I wonder what any mother of an infant would make of these remarks?
Should her touching and holding her child really always be ‘enlightened
and inspired’ by a prior seeing that will make her touching and holding
‘appropriate’? Well, sometimes a ‘looking’ might play that role—perhaps
her baby looks pale and she picks it up. But as a perfectly general claim
what Murdoch says is surely off-beam. Mother hears the baby cry, per-
haps in hunger or discomfort; she smells the dirty nappy; she feels the
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 219

baby is hot, or restless. More generally, touching—and more importantly

holding—is the most fundamental way she relates to her baby, and is
utterly crucial to any infant’s normal and healthy development. A blind
woman who can ‘hold’ (and smell and feel and hear) can mother, care
for and love her child perfectly well. By contrast, a mother who can see
but not touch or hold cannot do this. The child never touched or held
would be very seriously deprived, and likely to become depraved.
But even if Murdoch’s view does implicitly relegate touch and holding
behind ‘looking’ in the context of maternal care of infants, this might be
thought not to matter very much. ‘Isn’t that just one context after all?’ I
think that would be a mistaken response. Tenderness and gentleness have
a much broader significance in expressions of love which can be fully rec-
ognised only if touching and holding are given their proper due. From her
earliest work, Murdoch emphasised the importance of love in morals. She
did so in self-conscious imitation of Plato, who himself spoke about love
with no reference to tenderness or gentleness. The ascent of love in Plato’s
Symposium is an entirely visual business, from the merely seen beauty of
individual bodies all the way up to the vision of the Forms. And in the
Phaedrus, where bodily sensations and effects of loving are indeed spo-
ken of, what is described is only the perturbations of the lover’s body—
its prickings, its giddiness and its agitations at the sight of the beloved.
There is nothing at all about tender and gentle inflections of the body as
modes of one person’s lovingly attending to another, and about the giv-
ing and receiving of these as elemental in the living of many forms of lov-
ing human interaction. This large absence from Plato’s reflections on love
seems to be closely linked to the pre-eminence of the visual in his philo-
sophical orientation. And that absence, along with its link to the emphasis
on vision, is I think replicated in Murdoch’s own work.9
Tenderness can take various forms, and be manifest in various ways.
As well as maternal tenderness, there is tenderness to those who are ill,
or in particular need of comfort or of holding, or to the elderly; and
there is the distinctive tenderness—which can be vigorous and even
rough—of sexual love. To be sure, tenderness does not always involve
actual touch or physical holding. There can be tenderness in a tone of
voice, and also in written language where we hear and feel it in what
we read. And there can also be a tender looking, recognisable as such
both by the one looked upon and also by a witness to the look. But still,
the tenderness of a looking is revealed as a kind of visual caressing of
its object, experienceable in just that way. The tenderness even of a look
220 C. CORDNER

thus sustains a crucial link to ‘touch’ and holding, effecting a connection

across the very ‘distance’ on which it depends. (There can be gentleness
in these modes too.)
But, granting this extending of tenderness into look and voice, ten-
derness of actual physical touch and holding remains a crucial dimension
of human loving responsiveness. As such it is a mode of encounter, of
one person’s immediate presentness to another, a kind of active recep-
tiveness to another. Murdoch’s championing of the visual as acknowl-
edgement of distance, non-contact, non-possession, letting-be, I think
fails to engage with, or to make any conceptual-moral space for, the
kinds of encounter realised through such tenderness. And with what
warrant? Apparently nothing better than that when people touch there
is a risk they might seize and appropriate what they touch, or perhaps
indulge sentimentally in the contact. Again, that might happen, but as
noted earlier this says no more than that any form of human acknowl-
edgement and response has correlative risks and dangers attendant upon
it. And when tenderness is actually manifest, that specific danger has in
fact not materialised.
To recapitulate: tenderness of loving responsive touch informs the
very ways in which we are brought into the human world, and helped
to become fully human denizens of that world through being touched
and held as infants. But tenderness then also continues to be important
in our further living and loving relations with others, along the lines I’ve
just been sketching. To the extent that this is so, Murdoch’s emphasis on
vision as capturing what is most important in our orientation as moral
beings already seems flawed.10 For tenderness brings into play touch,
holding, encounter, and contact effected through receptiveness. ‘Non-
possession’?, yes; ‘non-appropriation’?, yes; but spatial distance drops out
as irrelevant to those things in this context (except perhaps in the specific
case of a tender look).
My critical comments so far have mainly aimed to bring out some ways
in which Murdoch’s privileging of vision distracts from appreciation of the
moral importance of hearing, touch, holding and encounter. I move now
to a thought in a rather different register. I noted earlier that Murdoch
moves from the visual as an image of distance and non-possession
to the visual as the site, of ‘reflection, reverence, respect’, apparently
without appreciating the size of this step. I think the visual can be a site
of reflection, reverence, respect, but that we cannot make sense of its
being so if we conceive of the visual in opposition to the other senses, and
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 221

more broadly to our embodied encounter with the world, as Murdoch

seems to do. Let me explain.
Murdoch quotes Buber approvingly: ‘without the truth of the
encounter all images are illusion’, and ‘Faith is not a feeling in the soul
of man but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole of real-
ity’ (MGM, 463–464). But her own invoking of the visual, specifically,
as enabling that ‘entrance’, arguably fails by abstracting the visual from
‘the truth of the encounter’ in something very like the way Buber is here
critiquing. A passage from R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art can
help to bring out more clearly what I mean by this. Having discussed
how the common assumption that painting is a visual art was manifested,
indeed celebrated, in nineteenth-century impressionism, Collingwood
continues:

Then came Cézanne and began to paint like a blind man … His landscapes
have lost almost every trace of visuality. Trees never looked like that. That
is how they feel to a man who encounters them with his eyes shut, blun-
dering against them blindly. A bridge is a perplexing mixture of projections
and recessions, over and round which we find ourselves feeling our way as
one can imagine an infant feeling its way, when it has barely begin to crawl,
among the nursery furniture. (Collingwood 1938, 144)11

Those paintings, Collingwood suggests, recapitulate the coming-to-be

for us in early childhood of a coherently robust world, through the man-
ifold inflexive interactions of our moving bodies with what we encounter.
Though immediately addressed to our eyes, the paintings ‘re-mind’ us
that only against a background of our mobile, embodied encounter with
a variously resistant world is there such a thing as seeing at all. To really
see even rocks and trees, to see them as they really are, we have to see
them as having their actual heft, density, solidity, their robust and impen-
etrable thereness. And to really see that, we have to be able to (so to
speak) take it into our embodied selves through the imaginative bodily
anticipations Collingwood describes. Only then is what we see given to
us in its reality through our visual experience. Only then is the distance
and separateness of what is seen, a distance and separateness of some-
thing genuinely and really existing—‘standing out’ or ‘standing forth’
in its own being.12 The ‘standing out’ of a thing in its own reality in
our seeing of it depends on that seeing of it being the imaginative re-en-
actment of that whole-of our-embodied-being encounter with it that
222 C. CORDNER

Collingwood describes. Putting it just slightly differently: the very reality

of that which is given as ‘at a distance’ from us in visual experience, is
realised by us only as a result of the embodied encounter that is imagina-
tively recapitulated in that visual experience.
And that the seeing of something is constituted that way is very inad-
equately reflected in Murdoch’s talk of the visual as ‘an image of distance
and non-possession’. It is only against the background Collingwood
describes that we can we make sense of images of vision as portending
reverence and respect for things in their ‘otherness’. Then their other-
ness as ‘at a distance’ is an otherness of things as existing—‘ex-isting’,
‘standing forth’—in world-ordered co-dwelling with us as in-relation
with them, in just those ways Collingwood describes Cézanne as remind-
ing us of. But if this is so, then Murdoch’s opposing of images of vision
to those of encounter, on which her privileging of the former depends, is
the result of a falsifying abstraction—the substitution of an image-that-is-
illusion for ‘the truth of the encounter’. For it is only as exemplifying the
truth of the encounter that the visual image is indeed ‘an entrance into
reality’. One thing Collingwood helps us appreciate, I suggest, is that
we can accept Buber’s emphasis on the spiritual importance of encoun-
ter without having to dismiss the spiritual significance of vision. The
visual can be a site of reflection, reverence, respect, but it can be so only
because of the rootedness of seeing in our humanly embodied encounter
with the world, and only so far as our own experience of seeing remains
nourished by those roots.
Now I must be explicit about something I have so far not fully clari-
fied. Grant that every I-Thou relation is one of reciprocity and dialogue,
and therefore of encounter between I and Thou. The converse, though,
does not hold. There are forms of encounter—forms of our genuine
‘entrance into reality’—that do not involve reciprocity, or at least the rec-
iprocity of dialogue. Murdoch points out that ‘our relation with a foreign
language which we are learning is not reciprocal’ (MGM, 478): the lan-
guage does not address me, enter into dialogue with me. It does not and
cannot attend to me as I can attend to it. If I-Thou is a form of encoun-
ter involving reciprocity and dialogue, there are also forms that do not
involve reciprocity and dialogue.13 The learning of a language is of the
latter kind.
This point both clarifies and strengthens resistance to Murdoch’s cri-
tique of Buber. It helps bring out that there are so to speak two lev-
els of critical response to Murdoch’s defence of vision. There are broad
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 223

objections to the exclusive privileging of vision-imagery, even in rela-

tion to forms of encounter that involve no I-Thou reciprocity and dia-
logue. And then along with those objections, there are additional
objections to thinking visual imagery adequate to reflecting the moral
character of I-Thou encounters as involving such reciprocity and dia-
logue. My discussion has developed objections at both levels. In now
explicitly marking the two levels, I also note the importance of the fact,
not made explicit in my discussion so far, that I-Thou encounters are
always potentially sites of moral challenge by those who encounter one
another, and of their being summoned to respond to, and to be ready
to be changed by, such challenges. This (potentially deeply unsettling)
character of I-Thou encounters—also a basic Levinasian theme—is
utterly fundamental in our moral relations with others.14 This is some-
thing which Murdoch—with her emphasis on the sustaining of ‘distance
and non-possession’ as the key to due respect and reverence for reality,
including the reality of other people—does not really engage with at all.
Maintaining distance from another can per se just as well be a way of
avoiding a morally important challenge of encounter with her as it can be
morally commendable.
As I hope is clear, I have not said that visual imagery is itself inher-
ently unsuited to orienting us to duly respectful responsiveness to real-
ity’s transcendence of us. That is not so. I have, though, opposed
Murdoch’s exclusive privileging of visual imagery in that connection; and
I have also tried to bring out some aspects of what, along with Buber, I
believe does lie beyond its reach. Perhaps one general lesson of my dis-
cussion is that we should beware placing ‘theoretical’ limits or restric-
tions on the kinds of image that can illuminate the variety of our ways
of coming to make sense of, to understand and to relate truthfully and
respectfully to the world wherein we dwell.

Acknowledgements My thanks to Hugo Strandberg for helpful comments on

an earlier draft.

Notes
1. Murdoch’s talk of ‘the old God’, ‘the old father God’, a ‘traditional’ idea
of God, is left unclarified.
2. The archaic ‘Thou’ translates Buber’s ‘Du’, the ‘intimate’ German form
of ‘you’.
224 C. CORDNER

3. For some reason, Murdoch here omits the following sentence from the
middle of the Buber passage she quotes: ‘The history of Greek philos-
ophy is that of an opticising of thought, fully clarified in Plato and per-
fected in Plotinus’.
4. I think Murdoch’s line of thought here has problems; but as they are not
my present concern I pass them by.
5. She says that ‘the classical Greeks seem to have been incapable of romanti-
cism and a fortiori of sentimentality’ (MGM, 499); and she seems to take
this fact to be connected with the absence of a personal God from their
outlook.
6. The specific implications her criticisms have for Buber’s conception of
God as the eternal Thou I will not consider. Neither, for reasons of space,
will I consider her critique of Buber’s ‘take’ on Plato‘s Timaeus.
7. All the same, it is worth noting that the most celebrated example of
looking and attending in Murdoch’s early work—the example of M and
D—has M ‘looking again’ at D in explicit abstraction from actual encoun-
ter with her. Even in that early work, Murdoch’s emphasis on vision
perhaps reflected some unease with the morally complicating effects
of interaction and encounter between people. But the unease there
remained mostly philosophically submerged.
8. What explains this shift to problematising the other senses? My speculative
answer is that confrontation with Buber (and perhaps other philosophers
of dialogue) challenged her either to acknowledge that her accent on
vision simply bypassed too much that mattered, or to purify her privileg-
ing of vision. I also think that her opting for the latter path answered to
tendencies already immanent in the earlier work—consider, for example,
the isolating of M’s reflections on D from any actual encounter with D
that I mentioned in the preceding note.
9. This is more evident in MGM than in the earlier work, but—see the
preceding two notes—it can also be glimpsed there.
10. As already noted, the flaw is not Murdoch’s alone. Plato has a share in
it, as I think Simone Weil—another strong influence on Murdoch—also
does.
11. Collingwood here draws on, while he also extends, Bernard Berenson’s
celebrated discussion of ‘tactile values’ in Renaissance painting (Berenson
1896). Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant essay, ‘Cézanne’s doubt’ develops a sim-
ilar theme, without reference to Collingwood (Merleau-Ponty 1964).
12. Henry Bugbee speaks in similar terms in likewise querying what he calls
‘the dogma of the ultimacy of a merely optical mode of thought in the
conception of manifest reality. What needs to be accommodated seems
to be a kind of feeling of emergent definiteness, of the standing forth of
the distinct thing. The thing that does not touch us, the merely “looked
 14 VISION AND ENCOUNTER IN MORAL THINKING (MGM CHAPTER 15) 225

at”, the mere object, cannot be manifest reality basically understood. In

the ancient Hebrew sense of the word—that with which there is not the
intimacy of touch is not truly “known”. No intimacy: no revelation. No
revelation: no true givenness of reality’ (Bugbee 1999, 130).
13. Buber himself seems to blur this very contrast, when he says that even in
our ‘life with nature’ the I-Thou relation can arise. He gives the example
of real encounter with a tree: in that case, he says, ‘the [I-Thou] relation
vibrates in the dark and remains below language’ (Buber 1970, 56–58).
It is hard to know what to make philosophically of this poetic image.
Moreover, if we ask why Buber insists on assimilating all forms of encoun-
ter to I-Thou, an answer is not easy to find.
14. This is not for a moment to deny that relations of love and tenderness
with others are also thus fundamental.

References
Berenson, B. 1896. The Florentine painters of the Renaissance. New York and
London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Buber, M. 1953. Eclipse of God. London: Victor Gollancz.
Buber, M. 1970. I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Bugbee, H. 1999. The inward morning. Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press.
Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The principles of art. London: Oxford University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. Cézanne’s doubt. In Sense and nonsense. Evanston:
Northwestern.
Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1997. Existentialists and mystics. London: Chatto & Windus.
 CHAPTER 15

The Urge to Write: Of Murdoch

on Plato’s Demiurge

David Robjant

Murdoch first invokes the Timaeus Demiurge in The fire and the sun:
Why Plato banished the artists, where he is ‘Plato’s portrait of the
artist’ (Murdoch 1997, 430). The Timaeus is also much returned to in
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (henceforth MGM). There she offers that:

Goodness is an idea, an ideal, yet it is also evidently and actively incarnate

all around us, charged with the love which the Demiurge feels for the eternal
Forms as he creates the cosmos. (MGM, 478, my italics)

Omitting the italicised, I once dodged a discussion of Murdoch on

the Timaeus that is overdue. The debt is difficult because the Timaeus
is difficult, but also because, as intimated, Murdoch has two strands of
thought about it. On the one hand she thinks it a defence of Forms,
and on the other hand she thinks it is an allegory on the inspiration and
limitations of the artist, or creative literary writer. Arguing that the two
strands get in each other’s way, and that one is mistaken, I will defend
and expand on ‘Plato’s portrait of the artist’.

D. Robjant (*)
London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 227

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_15
228 D. ROBJANT

Bête Noire
Murdoch is mistaken to insert the Forms into the Timaeus in precisely
the way she does. The context is disagreement with Gilbert Ryle, for
whom Plato is ‘an Odysseus rather than a Nestor’ (Murdoch 1997, 448).
Ryle’s Odyssean Plato’s Progress (1966) treats Plato as stuck on a rickety
‘middle period’ theory of forms exemplified by the Republic, but then
escaping from this nonsense in a ‘late period’ journey to reasonableness,
crucially represented by the Parmenides, but encompassing also, among
other texts, the Timaeus. Murdoch’s irritation with this reading may
surprise no one, and is seen in her copy of Ryle’s book, where, beside
one characteristic bit of Rylean interpretative charity, she has scrawled,
exasperatedly, ‘Oh God!’.1 Not sharing Ryle’s antipathy to the Forms,
Murdoch is keen to dispute his suggestion that Plato later abandoned
them:

The discovery of truth and reality, the conversion to virtue, is through

the unimpeded vision of the transcendent Forms. At the same time, in his
more logical metaphysical contexts, Plato criticizes and even attacks this
picture, without however abandoning it; it reappears in a splendid mytho-
logical guise in the Timaeus, and evidently expresses something for which
Plato cannot find any other formulation. (Murdoch 1997, 408)

Murdoch’s suggestion that criticism could accompany continued com-

mitment is fair. (Much would hang on how one fleshes that out—I have
my guess.2) The trouble is that Murdoch hangs her argument with Ryle
on a reading of the Timaeus, and perhaps motivates her reading of the
Timaeus out of that argument.
Murdoch so emphasises the forms in her discussion of the Timaeus
that she invites the innocent complaint: the forms are not named in
this dialogue! Allusion however is made, and citing Timaeus 51 she is
right to observe suggestive evidence of continued authorial interest in
the forms: ‘an argument for their existence is given in the most cur-
tailed but essential version at 51d-e’ (Murdoch 1997, 434). Timaeus
observes that knowledge ‘is always accompanied by a true account’
(Plato 2008, 51e) and that ‘if knowledge and true belief are two dis-
tinct kinds of thing, then these entities’, the objects of knowledge
‘absolutely do exist in themselves’ (Plato 2008, 51d). But admitting
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 229

this strength to her case, there are two drawbacks to Murdoch’s

­general reliance on Timaeus 51–52. In preview: (1) 51–52 does not
yield a conception congenial to Murdoch’s project with Plato, and (2)
given the role Murdoch wishes the forms to play in the work of the
Demiurge it is not adequate textual support for her reading merely to
show that Timaeus alluded to them. On the first trouble, recall that for
Murdoch, the Good is

not something obscure. We experience both the reality of perfection and

its distance away … If we read [Plato’s] images aright they are not only
enlightening and profound but amount to a statement of a belief which
most people unreflectively hold. (MGM, 508)

This ‘not something obscure’ has the flavour of the Meno, and ‘experi-
ence’ the smell of G. E. Moore intuiting the good, but those are not the
affiliations of Timaeus:

Is there such a thing as fire which is just itself? […] if knowledge and
true opinion are two distinct kinds of thing, then these entities abso-
lutely do exist in themselves, even though they are accessible only to our
minds, not to our senses […] the former is the property of gods, but of
scarcely any human beings, while the latter is something every man has.
(Plato 2008, 51b–52b)3

Relocating the forms away from their home contexts in morals and
geometry to this new pseudo-scientific context of the four elements, we
are left with an idea of fire-by-itself which could never be elicited from
a slave-boy. Fire by itself would be an oddity and Timaeus himself raises
doubts at 49b. Here ‘scarcely’ anyone has access to the objects of knowl-
edge. Indeed no-one. Murdoch, recognising the departure from the
Meno, attributes the ‘scarcely’ to ‘Plato’s increasing pessimism about
politics and human possibility’ (MGM, 476). This does not much help.
Murdoch’s project with the form of the Good is at home with Socrates,
not Timaeus. ‘Plato’s increasing pessimism’, if that is what it is, hardly
helps the thought that the Good is ‘not something obscure’, and here
Murdoch’s anti-Ryle Plato is scarcely coincident with Murdoch’s
pro-Murdoch Plato. ‘It is always a significant question to ask about any
philosopher what is he afraid of?’ (MGM, 359). Murdoch is afraid of
230 D. ROBJANT

Ryle’s story about Plato rejecting the theory of forms, as well as irritated
by it. ‘Oh God!’ indeed—but her reaction against this bête noire compro-
mises her own preferred treatment of the Forms, and also her sensitivity
to the Timaeus.
While we might perhaps conclude from 51 that the Timaeus does not
take part in any general repudiation of ‘middle period’ epistemology, this
is not in itself evidence that the forms play, in the myth of the Demiurge
from 27 onward, precisely the role Murdoch attributes to them. Yes, the
evidence of 51d–e might be used to support, if inconclusively, a view that
Plato remained interested in Republic themes. What that evidence will
not support, even inconclusively, are Murdoch’s specific claims:

The Demiurge in the Timaeus, creating the world, looks at and (in so far
as his alien material will allow) copies the Forms. (MGM, 400)
(Creation is) charged with the love which the Demiurge feels for the eter-
nal Forms as he creates the cosmos. (MGM, 478)

This Murdoch gloss is not something that Timaeus himself offers about
the Demiurge and his creation. Worse, it is not compatible with what he
does say.
Timaeus says that the gods created us, and were in their turn created
by another sort of god or craftsman, for which the Greek is δημιουργός
or dēmiourgos, whence Demiurge (Plato 2008, 41a–c, 31a). The
Demiurge in making the cosmos was copying a perfect ‘eternal model’
(Plato 2008, 29a, 37d, 38c) of the cosmos. Said model or ‘exemplar’
(Plato 2008, 39e) is then treated by Murdoch as a place-holder for ‘the
Forms’.
Of the stages of this identification, the most attractive is the idea that
the forms and the model are alike in ‘eternity’. But even this is diffi-
cult. What do we mean by ‘eternity’? The forms are eternal in the sense
that they exist now and yesterday and for all time—thus it is that things
in time can participate in the good. For Timaeus however ‘eternity’ is
sharply distinguished from ‘all time’ (Plato 2008, 38c), the distinction
being that to be in time and in all time means persistence in a world
where other things move, whereas ‘eternity’ is entirely elsewhere. The
movements of the planets and stars in our universe together constitute
time, because their movements are countable. This creates the problem
of how moving time in the heavens can be supposed to be a ‘moving
likeness of eternity’ (Plato 2008, 37d), given that the essence of eternity
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 231

on Timaeus’ conception is that it is separated from moving time (Plato

2008, 38c). What Timaeus says here is either confusing or confused or
both, but the least we can say is that identification of the ‘eternity’ of
the model with the ‘eternity’ of the forms is not straightforward. Resolve
eternity as we may, a ‘model’ that is a complete solar system visible only
to the Demiurge is still not the same sort of thing as a collection of uni-
versals or qualities or essences or, in the sense explored in the Republic
and Meno, forms. It is rather a particular world of particular objects like
our own, except available only to the Demiurge. The movements of our
universe are not explained by appeal to impersonal reason but to the
will of the Demiurge to faithfully copy what only he can see. The exact
movements of our heavenly bodies ‘exist in order that this universe of
ours might, by imitating the eternity of the perfect (model) … be as sim-
ilar to it as possible’ (Plato 2008, 39e). This is of course not explanation
as such. It is just relocation of a mystery in our skies to mystery in the
skies of the craftsman’s eternal ‘model’. Timaeus indeed breaks off the
pretence of explanation:

As for the other three planets, a thorough account of where and why he
located them as he did would make this supposedly subordinate discussion
longer and more troublesome than the main discussion it’s meant to be
serving. (Plato 2008, 38d)

But what main discussion is all this ‘meant to be serving’?

As previewed, Murdoch has two thoughts here, and one is that the
cosmology serves a mythological setting of the theory of forms (MGM,
408). I have so far put obstacles in the way of this story: (a) if Timaeus is
talking about the forms he is not doing so in a way helpful to Murdoch,
(b) citation of Timaeus 51 is not adequate support for ‘The Demiurge …
looks at and (in so far as his alien material will allow) copies the Forms’
(MGM, 400), (c) the supposed common point that the model and the
forms are both ‘eternal’ is not as easy as it looks, and (d) it doesn’t look
as if the Demiurge’s model is a quality or a universal. I want now to add
(e), the grammar problem. What Murdoch is proposing (MGM, 400;
478) is to treat ‘the Forms’, plural, and the Demiurge’s ‘model’, singu-
lar, as essentially two names for the same thing(s)—and in the dislocation
of that bracketed plural is the rub. The forms are plural, and each is sim-
ple. The Demiurge’s eternal model is explicitly singular, and its compo-
nents are also complex particulars.
232 D. ROBJANT

To go along with Murdoch’s idea that the Demiurge copying the

model, singular, just is his copying ‘the Forms’, plural, one would need
to hear some story about how the Forms plural can together constitute
a model cosmos, singular. A parallel story is alluded to by Timaeus, but
only in order to dismiss it:

People talk as if it were clear what fire and so on are and take them to
be principles and letters, so to speak, of the universe, when in fact they
shouldn’t even be compared to syllables. Only someone of slight intelli-
gence is likely to make such a comparison. (Plato 2008, 48b)

This might be an allusion to the ‘dream’ theory rejected at Theaetetus

201–202. There the ‘elements’ were unknowable and only the com-
plexes knowable, which is an inversion of what Timaeus is tempted to
say, at 51, about Fire as an object of knowledge. How to reconcile the
model with the forms is not directly confronted in Murdoch’s account.
Murdoch instead treats the trouble as already surmounted by her invo-
cation of the mythological ‘as if’. It is for her as if the model were the
forms, and as if the Demiurge in ‘creating the world, looks at and …
copies the Forms’ (MGM, 400). Indeed Plato’s stories are mythological
as-ifs, but this is not of itself licence to gloss them as suits struggle with
Ryle.

Remember the Republic?

Socrates, silent for the most of the dialogue, opens the Timaeus with
a wry pretended summary of the ‘main points’ (Plato 2008, 19a) cov-
ered in last night’s conversation, the Republic. ‘And what about procre-
ation? Not that we could easily forget what was said on this topic, since
it was so unusual’. ‘Yes’, says Timaeus. ‘There’s no difficulty remem-
bering that’. Socrates then asks if he has left anything out, ‘anything
missing, anything we still need to recall?’ Well, yes. There is nothing
in the summary of Socrates’ central and ambiguous confrontation with
Thrasymachus; nothing of the complications of Socratic commitment
around Glaucon’s much teased demand for luxury; nothing of the myth
of the cave; nothing whatsoever of the copious extended reflections on
literature and art; nothing on the place of ‘poetry’; in short, not a whit
of Murdoch’s main topics in the Republic. Have we forgotten something
from our summary of the Republic? Timaeus, ludicrously: ‘No, that was
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 233

exactly how the conversation went, Socrates’ (Plato 2008, 18c–19b, my

italics). To which absurdity Socrates reacts with a proposal that takes
us straight back to the most prominent unsummarised theme of the
Republic: the uses and dangers of literature.
What would be fun would be to hear some sort of epic story of this
tripartite city ‘contending against others in typical inter-city contests’
(Plato 2008, 19c), he says. On his conceit, the yearning for such a story
is intensified by the fact that he, Socrates, wouldn’t be able to offer such
a fiction, and, moreover, neither would the poets be capable of such a
thing, because ‘none of them finds it easy to reproduce on stage any-
thing that falls outside his experience’ (Plato 2008, 19d). Socrates is
recalling Republic 604e:

Now, although the petulant part of us is rich in a variety of representable

possibilities, the intelligent and calm side of our characters is pretty well
constant and unchanging. This makes it not only difficult to represent,
but also difficult to understand when represented, particularly when the
audience is the kind of motley crowd you find crammed into a theatre,
because they are simply not acquainted with the experience that’s being
represented to them. (Plato 1998, 604e)

Murdoch comments: ‘Goodness, being lucid and quiet and calm, can-
not be expressed or represented in art’ (MGM, 12). Which is as much as
to suggest that if the tripartite city of the Republic could be successfully
represented in epic narrative, this would serve as a proof that it was not,
in fact, good.
Socrates’ ironic allusions to the literary concerns of the Republic at
Timaeus 19 are as lost on Timaeus as they are on Critias, who suggests
that by offering up the Republic in narrative epic he is about to help
Socrates secure and illustrate the nobility of the tripartite state (Plato
2008, 20c), rather than, as Republic 604 would tend to suggest, under-
mine it. The speech he then gives is funny. I will paraphrase for effect—
the effect of condensing and exhibiting what Critias actually says—but
the original is no less amusing. Well Socrates, you may think that you were
describing something fanciful in last night’s conversation (The Republic)
(Plato 2008, 25e, 26c), but Athens was once exactly like the tripartite city
you were talking about (Plato 2008, 25e, 26d), 9000 years ago (Plato
2008, 23e), when we went to war with an empire from the west which
was based on a big island in the Atlantic (Plato 2008, 24e), which sank
234 D. ROBJANT

(Plato 2008, 25d). I have all this on the best authority because the story was
told to the great Solon by some Egyptian priests (Plato 2008, 22a), according
to my grandfather, who got it from his dad, who was a friend of Solon – as
everyone knows (Plato 2008, 20e). I admit I didn’t remember too well what
my grandfather actually said about all this (Plato 2008, 26a), but thinking
of entertaining you I spent the whole of yesterday perfecting my tale about it
(Plato 2008, 26b, 26c), because speeches are the important thing at festivals,
like my grandfather’s recitation contests (Plato 2008, 21b). It’s all true as
well (Plato 2008, 20d), and I hope you like it. He then adds: But maybe
the best place to start this whole story would be with the origin of the uni-
verse (Plato 2008, 27a). So first we have an expert in astronomy, Timaeus
– he’s going to go first tonight, and explain for your pleasure everything that
happened before Athens fighting Atlantis. After all that the panel can judge
our two stories together, at the end, if that’s OK (Plato 2008, 27b). Critias’
riotous ramble makes a unity of texts until recently presented as separate:
the Timaeus, dominated by Timaeus’ speech, and the Critias, dominated
by Critias’ tale of Atlantis, previewed here at Timaeus 20e–27b. The
two speeches are set up in dialogue, as the sort of story-telling inspired
in Socrates’ audience by their defective reception and selective memory
of the Republic. Both pick up from themes of the Republic as they have
remembered them, and both see themselves as helping Socrates’ Republic
discussion along in their own stories, despite both generally failing to spot
his irony about their memory of that conversation. The evening is adver-
tised as a double bill festival extravaganza, and with perfect continuity
between the two (the opening to the Critias is Timaeus announcing his
relief at finishing his speech in the Timaeus) there would be no difficulty
in presenting them as a single dialogue, the Timaeus-Critias (as Robin
Waterfield’s OUP translation all but does).
Focus on the dramatic unity of a creation myth with a quixotically
introduced tale about a sinking island, as told to great-grandfather’s
friend, as far as one can remember. Are we, in fact, so far from Cervantes?
Exhibition of Critias having raised a smile, Timaeus then gives his his-
tory of creation from the planets to the intestine by way of the Gods and
the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Lest we think that in such
expert cosmology we have left behind the playful teasing of the audience
evident in Plato’s characterisation of Critias, Timaeus confides along the
way various homely absurdities. He says that exercise is the best medi-
cine, that the creator god considered giving the universe legs and arms
but decided not to for lack of anything for it to stand on, that for similar
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 235

reasons the universe does not eat anything except its own waste, and
that the reason we aren’t just heads is that we would roll into dips in the
ground (Plato 2008, 93c, 33d, 33c, 44e). A case might be made that
this stuff would seem a lot less amusing to Athenians, but one might ask
whether this is not a way of manifesting our own conceit of ourselves as
sophisticates. If there’s a problem with legs and arms being attributed to
the universe why isn’t there a problem with ‘waste’? Continuing the scat-
ological theme, Timaeus later describes how our intestines slow down the
passage of our food in order to extract sustenance from it (Plato 2008,
73a), so his straight-faced suggestion that the body as a whole was cre-
ated as a method of transport for the head could not be entertained in all
seriousness even by himself. There is moreover authorial distance, and
the allusion to Critias’ silly claim to authority evident in what Timaeus
is made to say about the Olympian gods. Much as Critias invited us to
believe his story of Atlantis on the basis of what his grandfather said
although he doesn’t quite remember, we are now invited to believe in the
gods because our elders, supposedly, claimed to be descended from them,
and, well, they ought to know (Plato 2008, 40d–e).
Timaeus’ contrary contention at 51e that there is ‘scarcely’ a human
capable of knowledge is a striking thing for him to say. His reasoning out
the ‘likely’ (Plato 2008, 30b) construction of the universe, is after all rea-
soning. Offering reasons hardly fits with suggesting to your audience that
they are incapable of anything but belief under persuasion. Otherwise
odd, the ‘scarcely’ might make sense as authorial tease. Are you, dear
reader, one for fairy stories? In that case ‘scarcely’ is not so much ordi-
nary ‘pessimism’ about the intellectual capacities of the audience, as a
sort of probing irony about them, in the same vein of irony probingly
mined in the opening conversation gambit, where they pretend to sum
up the Republic:

SOCRATES: Is there anything missing, anything we still need to recall?

TIMAEUS: No, that was exactly how the conversation went.
(Plato 2008, 19a)

It was not, but the summation seems to work in this company—it is

plausible, much as Timaeus announces an aspiration to be ‘plausible’
(Plato 2008, 29c). Plausibility is a theme uniting the opening interven-
tions from Socrates and Critias with the entirety of Timaeus’ speech,
236 D. ROBJANT

and plausibility depends on the audience. What is the good in being

plausible, if you are plausible among the kind of people who can’t
remember what Socrates said about literature?
As noted, the Republic topics that Timaeus and Critias conspicuously
fail to remember are precisely the ones that most interest Iris Murdoch:
the fire and the sun, the cave, the merits and dangers of literary art. In
discussion of the Timaeus in The fire and the sun, she interweaves dis-
cussion of the Timaeus with consideration of Freud on the soul’s cor-
rupting uses of the art-object (Murdoch 1997, 422–423). She returns
to this in MGM:

In spite of their different aims, it is arguable that Plato and Freud mistrust
art for the same reason, because it caricatures their own therapeutic activ-
ity and could interfere with it. Art is pleasure-seeking self-satisfied pseu-
do-analysis and pseudo-enlightenment. (MGM, 423)

Can we speak of good artists? One excellence of Murdoch’s treatment of

the Demiurge is her emphasis on his status as an ideal artist, and an ide-
alised one. ‘He is such because his art is animated not by pleasure but by
love: The artist, ideally … should imitate the calm unenvious Demiurge
who sees the recalcitrant jumble of his material with just eyes’ (Murdoch
1997, 452). Recalling: ‘“attention”, which I borrow from Simone Weil,
to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual
reality’ (Murdoch 1997, 327). As ‘ideal’ artist the Demiurge is perfectly
good, and moved in his creation by love of something outside himself.
These two attributes are one:

Plato’s mythical God is a restless imaginative creative artist, Eros, seen in

the Timaeus as the Demiurge, the spirit who, looking with love toward a
higher reality, creates an imperfect world as his best image of a perfection
which he sees but cannot express. (MGM, 320)

This seems to better convey what had been meant at MGM 478, with-
out direct invocation of the forms. In these passages, Murdoch’s grasp
of Eros-Demiurge might conjure Plato writing the task of his love for
Socrates, copying him lovingly into ‘another material’ (MGM, 477). But
Socrates is not a form, and the same holds of the Demiurge’s ‘model’.
Where Murdoch understands the Demiurge as Plato’s allegory on
his own creative process, the forms will not serve as the thing copied
by the craftsman-god. Certainly, the Good is loved. This is essential to
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 237

Murdoch’s Plato. But the immediate love-object of the creator of the

dialogues is Socrates, and it is likewise Socrates that is directly portrayed;
it is Socrates who Plato imitates; Socrates imitated, discoursing in imi-
tation in art. Yes, a story can be told that in being in love with Socrates
one may be in love with Wisdom itself and the Good itself, and yes,
Plato might offer up a story of this kind. But what, in all this, is the crea-
tive-artist-in-love actually producing an image of? He writes us Socrates,
Glaucon, Timaeus, Critias. Only through them and in their conver-
sations is the Good itself glimpsed, hinted at, on occasion allegorised.
Here Plato is the bereaved admirer of Socrates and creative artist, both:

The energy of the attentive scholar or artist is spiritual energy. The energy of
the bereaved person trying to survive in the best way, or of the mother think-
ing about her delinquent son (and so on and so on) is spiritual. […] Plato
calls such energy Eros, love. Zeus became Eros to create the world … The
Timaeus Demiurge is inspired to create by love of the Good. (MGM, 505)

Yes, the Timaeus Demiurge is inspired to create by love of the Good. But
his creations are not mere copies of the forms. Every one of his creations is
described as a ‘living being’—and applying this to planets and stars and the
universe itself this is perhaps the most over-used colocation in the whole of
the Timaeus, ad nauseam and passim. Nor is the point a verbal tic.
Consider the attribution to the cosmos of a ‘world soul’, an attri-
bution which Murdoch finds suggestive and attractive but also ‘mys-
terious’ (Murdoch 1997, 431) and baffling. Many might share the
bafflement—Timaeus’ speech is much odder than any tale that could be
told of it. But one effect of the general banishment of inanimate being
is to emphasise that this particular creation story was never really both-
ered about matter in the first place. In the beginning, Jehovah created
the heaven and the earth. It is not until verse 11 that He makes grass, 14
before the stars, and 20 before there is ‘life’. But for the literary crafts-
man-god there is never anything but life:

So the god took thought and concluded that, generally speaking, noth-
ing he made that lacked intelligence could ever be more beautiful than an
intelligent product, and that nothing can have intelligence unless it has a
soul. And the upshot of this thinking was that he constructed the universe
by endowing soul with intelligence and body with soul, so that it was in
the very nature of the universe to surpass all other products in beauty and
perfection. (Plato 2008, 30a–b; italics mine)
238 D. ROBJANT

It is charmingly nonsensical to speak of ‘other products’ besides the

­universe, and I have italicised ‘generally speaking’ to emphasise the possibil-
ity of another platonic leg-pull. Generally speaking, things that are alive are
more beautiful than things that aren’t? What is an empirical qualification
like ‘generally speaking’ doing here, in pre-creation ruminations, where
ex-hypothesi the craftsman-god has no ‘generally’ to speak of? I accused
Murdoch of granting herself too much slack with the ‘as if’ of the myth,
and now you will say that I am not granting enough. But staying tight
to it, this weird creation myth beginning in banishment of the inanimate
might perhaps be helped along if we insist that the Demiurge is the alle-
gory not merely of a literary craftsman, but of that specific kind of liter-
ary craftsman who depicts the interactions of intelligent ‘living beings’,
because he finds them more beautiful. In other words, a playwright, or
the author of ironic philosophical dialogues. Plato lets in other characters,
other amusements, and fair dollops of inanimate beauty from time to time,
but ‘generally speaking’ he’s in love with Socrates. Nothing that lacked
intelligence could ever be more beautiful than an intelligent creature.
I connect also the bizarre process where the qualities of the cosmos
are continually precisified in relation to certain attributes of human
beings, which it doesn’t have. Why do these comparisons even arise?
The cosmos is ‘alive’, because generally speaking only living beings are
beautiful enough to be the sort of thing a perfectly good craftsman-god
would create (Plato 2008, 30a). So does it have hands or legs? Does it
eat and excrete? Does it have eyes and ears? (Plato 2008, 33b–34a). One
might well conclude from this line of questioning that the ‘living beings’
Plato is more interested in are the walking talking and eating sort of liv-
ing being, rather than spherical bodies in circular motion. The universe
(fictional or cosmological) exists only because its ‘model’ is beloved, and
as only souls can be so beautiful as to be so beloved, so the heavenly
bodies, if created by the craftsman, must themselves have souls on the
‘model’ of something with a soul.

Divine Madness
To produce an idealised image of a good artist motivated by selfless love
to render their muse as perfectly as possible is not, of course, to show that
any such good artists exist on earth—and the suspicion that Plato might
have been reflecting on his own creative activity when he set himself to
model the ideal does not entirely help. ‘Art is pleasure-seeking self-satisfied
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 239

pseudo-analysis and pseudo-enlightenment’ (MGM, 423). Storytelling can

give the dangerous pleasure of bringing form out of disorder, irrespective of
faithfulness to any model, and there are more corrupting satisfactions. And
yet … outside motivation by pleasure, perhaps there are those ‘possessed’
by ‘the visions and the voices’ of their model? (Plato 2008, 72b; 71e).
Timaeus’ discussion of oracular madness at 71e–72b is presented in
character as an explanation for the liver, and is introduced in the course
of Timaeus’ similarly anatomical reworking of tripartite soul imagery
from the Republic. Throughout, Critias and Timaeus are trying to outdo
each other in ‘return for’ Socrates’ ‘feast of words’ (Plato 2008, 27b) in
the Republic. Much as Critias claims to offer Athens’ war with Atlantis as
a living illustration of the tripartite state, it seems inevitable that Timaeus
will try to make our bodily organs an illustration of the tripartite soul.
The rational part is put in the head, that hungry for esteem is put in the
chest, and the base appetites in the stomach. Then Timaeus thinks of a
fourth component of the soul, ‘divination’, and sticks it among the intes-
tines, in the liver. The addition is poetically fecund in ways that would
take whole books to make prose. Partly, it is commentary on the psy-
chologies explored in the Republic. Much as Critias’ wont to illustrate
the tripartite analysis of the city in a combat narrative tends to under-
mine any attribution of goodness to that city, Timaeus’ yen to support
Republic psychology has the effect throwing it into doubt. How many
parts do souls have? If these parts have physical locations and we can add
‘divination’ for the liver, are we going to end up with as many parts of
the soul as we have organs in the body? A less absurd question: do we
need to posit a new part of the soul every time we discern a new motivat-
ing force there, like oracular inspiration? Well, why not? Putting ‘divina-
tion’ in the liver is also a provocation on the (un)clarity and situatedness
of oracular insight, and Plato is perhaps engaged in some variant of
Murdoch’s project: the defence of literature against the Socratic critique.
One strand of the defence is that literature, of the oracular sort, is as nat-
ural to embodied souls as food or sex. I omit much of the strangeness,
but connecting livers with literature we are at last aswim in the oddity of
the Timaeus, and might need a diversion to come to the point.
Oracular madness in the Timaeus should be understood in the light
of passages throughout Plato‘s work (but above all in the Philebus,
Phaedrus, Ion), associating the divine madness of oracles with the divine
inspiration of artists and lovers. Suggesting the playwright or the philo-
sophical writer, the oracle requires
240 D. ROBJANT

command of his intelligence … to recall and reflect upon the messages

conveyed to him by divination or possession, whether he was asleep or
awake at the time, but also to subject to rational analysis all the visions that
appear to him. (Plato 2008, 72b)

Not all diviners are equally capable of such two-way transit between
inspiration and consideration, as great writers must be. If a diviner
remained in divine madness, he would require a second person to
interpret:

These interpreters are occasionally called ‘diviners’, but that just displays
utter ignorance of the fact that they’re really translators of riddling say-
ings and seeings, and should properly be thought of not as diviners, but as
interpreters of omens. (Plato 2008, 72b)

This recalls the exegete. But to return to our defence of literature: the
liver. The created gods who created us knew that the appetitive part of
the soul would never pay attention to reason, and that it would be ‘more
readily bewitched by images and phantasms’ (Plato 2008, 71a).

But the gods had planned for exactly this eventuality, and had formed
the liver [for ‘divination’] and put it in the place where this [appetitive]
part of the soul lived [namely, the intestines]. They made the liver dense,
smooth, bright, and sweet (but with some bitterness), so that it could act
as a mirror for thoughts stemming from intellect, just as a mirror receives
impressions and gives back images to look at. (Plato 2008, 71a–b; italics
mine)

Compare: ‘the representational arts … hold the mirror up to nature’

(Murdoch 1997, 370). By hiding the ‘mirror’ somewhat un-optimally
in the intestines alongside the appetites and waste, Plato on the liter-
ary liver might be summarised: ‘we are all in the gutter, but some of
us are looking at the stars’.4 What sight we can have of them reflected
in blood and shit amid our baser appetites is left open to doubt by
Plato’s imagery, and a project to construct the mirrors of refracting tele-
scopes out of ‘smooth’ livers is perhaps inadvisable. Nevertheless, while
Dionysian and drunk on something, the liver of divination imagery
defends literary art as a way of reflecting, confusedly, certain omens of
otherly perfection, and of making them digestible to parts of the soul
 15 THE URGE TO WRITE: OF MURDOCH ON PLATO’S DEMIURGE 241

that consume nothing else. Liverish literature is a mirror, and also part
of our guts. These aspects are not simply contradictory, but they are in
tension in the image.
Might there also be a response to Freud’s worry to be found in
Plato’s association of art’s bloody mirror with divine madness, rather
than self-seeking pleasure? Any status of Plato’s readers as ‘interpreters
of omens’ is in fruitful contrast with Critias’ earlier talk of the audi-
ence for this evening’s entertainment as a ‘panel of judges’, who are
to evaluate his own speech against Timaeus‘rather as befits a ‘recita-
tion contest’ (Plato 2008, 27a; 21b). Amusement is the second-rate
prize. Plato’s riddling is certainly a kind of fun, but the defence of this
potentially corrupt and corrupting fun is that it is also divine madness,
possession by a ‘model’ you love and wish to recreate as best you can.
This sense in which the craftsman-god (and Plato) are ‘artists’ is not
the sense in which ‘we are all artists’: ‘We are all poets. Well, surely
one will empty the concept by such treatment! If we are all poets, what
about real poets?’ (MGM, 505). What about real poets, indeed? It is
only with real poets that talk of ‘divination’ and ‘possession’ is in place,
and here the ideal artist and the real artist present the same demand. If
there is good art and if there is any good reflected liverishly in his dia-
logues, Plato is telling us, this is only in virtue of his being possessed by
Socrates.

Conclusion
Murdoch tells us that in the Timaeus Demiurge Plato’s ‘splendidly com-
plex mythical image of the creative process’ presents ‘interesting analo-
gies with art of the mortal variety’ (Murdoch 1997, 435). Indeed so,
and far more than Murdoch’s discussion itself allows. Murdoch, far along
the right path, does not go to the ends of these ‘interesting analogies’
because she comes to the Timaeus in a quarrel with Ryle. She wants to
press this ‘late’ dialogue as an example of Plato still mythologising the
forms. The forms are there, perhaps. Yet what the Demiurge is possessed
by and trying to copy is not ‘the forms’. It is rather his ‘model’, and it is
possible to gloss this ‘model’, as Murdoch herself sometimes does, as an
allegory on the ‘living beings’ right in front of us, seen as the ideal artist
could see them, and judged justly as the ideal artist could love them, had
he no word limit, and were missing nothing of his guts.
242 D. ROBJANT

Notes
1. Murdoch’s London and Oxford libraries are held in the Kingston
University Archives and Special Collections, London.
2. See Robjant (2012).
3. In this chapter, ellipses included in brackets indicate the omission of a
complete sentence, while ellipses without brackets indicate the omission of
a few words.
4. Not Oscar Wilde, but Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s
fan, Wilde (2008).

References
Murdoch, I. 1992. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM).
London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. 1997. Existentialists and mystics, ed. Peter Conradi. London:
Chatto & Windus.
Plato. 1998. Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato. 2008. Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Robjant, D. 2012. The earthy realism of Plato’s metaphysics, or: What shall we
do with Iris Murdoch? Philosophical Investigations 35 (1): 43–67.
Ryle, G. 1966. Plato’s progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilde, O. 2008. The importance of being Earnest and other plays. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
 CHAPTER 16

Fields of Force: Murdoch on Axioms,

Duties, and Eros (MGM Chapter 17)

Mark Hopwood

Introduction
In writing about Iris Murdoch, it is difficult to resist the urge to try to
place her somewhere in the contemporary debate in moral philosophy.
To the extent that one feels that Murdoch’s work deserves to be taken
seriously, it is natural to want to find some kind of identifiable position
that can be attributed to her and defended against its rivals.1 The prob-
lem is that it is not always entirely clear what that position would be.
She is obviously not a utilitarian, although she does at various points
say quite positive things about utilitarianism. It is equally obvious that
she does not mean to identify herself as a Kantian, although she often
acknowledges the profound influence of Kant on her own views.2 Those
who have attempted to categorise Murdoch according to the standard
taxonomy of available positions have generally placed her within the
‘virtue ethics’ tradition, but despite some obvious points of resonance
between Murdoch’s work and the writings of her friends and contempo-
raries Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe (to whom Metaphysics as a
Guide to Morals [henceforth MGM] is dedicated), sensitive readers have

M. Hopwood (*)
The University of the South, Sewanee, TN, USA

© The Author(s) 2019 243

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_16
244 M. HOPWOOD

generally noted that Murdoch seems to be trying to do something quite

different from standard virtue theorists.3 Aside from the fact that her pri-
mary inspiration is drawn not from Aristotle but from Plato, Murdoch
does not seem to be putting forward a systematic theory of virtue, or
indeed any kind of systematic theory at all. Indeed, the most tempting
strategy of all might be to classify Murdoch as a kind of particularist
who believes that the solution to the central questions of morality is to
be found not through the application of general principles but through
‘loving attention’ to particular individuals and situations.4
In this chapter, I want to argue—through a reading of chapter 17
of MGM (‘Axioms, duties, Eros’)—that none of these interpretations
gets Murdoch quite right. The problem with all of them is that they
take Murdoch to be committed to a methodological approach to moral
philosophy—foundationalism—that she specifically rejects both in that
chapter and elsewhere in her work. A foundationalist theory, according
to Linda Zagzebski, is one that ‘is constructed out of a single point of
origin’ (Zagzebski 2017, 9). Utilitarianism, for example, is constructed
out of the principle of utility. A utilitarian may be prepared to allow a
role for virtue, rights, duty, and other moral concepts, but each of these
concepts will be explained in terms of the principle of utility. (A virtue is
a character trait that tends to facilitate bringing about the greatest happi-
ness for the greatest number, etc.) Foundationalist theories do not have
to be based upon rules or principles, however. Aristotelian particularism
(of the kind often attributed to John McDowell) is based upon phronesis
or practical wisdom.5 An Aristotelian particularist might be prepared to
allow that some moral problems are best addressed by employing the
principle of utility, but only in those circumstances in which the practi-
cally wise person would employ it. A version of Murdochian particular-
ism could be constructed along similar lines, with loving attention taking
the place of practical wisdom as the foundational concept of the theory.
As I hope to show, even a relatively cursory reading of chapter 17 of
MGM makes any foundationalist interpretation of Murdoch untenable.
Not only is Murdoch not proposing a single point of origin for morality;
she makes it clear that she does not think that there can be one. The
more difficult question is what kind of interpretation of Murdoch’s pro-
ject would be tenable. The best way to read Murdoch, I will suggest, is
as a methodological descriptivist.6 In order to clarify what it means to
label Murdoch as a ‘descriptivist’, I will take a brief detour into her ear-
lier work. There, we see Murdoch setting out a philosophical methodol-
ogy that remains remarkably consistent throughout her career. Although
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 245

this methodology is descriptivist in the sense that it seeks to establish

(as Murdoch puts it) what our moral concepts are as opposed to what
they must be, it should not be construed as a form of ‘neutral analysis’.
Description, for Murdoch, is never neutral: it is always at least in part
an attempt at persuasion. In the final section of the chapter, I will try
to say something about what Murdoch is trying to persuade us of in
Metaphysics by looking in more detail at the central (but underexplored)
metaphor of the ‘field of force’. Once we understand what Murdoch is
trying to do with this metaphor, we will be in a better position to see
how we might attempt to ‘place’ her within the contemporary debate.
Murdoch is not the proponent of another form of foundationalism, even
one based on the concept of loving attention or ‘the Good’. She is the
proponent of an entirely different approach to moral philosophy that
presents a radical alternative to the foundationalist project.7

Murdoch and Foundationalism

The decisive blow against foundationalist readings of Murdoch comes
in the very first sentences of chapter 17, ‘Philosophers have sought
for a single principle on which morality may be seen to depend. I do
not think that the moral life can be in this sense reduced to a unity’
(MGM, 492). These two sentences very clearly rule out any Kantian or
utilitarian interpretation of Murdoch, but they might be thought to leave
room for the particularist reading. When Murdoch says that she does
not think that, ‘the moral life can be in this sense reduced to a unity’, it
might be thought that Murdoch is rejecting the idea of basing morality
on a single principle (like the principle of utility or the categorical imper-
ative), but not necessarily the idea of basing it on a single capacity (like
practical reason or loving attention). Only a few lines later, however,
Murdoch makes it clear that she is using the term ‘principle’ in a broader
sense to encompass any kind of single foundation, including the capacity
for loving attention:

I used earlier the image of a field of force, a field of tension, between

modes of ethical being, divided under the headings of axioms, duties, and
Eros. There is a necessary fourth mode which I name Void, which I have
mentioned earlier and will return to. This picture is of course awkward
since the entities, besides being of different types, are internally divided
against themselves. (MGM, 492)
246 M. HOPWOOD

When Murdoch uses the term ‘Eros’ in chapter 17, she intends it
to denote a ‘mode of ethical being’ that includes the concepts of lov-
ing attention, consciousness, ‘moral vision’, etc. There is no doubt that
this mode of ethical being is absolutely central to Murdoch’s account of
morality. As she writes later in the chapter, ‘a large part of what I have
been concerned with comes under the heading of Eros’ (MGM, 494).
Nevertheless, Eros is still only one mode of ethical being, alongside
axioms, duties, and void. Murdoch had actually made this point quite
explicitly a number of years previously, towards the end of the essay ‘The
idea of perfection’:

I have several times indicated that the image which I am offering should
be thought of as a general metaphysical background to morals and not as a
formula which can be illuminatingly introduced into any and every moral
act. There exists, so far as I know, no formula of the latter kind. We are
not always the individual in pursuit of the individual, we are not always
responding to the magnetic pull of perfection. Often, for instance when we
pay our bills or perform other small everyday acts, we are just ‘anybody’
doing what is proper or making simple choices for ordinary public reasons;
and this is the situation which some philosophers have chosen exclusively
to analyse. (Murdoch 1999, 334)

Since Murdoch herself postpones any further discussion of ‘void’ for the
following chapter of MGM, I will follow her in leaving it to one side for
the purposes of my argument here.8 It might be worth, however, review-
ing the basic points that she makes in her analysis of axioms and duties.
In chapter 17 Murdoch is to a great extent (as she acknowledges)
repeating things that she has said in previous chapters. In particular, her
discussion of axioms draws on chapter 12 (‘Morals and politics’) and her
discussion of duties on chapter 10 (‘Notes on will and duty’). Axioms,
according to Murdoch, are ‘isolated unsystematic moral insights which
arise out of and refer to a general conception of human nature such as
civilized societies have gradually generated’ (MGM, 365). In chapter 17,
Murdoch gives the example of the three ‘unalienable rights’ of the
American Declaration of Independence (life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness), as well as the ‘general command “Be kind”’ (MGM, 493). In
chapter 12, she provides a range of other examples, including the princi-
ple that torture is wrong (MGM, 367) and that violence is not a justifia-
ble means to achieve political ends (MGM, 357).
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 247

Murdoch defines duties in chapter 10 as ‘moral rules of a certain

degree of generality’ (MGM, 302), for example ‘don’t lie’. Murdoch
takes duties, unlike axioms, to be primarily private and individual. As
she puts it: ‘duty recedes into the most private part of personal morality,
whereas axioms are instruments of the public scene’ (MGM, 381). In
describing duties as ‘private’, Murdoch does not mean to suggest that
one’s sense of duty cannot be communicated in public. Someone with a
strong sense of civic duty, for example, might express that sense of duty
by turning out to vote and exhorting others to do likewise. The point is
rather that duties are a matter of personal commitment, whereas axioms
are taken to express the shared values of a whole society or political
community.9 It is essential to the character of duty that it should be
encountered as an absolute and rigid limit on one’s behaviour:

Duty can appear when moral instinct and habit fail, when we lack any
clarifying mode of reflection, and seek for a rule felt as external. Most
often perhaps we become aware of duty when it collides head-on with
inclination. (A place for the concept of will-power.) Anyone may suddenly
find himself, in an unforeseen situation, confronted in his stream of con-
sciousness by the notice DON’T DO IT. (Socrates’s daemon told him only
what not to do.) (MGM, 302)

Murdoch’s discussion of axioms and duties makes it clear that she is

not (as she has sometimes been interpreted) hostile to the very idea of
rules and principles playing a role in moral life. Nevertheless, it might
be thought that it is still possible to accommodate what Murdoch says
about axioms and duties within a foundationalist interpretation of her
view. One of the most subtle and interesting attempts to develop this
kind of reading is Bridget Clarke’s. She presents Murdoch as a virtue
ethicist for whom virtue is ‘a capacity for a kind of moral perception’
(Clarke 2012, 228). Clarke acknowledges that Murdoch regards rules
and principles as a significant part of moral life, but argues that such rules
and principles take a secondary role to moral perception.

The agent’s critical resources consist in habits of thought, attention, and

communication which depend on some normative commitments even as
they call others into question. Virtue is the perfection of these habits. And
while virtue understood in this way involves principles of conduct, these
principles ultimately originate and operate from within the agent’s evalua-
tive outlook. (Clarke 2012, 228–229)
248 M. HOPWOOD

On Clarke’s reading of Murdoch, principles of conduct are ‘character-

dependent’ in the sense that they ‘depend upon the agent’s character for
their proper application’ (Clarke 2012, 230). To illustrate the notion of
character dependence, Clarke gives the example of John Dashwood in Jane
Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. John is instructed in his father’s will to
‘look after’ his sisters, but is not told precisely what this entails. After ini-
tially considering the possibility of sharing his money with his sisters, John
eventually convinces himself (with the help of his wife Fanny) that it would
be ‘absolutely unnecessary, if not highly indecorous’ to offer them any-
thing more than ‘neighbourly assistance’ (such as helping them move into
a new house). In this case, Clarke argues, John is committed to the right
­principle—i.e. that he should look after his sisters—but his cold-heartedness
and selfishness prevent him from applying this principle in the right way.
If we think about axioms and duties as being character-dependent in this
way, then we can allow them to play a role in Murdoch’s account whilst still
preserving moral perception—i.e. Eros—as the foundational concept.
I think there is a great deal about Murdoch’s view that Clarke’s read-
ing gets right. Murdoch would agree that principles of conduct are
often character-dependent in the sense Clarke suggests, and there is
certainly good textual support for giving Eros a privileged place among
Murdoch’s modes of moral being. A morality of axioms, Murdoch
writes, ‘needs the intuitive control of a more widely reflective and gen-
eral morality’ (MGM, 362). The case of duty is similar:

If thought of without the enclosing background of general and changing

quality of consciousness, of moral experience, of acquired moral fabric,
[the idea of duty] may seem stark, inexplicable except as arbitrary orders
given by God, or be considered as mere historically determined social
rules. It may also suggest that morality is an occasional part-time activity
of switching on the ethical faculty on separate occasions of moral choice.
But to return to an earlier metaphor, we can only move properly in a world
that we can see, and what must be sought for is vision. (MGM, 303)

Murdoch is well aware that axioms and duties may lead us astray and
thus need to be ‘enclosed’ and ‘controlled’ by loving attention. In
another passage, she makes the priority of Eros even more explicit:

Someone may say, so you want to distinguish rough general rules of moral-
ity, such as constitute important inspirations and barriers in politics and
public life, from a private progressive spirituality, connected with a total
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 249

change of consciousness? Yes, but the situation is more complicated, since

(political) axioms must also be distinguished from imperatives of duty. I
certainly want to suggest that the spiritual pilgrimage (transformation-
renewal-salvation) is the centre and essence of morality, upon whose
success and well-being the health of other kinds of moral reaction and
thinking is likely to depend. (MGM, 367)

These passages make it clear that Eros does indeed have an important
kind of priority for Murdoch. Murdoch uses the metaphor of health to
describe the role of Eros, and I think it is helpful to extend this met-
aphor as a way of interpreting the claim that Eros is the ‘centre and
essence’ of morality. For Murdoch, Eros is the heart of morality, pump-
ing blood to the other organs. Without consciousness and loving atten-
tion, axioms and duties may come to seem ‘stark and inexplicable’, and
may even lead us down morally dangerous paths. As Hannah Arendt’s
study of Adolf Eichmann makes clear, a commitment to ‘doing one’s
duty‘detached from a sense of the reality of other individuals can lead to
horrifying consequences (Arendt 2006). In the case of axioms, Murdoch
is quite clear that a liberal state needs both the stability provided by
widely accepted axioms and the occasional destabilisation brought about
by ‘conscientious law-breakers’. To that extent, something like Clarke’s
reading—i.e. that axioms and duties ‘operate within’ the agent’s evalua-
tive outlook, with loving attention providing the corrective principle for
both—seems about right.
For all that Clarke gets right about Murdoch’s view, however, there
are other moments in the text that sit less comfortably with her reading.
As we have seen, in chapter 17 Murdoch writes that the picture she has
presented is ‘awkward’ since the four different modes of moral being,
‘besides being of different types, are internally divided against them-
selves’. We can get a better understanding of these internal divisions by
looking more closely at what Murdoch says about axioms and duties.
The role of duty is to ‘confront’ us in our stream of consciousness; it is
what appears ‘when moral instinct and habit fail’. Murdoch is insistent
that duty is not to be ‘reduced away’ to anything else. Indeed, she could
not be much clearer on this point: ‘Duty is not to be absorbed into, or
dissolved in, the vast complexities of moral feeling and sensibility’ (MGM,
302). In order for duty to play the role that Murdoch envisages, it must
be able to interrupt the stream of consciousness. We need to be able to
recognise the moral demand as ‘external, contrary to instinct and habit,
contrary to usual modes of thought’ (MGM, 303). To respond to the call
250 M. HOPWOOD

of duty is, at least in some cases, to ignore or even actively go against the
current of one’s moral vision. As Murdoch writes in ‘The idea of per-
fection’: ‘We may sometimes decide to act abstractly by rule, to ignore
vision and the compulsive energy derived from it; and we may find that
as a result both energy and vision are unexpectedly given’ (Murdoch
1999, 334–335). When Murdoch says that we may sometimes decide to
act ‘abstractly’ by rule, she seems to have in mind a kind of act that is
divorced from one’s usual evaluative outlook—one that comes about as
a result of ignoring vision. Murdoch often talks about duties as ‘moral
taboos’ learned in childhood, and notes that duties framed as negatives
(‘don’t lie’; ‘don’t steal’) are useful precisely because of their clarity—i.e.
because their correct application does not depend to any great extent
upon moral character. (It is no accident that Murdoch takes Socrates’
daimon—which only tells him what not to do, without offering any
explanation or argument—as a paradigmatic example of the call of duty.)
If Murdoch’s account of duty sits awkwardly with Clarke’s reading,
then something similar could also be said of her account of axioms.
Axioms, Murdoch writes, ‘are public banners flown for complex reasons
which may be partly, even grossly pragmatic’. Of course, politicians and
statesmen are ordinary moral agents too, and sometimes ‘we are moved
to claim the rights of others by our own general moral understanding
and sensibility’, but ultimately ‘we do not “live” the world of politics in
the way we “live” our private lives’ (MGM, 386). Although Murdoch is
quite clear that morality cannot be reduced to axioms, she is also at pains
to point out the tensions between the public world of axioms and the
private world of Eros. Axiomatic morality is designed to be ‘inflexible’—
i.e. not open to interpretation. As Murdoch puts it: ‘we “cut off the
road to an explanation” in order to safeguard the purity of the value’
(MGM, 386). The point of formulating simple and axiomatic statements
of human rights, for example, is to reduce as much as possible the role of
moral character in determining the application of those rights. Murdoch
recognises, of course, that even the simplest principle requires interpre-
tation, so axioms can never entirely be separated from vision and con-
sciousness, but the whole point of introducing the category of axioms is
to emphasise the existence of areas of morality in which the role of indi-
vidual moral character is reduced to the smallest possible extent.
Clarke’s account of the character dependence of rules and principles,
though plausible in its own right, thus seems to obscure an important
feature of Murdoch’s account—i.e. the inherent tensions between
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 251

axioms, duties, and Eros. These three modes of moral being do not form
a seamlessly integrated whole; in fact, they seem to pull us in different
directions. Axioms and duties, while less fundamental than conscious-
ness and vision, lay claim to a kind of independent authority that can-
not fully be brought under the authority of Eros. In fairness to Clarke,
it ought to be said that she recognises this point, at least to some extent.
She acknowledges that for Murdoch, axioms and duties offer guidance
that ‘does not depend upon the deliverances of [the agent’s] sensibility’
(Clarke 2012, 243). For Clarke, however, the apparent independence of
axioms and duties presents a problem for Murdoch’s view:

[Duties] and axioms themselves may stand in need of revision (or rejec-
tion). They are, for Murdoch, historically and socially conditioned norms,
not infallible edicts from a metaphysical beyond (MGM, 493). So while
duties and axioms can, and doubtless do, check the agent’s impulses, per-
ceptions, and reflections, the question is how the virtuous person can ever
check them. (Clarke 2012, 244)

Clarke’s concern here seems like a reasonable one. As she points

out, Huck Finn’s duty by the received standards of the antebellum
south is to return the runaway slave Jim to his master. In order to
do the right thing, Huck has to go against his sense of duty, no mat-
ter how powerfully it calls to him. With such examples in mind, Clarke
is sceptical about the usefulness of axioms and duties for Murdoch’s
account. Indeed, she almost seems to be somewhat puzzled about what
they are doing there. Why introduce the idea of axioms and duties as an
external check on moral perception if such principles are just as likely—if
not more likely—to lead us astray?
It is at this point that we need to come back to the question of
Murdoch’s philosophical methodology. The problem for Clarke, I want
to suggest, is that she is reading Murdoch in the wrong way—i.e. as a
foundationalist. She is (on her own account) trying to find a place for
Murdoch in the contemporary debate as the proponent of an original
form of virtue ethics based on moral perception as a foundational con-
cept. Although this reading captures much of what is important about
Murdoch’s view, it leaves other aspects looking somewhat mysterious—
specifically, Murdoch’s account of axioms and duties. What I want
to suggest is that we will only understand what Murdoch is trying
to do with these concepts if we read her in the way that she presents
252 M. HOPWOOD

herself—not as a foundationalist, but as a descriptivist. On this reading,

the goal of Murdoch’s moral philosophy is not to resolve the tensions
between different modes of moral being, but simply to describe those
tensions in an accurate way. In order to explain precisely what Murdoch’s
descriptivism amounts to, however, we need to take a brief detour into
some of her earlier essays before returning to look at the role it plays in
her later work.

Making Pictures
Murdoch’s philosophical methodology, although it developed in various
ways over time, remained remarkably consistent over the course of her
career, and the early essays help to illuminate what she takes herself to be
doing in MGM. In one of her very earliest published pieces, ‘Thinking
and language’, Murdoch argues for a view to which she would remain
committed throughout her writings—i.e. the fundamentally metaphori-
cal nature of much of our thought and language:

[Metaphor] is not a peripheral excrescence upon the linguistic structure,

it is its living centre. And the metaphors which we encounter, and which
illuminate us, in conversation and in poetry, are offered and are found illu-
minating because language also occurs in thinking in the way that it does.
We do not ‘suddenly’ have to adopt the figurative mode; we are using it all
the time. (Murdoch 1999, 40)

For Murdoch, metaphor is not merely useful for describing our expe-
rience; it is to some extent constitutive of our experience. As Murdoch
writes:

If we think of conceptualizing … as the activity of grasping, or reducing

to order, our situations with the help of a language which is fundamentally
metaphorical, this will operate against the world-language dualism which
haunts us because we are afraid of the idealists. Seen from this point of
view, thinking is not the using of symbols which designate absent objects,
symbolizing and sensing being strictly divided from each other. Thinking
is not designating at all, but rather understanding, grasping, ‘possessing’.
(Murdoch 1999, 41)

This account of the nature of thought is crucial to understanding

Murdoch’s view of moral philosophy. As a mode of thought, moral
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 253

philosophy can be understood as the attempt to ‘grasp’ or ‘possess’ our

moral experience. For example: thinking of morality in terms of a system
of laws helps us to grasp and ‘reduce to order’ our sometimes confused
sense of duty. Similarly, the principle of utility—morality as cost/bene-
fit analysis—offers a way of simplifying, ordering, and prioritising what
might otherwise be a bewildering array of moral demands. What makes
moral philosophy so difficult is that such metaphors are already part
of moral life, playing a central role in shaping the phenomena that the
moral philosopher is called upon to analyse. In her essay ‘Metaphysics
and ethics’, Murdoch begins to lay out a positive conception of a philo-
sophical methodology that would take this difficulty into account:

Philosophers have usually tended to seek for universal formulae. But

the linguistic method, if we take it seriously, is by its nature opposed to
this search. Logic, whatever that may be determined to be, has its own
­universality; but when we leave the domain of the purely logical we come
into the cloudy and shifting domain of the concepts which men live by
– and these are subject to historical change. This is especially true of
moral concepts. Here we shall have done something if we can establish
with tolerable clarity what these concepts are. We should, I think, resist
the temptation to unify the picture by trying to establish, guided by our
own conception of the ethical in general, what these concepts must be. All
that is made clear by this method is: our own conception of the ethical in
general – and in the process important differences of moral concept may
be blurred or neglected. (Murdoch 1999, 75)

Murdoch once again denies that moral philosophy can hope to establish
anything ‘which has a sort of logical universality’ and attempts to explain
why she thinks this is impossible:

The difficulty is, and here we are after all not so very far from the philoso-
phers of the past, that the subject of the investigation is the nature of man
– and we are studying this nature at a point of great conceptual sensibility.
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resem-
ble the picture. This is the process which moral philosophy must attempt
to describe and analyse. (Murdoch 1999, 75)

Although the statement that ‘man is a creature who makes pictures

of himself and then comes to resemble the picture’ has become well
known, Murdoch’s reasons for making it are not always fully understood.
254 M. HOPWOOD

When Murdoch says that we come to resemble the pictures we create,

that is another way of articulating the point made earlier in ‘Thinking
and language’—i.e. that the pictures and metaphors we use play a central
role in constituting our experience. When the moral philosopher sits
down to attempt to grasp and reduce to order the moral domain, she is
faced with a set of human subjects who are already being shaped by the
metaphors and pictures they use to grasp their own experience for them-
selves. Consequently, any attempt to impose a single picture or universal
formula—in other words, any attempt to say what our moral concepts
must be—risks obscuring the complexity and differences of our moral
concepts as they are.
There is a good example of the kind of problem that Murdoch is con-
cerned with in the essay ‘Vision and choice in morality’, published around
the same time as ‘Metaphysics and ethics’. In that piece, Murdoch dis-
cusses the ‘current view’ of morality, according to which ‘a moral judg-
ment, as opposed to a whim or taste preference, is one which is held by
the agent to be valid for all others placed as he is’ (Murdoch 1999, 77).
As Murdoch points out, a problem for the current view is that some peo-
ple seem to regard themselves as being ‘set apart from others, by a supe-
riority which brings special responsibilities, or by a curse, or some other
unique destiny’ (Murdoch 1999, 86). Such agents would not necessarily
say that what is morally required for them is necessarily valid for every-
one else. Of course, the proponent of the current view can attempt to
‘force the situation into the model’ by arguing that even someone who
takes themselves to be subject to a unique destiny is committed to the
claim that what is morally required of them would hold universally for
anyone subject to precisely the same destiny, even if that turns out to be
no-one but them. Murdoch’s question at this point is simply: ‘whatever
is the point of doing [this]?’ (Murdoch 1999, 86). If we insist, we can
find a way to reinterpret all the various and diverse forms of moral expe-
rience we encounter to fit them within the constraints of a single picture.
In doing so, however, we may find that we ‘have won a similarity, but we
have lost a much more important and interesting difference’ (Murdoch
1999, 88). Moral philosophy, Murdoch argues, ‘should remain at the
level of the differences, taking the moral forms of life as given, and not
try to get behind them to a single form’ (Murdoch 1999, 97).
This is the core of Murdoch’s descriptivism. The first task of moral
philosophy, as Murdoch sees it, is to give an accurate account of our
moral concepts as they are. It would be misleading, however, to suggest
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 255

that in seeking to provide an accurate description of our concepts the

moral philosopher is able to remain neutral. We need to remember that
the moral philosopher is no less human than the subjects of her analy-
sis. She too is a picturing creature. Consequently, any moral theory is
likely to be ‘half a description and half a persuasion’ (Murdoch 1999,
75). In Murdoch’s own work, persuasion does not take the form of try-
ing to establish what our moral concepts must be, but rather of trying
to remind us of a set of concepts we are in danger of losing altogether:
consciousness, attention, love, truth, the Good, etc. The loss of these
concepts would not merely represent the loss of a way of describing
the world; it would represent the loss of a way of being in the world.
Murdoch’s concern about the potential loss of this way of being is a
moral concern. As we have already seen, she thinks that a morality of axi-
oms or duties detached from the concepts of vision and loving attention
would carry distinctive moral dangers. In reintroducing these concepts,
Murdoch is aiming to give us the resources to avoid such dangers.

Force Fields
I think that we are now in a position to return to MGM to reassess
Murdoch’s account of the relation between axioms, duties, and Eros.
I suggested above that if we take Murdoch to be committed to founda-
tionalism, her theory is likely to appear unsatisfyingly incomplete. If we
understand her in the way that she understands herself, however—i.e. as
a descriptivist—then her willingness to accommodate a certain degree of
‘awkwardness’ in the picture makes perfect sense. If there is a tension
in moral life between different modes of moral being, then her job is
simply to describe this tension as accurately as possible in order to help
us to confront it when it arises. The specific metaphor that Murdoch
uses to describe the tensions between different modes of moral being—
the ‘field of force’—is worth dwelling on. It is borrowed from Theodor
Adorno, a debt that Murdoch acknowledges in the course of a relatively
lengthy discussion of his work in chapter 12. As Martin Jay writes in
his book Force Fields, Adorno uses the force field metaphor ‘to suggest
a nontotalized juxtaposition of changing elements, a dynamic interplay
of attractions and aversions, without a generative first principle, common
denominator, or inherent essence’ (Jay 1993, 2). The first appearance of
the phrase in MGM comes in a paragraph in chapter 10 that begins with
another metaphor that Murdoch uses more than once in the book:
256 M. HOPWOOD

Simone Weil uses an image of the human situation as being like that of
a mountain walker who is aware of what is very distant, what is less dis-
tant, what is near, as well as of the uneven ground beneath her feet. Our
confused conscious being is both here and elsewhere, living at different
levels and in different modes of cognition. We are ‘distracted’ creatures,
extended, layered, pulled apart. (MGM, 296)

I think that it is illuminating to read this passage in the light of our

earlier discussion of the constitutive role of metaphor in language and
thought. In ‘Metaphysics and ethics’ and ‘Vision and choice in morality’,
Murdoch sets up different positions against each other—the ‘Liberal
view’ and the ‘Natural Law view’—in order to bring out the contrast
between different sets of moral concepts. As she is well aware, however,
no actual human being is ever completely identified with a single set
of moral concepts. Although she often makes use of stylised characters
(‘Kantian man’, etc.) in her work, Murdoch makes it clear that real indi-
viduals are capable of thinking in terms of multiple different pictures or
metaphors at different times. In ‘Vision and choice’ she notes that, ‘there
are fundamentally different moral pictures which different individuals
use or which the same individual may use at different times’ (Murdoch
1999, 97, my emphasis). What she is trying to bring out in chapter 17 is
that each of us is not only capable of thinking in terms of axioms, duties,
and Eros; our experience itself is partly constituted by these concepts. We
are capable of feeling the pull of duty or the weight of political commit-
ments and the tension between these different modes. When Murdoch
describes us as ‘distracted creatures, extended, layered, pulled apart’, she
is trying to describe what it is like to live within a set of different pictures
and metaphors that are internally divided against each other.
The force field metaphor, then, is intended to give us a way of doing
justice to the tensions between different modes of moral being that
characterise our lived moral experience. These tensions, however, are
only one half of the picture. In chapter 17, Murdoch acknowledges that
although it may not be possible to reduce moral life to a single principle,
there is nevertheless a kind of unity to it:

When assessing others and ourselves, we may discriminate between differ-

ent ‘aspects’. But a human being is a whole entity, there is also something
essentially one-making about morals, and we may seek to exonerate or
accuse on the basis of a seen or felt unity. … The image of good here takes
the place of God in its connection with a whole being. (MGM, 492)
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 257

It is tempting in reading this passage to think that Murdoch must be

committing herself to a kind of foundationalism after all. Surely there is
a single principle upon which morality may be seen to depend—i.e. the
principle of the Good?10 Although an analysis of Murdoch’s account of
the Good would take us well beyond the scope of this chapter, I think
that it is important to see why Murdoch does not take it to play the role
of a foundational principle. In fact, I think that for Murdoch the Good
is not a principle at all. It is encountered in and through our experience,
in our intuitions of a ‘seen or felt unity’ underlying the tensions and con-
flicts between different modes of moral being. This unity is transcendent,
however, in the sense that it cannot be captured in any single philosoph-
ical principle or concept. It is in a sense the inspiration for all of our
moral principles and concepts, but for precisely that reason it cannot be
brought fully within any of our conceptual schemes. To put the point in
another way: the Good is responsible for a sense of lived unity that can
never adequately be translated into a theoretical unity.
Understood in this way, the deepest tension in Murdoch’s ‘field
of force’ is not the tension between the four different modes of moral
being; it is the tension between ‘the imperfect soul and the magnetic
perfection which is conceived of as lying beyond it’ (Murdoch 1999,
384). This, of course, is where Murdoch’s Platonism comes to the fore.
At the end of chapter 17, she returns to Plato’s Phaedrus:

The myth in the Phaedrus tells us that every human soul has seen, in their
pure being, the Forms (Ideas) as justice, temperance, beauty, and all the
great moral qualities which we ‘hold in honour’, when dwelling with the
gods in a previous existence; and when on Earth we are moved toward
what is good it is by a faint memory of those pure things, simple and calm
and blessed, which we saw then in a pure light, being pure ourselves. This
seems to me an excellent image of our apprehension of morality and good-
ness. (MGM, 497)

What Murdoch does not mention (or at least, not here) is that in the
Phaedrus myth the sight of beauty is initially a source of pain and irrita-
tion as the lover’s wings begin to sprout again from their stumps. This
part of the myth seems to be an excellent image of what it is like to
experience the field of force between axioms, duties, and Eros. We are
‘distracted creatures, extended, layered, pulled apart’. Our lives are illu-
minated by a sense of unity that we find ourselves unable fully to express
258 M. HOPWOOD

in thought and language. While we still retain our human form, philos-
ophy cannot resolve these tensions for us, but it can describe them in a
way that helps us re-orient ourselves towards the good that lies beyond
description.

Notes
1. Maria Antonaccio’s Picturing the Human (2000) is probably still the
best and most comprehensive attempt to undertake this task, although
Antonaccio’s interpretation of Murdoch as a ‘reflexive realist’ has recently
come under criticism (Robjant 2011).
2. Some interpreters have attempted to read Murdoch as a kind of Kantian
(Velleman 1999). For criticism of this approach, see Millgram (2004) and
Hopwood (2018).
3. See Nussbaum (1999), Brewer (2011), and Banicki (2017) for discussion
of Murdoch’s relation to the category of ‘virtue ethics’.
4. Denham (2001) is a good example of this line of interpretation. The par-
ticularist reading is criticised in Hopwood (2017) and also discussed in
Millgram (2005) and Driver (2012).
5. See McDowell (1979, 1995) for classic statements of this position.
6. In a recent article, Nora Hämäläinen (2018) argues for a similar reading
of Murdoch’s approach. See also Hämäläinen (2016).
7. In contrasting descriptivism with foundationalism, I do not mean to
suggest that these two approaches exhaust all the methodological
options open to moral philosophers. One might, for example, adopt a
kind of theoretical pluralism grounded in multiple different ‘points of
origin’. (Martha Nussbaum [2000] might be read as proposing such a
methodology.) Although I do not have the space to explore this issue
in any depth here, the main difference between theoretical pluralism
and the kind of descriptivism I want to attribute to Murdoch is that
the theoretical pluralist retains the aspiration to ‘pin down the exact
relations between the different registers of moral thought’, as Nora
Hämäläinen has helpfully put it to me. As I hope to show, Murdoch’s
descriptivism does not seek to achieve (and indeed, might be seen as
actively trying to avoid) this kind of systematic unity. See chapter 4 of
Hämäläinen (2016) for a helpful discussion of Nussbaum’s relationship
to foundationalism.
8. See Hämäläinen’s chapter on ‘Void’ in this volume.
9. I am grateful to Nora Hämäläinen for pressing me to clarify this point.
10. This, I think, is Clarke’s way of reading her.
 16 FIELDS OF FORCE: MURDOCH ON AXIOMS … 259

References
Antonaccio, M. 2000. Picturing the human: The moral thought of Iris Murdoch.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Arendt, H. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New
York: Penguin Classics.
Banicki, K. 2017. Iris Murdoch and the varieties of virtue ethics. In Varieties of
virtue ethics, ed. David Carr, James Arthur, and Kristján Kristjánsson, 89–104.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brewer, T. 2011. The retrieval of ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, B. 2012. Iris Murdoch and the prospects for critical moral perception.
In Iris Murdoch, philosopher, ed. Justin Broackes, 227–254. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Denham, A.E. 2001. Envisioning the Good: Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology.
Modern Fiction Studies 47 (3): 602–629.
Driver, J. 2012. ‘For every foot its own shoe’: Method and moral theory in the
philosophy of Iris Murdoch. In Iris Murdoch, philosopher, ed. Justin Broackes,
275–292. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hämäläinen, N. 2016. Descriptive ethics: What does moral philosophy know about
morality? New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hämäläinen, N. 2018. Iris Murdoch and the descriptive aspect of moral philoso-
phy. Iris Murdoch Review 9: 23–30.
Hopwood, M. 2017. Murdoch, moral concepts, and the universalizability of
moral reasons. Philosophical Papers 46 (2): 245–271.
Hopwood, M. 2018. ‘The extremely difficult realization that something other
than oneself is real’: Iris Murdoch on love and moral agency. European
Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 477–501.
Jay, Martin. 1993. Force fields: Between intellectual history and cultural critique.
New York: Routledge.
McDowell, J. 1979. Virtue and reason. The Monist 62 (3): 331–350.
McDowell, J. 1995. Eudaimonism and realism in Aristotle’s Ethics. In Aristotle
and moral realism, ed. Robert Heinaman, 201–218. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Millgram, E. 2004. Kantian crystallization. Ethics 114 (3): 511–513.
Millgram, E. 2005. Murdoch, practical reasoning, and particularism. In Ethics
done right: Practical reasoning as a foundation for moral theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Murdoch, I. 1993. Metaphysics as a guide to morals (Abbreviated MGM). New
York: Viking.
Murdoch, I. 1999. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and litera-
ture. New York: Penguin Books.
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Nussbaum, M. 1999. Virtue ethics: A misleading category? Journal of Ethics

3 (3): 163–201.
Nussbaum, M. 2000. Why practice needs ethical theory: Particularism, princi-
ple, and bad behavior. In Moral particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret
Olivia Little, 227–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robjant, D. 2011. As a Buddhist Christian: The misappropriation of Iris
Murdoch. Heythrop Journal 52 (6): 993–1008.
Velleman, J.D. 1999. Love as a moral emotion. Ethics 109 (2): 338–374.
Zagzebski, L. 2017. Exemplarist moral theory. New York: Oxford University
Press.
 CHAPTER 17

Which Void? (MGM Chapter 18)

Nora Hämäläinen

The Need for Void

Readers of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (hereafter MGM) often
tend to go straight for the chapters and topics that interest them and
bother less with the book as a whole.1 This at least is what I did initially.
After having read it through, with poor concentration, not really know-
ing what I was confronted with, I went for the passages that I had
earmarked, treating them as aphoristic evidence of whatever view I was
attempting to attribute to Murdoch. Something like this is perhaps often
unavoidable, given the plurality of topics in the book.
There is, however a frame to the book, constituted by the first and
two last substantial Chapters (17 and 18),2 which is necessary to appre-
ciate if one wants to understand the nature and role of the chapter on
void. The first chapter sets the agenda: to speak about the predicament
of thinking in our time, of our moral and metaphysical present, its guid-
ing metaphors, its emotional cadences, and especially its take on the
images of unity and disunity that guide so much of thinking. The chap-
ters on ‘Axioms, duties and Eros’, and ‘Void’ order and qualify what has
been said in the book. Murdoch has in much of the book explored a
take on moral experience that is distinctly unifying: that of our longing

N. Hämäläinen (*)
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic

© The Author(s) 2019 261

N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.),
Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9_17
262 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

for and attempts at ascendance towards what is good. We could perhaps

think of this as a secular theology. But she does not want to leave the
reader with the impression that unification is her last word. Our moral
life does not fit into any one unifying vocabulary or style of thinking, and
no improvement can be hoped for from a procedure which seeks illumi-
nation through reduction.
Axioms, duties and Eros are her names for three different but equally
important ways of approaching ethical issues: a political domain of axioms,
a personal (and interpersonal) domain of duties, and a perfectionist ethics
of Eros. These are not alternative theories, but rather different conceptual-
isations and vocabularies that are equally available to us and at play in dif-
ferent areas of our moral lives. The tripartition should be seen as a heuristic
one: there are no watertight boundaries between these, considerations per-
taining to these three dimensions often intermingle in our moral thinking.
The chapter on void comes as a postscript, a tail, an aber to that dis-
unifying chapter. It is presented by Murdoch as a fourth dimension to be
added to the three previous ones, but she also emphasises that it is dif-
ferent, a ‘tract of experience’ rather than a dimension of moral thought.
This manner of linking void to the other three and yet giving it a chapter
of its own indicates two different things. On the one hand she wants to
emphasise that the tripartite list of dimensions of moral thought is not
meant to be complete: there are indeed aspects of moral thought that
escape these categories, and we should want to talk about those too.
Maybe more dimensions need to be added? On the other hand, the func-
tion of void is not here primarily to extend the taxonomy, but to check
misleading interpretations of her philosophy of Eros.
She puts words in the mouth of an imaginary opponent to formu-
late a specific risk with her morality of Eros and spiritual ascent: ‘Your
view of spiritual refreshment as everywhere available is ridiculously opti-
mistic, even sentimental. It seems to neglect how miserable we are, and
also how wicked we are’ (MGM, 498). It may seem curious to think of
the ethics of Eros as particularly optimistic, the way the imaginary oppo-
nent does. Hasn’t Murdoch emphasised how difficult it is to do good, to
see clearly, to purify one’s vision of selfish fantasies? Isn’t this a substan-
tially less cheerful morality than the standard idea of morality as doing
the right thing in circumscribed moral situations and then minding your
own business the rest of the time?
The optimism that the imaginary opponent points out lies not so
much in the idea that an ethics of Eros would be easy to live by, but
in the promise of a guiding light in human life, a good or a God, that
 17 WHICH VOID? (MGM CHAPTER 18) 263

structures our experience as meaningful and directed. No matter how

difficult the ascent, we can always start to climb, there is always a direc-
tion that will come clear to us if we attend properly, if we wait. But
this isn’t quite true. The always here involves a lazy oversight. There
are extraordinary places in human life where the sun of the good does
not shine, where we are beaten into indifference through severe suffer-
ing, where we are metaphorically forsaken by God. Void, in Murdoch’s
vocabulary, becomes the name for the ‘black misery’ and ‘wickedness’
that may seem to make the idea of moral ascent a romantic fantasy.
Thus, where the penultimate chapter is a critique of the idea that she
would want to present an all-encompassing ethics of Eros, for all areas
of life, the last chapter is a critique of the idea that the light of the good
would always be available to us. The fact that both mistaken ideas have
been attributed to Murdoch by very capable scholars shows that both
of these chapters were necessary.3 The same fact indicates, however, that
she did perhaps not quite succeed in articulating the importance of these
themes at the end of the book.

The Structure of the Chapter

The chapter on void, like many other chapters of the book, is far from a
model case of pedagogical structuring. But there is much to learn from
the actual sequence of thought in it.
It begins with Murdoch introducing an experiential region of ‘despair’
or ‘affliction’ that moral philosophy needs to take into account. Her
expressions here are very tentative, ‘might seem to have been left out’,
‘might be thought of’, indicating that she is unsure about something or
saying only what someone else might say.

It might be thought of as an opposing companion piece to happiness. It

might also, in a different way, be placed in opposition to ‘transcendence’,
a word that I have used to mean a good ‘going beyond’ one’s egoistic self,
as in the Platonic pilgrimage or innumerable ordinary experiences. What
I refer to here is something extreme: the pain, and the evil, which occa-
sion conditions of desolation such as many or most human beings have
met with. (MGM, 498)

The indirectness here is, however, not due to a desire to distance herself
from the ideas she is presenting. It is rather that she does not quite know
which words or images she should use to assemble the topic or area of
264 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

concern. We could also say that as an experienced writer she achieves a

specific kind of precision by candidly confessing her difficulties.
Then she assumes the voice of someone deeply concerned by the
state of the world: it is a terrible thing to be human, there is so much
suffering and ‘even in “sheltered” lives there is black misery, bereave-
ment, remorse, frustrated talent, loneliness, humiliation, depression,
secret woe’ (MGM, 498–499). In such a situation, shouldn’t one ‘think
statistically’, bring relief to the greatest possible number, instead of talk-
ing about individuals and spiritual sources?
The imagined opponent here both is and is not Murdoch herself: in
the voice of a progressive, reform-oriented utilitarian (who obviously is
someone else), she formulates worries that she finds perfectly valid, at
least as worries. Then she recommences in a voice that is completely her
own. Having thus tuned into the topic she wants to talk about, she points
at the particular difficulty of bringing it properly into view. ‘It is not easy
to discuss such a matter or take it as a single subject’ (MGM, 499).
Our difficulties with this area are not due to any simple negligence
of it as a philosophically interesting one. The problem is more funda-
mental: it is difficult for people to access this region of thought without
distorting it. When people suffer severely, when they are in the void, they
cannot do philosophy or art, and when and if they recover they are to a
certain extent protected by forgetfulness. Art often romanticises despair.
‘Christ on the cross is an image so familiar and beautified that we have
difficulty in connecting it with real awful human suffering’ (MGM, 499).
It is, in Murdoch’s view difficult to find true pain in art, although there
are a few exceptions: Greek tragedy and poetry, some great novels.
Philosophers, too, have relatively little to say about it, although their
reasons may be somewhat different. ‘Philosophers, even while consign-
ing whole areas of human existence to blindness and suffering, do not feel
moved to exhibit distress’ (MGM, 499). That is, while acknowledging the
reality of suffering, philosophers are unlikely to express it, explore it, make
it vivid. This is due to the human difficulties that they share with artists
(forgetfulness etc.), but also because they do not see it as part of their job.
The ‘existentialist tradition’ has done its share to correct this, but Murdoch
sees something of an aestheticising of despair in both Kierkegaard and
Sartre. Simone Weil is mentioned as a ‘fine writer on the subject’. Then
Murdoch notes that ‘perhaps art does it best after all’ (MGM, 499–500).
The charge is that most philosophers and artists do not quite know
suffering, affliction, void. Yet they should at least try to know it better,
 17 WHICH VOID? (MGM CHAPTER 18) 265

because without a grasp of this region of experience our understanding

of morality is severely limited. Murdoch doesn’t purport to know it any
better and is consciously tentative. She uses the remaining pages to hover
over the question of what kinds of suffering there may be, and to what
extent they can be of moral use.
First, she considers the idea of suffering as a form of education: the
idea that suffering of guilt and remorse can purify and bring the wrong-
doer closer to god. Then she considers the pain of bereavement, mixed
or unmixed with feelings of guilt. In all such cases human beings mostly
seem capable of recovering: ‘“nature” reasserts itself’ (MGM, 500). There
are worse things: ‘The more terrible pictures are of solitary prisoners with
no term of release.’ In such a situation even religious faith may fade away
and ‘the idea of death and non-being are made real’ (MGM, 501).
Then she goes back to the question of learning. Shouldn’t the emp-
tiness of severe suffering be used as a memento mori? When we see
that ‘anyone can be destroyed’, that all can be taken from us, even our
personality: is there not a spiritual possibility in this? She notes that
‘Buddhism teaches the unreality of the world of appearance’ and St John
of the Cross talks about the dark night and the ‘abyss of faith into which
one falls’. She clearly sees the charm in these ideas, yet doesn’t quite buy
into the idea of suffering as something to be used for enlightenment.
‘Yes, it is possible, but very often it is just too difficult, to “learn” from
deep despair’ (MGM, 501–502). This is the voice of ordinary, sanguine,
compassionate Murdoch, cautious of spiritual excess. She does not spell it
out, but she seems to think that those who claim that we should use our
despair for our moral edification do not quite know what real despair is.
Then she turns to Simone Weil, and introduces her concept of
malheur, which she translates as ‘affliction’, noting that Weil means
something more than ordinary unhappiness or sorrow. She provides
three quotes from Weil’s notebooks, talking about three experiences of
suffering: bereavement, the inability to forgive, and the experience of
painful thought felt as a burn. Elaborating on these, Murdoch empha-
sises that we must not, when experiencing such things, deflect from the
pain and fill the void with fantasies of ‘bouncing back’. ‘Void makes
loss a reality. Do not think about righting the balance, but live close to
the painful reality and try to relate it to what is good. What is needed
here, and is so difficult to achieve, a new orientation of our desires, a
re-education of our instinctive feelings’ (MGM, 503).
266 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

It is not easy to tell whether Murdoch is speaking in her own voice or

if she is recounting the perspective of Weil. The use of ‘fantasy’ here does
not have a counterpart in Weil. But in the next paragraph she describes
what she has just said as ‘a partly metaphorical description of malheur’
using the French word rather than the translation that she has just pro-
vided. So, where are we?
Murdoch’s style of moving between different voices and perspectives
evokes literary free indirect discourse. She is, herself, in all the voices
because she has made them, out of the thought stuff that is in circula-
tion: things we are expected to or feel inclined to take seriously. But she
is not equally in agreement with all of them, as we saw with the utilitar-
ian voice above. With Weil the relation is to some extent unclear, because
she has borrowed so much from her, and is so impressed.
In the last long paragraph, she talks about ways out of affliction, look-
ing at the matter from different angles. Friends can help, starting a new
life, a moral or spiritual effort, love, some ‘pure or innocent thing which
could attract love or revive hope’. ‘The inhibition of unworthy fantasies
is perhaps the most accessible discipline’ (MGM, 503). She suggests that
there might be an element of this kind of discipline in our day to day lives
and relations to other people. And here we may be surprised to find a
void that isn’t the negative counterpart of Eros after all. It was supposed
to be the pit into which we fall in great suffering, when we have lost our
natural striving for whatever we find good, when the world has lost its
allure. But this place outside the Erotic striving is now strangely incor-
porated in Murdoch’s ethics of Eros in the very last paragraph. She notes
that ‘we have (gravity, necessity) a natural impulse to derealise our world
and surround ourselves with fantasy. Simply stopping this … is progress.
Equally in the more obscure labyrinths of personal relations it may be
necessary to make the move which makes the void appear’ (MGM, 503).
This last paragraph is so ‘typical Murdoch’ that we may not notice
how odd it is. It seems that she is just returning to her safe bravura, talk-
ing about the overcoming of selfish fantasy. But we need to think about
this more carefully. After having shrugged off the idea of void (severe
affliction?) as a path to edification, she makes a small place for a neces-
sary void (painful/difficult emptiness?) in the middle of everyday activi-
ties and relations. It turns out that void might be a central component of
Erotic ascent and edification after all. But which void?
Is she aware of what happens here? If she is, why didn’t she spell it
out more clearly? The chapter seems unfinished: It says interesting
 17 WHICH VOID? (MGM CHAPTER 18) 267

things, but probably the wrong things to pin down what she thinks of
the importance of void. Maybe the work was completed before she quite
knew what to say. Nevertheless, I will try out the possibility that the
strangeness of this ending is due to a certain lack of transparency in her
relationship to Weil. There is a systematic metaphysical difference that
she doesn’t spell out, perhaps because she does not see it clearly. Yet it
causes the two aspects of void borrowed from Weil‘s thought to fall apart
in her own.

Murdoch and Weil

Murdoch’s discovery of Weil in the 1950s was a turning point in her
philosophical thought.4 At the time of discovering Weil’s work, Murdoch
was growing weary of the thin conception of moral life and conscious-
ness in Sartre’s work, which in many other respects a few years earlier
had greatly impressed her. In Weil she found several ideas that would
provide a basis for her new orientation in moral thought. One of them
was Weil’s non-dualist and moral reading of Plato. In this line of reading,
Plato’s central concerns are not to be understood in purely epistemolog-
ical and metaphysical terms, and he does not postulate a transcendent
world beyond this one. He is rather interpreted as a thinker concerned
with the moral task of accurately seeing the common world that is right
in front of him. He also provides, through his notion of Eros, a dynamic
picture of our strivings towards the good, which places love at the centre
of the moral life. Another theme that Murdoch picked up is the Weilian
notion of ‘attention’, with its emphasis on the active, attentive, self-for-
getful waiting, which is required in order to overcome selfish and dis-
torted conceptions of other people and social situations (Larson 2009,
2014; Conradi 2001).
Focusing on these influences, it may seem as if Murdoch took the
whole of her moral philosophy from Weil, adding little to it. As Kate
Larson (2009) observes, one of Murdoch’s critical contrasts with Weil
has to do with the role of the imagination. Weil has little regard for the
imagination, seeing it mainly as a source of projections and an obstacle
to accurate vision. Murdoch in her turn, as we know, gives great impor-
tance to our imaginative capacities in moral life. Hence the distinction
between perceptive imagination and selfish fantasy, by which she seeks
to save what she finds valuable in the imagination, while acknowledging
what she thinks of as sound caution on the part of both Plato and Weil.
268 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

A second central point of disagreement is the role and nature of Eros.

Where Weil wants to see our erotic energy, our desire, purified from selfish
and earthly concerns, and turned towards God, Murdoch persists in the
belief that personal, physical and romantic love participate in the good,
and are great teachers of goodness. For Weil, as Larson puts it, ‘there is to
be no touching, no fantasy, no projections’ (Larson 2009, 154). Personal
love of the kind that requires the lover’s company and presence, is rep-
resented as devouring the beloved. Self-negation and purification of love
from the selfish component is, on the other hand, seen as a lever, which
lifts the lover to a higher spiritual level. Murdoch, to the contrary, sees
much of value in personal and erotic relationships, and distrusts them
mainly in their potential for excess and self-indulgence.
In these points of disagreement, we find intimations of a fundamental
difference between Weil and Murdoch, which, though duly noted, is not
fully appreciated by Larson. What seems to me left out in her account is
the disturbing sternness and strangeness of some of Weil’s thought. As
Murdoch puts it in her review of the English translation of Weil’s note-
books in 1956, ‘The personality which emerges from these writings is
not always attractive, but it compels respect. She is sometimes unbal-
anced and scarcely accurate’ (Murdoch 1997, 160).
Unless we pay proper heed to this dissonance between them, we
run the risk of domesticating Weil into a context of secular moral
philosophy where she does not quite fit. A possible consequence is that
Murdoch’s contribution stands out as less original than it is, just a pale
copy of Weil’s central ideas. Another potential risk is that a reader who
experiences a rebarbative quality in Weil’s writings will be more likely to
project her spiritual ‘extremism’ on Murdoch.
One reader of the latter kind is Sabina Lovibond (2011), who has
argued that Murdoch, under the influence of Weil, developed a philos-
ophy which elevates feminine masochistic forms of self-denigration,
and thus is deeply anti-feminist and anti-egalitarian. This reading is
based, among other things, on a certain way of understanding the self-
forgetfulness of ‘attention’ in contrast to the self-assertiveness that is an
essential part of social movements and social critique. Murdoch’s image
of the self-forgetful aunt is on this reading a dubious moral ideal, since
it seems to give consent to social oppression and fundamental hierarchy.
I have criticised this reading elsewhere (Hämäläinen 2015) and it seems
to me that the negative assessment could in part have been avoided if the
contrasts between Weil and Murdoch were better understood.
 17 WHICH VOID? (MGM CHAPTER 18) 269

The Concept of Void

The concept of void is a central place where the difference between
Murdoch and Weil can be perceived. Weil’s discussion of void is the
product of a metaphorical rendering of a human being’s spiritual life. In
this picture, the self, with its desires and imaginings, fills the whole space
it can enter, like a gas. We must struggle against this tendency, we must
not fill the void. This is excruciatingly painful because it goes against our
natural impulse, but only through the void can divine grace enter our
lives. Through suffering the void, we achieve detachment and are able
to reach a higher spiritual level. ‘A time has to be gone through without
any reward, natural or supernatural’ (Weil 2002, 11).
In this metaphorical metaphysics of self, suffering gains a positive
valence, not perhaps of means to an end, but as an indispensable passage.
In an explication that recalls the book of Job, Weil sings the praise of
affliction.

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment.

Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation—no
apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.
To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compen-
sation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of
death.
‘He emptied himself of his divinity.’ To empty ourselves of the world.
To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy
in space and time—that is, to nothing.
To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute soli-
tude. Then we possess the truth of the world. (Weil 2002, 12)

A similar drive to nothingness is present in Weil’s reflections on Zen. In

MGM Murdoch quotes Weil who writes that: ‘The primitive Zen method
seems to consist of a gratuitous search of such intensity that it takes the
place of all attachments. But, because it is gratuitous, it cannot become
an object of attachment except in so far as it is actively pursued, and
the activity involved in this fruitless search becomes exhausted. When
exhaustion point has been almost reached, some shock or other brings
about detachment’ (MGM, 247).
Murdoch comments that: ‘The imageless austerity of Zen is impres-
sive and attractive. It represents to us “the real thing”, what it is like to
be stripped of the ego, and how difficult this is. (Plato’s distance from
270 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

the sun.)’ She notes approvingly that Weil ‘felt a natural affinity with this
“extremism” which indeed she practiced in her own life’ (MGM, 247).
But such religious ‘extremism’, a spiritual striving to self-effacement,
does not follow into Murdoch’s own philosophical account.
In the theme of void, we see the merging of eastern influences with
Christianity, distinctive of Weil’s work. Murdoch finds this combination
attractive, for a variety of reasons that have little to do with her supposed
love for the ascetic extreme. Anscombe, to whom MGM is dedicated,
addressed the disappearance of the Christian moral framework and the
necessity of formulating a viable moral psychology and philosophy of action.
In a sense, Murdoch finds all of these missing things in Weil: ‘we are pre-
sented with a psychology whose sources are in Plato, in Eastern Philosophy,
and in the disciplines of Christian mysticism, and yet which bears upon con-
temporary problems of faith and action’ (Murdoch 1997, 158).
The account is, much to Murdoch’s taste, profoundly metaphorical
and ‘platonic’, as she summarises it in her distinctive style:

The soul is composed of parts, and justice, and also faith, consist in each
part performing its own role. ‘The baser parts of myself should love God,
but not too much. It would not be God.’ We do not know what we are –
(the lesson of psychoanalysis). Until we become good we are at the mercy
of mechanical forces, of which ‘gravity’ is the general image. (Murdoch
1997, 158)

This account of the human condition is defined by ‘gravity’, a force

that pulls us down to act upon and perceive with the ‘lower parts of the
soul’. This is what we need to struggle against (as Murdoch’s famous M
struggles against jealousy and prejudice). Making sense of this struggle is
difficult since we do not necessarily recognise the good, or see it as some-
thing to strive for, from the perspective of our lower impulses. This is why
goodness is so difficult. ‘We make advances by resisting the mechanism:
but there is no reward. Energy and imagination are on the side of the low
motives. To resist gravity is to suffer the void’ (Murdoch 1997, 158).
For Weil void is the painful and necessary nothingness of not striv-
ing to and desiring various good things. She wants to empty our desire
of its objects and preserve its energy. Thus, void is a transitory nothing-
ness that we suffer from because we cannot see its point. As Murdoch
puts it: ‘During our apprenticeship good appears negative and empty’
(Murdoch 1997, 158).
 17 WHICH VOID? (MGM CHAPTER 18) 271

Here Murdoch is paraphrasing and explicating Weil, but when she

later puts the idea of void to use in MGM it has, as we saw, assumed
a different form and function. Murdoch’s void here is, as mentioned, a
‘tract of experience’ quite like Weil’s, but a different one. It is consti-
tuted by a sense of ordinary experiences of severe suffering, and loss of
meaning and orientation. The importance of void at the end of MGM
derives from the philosophical need for a well-rounded descriptive
account of moral and spiritual life. These terrible things exist, they some-
times need to be endured, and they have implications for morality, for
our conceptions of good and evil, for what kind of moral theory we can
take seriously.
For Murdoch suffering, despair or nothingness do not take the role of
a necessary means to spiritual ascent that they do for Weil. There is natu-
ral goodness, and we can learn through love, compassion, friendship, art
and imagination. We need of course to practise our attention and learn
to forget about ourselves. But only in certain situations do we need to
‘endure the void’ in Weil’s painful manner: in grief, or when we need
to let go of a loved one, or of a cherished ambition that has oriented
our life this far, for example. In such cases it does matter how we pro-
ceed: whether we indulge ourselves with comforting fantasies or endure
with composure, for example. Here Weil’s reflections, as paraphrased
by Murdoch, are helpful: ‘Void makes loss a reality. Do not think about
righting the balance, but live close to the painful reality and try to relate
it to what is good’ (MGM, 503).
But this is for Murdoch a recipe for the afflicted, not for everyone. In
Murdoch’s normative ethics of self-formation, the imperative of ‘endur-
ing the void’ is checked by various other considerations and spiritual pos-
sibilities, which may render renunciation and suffering superfluous. The
Weilian spiritual necessity of void is only comprehensible if we seek God.
Her theology also motivates the link between deep suffering and the
compulsory void to be observed in our relation to other people. They
are two aspects of the same necessarily painful path to God. Their pain-
fulness is in a sense defining rather than empirical. If it does not hurt,
you are not doing the right thing.
For Murdoch the ordinary attention, the holding back that is char-
acteristic of a good relation to people and situations, is not necessarily
painful. Whether it is, is an empirical matter: it might come easily to
some people. It is thus not comprehensible as a small token of affliction;
it is not an aspect of the severe suffering of opening up for grace. This
272 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

connection only makes sense within Weil’s spiritual anthropology. For

Murdoch it is something else, an askesis, a small moral exercise. Thus,
the two meanings of void in the last paragraph of the chapter on void in
MGM fall apart. Thinking ‘with’ Weil causes Murdoch to give a charac-
terisation of void which does not really have a place in her own thought:
a change of topic occurs. From the tract of experience which resists a
reduction to the erotic ethics of spiritual ascent, she moves to the askesis
of holding oneself back, which is internal to the ethics of Eros.
Thus, part of the difficulty with the chapter on Void is that Murdoch
at the end, enticed by Weil, fails to stick to the topic: to keep affliction
properly in view and explore its significance for moral life. This is a small
thing and forgivable, but it may indicate that Murdoch is not the best
guide to what she herself is doing with Weil’s work, how it transforms in
the absence of God and in the light of Murdoch’s emphasis on the plu-
rality of human experiences.
It may also have the consequence that the reader of the chapter fails
to take seriously the idea of affliction/void as a place beyond the erotic
order of ascent towards the Good. If void can be turned into a necessary
aspect of erotic edification, then perhaps there is no valley of death in
life? Perhaps the good can always be accessed if we just try hard enough?
But Murdoch contradicts this clearly: there are places where trying
doesn’t help. This should be a check on our eagerness to embrace the
potentially naïve optimism of Eros.

The Christian and the Secular Revisited

One way to parse the contrast between Murdoch and Weil here would
be to emphasise the fact that one is a secular and the other is a religious
thinker. This is central, but it needs to be qualified. In an interview Cora
Diamond notes that she, although deeply influenced by Murdoch, has
avoided the religious stuff in her work. Diamond expresses her dis-
comfort with this aspect by referring to Stanley Hauerwas who ‘once
remarked that the problem with Murdoch is not that she is not religious
but that she is too religious, where “religious” is used in a very Barthian
kind of way, as a term of criticism’ (Bronzo 2013, 274).
Murdoch surely is more ‘religious’ in her work than most broadly
analytic moral philosophers, but it is easy to exaggerate the religious
aspect of her thinking, especially if one fails to appreciate the funda-
mental friction between her and Weil. For Murdoch ‘god does not and
 17 WHICH VOID? (MGM CHAPTER 18) 273

cannot exist’. For her this also means that the possibility of Christian
faith has been lost for us. Our challenge is to figure out how to save the
moral insight that is stored in religious understanding, and to find new
non-Christian or post-Christian ways of attending to our souls.
From Weil’s point of view the alleged impossibility of faith is a mis-
take: faith is the central thing for her, not morality. But her idea of God
is not in every respect too different from Murdoch’s idea of perfection.
For Weil God is a paradox, in him we love that which cannot exist.

Nothing which exists is absolutely worthy of love.

We must therefore love that which does not exist.
This non-existent object of love is not a fiction, however, for our fictions
cannot be any more worthy of love than we are ourselves, and we are not
worthy of it. (Weil 2002, 110)

The difference thus is not that one believes in an otherworldly being and
the other has realised that this faith is no longer tenable. Both concep-
tualise a necessary and at the same time impossible something, that ori-
ents our spiritual life, though under different names. The shape of their
thought about god/good is similar: this is perhaps one of Murdoch’s
debts to Weil.
We should also not mistake Weil as elevating suffering to an end.
Weil (like Nietzsche) emphasises that ascetic self-denial should never
be an end in itself, but rather a means that is very carefully used.5 As
Weil observes, self-denial, when indiscriminately applied, will only make
itself useless as a tool for any educative purpose (Weil 2002, 125). But
the need for its application in her theology is so extensive that it is very
difficult to accommodate it into a secular world view, without lapsing
precisely into pointless masochism. The purpose of Weil’s askesis is not
connected to any ordinary sense of earthly human flourishing, but to the
love of and striving towards God. This implies a different metaphysics of
the soul, a different hierarchy of value.
In Murdoch’s work, in contrast, the striving to selflessness, and the
idea of a spiritual ascent, are meaningful precisely as parts of a distinc-
tive conception of quite ordinary human flourishing. The significance of
learning to attend without selfish concern, and to endure pain and the
void, is directly connected to both one’s own happiness and the happi-
ness of others. It is one of the lifeboats by means of which we steer clear
of quite ordinary misery, degradation and despair.6
274 N. HÄMÄLÄINEN

Notes
1. One notable exception is Stephen Mulhall’s essay (1997), where he
addresses the architecture of the book.
2. There is a Chapter 19 after these, which contains many memorable
formulations, but it is intended as a summary and does not take up new
substantial themes.
3. For the former view and a critique of it, see Bridget Clarke (2012) and
Hopwood’s chapter on Axioms, duties and Eros in this volume. For the
latter view and a critique of it see Antonaccio (2012), Mulhall (2007),
and Robjant (2013). Both Robjant and Hopwood share my reading of
Murdoch as an ‘earthy’ philosopher, seeking to describe our complex lived
experience and moral life.
4. In an attempt at dating Murdoch’s encounter with Weil Peter Conradi
notes that ‘IM’s copy, in French, of Weil’s The Need for Roots bears the
publication date 1949’ (Conradi 2002, 633, Note 122).
5. Concerning Nietzsche, see his discussion on the philosophers’ ascetism (in
the ‘Third essay: What do ascetic ideals mean?’) in Nietzsche (1994, e.g. 84).
6. My thanks to Gillian Dooley and Niklas Forsberg for helpful comments on
a previous draft of this paper.

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 Index

A artists, 9, 23, 40, 57, 59, 87, 94, 103,

Adorno, Theodor, 62, 184, 255 114, 173, 203, 227, 236–238,
aesthetics, 13, 51–64, 82, 84, 129 241
anamnesis, 43, 59 asceticism, 84, 85
animals, 40, 62, 86, 87, 89, 132, 186, attention, 6, 42, 47, 72, 76, 87, 103,
203, 205 107–122, 126, 130, 134, 135,
Anker, Elizabeth, 119 140, 149, 156–158, 189, 198,
Anscombe, Elizabeth, 11, 33, 149, 203, 207, 209, 214, 218, 236,
164, 243, 270 244–249, 255, 267, 268, 271
anthropology, 40, 112, 272 Auden, W.H., 54
Antonaccio, Maria, 5, 7, 15, 23, 24, Austen, Jane
99, 100, 102, 104, 166, 207, Sense and Sensibility, 248
258, 274 axioms, 15, 183, 185–188, 192, 243–
Picturing the Human, 23, 258 251, 255–257, 261, 262, 274
Arendt, Hannah, 249 Ayer, A.J., 27, 70, 71
Aristotle, 57, 244
art, 2, 4, 13, 19, 21–23, 28, 29, 35,
37, 40–47, 51–64, 70, 81, 84, B
93–96, 98, 105, 107, 112–117, Badminton College, 25
120, 126, 131, 133, 135, 139, Baker, Beatrice Mary, 25
165, 167, 169, 172, 175, 176, Bayley, John, 17
180, 181, 198, 201, 212, 221, beauty, 44, 46, 59, 76, 131, 137, 203,
232, 233, 236, 237, 241, 264, 219, 237, 238, 257
271 behaviourism, 151, 173

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 277
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
N. Hämäläinen and G. Dooley (eds.), Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18967-9
278 Index

Berkeley, George, 10 consciousness, 9, 23, 27, 39, 48, 55,

Berlin, Isaiah, 12, 193 60, 61, 94, 96, 100, 103, 104,
Bible, 29 107–122, 126–131, 133, 158,
Book of Common Prayer, 29 169, 202, 211, 246, 248–251,
Book of Job, 269 255, 267
Booth, Wayne critique (literary studies), 107, 108
Rhetoric of Fiction, The, 94
botany, 138, 139
Bradbury, Malcolm, 27 D
Brewer, Talbot, 136 deconstruction, 26, 55, 63, 110, 111,
Brophy, Brigid, 18 114, 118, 119
Browning, Gary, 7, 11 Demiurge, 227–241
Buber, Martin, 8, 14, 15, 210–225 demythologisation, 37, 47, 58, 180,
Buddhism, 5, 10, 61, 80, 87, 90, 174, 182, 210
210, 265 Dench, Judi, 18
Derrida, Jacques, 4, 8, 10, 14, 26–29,
38, 40, 80, 110, 111, 117–119
C Descartes, René, 62, 147, 149, 195
Canetti, Elias, 26 descriptivism, 244, 245, 252, 254,
Carson, Anne, 126 255, 258
Casals, Pablo, 138, 139 dialogue, 210, 218, 222, 224
categorical imperative, 69, 207, 209, Diamond, Cora, 5, 75–77, 128–130,
213, 245 158, 159, 272
Cavell, Stanley, 2, 6, 15, 131 duty, 15, 39, 69, 72–74, 82, 83, 85,
Cézanne, Paul, 62, 221, 222 86, 89, 173, 189–191, 207, 216,
chemistry, 138, 139 244, 247–251, 253, 256, 261,
Chichester University, 2 274
children, 125, 132, 188, 199, 205,
218, 219
China, 18, 182 E
Christianity, 6, 12, 59, 80, 82, 88, Eagleton, Terry, 29, 118
174, 175, 195, 203–205, 210, Eckhart, Meister, 81, 82, 87
215, 270, 272, 273 ecology, 186
civil disobedience, 186, 190–192 Edinburgh, 13, 18
Clarke, Bridget, 247, 248, 251, 274 education, 12, 14, 113, 117, 125–
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176 140, 213, 265, 273
Collingwood, R.G., 7, 221, 222, 224 empiricism, 80, 81, 88, 89, 103
compassion, 27, 69, 72, 81–83, Eros, 15, 44, 57, 59, 63, 130, 207,
85–87, 89, 204, 205, 271 236, 237, 244–246, 248–251,
Conradi, Peter, 18, 21, 24, 96, 102, 255–257, 261–263, 266–268,
274 272, 274
 Index 279

existentialism, 5, 26, 110, 173, 195, god, gods, 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, 18, 29, 53,
264 54, 56, 58, 63, 75, 87, 114,
132, 195–207, 209–213, 215,
223, 224, 230, 234, 236–238,
F 241, 248, 256, 262, 265, 268,
fact-value dichotomy, 13, 36, 67–76, 270–273
83, 146, 195 Good, the, 44, 52, 62, 255, 257
fantasy, 14, 43, 116, 157, 167–169, grammatology, 112
172, 173, 175, 198, 263, Greek philosophers, 62
266–268 Greek philosophy, 211
Felski, Rita, 119, 122
feminism, 119, 186–188, 193, 268
fiction, 52, 93, 99, 100, 103, 104, H
122, 233 Hadot, Pierre, 6, 15
fictional characters, 11, 13, 19, 44, haiku, 61
53, 55, 100, 102, 104, 128, 188, Hämäläinen, Nora, 187, 258
191, 238, 256 Hauerwas, Stanley, 5, 272
Foot, Philippa, 11, 17, 18, 243 Hederman, Mark Patrick, 25, 30
Form of the Good, 6, 45, 53, 57–59, Hegel, G.F.W., 29, 57, 101, 110, 184
62–64, 71, 75, 85, 127, 131, Heidegger, Martin, 4, 19, 27, 28, 80,
140, 172, 195–198, 200–203, 84, 89, 187, 211
205, 207, 209–210, 212, 213, Hinduism, 55, 80
218, 229, 236, 237, 245, 257, history, 22, 37, 41, 108, 133, 184,
272 185
Forsberg, Niklas, 13, 15, 33, 44, 48, history of philosophy, 165, 167, 176,
95, 99, 118, 122, 140 224
Foucault, Michel, 6, 7, 15 humanism, 3, 54, 55
freedom, 25, 39, 59, 74, 84, 86, 111, human nature, 48, 54, 73, 74, 117,
114, 121, 183 204, 246, 253, 265
Freudian theory, 59 Hume, David, 10, 58, 70, 73, 74, 76,
Freud, Sigmund, 59, 113, 128, 140, 77, 79, 153, 176
236, 241 Husserl, Edmund, 60–63
Fricker, Ludwig, 68

I
G imagery, 15, 23, 44, 70, 87, 94, 96,
Gaita, Raimond, 5, 77, 133, 140 98, 104, 172, 177, 211, 213–
gardening, 126 216, 218, 223, 239, 240
geometry, 130, 131, 134, 135, 229 images, 3, 8, 21, 40, 41, 44–46, 58,
Gifford Lectures, 17–22 87, 128, 151, 158, 166, 167,
Gillies, Robert, 21 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 197,
280 Index

215, 218, 221, 222, 229, 240, 136, 146, 147, 150, 153–157,
256, 261, 263 159, 203, 219, 222, 225, 252,
imagination, 14, 23, 43, 94, 98, 99, 256, 258
101, 157, 166–177, 267, 270, Latour, Bruno, 7
271 Lebensformen, 154, 156
Iris (film), 18 Lebowitz, Naomi, 18, 20
Islam, 12, 177 Le Doeuff, Michèle, 176
I-Thou concept, 8, 210–212, 216, liberalism, 1, 54, 55, 117, 182, 185,
217, 222, 223, 225 249
Lidderdale, Hal, 17
literary criticism, 14, 24, 58, 94, 95,
J 97, 100, 107, 108, 111–118,
James, Henry 120–122
Golden Bowl, The, 112, 121 literary critics, 122
Japan, 13, 52, 56, 58, 60, 61 literature, 2–4, 11, 14, 21, 22, 40,
Jesus Christ, 45, 174, 203, 210, 212, 45, 52, 93–95, 97, 99–104, 107,
264 112–115, 117–121, 126, 128,
Johnson, Samuel, 25 133, 140, 165, 167, 175, 232,
Judaeo-Christian tradition, 215 236, 239–241
Judaism, 177, 211 love, 1, 23, 44, 47, 57, 61, 64, 86,
Julian of Norwich, 81, 88 114, 127, 133–135, 137, 189,
justice, 18, 85, 192, 216, 257, 270 195, 198, 200, 204, 205, 207,
212, 219, 225, 227, 230, 236–
238, 255, 266–268, 271, 273
K Lovibond, Sabina, 129, 187, 268
Kant, Immanuel, 7, 26, 45, 46, 64,
68–70, 72–75, 80, 82, 84–86,
101, 102, 126, 166–172, 175, M
176, 197, 207, 209, 211–213, MacIntyre, Alasdair, 5
243 MacKinnon, Donald, 17
Groundwork of the metaphysic of MacNeice, Louis, 57
morals, 74 Magee, Bryan, 4, 53, 94, 96, 98, 102,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 126, 264 176
Koestler, Arthur, 10 Malcolm, Norman, 203
Kripke, Saul, 146, 149, 153–156 Marcel, Gabriel, 17
Martin, Priscilla, 25
Marxism, 10, 11, 54–56, 111, 184
L Marx, Karl, 110, 113, 184
language, 8, 23, 26–28, 38, 40, 47, mathematics, 126, 127, 131, 133
48, 68, 87, 95, 96, 98, 107, 109– McDowell, John, 5, 244, 258
117, 119, 120, 122, 126, 127,
 Index 281

meditation, 52, 61, 120, 127, 174, ‘A House of Theory’, 182

210 ‘The Idea of Perfection’, 22, 175,
Medlin, Brian, 11, 98, 101, 105, 145, 246, 250
146, 149 journals, 17, 18, 182, 193
memory, 15, 43, 59, 61, 147, 151, ‘Metaphysics and ethics’, 253, 254,
175, 234, 257 256
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 63, 64, 224 Nice and the Good, The, 182, 188,
metaphor, 3, 4, 9, 15, 23, 24, 96–98, 190, 191
100, 112, 117, 120, 134, 210, Nuns and Soldiers, 175
213, 214, 245, 249, 252–256, Philosopher’s Pupil, The, 19, 21
261 ‘Postscript to On “God” and
Middleton, Thomas “Good”’, 182
Changeling, The, 26 Sea, The Sea, The, 187
Midgley, Mary, 176 ‘Sovereignty of good over other
Mill, John Stuart concepts’, The, 23
On Liberty, 183 Sovereignty of Good, The, 11, 20, 72,
mimesis, 42, 45, 62 140, 163, 166
modernism, 42, 104, 110, 118, 119 ‘The Sublime and the Good’, 176
Moi, Toril, 119, 122 ‘Thinking and language, 254
Monty Python, 57 Under the Net, 93, 101, 182, 191
Moore, G.E., 34, 71, 77, 229 Unicorn, The, 26, 64
moral vision, 1, 14, 24, 44, 53, 72, ‘Vision and choice in morality’, 75,
107, 114, 118, 121, 157, 180, 254, 256
196, 209–225, 246, 248, 250, vocabulary, 22–30
251, 255, 262 Word Child, A, 187
Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle, 128 music, 41, 42, 52, 84, 131, 133, 135,
Mulhall, Stephen, 24, 30, 41, 96, 97, 139
118, 119, 165, 207, 274 mysticism, 13, 57, 69, 79–84, 86–88,
Murdoch, Iris 90, 210, 270
Accidental Man, An, 188, 190–192
Bell, The, 182
Black Prince, The, 99, 101 N
Book and the Brotherhood, The, 10, Nansen Osho, 60
14, 19, 52–54, 64, 125, 191, narrators, 187
192 nature, 7, 13, 19, 56, 61, 85, 87, 108,
correspondence, 17, 19, 145, 182, 138, 139, 225, 240
193 Nehamas, Alexander, 6
Existentialists and Mystics, 22, 101, neo-Aristotelean philosophy, 39
102 Neo-Platonism, 126, 180
Fairly Honourable Defeat, A, 188 Nicol, Bran, 29, 99, 118
Fire and the Sun, The, 95, 175, 236 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 6, 28, 58, 80,
Flight from the Enchanter, The, 19 84, 89, 113, 176, 273, 274
‘On “God” and “Good”’, 163, 165 Nirvana, 89
282 Index

novelists, 4, 22, 93, 94, 97, 99–101, Platonic philosophy, 42–46, 53, 55,
104, 131 59, 62, 64, 83, 89, 99, 126, 127,
novels, 2, 14, 19, 44, 53, 54, 57, 94, 180, 195, 207, 209, 213, 216,
99–102, 104, 125, 128, 163, 263
182, 187, 188, 191, 192, 264 playwrights, 238, 239
poetry, 18, 21, 28, 60, 61, 97, 117,
131, 200, 241
O point of view, 97, 102, 104, 266
obedience, 186, 203 politics, 3, 4, 14, 54, 102, 112, 114,
Ontological Argument (OA), The, 6, 128, 179–192, 229, 246–250,
9, 14, 53, 58, 62–64, 195–207, 256, 262
212 postmodernism, 110, 118, 119, 128
original sin, 204 poststructuralism, 110, 118, 119
prayer, 6, 9, 126, 206, 210, 212, 215
private language, 150, 154
P Psalm 14, 207
parousia, 62 Psalm 139, 21, 29
Partridge, Michael, 22 psychoanalysis, 112, 128, 140, 270
philosophical dialogues, 238 Pythagoras, 87
physics, 54
Pickering, R., 9, 10
Plato, 10, 18, 24, 28, 43–45, 53, Q
56–59, 62, 64, 71, 75, 80, Queneau, Raymond, 3
83–86, 97, 98, 101, 102, 119,
125, 127, 128, 134, 135, 140,
158, 166–169, 171, 172, 176, R
179–181, 183, 193, 197, 209, reciprocity, 222, 223
211–214, 219, 224, 227–241, religion, 6, 12, 15, 37, 40, 54, 56, 59,
244, 267, 269, 270 64, 70, 74, 80, 85, 87, 107, 114,
allegory of the cave, 75, 166, 172 148, 166, 174, 180–182, 195,
Critias, 234 209, 210, 212, 265, 270, 272,
demiurge, 15 273
Meno, 59, 134, 197, 206, 229, 231 remorse, 202–205, 207, 264, 265
Parmenides, 228 rhetoric, 23, 28, 34, 94–100
Phaedrus, 26, 62, 219, 239, 257 rights (human, civil etc.), 14, 18,
Philebus, 239 182–187, 192, 204, 244, 246,
Republic, 24, 64, 97, 98, 172, 183, 250
228, 230–236, 239 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 10, 62
Symposium, 62, 94, 98, 164, 219 Robjant, David, 274
Theaetetus, 232 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 138, 139
Timaeus, 12, 15, 224, 227–241 Royal College of Art, 125
Russian language, 136, 137, 139
 Index 283

Russian literature, 137 204, 207, 222, 237, 249, 262,

Ryle, Gilbert, 15, 228, 229, 232, 241 264–266, 268–273
St Andrews University, 21
St Anne’s College, Oxford, 125
S St Anselm, 53, 58, 63, 64, 203, 206
Sacks, Oliver, 138, 139 Steiner, George, 98, 99, 101, 102
sailing, 135, 139 Stoicism, 82
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 264 St Paul, 174
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 119 structuralism, 14, 26, 29, 47, 48, 55,
scepticism, 21, 33, 37, 38, 46, 47, 64, 95, 107–122, 173
146, 153, 155, 156, 251 suffering, 55–57, 70, 82, 85, 168,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 10, 13, 25, 29, 173, 263–266, 269, 271, 273
30, 68–70, 72, 73, 79–90, 96, sympathy, 13, 87, 95, 104, 146, 184,
101–105, 126, 196 199, 202, 203
On the Basis of Morality, 80, 85, 87
World as Will and Idea, The, 79, 80,
82, 83, 85–90 T
Schweiker, William, 5, 24, 166 Taoism, 54
science, 7, 37, 55, 67, 68, 73, 115, Taylor, Charles, 3–5
126, 128, 138, 195, 198, 199 television, 43, 57
Second World War, 182 theatre, 233
Sekida, Katsuki, 13, 52, 53, 60–64 theologians, 2, 3, 5, 13, 20
self, the, 6, 87, 96, 108, 111, 137, theology, 5, 6, 21, 22, 37, 56, 74,
157, 180, 183, 184, 269 271, 273
semiology, 112 Tomkinson, Fiona, 11
senses (hearing, touch etc.), 41, 60, totalitarianism, 182
64, 88, 170, 211, 213, 216,
218–220, 268
Setcho, 60 U
sex, 59, 86, 188, 219, 239 unity, 5, 13, 33–48, 52, 55, 58–60,
Shakespeare, William, 169, 176 62, 118, 131, 164, 179–181,
sin, 6, 46, 204 184, 198, 234, 245, 256–258,
sociology, 40 261
Socrates, 86, 97, 98, 134, 229, 232, unselfing, 29, 30, 62, 120, 157, 158
233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, utilitarianism, 55, 77, 173, 243–245,
247, 250 264, 266
Spear, Hilda, 30 utopianism, 95, 182, 184, 191, 192
Spinoza, Baruch, 179
spirituality, 2, 3, 5, 6, 24, 29, 30,
43, 52, 57, 82, 126–128, 130, V
137, 140, 177, 182, 183, 186, Valéry, Paul, 9, 10, 164, 165, 175
Vietnam War, 190, 191
284 Index

virtue, 1, 11, 27, 39, 44–46, 55, 59, White, Frances, 11

64, 84, 85, 96, 116, 134, 190, will, 39, 69–70, 72–74, 79–86, 88–89,
196, 201, 214, 228, 244, 247 129, 155, 212, 217–218, 231,
virtue ethics, 11, 39, 57, 86, 243, 247, 247
251, 258 Williams, Bernard, 5
vision, 15, 39, 40, 44, 62, 76, 101, Wilson, A.N. (Andrew), 2
112, 130, 152, 209–225, 228, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 10, 14, 20,
250, 267 29, 30, 40, 68–72, 75–77, 80–83,
visual arts, 4, 42, 52, 84, 131, 133, 87, 88, 90, 96, 101, 102, 126,
221, 224 129, 138, 145–160, 203, 204
vocabulary, 22–30, 119, 136, 165, Investigations, 71, 72, 75, 77, 101,
262, 263 102, 105, 146–149, 153, 155,
voice, 24, 34, 86, 95, 97, 98, 102, 156, 160
104, 216, 219, 264–266 Tractatus, 68, 69, 71, 75, 76, 88,
void, 57, 246, 261–273 101, 146

W Z
Weil, Simone, 10, 15, 62, 72, 76, 120, Zen Buddhism, 10, 52, 60, 61, 64,
130, 135–137, 157, 198, 207, 167, 269
224, 236, 256, 264–274 Zwicky, Jan, 133, 137