Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics 303136080X, 9783031360800

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IRIS MURDOCH TODAY

Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics A Guide to her Early Writings Lesley Jamieson

Iris Murdoch Today Series Editors

Miles Leeson Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK Frances White Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK

The aim of this series is to publish the best scholarly work in Murdoch studies by bringing together those working at the forefront of the field. Authors and editors of volumes in the series are internationally-recognised scholars in philosophy, literature, theology, and related humanities and interdisciplinary subjects. Including both monographs and contributed volumes, the series is scholarly rigorous and opens up new ways of reading Murdoch, and new ways to read the work of others with Murdoch in mind. The series is designed to appeal not only to Murdoch experts, but also to scholars with a more general interest in the subjects under discussion.

Lesley Jamieson

Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics A Guide to her Early Writings

Lesley Jamieson Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value University of Pardubice Pardubice, Czechia

ISSN 2731-331X     ISSN 2731-3328 (electronic) Iris Murdoch Today ISBN 978-3-031-36079-4    ISBN 978-3-031-36080-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In loving memory of my Grandma Bernice

Acknowledgements

This book began its life at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario where I first encountered Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings. I’d seen her name in passing before, but it wasn’t until Jacquelyn Maxwell suggested that we read one of her essays for a reading group meeting that I actually read one of her papers. I’d never encountered anything like it before, and soon after revised my doctoral research plan. Jacquelyn and I went on to host a dedicated Murdoch reading group, slowly making our way through the contents of Existentialists and Mystics alongside a rotating cast of faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars. I’m grateful to everyone who participated, but especially to Michael Vossen, Kate Lawson, Sue Donaldson, Nancy Salay, Brennen Harwood, Christine Sypnowich, and David Bakhurst. The last of that list is the person I perhaps owe the most to. David Bakhurst was my doctoral supervisor at Queen’s. It is a fact that no one has read as much of my writing as he has, and I’m very grateful for his patience with wading through so many ponderous and typo-filled early drafts. His comments characteristically encourage one to exercise greater intellectual honesty, read others with sympathy and respect for insight (even if one ultimately finds much to disagree with), and to look for the real-world significance of philosophical questions that might look rarefied at first glance. During and after my time at Queen’s, I had the good fortune to participate in Rachael Wiseman and Clare Mac Cumhaill’s (Women) In Parenthesis. This research project is dedicated to recovering the neglected history of Iris Murdoch and three of her Oxford peers (Mary Midgley, vii

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Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot in the years prior to and during the Second World War. Clare and Rachael’s work has been a profound source of inspiration and brought about a major shift in how I think about the relationship between philosophical ideas and the historical contexts they develop in. It helped me to move away from seeing Murdoch as just a defender of philosophical positions and see her as a student, a friend, an activist, and a writer, and to investigate the connection between these aspects of her person, the historical period she lived through, and the philosophical texts she penned. This book would not have taken the shape it has were it not for the supportive network of scholars I’ve met through the Iris Murdoch Society (IMS). Miles Leeson and Frances White work tirelessly to foster public and scholarly interest in Iris Murdoch’s literary and philosophical works, and have organized venues for us to share our work and meet one another. I benefited tremendously from the useful feedback I received on my work at their Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference at St. Anne’s College, Oxford in 2019. Through IMS, I was also able to take part in the online Iris Murdoch Reading Group organized by Mark Hopwood—a source of sorely needed intellectual community during some of the loneliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this past year I’ve called Pardubice in the Czech Republic my home, and have had the good fortune to work alongside the scholars of the Centre for Ethics as Study of Human Value (CE) at the University of Pardubice. CE is a unique place; it brings together a diverse set of scholars who are united by a commitment to making philosophy answerable to the real complexities of human life. Before arriving, I was already inspired by the work that the CE researchers have produced, particularly Niklas Forsberg, Nora Hämäläinen, and Silvia Caprioglio Panizza. I hope that my “practical” reading of Iris Murdoch’s philosophy lives up to the CE ethos. This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. Additionally, my doctoral research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

1 Approaching  Murdoch’s Early Philosophy  1 Bibliography  11 2 Having  a Mind on the Borders of Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 13 Introduction: Murdoch and the Changing of the Guard  13 What Was Clarificatory Philosophy?  19 Philosophy and the Public Good  25 Clarification and Poetic Language  31 Murdoch and the Post-War Consensus  35 Bibliography  38 3 Behaviourism  and Human Separateness 41 Introduction  41 Three Sorts of Behaviourism: Method, Revision, and Re-Evaluation  43 Murdoch’s Ambivalence Towards Behaviourism  53 Recounting How We Think Towards Understanding  57 A Renewed Vocabulary for Thinking  63 Regulative Ideas and Practical Guidance  70 Bibliography  73

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Contents

4 The  Disorientation of Love and the Decline of Literature 75 Introduction  75 The Influence of Kantian Aesthetics  78 Kant on the Sublime  84 Sartre and the Modern Novel  86 The Shakespeare Principle in Action  94 Freedom as Love—And Its Enemies 102 Conclusion 115 Bibliography 118 5 The  Limits of Modern Moral Philosophy121 Introduction 121 Ethical Non-Naturalism and the Development of the Current View 123 Moral Difference and Moral Learning 132 Consistency, Reality, and Metaphors of Vision 143 Bibliography 151 6 Moral  Philosophy, Moralism, and the Socialist Imagination153 Introduction 153 Moral Vision and Moral Philosophy 156 Two Accounts of the Danger of Conceptual Loss 161 The Socialist Imagination Under Threat 168 Dogmatism, Communism, and the New Left 178 Bibliography 186 7 A Prelude to The Sovereignty of Good?187 Introduction 187 Methodological Continuities from “Thinking and Language” to The Sovereignty of Good  192 The Limits of Transcendental Arguments 200 Bibliography 208 Index211

CHAPTER 1

Approaching Murdoch’s Early Philosophy

There are few who would read Murdoch’s philosophy and deny that she has a unique philosophical voice. For some, it is too unique. During my doctoral studies, I once attended a reading group meeting where we discussed “The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts”; a first-time reader couldn’t stop himself from interjecting, “well these things are very nice to assert—and she certainly paints a compelling picture—but where are the arguments?” He wasn’t being wilfully obtuse—this scholar simply had a set of expectations for what a philosophical text should do and try to achieve in order to convince by rational means rather than to merely persuade. By his lights, it would be insulting to Murdoch to handle her writings with kid gloves rather than assessing them by these standards. Due respect means reading someone’s work in such a way that it might be found wanting. The lights in question are ideals of analytic philosophy— Tony Milligan offers a useful simplification of these in “Iris Murdoch and the Borders of Analytic Philosophy” (2012), writing: [G]ood philosophy presents a clear, disambiguated thesis; it does so with a minimum of rhetoric; it presents one or more valid arguments for the thesis, and then considers (in a charitable manner) and responds to, the relevant

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Jamieson, Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0_1

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objections to the arguments and/or objections to the disclosed and undisclosed premises from which they draw.1

To this, we might add that analytic philosophers are typically committed to following where the reasons lead them rather than allowing one’s personal sensibilities or prior commitments to direct one’s intellectual path. A text that falls short of these standards can pull a reader up short, leading them to ask the dreaded question: “Should this really be called philosophy at all, rather than, say, literature?” Calling a philosopher ‘literary’ can be a way of denying that what they do should properly be called philosophy at all—“wasn’t the late Heidegger more of a poet?” “Who even knows what to call Derrida …”. The professor of my anecdote was neither the first nor last to have their hackles raised by Murdoch. Hannah Marije Altorf has discussed this phenomenon at length, recalling an incident where she was (informally) told that according to philosophers in the UK in the early 2000s, Murdoch’s ‘philosophy’ was not really philosophy at all.2 This observation is corroborated by the sorry state that scholarship on her philosophical writings was in prior to that time. The first monograph on the topic—Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, edited by Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker—only came out in 1996. This was 26 years after the publication of The Sovereignty of Good (1970). In his introduction to a comprehensive collection of essays on Murdoch’s philosophy published in 2012, Justin Broackes remarks, “There are people who suspect now, I think, that Murdoch was either not quite a serious and substantial philosopher or not quite a professional, recognized by her fellows.”3 While Murdoch’s relationship to her contemporaries seems to have been largely cordial, their remarks about her don’t give the impression that they saw her as a fellow analytic philosopher. Ved Mehta records Stuart Hampshire describing her as “elusive” before noting that he (Mehta) thinks of her as “much more an intuitive person than an analytic one.”4 In a more oblique form of criticism, when asked about her by Mehta, R. M. Hare describes her simply as 1  Tony Milligan, “Iris Murdoch and the Borders of Analytic Philosophy”, in Ratio, 25(2) (2012), 167. 2  Hannah Marije Altorf, “Iris Murdoch and Common Sense Or, What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy”, in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 87 (2020), 201–220. 3  Justin Broackes, “Introduction”, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 4  Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Fly-Bottle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 91.

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an exegete of existentialist philosophy who had “read the big books” of existentialism—completely passing over the fact that she had penned multiple critical discussions of his own position in moral philosophy (universal prescriptivism).5 Times have changed since the early 2000s and Murdoch’s philosophical writings are now read more widely by analytic philosophers. There is, however, something troubling about the way that her work is sometimes treated that suggests that she is still being held to the same standard that triggered the “where are the arguments” response from my former colleague. That is to say, there is sometimes the uncomfortable appearance that Murdoch is being saved from her own excesses; that sympathetic scholars are preventing responses like my colleague’s by showing that beneath the “compelling pictures” and the awkward displays of ethical and political commitment, Murdoch’s work contains real arguments (or at least fine materials for constructing them). There are two forms that this rehabilitation project has taken. The first concedes that Murdoch’s writings are profoundly insightful but unclear; it attempts to extract her most insightful remarks and reassemble them in a form more palatable to analytic moral philosophers. The second insists that Murdoch’s ‘unclarity’ is only apparent; if we look at her work in the right way—synoptically—we can see her using legitimate argumentative methods to defend a familiar sort of position. The first of these two rehabilitation strategies is taken up by Kieran Setiya. He accounts for the limited influence Murdoch’s work has had on analytic moral philosophy in terms of “difficulties internal to Murdoch’s work.” He writes: Her writing can be opaque, her views obscure. It is not easy to identify arguments, if she has them, or clear objections to opposing views … if Murdoch is to speak more audibly to contemporary philosophers, so that she cannot be ignored, her ideas must be reframed as interventions in existing disputes, her arguments must be recovered and her conclusions made clear.6

Setiya treats this problem by assembling Murdoch’s insightful remarks into argumentative forms that speak to contemporary debates about what  Mehta, The Fly and the Fly-Bottle, 51.  Kieran Setiya, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good”, in Philosopher’s Imprint 13(9) (2013), 1. 5 6

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distinguishes two persons who seemingly share in their view of a situation and yet differ in their motivation to do the right thing. By distilling her “odd mix of empirical psychology, moral exhortation, and speculative metaphysics” into a theory of moral concepts and perception, Setiya offers a novel, Murdoch-inspired defense of internalism in a form that is “audible” to analytic moral philosophers.7 Jessy Jordan exemplifies the second tack. He reviews her corpus in its entirety and shows how segments of individual works contribute to a larger overall argument for a species of moral realism. In an early formulation of this, he traces a “three-act structure” across her career. The first act takes place during the 1950s; it is “deconstructive”, comprised of genealogical arguments that establish an “Anti-Enlightenment narrative”, intended lay bare “the deeply influential, widely pervasive, and uniquely problematic intellectual, spiritual, and moral shift that occurred in the modern period through a coordination of historical, social, and conceptual analysis”.8 Jordan’s understanding of Murdoch’s use of the history of philosophy is influenced by Charles Taylor, who claims that we need to recover the history of philosophical positions that have attained the status of unquestionable common sense. By doing so, we can recognize their contingency, seeing that these positions were formed at a particular moment in history and that we can reassess their credentials while also noticing that the position used to have live competition. We engage in recollection so that we might recover these alternative positions from the dustbin of history and restore the practices they once informed.9 When Jordan describes Murdoch as a genealogist, he is picturing her as crafting “a historical narrative designed to subvert a dominant philosophical consensus, thereby liberating one to consider an alternative philosophical picture”.10 The other “acts” reconstruct on the grounds cleared by her genealogical deconstructions. In his later analysis of Murdoch’s methods, Jordan claims that in the 1960s “second act” of her career, Murdoch introduces a rich set of phenomenological observations as she discusses Plato, attention, and the Good. These observations, when read in light of  Setiya, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good”, 2.  Jessy Jordan, Iris Murdoch’s Genealogy of the Modern Self: Retrieving Consciousness Beyond the Linguistic Turn (PhD Dissertation: Baylor University, 2008). 9  Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and its History”, in Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy eds. Richard Rorty, J.  B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 22. 10  Jordan, Iris Murdoch’s Genealogy of the Modern Self, vii. 7 8

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how she discusses the ontological argument in her “third act”, contribute to a transcendental argument for the necessity of the good to human cognition.11 On this reading, we should understand Murdoch’s earliest forays in academic philosophy as preambles to a defense of moral realism. We have then two ways of responding to the “where are the arguments” question. Either there are none (but there are ample materials that can be used to construct one), or there is one (but it doesn’t fully reside in any one paper, which contain only sub-arguments). I have no serious objection to philosophers treating Murdoch’s work as a repository of insight and source of inspiration as they participate in contemporary debates about internalism, particularism, realism, and the like (although this should always be done cautiously). Speaking about her 1950s contemporaries, Murdoch herself warns, “There has been of late something of a tendency to read back into the great metaphysicians our own logical formulae, and to treat them as if they were trying ineptly to do what we have done successfully.”12 While Murdoch would probably reject the label “great metaphysician”, the issue she flags here is clearly relevant. By taking a particular image of philosophical clarity and rigour for granted, we’re left with the appearance that Murdoch tried and failed to live up to that standard. It elides the fact that these ideals are open to contestation and reinterpretation, and that Murdoch might be fruitfully read as exemplifying an alternative conception of the aims and methods proper to philosophical exploration. Rather than bemoaning that Murdoch crosses the lines between persuasion and argument, between literature and philosophy, and between moral philosophy and moralizing, we might try to see how the apparently problematic aspects of her writing come together into a vision of philosophy that questions how these lines are typically drawn. The synoptic approach avoids accusing Murdoch of obscurity, but ultimately suffers from the same problem as the first. That is to say, Jordan presents Murdoch’s work as perfectly rigorous, defending a form of moral realism through genealogical and transcendental arguments; however, by zooming out and adopting the synoptic view, he elides the very aspects of her writing that lead philosophers to accuse her of excessive literariness or moralizing. Her works may be replete with metaphors, analogies, and 11   Jessy Jordan, “On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method”, in European Journal of Philosophy 30(1) (2022), 394–410. 12  Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 73.

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compelling pictures, and she may draw regular linkages between philosophy and the ills of post-war literature and politics, but the synoptic view makes these aspects of her writing look like stylistic quirks, at best ancillary to her more fundamental philosophical aim: displaying the universal (moral) structure of human consciousness. It may even be that they detract from the project that Jordan identifies at the synoptic level; commentary on this topic is outside the scope of his exegetical project.13 Giving Murdoch’s use of literary language the window-dressing treatment should strike us as peculiar, given how she characterizes the activity of moral philosophy. It is, in her words, a practice of analysing and describing our own morality and that of others that involves “the making of models and pictures of what different kinds of men are like”, often by making poetic use of language.14 Philosophers don’t incidentally work with imagery—picture-making is a central activity, albeit one that philosophers sometimes engage in without fully understanding what they are doing. In her early manuscript on Sartre’s fiction and philosophy, she notes that it is replete with deeply imagistic depictions of the “human condition” that succeed only in representing the preoccupations of a particular sort of Sartrean psychology: persons with especially metaphysical temperaments who worry about the imperfect fit between abstract concepts and the flux and ambiguity of concrete existence, with how dissimilar the contingent occurrence of events is from the necessity of the succession of notes defined by a song. This is only one possible response; for Gabriel Marcel, the same messiness and overabundance appears glorious rather than nauseating. There’s nonetheless something worthwhile in representing the structure of one perspective from among a diversity of outlooks.15 On Murdoch’s view, Sartre’s imagery-laden writing—replete with metaphors of the “viscous, the fluid, the paste-like”—make this way of being human and relating to a world available to his readers. What we do when we engage in metaphysical reflection is to develop tools for self-­ interpretation that make use of “concepts, images, explanatory schema, and metaphors to describe reality and human existence”. As Maria 13  Tony Milligan also cautions against treating Murdoch’s literariness as something that can be separated from what she is doing as a philosopher, arguing that the metaphors she employs are not incidental and cannot be elided or translated into more literal language without altering her meaning. See Tony Milligan, “Iris Murdoch and the Borders of Analytic Philosophy”, in Ratio 25(2) (2012), 164–176. 14  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 74. 15  Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 49.

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Antonaccio puts it, “In her view, metaphysics is not (as some analytic philosophers would hold) a logically neutral attempt to explain the nature of reality, but a ‘figurative’ activity of creating myths, concepts, and images to describe and illuminate human moral existence.”16 Furthermore, this activity cannot always be separated from moralizing and persuasion. Murdoch warns us that the attempt to explain our own morality and others’ is likely to produce pictures that are “half a description and half a persuasion”. We are not just persuaded to go on to affirm a set of would-be facts when we engage with these self-portraits—we are persuaded to become something. Murdoch writes, “man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and them comes to resemble the picture”.17 While it is not clear what kind of mechanism is operative in this process of coming-to-resemble, it suggests that the picture-making disciplines (of which philosophy seems to be one) have the power to influence our wider culture. Murdoch does not think that the picture of human freedom (as unconstrained choice), world (as a realm of neutral empirical facts), and morality (as responsible self-determination) that dominated post-war philosophy were practically inert; they “crystallised”—strengthened and organized—more diffuse cultural attitudes into influential self-­ understandings.18 As Silvia Caprioglio Panizza puts it, “our background ideas about what is the case, what is real, the structure of reality and self, are not just idle abstractions—and when they are, they are either postures, or not applicable to everyday life—but inform everything we think and do, inseparably from moral sensibility, thought, and action.”19 There is an internal relationship between metaphysical ideas and the nuts and bolts of how we live our lives.20 Taking Murdoch seriously as a maker of metaphysical pictures might mean taking her seriously as a kind of moralizer who participated in the complex processes whereby human beings come to resemble this or that image of themselves. When Nora Hämäläinen reflects on Murdoch’s use of poetic language, she highlights the role that such images play in helping us to develop into better people. When teaching students to become better singers, instructors will sometimes present them with metaphorical  Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 22.  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 75. 18  Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 270. 19  Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention (New York: Routledge, 2022), 63. 20  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 74–75. 16 17

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descriptions of the body and the movement of air; we don’t relate to our breathing as a process of activating this or that collection of muscles within ourselves and guidance in those terms would not be helpful to trainee singers. Instructors will sometimes tell their students to picture their torsos as hollow barrels they must completely fill with air or to imagine the stream of air they breathe out as they sing as a washing line, smooth and even until they come to clothespin-consonants that demand sharp articulation.21 When Murdoch offers us imagistic descriptions of metaphysical phenomena, we might think of it along these lines: as part of the training of our moral capacities. Following Plato, she seeks to craft “an imaginary of human development in knowledge and virtue”.22 Murdoch’s use of imagery was not, on Hämäläinen’s view, accidental or ancillary to what she was attempting to do in her writings. Metaphysical pictures don’t just describe us; for better or for worse, they guide us. There is a tension between this interpretation of Murdoch and the synoptic, transcendental reading. According to Jordan, the aim of a transcendental argument is to show us that what philosophers treat as dubious is in fact necessary to what thought and experience are for us. Murdoch does not establish how things are in some mind-independent reality; rather, her career culminates in the claim that the concept of the Good is presupposed in human cognition as such and cannot be seriously doubted. “Good is something necessary to human experience, thought, and belief (e.g., it cannot be thought away), not that there is a mind-independent reality in some Platonic ‘elsewhere’, similar to the Christian ‘elsewhere’”.23 Doubts about the reality of value are akin to doubts about the existence of an external material world or causal relations. The activity of moral thinking—thinking as if there were real worldly structures of better and worse, of important and unimportant, of good and bad—is ubiquitous and inescapable. It is immutable in human life as such insofar as human beings think at all. What a philosopher does in bringing this to our attention cannot affect its status as a structure of consciousness. If her work offers practical guidance, it looks like it’s guidance away from anti-realist theories of value.

21   Nora Hämäläinen, “What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist?  – Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor”, in Philosophical Papers 43(2) (2014), 222. 22  Hämäläinen, “What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist”, 223. 23  Jordan, “On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method”, 404.

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The transcendental reading may be true to aspects of Murdoch’s later thought—this is a question I will return to at the close of this book—but it misses something of the content and mood of her early writings which are preoccupied by troubling historical changes and the mutability of particular human practices. Content-wise, Murdoch’s 1950s writings cover a number of topics that are much more particular than, and not clearly concerned with, the necessarily value-laden structure of human consciousness. In “Thinking and Language” and “Nostalgia for the Particular”, she engages with Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle’s “behaviouristic” analyses of mental concepts like “thought” and “inner experience”. Papers like “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” and “Against Dryness” discuss trends in twentieth-century literature, literary criticism, and aesthetics and describe what she takes to be the moral virtues of great novelists and playwrights of past centuries and the shortcomings of formalistic criteria of aesthetic value. One of her least discussed papers, “A House of Theory”, identifies connections between the rise of an anti-metaphysical and scientistic empiricism and the decline of socialism in post-war Britain. These papers centre on very specific practices—the depiction of human beings in prose fiction, the production of socialist pamphlets—which don’t share in the supposed immutability of evaluative consciousness as such. We might necessarily occupy worlds of value, but we do not necessarily regard other human beings as worthy of our interest and tolerance as the messy, eccentric, and inexhaustibly particular individuals that they are. Murdoch certainly did not think that twentieth-century novelists wrote their characters as if they were valuable in this way. It may be a mistake to claim that human beings are or could be simply in touch with a world of evaluatively neutral empirical facts to which moral tags are later applied, but we do not necessarily think our understanding of the world would be enhanced by developing a richer vocabulary of evaluative political concepts. Murdoch lamented that post-war socialist writers did not concern themselves with that sort of concept. Even if Jordan is right to think that, for Murdoch, no philosophical position can alter the evaluative structure of human consciousness, she believed that particular moral activities are mutable and had withered in the post-war period. In her early writings, Murdoch is preoccupied by the decline of the socialist imagination and of modern literature. By abandoning the synoptic view, we can zoom in on Murdoch’s St. Anne’s writings and appreciate aspects of her approach to philosophy that have thus far been obscured by focusing only on the role they play in

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laying the groundwork for her later writings. We can closely examine how she employed literary language in this work with an eye to seeing the contribution it made to her more localized projects, rather than treating it as mere window-dressing. We can notice the particularities of the literary, moral, and political practices that she discusses, rather than subsuming them under the general heading of Good-presupposing consciousness; and we can make sense of how what and how she wrote was connected to her post-war political and cultural obsessions. Doing so, we will be able to see what she did in her early career as an attempt to exploit the advantages her unique talents and perspective as a philosopher: the fact that she had a mind on the borders of philosophy, literature, and politics. From the earliest days of her professional career as a philosopher, Murdoch was alive to the dangers that her path would be fraught with. She worried about whether she would be able to rise to the occasion. In a letter penned while she was a Sarah Smithson fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1947, she confided the following: “The question is, can I really exploit the advantages (instead of as hitherto simply suffer from the disadvantages) of having a mind on the borders of philosophy, literature, and politics—all bloody doubtful.”24 Neither the synoptic nor the salvaging approaches to Murdoch’s work enable us to see this as a central problematic animating her early forays into philosophy. A first step to remedying this is to reflect on the context in which she wrote that letter and who she was when she wrote it: respectively, the postwar ascendance of ‘clarificatory’ or ‘linguistic’ philosophy in Britain, and a young philosopher educated during a unique moment in history. Murdoch’s philosophical education took place at Somerville College from 1939 to 1942 at a time when British philosophy was especially heterogenous and questions about the nature of philosophical clarity, the public role of the philosopher, and the methods proper to these aims received diverse answers. By telling the story of Murdoch’s intellectual development in a way that incorporates both the dissident British philosophers she learned from before and during the war, the existentialist philosophers who inspired her after it, and the changing disciplinary norms that attended the postwar period, we can see her early writings in a new light. They were neither an insightful exercise in obscurantism nor reducible to a small piece in the development of 24  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 17 October 1947, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 67.

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a career-spanning defense of moral realism. Murdoch’s early career produced a self-contained, rigorous, and clear set of papers that spoke both to live questions in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and moral philosophy and to a live question about the practice of philosophy itself. To see this, we must avoid taking the meaning of concepts like ‘clarity’ for granted.

Bibliography Altorf, Hannah Marije. 2020. Iris Murdoch and Common Sense Or, What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 87: 201–220. Antonaccio, Maria. 2000. Picturing the Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broackes, Justin. 2012. Introduction. In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes, 1–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caprioglio Panizza, Silvia. 2022. The Ethics of Attention. New York: Routledge. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2014. What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist?—Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor. Philosophical Papers 43(2): 191–225. Jordan, Jessy. 2008. Iris Murdoch’s Genealogy of the Modern Self: Retrieving Consciousness Beyond the Linguistic Turn. PhD Dissertation: Baylor University. Jordan, Jessy. 2022. On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method. European Journal of Philosophy 30(1): 394–410. Mehta, Ved. 1962. The Fly and the Fly-Bottle. New  York: Columbia University Press. Milligan, Tony. 2012. Iris Murdoch and the Borders of Analytic Philosophy. Ratio 25(2): 164–176. Murdoch, Iris. 1957/1998. Metaphysics and Ethics. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 59–75. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1959/1998. The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 261–286. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1987. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Setiya, Kieran. 2013. Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good. Philosopher’s Imprint 13(9): 1–21. Taylor, Charles. 1984. Philosophy and its History. In Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, eds. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 17–30. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Having a Mind on the Borders of Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

Introduction: Murdoch and the Changing of the Guard When Murdoch was beginning her professional career in the mid-1940s, she regularly reported feeling like an outsider at home. Given the growing divide between British and continental philosophy, this can be explained in large part by the fact that she cut a rather Continental figure, resembling a displaced French intellectual more than the increasingly standardized image of a British philosopher (i.e., the linguistic philosopher). Like Sartre and Beauvoir, she was not wholly dedicated to either philosophy or literature, but belonged to both worlds. While her first novel, Under the Net, wouldn’t be published until 1954, she was deeply involved in literary circles prior to that point. She frequented the watering holes of Soho in London that the likes of Dylan Thomas frequented in the 1940s. She also struck up a deep friendship and decade-spanning correspondence with the French novelist Raymond Queneau, who she met at Innsbruck in 1946 after attending a talk he gave. Queneau would advise her about developments in French philosophy and literature, Murdoch would send him copies of major works of British philosophy like Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and discuss Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. She took on the task of translating his acclaimed novel, Pierrot mon ami (1942)—although her translation was rejected by the publisher John Lehmann, who gave the contract to another translator (one issue being her self-proclaimed “bluestocking” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Jamieson, Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0_2

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lack of facility with the sorts of English slang necessary to translate that novel’s playfully colloquial French prose).1 In the meantime, she spent the last few years of the decade working out ideas for novels. In Murdoch’s eyes, the difference between British and French philosophy was between a philosophy that had the tools to analyse and describe a world “in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus” and one better suited to “the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party”.2 In the years immediately following the Second World War, Murdoch was drawn to writers and philosophers who spoke to these latter facets of life, familiar to her through her own rich political, romantic, and sexual experiences. She had served the Communist Party of Great Britain as a propogandist during her years as a student at Somerville College Oxford 1939–1942 and was responsible for convincing many of her Oxford peers that a communist future was inevitable and that the Proletarian movement was worth joining.3 She continued to host meetings for and share documents with the Party while she worked for the Treasury in London after 1942.4 She was also a woman who was increasingly familiar with the complex permutations that romantic and sexual relationships could take—and her own capacity to betray those closest to her.5 Philosophically, she found Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Buber 1  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 15 February 1947, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 87. 2  Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 79. 3  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Anne Leech, early April 1939, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10. 4  There are uncertainties about how long Murdoch’s faith in Communism endured during and after the Second World War. Her faith in the inevitability of historical events of any sort had certainly disappeared by the time she penned “Metaphysics and Ethics” in 1957—a work in which she expressed sympathy with Isaiah Berlin’s famous critique of historical teleology. Regardless, Murdoch spent the 1940s campaigning for Labour all the while retaining a strong conviction that its welfarist aims and methods were inadequate to the task of bringing about the sorts of changes that would genuinely transform an exploitative and alienating world. I discuss this topic at length in Chap. 5. 5  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman describe the final years of the Second World War as a period when Murdoch’s close friendship with her roommate Philippa Bosanquet (later Philippa Foot) became complicated by a “tangled erotic muddle”. Murdoch described her behaviour from this period as “nauseating”. See Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals (London: Chatto & Windus, 2022), 120.

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speaking to these experiences in ways that the homegrown linguistic philosophers did not. Murdoch’s fascination with existentialist philosophy intensified while she participated in post-war reconstruction efforts, working to resettle migrants in a Europe ravaged by war and altered by the Potsdam Agreement. Her time working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) gave her the opportunity to hear Jean-­ Paul Sartre speak in Brussels, and she subsequently met him in person on multiple occasions. She found these encounters deeply invigorating, declaring that, philosophically, “it’s the real thing”.6 This came at a cost, carrying her towards interests that put her out of step with her contemporaries in Britain. In her correspondence from this time, she described her ambition of approaching ethics in a manner that would do justice to the complexity of human psychology and the difficulty of our relationships with one another. She hoped to shed light on these problems by drawing on classical and then-contemporary existentialist philosophy, but knew full-well that linguistic philosophers thought Sartre was “a joke. Kierkegaard? Unreadable”.7 This might sound exaggerated, but it’s not far from the truth. Ayer’s review of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness described it in less than glowing terms: “exceedingly long”, “always difficult”, “often obscure”, and “more readily admired than understood”.8 After returning to Britain from Europe, Murdoch applied to the Sarah Smithson Fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1946. In her proposal she singled out Buber as someone whose insights into the plurality of our modes of consciousness—the I-Thou and the I-It—showed a way to overcome the naïve psychology then dominant in British moral philosophy.9 According to Buber, the attitude we adopt towards the world when we view it in terms of discrete objects taken in through perception and cognition is only one of two attitudes that we are capable of.10 The I-Thou is characterized by an absorbed encounter with another (be it a human being, nature, or a work of art) in which our selfish interests and

 Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 151.  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 25 August 1946, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 79. 8  A. J. Ayer, “Novelist-Philosophers V: Jean-Paul Sartre” in Horizon (July, 1945): 12. 9  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 157–158. 10  Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 50. 6 7

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linguistic habits are temporarily held at bay.11 Making judgements about the other’s qualities and character in the ways suggested to us by the conventions of ordinary language use is antithetical to the creative freedom of I-Thou consciousness.12 While Murdoch would develop these insights throughout the 1950s and bring them to bear on her discussions of dominant strains of British thought—behaviourism in the philosophy of mind, formalism in aesthetics, and non-descriptivism in moral philosophy—in the years immediately following the Second World War, she described her mind as divided (“schizophrenic”) and herself as unsure of how this alien tradition could be brought fruitfully into conversation with British philosophy. Above all, she was unsure whether she was personally capable of carrying such a thing off. She often confided in Queneau about this. In her letters to him, she described “disillusion with my efforts to think and write”,13 and later characterized herself as “too weak an instrument for what I want to achieve”.14 There were precedents for that sort of thing that Murdoch would have been aware of. Before the war, clarificatory philosophy was still one among a number of philosophical schools represented at Oxford. Philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and A. J. Ayer worked alongside the older generation of British Idealists like R.  G. Collingwood and Oxford Realists like H.  A. Pritchard, many of whom were too old to serve in the war and remained to teach women students like Murdoch while her young male counterparts were recruited to the intelligence services and armed forces. Murdoch’s studies during this unique period were shepherded by Jewish refugees (like the Kant scholar Heinz Cassirer), women (the Platonist,

 Buber, I and Thou, 62.  While Buber’s I and Thou played an important role in Murdoch’s development as a philosopher and can be detected as an influence on her early career writings, she would not engage his thought directly in her work until much later. By the time she was penning the Gifford Lectures that would eventually be published as Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals in 1992, her relationship to Buber was much more ambivalent. See Victor Jeleniewski Siedler, “Murdoch and Jewish Thought”, in The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood (New York: Routledge, 2022), 409–423. 13  Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 28 February 1946, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 99. 14  Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 11 April 1949, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 69. 11 12

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Mary Glover),15 the elderly (H. W. B. Joseph, who specialized in Ancient philosophy), and the infirm (Donald MacKinnon, who came up alongside, but had profound misgivings about the younger generation of clarificatory philosophers who called themselves “the Brethren”).16 In a letter to her friend Frank Thompson, she wrote: This man MacKinnon is a jewel, it’s bucked me up a lot meeting him. He’s a moral being as well as a good philosopher. I had almost given up thinking of people and actions in terms of value—meeting him has made it a significant way of thinking again.17

MacKinnon played an especially formative role in Murdoch’s education.18 Following the war, Murdoch’s teachers would see their influence decline at Oxford as the linguistic “Revolution in Philosophy” began in earnest. In his autobiography, R. M. Hare notes that he returned from the war to find a very different university from the one he left behind. What had previously been a scene dominated by the Realists (students of Cooke Wilson such as Joseph and the ethical intuitionists, Pritchard and W. D. Ross) and “the old idealists, the followers of Bradley and Bosanquet and indirectly of Hegel” had been transformed by retirements and deaths (including Collingwood’s in 1943). While Hare described the latter as a stimulating lecturer and a charismatic figure, he had “little lasting

15  As Mario Ricciardi notes, Oxford linguistic philosophers, unlike their Cambridge counterparts, had an abiding interest in classical philosophy. They tended to be Aristotelians, however, rather than Platonists. There is thus a closer continuity between Glover’s classical interests and Murdoch’s later readings of Plato in The Sovereignty of Good. See Mario Ricciardi, “Philosophy, Literature and Life”, in Politeia 66 (2002), 9–10. 16  The Brethren included A.  J. Ayer, J.  L. Austin, and Stuart Hampshire. Ricciardi, “Philosophy, Literature and Life”, 9. 17  Murdoch, Letter to Frank Thompson, 24 December 1941, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 19. 18  For an overview of what set MacKinnon apart from his contemporaries (and how he influenced Murdoch and her peers, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley), see Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, “Interrupting the Conversation”, in Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (6) (2022), 838–850.

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influence”.19 By 1949 Murdoch reported that clarificatory philosophy was synonymous with British philosophy as such.20 To see why Murdoch thought of her borderland mind as both a liability and as a tenuous, but possible, source of strength, we need to look beyond her idiosyncratic taste in existentialist philosophy and interest in topics such philosophers took up and see that Murdoch was struggling to find her feet during a period when the dominant view of the aims and ideals of philosophy was itself shifting. Her education had initiated her into a contested field of norms, including norms defining: clarity, the public role of the philosopher, the boundary between philosophy and preaching or exhortation, and meaningful statements. The narrowing of British philosophy meant the sedimentation of a narrow interpretation of these norms that made literariness and political commitment into liabilities. Clarificatory philosophers viewed poetic or rhetorical modes of speech as sources of confusion, differing amongst themselves only in the particularities of what methods they thought best for rooting out unclarity. Furthermore, since the publication of Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936, the very idea of a philosopher advancing moral or political views was verboten. As we shall see, it would be a mistake to treat clarificatory philosophers as a-political. Murdoch would later identify the distinction between fact and value—a hallmark of linguistic moral philosophy—as an expression of liberal values.21 Nonetheless, their vision of what it meant for a philosopher to intervene in the political culture of their time was extremely narrow. H. H. Price’s 1945 presidential address to the Aristotelian Society, “Is Clarity Enough?”, can help to bring these forms of narrowness into view. Price was a philosopher of perception with a special interest in sense-­ datum theory who, like Ryle, was more well-disposed towards developments in logic than the older generation of Idealists and Realists.22 Shortly after peace was declared on the European front, Price used his address to take stock of the post-war status quo and to ask whether clarificatory philosophy’s new position was deserved or whether it represented a sort of  R. M. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, in Utilitas 14(3) (2002), 284.  Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 29 October 1949, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 120. 21  See Chap. 6 for a sustained discussion of this. 22  Ricciardi, “Philosophy, Literature and Life”, 6–9. 19 20

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misstep that should be corrected going forward. His address began as follows: I think it is fitting that at this meeting, the first we have had after six years of war, we should consider the present position and future prospects of Philosophy in this country. It is psychologically impossible that we should just begin again where we left off six years ago. And even if we could, I do not think we should wish to. For it is felt by quite a number of people, rightly or wrongly, that during the twenty years between the two wars Philosophy had somehow taken the wrong turning. It is even said sometimes that the wrong turning which it took was one of the main causes of the disasters which have befallen civilisation.23

Price considered whether “clarity is not enough” with two particular concerns in mind. First, he asked whether clarificatory philosophy was too specialized and, as a result, trivial relative to the needs of the wider public. If philosophers are meant to provide public moral or political guidance, then clarificatory philosophers had failed to fulfill their responsibility (and post-war philosophers should try to avoid repeating their mistake). Second, Price wondered whether the aim of philosophy had been understood too narrowly during the interwar period. In both cases, Price’s questions invite us to reflect on differences between how the outgoing generation of philosophers like Collingwood and Lindsay understood the proper aims and methods of philosophy and the clarificatory philosophers’ vision. Each of these lines of criticism also gives us a window into Murdoch’s ambivalence about her own place in the post-war scene as a philosopher with a mind that also bordered on literature and politics. So let’s have a look at what clarificatory philosophy looked like in the interwar period before turning to Price’s post-war re-evaluation.

What Was Clarificatory Philosophy? When Price spoke of ‘clarificatory philosophy’, he had in mind a mode of analytic philosophy that developed between the wars at Oxford. This philosophy was directed towards resolving linguistic puzzles. Its audience was perplexed individuals—usually philosophers or others with a penchant for  H.  H. Price, “‘Clarity is Not Enough’”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes 19 (1945), 1. 23

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abstraction—aiming to help them overcome “muddles or headaches generated by language; either by everyday language, or by the technical language of some science”.24 This took two main forms at Oxford: logical positivism (promulgated by Ayer) and verbal philosophy (practised by Ryle and Margaret MacDonald). While internally diverse, these philosophers subscribed to a similar vision of what philosophy should aspire to and avoid. As Rachael Wiseman puts it: [their] aim was to uncover and describe the formal structure of language and not to make new discoveries about the nature of Reality, as previous generations of philosophers had attempted. Indeed, this method was to be a prophylactic against the urge to build baroque ontological systems.25

Both branches of thought sought to identify and treat the confusions that abounded in metaphysically and evaluatively substantive philosophical writing. One of the most influential defenses of logical positivism in Britain was Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). One of Ayer’s teachers was Ryle, who sent his student first to study at Cambridge with Susan Stebbing and in 1933 and later to Austria where Ayer became acquainted with the positivists of the Vienna Circle.26 Despite the language barrier, he would glean enough during his time on the Continent to develop his own interpretation of the Wittgensteinian dictum: “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. … Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”27 Upon his return, the young Ayer typed out a manifesto on the empirical requirements of clarity that was designed to silence the old guard Realist moral philosophers and idealist metaphysicians. According to a conversation overheard by Ryle in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, Pritchard and Joseph found Ayer’s book outrageous, insisting that it was a “scandal that the book had found a publisher”. Collingwood, by contrast, saw at once

 Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, 4.  Rachael Wiseman, Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention (New York: Routledge, 2016), 14. 26  While Wittgenstein’s relationship to Oxford senior lecturers was in general frosty, Ryle “had a kind of friendship with the notoriously unsociable expatriate” and kept abreast of developments in his work. Ricciardi, “Philosophy, Literature and Life”, 8. 27  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 48. 24 25

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that the book’s fame would surpass anything his own generation had penned.28 The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in British philosophy had been marked by active engagement with the ideas of Hegel and attempts to construct metaphysical systems that offered both synoptic understanding and a vision of how one should live. T.  H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet fit this bill. Ayer declared war on such efforts—rather than engaging directly with the likes of Bradley, Ayer plucked out statements from Appearance and Reality and declared them “pseudo-propositions”.29 Ayer did not see his role as examining the methods by which Idealist philosophers drew conclusions about suprasensible realities; in his view, one could simply look at the sorts of conclusions philosophers like Bradley drew and ask whether or not their truth could be decided in principle by some observation or set of observations. Bradley wrote, “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress”—Ayer responded by insisting that this statement is not even in principle verifiable.30 His work empowered the younger generation of philosophers coming up at Oxford between the wars to classify huge swathes of philosophy as mere nonsense, unworthy of serious intellectual engagement.31 The task of the philosopher, on this view, was to sweep away such confusions. Ayer wrote, “Philosophy, as a genuine branch of knowledge, must be distinguished from metaphysics”.32 We can do so by learning to discern important differences between statements with superficially similar logical structures. According to Ayer, the mark of a meaningful, non-tautological sentence is its verifiability. Only sentences that can be empirically verified have what Ayer calls “factual content”. The meaning of some declarative sentences can be clarified by describing the empirical evidence we would accept as making their truth more probable. For example, there are particular observations that I would accept as evidence for ‘Judy is angry’, including hearing Judy speak with a raised voice or seeing her hands clenched into fists. If someone were to assert that Judy’s angry mental state was a private entity that could not even in principle manifest itself  Ricciardi, “Philosophy, Literature and Life”, 10.  A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Penguin, 1936), 36. 30  Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 36. 31  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 51. 32  Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 41. 28 29

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publicly, their use of the concept “anger” would no longer be meaningful.33 This would be a paradigmatic instance of metaphysical nonsense, that is, statements purporting to describe realities that transcend the limits of all possible sense-experience and cannot in principle be verified.34 Ayer’s treatment of substantive evaluative statements followed a similar pattern. The Oxford Realists Pritchard and Ross had developed a position in moral philosophy known as ‘Ethical Intuitionism’, according to which statements about one’s duty or the prima facie rightness of actions of certain types could be known through a non-empirical faculty of intuition. If ethical concepts like “wrong” or “bad” could be analysed in terms of empirical criteria, then it would be possible to know the ethical character of an action on the basis of empirical facts. The Ethical Intuitionists denied that justifications of this kind were possible, but nonetheless asserted that we can know immediately and non-inferentially that some such statements are true.35 Like his dismissal of Bradley, Ayer’s response to Intuitionism bypassed the substance of their arguments in order to show that they were confused—in this case, by the syntax of substantive evaluative statements like ‘lying is wrong’. These sentences seem to claim that actions of a given type (e.g., lies, pleasure, or rigged elections) have further qualities like wrongness, goodness, or injustice. Ayer maintained that the predicative grammar of these statements is just as misleading as that present in unverifiable metaphysical statements. This is because fundamental ethical concepts are “pseudo-concepts”; the presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. There is no difference between the empirical content of ‘Marcel told a lie’ and ‘Marcel acted wrongly when he told a lie’. When one uses the latter rather than the former, all one is adding is an expression of disapproval.36 Ayer’s verification principle is meant to describe a limit to what philosophers can meaningfully undertake. Philosophers can attempt to define moral concepts; Ayer didn’t oppose the very act of proposing utilitarian definitions of ‘good’ as ‘happiness’, ‘pleasure’, or ‘the satisfaction of desires’. Whether such efforts stood a chance of success was a separate matter. Ayer maintained that philosophers could also develop arguments  Ibid. 171.  Ibid. 34. 35  See especially H. A. Pritchard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” in Mind 21 (1912), 21–37. 36  Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 107. 33 34

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about the legitimacy or possibility of substantive definitions (his own work belonged to this category). But this exhausts what moral philosophers can meaningfully undertake. Substantive evaluative judgements do not belong to philosophy proper. Ayer maintained that philosophers could achieve greater clarity by learning to see the difference between concepts with empirical content and moral and metaphysical pseudo-concepts that have at best emotive significance. Twentieth-century British philosophy—especially the Idealists and the Ethical Intuitionists—had produced work that was rife with nonsense, fruitless debate, and confusion. Ayer hoped to set the stage for a purified philosophical practice that refrained from substantive moral theorizing and metaphysical speculation.37 Other clarificatory philosophers like Ryle and MacDonald differed from Ayer in many respects. What united this heterogenous group of clarifiers was their shared view that the audience of philosophical clarification is confused philosophers—not ordinary people. Obviously, non-­ philosophers sometimes speak imprecisely, but Ryle distinguished these “philological” confusions from properly philosophical confusions.38 The latter arise specifically when superficial similarities between two expressions lead philosophers to conclude that they share a logical form; they then draw metaphysically extravagant conclusions about the sorts of facts that these expressions register. Ryle noticed this pattern at play in discussions of nonexistent objects. Philosophers had been (mis)led to reach Meinongian conclusions about modes of being other than existence—for example, subsistent non-­ actuality—by the syntax of statements like ‘Carnivorous cows do not exist’. This statement seems to denote an object (carnivorous cows) that is then described using the predicate ‘do not exist’ in much the same way that an existing cow could be described as having spots. There being no such object in existence, philosophers conclude that the subject of the statement must be an object that is not existent and would share this alternative mode of being with all nonexistent objects (including objects with contradictory properties like round squares). Ryle insisted that philosophers are (mis)led to conclusions like this by the ambiguity of syntax. The role of the clarificatory philosopher is to notice when confusions of this kind arise and to transmute the misleading expression to one whose syntax  Ibid., 103–107.  Gilbert Ryle, “Systematically Misleading Expressions”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 32 (1931–1932), 141. 37 38

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is better suited to its logical form (e.g., “Nothing is both a carnivorous beast and a cow”, a statement that doesn’t even commit its speaker to the existence of cows, much less subsistent non-actual carnivorous ones). This exercise is only necessary because philosophers, being interested in abstracting away from the particulars and making generalizations, notice superficial similarities in the syntax of expressions and falsely suppose this to indicate a shared logical form.39 By contrast, the plain man doesn’t go in for this kind of generalization and has no difficulty understanding quasi-ontological expressions, transmuted or not. Philosophy has nothing to offer someone who is not a misled philosopher since for such a person, “there is no darkness and no illumination required or possible”.40 MacDonald had a slightly different view of clarification than Ryle.41 Nonetheless, she shared his views on audience. Clarificatory philosophy is not educational. By doing philosophy, we do not “correct and enlarge our ordinary and technical vocabularies”.42 Rather, what is achieved through clarificatory philosophy is, on MacDonald’s view, a clearer appreciation of how far an analogy between the logical behaviour of different concepts can be carried before its use is exhausted and it begins to mislead. What both stripes of clarificatory philosopher shared in common was a view that philosophy was prone to metaphysical excess and perplexity. They shared the belief that Ethical Intuitionism, Idealism, and Meinongianism all arose from confusions—either about what is required for a statement to have factual content, or about the logical form and implications of ordinary expressions. The aim of philosophy is to identify and rein in these confusions and to return philosophy to its proper scope and function: restoring the clarity that comes when we recognize important distinctions between apparently analogous uses of language. For Ayer, this meant seeing that philosophers should not attempt to defend substantive evaluative judgements about the good, the right, and the just; for Ryle and MacDonald, this meant seeing that philosophers should show us how  Ryle, “Systematically Misleading Expressions”, 146.  Ibid., 140. 41  For an extended discussion of how MacDonald’s vision of clarity differed from Ryle’s (and how she brought this to bear in her critical review of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949)), see Michael Kremer, “Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle”, in Metaphilosophy 30 (2022), 288–311. 42  Margaret MacDonald, “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38 (1938), 312. 39 40

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to avoid drawing metaphysically extravagant conclusions from the syntactical structure of expressions. For both, philosophy is an insular practice whose audience is other philosophers. Critics of clarificatory philosophy, especially Collingwood, Lindsay, and (to a much lesser extent) Price saw this as an impoverished conception of philosophy’s aims and audience. Seeing why this is so, we can appreciate what led Murdoch to think it was disadvantageous to have a mind on the borders of philosophy, politics, and literature. It also helps us to see the importance of Murdoch’s wartime experience at Somerville College, learning in an environment where clarificatory philosophy’s rivals enjoyed a brief period of resurgence before the linguistic “Revolution in Philosophy” began in earnest.

Philosophy and the Public Good In a world of fascism, genocide, and war, the insular pursuit of clarity seemed trivial—even to the point of irresponsibility.43 In his presidential address, Price noted that critics believed that interwar clarificatory philosophers should have tried to prevent the disasters that had befallen civilization.44 Instead, they had busied themselves in a practice of “first planting weeds and then pulling them up again”.45 This insular and specialized practice seemed out of step with the urgent issues facing the British public—and, what is more, a dereliction of duty.

43  Clarificatory philosophers were not the only ones to be accused of triviality. The Realists, Ross and Pritchard, were also charged with this. In her memoirs, Dorothy Emmet recalls the sorts of examples that used to dominate their lectures during the interwar period at Oxford: cases of failing to return borrowed books or wondering whether or not to rouse unconscious people by the roadside. Such issues seemed far away from the moral problems that actually impinged upon the students. Dorothy Emmet, Philosophers and Friends (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 7.  Murdoch shared this opinion. She described her first encounters with Sartre’s philosophy—a philosophy that spoke directly to wartime experiences rather than just the quotidian—as a profound relief from the “milk and water” ethics of the intuitionists. Sartre seemed to be “just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Pritchard”. Iris Murdoch, Letter to Leo Pliatzky, 30 October 1945, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 50. 44  Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, 1. 45  Ibid., 7.

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Price didn’t name any individuals who held this view. His remarks nevertheless echoed the strident tone in which Collingwood concluded his 1939 autobiography. In that work, Collingwood diagnosed interwar Britain as a democracy in peril, its health threatened by a growing dependence on sensationalistic sloganeering and tabloid journalism. A particularly egregious sign of this ill-health was the government’s failure to support democracy abroad by opposing fascism in Spain and lending support to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. For Collingwood, these social ills were linked to philosophers’ abandonment of their social function as members of the British intelligentsia. Of his contemporaries, he wrote: [F]or all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, [they] were the propagandists of a coming fascism. I know that fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.46

What Collingwood left unsaid was how, in his view, philosophers should connect themselves to practical affairs and self-consciously take up political struggle qua philosophers. That interwar philosophy had been deeply insular was clear; but what would it mean to bring philosophy into the daylight as a fighting discipline? Looking backwards to the late nineteenthand early-twentieth-century British Idealists, he might have been thinking of T. H. Green’s view that the knowledge acquired through philosophy, particularly moral theory, is internally related to an individual’s motivations. Price characterized Green as someone who believed that “a man who understands ethical principles will act more virtuously in consequence”.47 This is one way that philosophy could make a difference to the lives of persons other than philosophers. A. D. Lindsay, a politically engaged interwar philosopher who ran as a Labour candidate in 1938, also believed that philosophers had a part to play in influencing public thought. His former student Dorothy Emmet recalls in her memoirs that Lindsay rejected the vision of philosophy as the insular weeding out of verbal confusions. Philosophy should discuss 46  R. G. Collingwood, “An Autobiography”, in An Autobiography and Other Writings ed. David Boucher and Teresa Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 167. 47  Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, 10.

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questions that matter deeply to human life and should be part of a general education.48 He conceived philosophy as the “criticism of standards”. In both morals and politics, we have transcendent ideals of Goodness, an idea of the General Will, powerful exemplars like Jesus Christ, and conceptions of reasonability that play important roles in orienting our will.49 For Lindsay, philosophers are tasked with articulating the standards operative in our society and reflecting on how they shape our practices. In the moral realm, an understanding of these standards can help us to see that the domain of the moral is not exhausted by the rights and duties of ordinary social life. We are sometimes also inspired to go beyond the call of duty in service of ideals of kindness, love, and heroism. Philosophers can serve the public good by illuminating the character of our own ideals, that we might live by them.50 Lindsay’s vision of the public aims and audience of philosophy was in direct conflict with Ayer’s understanding of clarity. As we’ve seen, Ayer rejected the view that making and defending substantive evaluative judgements was a proper task for a philosopher and denied that one could meaningfully speak of entities that cannot in principle be subject to some verificatory procedure. If what Lindsay was proposing as a philosophical practice was simply meant to describe “the phenomena of moral experience and their causes”, then this was really psychology or sociology rather than philosophy.51 Philosophy is simply not meant to take part in moral education or political struggles of the sort Collingwood described. A person might moralize, exhort, or try to persuade others to comport themselves in ways that one approves of, but these are not things that one can do qua philosopher. This is not to say that clarificatory philosophers had no sense of civic responsibility. Like Ayer, Stebbing played a major role in introducing logical positivism to British audiences. She brought members of the Vienna Circle like Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap to give lectures at Oxford and King’s College London. She was responsible for Ayer meeting Carnap in 1934, and published work introducing logical positivism to British audiences prior to the publication of Language, Truth, and Logic in  Emmet, Philosophers and Friends, 19–20.  Emmet speculates that “Lindsay would have applauded Miss Iris Murdoch’s latter-day Platonism, in her Leslie Stephen lecture, The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”. Emmet, Philosophers and Friends, 22. 50  Ibid., 20–23. 51  Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 103. 48 49

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1936.52 Stebbing was an active humanitarian in her life outside of academia who spent a considerable amount of time in the 1930s and 1940s working to secure the safety of refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries.53 She stands out among her clarificatory peers as someone who saw a political role for philosophy (and sought to exercise it). In her 1938 book, Thinking to Some Purpose, she expressed concern with the same developments at home and abroad that Collingwood wrote about in his autobiography: fascism in Europe, communism in Russia, and a culture of tabloid journalism and sloganeering at home that was threatening the health of British democracy.54 Misleading analogies, the replacement of nuanced analyses with simple catch-phrases (what Stebbing calls ‘potted thinking’), and emotionally loaded ‘question-begging’ language were making it difficult for people to work out what to think about complex questions like how Britain should respond to the Spanish Civil War. She noted that citizens who lacked the tools for identifying and avoiding these threats were liable to be misled in their thinking. Furthermore, they wouldn’t see that standards of public discourse were slipping or know to fight to put a stop to it.55 Stebbing saw that the very tools of clarificatory philosophy that we’ve taken stock of so far—the distinction between factual and merely emotive language, the identification of misleading analogies—could serve public aims. Their use was not restricted to chiding other philosophers. Importantly, Stebbing’s work was silent on substantive questions of rightness, goodness, and justice. She did not weigh in on the merits of the Republican or the “Nationalist” cause in the Spanish Civil War.56 Stebbing understood her role as a public philosopher in more indirect terms: to highlight the misleading ways that such issues were discussed by newspapers and in political speeches in the years leading up to the Second World War, and to help her audience to be more vigilant in the face of such propaganda going forward. 52  For a discussion of Stebbing’s role in introducing logical positivism and the work of the Vienna Circle to British audiences, see Michael Beaney, “Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis”, in The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism ed. Friedrich Stadler (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 339–350. 53  Peter West, “Introduction”, in Thinking to Some Purpose (New York: Routledge, 2022), xviii. 54  Susan Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose (New York: Routledge, 2022), 249. 55  Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose, 4. 56  Ibid., 60.

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Stebbing’s public philosophical work showed that clarificatory philosophy could be made compatible with civic responsibility. In considering the triviality objection to clarificatory philosophy, Price would echo the thought that philosophers should not try to be publicly useful by preaching or weighing in directly on public matters. Their role is not to communicate substantive conceptions of goodness, rightness, or justice. They might, however, serve the public good indirectly by promoting clearer thinking about such issues. Price noted that the plain man’s grasp of moral concepts can be muddled in ways that clarificatory philosophy might help to resolve. Greater clarity of thinking about concepts like ‘motive’, ‘intention’, ‘rightness’, and ‘conscientiousness’ is likely to promote fairness and charity in how we think about others’ actions and our own. Learning to appreciate differences in the logical behaviour of concepts like these can thus lead indirectly to positive outcomes.57 What philosophy cannot do is instill values in persons who lack them. As Price puts it, a clarificatory philosophy cannot “provide us with a conscience if we have none”.58 While we might worry about the conscience of our age, and wish that someone would fill the void left by the decay of religious belief among educated people, there is no reason that this role must be foisted upon philosophers.59 As discussed in Chap. 4, post-war moral philosophy would be dominated by R.  M. Hare. Hare was a philosopher who came up at Oxford during the same pre-war period as Murdoch (although because he was an able-bodied man who ultimately decided against conscientious objection, his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war while hers were not). After returning from service with the Indian Army, Hare was offered a position as tutor and fellow at Balliol College, Oxford in 1947.60 Like Ayer, Hare was deeply critical of the Ethical Intuitionists. In his view, they offered little help to those making moral decisions—his own fraught decision to enlist, having up until that point been a committed pacifist, was

 Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, 11.  Ibid., 11. 59  Ibid., 15. 60  Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, 285. 57 58

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not much helped by trying to “intuit” where his duty lay.61 Hare’s rejection of emotivism would allow the critical thinking conception of public philosophy to extend to moral philosophy itself, newly conceived of as a form of discourse subject to internal rational standards. For Hare, philosophy could help one to notice when inconsistencies arose between one’s principled commitments, judgements, and actions, thereby supporting the exercise of individual autonomy. It could not, and should not, try to communicate and defend a substantive vision of the good life. As Murdoch would later remark, linguistic moral philosophers viewed this as tantamount to dogmatism. It was philosophically and morally indefensible (though the latter charge was only implicit).62 We are now in a position to see a few ways that Murdoch might have felt out of step with her contemporaries after the war. Hare disavowed any influence from philosophers like MacKinnon and Collingwood and approved of the ascendence of clarificatory philosophy, which he found “exciting”.63 By contrast, Murdoch had cherished her heterogenous Oxford teachers, especially MacKinnon. According to Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Murdoch was influenced by MacKinnon’s view that philosophers belong to the historical time and place they work in and that they should proceed with the care and seriousness proper to work that is liable to be taken up as doctrine; moral philosophers’ role is to “interrupt the conversation”, disrupting dogmatic thinking pervasive in their society by inviting their audience to reconsider pressing questions along fresh conceptual lines.64 Philosophers like Stebbing saw a place for public philosophy in addressing the interwar outbreak of muddled thinking that threatened the health of British democracy. After the war, Murdoch was also a vocal social and cultural critic, but the content of her critiques and the kind of intervention she saw philosophers (qua philosophers) as capable of making differed dramatically from Stebbing and Hare. As a former Communist Party member, Murdoch was perturbed to see liberalism 61  Hare was also, like Stebbing, engaged in hands-on community service. He records that prior to the war, he had been filled with guilt about the good fortune he enjoyed while “the unemployed were finding it hard to survive”. Hare would work with unemployed people in South Wales, the Midlands, and Cumberland while studying at Rugby. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, 275. 62  Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 66. 63  Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, 284. 64  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, “Interrupting the Conversation”, 845.

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ascend as the default ideology while socialism slowly ceased to be a major force in British social and political life. Far from peripheral to the concerns that animated her early philosophical writings, this books argues that Murdoch’s sense of what political and cultural conversations needed to be interrupted shaped her early career work. We can understand the story of her earliest forays into philosophy as the story of Murdoch finding a way to express her own political sensibilities in the face of a growing consensus about the proper place of philosophy in public life.

Clarification and Poetic Language Murdoch was not only worried about the viability of a philosophical practice that drew upon her political sensibilities. She was also ambivalent about her literariness. Murdoch’s wartime education had put her in touch with philosophers who thought that clarity could be served by a facility with poetic language. By contrast, the clarificatory philosophers viewed clarity as something achieved by eliminating expressions with misleading syntax, identifying false analogies between linguistic contexts, and drawing a sharp distinction between fact-stating and merely expressive or nonsensical uses of language. This in itself does not constitute antagonism towards poetic language.65 In his inaugural address, Price noted that the clarificatory philosophers were committed to a further dictum: that whatever can be said at all, can be said clearly.66 While on the face of it this sounds innocuous enough—who would deny that we should try to express ourselves clearly—when combined with a stringent conception of clarity, it was a license to root out the “nonsense and twaddle” of philosophers who fell short of that ideal and to dismiss their work on semantic grounds instead of engaging with its content. Sympathetic with the critics, Price believed that clarity comes in a plurality of forms and can be served by a plurality of methods. While the logically transparent and literal language championed by clarificatory philosophers served analytic clarity, Price thought they had overlooked 65  Ayer in particular viewed poetry as in some ways similar to metaphysics in that poets sometimes eschew literal meaning in favour of sentences chosen for their rhythm and balance and to produce particular emotional effects. While the metaphysician accomplishes only this much, he’s worse off than the poet; the poet didn’t fail at producing sentences with literal meaning, because he didn’t try. The metaphysician has tried and failed. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 44–5. 66  Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, 29.

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synoptic clarity. By this he meant the clarity that comes when one articulates a new way of organizing the facts (e.g., within a “point of view” or “outlook” such as the theocentric perspective of the Medieval Schoolmen or the biocentric outlook of Bergson). A point of view of this sort operates like a map; it is not meant to photo-realistically depict the geographic facts about a region, but rather to bring out a particular set of relations and patterns among the facts.67 Price believed that synoptic clarity was sometimes best served by non-literal uses of language like metaphors, paradoxes, and oxymorons.68 Once again, we can see Price’s consideration of the claim that “clarity is not enough” as an attempt to determine whether something of value was being left behind in the linguistic “Revolution in Philosophy” at Oxford. His remarks on literary language directly invoke Collingwood’s discussion of the language of philosophy in his Essay on Philosophical Method (1933). In this work, Collingwood echoes the clarificatory dictum that philosophy is not in the business of overcoming the darkness of ignorance (like the paleontologist who shares her discovery of a new genus of dinosaur). The task of the philosopher is rather to find “relatively new words for relatively new things; words with which to indicate the new aspects, new distinctions, new connections which thought brings to light in a familiar subject-­ matter; and even these are not so much new to us as hitherto imperfectly apprehended”.69 While clarificatory philosophers sought to move from perplexity to clarity, Collingwood emphasized the movement from dim apprehension to clarity. Philosophers’ insights—that there are important distinctions, novel aspects, and compelling analogies to be drawn among subject matters—begin their life pre-verbally. Such thoughts are often “dark and half conscious” before they are formulated in language. Philosophical writing requires that one search after words capable of verbalizing one’s thoughts to oneself and others.70 The most apt language for achieving this shares in the novelty of what is thereby brought to light— philosophers don’t coin new words like ‘brachiosaurus’, but they nonetheless speak imaginatively.

 Ibid., 26.  Ibid., 30. 69  R.  G. Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205–206. 70  Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method, 200. 67 68

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Poetry, on Collingwood’s view, provides us with a superior picture of what is involved in giving form to novel philosophical ideas. In poetry, particular choices of concepts and how one arranges them is not separable from the poem’s content. While philosophy is prose and not poetry, philosophers can learn from poets by coming to appreciate the significance of bringing ideas to full consciousness in and through well-chosen and carefully arranged language. According to Collingwood, this challenges the fiction that prior to formulating one’s thoughts, one’s ideas already carry their full content; rather, the process of linguistic formulation is what enables one to fully grasp a thought. The movement from dim apprehension to insight demands that the philosopher “go to school with the poets” and learn to select words and phrases—including metaphors and similes— with just the right shades of meaning.71 Poets have “a disposition to improvise and create, to treat language as something not fixed and rigid but infinitely flexible and full of life”.72 When philosophy aims at clarifying what is obscure and dimly apprehended, rather than rooting out ethical and metaphysical nonsense, a mind on the borders of philosophy and literature can be an asset. Collingwood’s position differed sharply from a traditional view of the relationship between philosophical and aesthetic modes of writing. In the frontmatter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explained that while he could have introduced more concrete illustrations and “aesthetic clarity” to his work, his priority was logical clarity—and the two are at odds such that one can paradoxically say “many a book would have been much clearer if it had not been made quite so clear”. He continued: For the aids to clarity help in parts but often confuse in the whole, since the reader cannot quickly enough attain a survey of the whole; and all their bright colours paint over and make unrecognizable the articulation or structure of the system, which yet matters most when it comes to judging its unity and soundness.73

A lively writing style that feeds the imagination with metaphors, analogies, and well-drawn examples can make one’s work accessible to less disciplined, popular audiences; doing so, however, runs counter to the aim of  Ibid., 207.  Ibid., 214. 73  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A xix. 71 72

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displaying logical structures clearly. This might sound like a convenient excuse for bad writing, but the distinction he drew lived on in twentieth-­ century clarificatory philosophy, practitioners of which maintained that philosophical clarity is best served by a hard and well-defined language and should emulate the achievements of the natural sciences and mathematics.74 By contrast, Collingwood saw a greater continuity between the aims of artists and poets and the aims of philosophers. Both write in a way that should ideally marry form and content, style and substance (and both go wrong if they sacrifice one member of these pairs for the other). In The Principles of Art (1938), he wrote: [W]e have got into the habit of thinking that a writer must belong to one of two classes. Either he is a ‘pure’ writer, concerned to write as well as he can, in which case he is a literary man; or he is an ‘applied’ writer (to adapt the old distinction between pure and applied science), concerned to express certain definite thoughts, and anxious to write only well enough to make his thoughts clear, and no better. This distinction must go. … Subject without style is barbarism; style without subject is dilettantism. Art is the two together.75

Philosophical writing must be artful if it is to achieve genuine clarity and not mere technical precision. We saw that Price echoed Collingwood’s perspective and cautioned against an excessively narrow conception of clarity that treated imaginative uses of language as at best decorative, at worst obscurantist. Sometimes a subject matter is most clearly presented in dry, technical prose; but sometimes what is called for are terms capable of helping us to see the lay of a land that was under our feet but escaped our notice. It is true that “whatever can be said at all, can be said clearly”, but much of what can be said clearly in principle cannot yet be said clearly in practice. Price conceded to the critics of clarificatory philosophy that: there may very well be some things which in the terminology available at the time can only be said obscurely; either in a metaphor, or (still more 74  See James Camien McGuiggan, “Scientific, Poetic, and Philosophical Clarity,” in Metaphilosophy 53(5) (2022), 605–622. 75  R.  G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 298–299.

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­ isturbing) in an oxymoron or a paradox, that is, in a sentence which breaks d the existing terminological rules and is in its literal meaning absurd.76

Unconventional language might seem confused, obscure, or absurd at the moment it is used—and some poetic turns of philosophical phrase surely are just “solemn muddles” masquerading as “profound truths”. But in other cases, such phrases convey genuine insights and novel uses of language inspire a change in terminological rules; the “wild metaphor or outrageous paradox of today may become the platitude of the day after tomorrow”.77 After the war, we can imagine that Murdoch, like Price, saw Oxford philosophy’s move away from Collingwood’s vision of poetic clarity as a loss. According to the clarificatory philosophers, her literary mind could contribute nothing of value to her philosophical writings; but her heterogenous wartime education would have given her a wider sense of possibility.

Murdoch and the Post-War Consensus At the end of the Second World War, Oxford philosophy was at an important turning point. It could stay the course and embrace the restrictions that clarificatory philosophers placed on the aims and methods of philosophy. Doing so would mean abandoning the sorts of projects taken up by philosophers like Lindsay and Collingwood. It would mean accepting a limited social function and a narrow conception of clarity. Price understood that critics of clarificatory philosophy were unhappy with this, but he believed that attempts to play a more direct role in public moral and political life lay outside the proper scope of philosophical activity. By the time Murdoch was writing her despondent letters to Raymond Queneau after the war, worrying that her literary and political mind was a liability, this point of view was no longer effectively counterbalanced as it had been during her time as a student at Somerville College. The clarifiers were back from the war and their day had come at Oxford. There is a real sense in which Collingwood’s death in 1943 marked the end of a significant chapter in British philosophy. His former seat as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics was filled by Ryle, who made it his post-war mission to establish clarificatory philosophy as the dominant  Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, 30.  Ibid., 30.

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form at Oxford and beyond. Ryle worked to establish the B. Phil graduate degree programme at Oxford—this programme would train many young philosophy students in the ways of linguistic philosophy before securing them university positions across the country. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman describe this as Ryle’s “non-military expansionist campaign”.78 In the post-war period, the proportion of Oxford-trained philosophers teaching at universities in Britain grew dramatically from 36% in 1939 to 59% in 1955.79 Shortly after in 1948, Ryle became editor of Mind (a position that he held from 1948 to 1971). These two roles gave Ryle immense power as a British tastemaker, influencing what was taught, the sorts of papers that got published, and what subject matters were considered worthy of discussion. As Geoffrey Warnock would later report (reflecting on Ryle’s Mind editorship), this meant that Collingwood, Joseph, and Lindsay were no longer thought “worthwhile even to disagree with”—they were “unfashionable” and “back-numbers”.80 As a result of these changes, post-­ war philosophy began to look rather homogenous. Warnock recounts Murdoch asserting that “our current philosophers looked very different only if, so to speak, one was standing close to them; from further away a family resemblance, at the very least, would look very clear”.81 As Hare would later put it in his autobiography, Ryle was “an academic politician … he transformed philosophy almost single-handed”.82 That Murdoch was well aware that the tide had turned against her wartime teachers is evidenced by her gloomy letters. Perhaps she feared that finding her own voice and challenging the post-war consensus meant risking the same sort of irrelevancy as Collingwood and Lindsay. Despite these challenges, Murdoch held out hope that she might find some advantage in having a mind that bordered politics and philosophy, and find a way to intervene in the culture of post-war Britain without merely “preaching” or teaching lessons in critical thinking. She surely took inspiration from other outsiders, especially those who, like Collingwood and (to a lesser extent) Price, saw that there was value in finding imaginative ways to illuminate subject matters that evade the expressive powers of conventional language,  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 140.  Thomas Akehurst, The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 60. 80  G. J. Warnock, “Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship”, in Mind 85 (1976), 47–48. 81  Warnock, “Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship”, 48. 82  Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, 284. 78 79

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or those who, like Lindsay, saw that philosophy could illuminate the perfectionist standards operative in practical reason. Murdoch’s stay at Newnham College was a short one, lasting only from October of 1947 to the Spring of 1948. At the advice of Philippa Foot, she applied for a tutorship at St. Anne’s College, Oxford that Spring (with characteristically little hope about securing it). In his letter of recommendation, even her former tutor MacKinnon described her as someone that the college would be taking a chance on, flagging her past as an active Communist Party member.83 While he told the hiring committee that perhaps the sounder choice would be Mary Scrutton (later known as Mary Midgley), the hiring committee ultimately chose Murdoch for the post. She would later be promoted to fellow at St. Anne’s, and continue on in that position until 1963. This book is a guide to Murdoch’s early philosophical writings from her time at St. Anne’s. Its central argument is that these writings are best read as Murdoch’s answer to the question she posed to Queneau in 1947: could she 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? While it had all looked “bloody doubtful” then, her early writings from the St. Anne’s period of her career are best appreciated as attempts to find a way forward in an inhospitably homogenous philosophical landscape without sidelining her own political sensibilities or treating her rich literary imagination as a liability. To see this, we must abandon the salvaging and synoptic views on her career. Instead, we need to closely examine how she practised philosophy during this early period, paying special attention to how she approached philosophical questions in individual papers, where she published and to what sorts of audiences, and the throughline cultural and political concerns that animated her work. By doing so, we can see how to respond to people like my fellow reading group member who characterized Murdoch as someone who simply asserts things and paints compelling pictures, but doesn’t make arguments. The response should not be to accept the standards of clarity and argumentative rigour prized by analytic philosophers and to show that Murdoch lives up to them after all. We should rather notice that the meaning of these concepts is contestable and that this had been hotly contested during Murdoch’s formative years as a student-philosopher.  Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 208.

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I will show what comes to light when we read her work as embodying a distinctive approach to philosophical clarification. For Murdoch, ‘clarity’ means coming to see clearly what we otherwise only dimly apprehend in our own experiences and practices. It is achieved by challenging limited metaphysical pictures of human mindedness, freedom, and reality and using imaginative language to develop relatively new ones. It is called for when philosophically and culturally dominant metaphysical outlooks leave us incapable of recognizing what we, at our best, experience and do as human beings. Crucially, the audience of her early philosophical writings did not only include academic philosophers. It also included novelists, socialist pamphleteers, and those who needed the moral and political energy that, at their best, such cultural resources can provide. In Murdoch’s hands, clarificatory philosophy could serve moral and political public needs without being restricted to lessons in “critical thinking” or devolving into moralistic “preaching”. Metaphysical picture-making can serve clarity and provide practical guidance.

Bibliography Akehurst, Thomas. 2010. The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury. Ayer, A. J. 1971. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Penguin. Ayer, A. J. 1945. Novelist-Philosophers V: Jean-Paul Sartre. Horizon (July): 12–25. Beaney, Michael. 2003. Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis. In The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism ed. Friedrich Stadler, 339–350. Dordrecht: Springer. Buber, Martin. 1996. I and Thou. New York: Simon & Schuster. Collingwood, R. G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R.  G. 2005. Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R. G. 2013. An Autobiography,” in An Autobiography and Other Writings eds. David Boucher and Teresa Smith, 1–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emmet, Dorothy. 1996. Philosophers and Friends. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hare, R. M. 2002. Philosophical Autobiography. Utilitas 14: 269–305. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kremer, Michael. 2022. Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. Metaphilosophy 30: 288–311.

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Mac Cumhaill, Clare and Wiseman, Rachael. 2022a. Interrupting the Conversation. Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (6): 838–850. Mac Cumhaill, Clare and Wiseman, Rachael. 2022b. Metaphysical Animals. London: Chatto &Windus. MacDonald, Margaret. 1938. The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38: 291–312. McGuiggan, James Camien. 2022. Scientific, Poetic, and Philosophical Clarity. Metaphilosophy 53(5): 605–622. Murdoch, Iris. 1957/1998. Metaphysics and Ethics. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 59–75. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1987. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Price, H. H. 1945. ‘Clarity is not Enough’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes 19: 1–31. Pritchard, H. A. 1912. Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake? Mind 21: 21–37. Ricciardi, Mario. 2002. Philosophy, Literature and Life. Politeia 66: 5–21. Ryle, Gilbert. 1931–1932. Systematically Misleading Expressions. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 32: 139–170. Siedler, Victor Jeleniewski. 2022. Murdoch and Jewish Thought. In The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood, 409–423. New York: Routledge. Stebbing, Susan. 2022. Thinking to Some Purpose. New York: Routledge. Warnock, G. J. 1976. Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship. Mind 85: 47–56. West, Peter. 2022. Introduction. In Thinking to Some Purpose, xv–xxviii. New York: Routledge. Wiseman, Rachael. 2016. Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Behaviourism and Human Separateness

Introduction In 1949, Murdoch confided to Raymond Queneau that she hoped to write something “refuting Ryle. Ryle is the reigning professor here. His book on Mind, just published, summarizes the post-Wittgensteinian empiricism which is British philosophy at present”.1 Less than two years later, Murdoch and Ryle were panelists at the same symposium at the Aristotelian Society (speaking alongside Tony Lloyd at a session chaired by H. H. Price). This was the first of two opportunities that Murdoch had to publicly challenge philosophical behaviourism. The second would come the year later when she gave another Aristotelian Society talk entitled “Nostalgia for the Particular”. In these two papers, Murdoch challenges behaviouristic views of mind and language associated (rightly or misleadingly) with Ayer, Ryle, and Wittgenstein. We know that she had read Ayer’s and Rye’s work on this topic. The extent of her familiarity with Wittgenstein’s discussions of private language is less certain. The Philosophical Investigations would not be published until 1953, but we know that through her friendship with Elizabeth Anscombe (the translator of that work), she had been given access to at least some portion of it 1  Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 29 October 1949, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 120.

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during her Newnham College days.2 I focus on Ayer and Ryle as Murdoch’s primary antagonists in what follows; regardless of whether she had Wittgenstein in mind during these talks, casting her as antagonistic towards his work would be misleading.3 While there are differences between particular philosophers associated with behaviourism, they are united by a rejection of a traditional picture of the relationship between the mind and the public sayings, doings, and movements of the body. In the traditional picture, the observable behaviours of the body are causally linked to a subject’s mental states, such that our contact with other minds is only ever indirect, mediated through what they say and do. While the version of this model that the behaviourists had in their sights was a Cartesian variant, it also tracks how an identity theorist might conceive of the epistemic standing of behaviour and its relationship to brain states (which cause changes in the physical body without themselves being observable in any ordinary sense).4 Behaviourists reject this picture, upgrading publicly observable behaviour from mere indirect evidence to the public manifestation of a subject’s mind. These behaviours are internal to the meaning of mental concepts, not just the symptoms of conceptually distinct mental states. While Murdoch was sympathetic to aspects of this outlook, she was sensitive to the dangers of using it as a model for everything we think of as ‘mental’. In her view, the traditional picture overemphasizes the privacy of mind, but the behaviourists underplayed it by neglecting the special relationship that an individual has to her own experiences. In her view, “the choice must be rejected between logical behaviourism and the private theatre”.5 We need a third way to picture human mindedness to achieve clarity about our own familiar practices and their importance in our lives. 2  Murdoch, Letter to Hal Lidderdale, Late Spring 1948, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 109. 3   For more on this, see Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, “Wittgenstein and Murdoch”, in The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood (New York: Routledge, 2022), 318–330; Nora Hämäläinen, “What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist? Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor,” in Philosophical Papers 43(2) (2014), 191–225. 4  See Paul Standish, “Inner and Outer, Psychology and Wittgenstein’s Painted Curtain,” in Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (1) (2022), 115–123. 5  Iris Murdoch, “Thinking and Language,” in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 38.

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To see how and why she responds to philosophical behaviourism as she does, more needs to be said about the views she was addressing.

Three Sorts of Behaviourism: Method, Revision, and Re-Evaluation The label ‘behaviourist’ has its original home in psychology. It describes a methodological principle adopted by John Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and B. F. Skinner. According to Watson: Psychology as the behaviorist views is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.6

The goal of the psychologist is not to link outward behaviour to its inner cause in the consciousness of the subject, but rather to identify law-like patterns of stimuli and response and thereby to create a science of behaviour. Consciousness is not empirically observable; one must rely on the subject to truthfully testify to what (if anything) transpires there. Reliance on testimony put psychology uncomfortably out of step with the other sciences. As Ryle notes, “Only people’s overt behaviour can be observed by several witnesses, measured and mechanically recorded”.7 As a point of methodological principle, scientific psychologists restricted themselves to considering overt behaviour. While methodologically united, behaviourist psychologists might differ metaphysically. In practice, a psychologist of this stripe would ignore the phenomena of the inner life, but might nevertheless believe that observable behaviour is the effect of unobservable mental causes. Alternatively, one might believe that human beings are complex physical mechanisms and that psychological concepts describe the operations of this mechanism and nothing more. A behaviourist psychologist could be a Cartesian substance dualist or subscribe to the mechanistic theories of Hobbes and Gassendi when it comes to the causes of human behaviour. By contrast,

 John Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it,” in Psychological Review 20(2) (1913), 158–177. 7  Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Penguin, 1963), 309. 6

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the philosophical behaviourists’ aim was to challenge the very notion of an “inner cause”. Philosophers were aware of the striking similarities between their analyses of mental concepts and the psychologists’ research programme. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle writes, “The general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatized as ‘behaviourist’”.8 For Ryle, the comparison was apt insofar as his analysis of mental concepts revealed something very similar to what the psychologists discovered. While philosophers of mind and psychologists had previously centred the private occurrences of consciousness as the primary stuff of mind, when they took the description of behaviour as their starting point, they discovered how negligible those occurrences really were. The science of psychology could advance perfectly well without them. Ryle hoped to show that they were also ancillary to our ordinary use of mental concepts, and need not feature in philosopher’s analyses. What separates the main types of philosophical ‘behaviourism’ is the sort of clarificatory philosophy practised. In Chap. 2, I described two forms found at Oxford during the interwar period. Verificationists are revisionary clarifiers who look to overcome the confusions of ordinary thought by developing tools for dividing the meaningful wheat from the merely expressive or nonsensical chaff. Ordinary Language clarifiers, by contrast, leave ordinary language in its place—the perplexities that concern philosophy are internal to the practice of philosophy—they do not belong to the “plain man”. It is through attention to the logic of ordinary language use and due caution about superficial syntactical similarities between expressions that philosophers can help each other to avoid traditional metaphysical puzzles. For each form of clarification, there is an associated form of behaviouristic philosophy of mind. Ayer applies his revisionary mode of clarification to topics in the philosophy of mind by evaluating mental concept use in light of verificationist criteria. He describes his principle as follows: We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the propositions which it purports to express— that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the 8

 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 308–9.

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assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition. The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant.9

While we might take ourselves to be saying something meaningful when we insist “there is an external world” or “it was wrong to break your promise to me” and think that it is sensible to argue about such matters, Ayer denies this. We’ve seen already that he is an emotivist, denying that moral statements have literal significance. He’s also a committed phenomenalist, denying that there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the substances we encounter in the “external world” and the totality of their sensible appearances. Talk of that which is somehow beyond what we could in principle observe is not really meaningful. Verificationism also has consequences for how we should understand talk of thinking, the self, and mental states like emotions. We might think we know what we mean when we say “so-and-so is thinking p”, but Ayer insists that the concept ‘thinking’ is actually a “serious matter for dispute”.10 The Standard View of Thinking analyses thoughtascriptions into five distinct components: (1) the subject of thinking: a person; (2) the instrument of thinking: the mind or a part/faculty of it; (3) the modes of thinking: “considering, believing, wondering, doubting, supposing, judging, imagining, knowing”, and so on; (4) the “medium” of thinking: symbols, like words and images; and (5) the object of thinking: this is either the object or state of affairs represented by thought, or a proposition.11 In Ayer’s view, many of the items on this list are metaphysically suspect. The notion of a mind-independent object of thought (5) is ruled out by his phenomenalism. We can do away with it by concentrating on the symbols that thought is conducted with (the medium of thought) and how they are (at best) used, rather than concerning ourselves with the mindindependent objects that those symbols are sometimes purported to represent.12 Ayer also takes issue with (1) and (2) for related reasons. ‘The self’  A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Penguin, 1936), 48.  A. J. Ayer, Thinking and Meaning: Inaugural Lecture (London: H. K. Lewis and co. Ltd., 1947), 2. 11  Ayer, Thinking and Meaning, 3. 12  Ibid., 10. 9

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as the subject of thought and ‘the mind’ (or some faculty thereof) as the instrument of thought are concepts that are sometimes taken to name entities that actually make no difference to sensory experience. While the activities of thinking and its modes are in principle observable, we do not observe further entities that perform these activities. This coheres with Ayer’s writings on the self. In Language, Truth, and Logic, Ayer claims it is meaningless to posit a subject of experience over and above the set of sense-contents that occur within the “sense history” of a given body. What makes our experiences and our thoughts our own is just the fact that they are indexed to one body and belong to a single logical set, not that they are had or performed by a substantial self. Ayer thinks of this as a development of Hume’s Bundle Theory.13 A similar argument tells against dividing the mind into distinct faculties responsible for particular activities—what sensory observations could we predict or explain by claiming that someone’s faculty of judgement was instrumental in their thinking p (rather than some other faculty)? Thought-ascriptions should not be understood in terms of a substantial self relating to a mind-­ independent world by exercising her faculties. The elements of the Standard View of thinking that survive Ayer’s verificationist critiques are (3) and (4): empirically distinguishable modes of thought like considering, inferring, affirming, and doubting, and the symbols that thought manipulates. This revisionist analysis is behaviouristic in that it eliminates everything that transcends public experience and cannot in principle be verified. Symbol manipulation can be done publicly through speech or writing; thought can thus in principle be observed by others. The symbols themselves, if they are understandable, are used according to public criteria to describe or predict sense-experience or to describe logical relations between concepts. In speaking, we thus fully expose our thought to others. On Ayer’s view, all mental phenomena are publicizable. For example, to assert that someone is angry is to either describe their current behaviour or to hypothesize about how they might behave under certain circumstances. We might describe someone as angry if they are currently frowning and clenching their fists or if we would predict that they would behave angrily under certain circumstances (e.g., if their children weren’t present). Private feelings form no part of the concept; if someone claims that they are having a private experience of anger but don’t behave in any  Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 165–7.

13

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recognizably angry ways, it would be appropriate to question the sincerity of their report or express surprise.14 Ayer’s “simplification” of the Standard View and his analyses of mental concepts like anger allow us to avoid the epistemic mysteries that arise when the mind is pictured as the private wellspring of behaviour. For him, there is no mystery about how we learn about others’ minds. Philosophical difficulties surrounding other minds are, Ayer writes: fictitious problems arising out of the senseless metaphysical conception of mind and matter… Being freed from metaphysics, we see that there can be no a priori objections to the existence either of causal or of epistemological connections between minds and material things…[For example,] my belief that the Labour Party will be returned to power at the next election is not an event which takes place at a particular moment ‘in my mind’; it is a matter of my being disposed to make this prediction when the subject arises, and generally of my behaving in a way that, in the relevant situations, is more likely to be successful if the prediction is true than if it is not.15

Similarly, I do not need to commit myself to the existence of a substantial ego, private experiences, or a realm of mind-independent objects to analyze the claim that someone is thinking p.16 Meaningful talk about the mind cannot refer to entities, occurrences, activities, or states that cannot in principle make a difference to what we observe in a person’s behaviour—we simply cannot meaningfully speak of the body as indirect evidence for nonobservable inner states or of a transcendent, substantial self. As we’ll see, Murdoch is deeply suspicious of the picture of the human being and the activity of thinking that emerges from Ayer’s clarificatory work. According to Ayer, the role of the philosopher is to clarify the ambiguities present in language as it is used by both philosophers and ordinary persons, weeding out spurious questions that cannot be answered by appeal to empirical evidence or logical investigation.17 We can see how Ayer’s verificationist behaviourism differs from Ryle’s clarificatory behaviourism by noticing how the latter (as Giuseppina D’Oro puts it) refuses to “stray from the ordinary use of words and assign to them a technical meaning that is

 Ayer, Thinking and Meaning, 4.  Ibid., 15. 16  Ibid., 7. 17  Cheryl Misak, Verificationism: Its History and Prospects (New York: Routledge, 2005), 64. 14 15

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not reflected in the vernacular, everyday usage”.18 Ryle describes his philosophical approach as “cartography”. Philosophers should attend to ordinary speakers as one would trust the expertise of a local resident of a town who knows how to navigate its streets. They have a knowledge of the town that is manifest in their ability to successfully get from A to B. Their knowledge differs from that of the mapmaker who explicitly articulates the layout of the town for others’ benefit, but their subject matter is the same. The mapmaker is, in a sense, making explicit what is implicit in what the local resident does in their everyday life. Similarly, the task of the clarificatory philosopher of mind is to “map” what is implicit in an ordinary person’s facility with mental concepts: connections between concepts and their criteria and distinctions between concepts that perform different roles in our language (e.g., referring to objects or events vs. identifying behavioural dispositions).19 As Ryle puts it, ordinary speakers “can talk sense with concepts but cannot talk sense about them; they know by practice how to operate with concepts, anyhow inside familiar fields, but they cannot state the logical regulations governing their use”. Ryle’s aim is to “rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess”.20 Rectification is aimed at confused philosophers, not the plain man. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle reminds philosophers that our ordinary psychological concepts do not name private mental entities or occurrences. Traditional philosophers have lost sight of this because the Cartesian Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine has become an “Official Doctrine”. In this view, while bodies are subject to mechanical laws, occupy space, and are publicly observable, minds are not. The mind is an independent source of causation: non-spatial, private, and radically distinct from the material body. This line of thinking preserves the mind’s freedom to decide what to think and do by setting mind apart from the realm of mechanistic laws. The mind interacts with the causal mechanisms of the body through perception, sensation, and passion, but what one thinks is not determined by what one perceives (we are capable of doubt). Furthermore, the mind can exercise a distinct form of causal power by willing bodily movements. According to Ryle, Descartes described the mind according to an “obverse 18  Giuseppina D’Oro, “Collingwood and Ryle on the Concept of Mind,” in Philosophical Explorations 6 (2003), 20. 19  Gilbert Ryle, “Abstractions,” in Collected Papers, Volume 2 (London: Hutchinson, 1971), 441. 20  Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 9.

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vocabulary” which was merely the negative complement of mechanistic language; “minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork”.21 The two-worlds picture yields a familiar conception of the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. A major component of the Official Doctrine is that consciousness is “self-intimating”—the mind has immediate knowledge of its own activities and ideas and “cannot help being constantly aware of all the supposed occupants of its private stage”. Mental processes are “phosphorescent, like tropical sea-­ water, which makes itself visible by the light which itself emits”.22 In The Passions of the Soul, for example, Descartes claims that the soul causes ideas of its own volitions simply by having them; he writes, “we cannot will anything without thereby perceiving that we are willing it”.23 By contrast, when I observe another person’s behaviour I am only ever seeing the outward effects of a hidden inner cause, comparing the others’ behaviour to my own to try to infer the nature of that inner cause by analogy.24 For example, I can infer that you are angry because I know that in my own case, my private feelings of anger are often accompanied by frowning and fist-clenching. Ryle dislodges the Official Doctrine by applying his “cartographic” method to a number of mental concepts and showing that our expert use of them does not reflect the dualist picture. When we describe someone as angry, attribute a belief to them, or claim that what they just did was skillfully and intelligently done, we are not making fraught inferences from their public behaviour to the private mental occurrence that caused it. These concepts don’t refer to inner occurrences at all—their role in our language is rather to identify dispositions, and in doing so, to “license inferences”. Generally speaking, disposition statements play two roles: first, they license one to explain a substance’s behaviour in terms of the disposition; second, they license one to predict that under the relevant circumstances, the substance will behave in ways characteristic of the disposition. When I am told that sugar is soluble, I am given license to explain why sugar cubes have tended to dissolve in my tea and to foresee that this will happen if I drop one in my tea now.  Ibid., 21.  Ibid., 148. 23  René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 335. 24  Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 16. 21 22

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When I ascribe a dispositional mental concept to someone, I am similarly claiming that their behaviour—what they say, do, fixate their attention on, fantasize about, etc.—can be explained and predicted in terms of that disposition.25 For example, I can recognize that my friend is vexed by a colleague’s critical remarks about his paper by noticing that his behaviour can be explained by that disposition. He tends to bring up the topic and, when it arises, tends to harp on about the injustice he has suffered, daydreams aloud about self-vindications and retaliations, and never tries to see what was true in the criticism. The life of his angry disposition is longer than these outbursts. Sometimes he’s like a sugar cube that is not currently submerged—the circumstances are not right for these behaviours to bubble up (e.g., he’s happily absorbed in eating his lunch). Believing that he is still vexed, however, I have hypotheses about how he will behave in the future (e.g., repeating his angry behaviours the next time the offending colleague’s name comes up around the water cooler).26 Importantly for Ryle, my friend’s emotion is not a private inner occurrence that causes these behaviours. My friend does not harp on about this incident because he is propelled by an inner throb, pang, or prickling feeling, and he need not feel anything of the kind when he is meticulously detailing to me why the critical comment missed the spirit of his paper. Of course, during the life of his anger he might sometimes feel noticeably perturbed.27 To describe someone as angry is to say that their behaviour hangs together in an intelligible pattern and will go on like that for some time. Ryle challenges the Official Doctrine by showing that many of our mental concepts name dispositions, not occurrences. Disagreements in this realm are about the “absence or presence of certain sorts of testable-­ cum predictive assertions”.28 We arrive at these explanations and predictions on the basis of someone’s behaviour, which is publicly observable. Importantly, this puts us on a very different footing than the Official Doctrine vis-à-vis the asymmetry of self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. The vexed friend and I both rely on behavioural criteria in determining whether he is vexed at our critical colleague. If he’s in a better position than me to judge, it’s not because he has privileged access to the private disturbances of his consciousness whereas I must rely on indirect  Ibid., 119–20.  Ibid., 93. 27  Ibid., 85. 28  Ibid., 26. 25 26

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evidence. The explanation is practical. In principle we could, but in practice we do not, verbalize all of our thoughts and let on about our private obsessions by letting them steer conversation; we do not share all of our fantasies; we do not act on all of our inclinations. My friend is not dependent on his own frankness in the same way that I sometimes am. Furthermore, making judgements about another’s dispositions can require acquaintance with the history of a person’s behaviour and seeing them in the right sorts of circumstances, not just a momentary glimpse. It just so happens that this is less of a barrier to self-knowledge—our memories aren’t perfect, but they are rarely spottier than someone else’s memory of us. In making the asymmetry of self- and other-knowledge practical, Ryle makes it possible for us to explain the fallibility of the former. While my vexed friend might be better situated to detect patterns in his thoughts, imaginings, and inclinations since more information is in principle available to him, he is not necessarily inclined to notice these things in himself. His pride might motivate him to avoid considering the possibility that he’s been ruffled by our colleague’s critique, whereas I (having no dog in this fight) find it perfectly obvious that he’s vexed.29 According to Ryle, if self-­ knowledge proceeded as the Official Doctrine has it—if it were based on the mind’s immediate self-consciousness of its own states and operations— it should not be fallible in this way. It is, however, simply not the case that we are incessantly self-monitoring or scrutinizing our doings and thinkings; when we know something about ourselves that the other doesn’t, this is not because we can appeal to epistemically superior “ghostly happenings”.30 It’s just that we can in principle remember behaviours that the other has not observed, either because they were not present or because we were deceptive or simply guarded around them. This practical form of privilege is paired with an ordinary sort of fallibility; we are sometimes not interested in reflecting on ourselves in this way or in doing so with the sort of care and honesty that would reveal the awful truth about ourselves. Ryle’s behaviourist position shares a number of features in common with the verificationist variant. Both present the mind as, in principle, available to public observation and deny that mental concepts name experience-­ transcending entities or occurrences. However, Ryle does not take the more revisionary step of reducing the self to a logical set composed of  Ibid., 88.  Ibid., 154.

29 30

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experiences indexed to a given body or the mind to just that which can be empirically verified. He is not interested in rooting out empirically vacuous nonsense, but rather with clearly mapping what ordinary persons already do on the basis of empirical criteria alone. Doing so reveals that inchoate inner episodes like feelings, impressions, or inarticulate thoughts are radically less important than the Official Doctrine gave them credit for. What the other cannot observe in the patterns of our sayings and doings are simply not the sorts of things we’re interested in, any more than we have an interest in knowing about one another’s dreams or knowing exactly what they experience when they remember a childhood smell like their grandmother’s perfume. The private reaches of your mind are not a problem for me, because I don’t care about your phantasmagoria (unless I am a psychoanalyst who, unable to make sense of your sayings and doings in the ordinary ways because they are “lunatic”, turns to these private occurrences as if to a cipher).31 On Ryle’s view, our interest in one another’s minds is more like that of a novelist or biographer. He writes: Novelists, dramatists, and biographers had always been satisfied to exhibit people’s motives, thoughts, perturbations, and habits by describing their doings, sayings, and imaginings, their grimaces, gestures, and tones of voice. In concentrating on what Jane Austen concentrated on, psychologists began to find that these were, after all, the stuff and not the mere trappings of their subjects.32

In his contribution to the “Thinking and Language” symposium that Murdoch also presented at in 1951, he elaborates by drawing a distinction between a “history” and a “chronicle”. A history involves the kinds of broad and contextualized descriptions of mind—especially as manifested in unguarded speech and behaviour—which might feature in a novelist’s account of a period in someone’s life. A chronicle, by contrast, details the individual occurrences of a particular mental episode. A history of a woman deciding to leave her husband might characterize it in terms of features of the context that made this question pressing for the potential divorcée, sentences said to herself or others about the state of her marriage that  Ibid., 60.  Ibid., 309.

31 32

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disclose her thoughts, and uncertainty-manifesting behaviour like pacing or revisiting old photo albums. A chronicle of this episode might attempt to list every thought, feeling, mental image or vague impression, association, and memory that took place over the course of the episode.33 Ryle suggests that the inclusivity and granularity of a chronicle of mental occurrences is excessive; we don’t need it to satisfy our ordinary interest in one another’s minds, and don’t fret that any such attempt might let granules slip through the coarse net of ordinary language. When we map ordinary language use, they do not figure as points of interest.

Murdoch’s Ambivalence Towards Behaviourism The central difference between Ayer and Ryle, between what we might think of as revisionary and re-evaluative behaviourism in the philosophy of mind, is significant for what follows. It allows us to see that Murdoch was also operating at two levels in her early writings. On the one hand, she was critical of Ayer’s revised picture of the human being as an insubstantial manipulator of symbols. But she was also responding to Ryle’s devaluation of inner life phenomena. The first might be described as empirically inadequate—it presents a distorted picture of what we are and do as thinking beings. The second captures much that is true about mental concepts like “anger” and “thinking”—Murdoch is sympathetic to Ryle’s analysis of mental concepts—but is also dangerous in its devaluation of inner life phenomena in that it crystallizes a worrying lack of curiosity about ourselves and others. To begin with Ayer, Murdoch discusses views that track what I’ve said about his behaviourism without naming him explicitly. In “Thinking and Language”, Murdoch describes a “mathematical model for language” according to which language users engage in a limited set of activities: making calculations, observations, inductions, and exclamations. For such people, it would be obvious where to draw the boundaries between meaningful expressions of thought and merely emotive language use. Furthermore, it would be appropriate to describe their use of empirically defined concepts as the manipulation of symbols, with use determined by the logical relationship between a symbol and its sensory criteria (users themselves simply 33  Gilbert Ryle, “Symposium: Thinking and Language”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 25 (1951), 74–5.

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falling into the “grooves” of these rules in thought and speech). We have here some of the hallmarks of Ayer’s thought: the simplified view of thinking and the distinction between descriptive and emotive uses of language. In the picture that Murdoch evokes, there is no self who is doing the thinking and to whom we’d need to refer if we wanted to know what the verbalized symbols mean. It is precisely here that Murdoch thinks that the mathematical model goes wrong. She writes: [In] a description of thinking we cannot consider language as a set of grooves into which we slip. Here language cannot be considered as saying itself; it is not ‘p’ that says ‘p, but I who say ‘p’ meaning p. Language is a set of occurrences.34

By this, she means that they are not a-historical strings of symbols the meaning of which is fixed independently of when and in what spirit they are used. We can appreciate this by reflecting on how little I would learn about what someone thought simply by being told what words occurred to him just then. “A machine which gave us a verbal version of another person’s thought might tell us very little”, Murdoch notes.35 We need to know something about the context in which ‘p’ entered his thoughts, the frame of mind he was in when he thought ‘p’, what question he was trying to settle for himself. To understand what someone meant by ‘p’, we need to reflect on who said ‘p’, in what context, and with what gestures, tone, “force and colour” the words were thought.36 In short, we need to bring the subject of thinking back into the picture. If Ayer’s view makes it “a matter of accident into which series of mental events a particular symbolic configuration had got itself”, this shows the “serious empirical unsuitability” of this way of picturing human beings. Murdoch insists that “it is an important fact about us that we are not like these people”.37 The sort of people we are and who we seek to understand in connecting thoughts to

 Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 35.  Ibid., 34. 36  Ibid. 37  Ibid., 35. 34 35

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their thinkers are more than just the physical sites in which strings of symbols happen to occur.38 Despite her quarrels with Ayer, Murdoch is in deep sympathy with the philosophical behaviourists’ attempts to challenge the traditional picture of mind and self-knowledge. Murdoch seems to agree with Ryle that we do not appeal to private feelings to determine what emotion we’re undergoing. She writes: When I am jealous or angry something quite particular happens within me. … But it is still the outward context and not the precise nature of the inner feeling, however intense this may be, which determines the name which we give to the condition as a whole. Could we imagine a machine which induced ‘jealous feelings’ in the absence of any jealousy context? It is in a particular situation that we call a thought jealously toned.39

We might appeal to feelings when answering “when did your jealousy begin?” (e.g., I felt disturbed at noon), but it is to the prompting situation and my subsequent behaviour that I appeal to determine what my feeling meant (e.g., this occurred when I found out about my colleague’s promotion and began wondering why I’d been passed over).40 Furthermore, Murdoch rejects the picture of speech as nothing more than the outer effect of a distinct, mental cause—when we speak, this can be described as the exposure of a fully verbalized thought.41 In sum, she concedes to Ryle that “What we look at when using mental words is context and conduct, not inner events. This is true up to a point”.42 Murdoch’s departure from behaviourism begins with Ayer’s revisionist picture of thinking, but carries forward to Ryle’s devaluation of inner life occurrences. H.  H. Price, who chaired the “Thinking and Language” symposium that both Murdoch and Ryle spoke at, highlights the question of pointlessness as the central topic of disagreement between the two philosophers. Is 38  In this, we see a deep commonality between Murdoch and MacKinnon. For a discussion of the latter’s rejection of the dangerous view that human beings are fundamentally calculating machines, see Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, “Interrupting the Conversation: Donald MacKinnon, Wartime Tutor of Anscombe, Midgley, Murdoch and Foot”, Journal of Philosophy of Education 56(6) (2022), 838–850. 39  Iris Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 45. 40  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 45. 41  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 34. 42  Ibid., 36

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dwelling on the texture of inner experience “Pointless?” Price asked, before responding: Yes, if you are concerned with something else: but very much to the point, if the episodes are just the things you want to describe…It is precisely the incidents, the episodes, which puzzle [Murdoch]. It is their elusiveness, their unamenability to literal description, which she is talking about.43

Murdoch notes that Ryle’s devaluation of the inner life leads him to neglect “the problems of motivation and self-knowledge which … do not arise if we consider only the sort of knowledge involved in the everyday labelling of our acquaintances”.44 There are concepts like “anger” and “jealousy” that we ascribe to others on the basis of behaviour and that we can see on their faces, hear in their voices, and notice in what they say and do without sharing deep intimacy. Similarly, there are cases where we’ve heard what someone thinks in virtue of having heard what they’ve said. But there is more to learn about ourselves and others than what ordinary psychological concepts capture. Murdoch’s writings give voice to the nostalgic sense of loss that drives proponents of the Official Doctrine back to the Cartesian Theatre. Their sense of the fine-grained particularity of experience leads them to neurotic views about the unbridgeable gap between such events and verbal expression—and the individual’s unmediated, non-conceptual grasp of inner life occurrences. Murdoch denies that language is necessarily a coarse net through which thought slips or that self-knowledge looks quite like this, but thinks an important truth is in the vicinity. What Ryle and the “plain men’ of his generation found dull does not determine what can and should be found interesting in human experience. The first stage of Murdoch’s response to the behaviourists is to naïvely recount ordinary types of thought and experience that are neglected and in fact cannot be accommodated by the philosophers she is challenging. Her discussions chart a treacherous course between the Scylla of picturing self-knowledge as a relation between a subject and her immediately graspable introspectable contents and the Charybdis of picturing the inner life

43  H. H. Price, “Symposium on Thinking and Language”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 51 (1951), 331. 44  Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 120.

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as shadowy, spineless, and largely irrelevant to the use of mental concepts and point to a need for a renewed conceptual framework.

Recounting How We Think Towards Understanding At the opening of “Thinking and Language”, Murdoch states her intention to describe thinking from a pre-philosophical perspective. She writes: I set aside philosophical theories, old and new, about the nature of thinking: theories such as that it is having representations, or cognising propositions, or manipulating symbols or behaving in certain ways. I shall assume, as we all do when we are not philosophising, that thinking is a private activity which goes on in our heads, that it is a ‘content of consciousness’.45

This is a method she calls “naïve empiricism”.46 Ayer arrives at his simplified view of thinking by applying a philosophical theory of meaning to the elements of the Standard View—determining what cannot figure in an analysis of the concept if one is to satisfy the verification principle and revising our ordinary conception accordingly. As we’ve seen, this means eliminating the substantial subject who does the thinking and describing thought as the in-principle publicizable manipulation of symbols. By contrast, Murdoch’s starting point is reflection on what we’d ordinarily call ‘thinking’ and what this activity is like for us. While we sometimes think aloud, exposing our thoughts verbally, its most exemplary form is the silent variety. While we sometimes try to think impersonally—when I’m considering a trigonometry problem, I’m trying to think what anyone should think in working out the solution—the more usual case is thinking that depends for its meaning on the subject’s context and the tone, force, and colour of the thought. Finally, Murdoch highlights that sometimes thoughts involve “obscure drifting images” and confused occurrences of words.47 To see what she’s getting at here, consider the difference between thinking about whether or not to wear a coat, in which one might observe to oneself that the clouds are dark and foreboding, and thinking about someone dearly missed, in which one might remember the look on their face, the thrilling feel of an embrace, and  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 33.  Ibid., 42. 47  Ibid., 33–34. 45 46

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rehearse the future reunion date to oneself like a mantra. Planning and pining are both modes of thinking, and neither activity is necessarily performed through silent, verbal monologue. Whereas the “manipulation of symbols” view makes it seem as if thinking is the rehearsal of words or consideration of images that might be captured by the formulation “so-and-so is thinking p”, this misses the thinking activity that takes place when one is still just groping towards a determinate idea, for example, when one is trying to work out what to think about something, to find the mot juste, or to work through an experience they don’t presently know how to characterize. These forms of thinking fit Collingwood’s description of poetic clarification—we attempt to move from what we “hitherto imperfectly apprehended” to an understanding of new aspects, distinctions, or connections in an otherwise familiar subject matter.48 While the conclusion of such activity can in principle be shared with others, we cannot share what we still only dimly apprehend (beyond letting our interlocutor know we think that matters are deeper, more interesting, more interconnected, or more unique than we can yet do justice to). I’ll refer to the kinds of thinking that Murdoch is interested in as “thinking towards clarity”. Thinking towards clarity is an important and familiar practice of self-­ reflection that shows the limitations of both behaviourist and Private Theatre models of mind. We engage in it when we feel that there is a gap to be closed between what we dimly apprehend in a subject matter, and what we’re readily able to say using our ordinary stock of concepts, keyed to public criteria according to convention. The inadequacy of everyday language is invisible when we focus on the general labelling of our acquaintances; its inadequacy is “obvious”, Murdoch thinks, if we consider the experience of attempting to break through a linguistic formulation grasped as inadequate in relation to an obscurely apprehended content”.49 When our experiences are unusual, or the attention we pay to them is fine-­ grained and exploratory rather than content with simple labelling, conventional language can feel like “a coarse net through which experiences slip”.50 The right words are not readily available and must be struggled after if we are to close the gaps in our net. We grope for idiosyncratic uses 48  R.  G. Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205–206. 49  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 35. 50  Ibid., 35.

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of familiar words, metaphors, analogies, or newly synthesized phrases with nuanced shades of meaning. Murdoch agrees with Collingwood that thinking towards clarity is where poets have a lot to teach us. Poetry exemplifies the renewal of ordinary language and the extension of its expressive powers—but of course a poetic spirit can serve any attempt to say what we mean, where what we mean is something off the beaten track. Poetry enters Murdoch’s reflections on behaviourism in a second way: what a poet writes gives us occasion to practise clarificatory thinking. To remind us of what this kind of thinking is like, Murdoch presents the example of reading John Clare’s Summer Images. While the poem is composed of words, our experience of the poem is something more than the occurrence of those words in one’s mind (which might readily be shared with others). Murdoch notes that it overflows that verbal content. Reflecting on the poem involves thinking towards an understanding of the impression that those words made, the overall effect that they had on us. We try to close the gaps in our net by turning to metaphor. To illustrate, Murdoch formulates her own impression as “a smooth delicate suspense followed by an enormous sense of chaotic expansion at the last line”.51 She takes concepts learned in relation to public things like porcelain sinks or the movements of smoke (“smoothness” and “expansion”) beyond this usage and applying them to her own inner experiences. Here we see that, “Metaphor is not a peripheral excrescence upon the linguistic structure, it is its living centre”.52 Ryle is right that we are not interested in describing our every impression, emotional experience, or budding thought and Murdoch would agree with him that we’re not always monitoring our own consciousness. She writes: What we are explicitly aware of at such times however is not ourselves being aware, nor even a particular determinate mental datum as such—but the world provoking or inviting us in some particular way or charged with some particular properties.53

But not always is far from never. Sometimes we do take an interest in our own experiences, and this is not because we’re prone to pointless  Ibid., 37.  Ibid., 40. 53  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 118. 51 52

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navel-gazing or have taken up psychoanalysis as an eccentric hobby. When we try to verbalize our experiences, we make it possible to share more of our mind with others and to discover to what extent theirs differ. They might come to see things as we do or not (sometimes our words will influence what the other subsequently sees).54 Insofar as they understand what we say, they can learn that beneath the opaque surface of our readily labelled behaviour, there are deep differences in vision that often go unvoiced and unnoticed. It is by sharing our experiences that we discover how deep our differences can run. I can marvel: “that’s what you got out of that poem?” This point generalizes well beyond discussions of poetry. In “Thinking and Language”, Murdoch reminds us of a familiar gap that can open between what we experience and what we can easily put into words. The particularity of the former can demand an articulacy that we’re not immediately capable of. The net of everyday language is too coarse. These reflections suggest that the inner life is home to occurrences that are not readily exposable like silent soliloquys. We don’t determine the character of an emotional episode like jealousy by dwelling on the feel of our pangs and twinges, but it seems as if we do learn to characterize our experiences of art and poetry by attending to inner experience as such. It is false that the inner life “is nothing, or is at best shadowy and nameless”.55 This private use of descriptive concepts can seem puzzling if we think that a concept, if it is to be used in a way that’s answerable to standards of correctness, must be capable of public verification. Clearly another person is not in a position to tell me whether or not John Clare’s “Summer Images” gave me a sense of chaotic expansion, and yet I seem to be doing something more than venting emotion or spouting nonsense in saying that it did. I’m engaged in a perfectly familiar descriptive practice. Even if it doesn’t yield to standards of objectivity of the sort that Ayer was interested in, further reflection reveals that it is nonetheless answerable to some standards. Murdoch writes, “[W]e know too of ways in which to adjust and check, in ourselves and others, the accuracy of this technique … which we use naturally, as a part of our ordinary living.”56 We trust our own judgements when they are adequate, rich, bend to fit the details of a case, and when we’ve tried to induce a “truthful and imaginative state of mind

 Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 37.  Ibid., 38. 56  Ibid., 39. 54 55

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in the present”.57 How, we might ask, can we make sense of our relationship to such “private datum” without supposing that we simply coin names for the occupants of the Private Theatre, with whom we enjoy a pre-conceptual contact? As we’ll see, that this might seem impossible is a function of one’s lack of conceptual resources. The moral register of what Murdoch says here—her focus on “truthfulness” rather than simply “accuracy”—signals another sense in which the practice in question is not pointless, as per the re-evaluative strain of behaviourism. In a second case that she considers, Murdoch examines the practice of discovering our intentions. In George Elliot’s Daniel Deronda, there is a scene in which Gwendolen’s detested husband is drowning. She does not throw a lifebelt to him, and he dies. In this example, we’re invited to see a difference between an investigation that asks only how she behaved, and one in which we want to characterize an inner life event by chronicling its constitutive moments. The question of Gwendolen’s intention is not answered by the first strategy. To answer it, we’d want to know about the episode of thinking that took place before and after her husband drowned, not just her public conduct. To put the matter starkly, was Gwendolen fantasizing about life as a widow as she watched him flounder, or was her mind fully occupied by a silent chorus of “oh no!” that seemed to fill her consciousness and block out any thought of throwing the lifebelt? Was she panicked into inaction, or inactive because she wanted to be free of him? In this kind of investigation, a thinking episode is taken as a datum which we want to know how to characterize. In our own case, finding the answer has all the moral importance of discovering what we’re made of, morally. In this too, we see how personal thinking is. Far from the impersonal occurrence of symbols, thinking can be shut down by a person’s fears or animated by her interests. This episode of thinking is Gwendolen’s, her self-image hangs in the balance, and whether she investigates it truthfully or with self-protective avoidance will determine whether she arrives at an accurate conclusion. Murdoch ambiguously notes, “It is also remarkable that another person, Deronda, thinks that he too is able to come to a true conclusion about Gwendolen’s intention”.58 He may have happened upon the right answer on the basis of behaviour and context alone, but his  Ibid., 41.  Ibid., 36.

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confidence betrays a failure to recognize what his question was really about and to see that he cannot settle the question unless Gwendolen finds the courage to look inward and then trusts him with what she discovers. Gwendolen’s mind is her own and opaque to view in a way that Deronda, like the behaviourists, fails to take seriously. In presenting these reflections on thinking, language, and inner experience, Murdoch is giving what she calls a “question-begging description”.59 Rather than restricting herself to what would satisfy a verificationist theory of meaning or dispositional analysis of mental concepts, Murdoch gives herself free rein to describe what thinking towards understanding is like for us. This form of description is surprisingly difficult to achieve. First, we are so close to what comes naturally to us that it is easy to overlook it. As Wittgenstein puts it, “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes)”.60 The second difficulty arises when our theoretical commitments convince us that what we do naturally is either metaphysically suspect or a sort of minor curiosity. For Murdoch, to “set aside all philosophical theories, old and new” enables us to bring into view a subject matter that shows the limitations of those theories in a way that would be impossible if the description of the subject matter were itself domesticated to fit them. It enables us to see that we cannot clearly picture ourselves in their terms—that we need new pictures. So, what does Murdoch’s naïve description show thinking towards clarity to be like? It seems to involve a movement from a dim apprehension to a clear grasp of something. It seems to be about an inner event that exceeds whatever verbal contents might occur within it. It seems to naturally involve the use of poetic language as a means of achieving clarity. It seems to be a way that we arrive at self-knowledge that can be interesting, even morally important, to ourselves and others. Finally, in taking this seriously as a form of privileged access, we can come to recognize that the public face of behaviour can be an opaque surface behind which the other’s unique vision and intentions remain a mystery—that is, unless we are brought into their confidence through confession or intimate conversation.

 Ibid., 36.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 2009), §129. 59 60

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A Renewed Vocabulary for Thinking It can sound like Murdoch’s naive recounting of what thinking is like only serves to reinstate the Private Theatre model, where subjects are immediately and non-conceptually in touch with the contents of their consciousness. On this view, imposing an alien verbal structure on our thoughts would always be doomed (given the coarseness of language and the particularity of those inner contents). It would be something we do for others’ sake rather than our own, since we are never in the dark about what we’ve experienced—we just don’t know how to express what we know. This is not, however, Murdoch’s goal. She writes, “The determination to regard consciousness itself as a source of knowledge, illuminating its own acts, leads easily to the creation of a suitable variety of mental objects, whose mode of existence subsequently seems puzzling”.61 If inner experiences are not shadowy and spineless ephemera, and if we genuinely discover something about ourselves by attending to them, we need new ways to picture what this practice operates on and looks like when it goes well. At her second excursion to the Aristotelian Society, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, Murdoch would furnish her readers with a set of metaphors and analogies to accomplish just that. The first of these is the metaphor of spines—our experiences, she writes, can be vertebrate or invertebrate. This image is perfectly chosen to play against Ryle’s discussion of the successes of behaviouristic psychology. In making no mention of the deliverances of ‘inner perception’, behaviourist theories of mental states were, he writes: at first likened to Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. But the extruded hero soon came to seem so bloodless and spineless a being that even the opponents of these theories began to feel shy of imposing heavy theoretical burdens upon his spectral shoulders.62

The structure that sustains our use of psychological concepts like ‘anger’ and ‘jealousy’ is the shape of a person’s responsiveness to their context, the intelligible patterns of their behaviour—not inner pangs and twinges. In taking up the metaphor of spines, Murdoch invites us to question how spineless “the extruded hero”, inner experience, really is.  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 119.  Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 309.

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Murdoch agrees that some of our experiences are spineless invertebrates. A mollusk (e. g., a clam or a snail) is a being that wears the shell that structures its body on the outside and in plain view. Conditions that are metaphorically invertebrate are similarly available to public verification and we don’t dwell on the qualities and components of our inner experience to work out what to say about them. We might think of the frustration I feel on my commute to work when my car won’t start as available to observation insofar as relevant features of the context and my behaviour are public. Someone who knows that I need to leave for work immediately to clock in on time and hears me cursing the ghost of Henry Ford is hearing my frustration. Whatever else happens privately is ancillary to determining what is going on with me. Echoing the Wittgensteinian image of the Beetle in the Box, Murdoch notes that in such cases, “The thing inside the box gives weight to the box, but it does not give shape to the box”.63 Returning to crustaceans, we might say that the public “shell” of behaviour yields readily to “the thin light touch of recognition”.64 The nebulous goo within the shell plays no part in this process. By contrast, some of our experiences are metaphorically vertebrate. These are “rigid objects of contemplation … their structure is inside them”.65 The idea that inner episodes have spines that we can trace through inwardly directed attention and describe using metaphors is meant to help us to see two things: first, our inner experiences have what they need to be recognized as instances of repeatable patterns; and second, the concepts we use to grasp them are not learned through private acts of pointing. These two elements make it possible for Murdoch to picture what we do when we try to grasp these experiences without running afoul of a particular reading of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument. That is to say, the metaphor of structure allows us to see Murdoch as avoiding the Private Theatre model of self-knowledge without giving up on the idea that “we have ‘mental experiences’ which are perfectly specific and able to be described unambiguously in the way in which ‘physical’ experiences can be described”.66 In the Philosophical Investigations, a private linguist is pictured as someone who turns his attention inward to a non-conceptual stream of  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 45.  Ibid., 54. 65  Ibid., 54–5. 66  Ibid., 45. 63 64

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consciousness that is made up of immediately recognizable objects. By naming them, he forges a new connection between word and referent. There is a reading of the Private Language argument that gives it a behaviouristic gloss. For example, on Norman Malcolm’s reading, Wittgenstein’s discussions of pain are meant to dislodge both the plausibility of this picture of mental concept acquisition and the view that concepts like ‘pain’ are used to refer to inner objects at all. In “Knowledge of Other Minds”, Malcolm notes that we do not learn that we are in pain by reasoning from the sensation and drawing the conclusion “I am in pain”. “The use of this psychological sentence has nothing to do with recognizing or identifying or observing a state in oneself”.67 I do not report on my experience by saying “I am in pain”—rather, I extend my infantile non-verbal expressions of pain (my winces and cries). A baby’s cry is not the report of a conclusion she draws on the basis of sensory evidence, nor is the child’s saying of ‘this hurts’ (despite the latter’s syntax).68 The role of pain language is rather to alert others to our suffering, to seek reprieve. On this reading, Murdoch’s contention that we sometimes attend to and seek to describe inner life experiences looks deeply suspect. Happily, there is an alternative reading that actually brings out what she was trying to clarify through the use of the metaphor of vertebrate experience. According to John McDowell, the Private Language Argument is primarily an attack on the dualism of conceptual scheme and mental content. That is to say, he is attacking the idea that the contents of consciousness are individuated and intelligible regardless of how developed a subject’s conceptual capacities are. The image of the private linguist is an expression of this dualism. By challenging its plausibility, Wittgenstein does not mean to also show that we can never refer to or describe inner life experiences. McDowell thinks that PI §304 helps us to appreciate this. In it, Wittgenstein responds to the accusation that for him, “the sensation itself is a nothing”. He replies, “Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either!”69 Rather than seeing this as a description of what is always the case for us—that our sensations are not ‘somethings’—McDowell takes this as an attempt to consider the nature of pre-linguistic awareness. Prior to learning a language, we were not already in touch with what we s­ ubsequently 67  Norman Malcolm, “Knowledge of Other Minds”, in Journal of Philosophy 55 (23) (1958), 977. 68  Malcolm, “Knowledge of Other Minds”, 978. 69  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §304.

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learned to recognize, describe, and respond rationally to through that language. Our consciousness is not always-already individuated into recognizable ‘somethings’, such that we could imagine someone privately pointing to and forging connections between such items and their names. But prelinguistic experiences are not nothing either. It seems obviously true that infants can suffer and that, even if we had never learned to speak, we’d still find stubbing our toe excruciating. For McDowell, the mistake is to take this to mean that “what this pain really is must be the pain I would admittedly have felt, in consequence of this wound, even if I had never learned to talk”.70 Pre-linguistic suffering is not individuated and cannot be an object of attention. Here we have a true case of invertebrate experience— there is nothing with intelligible structure underlying the expressive behaviours of the crying infant (even if the shapeless stuff within the shell is not a nothing either). For this reason, a different sort of story must be told about how we develop the concept of pain—which is to say, how we come to be the sorts of beings who can attend to and rationally respond to pain in ourselves and others (rather than just suffering it).71 Recognizing that pre-linguistic pain is spineless does not, however, tell us what to think about our mature inner lives. For McDowell, by noticing that the target of the Private Language Argument is a version of the dualism of Scheme and Content and not the object-reference model as such, we can accept the harmless and commonsensical thought that we sometimes do reflect and report on our inner lives. What else am I doing when I tell the doctor that a pain is hot and throbbing, when I wonder whether the brown colour I’m imagining is best described as ‘burnt sienna’, or when I tell my friend that I experience John Clare’s words as smooth and that they give me a sense of chaotic expansion? Murdoch does not think that concepts like ‘smooth’ or ‘expansive’ are acquired through acts of private ostension. They are metaphors, the development of which she thinks of as a “renewal of language”, not its acquisition. As someone possessed of such conceptual capacities, there is nothing objectionably Private Theatre about the thought that inner experiences have the right sort of spinal structure for us to truthfully say: “It is like this”.72 McDowell, like Murdoch, appeals to a concept of formal structure when he writes, “The episode of 70  John McDowell, “One Strand of the Private Language Argument”, in Mind Value and Reality (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1998), 294. 71  McDowell, “One Strand of the Private Language Argument”, 295. 72  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 53.

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consciousness comes to us in already conceptual shape; it is not a question of our imposing conceptual shape on a given this.”73 We discover, we do not create, the character of our experiences when we recognize this “shape”. As Murdoch might put it, the conceptual “shape” or “spine” of our experience might be obvious at a glance, like a sharp pain, or might demand a more sustained attention to work out. In either case, we don’t put it there. The metaphor of an inner spine is meant to supplement our vocabulary of inner life happenings. The ‘datum’ we work on when we try to characterize an inner life event is neither immediately known to us nor a shapeless nothing. It is a vertebrate entity with an “inner complexity and rigidity sufficient to enable it to withstand the flux of attention”.74 By tracing its spine, we can recognize its character. While this metaphor helps us to grasp the object of the sort of thinking Murdoch is interested in, we might find the image of tracing an animal’s spine unhelpful when we want to understand what this practice is like. For one, most of us are not orthopedic specialists. There’s a second worry that Margaret MacDonald articulates in her review of The Concept of Mind. While acknowledging that “comparisons and analogies … are often very useful”,75 it can be dangerously misleading to restrict ourselves to just one and we must be alive to the strengths and limitations of each model.76 She notes that “a complete philosophical analysis would consist of many partial analogies, of illumination from many angles while leaving its subject ‘What it is and not another thing’”.77 In this spirit, Murdoch introduces a second literary device to clarify what this practice of self-reflection is like and to show that our reflective relationship with ‘vertebrate experience’ is not as peculiar as it appears at first blush: the analogy between inward attention and how we attend to works of art and literature. Murdoch writes, “Sometimes, since thoughts are queer phenomena, we may find it hard to offer a clear and unambiguous description—but this will be true in the same way of other kinds of queer phenomena with which we have to deal.”

 McDowell, “One Strand of the Private Language Argument”, 283.  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 54. 75  Margaret MacDonald, “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38 (1938), 312. 76  Michael Kremer, “Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle”, in Metaphilosophy 30 (2022), 18. 77  Margaret MacDonald, “Professor Ryle on the Concept of Mind”, The Philosophical Review 60 (1951), 86. 73 74

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Brooding upon an inner experience follows the same pattern as “looking hard at something to decide what it is”.78 There are two features that make the analogy fitting. First, artworks are an especially clear case of a something that we need to dwell on rather than taking in their significance at a glance. Second, discerning their meaning demands more than simply chronicling their component parts (e.g., whatever individual words, images, or coloured patches constitute them). There is a sense in which our sustained, discursive attention discovers something deeper that is there to be found in the whole. The initial appearance of an artwork does not exhaust its sense. Murdoch writes, “[A] work of art does not simply ‘hit’ us, or if it does that is not an aesthetic experience”.79 A quick glance at Murdoch’s favourite painting, Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, might reveal an upside-down figure and fill a spectator with a feeling of unease. But if someone came away from the gallery reporting these momentary impressions, we’d question whether they’d really experienced the painting. Similarly, we wouldn’t be satisfied if they were able to list the readily discernible objects in the frame—a bucket, a lute, a satyr—and their relative locations. While an exhaustive experience might be impossible, one could show themselves to have paid a real attention to the painting by remarking on how these elements come together into a scene that juxtaposes the torment of the flayed satyr with the calm, workaday demeanor of his tormentors and the gaiety of Apollo playing his lute. For Murdoch, such attention reveals something about the horror and misery of human life, but also about the terrible but inspiring role the artist plays in finding beauty in it.80 Attention to the work of art involves sustained attention, not a momentary glance. We consider how the elements of the work are organized and what this configuration amounts to. With this goes the idea that attention to a work of art is holistic. We are not concerned with chronicling each feeling evoked as we look at a painting or adumbrating the individual plot-beats of a novel. Murdoch writes, “What is special about art is not to be found by examining the quality of the moment-to-moment experiences which we have when attending to it”.81 For example, while we might experience a number of feelings in  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 51.  Ibid., 55. 80  Dan Piepenbring, “Iris Murdoch’s Favourite Painting”, The Paris Review, July 15, 2015. 81  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 56. 78 79

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reading a particular passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the emotional impact of the scene depends on the larger structure of the novel; we determine what it means in light of what came before and what comes after. The significance of an artwork is not contained in the momentary impression of any isolated part, but is a function of their place in a larger structure. For this reason, Murdoch describes the consideration of a work of art as “a sustained exercise of the discursive intelligence”.82 The analogy that Murdoch makes helps us to see how unlike these forms of attention are to unmediated awareness of Private Theatre occurrences. In her view, works of art speak to us in specific languages. This is quite literal in the case of prose literature and poetry, but visual media like painting and weaving also have conventional vocabularies. We cannot access the significance of an artwork without “a previous knowledge and acceptance of certain conventions”.83 For example, we can imagine someone wondering what could possibly be said about Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire (1967), a 5.4 x 2.4  m acrylic painting consisting of three equally sized vertical stripes painted blue, red, and blue. This precise situation played out in Canadian public discourse when the National Gallery of Canada controversially acquired this painting for $1.76 million. Some people wondered whether abstract works like Voice of Fire ought to be considered art at all. This is a case where unfamiliarity with the conventions of abstract art—or a refusal to accept them—can preclude one from experiencing a painting as anything more than a coloured surface. Similarly, even a painting depicting realistic human figures demands a knowledge of the conventions of its genre. For example, we sometimes can only tell that a depiction of a luteplayer is a representation of Apollo because we appreciate conventions of classical iconography. Finally, Murdoch notes that a Persian rug has a ‘language’ that we can learn to enjoy.84 Some of a work’s significance can only be accessed by understanding these languages—it is no more pre-linguistically Given than pain. Reflecting on what it is like to brood upon an artwork gives us a familiar example of how the significance of an object can exceed its initial appearances and what it’s like to plumb those depths. Our powers of discernment can be further refined through this process, Murdoch notes, “making  Ibid., 55.  Ibid., 55. 84  Ibid., 54. 82 83

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it more and more specific, seeing more and more deeply into a sense which is before us”. Once again, by describing an artwork or a mental event as structured, as having a language that we can learn to grasp, we acknowledge that thought is answerable to its object.

Regulative Ideas and Practical Guidance We’ve now seen two aspects of Murdoch’s approach to philosophical clarification at play: first, her recounting of familiar, even natural, aspects of human life that were either revised beyond recognition or neglected by her contemporaries; second, her use of metaphors and analogies to bring these activities more clearly into view. In this, we see the earliest glimmer of the strength that Murdoch drew from being a philosopher with a mind on the borders of literature—or who “went to school with the poets”, as Collingwood might put it. It would be a mistake to think that Murdoch’s work on this topic was meant as a purely intellectual intervention in an insular debate about mental concepts and self-knowledge. Furnishing a richer set of concepts for what we aspire to when we engage in thinking of the kind she reminds us of is thoroughgoingly practical, because what she is furnishing her audience with is in essence a regulative idea. By appreciating this, we can see a subtle way in which her early writings evade the reading that synoptic readers of Murdoch like Antonaccio and Jordan give to her work. She is not laying bare the structure of human cognition and experience—which is to say, a structure that characterizes thinking as such regardless of whether or not we understand this in ourselves. A regulative idea is keyed to a specific practice which is itself mutable in human life. Far from taking herself to have established that inner experiences really are as she describes them—deep and rigid structures we can speak truthfully about—she calls their vertebrate character “an important and necessary ‘illusion of immanence’”.85 Two of these terms call for explanation. In what sense is the meaning of these experiences “illusory”? And what sense can we give to the idea that regarding them as such is “necessary”? Necessary to what exactly? Our first clue comes when Murdoch backs away from the word ‘illusion’. This word suggests too strongly that the phenomenology of the practice of conceptualizing inner life events is misleading—that whatever  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 39.

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goes on when we do such things is at best a practice of invention, at worst spouting nonsense, but never self-discovery or -revelation. For Murdoch, resisting Ayer’s revisionary behaviourism is resisting a misdescription of what empirical reflection on our lives reveals us to do. Plainly, some of us sometimes look inward in the way that Murdoch is interested in, and so Ayer’s picture of thinking is “empirically unsuitable”. But empirical reflection cannot proceed from any odd standpoint. The necessity of thinking of inner experience as vertebrate cannot be established from outside the perspective of the practitioner who recognizes that it is an important fact that we are not reducible to inference-making symbol manipulators. For Murdoch, the ontological status of vertebrate inner experience derives from this importance—it is ‘necessary’, not in the sense that it is impossible to abandon this view in a way that bears on more than just our words (e.g., that is reflected in how we think and experience). Rather it is necessary in the sense that we cannot engage in this practice unless we retain faith that such a practice has a point (an object and a value). The distinction I mean to draw here is between the kind of necessity we might attribute to the idea of an external world and the necessity of believing in the systematicity of nature. Murdoch is interested in the latter form of necessity in these early papers. She writes of the idea of vertebrate inner experience: It is rather a necessary regulative idea, about which it makes no sense to ask, is it true or false that it is so? It is for us as if our thoughts were inner events, and it is as if these events were describable either as verbal units or in metaphorical, analogical terms… [I]f a philosophical precedent be needed for this important as if, we have only to look to Kant’s use of the regulative idea of freedom, which seems to me essentially similar and equally empirical.86

Human freedom and the systematicity of nature are neither objects of experience nor do we come to know them through logical analysis. They are, rather ideals that are required for a practice because they provide us with a sense of their point. For example, to discover systematic relationships between apparently unrelated phenomena in the natural world, one must have faith that nature is systematically organized and will yield to such an inquiry. In doing so, we make discoveries that depend for their sense as discoveries on this ideal.  Ibid., 39.

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Similarly, Murdoch denies that we could observe or demonstrate that some experiences possess the kind of intelligible form that makes it worthwhile for us to brood upon them like one might gaze at a Persian Rug. Our sense that there is a meaning immanent to our experience that evades a momentary glance inspires us to go looking for that meaning. It gives us faith that attention will be rewarded. When imaginative effort enables us to overcome a coarse and conventional description of an experience, the question of whether that experience really was intelligible loses its sense. We see the importance of regulative ideas when we notice that the practices they inspire and orient us in are themselves mutable. When we are within the standpoint of a practitioner, it is senseless to ask whether or not the events of consciousness yield to metaphorical and analogical description. We are alive to standards of adequacy, truthfulness, and nuance and how we can fall short of them. We know that what we’re trying to do is to understand something worth understanding. But not all of us occupy that standpoint—a human being is not necessarily a poet. This is clear enough when we reflect on how attempts to share our experiences can go wrong. When Murdoch describes her impression of John Clare’s Summer Images, she imagines herself sharing this with another person who is attending to the same poem, understands what she says, and whose subsequent experiences are enriched by her words. But there is a perhaps more familiar scenario where we stray from kitchen sink interests and ordinary ways of thinking and find ourselves alone. John Clare saw a snail—what’s the big deal? In Ilham Dilman’s Love and Human Separateness, he discusses a passage from Camus’s La Peste describing the perils and disappointments of attempting to “open one’s heart” and share an experience that one has ruminated upon with patience and passion. Regardless of how fine-grained one’s language is, the other is sometimes incapable of imagining that one is doing anything other than giving a cumbersome name to a basic emotion. You say “pasta carbonara”—they hear “fancy Kraft Dinner”.87 Faith that our inner experiences warrant sustained attention rather than a momentary glance, and poetic expression rather than conventional labelling, is not universally shared. We’ve seen already that Ryle waved it off as a kind of pointless navel-gazing and treated this as received wisdom. It is the very mutability of attention that motivates Murdoch to reinstate an image of the particularity and depth of human experience.  Ilham Dilman, Love and Human Separateness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 116.

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In her first manuscript, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Murdoch writes: The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-­ awareness of mankind…What the psychoanalyst does for the particular consciousness of the individual the metaphysician does for the intellectual consciousness of the group he is addressing, and through them perhaps for the consciousness of an epoch. He presents a conceptual framework which is an aid to understanding.88

In an immediate sense, Murdoch was presenting the 100-odd philosophers in attendance at her two Aristotelian Society talks with a novel conceptual framework. But Murdoch did not think that Ayer, Ryle, or behaviouristic philosophers more generally were alone in finding the inner life unreal or uninteresting. Murdoch’s eye was on the consciousness of the epoch, with non-philosophers’ limited and shallow self-­understandings and the attitudes and inattentions that flowed from them. In her view, the post-war period saw the popular ascendance of a particular picture of the human being as identical to her public face. With this came a widespread forgetfulness about what it meant to take human separateness and difference seriously in the intimacy of human relationships and in the intimacy of authorial representation. As we’ll see, behaviourism’s infection of literature was especially troubling to Murdoch. This is because of the important role that literature that is not infected can play in fostering the very kinds of attentive practice that behaviourism imperilled.

Bibliography Ayer, A. J. 1971. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Penguin. Ayer, A. J. 1947. Thinking and Meaning: Inaugural Lecture. London: H. K. Lewis and co. Ltd. Collingwood, R.  G. 2005. Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descartes, René. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dilman, Ilham. 1987. Love and Human Separateness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. D’Oro, Giuseppina. 2003. Collingwood and Ryle on the Concept of Mind. Philosophical Explorations 6: pp. 18–30.

 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 137.

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Hämäläinen, Nora. 2014. What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist?—Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor. Philosophical Papers 43(2): 191–225. Kremer, Michael. 2022. Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. Metaphilosophy 30: 288–311. Mac Cumhaill, Clare and Wiseman, Rachael. 2022. Interrupting the Conversation. Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (6): 838–850. MacDonald, Margaret. 1938. The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38: 291–312. MacDonald, Margaret. 1951. Professor Ryle on the Concept of Mind. The Philosophical Review 60: 80–90. Malcolm, Norman. 1958. Knowledge of Other Minds. Journal of Philosophy 55 (23): 969–978. McDowell, John. 1998. One Strand of the Private Language Argument. In Mind Value and Reality¸ 279–296. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press. Misak, Cheryl. 2005. Verificationism: Its History and Prospects. New  York: Routledge. Murdoch, Iris. 1951/1998. Thinking and Language. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 33–42. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1952/1998. Nostalgia for the Particular. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 43–58. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1987. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Piepenbring, Dan. July 15, 2015. Iris Murdoch’s Favourite Painting. The Paris Review. Price, H.  H. 1951. Symposium on Thinking and Language. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 51: 329–338. Ryle, Gilbert. 1951. Symposium: Thinking and Language. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 25: 65–82. Ryle, Gilbert. 1963. The Concept of Mind. New York: Penguin. Ryle, Gilbert. 1971. Abstractions. In Collected Papers, Volume 2, 435–445. London: Hutchinson. Søndergaard Christensen, Anne-Marie. 2022. Wittgenstein and Murdoch. In The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood, 318–330. New York: Routledge. Standish, Paul. 2022. Inner and Outer, Psychology and Wittgenstein’s Painted Curtain. Journal of Philosophy of Education 56(1): 115–123. Watson, John. 1913. Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it. Psychological Review 20(2): 158–177. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

CHAPTER 4

The Disorientation of Love and the Decline of Literature

Introduction In Murdoch’s writings on literature and philosophy from the second half of her St. Anne’s period, we see her discussing the limitations of behaviourist pictures of the human being in a way that is more directly tied to popular trends in post-war thought and culture. In “The Sublime and the Good”, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, and “Against Dryness”, she is still concerned with the behaviourist reduction of the human being to her public face and still thinks that art can be exemplary of what it means to take the separateness and individuality of human beings seriously—albeit with a shift in focus from poetry to the novel. At the same time, these writings mark a departure from her Aristotelian Society talks. First, the philosophical outlook she is concerned with extends beyond clarificatory behaviourism to include Sartrean existentialism. For all their differences, she saw these as two sides of the same coin. She writes, “Both philosophies are against traditional metaphysics, attack substantial theories of mind … construe virtue in terms of will rather than in terms of knowledge, [and] emphasize choice.” While the linguistic behaviourists make the opacity of mind unintelligible by “turn[ing] away from the chaos of empirical inwardness to the clarity of overt action”, the existentialists err on the side of pessimism, holding that it is hopeless to treat oneself or others

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Jamieson, Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0_4

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as potential objects of knowledge.1 Murdoch had long been alive to the close kinship between these views—in her 1950 paper “The Novelist as Metaphysician”, she presents a passage written by Ayer as if it were penned by Sartre, before lifting the curtain to reveal the British emotivist.2 For both, freedom looks like an absence of external constraint on individual decision-making. These papers also mark an important shift in how Murdoch construed the danger of behaviourism. Her Aristotelian Society talks highlighted the dangerous way that behaviouristic conceptions of human mindedness disorient practices of inwardly directed attention. By contrast, the three literature and philosophy papers I’ll be considering are primarily concerned with our practices of other-directed attention. This includes how we attend to others in our day to day lives, how those of us who go in for writing depict others in our literary endeavours, and (related to both) the criteria we appeal to in evaluating literature. A third difference bears on how Murdoch discusses our experiences of art. In “Nostalgia for the Particular”, Murdoch’s remarks on aesthetic experience were presented as uncontroversial. The analogy between self-­ reflection and art appreciation was designed to play down the apparent metaphysical queerness of private inner life events by finding a partner in crime for what we do when we try to make sense of them. Going forward, we’ll be examining views about characterization and aesthetic value that ran afoul of dominant theories and would have been controversial in the 1950s during a flowering of Kant-inflected aesthetic theory. Her contemporaries might have objected to that moniker, but Murdoch insists that Kant was “the father of most modern theories of art”.3 In applying her characteristic methods of clarification, Murdoch’s aim was to remind her readers of what it is like to read the great novels of the past, to help them to understand what their authors achieved, and to disclose why we need their example and inspiration. Finally, the literature and philosophy papers see Murdoch addressing a more public audience. These works originally appeared as BBC radio talks and contributions to literary magazines. They thus represent Murdoch in 1  Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 267–9. 2  Iris Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 105. 3  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 262.

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her role as a cultural critic and public philosopher, discussing a “powerful” philosophical view about the nature of human individuality and freedom that had captured the post-war public imagination.4 As she puts it, “Philosophy, like the newspapers, is both the guide and the mirror of its age”.5 Most notably, the dominant theory of personality influenced novelists’ approach to characterization and led to a decline in both the quality of prose literature and in critics’ ability to distinguish greater and lesser works. Murdoch notes that “recent changes in the portrayal of character in novels [are] symptoms of some more general change of consciousness”.6 Far from a neutral change, Murdoch calls this the “decline in our literature”.7 The decline of characterization in modern literature stripped post-war society of an important source of moral inspiration and a “technique for exploring and controlling our own spiritual energy”.8 The existentialist-­behaviourist picture of the human also bore on how the wider public understood the value of prose literature—this was reflected in the ascendance of formalist literary criticism. Murdoch writes: It remains important to keep alive certain standards of value and comparison. Unless we do this, and do it, I think, in something like the way I’m suggesting, we shall be unable to understand or explain why it is that Walter Scott and Tolstoy are to a staggering degree better than the most praised of contemporary novelists. And what we cannot explain we may cease to believe. We shall lose our sense of distance, and this will be a pity.9

The withering of standards of value and comparison is a “pity”, in her view, because it leaves the public without the spiritual nourishment that great literature offers and an understanding of our need for it. In Murdoch’s view, post-war aesthetic theory was shaped by two primary forces. First, behaviouristic-existentialist cultural forces led to the neglect of realistic representation of human beings as a critical standard. Second, Kant’s Critique of Judgment provided the prototype for a purely formalistic style of criticism that would satisfy sceptics about human 4  Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin), 289. 5  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 287. 6  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 261. 7  Ibid., 267. 8  Ibid., 269. 9  Ibid., 281.

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substance. Curiously, while Murdoch thought that Kant was the architect of much of what was wrong with aesthetic theory in the 1950s, she also thought that it contained clues about how to correct course. Before analyzing the philosophical methods that Murdoch employs in her aesthetic writings, let us consider Kant’s influence on twentieth-century aesthetics.

The Influence of Kantian Aesthetics In the Critique of Judgment, Kant analyses judgements of taste and our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. When we judge that something is beautiful, our judgement is not always a pure judgement of taste; by seeing how the purity of these judgements can be undermined by human interest or conceptual thought, we can appreciate that the contemplation of the beautiful is set apart from our everyday practical and theoretical engagements with the world. According to Andrew Bowie, Kant was torn between his admiration for the accomplishments of the natural sciences and the increased power it gave humans to reshape, control, and exploit the natural world, and his recognition that this left increasingly little space for noninstrumental, non-dominating, and disinterested modes of engagement with nature.10 Our appreciation for beauty in nature is a contemplative reprieve and reminder of what we are like when we value others for their own sake. For Kant, objects of judgements of taste are not viewed as relevant to human interests and understanding; in fact, we do not regard them as instances of any concept whatever, instead focusing our attention on their unique collection of sensuous formal features. Judgement is generally “the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal” and ordinarily involves thought constrained by the principle connecting the use of a given universal to some phenomena.11 The concept ‘beautiful’ differs from ordinary empirical concepts in that it is not connected to phenomena by a determinate principle, that is, one specifying general empirical criteria for calling something ‘beautiful’. It applies to perceptual forms considered as individuals. Furthermore, there is no immediate recognition or line of thinking that imposes itself on us as we regard something as beautiful—even it might induce thought in us, there is a sense in which no 10  Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 25–6. 11  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 18.

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description is adequate to it our object and our thought is likely to take flight in directions that are inspired by the object but go beyond what it strictly is or represents (e.g., birdsong or a painting of a satyr being flayed alive).12 As Kant puts it, “The cognitive powers brought into play by this representation are here engaged in a free play, since no definite concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition.”13 In its purest form, this mode of judgement is inspired by things like “Flowers, free patterns, lines aimlessly intertwining—technically termed foliage” insofar as these “have no signification, depend upon no definite concept, and yet please. Delight in the beautiful must depend upon the reflection on an object precursory to some (not definitely determined) concept”.14 Our purest experiences of beauty relate to phenomena which we delight in without seeing them as meaningful, representational, or as instances of universals. In the case of sound, this is best accomplished when music is wordless and we don’t think of it as composed according to the conventions of a musical tradition. Kant writes: A bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical role, seems to have more human freedom in it, and thus to be richer for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes.15

This is not to say that we cannot contemplate the beauty of a living organisms like an Andalusian horse or human creations like a sonata composed by Mozart. These judgements are just less pure; how we contemplate a determinate object is constrained by an idea of what, for example, a perfect horse or sonata is like. Kant writes: In such a case, where one says, for example, ‘that is a beautiful woman,’ what one in fact thinks is only this, that in her form nature excellently portrays the ends present in the female figure. For one has to extend one’s view beyond the mere form to a concept, to enable the object to be thought in such manner by means of an aesthetic judgment logically conditioned.16

 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 175–9.  Ibid., 58. 14  Ibid., 46. 15  Kant quoted by Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 207. 16  Kant, Critique of Judgment, 173. 12 13

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“Free beauty”, according to Kant, differs from dependent, or logically conditioned, beauty in that it “presupposes no concept of what the object should be”.17 As we shall see, the ideal of free beauty lived on in twentieth-century aesthetics. Even when a painting or poem either represents empirical phenomena or involves words, aesthetic experience proper pertains to the work’s formal features and not its content. For this reason, questions of how well a work represents a given subject matter or the truthfulness of what it expresses are ancillary to aesthetic concerns. As Murdoch puts it, “the beautiful is the experience of a conceptless harmony between the imagination and the understanding. Art, as the production of the beautiful, is not a matter of discovering or imparting truths”.18 Judgements of taste have four distinctive features that Murdoch highlights. First, they cannot be verified by appeal to rules or reasons. Kant writes, “There can be no objective rule of taste by which what is beautiful may be defined by means of concepts.”19 There are not generalizable reasons for calling something beautiful, and no property that something must have if it’s to qualify. This is especially so in the case of pure judgements of taste about free beauties. We regard a beautiful occurrence of birdsong as a particular, identical to its unique perceptual form rather than as a collection of universal properties that contribute to beauty wherever they appear. The occurrence of a trilling sound doesn’t force me to judge that the birdsong was beautiful, any more than the accuracy of a portrait or the truth of a poem necessarily make them better qua beautiful objects. Second, judgements of taste are “apodictic”. When we judge that something is beautiful we are making an unverifiable claim that others should converge in viewing the object as we do. As Murdoch puts it, we are “suitors for agreement, holding that everyone ought to hold beautiful what we hold beautiful”.20 Kant insulates aesthetic judgement from a radical subjectivism by noting that when we take something to be beautiful, we are critical of those who fail to appreciate it as we do.21 This prescriptive logic gives judgements of taste a claim to universality that judgements about what we find agreeable lack. I don’t try to correct a person who  Ibid., 72.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 262–3. 19  Kant, Critique of Judgment, 75. 20  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 207. 21  Kant, Critique of Judgment, 51. 17 18

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finds pineapple on pizza pleasant. I would, however, question the taste of a person who fails to find Cézanne’s “View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph” beautiful (or would question them, Kant argues, if I’m really making an aesthetic judgement about this work). Third, the object of a judgement of taste is purposeless. We are delighted by the fact that the object has the air of being complete and valuable just in how it presents itself to our imagination; this even though we don’t regard it in terms of its usefulness or the external purpose for which it was crafted (if indeed it could be used or was crafted). Kant speaks of this as “purposiveness without purpose”.22 A free beauty is strictly gratuitous, but even dependent beauties are viewed as if they were gratuitous. Finally, a judgement of taste is more like a perception than an emotional response; the pleasure we take in the beautiful object is nothing other than the experience of the imagination and understanding joined in harmony when we contemplate a “conceptless representation”.23 Rather than exciting our emotions, our experience of the beautiful is “contemplative and restful”.24 In “The Sublime and the Good,” Murdoch claims that Kant’s aesthetics have profoundly influenced twentieth-century artists, critics, and philosophers. With the strictness of the divide between free and dependent beauty removed, Kant’s view is readily transformed into “a familiar current view of art which would command much greater agreement”, especially among the Bloomsbury Group, Symbolist poets, formalist literary critics, and linguistic philosophers.25 The Bloomsbury Group proclaimed that art was for art’s sake, denying that it should be judged according to external standards (say, of truth, utility, or ethics). They insisted upon the “independence, self-­ containedness, [and] for itselfness of a work of art”.26 According to Murdoch, we can also detect this Kantian view in the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom the “ideal of significance [was] the ideal of the resonant self-contained work of art which made itself as like as possible to a thing”.27 In Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, she claims that Mallarmé “seeks rather to make language perform the impossible feat of simply being without referring at all. The reader is held by a pure incantation wherefrom  Ibid., 63.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 207. 24  Ibid., 209. 25  Ibid., 209. 26  Ibid., 219. 27  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 277. 22 23

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the ordinary senses of the words have been systematically purged”.28 She discerns Kant’s legacy in the formalist style of literary criticism popularized by I. A. Richards, who insisted that one should examine the formal properties of a poem—the configuration and qualities of words themselves—rather than their meaning. A poem might consist of “intelligible sentences”, but Richards insisted that “a poem does not say anything”.29 Finally, she describes her contemporaries at Oxford as aesthetic Kantians. There was no shortage of philosophers to single out as examples of this clarificatory Kantianism, but Murdoch chose Stuart Hampshire.30 In his contribution to the 1954 collection Essays on Aesthetics and Language, “Logic and Appreciation”, Hampshire claims that “a work of art is gratuitous”.31 Whereas in ordinary life, we are interested in what the objects and events in our surroundings are, whether they are useful or obstructive, and how they might feature in moral or practical decision-­making, those interests are suspended when we engage in aesthetic judgement. The aesthetic is “anything which, when attended to carefully and apart altogether from its uses, provides, by the arrangement of its elements and their suggestion to the imagination, some peculiar satisfaction of its own”.32 Such a thing might be crafted by humans or discovered in nature, but if our regard for it is aesthetic, we only attend to its sensuous features. That includes: “concordances of colours and perceived rhythms and balances of shapes … the recondite qualities of form, expression, style, [and] atmosphere”.33 Aesthetic judgement is set apart from practical and theoretical concerns. While one might recommend a gallery exhibit because it is culturally significant or will make for an impressive date, when we consider Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas in light of its power to impress prospective romantic partners, we are not regarding it as an aesthetic object. Similarly, fretting  Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 66.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” 210. 30  For example, in Margaret MacDonald’s contribution to the same volume, she echoes Kant’s view that aesthetic judgements are apodictic yet rationally indefensible. On her view, the function of art criticism is to invite one’s readers to share in a mode of attention that discloses the value of the work, rather than to offer them generalizable reasons for valuing it. See Margaret MacDonald, “Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts”, in Aesthetics and Language ed. William Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 114–130. 31  Stuart Hampshire, “Logic and Appreciation”, in Aesthetics and Language ed. William Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 166. 32  Hampshire, “Logic and Appreciation”, 168. 33  Ibid., 166. 28

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over orientalism in Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus is moral, not aesthetic, criticism. Hampshire insists that “[n]othing but holding an object still in attention, by itself and for its own sake, would count as having an aesthetic experience”.34 We can hear further echoes of Kant’s Third Critique in Hampshire’s insistence that the judgements we make about a work of art are indefensible. While I discover the beauty of a work by considering its particular elements and qualities, I cannot infer that something is beautiful just because it possesses these elements or qualities. There are no generalizable reasons that I could offer as a justification for my aesthetic judgement. Instead, each work must be treated as unique, its beauty discovered by attending to it as such. Hampshire notes that whereas virtue and good conduct are “essentially repeatable and imitable,” we take it to be a demerit in a work if it recreates another. “The canons of success and failure, of perfection and imperfection, are in this sense internal to the work itself”.35 Murdoch by no means wants to deny that disinterested contemplation of the beautiful is good. After her departure from St. Anne’s, she would give it a central place in her discussions of egoism and unselfing.36 During the period of her career we are considering, however, she was concerned with the narrowness of the sort of aesthetic value that Kant-inflected writers, critics, and philosophers fixated on. The ideal of aesthetic purity leaves no room for the value that a literary work might have because of how it distresses and exhilarates us (rather than calming us) and because of how truthfully it represents human characters (rather than its formal qualities). Murdoch rejected the thought that beauty exhausts what we actually value in works of art and cannot illuminate why we value the works of art that we in fact do. She writes: Why will Kant’s view simply not do at all? … It does not in any way account for the greatness of tragedy. Nor does it account for that similar greatness in non-literary arts which may bear other names. Kant prefers bird-song to opera. Kant thinks that art is essentially play. Now Shakespeare is great art, and Shakespeare is not play, so Kant must be wrong.37

 Ibid., 169.  Ibid., 162. 36  See especially Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 363–385. 37  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 211. 34 35

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Similarly, the greatness of Tolstoy’s novels is not a function of their purely formal features. There is a kind of aesthetic value at play in Shakespeare and Tolstoy that is about how they represent human life.38

Kant on the Sublime Kant’s Critique of Judgment provides us with a second form of aesthetic experience that Murdoch believes is more promising: the sublime. We find objects beautiful when the imagination and the understanding harmonize without the former being determined by the latter. The sublime, by contrast, is an experience of the disharmony between our powers of imagination and our understanding. In the Third Critique, Kant locates the sublime in our experience of nature as either unimaginably vast or irresistibly powerful. He describes two forms that the sublime takes: the “mathematical sublime”, which is inspired by the vastness of nature; and the “dynamical sublime”, which is inspired by nature’s overwhelming might. While the sublime discloses our limitations, it also leads us to reflect with pleasure on the infinite powers of human reason. Kant writes, “The feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful.”39 The vastness of the Alps discloses the limitations of our powers of receptivity and imagination; we are not able to perceive or represent the totality of the Alps to ourselves all at once. In moving our attention from one end of the mountain range to the other, what we first apprehended disappears from view and fades in memory such that the Alps can never be fully present to us in their sensible totality. Nevertheless we can form an intellectual idea of their vastness through mathematics. This indicates, Kant writes, “a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense … the mere ability even to think the given infinite without contradiction, is something that requires the presence in the human mind of a faculty that is itself supersensible”.40 The dynamically sublime differs in that, rather than exulting in our power to transcend our perceptual and imaginative powers in thought, the limitations of our physical bodies lead us to recognize that our moral freedom cannot be dominated by even the most  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 261.  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 91. 40  Ibid., 102. 38 39

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destructive forces of nature. We are confronted by our physical vulnerability when we encounter: Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might.41

These experiences are sublime rather than merely frightening because “they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature”.42 At the most extreme, I can will myself to act with courage even when my mortal fate is sealed by an oncoming avalanche. In both its forms, the sublime discloses the dignity and power of reason. This inspires us to take up what Murdoch calls our “supersensible destiny”.43 Murdoch characterizes Kant’s discussions of beauty as both “obscure” and yet “friendly and familiar. We take to it like ducks to water”.44 It has the power to illuminate a very specific experience we have of nature and some artworks. We might think of symbolist poetry, abstract expressionist painting, and music as art forms that come closest to the ideal of pure beauty. There is, however, more to aesthetic experience than “free play” and “harmony”. With the sublime, we have an experience that is more emotionally lively—both distressing and exhilarating—and that pertains to phenomena that are unlike beautiful objects because, so far from being self-contained objects that give the imagination the chance to freely play, they are vast—in the case of the starry heavens, even boundless—and overwhelm our imaginations. Murdoch sees promise in the sublime; it is well-­suited to filling a dangerous gap in twentieth-century aesthetic thought, except that it first must be purged of its romantic obsession with nature. Murdoch laments:

 Ibid., 111.  Ibid., 111. 43  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 264. 44  Ibid., 263. 41 42

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With the theory of the sublime we have the distressing feeling of some vast and wonderful idea being attached to a trivial occasion. Who, one might say, cares what sort of emotions Kant experienced in the Alps? There must be more to it … Kant’s view is pregnant with a concept of the tragic, and with a theory of the connection between literature and morality.45

Murdoch thinks that this concept might be reinterpreted and made to describe our experience of the characters represented in great prose literature and to disclose its moral importance. Before this reinterpretation can be accomplished, a further set of philosophical prejudices must be purged. On Murdoch’s view, these are the very prejudices that are responsible for both philosophy’s turn away from the inner life and the decline of twentieth-century literature. She writes, “Linguistic and existentialist behaviourism, our Romantic philosophy, has reduced our vocabulary and simplified and impoverished our view of the inner life”.46 Post-war subjects, in her view, thought of themselves as free choosers and as inhabitants of an empirically straightforward world. That world contained no deeper mysteries or meanings beyond what an ordinary vocabulary and cursory glance could reveal. What they needed was both a conception of the real separateness of persons and a new image of freedom that embraced more than just choice. As different as Sartre was from the clarificatory behaviourists, Murdoch thought that he also exemplified the prejudices that robbed post-war subjects of the conceptual frameworks necessary to understand the value of sublime literature.47

Sartre and the Modern Novel Murdoch describes Sartre as an intellectual heir to Kant. She detects in his work a fixation on “the problem of Kantian dualism”.48 The dualism she has in mind is between the “empirical world and creative spirit”.49 Kant, she writes:  Ibid., 264.  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 293. 47  While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss, Murdoch’s reading of Sartre has been criticized as inaccurate. See for example Richard Moran, “Iris Murdoch and Existentialism”, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 181–196. My remarks on Sartre in this chapter are only meant to capture how Murdoch understood his philosophy. 48  Iris Murdoch, “The Existentialist Political Myth”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 132. 49  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 76. 45 46

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did not conceive of the mind’s relation with its object as being that of static contemplation or the receiving of atomic impressions. He conceived the mind as struggling with reality, as seeking totality, rational satisfaction, within it; on the other hand, Kant distinguished between the shifting phenomenal show, and an unknown or partially known, transcendent reality that lay beyond it.50

In his discussion of the sublime, Kant uses the vastness of nature to describe our relationship with a world that transcends our present comprehension. In his hands, our struggles with apparently formless nature inspire us with optimism about our own rational powers. We are temporarily embarrassed scientists faced with a temporarily transcendent reality. Murdoch thinks that Sartre explores a similar tension in La Nausée. Unlike Kant, however, when Roquentin—the central character of that novel—experiences nature as formless, he sees that his judgements will never be externally determined by things themselves. The encounter is closer to the aesthetic experience of “free beauties”—objects in the natural world constrain thought no more than an abstract expressionist painting and he discovers the true, wide scope of his own creative freedom. Sartre recasts the Kantian faith in universal reason and the ultimate comprehensibility of nature as a psychological urge. Human beings are tempted to treat the events of nature as necessary and our own judgements as the discovery of objective facts. Most dangerously, we are tempted to treat human beings (including ourselves) as substantial and knowable when in reality human freedom consists in the power to make a break with any description of our character or values. This Sartrean picture makes it difficult to see what we are answerable to in attempting to understand ourselves or others. According to Murdoch, this accounts for the failure of twentieth-century novelists—Sartre included—to populate their works with a “plurality of real persons more or less naturalistically presented in a large social scene”.51 Unconstrained in thought and action by any external authorities, Sartre presents the human being as answerable to themselves alone. Hence, “for the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity”.52 In this, Sartre is an inheritor of nineteenth-century Romanticism, by which she means the conviction  Murdoch, “The Existentialist Political Myth”, 130–131.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 271. 52  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 290. 50 51

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that the search for universal truths is fruitless and that we each have licence to pursue ‘experience’ recklessly and without concern for convention or institutions that would artificially limit our freedom.53 In this view, the self is created through sincere choices and actions, not discovered through introspection or the accrual of empirical observations. In this respect, Sartre’s turn away from the substantial self is more extreme than the behaviourists’. In La Nausée, Roquentin discovers that there is a gap between the universal concepts we use in describing the world and concrete particulars like seagulls, tram seats, and café patrons.54 Murdoch writes: Before he had thought in terms of classes and kinds; now what is before him is a particular existing thing. … What does exist is brute and nameless, it escapes from the scheme of relations in which we imagine it to be rigidly enclosed, it escapes from language and science, it is more than and other than our descriptions of it.55

Sartre denies that empirical judgements are logically necessitated by the form of objects themselves; they are pictured as within the scope of our creative freedom. As Murdoch puts it: We may if we please picture the world ‘realistically’ as an assembly of things with stable and determinate characteristics; and even the nebulous things therein offer themselves as capable of being named and defined. [However,] after all, the solid things of the world do not have their qualities unambiguously written upon them. It is the observer who draws lines and affixes labels.56

Sense is never discovered in the world; human consciousness is always responsible for its presence (consciously or not). Murdoch concludes, “No ‘meaning’ escapes the scope of consciousness, either in the world or in the psyche. The sense of all objects is a human sense, which I responsibly maintain; they are not labelled either by external Nature or by a Rational Self in me”.57 53  Iris Murdoch, “T. S. Eliot as a Moralist”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 162. 54  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 39. 55  Ibid., 42. 56  Ibid., 116. 57  Ibid., 128.

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By rejecting of the necessity of empirical descriptions, Sartre reframes the desire to comprehend nature as a totality. It is a merely psychological craving for rational order, and it leads one to a species of dishonesty about the human situation. Murdoch writes, “According to Sartre, a desire for our lives to have the form and clarity of something necessary, and not accidental, is a fundamental human urge.”58 We want nature to have determinate forms that limit the scope of our creative freedom by constraining our thought. We want the events of nature and of our lives to be orderly and to yield to necessary explanations. For this reason, we want the events of our lives to unfold like the events of a story, their meaning fixed by their relation to a conclusion that gives the telling of the story its point. One of Roquentin’s nauseating discoveries is that human lives are not like this.59 Far from following one another to realize an external meaning and to arrive at a foregone conclusion, the events of human life unfold according to the individual’s choices. Their meaning is created not discovered. Murdoch uses the metaphor of “glueyness” to picture consciousness’s attraction to, but ultimate freedom from, objective thinking. We experience “the world provoking or inviting us in some particular way or charged with some particular properties”.60 Our gaze sticks to objects and naturally solidifies into judgements that take themselves to be objective. For example, we are tempted to think that we can appeal to a person’s stable characteristics—their bad-temperedness or shrewdness—to explain their behaviour. We are tempted to think of them in light of their biographies, describing their personality as the inevitable outcome of historical forces. Biographical thinking and objective character description picture the human as “fixed, opaque, and complete”.61 For Sartre, this is an attractive but dangerous view. In a review of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Murdoch writes: The subject does not have the mode of existence of objects. It is, however, haunted by its awareness of this other mode of existence, towards which it constantly aspires. It wishes to be in-itself. From this characteristic of con-

 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 269.  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 40. 60  Ibid., 118. 61  Ibid., 120. 58 59

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sciousness there follows results, such as ‘bad faith’ (the consoling illusion that one can be something in a thinglike manner).62

The glueyness of consciousness encourages us to unreflectively immerse ourselves in a world of stable facts, including supposed facts about ourselves.63 It encourages us to deny our own creative freedom, which is the power of consciousness to unstick itself from this glueyness and “to spring out of unreflective thing-like conditions”.64 For Roquentin, this freedom is a source of nausea, but also that which “enables him to see through the pretentions of the salauds. It is both the instability of the momentary consciousness and the disciplined avoidance of the settled illusion”.65 The self is insubstantial and must constantly remind itself of the contingency of its own outlook and character. In Sartre’s account, moral consciousness consists in our awareness of our own fundamental power to unstick ourselves from would-be objective thinking about nature, human beings, and meaning. The only constraint on our freedom is a quasi-Kantian principle that “the ultimate meaning of the actions of men of good faith is the pursuit of freedom as such. … I cannot take my own freedom as an end without also taking the freedom of others as an end”.66 By reflectively recognizing that nothing other than freedom is necessarily valuable, a human subject can take responsibility for her own creative role in judgement. We must “realise that value is a function of the movement or yearning of our consciousness” rather than something discovered in the world.67 Murdoch’s fundamental disagreement with Sartre’s representation of the human predicament comes through in her invocation of Gabriel Marcel. “Why … does Sartre find the contingent over-abundance of the world nauseating rather than glorious?”68 His attitude reveals more about his own fears and desires than about human nature as such. The discovery that a given universal fails to capture the concrete particularity of its object need not convince us that we are not answerable to the world. Sartre is 62  Iris Murdoch, “Hegel in Modern Dress”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 147. 63  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 47. 64  Ibid., 91. 65  Ibid., 103. 66  Ibid., 102. 67  Ibid., 94. 68  Ibid., 49.

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right to deny that human beings can be objectively and tidily summed up. In Murdoch’s view, this is not because there is nothing to learn. It is rather that they are too individual, their psyches too messy, and their perspectives only partially revealed to us. Their histories are too complicated and often too unlike our own and we cannot trace necessary connections between their past experiences and present identities. We are too little able to understand their outlook and motives without their honesty and trust in us as confidants.69 There is bound to be a gap between our image of the other and their reality, but we should not conclude that there is no substance for us to struggle to understand. Rather, there is so much that “to understand other people is a task which does not come to an end”.70 For Murdoch, both behaviourist complacency and existentialist hopelessness distract us from the task of attending to others in a manner that is answerable to their separateness and individuality. By contrast, great literature helps us to recover Marcel’s sense of gloriousness and inspires us to take up this task. Her primary complaint against twentieth-century novels was that they failed to do this. Throughout her writings, Murdoch refers to the novels of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus sometimes as “phenomenological novels’,71 other times ‘philosophical novels’,72 and sometimes ‘metaphysical literature’. In the third case, she is following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who declared that with Simone de Beauvoir’s novels “the era of moral literature ended and the era of metaphysical literature began”. Murdoch claims that Merleau-­ Ponty “was referring … to the fact that in an existentialist novel the interest is focused upon the ambiguity of the characters’ situation, and upon how the characters choose to resolve this”.73 Novels like La Nausée are constructed with a didactic purpose: to depict human existence according to an existentialist understanding of the human predicament. In discussing these novels, Murdoch means to shed light on a more general trend in twentieth-century literature. Her primary concern is how these novelists tended to approach characterization. An overall suspicion of objectivity and the referential powers of language led some modern novelists to turn their attention away from the social scene and its inhabitants and to  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 215.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 283. 71  Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician”, 101. 72  Iris Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 20. 73  Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician”, 108. 69 70

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instead focus on the subjective experience of one individual. For Murdoch, several distinct literary movements and styles could be diagnosed in terms of what she calls the “sickness of language”. This is a phenomenon which includes suspicion of the mediating role that language plays in thought about the world, a loss of shared social and political values, and finally a loss of a sense of a shared reality populated by discrete and knowable objects. Surrealism; symbolist poetry; Virginia Woolf’s impressionism and James Joyce’s post-impressionism are all discussed in these terms. Murdoch notes the ways in which the modern English novel, such as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake turn away from the convention of representing of reality as if it were a common world composed of real objects, persons, and events; instead, these authors focus on subjective impressions.74 Other characters only show up through the medium of those impressions and without independent being. Sartre and other philosophical novelists were less interested in the texture of subjective experience, but their novels also lacked the kind of pluralism that Murdoch is concerned with. Their aim was to craft crystalline myths illustrating the existentialist predicament, not to represent human beings in their rich diversity. Murdoch writes, “Sartre’s novels and plays have a strictly didactic purpose. They are intended to make us conscious of this predicament, so that we may pursue sincerely and with open eyes our human métier of understanding our world and conferring meaning upon it.”75 As a consequence, Sartre’s characters don’t seem to have a freedom of their own—they are in the book to serve a philosophical purpose, not to live with their own, author-independent purposes. Their sayings and doings are always subordinate to the didactic goal of the book. Murdoch criticizes this thematic overdetermination, writing: The only thing one might say is that these characters and the universes which they inhabit are made excessively transparent. We can see a little too precisely what is being done. These [characters] are appealing, but they are never enchanting—and the worlds in which they live are without magic and without terror. There is here none of the enticing mystery of the unknown.76

 Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 63–80.  Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician”, 103–104. 76  Iris Murdoch, “The Existentialist Hero”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 114–115. 74 75

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In this sense, Sartre’s characters lack separateness from their author and reality for his readers. This problem is clear in a novel like La Nausée, where anyone who is not the novel’s narrator appears as part of his metaphysical struggles. Characters beyond Roquentin appear on the scene as temptations for him to yield to the “glueyness” of consciousness, or as examples of those who have. It is also a problem with Les Chemins de la Liberté—a work that follows a number of characters rather than just one. In that novel, Murdoch notes that the reader is introduced to one character at a time, each depicted as a consciousness grappling either with the metaphysical import of his own creative freedom or with political and personal questions that can only be answered through random bursts of decision-making after periods of “Hamlet-like” vacillation.77 Since their thought and action discloses personal commitment rather than the substance of their character, the protagonists’ “reflections, instead of deepening our sense of their concreteness and complexity, strip them to the bare structure of the particular problem which they embody”.78 According to Murdoch, the crystalline tidiness of Sartre’s novels brings them close to the Kantian ideal of beauty. In La Nausée, Roquentin discovers that artistic form is a source of (momentary) reprieve from the nausea inspired in him by concretely existing things. Abstract geometric figures and formal aesthetic objects like melodies exhibit a kind of necessity and perfection that is absent from concretely existing beings like seagulls or the succession of events comprising a human life. To be this melody, the notes must proceed like this; and by doing so a particular succession of notes is unambiguously this melody. Murdoch writes, “The notes follow one another, inevitably, away in another world. Like the circle, they do not exist. They are”.79 While works of this kind do not save reality from its formlessness, they inspire Roquentin to write a novel of his own so that he too can create something formally ordered and non-concrete. A philosophical novel, we might say, has a similar artificial necessity. The artist imposes the unity of the didactic myth onto happenings and persons that would in reality be disordered. Philosophical novels are “small, compact, crystalline, self-contained” and therefore “mythical”.80 They are  Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 57.  Ibid., 59. 79  Ibid., 41. 80  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 279. 77 78

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distressing lessons about the human predicament, but presented with the consolation of form. As if nauseated by the burgeoning over-­abundance of human life, their authors recoil. Murdoch writes, “[W]hat is feared is history, real beings, and real change, whatever is contingent, messy, boundless, infinitely particular, and endlessly still to be explained; what is desired is the timeless non-discursive whole which has its significance completely contained in itself.”81 The philosophical novelists create something beautiful at the expense of sublimity. Murdoch’s criticisms might sound harsh. What she was trying to show was not that twentieth-century literature was bad—only that there was an important kind of value that they lacked. The admiration for Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir that pervaded her correspondence with Queneau did not simply evaporate. Similarly, while she would devote herself to illuminating the greatness of novelists like Tolstoy and Jane Austen, this should not be taken as evidence that she didn’t admire other nineteenth-­century novelists like “Dostoevsky, Melville, Emily Brontë, Hawthorne to whom we would not want to deny a first place”.82 She acknowledged that prose literature can be commendable for a number of reasons that are by no means exhausted by what she admired in Tolstoy, Eliot, and Austen. Murdoch’s frustrations with twentieth-century literature are a function of the fact that it propagated rather than challenged the behaviourist-­existentialist theory of personality. Furthermore, without an alternative vision, we cannot make sense of the greatness of literature that has the capacity to inspire us to glory in, rather than recoiling in nausea from, the messiness and diversity of human life. This left post-war subjects disoriented in their practices of attention and ignorant about where to look for help.

The Shakespeare Principle in Action We are now in a position to analyse Murdoch’s argumentative strategy for recovering the intelligibility of this important form of aesthetic value. “The Sublime and the Good” begins with two methodological questions about how philosophers should approach the subjects of art and aesthetic value. The first is a question of priority: should we study aesthetic value by first setting out a definition of what art is at its best and then determining which works of art conform to it? Or should we first gather data about what works  Ibid., 274.  Ibid., 272.

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we are already convinced are great and generalize from there? Murdoch notes that Tolstoy defended the former methodology. In What is Art? he claims that art in general is concerned with the transmission of feelings, but art that is most worthy of that name “is not the transmission of any feeling, but only of the highest feelings, i.e., feelings flowing from religious perception”.83 By means of inspiring these feelings, art joins human beings together and facilitates the progress of humanity. The works of art best suited to accomplishing this are simple, speaking in a language shared by everyone and so universally accessible. The greatest works of art include “the Iliad, the stories of the Old Testament, the parables, [and] folk tales”.84 Even if a given work happens to please the vast majority of people, a judgement about its value as a work of art is nonetheless answerable to these criteria. While Murdoch admires Tolstoy as a novelist, she disagrees with his critical writings and believes they give rise to “shocking eccentricities in [his] direct judgment of the merit of art”.85 She adopts the second methodology and defends the authority of our pre-theoretical apprehension of which works of art are good. This apprehension, she writes: Has just as much authority, engages our moral and intellectual being just as deeply, as our philosophical reflections upon art in general … our aesthetic must stand to be judged by great works of art which we know to be such independently. [If an aesthetic theory does not] give a satisfactory or sufficiently rich account of what we unphilosophically know … then away with it.86

In this, we hear strong echoes of Murdoch’s description of the “naïve empiricist” philosophical method in “Thinking and Language”. In that work, she states: “the method of investigation … will involve a study, a developing and a vindicating of our ordinary and familiar linguistic habits”.87 A decade later, she remains convinced that a philosopher should illuminate our own ordinary experiences rather than imposing “eccentric” judgements on their readers.

 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 211–212.  Ibid., 212. 85  Ibid., 205. 86  Ibid., 205. 87  Iris Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 42. 83 84

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The second methodological question Murdoch asks in “The Sublime and the Good” is about scope: should one be selective or inclusive about the experiences one considers? One might think that the most empirically sound philosophical method would be to examine all cases where we approve of natural phenomena or works of art—be it a performance of King Lear or a parrot’s plumage—and by examining these, determine what “lowest common denominator” unites them. Murdoch thinks that the merits of this approach are often overstated. A lowest common denominator investigation may disguise the evaluative commitments of the person conducting the investigation and shape their selection of data. The resulting theory will purport to be the result of a neutral investigation, when in fact, “[w]hether we think art is an amusement, or an education, or a revelation of reality, or is for art’s sake (whatever that may mean) will reveal what we hold to be valuable and (the same thing) what we take the world to be fundamentally like”.88 Rather than allowing these presuppositions to lurk insidiously in the background, Murdoch adopts an approach that wears its evaluative commitments on its sleeve. She narrows the scope of her inquiry to the highest manifestations of art which we judge to be so independently of any theory (if not independently of an evaluative outlook more generally). Her study of what makes these works great discloses what we in fact hold valuable but cannot explain if we are restricted to Kantian aesthetics and the behaviourist-existentialist conception of the free, substanceless human being. It thus points towards the need for a richer conceptual framework capable of illuminating our experiences of great art. Murdoch calls the method she adopts “the Shakespeare principle”. She writes: “Let us start by saying that Shakespeare is the greatest of all artists, and let our aesthetic grow to be the philosophical justification of this judgment.”89 His tragedies are among the highest manifestations of art, and we know this to be so independently of philosophical theory. Kantian aesthetics fall short of this principle. These theories do not take the artistic greatness of Shakespeare as their starting point and they are not relevant to how we experience works like King Lear. First, far from our understanding being held at bay when we watch a performance, what we witness engages our understanding—as Murdoch puts it, our experience of King Lear is not “a momentary quasi-perceptual state of mind … [T]he art object is not

 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 206.  Ibid., 205.

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just ‘given’, it is also thought”.90 Furthermore, the audience does not just respond to the formal features of a tragedy—I would find it strange if someone returned from a performance of King Lear praising the rhythm of the actors’ speech without reference to the profundity of what was said.91 Finally, our experience of tragic prose is not restful and disinterested in the way that Kantian aesthetic theory stresses. While Murdoch agrees that great art can quiet human selfishness, it is also quite stressful; a performance of King Lear is, “if we perform it properly which we hardly ever do, painful”.92 This sounds more like Kant’s description of the sublime than the beautiful—so much the worse for contemporary theorists, who pay the former no heed. The Shakespeare principle tells us: so much the worse for beauty-centric aesthetic theories. We need a different aesthetics to justify our pre-philosophical judgement that Shakespeare is the greatest of all artists. While King Lear is the measure of an aesthetic theory on Murdoch’s view, she returns to nineteenth-century realist novels, especially Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to explore the features that make these works great. There are two that she highlights. First, great authors naturalistically represent a plurality of real persons coexisting in a large social scene. Anna Karenina does not centre on the titular character’s perspective as either a source of kaleidoscopic impressions or a site of an existential drama. She is one member of a diverse cast, and more minor characters like Dolly, Stiva, and Kitty, are presented as substantial, individual, and interesting in their own right.93 They are not stock characters or symbols—rather we are alive to their unique qualities of character and outlooks on the events of the narrative that show through in their sayings, doings, and responses; we see that these were formed by their personal history and social situation (even if we are only privy to tantalizingly suggestive hints about what this may have looked like). In short, great writers represent characters who give us the sense that there is a substance to be known, an interest in trying to learn about that substance, and an awareness that dimensions of that substance are yet mysterious. Each individual has the power to surprise us.  Ibid., 210.  In this, there are echoes with Murdoch’s discussions of aesthetic experience in “Nostalgia for the Particular”—particularly her insistence that in responding to a Persian Rug, we are responding to its “language” and discerning its “sense”. Iris Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998) 54–55. 92  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” 216. 93  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 294. 90 91

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The highest manifestations of prose literature have a second, related feature: they are tragic and so engender a distinct kind of experience that Murdoch describes of as a version of the Kantian sublime. She notes that “the theory of the sublime ought to be Kant’s theory of tragedy”.94 Doing so means shifting its application away from the unimaginable vastness of the Alps and “the fruitless aspiring demand for some sort of impossible total perceptual comprehension of nature”.95 Murdoch notes that the Kantian sublime can be transformed into a theory of tragedy if “we think of the spectator as gazing not at the Alps, but at the spectacle of human life”.96 As it relates to tragedy, the sublime should be understood as a human response to our inability to fully comprehend other human beings in their individuality, an experience that is prompted by art that represents the kinds of characters that Shakespeare and Tolstoy excelled at depicting in complex moral conflicts. The lives that they pursue are worthy, but the realization of one person’s vision of the good excludes the realization of the other’s. Murdoch wants to distinguish her conception of tragedy from Hegel’s. Hegel describes conflicts of value as a form of social critique that points towards a resolution. There is a more comprehensive perspective that, if adopted by the tragic hero, would show him how to yield to the other’s vision of the good without sacrificing his own values by achieving a synthesis in which the two conflicting outlooks are harmonized. Murdoch agrees that the tragic pertains to the morally complicated social world and to conflicts between individuals. However, she thinks that Hegel’s account has shortcomings that point to the strengths of the Kantian sublime as a theory of tragedy. The Kantian mountaineer is faced with something that is too vast for his imagination to fully embrace—while this is painful, it is also exhilarating in that it gives him the idea of his own supersensible destiny to comprehend nature as a systematic totality. Importantly, however, the mountaineer has only come to appreciate an ideal that orients and calls to him—he has not achieved the ideal or demonstrated that it is achievable. Comprehensive knowledge is, as Murdoch puts it, “demanded and as it were dreamt of by reason, but not given”.97 Similarly, tragedies of moral conflict show us how far we are from the ideals that our reason dreams of.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 213.  Ibid., 217. 96  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 282. 97  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 213. 94 95

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This includes both a universal vision of the good in which conflicting claims are ultimately resolved, and an understanding of the other in which I appreciate everything that makes them the individual who they are: their messy psyche, their history, their evaluative perspective on the world, all of which shows through in their behaviour without being transparent to my view. Through tragic literature of moral conflict, we discover that we can imaginatively engage with characters with evaluative outlooks that differ from our own and one another’s. We can find these differences of outlook worthy and interesting rather than minimizing or denying them or judging them as something to be judged. I don’t read Anna Karenina looking for a stand-in or lament that Tolstoy’s characters are unlike myself. Rather, I am inspired to try to understand them as they are, on the basis of what limited details I am given about their history, social situation, behaviour, and reactions. This discovery of difference is tragic for two reasons, relating to two insuperable limits it leads us to recognize in ourselves. First, I appreciate that I’ve only scratched the surface of understanding their personality and perspective. Second, I recognize that there is no master outlook within which moral disagreements can be arbitrated once and for all.98 Oftentimes agnosticism is more appropriate than moral superiority. Great literature like King Lear and Anna Karenina reveals that others are separate from us in ways that we will never cease discovering; while this inspires us with tolerant interest in these characters, it also confronts us with the painful recognition that we are not the measure of all things. The ideal of a comprehensive understanding of goodness or of another human being is always beyond us. Kantian beauty has nothing illuminating to say about our experience of tragic literature. Murdoch’s Shakespeare Principle tells us that we should set it to the side. In its place, she develops a theory of aesthetic value—the sublimity of tragic literature—that is meant to explain our most confident judgements about the highest manifestations of artistic greatness. But Murdoch’s task doesn’t end with this sketch. In her view, the second reason literature and literary criticism were in decline after the war was an inadequate picture of the human being. The behaviourist-existentialist picture of the human personality undermines the intelligibility of the experience she wants her readers to recognize and value by undermining faith in the substance and idiosyncratic texture of the inner life, and by obscuring the form of freedom we exercise in grappling with this when we attend to  Ibid., 216.

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others. Murdoch illuminates this shortcoming by describing the imaginative possibilities that this picture leaves for post-war subjects. We obliterate the fine-grained ways in which others differ from us by adopting either the conventional perspective of “Ordinary Language Man” or the self-centred perspective of “Totalitarian Man”. When we adopt the first of these perspectives, we have complacent faith in the power of ordinary language to capture what others are like. We trust that their minds can be revealed to us through public behaviour which is connected by convention to an ordinary stock of mental concepts—we think that such a person: is what he observably does … we turn away from the chaos of empirical inwardness to the clarity of overt action. What a man ‘feels’ is of no interest to us, and even what he believes is of no interest except in so far as his beliefs are defined by his actions.99

This picture enables us to ignore the ways that another’s experience of the world might differ from our own because we assume they inhabit the same realm of empirical facts as we do, having cottoned on to the same conventional connections between word and meaning as we have and being thus “surrounded in short by the network of ordinary language”.100 We need not worry that their sayings, doings, or reactions have shades of meaning that evade us. We’re all basically similar sorts of people—we differ only in that we are free to sometimes make different choices from one another. My parka is blue, yours is purple; I return my library books on time, you keep yours until you’ve finished reading them (ignoring recalls)—but we are not mysterious to each other because of these differences. Totalitarian man doesn’t minimize his differences from others—he does not allow them an existence that is separate from his own at all. As Murdoch puts it, this person has surrendered fully to neurosis and for that reason, is totally alone. Rather than merely downplaying human individuality, Totalitarian Man recoils from it. As we’ve seen, he denies that he is a substantial individual—to treat himself as having objective qualities would be to deny his freedom to choose. This denial of substance carries over to other individuals, who he does not regard as real, contingent other people, but instead reduces to players in the drama of his existential angst. They are yet more sources of glueyness, drawing him into modes of bad faith  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 268.  Ibid., 268.

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like the taking for granted of bourgeois social values. As Murdoch puts it, Totalitarian Man regards other human beings as “organised menacing extensions of the consciousness of the subject”.101 In this, there are echoes of the fearful Don Juan who is convinced that intimacy with women necessarily entails the curtailment of his freedom and loss of self and so is almost afraid to learn his lovers’ names—women figure as generic threats, not as individuals in their own right.102 If all we can do is minimize the individuality of other human beings or, treating them as generic players in our private psychological dramas, deny their independent reality, we cannot make sense of the value of works of art that represent that diversity to us. Murdoch thought that post-war culture could be described as existentialist-behaviourist in part because these two attitudes had become so pervasive (as was evidenced most conspicuously by trends in characterization in the twentieth-century novel). Writing of the wider public, and not merely philosophers, she notes that “there are many features in both these current philosophies in which we can recognise ourselves”.103 The twin dangers of conventional complacency or totalitarian recoil are expressions of a conceptual lacuna. We need, Murdoch writes: more concepts than our philosophers have furnished us with. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a ­non-­metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. … What we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being.104

What is wanting is a conceptual framework capable of illuminating what literature does when it represents human beings realistically, what in us is engaged when we take human individuality seriously, and a why this is so difficult for us (such that we need novels to support us in overcoming that difficulty). It’s all well and good to declare Anna Karenina “sublime”; but this alone doesn’t help us to see why we need great literature (and why the decline of characterization in twentieth-century literature constitutes a serious loss). Murdoch began the work of developing this conceptual  Ibid., 269.  For a discussion of this character type, see Ilham Dilman, Love and Human Separateness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 84–86. 103  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 270. 104  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 293. 101 102

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framework in her Aristotelian Society talks on behaviourism, and continues it in her writings on philosophy and literature from the latter half of her St. Anne’s period. It is a task that she takes on in hopes that the value of great literature might be “clarified”.105 The conceptual framework we need in order to clarify the value of tragic art involves three elements that correspond to the three elements of the Kantian sublime: (1) a supersensible, cognitive power that we intuit in ourselves through the experience of the sublime; (2) an aspect of reality that transcends appearances, which can be grasped by this cognitive power; and (3) a description of some part of us that is inadequate to (2) and must be overcome through the exercise of (1). For Kant, the sublime involves: (1) the power of reason to intellectually grasp what our imagination represents as vast formlessness; (2) nature conceived of as a comprehensible (if not intuitable) totality; and (3) our finite imaginative faculties. In Murdoch’s account, the tragic sublime involves: (1) our capacity to non-­judgementally, imaginatively, and lovingly attend to other human beings; (2) human beings conceived of as “substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable”106; and (3) our predilection for conventionality and neurosis.

Freedom as Love—And Its Enemies One of the most pervasive features of post-war thought was the view that individual choice is the locus of human freedom. In this respect, both Sartrean existentialists and British clarificatory philosophers were inheritors of Kant, who is, Murdoch writes, “the father of all modern forms of the problem of freedom”.107 Linguistic moral philosophers like Hare drew a sharp line between empirical and moral concepts, noting that while empirical judgements are answerable to observation and public rules governing concept-use, moral judgements are not. Each individual must decide for themself which actions they morally approve of and would prescribe for anyone in relevantly similar circumstances—connections between moral judgements and one’s reasons for making them are forged by the choice itself rather than something external to it (e.g., public conventions or religious doctrine). Similarly, the existentialists thought that we exercise our freedom when we make decisions and author our own actions with  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 270.  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 294. 107  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 262. 105 106

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courage and sincerity, alive to our freedom from external sources of authority.108 There are of course deep differences between these philosophies, but for Murdoch, their convergence on this understanding of freedom was more noteworthy in that it was symptomatic of the general consciousness of this epoch while “crystallizing” it. Murdoch thinks we need a different image of freedom to help us grasp the value of tragic art. We need to recognize that love is a kind of freedom. In this, we see her doing something different than she did during her Aristotelian Society Talks. Rather than introducing metaphors or analogies to supplement a limited conceptual framework, she is here making extraordinary use of familiar words in order to indicate new connections and distinctions among our experiences. What Murdoch means by ‘love’ is at once familiar but more specialized than what would ordinarily pass muster for that designation. Writing during the same decade as Murdoch, the American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm complained that love was popularly thought of as a sentiment that one falls into, not an art that one might be better or worse at. Problems of love were thought of as largely coordination problems—it is a challenge to find a person who, by their appearance, social status, and manners, inspires this feeling in us and who also feels it in return. If freedom and love were thought of in the same breath, it was either to indicate that we can’t choose to fall in love when a person leaves us cold, or to indicate differences in the social institutions of love. Historically, human beings were less free to choose who to love since this fell under the purview of parental authority or that of a marriage broker, but in the twentieth century, individuals were increasingly free to survey and select from the marketplace of potential lovers.109 For Murdoch, freedom and love come together in a rather different way. Love is the freedom which we enjoy as beings who are not constrained by a particular understanding of another person or evaluative outlook on them. Murdoch claims that we all have “an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others”.110 A loving attitude has two features: first, when I love another, I acknowledge that they have a history and inner life that go beyond what I observe of their public sayings and doings. They are separate from me in ways I can only progressively discover, in that I do not exhaustively and conclusively  Ibid., 268–270.  Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 1–2. 110  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 216. 108 109

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know them. Recognizing this means being open to the ways that the ideas I have about them can be unsettled as I learn more about their history, as they share their private feelings with me, and as I witness more of their comportment. When I love another, I allow the real person to conflict with my image of them.111 Secondly, rather than censuring them with the confidence of one who thinks that they know how everyone should live and treats themselves as the measure of all things, love is non-judgemental. Love means recognizing the other “as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves”.112 Rather than indulging in narrow-minded feelings of superiority or hostility towards those who live and see and the world differently, when I love I experience an “agnosticism which goes with tolerance”.113 Rather than understanding ‘tolerance’ as a species of forbearance for those we find personally abhorrent but deserving of protection from coercion or violence, Murdoch’s use of ‘tolerance’ is linked with genuine interest in the other.114 When I love someone, I take our separateness seriously by attending to them with an ongoing willingness to imaginatively revise my conception of them; I don’t allow my interest in them to be undermined by intolerance or confidence that I’ve already got them figured out. This, we shall see, is both a freedom to attend and reimagine and a freedom from conventionality and neurosis. Murdoch’s descriptions of love might seem esoteric and not as immediately intuitive as the description she gives of brooding upon a Persian rug in “Nostalgia for the Particular”. We might wonder how a new conception of love is meant to illuminate the freedom that Murdoch argues is at play in our experience of great art. It is helpful to return to Collingwood’s distinction between the founding of new names for a new phenomenon and the poetic attempt to clarify what we already dimly apprehend. The latter is achieved by using words in relatively new ways to indicate overlooked  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 295.  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 271. 113  Ibid., 283. 114  Murdoch’s fiction and non-fiction were both concerned with the problem of the intolerance faced by homosexuals during this period. For example, her novel The Bell (1958) sympathetically depicts a morally complex homosexual character. In 1965, she wrote an essay entitled “The Moral Decision about Homosexuality” (1965), in which she challenges the view that homosexuality is a social problem, a deviation from the natural, or a psychological disease. See Iris Murdoch, “The Moral Decision about Homosexuality”, in The Humanist 80 (1965), 70–73. 111 112

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aspects, distinctions, and connections in an otherwise familiar subject matter.115 In calling tolerant, imaginative attention ‘love’, Murdoch is not attempting to found an altogether new use of the word, like an arachnologist who dubs a newly discovered species of spider ‘David Bowie’. She is not surprising us by telling us that ‘love’ is a special kind of geological formation. The connection is only relatively new and somewhat surprising because it makes us realize that we’ve never attended to and noticed something that was in a certain sense there before our eyes. This isn’t as dramatic an example of poetic language use as her claim that our inner experiences have spines. Nonetheless, it is the kind of imaginative and improvisational use of a word that Collingwood thought necessary for breathing life into our language and reviving its clarificatory power—and thought philosophers should go to school with the poets to learn.116 In “Iris Murdoch on Love”, Niklas Forsberg notes that philosophy is sometimes a process of “anamnesis, ‘memory’ of what we did not know we knew”.117 To illuminate what is implicit in our ordinary practices—in this case, to appreciate the connection between love, tolerance, and the ongoing revision of our understanding of the other—we might need to identify and overcome a theoretical blockage. For example, we might notice that we have been thinking of ‘love’ as a specifically romantic or sexual passion, connected with physical attraction, obsession, jealousy, and the disruption of rational thought. Fromm complained that post-war media—especially popular music and movies—was dominated by this conception of love. A narrow focus on romantic love like this can obscure how much we love without being lovers. I can love my neighbour without being prone to fits of jealousy over the time he spends with his own family. According to Michael Polanyi, love can be the animating spirit of scientific inquiry; he calls it “the heuristic passion”; it sparks our curiosity and drives us to make contact with reality.118 The arachnologist who discovered the David Bowie spider likely did not want to make romantic contact with the object of his inquiry—we can love our mysterious world and cosmos without longing

115  R.  G. Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205–206. 116  Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method, 214. 117  Niklas Forsberg, “Iris Murdoch on Love”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love eds. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4. 118  Martin Turkis II, “Post-Critical Platonism: Preliminary Meditations on Ethics and Aesthetics”, in Tradition and Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 45 (2019), 31.

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for its tender embrace. A narrow focus on romantic love can prevent us from noticing what love looks like in other domains. Similarly, we might fail to notice what love is like because we’re intent on making it fit a particular conceptual scheme. Forsberg notes that rationalistic conceptions of love can be attractive for this reason. If we suppose that our mental lives are divided between beliefs and desires, it can be tempting to analyse love in those terms: beliefs about the values possessed by the object of love and desires to be near, or otherwise to possess this thing of value. In the grip of such an outlook, we fail to notice that what we’re describing looks too self-satisfied to be called love. Forsberg draws this out by turning to Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Collins attempts to demonstrate his love for Elizabeth Bennett by listing his reasons for believing that she is a suitable wife: wealth, nobility, reputation, beauty. This is one of many scenes where we’re invited to find Collins ridiculous, since he doesn’t realize that the very act of ceremoniously listing Elizabeth’s valuable properties shows that he doesn’t really love her. As Forsberg puts it, “His proposal is everything but an expression of curiosity into her being or a willingness to seek her out. He appears to think that he already knows her—or at least, knows everything that is of importance to him”.119 Furthermore, a ‘love’ based on lists of this kind gives the impression that one’s beloved is in principle replaceable. It makes it look sensible to question someone’s consistency if they fail to love all beings who possess the same valuable attributes as their present beloved.120 After Mr. Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth is refused, he very ‘rationally’ proposes to a woman with a similar set of characteristics (Charlotte Lucas). If we find it laughable to think that Mr. Collins loved Elizabeth, this suggests that something is amiss with a conceptual framework that cannot explain why. In the grip of misleading theories and fed on a narrow diet of examples, we are liable to overlook what love, broadly and pre-theoretically conceived, looks like. Reflection on concrete cases like the arachnologist’s love of spiders or the Mr. Collins lack of love for Elizabeth Bennett can remind us of what we in some sense already knew without having noticed it: that love operates in us at the level of interest. It precedes the deepening of understanding and motivates us to learn about a person, object, or subject matter. We experience our beloved as an enticing mystery that we’ve only  Forsberg, “Iris Murdoch on Love”, 9.  Ibid., 5.

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ever scratched the surface of. Similarly, love is not possessive. When love is tolerant, we hope that those we love flourish in lives that we might never choose for ourselves—for example, having ten children, working as a travel blogger in Vietnam, or becoming a nun—and that might take them away from proximity to us. I might grieve their departure and I might not share in their values, but I don’t disparage their choice right off the hop. I am interested in seeing what it is about such a life that draws them to it. Murdoch invites us to see that love energizes our attention and empowers us to resist the temptation to think the task of understanding the other is either already done or, because they differ from us, not worth doing. Love of this kind can be rare. Murdoch thought it was increasingly difficult to achieve in post-war Britain. Fromm agreed. In The Art of Loving, he noted that in the 1950s most people were only capable of participating in “egotism à deux”, their absence of love disguised by a withered cultural sense of what love really is. The post-war idea of marriage, he noted, was that of a “smoothly functioning team” supporting one another in the fulfillment of individual needs (e.g., to be well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, and amused).121 The psychoanalyst noted that apparently happy partners to such marriages were so riddled with narcissism that love was beyond their reach. He described narcissism as an orientation “in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena of the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one”.122 Narcissism leads one to view others in terms of one’s own desires and fears; he claimed that such persons could only enjoy various forms of “pseudo-love”.123 Nevertheless, Murdoch reminds us that something “does not cease to be of value when it becomes more difficult of attainment”.124 Reminding us of what love is at its best, Murdoch helps us grasp a form of freedom that was neglected and obscured by behaviourist and existentialist philosophers whose ideas expressed and crystallized popular attitudes from this period. The unexpected pairing of freedom with love (understood as tolerant and humble attention to what is valuable and independent from ourselves) generates a new conceptual framework for explaining the achievements and importance of great artists. Through the representation of characters and  Fromm, The Art of Loving, 75.  Ibid., 99. 123  Ibid., 75–85. 124  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 272. 121 122

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moral conflicts, Tolstoy both exemplifies and inspires freedom-as-love.125 The authors of sublime tragic works have a non-­ dominating attitude towards their characters, who are never extension of their own will (e.g., serving the author’s didactic purpose in writing the work), villains or victims to moralize about, or stock characters that yield readily to pat descriptions and who never surprise. Importantly, when they come into conflict with one another each character is revealed as having a distinct and worthy conception of what matters and how one should live. For example, in the Part One of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy presents us with such a conflict involving three characters. The romantic Kitty wants and expects to be proposed to by the dashing Vronsky, who sincerely enjoys their intimacy but is not serious about marrying her. Meanwhile Kitty’s mother, Princess Shcherbátskaya, laments the loss of old-fashioned rituals of matchmaking that made her own courtship with Kitty’s father far more predictable. She desperately wants her daughter’s uncertain situation to be resolved.126 These characters’ values—romantic love, mutual enjoyment, orderliness—shape their outlook on the scene, but are incompatible in this particular case. Hoping to bring her daughter’s courtship to a speedy resolution, the Princess Shcherbátskaya encourages her daughter to choose Vronsky and rebuff his romantic adversary, Levin. Far from presenting her as ridiculous or officious for doing so, Tolstoy casts her behaviour against the backdrop of a sincere belief that Vronsky is more serious about proposing to Kitty than Levin and an understandable wish to bring an end to the distressing uncertainty of her situation. Similarly, a lesser author might represent Vronsky as an instance of a generic type: the knavish seducer who plays fast and loose with the hearts of young women. In Tolstoy’s hands, however, his conduct is cast against the backdrop of same changes in late nineteenth-century Russian culture that so troubled the Princess. At this point in history, men could freely enjoy the company of unmarried young women without intending to marry them; to do so was not recklessly misleading. In this context, Vronsky’s preferential attentions to Kitty—coming to the house to visit with her, singling her out to converse and dance with at balls—are not conclusive evidence of his intentions to marry her and do not make him liable for whatever consequences follow from Kitty getting her hopes up. He might, as the Princess Shcherbátskaya’s husband presumes, be nothing more than a “Petersburg  Ibid., 284.  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York: Premier Classics, 2008), 53.

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fop”. Importantly, we are not led to think that the Princess is unreasonable for interpreting his attentions as she does in the absence of an outright proposal—inconclusive evidence can still be the best evidence available.127 Tolstoy invites readers to exercise compassion for the Princess and to understand how the situation looks by her lights. Similarly, a moralistic author might present Vronsky as a villain for showing so much favour to Kitty when he didn’t intend to marry her. However, even Kitty’s traditional mother recognizes that his flirtations are well within the realm of normal conduct. In other scenes, Vronsky shows himself to be frank and considerate of others’ feelings (if perhaps a bit flighty and too easily swept up in pursuit of enjoyment). Like Princess Shcherbátskaya, we are given small glimpses of Vronsky’s history that contextualize his behaviour and help us to make sense of it; Tolstoy reveals that during Vronsky’s childhood his parents conducted numerous extramarital affairs and that his mother continued to do so after his father’s death. We see that he has no understanding of what sets married life apart from and makes marriage preferable to a life of romantic adventure.128 Given this outlook, Tolstoy shows that Vronsky doesn’t see his behaviour in the same way as Kitty or her mother or understand how his actions could cause Kitty heartache. Tolstoy writes: If he could have known her family’s point of view and learnt that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would have been much surprised and would not have believed it. He would not have believed that what gave so much and such excellent pleasure to him, and—what was more—to her, could be wrong.129

What’s the harm in an exchange of chaste attentions when both parties are made happy by them? Knowing something of Vronsky’s history, we come to understand that his history has given him a unique outlook. He finds his own pleasure-seeking way of life interesting, and he has a right to lead that life regardless of how it conflicts with Kitty and her mother’s hopes. Had Tolstoy presented Vronsky as someone who was knowingly leading Kitty on, our tolerance would shade into judgement and our interest would shade into self-assured conviction that we have his number.  Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 51.  Ibid., 66. 129  Ibid., 67. 127 128

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In this limited drama, Tolstoy invites us to recognize major differences in each characters’ outlook on romantic attention, courtship, and marriage that are rooted in the personal histories that formed them as individuals. Their outlooks show through in how they understand Vronsky’s behaviour and respond to it. Tolstoy’s greatness lies in the fact that we can appreciate that there are moral differences here without being tempted to pick sides. Still more, we don’t take ourselves to know in advance how each character would respond were they to discover the extent of their conflict. What we’ve glimpsed of their thoughts, behaviours, and histories tells us that they are too complex to be reduced to archetypes whose actions and fates flow from the predestination of the simple qualities they exemplify. Tolstoy represents these characters as separate individuals, each having a right to exist and to pursue their own visions of the good life— and as all the more interesting for their independence from himself and each other. They attract and sustain what Murdoch describes as the endless task of understanding the other alongside the agnosticism of tolerance—that is to say, the freedom she connects with love. By reminding her readers of what love involves, Murdoch hoped to shed light on a form of freedom that was neglected by her contemporaries. Sublime tragic works of art invite us to exercise it in working out what to think about characters and their conflicts. Rather than the Alps, it is the diversity of human beings and the difficulty of understanding them “which brings the exhilaration and the power and reminds us, to use Kant’s words, of our supersensible destiny”.130 By inviting us to see that freedom is in question in how we regard others and not just discrete moments of decision-­making, Murdoch partially illuminates the value of great prose literature. What is still needed is a richer conception of what love is a freedom from: convention and neurosis. In her reclamation of the Kantian sublime, Murdoch provides us with a novel way to understand the human limitations that this experience, and great prose literature, disclose to us. For Kant, the mathematical sublime leads us to recognize a gap between what the imagination can represent and the vastness of nature. In this experience, we are momentarily frustrated by the limitations of our imagination. However, there is nothing “humbling or regrettable about this frustration. On the contrary, it brings with it a larger consciousness of the dignity of rationality”.131 While reason 130 131

 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 282.  Ibid., 283.

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might not yet comprehensively grasp the sublime scene, it intuits its own ability to pursue (if never fully realize) a systematic and exhaustive understanding of nature. It puts us in touch with a regulative idea of reason. While our powers of perception and memory are shown to be limited, reason’s powers are indefinite.132 Murdoch’s tragic sublime is not an experience prompted by the frustration of the imagination as such because loving freedom is itself “an exercise of the imagination”.133 In her moral psychology, Murdoch distinguishes between loving freedom, which we exercise in trying to respect the distinction between a real human being and our inadequate image of them, and the conventional and neurotic “energies” that make those inadequate images attractive to us. Conventionality and neurosis are the “two enemies of understanding, one might say the enemies of love”.134 Great prose literature like Anna Karenina is a source of “spiritual energy” that enables us to counteract these harmful psychological forces. We can understand Murdoch’s discussions of these energies as an extension of Simone Weil’s moral psychology. In a 1956 review of the first two volumes of The Notebooks of Simone Weil that she wrote for The Spectator (a British cultural and political affairs magazine), Murdoch notes that for Weil, the human psyche tends to operate like a set of “mechanical forces”, which are energized by our “low motives” (which are abundant and tend to determine the direction that our imagination goes in). We don’t become good by sheer force of willpower—rather, we need alternative sources of energy to support virtuous action.135 In her writings on art and literature from this period, Murdoch invites us to picture our own psyche as a battleground of warring energies; prose literature figures as a technique for exploring and controlling these energies, in part by inspiring love through the experience of the tragic sublime. As with her other uses of metaphors for inner experiences, this is not a “faute de mieux” placeholder for a literal description of the human psyche; it is a literary use of language that is vindicated insofar as it illuminates otherwise obscure human experiences and practices. Murdoch’s concern with conventionality can be traced back to her early writings on behaviourism. Throughout her early period writings, she notes  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 213.  Ibid., 216. 134  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 268–269. 135  Iris Murdoch, “Knowing the Void”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 158. 132 133

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that conventional and well-trodden habits of language-use play an ambivalent role in our cognitive lives. Sometimes, how things immediately seem to us is how they are; we have no need to dig deeper. We see at a glance that the person who winces and moans is in pain and that the steaming and whistling kettle has boiled. Murdoch accepts that the concepts we acquire through an ordinary upbringing enable us to see the world as it is. When we recognize something as something immediately, it can be like public conventions are flowing through me rather than like I’m using language agentially. This can be like the “touching of a spring, a mere reflex”.136 Nevertheless, our understanding of a concept’s meaning can become more idiosyncratic as we use it to illuminate our private experiences. In cases like these, determining what to think about a subject matter demands more of us. We sometimes sense that the descriptions that occur to us in this reflexive manner are inadequate and that we must struggle to find more imaginative ways to formulate our thoughts and experiences. In her writings on philosophy and literature, Murdoch shows how the reflexive force of convention operates in our dealings with others. There are ways of seeing persons and situations that are immediate and attractive to us. When convention is left to operate in us like a mechanical force, these thin descriptions will pass for adequate representations of their object. This can take place when, behaviouristically, we draw confident conclusions about another’s mental states on the basis of a limited stock of behavioural observations, as when the eponymous Daniel Deronda confidently concludes that Gwendolen intended for her husband to die when she had neither determined this for herself nor made a confidant of Deronda. We might also think of conventionality as operative in us when we find ourselves conversing by numbers. For Fromm, persons too often speak without concentration on the topic at hand or what is being said by their conversation partner. They “assert cliché opinions instead of thinking”, they give rote advice without really listening to how their interlocutor describes their problem.137 Conventionality is also closely linked with prejudice. For Murdoch, moral outrage against homosexuality was a particularly egregious example. She lamented that homophobia led many of her compatriots to assume that each homosexual individual was psychologically diseased, incapable of healthy relationships, or a seducer of minors. In the grip of conventional  Murdoch, “Nostalgia for the Particular”, 52.  Fromm, The Art of Loving, 96.

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complacency, prejudiced persons failed to take seriously the idea that these scorned individuals led lives that were valuable and interesting in their own right. In “The Moral Decision about Homosexuality”, Murdoch writes, “if there is illness here it is our society at large that is ill, in the sense of prejudiced or morally blind … What is needed is … just more humane and charitable recognition of our right to differ from one another”.138 While Murdoch would be happy to discuss the permissibility of seducing minors, the value of steady relationships, or the importance of honesty and loyalty, she denied that those were moral questions that attached in any special way to homosexual relationships. She writes, “Homosexuals in love can experience the same entire and unselfish devotion of body and soul to another which is characteristic of heterosexual love at its best”.139 Margaret Holland notes that Murdoch’s various discussions of convention “all involve the idea that a formulaic description is being substituted for a more demanding exploration of the nature of human life and individual persons”.140 We experience a work of art as sublime when we appreciate the inadequacy of our own over-simplifying, presumptuous, or prejudiced ways of thinking about others. This temporarily frees us from their powerful appeal. Great plays and novels introduce a countervailing energy: love, or the inspiration to take an interest in others as separate individuals by partaking in a great author’s attention to them. The second “enemy of love” Murdoch introduces is neurosis. While Sartre represents us as “isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey”, Murdoch counters that we are really “benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy”.141 The attractions of fantasy undermine our freedom because they prevent us from properly attending to other human beings. She writes, “We may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own.”142 While conventionality leads us to treat reality as simple and easily understood, when we are in the grip of fantasy we do not take ourselves to be answerable to reality at all. Instead, we view others as players in our own  Murdoch, “The Moral Decision about Homosexuality”, 73.  Ibid., 70–73. 140  Margaret Holland, “Social Convention and Neurosis as Obstacles to Moral Freedom”, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 260. 141  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 291. 142  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, 216. 138 139

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psychological dramas. Holland suggests that we should understand Murdoch’s use of this concept in light of “problems of self-centred egoism, anxiety, and obsession” that have been described by psychoanalysts throughout the twentieth century through to the present.143 Holland turns to David Shapiro to elaborate on the meaning of ‘neurosis’. He describes it as an ‘organizing feature of an individual’s personality’, relating to how one thinks, perceives, and experiences emotions. Shapiro characterizes neurosis as a rigidly focused attention which, because immobile, misses certain aspects of the world. The outcome of this inattention is a “lack of interest in real truth”.144 On Murdoch’s view, human beings tend to allow their consciousness to be over-determined by personal obsession and fears, with other persons disappearing from view in the process. For example, we hear concealed barbs in our colleague’s words because of our own deep feelings of inadequacy, or see our lover as a constant flight risk and cannot trust their assurances of their devotion because we have an intransigent fear of abandonment. Our neuroses give us an undue confidence that others are as we think they are, reducing them to fixed roles in our private, psychological dramas. Murdoch argues that great prose literature frees readers to view the characters independently from their own or the author’s personal neuroses. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “the individuals portrayed … are free, independent of their author, and not merely puppets in the exteriorisation of some closely locked psychological conflict of his own”.145 We are not given the impression that he is working out his own fears of abandonment by depicting Vronsky, a character who is inconstant in his romantic attachments. Vronsky is neither present in the story to confirm a thesis about the impossibility of lasting love nor punished to satisfy those who have been hurt in the past. He is a fully drawn human being who Tolstoy invites us to view tolerantly even if (tragically) his actions hurt Kitty. While Murdoch was critical of twentieth-century novels for reinforcing the power of our neurotic energies, she thought that great prose literature empowers us to resist it. Murdoch bemoaned the inadequacy of the terms of evaluation made available to her contemporaries through Kantian aesthetics. Its limitations, however, could not be shored up without first overcoming the “loss of  Holland, “Social Convention and Neurosis as Obstacles to Moral Freedom”, 261.  Ibid., 262–263. 145  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 271. 143 144

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concepts” she associated with the existentialist-behaviourist outlook. She writes, “We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world.”146 This empirical world includes human beings, here thought of as accessible to empirical observation through behaviour. What was wanting was a picture of the human being as substantial, individual, and recalcitrant to total comprehension. Similarly, freedom was pictured in terms of unconstrained decision-making and action; what was needed was “a different image of freedom”.147 In Murdoch’s writings on behaviourism, she addressed the first of these two needs. In her aesthetic writings, she set out the groundwork of this different image of freedom. By connecting it to the concepts of love and its enemies, she made it possible to develop a theory of art capable of living up to the Shakespeare Principle and explaining our pre-theoretical experiences of art. By developing a conceptual framework that clarifies what great literature frees us from (the attractions of conventionality and neurosis) and what it frees us to (love others with tolerance, humility, and imagination), Murdoch clarified what is distinctly valuable about Shakespearean tragedy and nineteenth-­ century realist novels.

Conclusion In the three papers we’ve been considering, Murdoch repeats the general pattern established in her earlier writings on behaviourism. In both of these sets of papers she reminds her readers of familiar (if increasingly rare, disoriented, and devalued) human practices with an eye to showing the limits of the conceptual framework that was available during the post-war period. In both, Murdoch identifies a conceptual lacuna responsible for the unintelligibility of the experience she recounts. Then, with her characteristic literary flair, Murdoch shows what can be gained when philosophers go to school with the poets. A poetic philosopher can help us to see how our words can be turned against convention and joined together in unexpected ways to clarify overlooked or distorted aspects of human life. Importantly, Murdoch’s interventions are not merely theoretical. She is keenly aware that her philosophical writings are not enough to help post-­ war subjects to overcome neurosis and conventionality and to achieve the moral discipline required for love. I don’t achieve self-discipline just by  Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, 293.  Ibid., 293.

146 147

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learning that I need it. Leafing through a self-help book is not a replacement for therapy any more than knowing the rules and being able to describe the major strategic approaches to chess makes me a grandmaster (or even particularly good at seeing when and how such strategies should be employed). It is through literature that we “can re-discover a sense of the density of our lives. Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy. … If it can be said to have a task, that surely is its task”.148 We might think of the voice of the great artist as a guiding hand helping us to practice as readers what we lack the discipline to achieve independently. But what role does this leave for the philosopher—and what is Murdoch trying to do in her own writings? Murdoch is animated by very concrete fears about the state of post-war culture and consciousness. By pairing her reflections on the pervasiveness of neurosis and conventionality in the 1950s with Fromm’s observations about the rise of narcissism, I’ve hoped to suggest that Murdoch was picking up on shifts in the culture that were genuinely there to be noticed. While Murdoch speaks of the increased difficulty of attention, Fromm speaks of concentration, but what he means is strikingly similar. For him, ‘concentration’ means the capacity to fully give oneself to an activity or a person and to treat them as the only thing that matters for that moment, thereby allowing them to “assume a new dimension of reality”.149 Where she speaks of the decline of a loving view of other human beings, Fromm describes a lack of objectivity, meaning the humility to see “the difference between my picture of a person and his behaviour, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears”.150 Their shared concern is a loss of understanding of love and the withering of the practice itself. Where they differ is in the kind of intervention they recommend in light of this diagnosis. Fromm views the sorry state of love in the post-war world as ultimately an indictment of the economic order and social conditions that undermine the personal virtues and capacities necessary for its practice. He writes “to analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence”.151 By contrast, Murdoch’s recommendation for  Ibid., 294.  Fromm, The Art of Loving, 95. 150  Ibid., 101. 151  Ibid., 112. 148 149

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improving the state of the art of loving is to renew the epoch’s appreciation for sublime tragic literature.152 What Murdoch offers in these writings is both theoretical and practical. To develop a critical standard of value and comparison is to ensure that her readers can explain and retain their pre-theoretical convictions about the greatness of Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century realists. It is these intuitions and not a formalist aesthetic theory that should be trusted in determining what one should read, recommend, and aspire to write oneself. To recognize that in Tolstoy we have an exemplar of a practice of loving attention is to know where to go looking for inspiration as we struggle to achieve that form of discipline as writers and in our everyday dealings with others. It is also to develop our own “sense of distance” from the ideal of freedom as love. The danger of lacking an articulated critical standard is that we will cease to believe in the greatness of Tolstoy, in the difficulty of understanding others, in our own profound fallibility, and in our need for external sources of inspiration and guidance such as those that sublime literature can provide. As she writes, “what we cannot explain we may cease to believe”.153 Murdoch spoke of the image of inner experience as substantial, describable events as a regulative idea. Its role is to orient and explain a familiar but increasingly devalued human practice. The idea of human separateness is connected to the notion that we each have richly idiosyncratic experiences the understanding and expression of which demands that we explore the poetic potentialities latent in ordinary words. It is not a necessary fact about us that we take our own individuality seriously by taking this kind of interest in our own experience. Articulating a regulative idea, Murdoch clarified this practice of self-reflection, both orienting her readers in it and helping us to see its point. In a similar vein, it is not a necessary fact about us that we attend to others as individuals. We don’t necessarily take an interest in how they differ from us in their experience of the world or understanding of their place in it. Far from it. It is not a necessary fact about us that we love others any more than it is a necessary fact about us that we appreciate, create, and 152  Fromm saw an important role for literature in fostering the art of loving; he does not specify what he means by “great works of literature and art of all ages” beyond that they present their readers with role models of spiritual quality—badly needed alternatives to the “movie stars, radio entertainers, columnists, important business or government figures” whose main qualification as role models is the sheer ability to make headlines (ibid., 98–99). 153  Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, 281.

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seek out works of art that exemplify and inspire the practice of love. The trends in twentieth-century literature that Murdoch was troubled by show this to be true. In describing love as a moral and aesthetic standard and articulating the energies in us that oppose its exercise, Murdoch was articulating an ideal necessary for orienting her readers in a fundamentally mutable and imperilled practice. Once again, reading Murdoch’s early writings as the work of a mind on the borders of literature and philosophy and against the backdrop of the practical fears that animated it shows us how they evade the reading that synoptic readers of Murdoch give to her work.

Bibliography Bowie, Andrew. 2003. Aesthetics and Subjectivity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Collingwood, R.  G. 2005. Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dilman, Ilham. 1987. Love and Human Separateness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Forsberg, Niklas. 2017. Iris Murdoch on Love. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love eds. Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fromm, Erich. 1956. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper and Row. Hampshire, Stuart. 1954. Logic and Appreciation. In Aesthetics and Language ed. William Elton, 161–169. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Holland, Margaret. 2012. Social Convention and Neurosis as Obstacles to Moral Freedom. In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. J.  Broackes, 255–274. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1952. Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, Margaret. 1954. Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts. In Aesthetics and Language ed. William Elton, 114–130. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Moran, Richard. 2012. Iris Murdoch and Existentialism. In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes, 181–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1950a. The Existentialist Hero. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 108–115. New York, Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1950b. The Novelist as Metaphysician. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 101–107. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1951/1998. Thinking and Language. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 33–42. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1952a. Nostalgia for the Particular. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 43–58. New York: Penguin.

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Murdoch, Iris. 1952b. The Existentialist Political Myth. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 130–145. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1956/1998. Knowing the Void. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 157–160. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1957/1998. Hegel in Modern Dress. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 146–150. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1958/1998. T. S. Eliot as a Moralist. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 161–170. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1959a. The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 261–286. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1959b. The Sublime and the Good. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 205–220. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1961/1998. Against Dryness. In: Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 287–295. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1965. The Moral Decision about Homosexuality. The Humanist 80: 70–73. Murdoch, Iris. 1967/1998. The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 363–385. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1970/1998. Literature and Philosophy. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 3–30. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1987. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. London: Chatto & Windus. Tolstoy, Leo. 2008. Anna Karenina (New York: Premier Classics). Turkis II, Martin. 2019. Post-Critical Platonism: Preliminary Meditations on Ethics and Aesthetics in Iris Murdoch and Michael Polanyi. Tradition and Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 45: 30–41.

CHAPTER 5

The Limits of Modern Moral Philosophy

Introduction In the previous chapters, I’ve recommended an approach to reading Murdoch’s early writings that focuses on three characteristic moves that she makes. First, she recounts familiar but philosophically neglected experiences in order to reveal the limited explanatory power of a dominant philosophical outlook or outlooks. This is a strategy for both identifying a conceptual lacuna and helping us to realize that it matters; far from curios or ephemera, the experiences she reminds us of relate to important human practices. Second, she introduces metaphysical metaphors, analogies, and imaginative uses of ordinary concepts to address the gap she identifies and to make it possible for us to think clearly about what we unreflectively do. Third, she casts these discussions against a backdrop of worrying cultural changes, suggesting that aspects of our way of life are mutable and genuinely under threat. We require a sense of the critical standards implicit in our practices of attention and an understanding of the discipline required to live up to them; with this in view, we can appreciate that the vitality of these practices requires something that theory alone cannot provide (but can point beyond itself towards): inspiration and guidance. Murdoch’s writings can be understood as a pointing finger, showing us where to go looking to find that support. This overall structure shaped her writings on behaviourism and the need for novels—her writings on moral philosophy and the state of post-war socialism also yield to this reading. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Jamieson, Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0_5

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In the trio of papers I focus on—“Metaphysics and Ethics”, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, and “A House of Theory”—Murdoch’s primary target is the dominant form of empiricism that informed understandings of the logic of moral language use and the limits of argument and that circumscribed the role of the political critic. R.  M. Hare’s ethical writings, for example, picture moral language use as justified by reference to empirical facts that the individual takes as moral reasons. The moral significance of those facts is, however, subjective. It is determined by an individual’s commitment to principles. No description of reality has inherent moral meaning. Non-naturalism and this focus on the individual as the unconstrained determiner of moral meaning are two strands of what Murdoch refers to as “the Current View” of moral agency. The other strand is a form of behaviourism that identifies an individual’s moral being with the actions that manifest her principles. Ethical discourse, in this view, cannot aspire to truth and evaluative concepts like ‘good’ cannot be defined in terms of empirical criteria. We cannot rationally compel others to see moral matters as we do, to choose as we would choose, absent agreement in principles. The role of a moral philosopher is not to moralize from scratch in that way; it is rather to lay bare the logical behaviour of moral concepts. Murdoch’s writings show that Hare’s philosophical theories crystallize—express and systematize—widespread public attitudes about moral judgement and the nature of reality. In doing so, they strengthen a dangerously narrow ideal of moral agency that leaves important practices to languish beyond the borders of the conceptual framework they establish. Attention to a wider set of moral practices and experiences help us to notice the presence of these borders and shows the need to discover new ways to picture moral agency and the world it operates within. This task is urgent, in that the practices that Hare neglects are not only mutable in principle— they were, like literature in the twentieth century, in decline in post-war Britain. Murdoch’s writings on moral philosophy are directly connected to her diagnosis of the decline of the spirit of socialism, pointing beyond themselves to the kinds of resources needed to correct course. In these writings, Murdoch exploits the advantages of having a mind on the borders of philosophy, literature, and politics, engaging in poetic clarification with an eye to addressing pressing political dangers. They thus invite us to appreciate the importance of the language of philosophy and the possibility of practicing philosophy with moral—even political—commitment without simply preaching.

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Ethical Non-Naturalism and the Development of the Current View While one of Murdoch’s primary interlocutors in her 1950s writings on moral philosophy is Hare, she often avoids naming him directly. In disagreeing with the view he espoused in The Language of Morals, she is disagreeing with something much greater in scope and importance than one book or one philosopher. Hare is one representative of a set of methodological commitments and substantive philosophical positions that she dubs “the Current View”. As we’ve seen, Murdoch tends to view the philosophical landscape in terms of patterns and historical trends, drawing together strange bedfellows like Ayer and Sartre in the process. The Current View represents a crystallization of beliefs and attitudes that belong to the culture at large. It is no ivory tower plaything. Hare exemplifies these beliefs, but also represents an important way that philosophical views can develop on the basis of unspoken moral commitments, shaped by one’s sense of what matters and what possibilities must be guarded against. For Murdoch, understanding Hare’s views fully requires that we answer the question “what is he afraid of, and what might he have been trying to erect a barrier against in his writings?”1 This question is drawn from one of her later essays, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, but the view that her post-war contemporaries were “erecting a barrier, special to one’s own temperament, against one’s own personal fears” is implicit in her discussions of the Current View. For Murdoch, investigating this question reveals Hare to be a moral philosopher, not merely with respect to his subject matter; his work is underwritten by an empiricist rejection of substantive metaphysics that is itself an expression of liberal ideology. The British strand of the Current View developed out of twentieth-­ century analytic philosophy. Its primary method is linguistic analysis, and it is committed to an atomistic empiricism and opposition to metaphysical speculation. One of its most central features, non-naturalism, is part of the legacy of G. E. Moore and the Principia Ethica. Proponents of the Current View accept Moore’s conclusion that ‘good’ is not a concept that can be defined in terms of any natural property such as “is conducive to pleasure”.2 1  Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 359. 2  Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 59.

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However, Moore did not think that this meant that goodness was not real or that it couldn’t be known. The unanalysability of ‘good’ did not mean that this concept should be treated as if it belonged to a totally different kind of language than our empirical concepts. Moore argued that we should treat ‘good’ as a concept that names a simple non-natural property, best understood through an analogy with another simple concept: ‘yellow’. As Alisdair MacIntyre puts it, “Yellow and good, we say, are not complex: they are notions out of which definitions are composed and with which the power of further defining comes”.3 While someone might attempt to define ‘yellow’ in terms of the specific wavelengths of light that produce the effect of us seeing yellow, just as someone might attempt to define ‘good’ in terms of the specific pleasures we experience when something is good, these synthetic associations presuppose rather than clarify the concepts in question. In the case of ‘good’, we are never precluded from asking whether a natural property such as pleasure is good in itself. The very idea of a pleasure that is not good is a perfectly sensical one. One corollary of the claim that ‘good’ is undefinable is that moral knowledge is non-inferential. I don’t learn that something is good by making an inference that carries me from an empirical description of the world to an evaluative conclusion. Instead, moral knowledge is acquired through a perception-like faculty of intuition. While subsequent philosophers would carry Moore’s commitment to ethical non-naturalism forward, they would reject his intuitionist moral epistemology along with the claim that moral statements are in the business of describing reality at all. For example, Ayer shares in Moore’s view that it is “not self-contradictory to say that some pleasant things are not good, or that some bad things are desired; it cannot be the case that the sentence ‘x is good’ is equivalent to ‘x is pleasant’ or to ‘x is desired’”.4 But unlike Moore, Ayer argues that the logical behaviour of moral concepts precludes substantive moral statements from being literally meaningful. While we can of course use ‘good’ to discuss the word itself (e.g., when we report on how individuals or communities use of the concept), as a predicate it adds nothing to the content of statements it appears in.5 The assertion that something is good does not describe or license me to predict future sense experiences. While Moore might respond that goodness makes a difference for our non-­perceptual experience of  Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: MacMillan, 1966), 250.  A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Penguin, 1971), 105. 5  Ibid., 103. 3 4

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intuition, Ayer writes, “unless it is possible to provide some criterion by which one may decide between conflicting intuitions, a mere appeal to intuition is worthless as a test of a proposition’s validity”.6 It tells us nothing more than that the individual has had a special sort of feeling towards something and is disposed to do things like assert “such-and-such is good” and demand that the others who challenge this claim reconsider. Ayer concludes that the role substantive moral statements play in our language is something other than description and prediction. It is the expression of emotions of opprobrium and approval.7 Hare would take up elements of Ayer’s view, but his position, universal prescriptivism, is designed to shore up the descriptive and ethical shortcomings he saw in it. MacIntyre notes that both philosophers affirm: the moral neutrality of philosophical analysis, the logical gap between fact and value, [and] the interminability of disagreement … What is altered in [Hare] is the attention paid to two intimately related topics: the question of the criteria which are employed in calling things, acts, or people good or bad, and the question of the nature of moral reasoning.8

Hare shares in the view that moral philosophy is “the logical study of morals” and not in the business of recommending particular moral principles or evaluations.9 In The Language of Morals, he focuses on the logical structure of moral concepts such as ‘ought’, ‘right’, and ‘good’, the criteria justifying particular uses of these concepts in evaluative judgement, and the relationship between purely factual premises and imperative or evaluative conclusions in moral reasoning. Like Ayer, he excludes “the psychology of morals” from the scope of moral philosophy proper.10 Hare and Ayer part ways on the question of whether moral discourse is really as rational as it appears at first glance. In ordinary practice, Hare notes, we celebrate the virtues of persons who exercise responsibility in moral decision-making rather than making arbitrary or externally determined choices. We stress the importance of self-criticism and the careful refinement of principle. Moral philosophy should study and help us to understand this. Similarly, it should be responsive to what we disapprove of: dogmatic  Ibid., 106.  Ibid., 107. 8  MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 260. 9  R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), iii. 10  Hare, The Language of Morals, iv. 6 7

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conventionality and intolerance. For Murdoch, it is no accident that the moral agent that Hare describes has essentially liberal virtues. He’s someone who thinks for himself, decides his own values, and respects each person’s right to do the same. He’s definitely not the sort who would be caught up in the conformist fervor of fascism. Hare, Murdoch notes, expresses the values and fears of a world that had “not recovered from two wars and the experience of Hitler”.11 Hare’s attention to the logical structure of moral argument and disagreement led to a major development in the history of ethical non-­ naturalism. Ayer had claimed that the judgement that one should do Φ is compatible with the judgment that one should not do Φ (even under identical circumstances). Hare denied that this was faithful to the character of moral discourse as we know it. First, it is a mistake to claim that these judgements are about the speaker’s emotional response to something rather than the object of the moral judgement itself. To make this point, he draws a parallel between the imperative “You should shut the door” and the moral judgement “you should not have told that lie”. He writes, “It seems strange to represent a remark about shutting the door as a remark about what is going on in my mind”.12 Similarly, “you shouldn’t have told that lie” is naturally read as a remark about the lie, not the speaker’s attitude. Furthermore, Ayer helps himself to a peculiar understanding of expression. Hare writes: Artists and composers and poets are said to express their own and our feelings; oaths are said to express anger; and dancing upon the table may express joy. Thus, to say that imperatives express wishes may lead the unwary to suppose that what happens when we use one, is this: we have welling up inside us a kind of longing, to which, when the pressure gets too great for us to bear, we give vent by saying an imperative sentence.13

Ayer seems to equate the stating of a moral judgement to an involuntary wince of pain when a moment’s reflection would reveal that we’re often deliberate and placid when we, for example, tell a friend that they should have returned their library books on time.

11  Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 287. 12  Hare, The Language of Morals, 6. 13  Ibid., 10.

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For Hare, moral judgements are unlike expressions of emotion in that they can indeed contradict one another—albeit not in quite the same way as two empirical statements. To show this, he examines the logical relations between indicative and imperative statements. Imperative statements are like descriptive statements in that they admit of assent. In the indicative case, assent signals that our interlocutor agrees with our prediction or description of the world. In the imperative case, assent signals their resolve to follow our advice or command when the time is right. This logical structure is reflected in how we determine whether someone’s assent was sincerely meant. If they fail to perform the action prescribed when the relevant circumstances arise and have no excuse, we question whether they really meant it when they nodded. Some assent is a matter of belief, some is a matter of commitment.14 In keeping with non-naturalism, Hare denies that an imperative or evaluative conclusion can be entailed by an indicative statement alone. There is no set of characteristics such that any painting that possesses them is necessarily a good painting. Moreover, even if there happened to be a set of characteristics that every painting we called ‘good’ shared in common, it would deform what we mean when we say “that’s a good painting” if we supposed that to be a good painting just means possessing those characteristics. What would be missing from this naturalistic analysis is our commendation. Hare concludes, “The proposed definition would prevent our saying something that we do succeed in saying meaningfully in our ordinary talk”.15 Similarly, that an action would be a lie does not entail that one should not do it.16 That being said, claims about how a person ought to act can be implied by a combination of a factual minor premise (e.g., that the proposed action would be a lie) and a universal evaluative major premise (e.g., one should not tell lies).17 That this action is a lie would imply that this person should not do it if they also assent to the major premise and resolve not to tell lies. Contradiction re-enters moral discourse here—it is contradictory to resolve not to lie and yet to lie.18 We begin to see how Hare reconciles non-naturalism with the rationality of moral discourse. Moral concepts like ‘good’ or ‘wrong’ do not have  Ibid., 20.  Ibid., 85–86. 16  Ibid., 33. 17  Ibid., 28. 18  Ibid., 50. 14 15

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descriptive meaning such that one must conclude that particular objects are good or actions wrong on the basis of some set of non-moral facts. It is up to the individual to determine what empirical criteria to base their judgments on by committing themselves to evaluative standards and universal moral principles. The descriptive meaning of ‘good painting’ or ‘good car’ can thus vary between individuals (although in practice we often converge—Hare notes that most of his contemporaries would agree that calling something a ‘good car’ implies that “it’ll do 80 and never breaks down”).19 Despite this variability in descriptive content, moral concepts have universal evaluative meanings. Whenever I call a painting ‘good’, I commend it. Whenever I call an action ‘wrong’, I prescribe that it not be done.20 This is enough for moral discourse to be evaluable in terms of consistency. The structure of moral judgement is rational and syllogistic; there is a major premise (a moral principle) that, when paired with the relevant minor premise (an empirical fact), implies that one is resolved to do, refrain from, recommend, or warn against particular actions or objects under the right circumstances. According to Hare, moral judgement also differs from emotional expression because it is prescriptive. When I am committed to a moral principle, I hold myself and every other moral agent to its standard and believe that others should share in my judgements. Principles partake of the same “subjective universality” as Kant’s apodictic judgements of taste. While a principle can be nuanced, admitting of exceptional cases and extenuating circumstance, there are no persons exempted solely on the basis of who they are. Hare clarifies this position by following Ernst Gellner’s distinction between “E-type” judgements and “U-type” judgements.21 The former are judgements that flow from principles that cannot be specified without the use of proper names or logical constants. Replacing these with universals would change the meaning of the principle and miss the spirit of the judgement. U-type judgements are those which can be made on the basis of “a rule wholly devoid of any personal reference, a rule containing merely predicates (descriptions) and logical terms”.22

 Ibid., 118.  Ibid., 97–100. 21  Ernst Gellner, “Ethics and Logic”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1955), 157–178. 22  R. M. Hare, “Universalizability”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1955), 295. 19 20

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Imagine someone with a personal commitment to be honest with his partner Alfred. In difficult conversations where he confronts Alfred with painful truths, he comforts himself that he’s living up to the principle “Never lie to Alfred”. This honesty policy does not, however, carry over to his relationships with others (he’s not even sure that, should he someday find himself with a different lover, he’d extend this commitment to that person. Alfred is special). Furthermore, he wouldn’t bat an eye if someone else were to tell their romantic partner white lies on occasion. This would be an example of an E-type principle in that it articulates the speaker’s partiality to one individual (Alfred) and includes a proper name that could not be exchanged for a universal like ‘one’s partner’ without changing its meaning. Properly, moral judgements flow from an individual’s commitment to U-Type principles like “one should never lie to one’s partner”, which tell us what figures as a reason for this person whenever it arises and what they think others should do under relevantly similar circumstances. According to Hare, “a reason cannot be a reason on just this occasion, and not on other similar occasions, any more than a rule of inference can apply in this case, but not in similar cases”.23 While Hare distinguishes moral judgements from expressions of preference or emotion, he agrees with Ayer that they are subjective. According to Hare, the principles that are explicit or implicit in our moral reasoning are chosen rather than discovered through some faculty of intuition or other cognitive means. To suppose that our principles are in some way self-evident would violate our experience of making difficult moral judgements, where what is in question is both what to do in the present and whether our principles should be modified to admit of exceptions or held firm. Our judgements are implied by our principles, and we are often at a loss about what judgements we should make; it follows, Hare argues, that we doubt our principles too.24 That we do so defines our freedom. Our principles are not fixed in place. A past commitment does not take matters out of our hands in the present—we are free to decide whether (and if so, how) they should be modified when we decide what to do. Each moment of decision about what to do is also a “decision of principle”.25 The careful modification of our moral principles proceeds from what Hare describes as a form of “perception” that develops over the course of our lives. We learn to  Hare, “Universalizability”, 297.  Hare, The Language of Morals, 41. 25  Ibid., 52. 23 24

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perceive that two cases of a given action type are unlike one another and to allow this perception to alter our principles. For example, I learn to perceive that a lie told to prevent a murder is significantly different from a lie told to avoid being held responsible for wrongdoing—and my commitment to never lying becomes a commitment to never lie except to save lives.26 “There is an infinite variety of possible first-order principles; to decide between these is our job as autonomous rational agents.”27 For Hare, it matters deeply how we exercise our freedom. It is, he notes, the “oldest and most ineradicable vice of moralists” to refuse to make moral decisions, especially by offloading them onto external sources of authority like the Ten Commandments or our parents.28 Such a person is inflexible and fails to take the demands of the concrete situations he encounters seriously by allowing that it might present special considerations he’ll need to adjust his principles in light of.29 In raising our children, we shouldn’t indoctrinate them to be uncritical clones of ourselves; we should prepare them to think for themselves and to face the unique conditions of the historical situation that they find themselves in. Children should “learn to use ‘ought’-sentences in the realization that they can only be verified by reference to a standard or set of principles which [they] have by [their] own decision accepted and made [their] own”.30 Against traditionally minded people who accused the youth of post-war Britain of moral decline, Hare celebrated their experimental spirit and independence of mind. Conservative dogmatism is one extreme; a refusal of commitment is the Scylla to that Charybdis. Hare warns against “the neurotic indetermination of the man who cannot ever make up his mind what he ought to do, even in comparatively familiar situations, because he is never satisfied that he has exhausted their infinite particularity”.31 It is important that one gets straight about the facts before deciding. For Hare, that means achieving an accurate and evaluatively neutral grasp of them (although this ideal is not always achievable in practice—it can be difficult to purge our thinking of loaded terms and emotional bias in the heat of the moment).32 But one must after  Ibid., 54.  Hare, “Universalizability”, 303. 28  Ibid., 302. 29  Ibid., 310. 30  Hare, The Language of Morals, 78. 31  Hare, “Universalizability”, 310. 32  Hare, The Language of Morals, 58. 26 27

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all decide. Better to be internally consistent and principled than to dither without a moral centre of gravity. Both of these extremes are forms of shirking responsibility and failing to exercise one’s autonomy by deciding for oneself how to bridge the gap between fact and value. Like Ayer, Hare has strong views about the scope of moral philosophy, drawing a sharp distinction between the subject matter that falls properly within its scope and what lies beyond. Outside, we find moral psychology, metaphysics, and the defence of substantive moral judgements; inside, we find examinations of the logical structure of our ordinary moral language use, definitions of various moral concepts, and discussions of the sorts of definitions that are possible. By distinguishing between the descriptive and evaluative meanings of moral concepts, Hare preserves the rational structure of moral discourse while recognizing the role that free individuals play in deciding for themselves how fact and value connect. These concepts cannot be authoritatively defined by anything external to one’s own autonomous will, including one’s family, religion, or nationalist dogma. The only limits that circumscribe what can count as a moral judgement or action are set by the formal features that define what a moral judgement is. To be moral, our judgements must derive from principles that have a distinct form—being U-type principles rather than E-type—and so must connect moral judgements to descriptive contents that we think are moral reasons in all cases and would prescribe for all agents. This means that moral agents are answerable to formal criteria like universality and consistency, but not to substantive constraints on the content of their principles—to the point that, as Philippa Foot notes, Hare would have to call “one shouldn’t step on the sidewalk cracks” a moral principle if it met his formal criteria.33 To each their own. While his study of morals was largely logical, his concerns with how individuals exercise their autonomy reveals Hare’s own liberal ideals. A moral agent should be factual (but not too worried about details), active, undogmatic, and independently minded. Moreover, his approach is shaped by the assumption a person’s morals can be analyzed without reference to metaphysical beliefs—we only need to know what facts a person took as reasons in a given case and how he acted to learn about his moral substance. Such persons might have metaphysical beliefs about the existence of God or the inevitability of the historical development of global 33  Philippa Foot, “When is a Principle a Moral Principle?” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 28 (1954), 105–108.

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Communism, but these are at most relevant to how particular individuals exercise their autonomy (e.g., how rigid their principled moral commitments are). In responding to Hare, Murdoch challenges his view of the scope of moral philosophy, his commitment to the fact–value distinction, and the claim that there is a necessary connection between substantive metaphysics and social dangers like dogmatism and intolerance. A faith in moral truth can actually protect us from these dangers and promote a form of moral self-criticism that Hare neglects. As we shall see, this neglect, characteristic of Hare and the Current View more generally, had practical implications for the political culture of post-war Britain that worried Murdoch and motivated her to intervene.

Moral Difference and Moral Learning In “Vision and Choice in Morality”, Murdoch’s aim is to challenge the Current View in moral philosophy by bringing “certain moral data into conflict with … the descriptive-evaluative view of moral concepts”.34 As we have seen, Hare set out to overcome the shortcomings of Ayer’s emotivism, respecting the rationality of moral discourse and the evils of dogmatism and intolerance while denying that moral concepts like ‘good’ and ‘ought’ have choice-independent criteria of application. According to Murdoch, Hare’s narrow sampling of moral concepts led him to overlook the shortcomings of his preferred descriptive-evaluative analysis. This echoes both the way that Ryle’s neglect of inwardly directed reflection gave the false impression that a behavioural analysis could cover the full range of mental phenomena and the way that neglect of great literature gave post-war aesthetic theorists unfounded confidence that questions of characterization were irrelevant to aesthetic criticism. She issues the following methodological warning and recommendation: A narrow or partial selection of phenomena may suggest certain particular techniques which will in turn seem to lend support to that particular selection; and then a circle is formed out of which it may be hard to break. It is therefore advisable to return frequently to an initial survey of ‘the moral’ so as to reconsider, in the light of a primary apprehension of what morality is, what our technical devices actually do for us.35 34  Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin: 1998), 84. 35  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 76–77.

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While Hare acknowledges that evaluative meaning pervades our language—many of our descriptive nouns, verbs, and modifiers have clear evaluative connotations—he excludes these from his analysis.36 This reinforces the appearance that we only use moral concepts to prescribe, commend, communicate our commitments, and decide how to act; we don’t use them to understand the empirical world of human beings, complicated events, and situations in which we choose. This has further implications for what we take moral freedom to look like. In what should be by now a familiar contrast, freedom pertains to decision-making and action, not love, understanding, and resistance to powerful cognitive habits. Murdoch responds to Hare and the Current View “by appeal[ing] to a certain range of ‘moral data’ to suggest that the current model illuminates and describes only a certain type or area of moral life, and that if we attempt to construe all moral activities in terms of it we are led to ignore important differences between sets of concepts”.37 She discloses the limitations of a dominant philosophical and cultural outlook by reminding her readers of familiar experiences that it fails to take seriously. In this case, her aim is to return us to the familiar ways that individuals differ amongst one another in their moral visions of the world and, relatedly, in how they use and understand concepts; she reminds us that we assess these visions and understandings in light of epistemic standards. Making sense of what we do thus demands changes to our conceptual framework. We’ve seen that for Hare, moral differences are fundamentally differences of decision and of the criteria that each individual takes up in their use of moral concepts like ‘ought’ and ‘good’. There are, thus, morally significant conceptual differences between people, but these are limited to these sorts of concepts and rooted in how individuals decide how to act from case to case in light of the non-moral facts and their commitment to universal moral principles. While the universal prescriptive character of these judgements means that we do criticize others for not acting as we think they should have and for not sharing our principled commitments, we cannot justify our criticism by pointing to external standards of truth against which moral agents might be measured. Moreover, it’s best to respect others’ right to make up their own minds. Hare’s framework leaves three possible objects for moral criticism. First, we can criticize another person for their ignorance of the facts relevant to a  Hare, The Language of Morals, 58.  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 92.

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particular decision, for example, for being inattentive, or believing falsehoods in spite of the evidence. Second, we might criticize someone for the quality of their commitments. For example, we are critical of those who dogmatically fail to reflect on their commitments or act for E-type rather than U-type principles when impartiality is called for (e.g., someone who has no qualms with lying to all and sundry with the exception of one special person in their lives—the honesty among co-­conspirators is not properly moral). Finally, we can criticize someone for failing to consistently align their actions with their stated moral commitments. Murdoch admits that these standards represent a widely held ideal of responsible moral agency and “key concepts of our general social morality (freedom, tolerance, factual arguments) … [that] have become practically unconscious and are taken for granted”.38 Hare’s picture crystallized something that had the ring of common sense in post-war British culture. While the substance of my neighbour’s world view is none of my business, my respect for him diminishes if I think that he has no principles at all, he’s a hypocrite, or he’s not suitably concerned with the facts or aware of his surroundings. According to Murdoch, the Current View obscures a different kind of moral criticism. While Hare’s moral critic treats a person’s actions as a manifestation of their principled commitments, she thinks that we sometimes link their sayings, doings, and comportment to something far less simple and communicable than a principle. She calls this “personal vision”.39 She writes: When we apprehend and assess other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something more elusive which may be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny: in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation.40

Others can differ from us in profound ways that are evidenced by their most mundane behaviours and modes of comportment, the minutiae of how they live. These are the sorts of differences we notice when someone tells a story in an unintuitive way, highlighting details that we find  Ibid., 89.  Ibid., 78. 40  Ibid., 81. 38 39

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irrelevant or dull, and leaving out important details that we then have to prod them to include. Some of what Murdoch lists as evidence of personal vision might be judged in prescriptivist terms. Someone who omits details from a story might be lying by omission and applying their moral principles inconsistently. Importantly, this would miss what we’re often really noticing in situations like this. Where deceit is not my concern, I often find myself simply struck by what this person is like and how they think, given this is how they talk about this sort of incident. The storyteller’s behaviour reveals their outlook on the world, or vision. Of course, sometimes these differences inspire us with admiration or interest rather than criticism— clearly Murdoch was struck favourably by Tolstoy’s vision, as evidenced by how he told stories. What she wants to remind us of is that beyond principles, decisions, and actions, “we do to a considerable extent include the area in question in our moral assessments of others and indeed of ourselves”.41 Consider, for example, a professional colleague who regularly interrupts others in conversation. This person prioritizes the correction of what we take to be insignificant errors of detail or grammar over allowing others to contribute to the substance of a conversation. Sometimes we are critical of this behaviour because it is evidence of their overall outlook on the world, especially what they notice (e.g., minor grammatical mistakes in others’ speech) and what they are insensitive to (e.g., that interruptions can discourage someone from participating further in a conversation). ‘Pedantic’ does not describe one conversational misstep; it applies to patterns of comportment that disclose someone’s defective understanding of what a conversation is and the place it should have in human life. Importantly, the difference marked by this concept is not reducible to a disagreement of principle. Two persons might agree in the abstract about when talk amongst people is mere chatter rather than a real conversation and accept the same principles (e.g., that a conversation devolves into a lecture if the exchange is too one-sided, and that it devolves into talking past one another if the participants are unwilling to take one another’s claims into account before speaking). Agreement in the abstract does not preclude us from disagreeing about when these criteria are met in practice and thus ultimately not sharing in an understanding of the “degree of generality of a moral word”.42

 Ibid., 81.  Ibid., 94.

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This type of experience is familiar enough, but it has two features that make it invisible to the Current View. First, the object of criticism is not an action; it is the vision and configuration of thought that we begin to discern how someone’s actions, reactions, and overall comportment hang together. Second, we are critical of our colleague’s personal vision because he cannot see something that is there to be seen (i.e., that his interruptions are unwarranted and that they derail conversation). This cannot be captured in terms of internal consistency or non-moral epistemic failings. Suppose we tried to explain the critique of pedantry in terms of a failure of consistency between what one avows and what one does. We might, for example, take umbrage at our colleague’s hypocrisy in wagging a finger of shame at others who derail conversations when he’s guilty of this himself. It’s important to notice that this would be something further to the claim that our colleague is pedantic. We would not feel differently about what our colleague’s behaviour seemingly amounts to if they harmonized their principles, judgements, and conduct (e.g., by admitting that they are committed to stopping the flow of conversation to get the facts straight and stopped judging others for doing this). A principled interrupter can still be pedantic. It should also be clear that there are many cases where someone is pedantic without being committed to this in a principled way. People who behave pedantically might not even notice what they do (much less avow that it is what everyone similarly situated ought to do). The critique of pedantry is not about the wrongness of particular actions or the commitments of the person who acts in this way—rather, the person’s behaviour is taken as evidence of something subtler and deeper, that is, the personal vision that underlies how our colleague sees the world and that shapes his inner and outer behaviour. Furthermore, focusing on commitment to principle makes it difficult to explain why it is hard to stop behaving pedantically. The Current View pictures the moral agent as always free to change his moral commitments and revise his principles. There is nothing to stop someone from choosing to act differently going forward.43 Murdoch objects to this picture of moral change. She notes that an outlook is “deep, ramified, hard to change and not easily open to argument”.44 Our pedantic colleague’s approval of errorcorrecting interruptions is linked to how he sees his actions (as helpful and conducive to good conversation); this approval cannot be withdrawn  Ibid., 83.  Ibid., 84.

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without learning to see his actions and the nature of conversation in a new light. He needs to learn to see something that is beyond his current understanding, not just take in facts that had previously escaped his notice but were otherwise readily available to his view. This cannot be achieved through good will alone, especially if he doesn’t even suspect that he is oblivious to something. Among other things, change can require outside help in the form of the communication of a new and far-reaching vision.45 I’ll return to the question of how such communication takes place in due time. For now, it’s important just to see that a renewed understanding of one’s conversational comportment is not achieved by the adoption of principles. It is more promising to think that criticism of personal vision pertains to a failure to act with a suitable knowledge of the non-moral facts. When we critique someone’s personal vision, we believe that they cannot see something that is there to be seen. In the case of our pedantic colleague, he does not see that his interruptions are unwarranted or that they derail the conversation rather than enhancing it. However, these are not non-­moral facts; I judge that a conversation is going badly and that my colleague’s interruption was not called for when I judge that he has derailed the conversation. According to Hare, our use of evaluative concepts should be analyzed into two components: the specification of the non-­moral facts and the appending of an evaluation, where the latter is achieved by implicitly or explicitly committing ourselves to a universal moral principle. This runs afoul of the realist phenomenology of the experience in question. It is not the case that my colleague and I inhabit the same world of facts—someone has interrupted another speaker and corrected a grammatical error—but differ in that I choose to append a negative evaluative concept to this and all relevantly similar conduct by calling it ‘pedantic’. Murdoch writes: Here moral differences look less like differences of choice, given the same facts, and more like differences of vision. In other words, a moral concept seems less like a movable and extensible ring laid down to cover a certain area of fact, and more like a total difference of Gestalt. We differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds.46

 Ibid., 82.  Ibid., 82.

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I don’t choose the scope of ‘pedantic’ when I apply it to my colleague’s patterns of conversational behaviour; I live in a world in which I can see pedantry and am critical of those whose vision is defective in this respect. Without overcoming the fact–value distinction, we cannot fully make sense of what it is to assess someone’s sensitivity to evaluative facts. Murdoch’s discussions help us to notice that our language is rife with choice-independent evaluative concepts. This complements Philippa Foot’s discussion of this topic in “Moral Arguments”. Foot examines the logic of condemnatory concepts like ‘rudeness’ and argues that they evade analysis in non-cognitivist terms. We only conclude that someone’s behaviour is rude if certain descriptive conditions are met, and in such cases, can only revoke it once we are given reasons for doing so. The kinds of reasons that can play this role are determined by public convention, not by individual choice; according to the conventions operative at the time Foot was writing, it was rude to wear flannels at a formal dinner party and someone who did so was conclusively rude (unless they had a good excuse).47 I cannot just decide that certain kinds of behaviour are rude without convention on my side; to use this word without regard for these criteria is to leave behind the concept itself.48 While similar, Murdoch’s claim is more expansive than Foot’s. She would agree that there are evaluative facts that are not determined by an individual’s choices. However, while Foot’s argument challenges the claim that we choose how we apply evaluative concepts, Murdoch’s challenge is addressed to the claim that non-moral facts are immediately present to me and that my moral judgements are based on them. For Murdoch, the moral quality of what I see or think about is not an add-on laid atop the non-moral facts according to choice or convention. The realities of good conversation and pedantic derailment are disclosed to me by my vision and understanding of the relevant concepts. What we need are ways of making sense of the realist phenomenology of the mode of moral criticism Murdoch reminds her readers of in these discussions. A second lacuna in the Current View’s conceptual framework appears when we reflect on conceptual forms of moral learning. Throughout Murdoch’s early writings, she repeatedly returns to the idea that our habitual or conventional ways of thinking are rife with limitations such that we

 Philippa Foot, “Moral Arguments”, in Mind 67 (1958), 507–508.  Foot, “Moral Arguments”, 508.

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need to continually renew our language.49 She carries this through her essays on moral philosophy, writing: “There are situations which are obscure and people who are incomprehensible, and the moral agent, as well as the artist, may find himself unable to describe something which in some sense he apprehends”.50 When we do overcome this limit, the resulting change is not best described atomistically, as if one new word had been added to our vocabulary and one kind of fact brought to our notice. Murdoch writes, “Here, communication of a new moral concept cannot necessarily be achieved by specification of factual criteria open to any observer … but may involve the communication of a completely new, possibly far-reaching and coherent, vision”.51 The renewal of language is a holistic experience. A renewed understanding of a concept is internally related to one’s total vision of life and puts one in fresh touch with an unpredictable range of particular facts. This experience is familiar, but the Current View can neither respect its realism nor explain its holism. We can appreciate the familiarity of this experience and recognize its features with an example drawn from her 1958 essay, “A House of Theory”. In this article, Murdoch bemoans that the concept ‘alienation’ is no longer widely used even by socialists. Without this resource, workers and socialists concerned with labour issues have lost the power to adequately describe the experience of wage labour in relation to an ideal of what work should look like, given the kind of beings that we are. She describes this ideal as: the vision of an ideal community in which work would once again be creative and meaningful, and human brotherhood would be restored; whereas now the working classes were deracinate and disinherited, human nature both in them and in their masters mutilated and divided: all that could be summed up in the Hegelian concept of ‘alienation’.52

We can appreciate the holism of moral learning by seeing the relationship between this vision of meaningful labour and unmutilated human nature, a refined grasp of the concept ‘alienation’, and the capacity to discern particular facts about one’s own and others’ working lives.53 49  Iris Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 35–6. 50  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 90. 51  Ibid., 82. 52  Iris Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 172. 53  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 183.

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Consider the case of a barista working for a major coffee shop franchise. While unhappy with her situation, she recognizes that on the whole she is better off than many others in her situation in that her boss is friendly and accommodating with scheduling. Comparing her situation to that of people living in countries without socialized medicine, she appreciates that what she needs to survive is secured by a combination of her wages and the provisions of a liberal welfare state. And yet the barista feels a deep but unnamed frustration, dimly apprehending that she is being wronged by her boss. Dwelling on this apprehension, she comes to see the source of her frustration is the strict set of procedures that the business owner has instructed all workers to follow. She sees the good sense of some of them. Regular hand-washing and sanitizing is always a good idea! She also thinks that some rules sacrifice worker dignity for the sake of company branding and prioritize negligible increases in productivity over worker comfort. For example, her workplace has a mandatory uniform policy and her managers constantly repeat the mantra “if you can lean, than you can clean” and berate employees who rest during lulls in customer traffic. Many of the workplace policies play an important role as rules of thumb that help new employees learn the ropes but don’t reflect how a skilled employee would do things if allowed to exercise her own creative judgement. These rules regiment the barista’s behaviour and prevent her from bringing her own insights to bear on how drinks are prepared or how she interacts with customers. We can imagine this barista being able to connect her mounting sense of frustration to these overly rigid and senseless rules, but she lacks the concept needed to “say just why what is felt to be wrong is wrong”.54 Suppose, however, that the barista begins sharing these feelings with a socialist friend who helps her to see this management style as an example of a general type of workplace organization called ‘Fordism’,55 and to understand her frustration in terms of her alienation from her powers of creative judgement. According to Murdoch, we should not picture this as  Ibid., 182.  According to Woodhall and Muszynski, some coffee shop settings can be characterized as Fordist. Fordist production is a style of scientific workplace management characterized by high levels of managerial direction and control, standardizing and routinizing work tasks, breaking labour down scientifically into its component parts, and eliminating the need for skill or organizational judgement on the part of individual workers. Julia R. Woodhall and Alicja Muszynski, “Fordism at Work in Canadian Coffee Shops”, Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 17 (2011), 57–59. 54 55

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the new acquisition of a single concept that enables her to name a fact that was otherwise available to her. The word may well have been familiar enough to her, though its sense maybe limited to youth with dyed black hair who don’t feel represented by popular media or political parties. The renewal of this concept comes through the acquisition of a new vision of what a human being is, namely a being whose flourishing requires the exercise of creative powers rather than just wages sufficient to meet bare survival needs. In light of this renewal of language and vision, the barista can finally make sense of her work experiences. Murdoch describes this kind of conceptual change as a global gestalt-­ shift that has far-reaching ramifications for how one sees the world.56 In developing this new vision of human life through her grasp of alienation, other facts would become available to the barista. For example, what had previously been the barely noticed background noise of the grocery store— the incessant beeping of the scanners at the cashiers’ stations—might now figure as an unjust annoyance to the workers and as a sign that this workplace, like her own, was not designed with the cashiers’ input. The absence of chairs at those stations presents itself as antagonistic to their comfort if not their health, such that the barista might chuckle at the expense of the store management when she notices a surreptitious pile of milk-crates—a make-shift stool—stowed at a cashier’s station. Rather than learning one fact and one concept, the overall configuration of the barista’s thought— what she notices in the world, what appears as significant, unjust, or funny—is altered. Our experience of conceptual moral learning is like the critique of outlook in that its phenomenology is realist; we cannot make sense of it if we sharply distinguish between facts and values. In coming to see that her work is alienating, the barista has learned to recognize something amiss in her regimented workplace that she’d previously only dimly apprehended; she has not simply chosen to prescribe against an action-type or denigrate a morally neutral state of affairs that she had previously been indifferent to. Importantly, the holistic character of conceptual moral learning poses problems for the Current View that we have not yet discussed. In “We are Perpetually Moralists”, Cora Diamond describes Murdoch’s conflict with Hare in terms of the latter’s atomistic view of concepts. She writes,

 Murdoch, “Vision and Choice”, 82.

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For Hare, what a word is as we use it is no different (apart perhaps from psychological associations) from what it would be if it had been coined right then on the spot and tied to some set of linguistic rules. (A use of term cannot have, internal to it, a critical reflective understanding of moral life).57

On the Current View, moral concepts are pictured atomistically; they are individuated “extensible ring[s] laid down to cover a certain area of fact” according to each individual’s subjective decisions).58 The prescriptivist analysis doesn’t speak to why the adoption of a moral principle connecting the concept ‘alienation’ to the non-moral fact that a worker is disempowered by the top-down imposition of procedures should have any bearing on what someone finds funny, what they are able to notice, or their vision of what it means to lead a dignified human life. Murdoch’s descriptions of conceptual moral learning invite us to recognize that there are internal connections between coming to a new understanding of a concept, a shift in what we are able to see, and change to our metaphysical outlook that we cannot appreciate if we picture our moral and cognitive faculties in isolation from one another. Hare’s inability to explain these connections can be traced to his initial, narrow selection of data. He selects moral concepts like ‘good’ and ‘ought’ that seem to yield to a logical analysis that presupposes the fact–value distinction. He neglects evaluative concepts with choice-independent criteria like ‘pedantic’, ‘rude’, or ‘alienation’ which are ill-suited to this analysis. Furthermore, he takes for granted a specific picture of the moral language user as divided between the will (to which emotions, desires and moral and practical judgement are referred), and the understanding (to which empirical and theoretical judgement and experience are referred). The moral data that Murdoch brings to our attention calls this picture of the moral language user—and the morally neutral realm of facts she inhabits—into question, suggesting that morality is a matter of “insight (or understanding or sensibility) rather than as action plus argument closely related to action”, and that study of it should attend to differences of understanding “which may show openly or privately as differences of story or metaphor or as differences of moral vocabulary betokening different ranges and ramifications 57  Cora Diamond, “‘We Are Perpetually Moralists’: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value”, in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 98. 58  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 82.

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of moral concept”.59 Clarifying these aspects of the moral life and making them available to reflection requires an alternative picture of our moral faculties and the reality they put us in touch with. Murdoch provides this by introducing a central set of metaphors pertaining to vision. In this, we see the second element of Murdoch’s characteristic methodology at play.

Consistency, Reality, and Metaphors of Vision In Murdoch’s aesthetic writings, she offers a distinct picture of human freedom as love. Love is a kind of freedom that we exercise when we recognize that another person is more complex, idiosyncratic, and impenetrably deep than can be captured by our images of them. When I love well, I resist the temptation to flatten their complexities, to judge them for personal differences, and to project my own neurotic fears and desires onto them. This is a far cry from the image of freedom as the power to choose one’s own universal moral principles in light of the empirically available facts. In her discussions of the Current View, we see her questioning just how available “the facts” are to us, just as she questioned the availability of inner life events and the reality of other human beings to a conventional outlook. Murdoch’s writings on moral philosophy build on those themes and connect moral agency to our responsiveness to “the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals ‘taped’, the connection of knowledge with love and spiritual insight with apprehension of the unique”.60 In addition to challenging the behaviourist notion of the publicly available mind and the individual we can boil down to choices and actions, she offers an alternative to the dominant picture of external reality as the realm of immediately available non-moral facts. She complements the image of freedom as love by linking it to vision, which both explains how our conceptual practices, behaviour, and comportment hang together as expressions of our unique moral being and helps us to recognize ourselves as capable of making increasingly insightful cognitive contact with choice-independent moral realities. Vision is the first of two metaphors that Murdoch introduces to clarify what we are like as moral beings, what we ordinarily do and the world we inhabit. As in the previous cases we’ve discussed, the point of developing imaginative conceptual frameworks is thoroughgoingly  Ibid., 82–83.  Ibid., 87.

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practical, meant to orient us in practices and to see what external supports are needed for us to achieve the discipline that they demand of us. A clearer understanding of ideals and our distance from them does not itself make approaching them any easier. One role that the metaphor of ‘vision’ plays is to help us to understand the kind of regularity that moral thinking has such that we can appreciate its answerability to how things really are. As we’ve seen, Hare was motivated to overcome emotivism in order to defend the rational credentials of moral argument. On his view, even if the principles justifying a given judgement are chosen by an individual rather than known, their presence enables us to think of moral judgement as rule-governed and answerable to the same standards of consistency available in regions of language use where truth is genuinely in play. Prescriptivism exemplifies a view of language that was shared by many of Murdoch and Hare’s contemporaries. In Ayer’s work, the meaning of empirical statements is said to be fixed by conventionally established principles that connect empirical statements to the sense-data accepted as evidence for verifying them. Alice Crary refers to the demand that truth-apt conceptual practices be underwritten by rules of this sort as “the abstraction requirement”. For the use of a concept to count as a “sound conceptual practice”—one that deals in genuine, objective regularities—our criteria for using the concept must be “discernible independently of any subjective responses characteristic of us as participants in it”.61 A sound conceptual practice must be demonstrably sound, in that we must in principle be able to share our criteria with those who do not share our subjective emotional dispositions, preferences, or intuitions. A moral principle is just the right sort of thing to connect judgement and criteria in this readily articulable fashion. In The Language of Morals, Hare argues that each individual’s use of moral concepts can meet the abstraction requirement in a limited way. Criteria for consistent use is keyed to the individual’s commitments rather than impersonal conventions. This ensures that, even though they cannot be thought of as tracking objective moral realities, moral judgement is answerable to rational standards. Our practices thus retain what Crary calls “intellectual legitimacy”.62 We can see Murdoch as participating in an ongoing philosophical conversation about

61  Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21. 62  Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment, 36.

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whether the abstraction requirement should be thought of as the test of whether a conceptual practice can be held to standards of truth or rationality. The abstraction requirement was not universally accepted by post-war philosophers. In “When is a Principle a Moral Principle?”, Foot interrogated the claim that moral judgements are underwritten by principles. Hare was cognizant of the fact that in making judgements about what we ought to do in particular cases, we do not always make syllogistic arguments or consciously appeal to formulated principles; he accounted for this by appealing to subconscious processes and noting that we would be able to formulate such principles after the fact. For Foot, our ability to do this does not give us sufficient reason to think that such a “hidden machinery” actually did underwrite the judgment in question. In fact, when we ordinarily describe someone as “principled” we are not making a claim about their disposition to make such post hoc avowals at all—we only mean that their behaviour displays a commendable consistency. This does not commit us to a particular picture of what underwrites this consistency. Hare’s appeal to principles is the introduction of a “myth” about moral consistency, not an explanation of it.63 Foot’s remarks belong to a similar family of arguments as Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. According to Stanley Cavell’s interpretation, Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument invites us to attend to practices like playing games and performing mathematical operations in order to notice that rules do not operate as a hidden mechanism constraining the use of concepts or carrying out of an activity. When we reflect on the rules of a game, for example, we see that they only limit what can count as a valid move, they do not determine what a player should do in particular cases of game play. A rule-governed activity is not “everywhere circumscribed by rules”.64 The appeal to rules cannot tell us what hems a player in from making any number of valid moves that we’d nonetheless think contrary to an understanding of the game. Furthermore, even where a practice is more determinately rule-governed, appeal to the rule itself does not help us to understand what is involved in interpreting the rule the right way in practice. If consistency is to be explained in terms of rules, then consistency in rule-application must itself be explained by rules. This route of explanation clearly just passes the buck implausibly  Foot, “When is a Principle a Moral Principle?” 97–101.  Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, in Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 49. 63 64

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down an increasingly long line of interpretive rules. For Cavell, Wittgenstein’s discussions help us to see that what we want to explain in understanding consistency is something deeper than the rules we may or may not actually appeal to when we engage in a practice consistently. What we lack clarity about is how we achieve a shared sense of what it looks like to go on in the same way in an activity such that diverse moves in our language games can be thought of as nonetheless unified.65 Concerns with the abstraction requirement pervade Murdoch’s writings from this period as well. In “Thinking and Language”, she denounces the picture of consistent language use as underwritten by fixed algorithms, claiming that this misrepresents what we discover ourselves to be like when we pay attention to our diverse thinking activities. To acquire a concept is not to be determined in what we think and say by external forces (say, public convention) that operate through us.66 We use language, and often we do so imaginatively as in cases where we appeal to metaphors and analogies to illuminate personal experiences. This antipathy towards the abstraction requirement also animates Murdoch’s reflections on the supposed difference between moral and non-moral concepts. In “Vision and Choice in Morality,” she describes the Current View of moral and non-­moral language as a misconception “to the effect that empirical terms have meaning via fixed specification of empirical criteria, and moral terms have meaning via movable specification of empirical criteria, plus recommendation”.67 For Murdoch, there is something deeply misguided about attempting to explain the consistency of empirical and moral concept use by appealing to criteria-fixing principles. What renewed attention to our own lives reveals is that there is a deep connection between our use of concepts, our sensibilities, our ideals, and the particular facts that are available to us. Murdoch introduces the metaphor of ‘vision’ to explain the coherence of the moral life, to clarify what the object of moral outlook criticism is, and to help us to appreciate what enables us to achieve new moral insights. Murdoch speaks of ‘vision’ in two ways to illuminate two, related forms of moral insight brought about through the renewal of our concepts. First, she discusses “moral vision”, which is our power to see and understand particulars in light of choice-independent evaluative concepts—as in the case of literal perception, vision relates us to a world that is there,  Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, 50.  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 35. 67  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 93. 65 66

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independently of our choices or preferences.68 Murdoch’s previous discussions of behaviourism and the inner life give us a clue that we should not take the perceptual metaphor too seriously, for example, by thinking that vision can only be directed towards external objects. Moral vision can also turn inward and put us in touch with our own patterns of thought and feeling. Similarly, moral vision is at work when we reflect, not just when we are directly confronted by something in the visual field. Margaret Holland interprets Murdochian vision as a power of “construal” and “discernment” in order to emphasize continuities between cases of looking with our eyes and these other modes of considering a subject matter. What is important to appreciate is that Murdoch denies that vision is a relationship between a subject and a realm of empirical facts that are simply given to anyone whose gaze falls upon them. As Justin Broackes puts it, “Far from us living all ‘in the same world’ (of empirical facts available to anyone), someone who lacks a certain area of moral vocabulary may in a sense live in a different world from someone who possesses it”.69 Because our grasps of concepts can differ, our vision, and so the facts readily available to us, can differ. It would be a mistake to focus exclusively on this quasi-perceptual sense of ‘vision’. Our power to discern particulars is related to what Murdoch calls our “total vision of life”.70 To understand what Murdoch means by this, we should notice what she is trying to capture: first, the fact that we can be more or less articulate about the moral outlook that informs and is evidenced by how we comport ourselves in thought and overt behaviour; and second, the consistency of how we think and otherwise lead our lives. This second point expresses Murdoch’s contention that we are substantial selves in a sense that cannot be analysed in terms of commitment to principles. The metaphor of a ‘total vision’ enables us to see illuminating parallels between having a personal moral outlook and having an artistic vision. When we say that an artist has a vision, we mean that they have an ideal of how a given project, such as the staging of a play or filming of a script,

68  Margaret Holland, “Touching the Weights: Moral Perception and Attention”, in International Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1998), 299. 69  Justin Broackes, “Introduction”, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 26. 70  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 81.

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should be realized and that this informs their behaviour and sensibilities.71 A director with a vision cannot fully share it with others in the abstract, and we can imagine some being far more equipped than others to articulate it at all. However, even an inarticulate director is sensitive to when performances work and should be encouraged or accepted and when actors need to be asked to try something different. These activities are informed by his vision. Finally, we know all too well that this principle of unity might also become an object of criticism—we might both judge that a film has a strong point of view in its interpretation of the source material and that it fundamentally misrepresents that source. By picturing our conceptual powers in terms of ‘total vision of life’, Murdoch helps us to see that we might be poor at describing the ideals that nonetheless unify our practices. This metaphor helps us to appreciate that the consistency of what we do derives from something deeper and further reaching in what it unifies than articulable commitments to principles. Furthermore, we can think that a conversationalist has a unique vision of conversation and its place in human life that nonetheless profoundly misses the mark. We see the kind of far-reaching coherence that Murdoch has in mind when we reflect on what happens when we internalize a new vision. In the case of the barista previously considered, the worker acquired a new concept, ‘alienation’, and in so doing experienced a shift in her sense of what human life is for, which had bearing on what she was alive to in her own workplace and in others’. In attaining a vision of human life as ideally creative, her understanding of what it means for a workplace to be unjust or for a worker to languish also shifted. For Murdoch, a total vision of life shows through in the full range of one’s conceptual habits, emotional dispositions, and behaviour such that we can appreciate that we either share in a similar outlook or don’t on the basis of how these all hang together in the overall “texture of a man’s being”.72 This suggests that we should reconsider what the linguistic method should look like in practice. As Niklas Forsberg puts it, instead of examining individual concepts and their criteria of application, linguistic analysis should examine how “words and life hang together in large … Employing the same words (say ‘human’, ‘being’, 71  The French term for a director is ‘réalisateur’ or ‘réalisatrice’, the root of which is the verb ‘réaliser”, which means both to direct and to fulfill (as in a dream for the future); unlike the English word ‘director,’ the French evokes the sense in which a director is someone who makes a vision concretely real. 72  Ibid., 81.

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‘moral’, ‘right’, ‘good’ etc.) is no guarantee of similarity in sense if the guiding pictures, our alternative visions, the place of these words in our respective form of life, differ”.73 In focusing on isolated concepts and criteria, linguistic analysts like Hare fail to take the linguistic method seriously. Picturing our conceptual capacities in relation to a “total vision of life”, Murdoch makes it clear that our vision is an ideal that we might be more or less able to articulate, that informs how we construe events, situations, and persons, and shapes how we live our lives from moment to moment. A vision of conversation underwrites our sense of what counts as a relevant remark, an unwarranted interruption, and a pedantic conversationalist; it shapes how we emotionally respond to those whose visions we think of as limited (e.g., with weary frustration or the rolling of eyes) and how we comport ourselves in conversation with others (e.g., attempting to find what is insightful in what another has to say). Conceptual learning is pictured as both a change in what we are able to see and a change in our total vision. Murdoch’s alternative picture of moral language use helps explain the regularity of our practices while rejecting the abstraction requirement and principle-based models of moral rationality. She overcomes the shortcomings of the Current View by making it clear what we take issue with when we criticize someone’s moral outlook and what changes when we gain a richer understanding of evaluative concepts. The second set of metaphors and analogies that Murdoch introduces illuminate the realist character of the experiences of moral difference and learning under discussion. These images enable her to overcome a major lacuna in the Current View’s conceptual repertoire; for a prescriptivist like Hare, moral language use is answerable to standards of consistency and responsibility, but a moral agent cannot be judged for their lack of insight into moral realities, there being none. According to Murdoch, the Current View “leaves no place for commerce with the ‘transcendent’”.74 We cannot explain the connection between deepening our grasp of evaluative concepts and the availability of facts without being able to picture reality as configured in morally significant ways that might transcend our understanding at a given moment.

73  Niklas Forsberg, “Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is”, in SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2011), 9. 74  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 80.

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Murdoch pictures the transcendence of moral reality using the analogy of a gestalt picture.75 This is a single configuration of lines and shading that can be seen as depicting two different objects. For example, a duck-­rabbit is an image that can be seen as a rabbit. However, by focusing on the grouping of lines that form the rabbit’s ears, one can begin to see it as a duck’s bill. Once this is achieved, the overall appearance of the image changes. One no longer sees a rabbit’s nose, one instead sees the back of a duck’s head. The moral configurations of reality are like this. In a sense, moral patterns are there to be seen, but in practice they can transcend what we are able to see at a given moment. The barista of our example once lived in a world where her workplace frustrations did not have a clear object and when she went grocery shopping she didn’t really think of the grocery store as a workplace, much less an alienating one. Her renewed understanding of alienation attunes her to details that had previously not stood out to her as salient to questions of workplace justice. Her moral vision has undergone a gestalt shift. Far from experiencing this as the outcome of a choice to affirm a given moral principle and to “approve of this area” of non-moral facts, our barista has come to see a different world and is alive to different facts.76 This world of significance would be inaccessible to those whose attention was fixed on different aspects of the grocery store, given their total vision. Someone might walk into the same store and view it as a business that exists for the sake of generating profits and is owned by someone with the prerogative to make decisions about its operation. What he notices and its significance is shaped by his understanding of these concepts; he sees the store’s operations as evidence of sound and profitable or wasteful and unsavvy management decisions. When he looks at the staff working in the store, he sees them in terms of overstaffing and bloated labour costs, understaffing and short-sighted neglect of customer satisfaction, lackadaisical management, etc. There is little that would come less naturally to this person than to notice a cashier’s lack of seating, much less to see it as evidence of the worker’s woeful lack of say in their own working conditions. He would be hard-pressed to use the word ‘alienation’ in anything but a joke. Murdoch clarifies the realist character of our experience of conceptual moral learning further by employing metaphors of light and dark. When  Ibid., 82.  Ibid., 82.

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we deepen our concepts and acquire renewed vision, this introduces a new source of light that pulls aspects of the world out of obscurity. Murdoch writes: There are situations which are obscure and people who are incomprehensible, and the moral agent, as well as the artist, may find himself unable to describe something which in some sense he apprehends. Language has limitations and there are moments when, if it is to serve us, it has to be used creatively, and the effort may fail. When we consider here the role of language in illuminating situations, how insufficient seems the notion of linguistic moral philosophy as the elaboration of the evaluative-descriptive formula.77

We mischaracterize our linguistic practices if we insist upon the public availability of “the facts” and deny that reality has moral configurations that some might be able to discern better than others. Murdoch invites us to see that our grasp of moral concepts makes a difference to the visibility of regions of reality, casting light on some while leaving others in darkness. What sets individuals apart from one another are differences in these patterns of darkness and light, in what stands out clearly, what we can only dimly apprehend, and what we are not able to notice at all. It can be jarring to be told that Vronsky was oblivious to the possibility that his attentions to Kitty might get her hopes up (rather than wilfully disregarding her feelings), or to accept that our pedantic colleague really sees himself as a helpful defender of truth and clarity (rather than wilfully disrespecting other speakers). Metaphors of vision, gestalt, darkness, and light are meant to help us to see that what we are critical of in others and what we want to overcome in ourselves is a limit in our language that prevents us from understanding what is in some sense there before our eyes. By appreciating that a change in our total vision is not achieved by adopting a new personal credo or principle, we are able to consider the question of what moral improvement demands with renewed seriousness.

Bibliography Ayer, A. J.. 1971. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Penguin. Broackes, Justin. 2012. Introduction. In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher ed. Justin Broackes, 1–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Ibid., 90.

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Cavell, Stanley. 1962/1976. The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy. In Must We Mean What We Say, 44–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crary, Alice. 2007. Beyond Moral Judgment. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1996. ‘We are Perpetually Moralists’: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value. In Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, 79–109. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Foot, Philippa. 1954. When is a Principle a Moral Principle? In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 28: 95–110. Foot, Philippa. 1958. Moral Arguments. Mind 67: 502–513. Forsberg, Niklas. 2011. Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is. SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 12: 1–17. Gellner, Ernst. 1955. Ethics and Logic. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55: 157–178. Hare, R.  M. 1955. Universalizability. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55: 295–312. Hare, R. M.. 1964. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holland, Margaret. 1998. Touching the Weights: Moral Perception and Attention. International Philosophical Quarterly 3: 299–312. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics. New York: Macmillan. Murdoch, Iris. 1951/1998. Thinking and Language. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 33–42. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1956/1998. Vision and Choice in Morality. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 76–98. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1958/1998. A House of Theory. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 171–186. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1961/1998. Against Dryness. In: Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 287–295. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1969/1998. On ‘God’ and ‘Good’. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 337–362. New York: Penguin. Woodhall, Julia R. and Muszynski, Alicja. 2011. Fordism at Work in Canadian Coffee Shops. Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 17: 56–69.

CHAPTER 6

Moral Philosophy, Moralism, and the Socialist Imagination

Introduction There are a number of qualities that set Murdoch’s philosophical writings apart from many of her contemporaries. She differed in her vision of what clarification is and who requires it. Like Collingwood and Price, Murdoch saw that poetic language is not the enemy of philosophical clarity; rather, it’s just what the doctor ordered when a subject matter lives on the margins of what we ordinarily take notice of and could readily describe if our words are restricted to their conventional tasks. The audience of philosophical clarification was not just one’s confused fellow academics, bewitched by the misleading syntax of our expressions or ancient dogmas of ghosts in machines—for Murdoch, philosophical confusions were symptomatic of pervasive conceptions of freedom, personal identity, moral and aesthetic value that infected the thinking of philosophers, artists, political writers, and “the plain man” alike. It is no surprise that just as often as she was to be found addressing philosophers at meetings of the Aristotelian society, Murdoch was giving BBC radio talks, writing for literary magazines, and addressing Socialists. To clearly understand what we are, what we do, and what we value is not a matter for specialists; it is a human need. In this chapter, I will examine a third contrast between Murdoch and the clarificatory philosophers: her embrace of a form of moralism. According to Price, one of the strengths of clarificatory philosophy is its © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Jamieson, Iris Murdoch’s Practical Metaphysics, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0_6

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separation of moral philosophy from preaching; the philosopher’s job is to “tell us what goodness is, not to make us good”.1 This separation is not so clear in Murdoch’s work, in which she develops imaginative imagery to represent ideals that are not meant to sit inert in the intellect. They are meant to orient familiar (if philosophically neglected) practices of self-­ reflection, literary engagement, love, and conceptual moral learning. Renewed self-understanding alone does not “make us good”, but they can help us to see where more concrete help lies. This is of course a rather different activity than Price warned philosophers against. Introducing a reinterpretation of freedom as love and goodness as vision is not an exhortation to volunteer for Oxfam, protest against nuclear proliferation, or always return one’s library books on time. Murdoch’s moralism comes through the communication of a vision. Murdoch does not differ from her post-war contemporaries because she moralizes when she practices moral philosophy whereas they achieve logical neutrality. She differs from them in the contours of the moral vision she communicates and her self-awareness that she is doing something that blurs the supposed distinction between neutral description and moral persuasion. Murdoch and proponents of the Current View have some strong moral differences that shape how they practice moral philosophy. In “Vision and Choice in Morality”, Murdoch describes differences of vision as differences of metaphor and vocabulary, differences in how one delineates the scope of one’s concepts, and differences in total vision of life.2 The differences between me and my pedantic colleague, between the barista and the businessman, and between two moral philosophers like herself and Hare are in this sense the same. We don’t cease occupying our own moral point of view when we turn our attention away from grievances with our bosses to morality itself—the same dynamics of visibility and darkness determine what a philosopher takes notice of and overlooks, the scope and sense of his concepts, and what he finds praiseworthy or lamentable in human conduct. Hare might have been surprised to be told The Language of Morals communicated a moral vision—he took himself to be analyzing the logic of moral language use and describing the formal requirements of moral 1  H.  H. Price, “‘Clarity is not Enough’”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes 19 (1945), 14. 2  Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 82.

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judgment. Far from moralizing, he was revealing the impossibility of being a philosophical moralist in the sense of defining moral concepts like “good” or “ought”. Murdoch, however, contends that his work has a determinate moral perspective and a persuasive (and not merely descriptive) role. It is, she writes, part of “the propaganda of Liberalism”.3 Murdoch defends the claim that the Current View communicates a substantive moral vision by pointing to the limits of what its proponents establish by argument. While Moore established that good cannot be conclusively defined and that substantive moral conclusions cannot be deduced from premises that command universal assent, it does not establish that individuals cannot have substantive moral convictions that are derived from their personal beliefs. Proponents of the Current View reject moral realism as a moral outlook for logical reasons that fall short of securing their conclusions; their position is in fact supported by the moral claim that moral realism is dangerous. One should eschew it just as one should reject dogmatism, intolerance, and unreflective conformity to external moral authorities. In this chapter, I will explain why Murdoch didn’t count this surreptitious moralism as a strike against the Current View. All moral philosophers moralize, herself included. Murdoch notes, “If we abandon the notion of a pure formula, we shall be able once again to see how deeply moral attitudes influence philosophical pictures of morality. (This present writing is doubtless no exception)”.4 Moralism, understood as the persuasive communication of moral vision, does not discredit hers or any view. What it does is situate philosophy as an activity performed by morally substantial beings and invite us to notice that we can assess it both on logical or descriptive grounds and on moral grounds—just as Murdoch assessed Rylean behaviourism on the basis of its devaluation of the inner life. The Current view devalued the activity of substantive moral theorizing and denied that we should conduct ourselves as moral realists—and their vision can be assessed by asking whether we think realistic moral attitudes are dangerous and ought to be abandoned, or whether this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. According to Murdoch:

3  Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 66. 4  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 98.

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moral theorising is not the discovery of bogus ‘facts’, but is an activity whose purpose and justification are moral … There is no philosophical (or scientific) reason why there should not be an area of theory, reflection, meditation, contemplation, between ourselves and the simple empirical levels of action, so long as certain arguments are eschewed, and so long as it is clearly recognized that the purpose of the theorising is moral clarification and understanding.5

If the purpose and justification of moral philosophy is itself moral, an analysis of Murdoch’s approach to philosophy should conclude by recognizing what her justifying moral purpose was. Why, in her view, should we try to defend the activities of vision-based and conceptual moral criticism and communication? While I don’t propose this as a complete explanation, we can understand the fears that animated Murdoch in her opposition to the Current View by attending to what she saw as withering in the post-war period: a traditional form that the communication of vision used to take among British Socialists, and with it, the very spirit of that movement. Her writings on moral philosophy are thus deeply connected to her answer to the question: “What is wrong with the British Left—and what should be done about it?” This was the prompt she responded to in writing “A House of Theory”, a paper that explores the practical consequences of the Current View’s conceptual lacunae.

Moral Vision and Moral Philosophy According to Murdoch, the primary arguments that support the Current View—Moore’s identification of the naturalistic fallacy and Kant’s claim that metaphysical beliefs cannot be philosophically established—do not logically require that we deny that there is any connection between metaphysical theory and one’s moral outlook. We cannot define goodness reductively, in terms of some natural property, or picture morality as issuing directly from a philosophically established metaphysical background (i.e., knowledge of what freedom, human nature, history, or the universe are like). However, metaphysical ethics need not look like this. One’s interpretation of evaluative concepts and one’s moral vision can be internally related to metaphysical faith, or “belief in the transcendent”.6 To 5  Iris Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 180. 6  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 65.

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conclude that this would not be a legitimate form of morality, a further premise is required. Murdoch thinks that the true animus of Hare’s approach to moral philosophy is the moral dictum that “you cannot attach morality to the substance of the world”.7 In “Metaphysics and Ethics”, Murdoch describes the separation of ethics from metaphysics as the spirit of modern liberal moral philosophy. While Ayer had attempted to sweep metaphysical statements about non-­ empirical realities to the side of philosophy with his verificationist broom, the post-war clarificatory philosophers were less inclined to dismiss such statements as mere nonsense. Hare writes, “Present-day Oxford philosophers do not now take such a destructive view as this; they are perfectly prepared to have metaphysical things said; in fact, as I shall argue, what we spend most of our time in Oxford doing is metaphysics.”8 Murdoch is not, however, accusing her contemporaries of turning their backs on metaphysics as such. What she finds significant in their approach to moral philosophy is that it centres on moral language use but excludes the possibility that metaphysical views could be relevant to the meaning of someone’s moral statements or even the source of their moral conviction. For both prescriptivists and existentialists, to think of one’s morality as derived from either metaphysical or empirical descriptions of reality is antithetical to the responsible exercise of moral autonomy. It is also socially dangerous. Murdoch writes: If you do this you are in danger of making your morality into a dogma, you are in danger of becoming intolerant of the values of others, and of ceasing to reflect on your own values through taking them too much for granted. In short, if you start to think of morality as part of a general way of conceiving the universe, as part of a larger conceptual framework, you may cease to be reflective and responsible about it, you may begin to regard it as a sort of fact. And as soon as you regard your moral system as a sort of fact, and not as a set of values which only exist through your own choices, your moral conduct will degenerate.9

It was understandable for philosophers reeling in the aftermath of the Second World War to have these fears; they nevertheless functioned as a  Ibid., 65.  R. M. Hare, “A School for Philosophers”, in Essays on Philosophical Method (New York: MacMillan, 1971), 47. 9  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 66. 7 8

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kind of philosophical prejudice. They led philosophers to neglect the phenomena of choice-independent moral language use and to overlook important sites of moral agency related to the renewal of language, the revision of aspects of one’s total vision of life, and the attainment of insight into reality. We can recognize Hare in Murdoch’s description of the liberal outlook supporting the separation of metaphysics and ethics. On Hare’s own telling, he was inspired to develop prescriptivism by his wartime experiences, in which he gained: first, his respect for diversity; second, his conviction that every person must exercise moral autonomy in the face of authority; third, his recognition that one’s principles should never become personal dogma; and finally, his commitment to impartiality and cosmopolitanism over nationalism. In his “Philosophical Autobiography”, Hare traces his “impulse to philosophy” to an incident that took place while serving with the Indian Army during the Second World War. A Japanese prisoner released after the Malayan Campaign returned to his regiment only to commit ritual suicide (hara kiri) to expunge the disgrace of being taken prisoner. Hare writes, “This and many illustrations of cultural diversity made me stop believing in a universal objective moral standard known by intuition without reasoning, such as is posited by Sir David Ross.”10 The Japanese soldier’s principle was neither right nor wrong in Hare’s view, and the practice should neither be condemned nor imposed on others. Hare was not committed to hara kiri and did not commit ritual suicide after his own release from a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Nonetheless, he believed that we could respect someone else’s principles without surrendering our own right to decide on our own. His wartime experiences also inspired him to model the process of making exceptions to otherwise excessively rigid principles. Prior to the war, Hare had been a committed pacifist; however, the atrocities of European fascism and imperial Japan led him to see what was at stake in this conflict, to reassess this commitment, and to admit of an exception to his principle. In short, he decided to enlist. Hare’s commitment to pacifism was further complicated by his subsequent experiences serving with the Indian Army. He recounts being struck by the intensity of “the gulf between rich and poor in the world”, especially between himself and the majority of people in India; this led him to realize that one could reasonably enlist for  R. M. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, in Utilitas 14 (2002), 281.

10

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economic reasons. He writes, “My earlier pacifist leanings were put into a new light by the attitude of our Indian soldiers, who looked upon fighting neither as noble and glorious, nor as wicked, but as an enjoyable and lucrative profession.”11 The decision to enlist or not had been for him detached from financial concerns; poverty stripped others of that luxury. This period in Hare’s life shaped his attitudes towards failures to make autonomous decisions, either through unreflectiveness or by adopting E-type rather than U-type principles. Reflecting on the evil actions committed by fascist governments gave Hare occasion to reflect on the complicity of the ordinary citizenry of those countries. In his view, many people failed to seriously reflect on their own duties, passively following their government’s directives rather than making decisions for themselves. In his own case, his decision to enlist was divorced from any concern with British nationalism. The proper name of a country should not feature in one’s moral reflection. His reason for enlisting was to avert calamity for the people of India who faced the same conquest by the Japanese that had brought such human misery to China. Hare was moved to develop a moral theory that was, unlike emotivism, able to model the distinctions between rational moral discourse and the assertion of personal preference, between responsible agency and unreflectiveness. Above all, his theory entrenched tolerance of personal and cultural diversity.12 According to Murdoch, the outlook that Hare carried forward with him after his wartime service reflected the dominant moral culture of post-war Britain. She notes that this culture was characterized by “the notion of guiding a choice, arguing, referring to facts, judging a man by his conduct, and so on”.13 Hare was not alone in believing that a person’s actions and not their words are the best evidence of what their principles and values are and that principled differences should be respected. It was widely believed that it was morally important that one get the facts straight before deciding how to act (when expediency allows).14 As we’ve seen, the concept of moral vision embraces both one’s ideals, how one interprets evaluative concepts, and what facts stand out to one as significant and what facts recede into obscurity. By presenting the Current  Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography”, 281.  Ibid., 281–292. 13  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 63. 14  Ibid., 67. 11 12

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View in moral philosophy as a particular vision of life, Murdoch invites us to see prescriptivism as a particular ideal of moral agency, one way of interpreting concepts like ‘freedom’, ‘consistency’, and ‘responsibility’, and as highlighting the moral significance of decision-making and action while leaving the phenomena of moral vision dark. Hare did not stop being the person who underwent formative experiences during the Second World War when he took up philosophizing. Rather, his moral personality encompassed motivations to coin relatively new concepts and to bring important aspects of the moral life into view, recovering them from emotivist neglect. For Murdoch, it is in the coining of new concepts that we communicate new and persuasive visions and “description moves imperceptibly into moralizing”.15 This much is inevitable; where moralizing becomes propaganda (of Liberalism) is when the vision builds systematic defences against possible rivals. The rejection of metaphysical ethics and the attaching of morality to the fabric of the world make it impossible to forward rival visions that depend on pictures of moral agency as insight into transcendent realities. By denying that such outlooks could be thought of as moralities at all, the Current View insulated itself against modes of moral thinking that didn’t fit its analysis. Murdoch points out that there are clear examples of moralities that do view themselves as extensions of metaphysical views (some Christians and all Communists). Furthermore, there are people who don’t have determinate ideas about the universe, human nature, or historical necessity, but nevertheless believe, “that moral values are real and fixed”.16 And of course, the prescriptivist model fails to describe aspects of the moral life related to the refinement of moral vision and struggle to know the world in morally rich ways. In Murdoch’s eyes, the danger of the propaganda of liberalism is similar to the danger of contemporary aesthetic theory. As we’ve seen, the danger of not understanding what we value is that we may cease to believe that it is valuable. When it comes to great literature, this means that we may lose our connection to an important source of spiritual energy and guidance capable of supporting us as we struggle to overcome our own worst habits and to love others as separate individuals. It is not inevitable that human beings will regard one another as historical, opaque, valuable individuals any more than our culture will inevitably produce sublime, tragic  Ibid., 74.  Ibid., 70.

15 16

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literature—Murdoch certainly didn’t think twentieth-century novelists were doing this! We have initial reason to think that Murdoch had similar fears about the fate of our vision-based moral practices. She writes, “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture”.17 What was then an empirically unsuitable picture of the moral life might play a role in bringing about its own suitability. One mechanism for accomplishing this is to remove the resources needed to sustain the practices in question. A limited set of explanatory concepts can narrow ordinary people’s self-understanding as moral beings while also diminishing the production and availability of resources that sustain us in our vision-based moral practices. In her writings from this period, Murdoch addresses herself to both the public at large but especially to those in a position to consider their own role producing such resources. My reading of this aspect of Murdoch’s thought in some ways echoes, but in some ways diverges from, other prominent accounts of the significance of losing our concepts. On Cora Diamond’s view, the Current View’s dearth of concepts is a problem because the inability to understand oneself or one’s experiences is an evil—what’s worse, this harm cannot even be acknowledged on the Current View. For Niklas Forsberg, the Current View risks making us conceptually complacent or dogmatic rather than critically reflective. These perspectives have strengths, but I will argue that neither fully captures the specificity of what Murdoch feared in the ascendance of liberal moral theory. There are elements of her perspective that we can only appreciate by reading her moral philosophy alongside her discussions of the failing health of socialism in post-war Britain and the withering of the visionary tradition of social criticism.

Two Accounts of the Danger of Conceptual Loss In “Losing our Concepts”, Diamond details different ways our language can be inadequate to our experiences. She follows Murdoch in highlighting, first, the disparity between a philosopher’s conceptual point of view and our ordinary moral experience and, second, an ordinary moral agent’s inability to articulate their own moral experiences. Diamond also agrees that these two forms of inarticulacy are connected and illustrates the force of this insight by: first, supplementing Stanley Cavell’s response to

 Ibid., 75.

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emotivism in The Claim of Reason, and second, using it to analyse literary depictions of conceptual deprivation. According to Cavell, emotivism betrays what he refers to as “amnesia” about the very concept of morality. Echoing Hare’s rejection of emotivism, Cavell claims that the American emotivist C. L. Stevenson flattens the distinction between rational and non-rational ways that one can influence another person’s moral judgement. Stevenson is committed to the view that no moral conclusion can be validly drawn from factual premises; he then determines that nothing can count as a moral reason since “a reason which is neither deductively nor inductively related to a judgment is therefore only psychologically related to it”.18 The study of so-called moral argumentation should thus think of itself as the study of psychological influences that induce one to transition from specifications of facts to moral conclusions. For an emotivist, “any statement about any matter of fact which any speaker considers likely to alter attitudes may be adduced as a reason for or against an ethical judgment”.19 The criterion for being a moral reason is simply being effective in causing an intended change in a target’s attitudes. This leads to an inclusive picture of moral argument that admits cases like coaxing small children to be good, for example, by promising that it’d make mommy proud. Stevenson actually cites that as exemplary of the “hortatory” character of moral argument. His choice is noteworthy, since the children being cajoled into sharing their toys are not yet in a position to see why excluding others from play would be bad and parents must use oblique strategies rather than appealing to their judgement. While emotivists like Stevenson purport to study moral argument neutrally, Cavell questions this. He suggests that Stevenson neglects the distinction we ordinarily draw between argument and influence. He is insensitive to how his choice of examples contributes to the appearance that there is no such distinction. It is strange to proffer techniques designed to manage the behaviour of small children as “typical instances of the way in which a moral judgment is supported”.20 Cavell complains: Such a theory says, in effect, that there is no theoretical difference between persuading someone to do something by convincing him that he ought to,  Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 260.  Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 274. 20  Ibid., 253. 18 19

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using reasons which convince you, and persuading him by appeals to his fears, your prestige, or another’s money.21

In ordinary linguistic practice we are apt to characterize an action differently on the basis of whether we think the agent’s judgement was based on moral reasons or mere persuasion. We don’t have the same moral attitude towards someone who returns his library books on time out of consideration for other library patrons, and someone who does so for fear of incurring fines or falling out of the good graces of a cute librarian. Similarly, we don’t think of the child who has been bribed and coaxed to share their toys as someone who is acting in light of moral reasons. In effect, Stevenson is approaching moral argument without a concept of what morality is; he has suffered a kind of conceptual “amnesia”.22 Diamond agrees with this diagnosis, but takes issue with the suggestion that philosophers have a monopoly on that ailment.23 Stevenson’s assumptions about facts and values distort his perception and prevent him from acknowledging what he might otherwise apprehend about the moral life by attending to our ordinary practices.24 However, we should not be too certain that the effects of this distortive outlook are confined to his reflections on the moral life and exclude, as Cavell seems to imply, ordinary language use itself. She writes, As Cavell portrays Stevenson, he suffers from a … type of cultural deprivation. He does not suffer from incapacity to use moral vocabulary in his ordinary life (at any rate, Cavell does not suggest that he does) but from an incapacity that shows itself in reflection on that use. What he lacks the capacity for is itself a particular kind of use of moral vocabulary. To be able to say: ‘This is what it is like to use these concepts’ is itself a use, a philosophically reflective use, of the concepts.25

Inspired by Murdoch, Diamond contends that conceptual amnesia is an expression of a more widespread “cultural deprivation” the effects of which are not restricted to philosophical reflection and are not isolated from ordinary use of moral concepts. Diamond writes:  Ibid., 278.  Ibid., 283. 23  Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts”, in Ethics 98 (1988), 260. 24  Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts”, 255. 25  Ibid., 260–261. 21 22

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[Murdoch] is concerned with an actual conceptual loss and with philosophers who are unable to see the place in ordinary moral life of concepts which are exercised there; but it would be wrong to take the philosophical blindness to be a matter of philosophers’ going on as if we had lost concepts which we have not lost at all, and which were perfectly happily there for everyone else, including the philosopher when he was not doing philosophy. [Murdoch] is struggling to make plain a form of conceptual loss which, she thinks, affects the whole educated Western world and which affects philosophers in a particular way.26

Stevenson’s amnesia is symptomatic of his own “total vision of life”, which itself reflects a widespread cultural loss of concepts. According to Diamond, our cultural conceptual amnesia pertains to the concept of the human being. She writes: The philosophy of mind which is the source of our inarticulateness in ethics presents to us, as a philosophical necessity, that picture of the human personality which our culture has inherited from the Enlightenment. We see ourselves as capable, using reason and our senses, of describing the world; and we take the application of scientific language as the model for such description of reality.27

Following Murdoch, we can recognize this as a conceptual deprivation by noticing that it is neither necessary nor adequate to what we experience in our own lives. This discontinuity implies that for the moment, we don’t fully resemble the picture of the human personality that we understand ourselves in terms of. In practice, we do things that violate this picture: we criticize our pedantic colleague’s narrow outlook on conversation, we learn to see workplaces in a new light, etc. These practices cannot, however, show up for us in reflection. As Diamond puts it, “The conceptual losses we have indeed suffered have not actually changed us into human beings limited to the interests and experiences and possibilities we can express in our depleted vocabulary.”28 This might lead us to ask: what’s so bad about lacking self-understanding if it doesn’t change our ordinary practices (or rather, only impacts what we can articulate about human morality)? What is the danger of a loss of concepts?  Ibid., 262–263.  Ibid., 262. 28  Ibid., 263. 26 27

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Diamond’s answer seems to be that it is a kind of intellectual harm. Diamond’s explorations of this take her away from Murdoch to one of her contemporaries, the Socialist art critic and writer John Berger. In A Fortunate Man, Berger describes a country doctor in a working-class village whose role is both to provide healthcare and also to act as an interpreter, helping the locals to discover names for their otherwise unnameable experiences and ailments. The residents of this rural location are members of British society who are sometimes thought shy and taciturn—men of few words—when in fact their silence is involuntary. What they really are is inarticulate, their capacity to think what they know and clarify their own experiences withered by separation from traditional sources of eloquence like proverbs and literary culture. As a result, there is a gulf between their emotional and introspective experiences and what they can name and recognize in themselves.29 Diamond invites us to see that we (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) are in the same boat as these villagers when it comes to the moral life, that is, “culturally deprived”. Like the rural patients described by Berger, a great deal of our lives is left in darkness, unavailable to thought or recognition. Diamond’s discussion of Berger is significant in that it echoes Murdoch’s concerns about Current View’s conceptual limitations as limits of intelligibility without capturing the sense of danger that pervades her writings. We’re not given the impression that Berger’s villagers would stop having the experiences they do—that their inner life would wither alongside their eloquence—if the doctor didn’t help them. Similarly, we’re not given the impression that the shape of the moral life is affected by what we’re able to acknowledge about it. What, then, are we to make of Murdoch’s claim that human beings make pictures of themselves and then come to resemble those pictures? We’re not yet the sorts of persons our moral philosophers envision, even as the inarticulacy characteristic of philosophers is shared by the population more widely. But Diamond is silent about the practical threat implicit in Murdoch’s “and then”, and about what makes philosophy a guide and not just a mirror of its age. In discussing conceptual loss, Niklas Forsberg acknowledges that Murdoch’s concerns about the dominant liberal moral outlook are thoroughgoingly practical. In “Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is”, he notes that there is a “battle” between real people and pictures they have of themselves. While the images of human life we find in  Ibid., 258–259.

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Hare and Stevenson’s writings don’t fully resemble us, they exert a magnetic influence. He writes, “I believe that it was a profound concern of Murdoch’s that we are on the verge of coming to resemble our own confusion.”30 We might ask, following Forsberg, what becomes of the practices that cannot be accommodated within the Current View. His answer relates to the importance of regarding one’s own moral outlook as provisional. Without seeing aspects of our total vision of life as potentially limited relative to a transcendent reality, we are liable to become complacently contented with our present understanding of human life, rationality, and freedom.31 The danger here is that thinking of our concepts as simple stable categories rather than areas for deep and ongoing exploration will lead them to stabilize. Forsberg concludes: The difficulty is to acknowledge that there is not only one world or one true vision of the human, where that sense is turned into custom, as a regulatory definition of what we must mean. The really dangerous thought is that we are done thinking.32

This echoes Murdoch’s reflections on the Current View, particularly her claim that a “simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it”.33 To illustrate what is at stake and why we must resist the Current View, Forsberg turns away from Murdoch and urges us to reflect on Western history. He writes: That there are dangers in thinking that one has the nature of the human being framed once and for all is obvious. Our history is packed with too many stories of such exclusions. To take power and control over the name ‘human’ has always been a strategy employed in order to stabilize different variations of the logic of us and them. The consequences of different positions where ones with some form of legitimacy have been taken to speak 30  Niklas Forsberg, “Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is”, in SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2011), 2. 31  Forsberg, “Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is”, 8. 32  Ibid., 13. 33  Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 293.

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truly when saying that she is not human, are clearly some of the most severe wounds our history bears witness of.34

Forsberg leaves it up to us to choose an atrocity to think through in terms of the denial of humanity, or to choose a form of conduct we regard as inhumane and othering. The twentieth century offers us a bevy of options. What the Current View takes from us is the means of admitting that such investigations into the scope and organization of our concepts might be necessary in that “I might not know the full sense of a concept I do manage to use”.35 To regard our own understanding as provisional does not entail that we don’t have any grasp of our concepts at all; rather, it is “to leave open the possibility that there is more to be known about other human beings, always”.36 On this reading, Murdoch warns us that we’ve lost the concepts we need to picture ourselves as beings whose moral lives involve an ongoing exploration of reality. The loss Murdoch worries about is not merely intellectual—it is a loss of the humility that comes with acknowledging the finitude of our own understanding. Without seeing that my facility with words might disguise shallowness or immaturity in my concepts, I risk falling into the same false certainty of those who confidently deny others’ humanity. Writing in the wake of the Second World War, Murdoch was undoubtedly sensitive to this kind of concern. Gary Browning argues that her early 1940s work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration made her especially attuned to the dehumanizing suffering of migrants and stateless persons—a fact evidenced by the large number of undocumented people and former refugee camp inhabitants to be found in her novels.37 Reading her work with the context provided by her political writings from this period, we see that we don’t need to turn to history, literature, or biography to illuminate the stultifying effects of the Current View. Murdoch tells us unambiguously that the Current View played a role in the deterioration of post-war British political life.

 Niklas Forsberg, Language Lost and Found (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 131.  Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, 133. 36  Ibid., 133. 37  Gary Browning, “Murdoch and the End of Ideology”, in Murdoch on Truth and Love ed. Gary Browning (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 145. 34 35

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The Socialist Imagination Under Threat According to Murdoch, the rejection of ethical naturalism and the elimination of metaphysics from ethics were motivated by a moral dictum opposing dogmatism, intolerance, and failure to reflect responsibly on one’s moral principles. When a particular set of principles are depicted as the moral law, this seems to license one to censure and indoctrinate others while neglecting one’s responsibility to continually reflect on one’s own principles. That’s one, familiar kind of dogmatism. Forsberg’s discussion of provisionality highlights that despite its ideals, the Current View entrenches and conceals a second kind of dogmatism: conceptual complacency. While Murdoch agrees that metaphysical truths cannot be philosophically established, there are forms of critical moral reflection—on our concepts and what they illuminate, rather than on our principles—that require faith in a “transcendent background” and in the power of vision for their health. Maintaining this critical outlook requires the humility of believing that moral reality outstrips one’s present grasp, which can only ever be provisional. This humility is opposed to both the conviction that the world is readily available to empirical observation and the conviction that one’s determinate metaphysical beliefs have the last word. The second of those represents the figure of the Communist. While Murdoch discusses Communism throughout her early period writings, she regards them as a small minority of the population and does not address them with the same urgency as proponents of the Current View.38 The Current View and conceptual dogmatism were here primary concern, although the danger of metaphysical dogmatism was by no means lost on her. The first conviction shaped how post-war socialists approached the task of producing educational materials and their avoidance of the techniques that past masters—especially William Morris—used to communicate their socialist visions. Having lost the idea of transcendent moral realities, “liberal-­minded socialists” or “the more progressive section of society” could “provide very little in the way of guidance and inspiration”.39 On Murdoch’s view, an important function of political writing is to “feed” the “the moral imagination of the young”.40 This is done through the communication of moral visions that enable one to access configurations of  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 67.  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 171. 40  Ibid., 181. 38 39

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reality that would otherwise be left dark. Writings of this kind are a “source of moral energy” capable of nourishing socialist movements.41 In “A House of Theory”, Murdoch examines the Current View’s impact on socialist writing and names it as one of the causes of the withering of the socialist movement in post-war Britain. The book that Murdoch’s paper “A House of Theory” appeared in was entitled Conviction. It might better (if less elegantly) have been titled “What happened to Socialist Conviction and how do we get it back?” In Norman MacKenzie’s introduction to the collection, he reflects on how different it is to be a British socialist in the 1950s than it had been in the 1930s. There had been a feeling of clarity and energy then. Hope was joined with a sense of where to exert one’s efforts to transform ideals into concrete action. There was, MacKenzie notes, “a sense of belonging, that there was something to be done and that they could have some part in doing it”.42 There were a number of “barricades” one could fight on. One could fight against: unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, the inadequacy of state schooling. One could fight for: sanctions against Mussolini’s Italy; arms for Spain; Chamberlain out of office; the Popular Front. For many, to be a socialist meant to work towards a Labour victory in the 1945 General Election. The fighting itself had relatively clear form—there were petitions, fundraisers, recruitment efforts, picket lines, protests, campaigns. One felt like one could have a decisive impact on the fate of Europe, and that one’s actions mattered.43 Murdoch took part in many of these activities during her Somerville College days. She supported the Republican cause in Spain, recruited for the Communist Party of Great Britain, campaigned for Labour in the 1938 Oxford by-election (and again for the ouster of Churchill in 1945). These years were characterized by conviction that a better world was possible and that one could meaningfully take the side of Socialism and play an active role in shaping the future. Of her ideals, she writes: “[M]y religion, if I have one, at the moment is a passionate belief in the beautiful, and a faith in the ultimate triumph of the people, the workers of the world. And in a longing for the civilisation in which every worker shall possess and love beauty.” In a letter to a Badminton school chum penned in 1939,  Ibid., 171.  Norman MacKenzie, “The Stalemate State”, in Conviction ed. Norman MacKenzie (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), 9. 43  MacKenzie, “The Stalemate State”, 10. 41 42

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she expresses her faith that this ideal might be transformed into action, writing: I thank God that I have the [Communist] party to direct and discipline my previously vague and ineffective idealism. I feel now that I am doing some good, and that life has a purpose and that the history of civilisation is not just an interesting series of unconnected muddles, but a comprehensible development towards the highest stage of society, the Soviet world state … It’s no use dabbling about on the surface, as a Labour government would do, with always the risk that the Conservatives will come in at the next election and undo all their work. We’ve got to reorganise society from top to bottom—it’s rotten, it’s inefficient, it’s fundamentally unjust, and it must be radically changed, even at the expense of some bloodshed.44

For Murdoch and others like MacKenzie who had come of age in the years prior to the Second World War, the clarity of purpose and energy the once enjoyed slowly dissipated as time passed. Murdoch traces the withering of the socialist imagination to a number of historical causes. She lists: the uneasy achievement of the Welfare State, disappointment with the Soviet Union, and the formation of the parliamentary Labour party. In his review of Conviction, Kenneth Alexander notes that post-war Britain was enjoying “rising living standards, extending welfare provision, the growth of government intervention in economic affairs, the disappointments and frustrations of nationalisation and above all the comparative stability of the labour market at a level near to full employment for almost twenty years”.45 With some of the worst harms of capitalism tempered, the formerly vibrant working-class movement had achieved a modest victory. Murdoch had celebrated Labour’s victory in 1945 and the promise that the Beveridge Report’s welfare state proposals would be implemented, declaring in a letter to David Hicks, “This is the beginning of the new world.”46 These events failed to create a post-capitalist society or a halfway house to socialism. As MacKenzie puts it, “what it did was marry social reform 44  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Anne Leech, early April 1939, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10–12. 45  Kenneth Alexander, “Review: Conviction”, in The New Reasoner 7 (1958), 112. 46  Iris Murdoch, Letter to David Hicks, 27 July 1945, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 46.

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to capitalist boom”.47 With the worst deprivations of society mitigated by welfare provisions and other government initiatives, the attention of this movement shifted to localized fights for reforms like schemes of nationalization and improvements to public education. While the raising of minimum standards was important, Labour social policy looked to Socialists like the playing of an eternal game of cat-and-mouse between the Establishment and reformers. The goal was general comfort and lessened inequality, not Happiness and a brotherhood of man. The energy to really transform the distribution of wealth, the realities of class, and the oligarchic hoarding of power had dissipated. The post-war welfare state “was created as the climax to a century of Socialist effort, but among its successes must be counted a paralysis of Socialist thinking”.48 Murdoch shared MacKenzie’s frustrations with “the Stalemate State”. She reflects on how writers like William Morris expressed visions of ideal communities in which “work would once again be creative and meaningful, and human brotherhood would be restored”.49 After the Second World War, ‘equality’ was no longer associated with the elimination of exploitation and alienation through the ending of capitalism; focus was placed on partially diminishing the distance between the rich and the poor and distributing opportunities for social and economic improvement more fairly through education reforms. Murdoch writes “it now seems possible that capitalism is not doomed after all … On both the theoretical and the practical plane economists have led us to believe that capitalism can (perhaps) … does not inevitably … grind the faces of the poor”.50 A second cause of socialism’s waning hold over the public imagination was disillusionment with existing state Communism. Murdoch writes, “The appeal of Marxism as a body of doctrine, never strong in this country, has diminished with the lengthening history of the USSR”.51 As we’ve seen, Murdoch had felt inspired by the achievements of State Socialism during her Somerville College days and dreamt of a “Soviet world state”. MacKenzie notes that for British socialists during the interwar period, Russia was looked to as proof that they were not just utopian dreamers. There was a place where what they dreamt of was real. The (apparent)  MacKenzie, “The Stalemate State”, 18.  Ibid., 19. 49  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 172. 50  Ibid., 172. 51  Ibid., 173. 47 48

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s­ uccess of the Soviet Union, MacKenzie writes, “had provided a psychological crutch for the Left, so the reaction to Stalinism created disillusion and dismay”.52 In the minds of many, socialism and Soviet Communism became so intertwined that discovery of the realities of Stalinism were thought of as proof positive that socialism as such was doomed to such authoritarian perversions. The public as a whole, MacKenzie continues, “became distrustful of any course, however innocuous and well-­ intentioned, that might seem in the end to lead to a totalitarian tyranny, to create the equality of the slave-camp in the name of human brotherhood, and to establish a society that was devoid of moral judgment because it had become the instrument of historical necessity”.53 By the late 1950s, many members of the Communist Part of Great Britain (including Murdoch) had given up their memberships. Murdoch responded to news about the Soviet Union with increasing disillusionment and a loss of her former sense of clarity. Learning about the Berlin Blockade left her “sick and confused” but “determined not to be flurried into any simplistic anti-Soviet attitudes”.54 Similarly, reading the news about Yugoslavia being expelled from Cominform for hostility to the Soviet Union, filled her “with gloom and confusion. Que penser, que faire, je n’y comprends rien [What to think, what to do, I don’t understand anything]”.55 In her disillusionment, she was forced to renew her search for the True Marxism.56 Others lost their faith in the Soviet experiment when they learned of the invasion of Hungary or when Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” was leaked, revealing the extent of Stalin’s purges and deceptions. As formal socialist bodies like the Communist Party bled membership in Britain, socialist theorizing was left to the few remaining party loyalists and leftist members of Labour. Liberal-minded and anti-Stalinist British socialists  MacKenzie, “The Stalemate State”, 14.  Ibid., 15. 54  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Hal Lidderdale, late spring 1948, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 109. 55  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Raymond Queneau, 20 July 1948, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 111. 56  Iris Murdoch, Letter to Hal Lidderdale, July 1950, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 125. 52 53

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largely gave this task up, both out of disenchantment with revolutionary politics and under the influence of the Current View.57 Browning adds that the decline in socialist theorizing expresses “a lack of faith in social engineering and utopianism”.58 While the development of welfare schemes made radical social change seem less urgently needed, this decline was accelerated by disillusionment with attempts to create egalitarian societies, projects that seemed doomed from the outset. Murdoch links the decline of visionary socialist theory with the ideals of linguistic moral philosophy. The methods of that practice were keyed to the ideals of clarity and neutrality, turning its attention away from the idiosyncrasies of personal ideals and points of view in order to isolate the formal dimensions of prescriptive moral language use. As a result, philosophers no longer explored the kinds of topics that formerly brought experts and laymen together, that is, substantive visions of the moral life, the good society, or the scope and meaning of choice-independent descriptive moral concepts.59 According to Murdoch, they neglected, “the activity of theorizing, imagining, or seeking for deeper insight”, and avoided reflecting directly upon the “intermediate area of concepts” that shape a subject’s contact with reality.60 While we’ve seen how these tendencies played out among moral philosophers, Murdoch claims that the exclusion of vision also affected political philosophers and socialist writers. It is important to broaden the discussion beyond philosophers in discussing socialist theory since, Murdoch notes, socialist theory in Britain was not traditionally produced by “academic thinkers”, but rather by groups like the Socialist League and the Fabian Society and individuals like William Morris.61 For post-war critics and theorists, “Political activity, like moral activity, is thought of as the making of empirical choices”.62 That is to say, it is concerned with how individuals specify the facts and apply principles in light of them. While moral philosophy remained energetic in this narrow linguistic form, political theory was altered for the worse and the traditions that produced political philosophers like T.  H. Green had faded.63 Browning elaborates,  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 173.  Browning, “Murdoch and the End of Ideology”, 141. 59  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 175. 60  Ibid., 177. 61  Ibid., 174. 62  Ibid., 178. 63  Ibid., 177. 57 58

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“Political philosophy in the immediate post-war period was restrained in its aspirations, reining back speculative tendencies in the shade of the critique of metaphysics that had been undertaken by logical positivism.”64 Philosophers avoided topics like the “nature of man” and thought “systematic political theorising is a bad thing … because it is ‘metaphysical’ and opinionated and obscures the scientific business of altering our society for the better”.65 We can see the narrow form that political philosophy took during this period by turning our attention to T. D. Weldon. Murdoch cites Weldon as the paradigmatic political philosopher from this period. He denied that political philosophers should offer practical advice or engage in theorizing; rather, they should use linguistic analysis to “separate the solid recommendations from the conceptual [metaphysical] mask which comes away, as it were, empty”.66 It is, in Weldon’s view, a grave error to suppose that philosophy leads to the discovery of eternal Ideas or Values and that anyone who is acquainted with these must know beyond any possibility of doubt how all States ought to be organized and what the relation of States to one another and to their own members ought to take.67

Weldon denies that political philosophy should take up questions of “foundations” or “ideology”, by which he means outlining axioms for proving the necessity, possibility, or desirability of a particular type of political organization. For one’s confidence in the correctness of one’s own views to be grounded in metaphysical beliefs is not just intellectually indefensible; it is dangerous. It is no accident that this echoes the moral dictum underpinning the practice of moral philosophy. Weldon and Hare wrote during the same period in British history and were in this respect cut from the same liberal cloth. Socialist writers were also affected by the growing influence of the Current View. During this period, they eschewed two of the tasks that made the writings of past socialists like William Morris valuable. First, Morris described the moral ideals he thought radical social transformation should aspire towards; second, he detailed the moral scandals of capitalism  Browning, “Murdoch and the End of Ideology”, 141.  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 178–179. 66  Ibid., 178. 67  T.  D. Weldon, States and Morals, a Study in Political Conflicts (London: Murray, 1946), xii. 64 65

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in evocative terms related to what a human being is. By contrast, postwar socialists presented themselves as quasi-scientists whose primary task was to engage in a “highly organised investigation of the mechanics of society” and its “inevitable quasi-biological development”.68 Socialist education concentrated on technical knowledge of economic systems and Benthamite discussions of strategies for improving the distribution of wealth in society. The public writings they produced were, Murdoch notes, “detailed technical books and pamphlets in which the author tells us briefly that we need public ownership in order to bring about equality, and then hurries on to the details of investment policy”.69 The meaning of evaluative concepts like ‘equality’ was regarded as obvious. ‘Alienation’ did not figure. Murdoch asks what is lost when both political philosophers and socialist writers reject metaphysically and morally substantive theory and reject “moral clarification and understanding” as aims.70 She answers that it cuts off communication between these writers and the wider public. Great political writers of the past like Morris communicated moral visions and enabled ordinary people who were neither economists nor academic philosophers to engage in conceptual explorations of ‘equality’, ‘labour’, and ‘humanity’. Like John Berger’s country doctor in A Fortunate Man, a political writer can introduce concepts like ‘alienation’ or ‘exploitation’ and pictures of human life in light of which particular working conditions can be seen for what they are: affronts to human dignity. Doing so, they can help readers to overcome forms of conceptual deprivation, gaining insight into their own experiences as working-class people under capitalism.71 Insofar as the Current View leaves these aspects of our moral and political agency dark, it prevents us from acknowledging that political writings differ in quality on the basis of how they inspire these kinds of conceptual explorations (or don’t). It leaves us without standards for assessing what they do or fail to do. If we are convinced that we all inhabit the same, empirically available world of facts and differ only in our choice of principles, it will look like overcoming those differences through political communication is a matter of bringing the relevant facts to the others’ attention and helping them to see how to accomplish conceptually simple goals like  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 180.  Ibid., 182. 70  Ibid., 180. 71  Ibid., 174. 68 69

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overcoming material inequality. However, Murdoch claims, “It is not true that ‘everyone knows what is wrong with our society’ and differ with each other only in their choice of solutions. We differ in how we see ‘the facts’ and in how words are inflected in our thinking. Our ability to express what is wrong in a profound, subtle, and organised way will influence our conception of a solutions as well as providing us with the energy to seek it”.72 In spite of the development of the Welfare state, “the working class exists, and with it many of the ills of capitalist society which were a scandal to our forefathers”.73 What was absent during the late 1950s was a theoretical apparatus capable of bringing working-class peoples’ grievances determinately into view and displaying the necessity of political organization and action. On Murdoch’s view, what was needed was a moral vocabulary capable of disclosing the working-class as a deracinate, disinherited, and excluded mass of people, not merely a group living on smaller incomes and with less access to quality schooling. A vocabulary of this kind was available in the past, but working-class people in the 1950s no longer understood themselves in those terms. This could be changed, however, if socialist writers took up the task of articulating a fresh socialist vision of life. Murdoch writes: To do this would involve a rethinking and regrouping on the theoretical plan of concepts such as ‘exploitation’ and ‘alienation’ which were formerly gathered about the Labour Theory of Value. The familiar ideas of ‘equality’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ need to be understood anew in the light of the problem of labour and not treated as independent ‘absolutes’ whose meaning is taken for granted. To treat them so is ultimately to imperil them.74

Socialists would be better equipped to play that important social role— fostering insight and inspiring their readers—if they understood the aims of political communication in light of the transcendence of reality and the moral demands of vision. Socialist writing and sublime literature occupy parallel positions in Murdoch’s thought. Like Tolstoy, William Morris is a writer whose greatness is obscured by the dominant intellectual culture of the post-war period. For the same reason, contemporary writers fail to produce works of a quality on par with his. While sublime literature supports the exercise  Ibid., 183.  Ibid., 182. 74  Ibid., 184. 72 73

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of loving freedom, great socialist theory supports the renewal of language and a clearer vision of the realities of life under capitalism. Appreciating Murdoch’s concerns about the withering of this literature and its connection to the Current View helps us to see that while Forsberg is right to point to conceptual stultification as a danger, Murdoch’s fears were more specific than stultification as such. The Current View threatened working-­ class people’s self-understanding, the intelligibility of important practices of social critique, and crucially, it affected the availability of the resources needed to nourish those critical practices. Without adequate pictures of the transcendence of reality and human powers of moral vision, the health of the working-class movement was threatened; this was in large part because it lost a vital spiritual resource when visionary theorists disappeared from the scene. Without the titular “house” of socialist theory, Murdoch believes that we will continue to see our society divided between: experts and ignorant (though perhaps contented) masses with no communication between them … What is needed is an area of translation, an area in which specialised concepts and recommendations can be seen and understood in the light of moral and social ideas which have a certain degree of complexity and yet are not the sole property of technicians.75

The goal of socialist writing should be to communicate a vision that enables one’s readers to gain insight into their own lives. One should not assume a shared understanding of the realities of working-class life and evaluative political concepts, jumping ahead to discuss technical matters and reform policies without concern for basic differences of vision. To see the problem with doing this, one must have a conceptual framework for recognizing differences of vision, the gap between words and the changeable concepts they stand for, and the possibility that these might be improved. The Current View lacked this. Murdoch, we might think, was inspired to develop just such a framework in her writings on moral philosophy by her recognition of the effect that the Current View had on British socialism.

 Ibid., 180–181.

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Dogmatism, Communism, and the New Left Murdoch’s writings from the late 1950s present a complex view of the relationship between moral philosophy and moralizing. While proponents of the Current View believed that substantive moral and metaphysical theorizing had been discredited, Murdoch denies that moralizing and metaphysical ethics are necessarily dangerous. Rather, it is dangerous to exclude conceptual exploration and the refinement of vision from the scope of our moral agency and to lose sight of the resources that are needed to support the exercise of that agency. We are not self-sufficient, free choosers, and we go wrong when we think that we have no need for inspiration or guidance in the moral life. One such resource that she saw disappearing was visionary socialist theory. However, Murdoch’s embrace of moralizing had limits; she believed that there are forms of moralizing that should be eschewed, that is, rigid and dogmatic theories that discourage ongoing, critical reflection on our concepts.76 Her distinction between spiritually energizing and stultifying forms of theory shows through subtly in her discussions of Marxism. Noticing this can help us to see that her defence of the practice of socialist theorizing should not be heard as a call to return to what she sometimes calls “Natural Law” Marxism. There can be ways of connecting metaphysics and ethics that do not lead to the deadening of the life of our concepts in the political realm, just as religious faith is compatible with the ongoing refinement of personal vision. The latter topic is not thematized in Murdoch’s St. Anne’s period writings, but is a natural extension of her thinking.77 When Murdoch brings up Marxism in her early writings, she has in mind those who believe in economic determinism and identify freedom with increasing knowledge of the laws at work in oneself and upon oneself as an economic subject.78 The Marxist, she writes, “regards his analysis, with its key concepts such as the dialectic, the role of the proletariat, and  Ibid., 180.  To see what this extension would look like, see Niklas Forsberg’s discussion of religious tradition in Language Lost and Found. In his view, the meaning of the concept “Jewish” is connected with the question “What does it mean to lead a Jewish life?” and is something that each individual must explore for themselves. It is not defined in advance in term of abstract principles (wear this, don’t eat that, and alter one’s body in this way) that the individual must simply internalize. Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, 136. 78  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 70–71. 76 77

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so on, as recording objective facts about the nature of the universe. The Marxist, the average Marxist that is, is doing metaphysics in the old pre-­ Kantian sense”.79 She cites Marxism as an example of a morality that evades description in the terms afforded to us by the Current View. To understand the judgements made by persons who inhabit “natural law” moral outlooks, we need to make reference to their metaphysical beliefs (and not just their chosen principles); the person making such judgements views themself as attempting to understand reality’s deep structure and their role in the universe, society, or history; it is by doing so that one discovers what must be done in the concrete case. In using the phrase “Natural Law”, Murdoch is highlighting a similarity between Catholic and orthodox Marxist philosophies; in her view, both present us with metaphysical pictures of nature (as governed by divine providence, or ordered according to historical materialism) from which we can derive “dogmatic” principles (of practical reason, or of political organization) which are independent of an individual’s will and demand submission.80 The Current View rules this out as a genuine morality because (Murdoch avers) they are committed to the liberal dictum that you should not present morality as “continuous with some sort of larger structure of reality, whether this be a religious structure, or a social or historical one”, lest you become dogmatic, intolerant, and foreclose critical reflection on your principles.81 One might have qualms with Natural Law moralities, but their issue is not that they connect metaphysics and ethics; this in itself does not justify excluding them from analyses of moral language use. Metaphysical ethics might also take the form of loving freedom and conceptual moral learning, where subjects’ activities are given sense by metaphysical belief in the depth and individuality of human beings and inexhaustible detail of the world.82 The orthodox Marxist goes wrong, on Murdoch’s view, in making these practices unintelligible. The Natural Law Marxist occludes the dynamics of vision by: first, devaluing the individual; second, denying human agency over elements of the ideological superstructure such as one’s moral outlook; and third, approaching political analysis with an excessively rigid set of concepts, insensitive to the 79  Iris Murdoch, “The Existentialist Hero”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 111. 80  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 70. 81  Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, 65. 82  Ibid., 87.

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­ articularities of the situation being analysed. To understand Murdoch’s p own moral outlook, it is helpful to see her as intellectually aligned with members of the British New Left, dissident socialists who, like Murdoch, gave up their memberships in the Communist Party of Great Britain during the post-war period and who shared these three objections. On Murdoch’s telling, Marxists tend not to view human beings as valuable qua individuals. Rather, they reduce human beings to their class position and role in bringing about the end of capitalism. In her view, it is both a religious and scientific outlook because they hold “the apocalyptic belief that capitalism was doomed, [and] the Messianic belief in the role of the proletariat”.83 E. P. Thompson, co-editor of The New Reasoner (an early journal of the British New Left that Murdoch contributed to) objects to how orthodox Marxists judge individuals and actions in light of revolutionary strategy, all too willing to sacrifice the lives of individuals in the name of their ultimate goals. In an early statement of his alternative vision, “Socialist Humanism”, Thompson describes the orthodox outlook as follows: [T]here is in the real world no morality except class morality. … Such events as the Rostov trial and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution reveal the foundations of Communist philosophy nakedly exposed in action. ‘Real’ Communists might quibble about the tactical—or political—expediency of such actions, but they have no grounds for moral revulsion. Those who feel such revulsion are not “real” Communists.84

The socialist vision that Thompson and his fellow New Leftists were developing was humanist in that it condemned the prioritization of political expediency over human life and individual freedom. Murdoch’s contribution to The New Reasoner was a review of Boris Pasternak’s then-recent novel, Doctor Zhivago. In this piece, Murdoch also challenged the subordination of the individual artist to the needs of a Communist government. Far from a propagandist or propagator of political certainties, the poet’s role is to attend to his society with love and compassion, thereby becoming a profound consciousness capable of deepening the understanding of his readers and enabling them to enjoy a newly founded communion with  Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 171.  E.  P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines”, in The New Reasoner 1 (1957), 119–120. 83 84

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one another.85 Murdoch’s writings are more generally animated by the value and inexhaustible particularity of the individuals, not their disposability. One need not be politically useful to be valued. In addition to being anti-individualistic, Murdoch describes Marxism as excessively deterministic in how it pictures the relationship between human consciousness and society’s economic base. It is, Murdoch notes, one of several “types of modern quasi-philosophy or semi-scientific metaphysics which seek to present the human mind as enclosed within social, historical, or psychological frames”.86 Thompson makes a similar complaint. He writes: Stalin declared the “superstructure” is connected with production only indirectly, through the economy, through the basis. The superstructure therefore reflects changes in the level of development of the productive forces not immediately and not directly, but only after changes in the basis, through the prism of the changes wrought in the basis by the changes in production.87

This is, however, patently a misdescription of the life of ideas in a society. According to Thompson, it “reduces human consciousness to a form of erratic, involuntary response to steel-mills and brickyards, which are in a spontaneous process of looming and becoming”.88 Throughout Murdoch’s writings, she highlights the importance of regarding ourselves as free with respect to the psychological and socio-historical forces operative in and on our psyches, that is, neurosis and convention. This is not to say that they don’t overdetermine how we think about and imagine the lives of others or that we can simply choose to escape their influence. It is rather to say that we are capable of loving freedom and that conceptual moral learning is possible (although both are extremely difficult). For Murdoch, it is important that we regard human beings as capable of overcoming cultural prejudices without attributing this power to objective determinants like the steel-mills and brickyards or changes wrought in the economic base by changes in the organization of production. Picturing human consciousness as if it were the inevitable by-product of deeper historical and economic realities is just as dangerous as a purely liberal picture of unconstrained freedom of choice. It conceals the  Iris Murdoch, “Review: Dr. Zhivago”, in The New Reasoner 7 (1958), 142.  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 71. 87  Thompson, “Socialist Humanism”, 113. 88  Ibid., 114. 85 86

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imaginative dimensions of human freedom. On the question of economic determinism, Murdoch sides with the liberal political philosopher Isaiah Berlin over the Marxists. In “Metaphysics and Ethics”, she favourably cites the critique of economic determinism that appears in his 1954 lecture “Historical Inevitability”. Berlin describes the Marxist picture of the human as follows: Men do as they do, and think as they think, largely as a ‘function of’ the inevitable evolution of the ‘class’ as a whole—from which it follows that the history and development of classes can be studied independently of the biographies of their component individuals. It is the ‘structure’ and the ‘evolution’ of the class alone that (causally) matters in the end.89

Marx and contemporary Marxists describe individuals as conditioned by and best understood in terms of social class rather than the specific circumstances of an individual’s life, their thoughts, or their dreams. A person can be understood as an instance of a type; there is no need for compassion, tolerance, or real interest in them as an individual. What makes us individual looks like the mere muck of ideology. In their subjective being, ordinary men “are blind in varying degrees to that which truly shapes their lives, they worship fetishes and invent childish mythologies, which they dignify with the title of view or theories in order to explain the world in which they live”. Reality is identified with the objective “march of history … real forces—impersonal and irresistible—which truly govern the world develop to a point where a new historical advance is ‘due’”.90 History transcends individuals, marching inevitably towards the destructive revolutions destined to transform capitalist societies without requiring individuals’ conscious input. This is a far cry from the complex textures of everyday life that Murdoch thinks personal vision discloses. Finally, while the meaning of ‘dogmatism’ differs between Murdoch and proponents of the Current View, Murdoch objects to dogmatic rigidity at the level of one’s conceptual outlook. This includes metaphysical pictures that present reality’s contours as determinate and fully knowable such that we can pronounce some interpretations fully right and others fully wrong. She approvingly writes of Hegel, “He did not class theories as 89  Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, in Liberty ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99–100. 90  Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, 112.

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either whole truths or total errors, but allowed to all the influential beliefs that men have held the status of interpretation and discovery of the world.”91 By picturing reality as inexhaustibly particular and the task of understanding as endless, it is possible to recognize that different conceptual outlooks will illuminate different configurations, yield different and valuable insights, and that we can conceive of some differences of vision “as constituting a conversation” rather than as the confrontation of reason and superstition, truth and falsity, good and evil.92 Not all differences are like this—we might think that it’s a very different thing to differ about the point of conversation than to differ about the humanity of Jewish people—but fear of the latter shouldn’t prevent us from attempting to understand and protect the former. In a similar spirit, the editors of The New Reasoner describe their mission as follows: “to contribute to the re-discovery of our traditions, the affirmation of socialist values, and the undogmatic perception of social reality”.93 Members of the British New Left complained that orthodox Marxists were too dogmatically wedded to their own terms of analysis, which then overdetermined their interpretations of particular phenomena. This is a propensity that John Saville, Thompson’s co-editor at The New Reasoner, describes as a Stalinist tendency to “substitute the smooth formulation for the gritty complexity of the real world”.94 Those who offered alternative views on questions of the value of the individual or the political sovereignty of Hungary were simply delegitimized as “not real Communists” rather than tolerated in their differences and seen as contributing to an ongoing conversation about what it meant to be a socialist. For Saville, this rigidity is blinding and leaves those attempting to develop political programmes or critiques to “grope in the dark”.95 Effective political actors must grapple with the true complexity of the world they live in

 Murdoch, “A House of Theory”, 176.  Ibid., 174. 93  John Saville and E. P. Thompson, “Editorial”, in The New Reasoner 1 (1957), 2–3. 94  John Saville, “A Note on Dogmatism”, in The New Reasoner 1 (1957), 78. 95  Saville, “A Note on Dogmatism”, 79. 91 92

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and honestly acknowledge when their terms of analysis have come out of step with political realities.96 In “Metaphysics and Ethics”, Murdoch describes a contrast between a liberal moral outlook and a natural law outlook. It might be supposed that we all must belong to one or the other of these camps. Either one maintains that moral agency can be defined in terms of free decision-making and action, or one pictures freedom as a function of insight into a determinate metaphysical framework that transcends the individual, gives her reality, and which is more important than them.97 However, we can break free from this false dichotomy when we notice what Murdoch does in her own philosophical writings. She reminds her readers of familiar experiences that they are ill-equipped to describe and explain, given the limited vocabulary afforded to them by the view of moral language, human freedom, and reality they were enculturated into. To make sense of these experiences, and to restore the health of our practices of conceptual moral learning and the critique of outlook, we need alternative pictures. We need to see ourselves as beings capable of revising and refining our moral vision through conceptual explorations, and of thus gaining insight into configurations of reality that otherwise outstrip what we can see. This is a kind of realism that inspires humility and tolerance, not the dogmatic digging in of one’s heels and devaluation of human beings. While Diamond and Forsberg are right to notice Murdoch’s worries about the loss of our power to acknowledge conceptual losses, privations, and stultifications, they do not acknowledge the specificity of her worries. Viewing Murdoch’s writings on moral philosophy alongside her contemporaneous discussions of socialism’s fading influence in British society, we can appreciate that the threat posed by the Current View was not hypothetical. While she was penning her early writings on moral philosophy, Murdoch was witnessing the disappearance of a specific practice of

96  Saville’s favoured example of dogmatism is an orthodox Marxists’ analysis of Indian independence; the conclusions they drew about this moment in history were constrained by the traditional Marxist theory of imperialism according to which “it is impossible for imperialist countries to grant constitutional developments that are other than fictional”. This principle, Saville notes, was not borne out by the realities of colonial independence; imperialist powers did not retain the power to completely subjugate the national leadership of countries like India. Dogmatic faith in it prevented Marxists from grappling with the complexities of Indian political reality. Saville, “A Note on Dogmatism”, 81. 97  Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, 70.

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visionary socialist theorizing and the starvation of working-class imagination; without nourishment, the spirit of socialism was withering before her eyes. Murdoch’s writings on moral philosophy and socialist theory offer an alternative to the culturally dominant liberal view of the proper domain of the philosopher and political writer, that is, to leave substantive questions to the side and to analyze concepts in isolation from metaphysical belief. While she did not see a necessary connection between metaphysical ethics, moralism, and dogmatism, this does not mean that she saw Natural Law outlooks like Marxism as harmless. She is wary of both the conceptual dogmatism that comes with thinking that reality is empirically given and the conceptual dogmatism of those who think its metaphysical contours can be fully known by experts. Neither outlook fosters curiosity about our world and the idiosyncratic persons who inhabit it or celebrates the imaginative renegotiation of our concepts and vision. Her position on liberal and Natural Law moralities echoes the middle ground that she strikes in her writings on aesthetics. As we saw in Chap. 3, Murdoch charts a course between the dangerous view that a human being is fully available to public view and the view that a human being should never be regarded as a possible object of knowledge. Neither metaphysical picture supports the exercise of loving freedom, which involves both humility about the limits of one’s own understanding and faith that the fullness of the other’s being inevitably outstrips one’s images of them. Neither picture enables us to understand the value of great, sublime literature in supporting the health of that practice. For Murdoch, the creation of metaphysical images, metaphors, and analogies is meant to support practices that are internal to a life of compassionate love, tolerance of difference, the imaginative renewal of language and moral vision, reflection on the ideals comprising one’s total vision of life, and respect for the transcendent and inexhaustible mystery of reality. Given our own predilections for conventionality and neurosis, these practices are as fragile as they are precious. We are not fated to take them up and cannot simply choose to adopt love and moral imagination as personal policies. We need external support in the form of sublime novels and visionary socialist writings if we are to stop ourselves from coming to resemble the picture of the human being we inherit from the Current View. The post-war loss of concepts was dangerous in part because of how it undermined self-understanding and in part because of how it concealed the value of those resources from public view.

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Bibliography Alexander, Kenneth. 1958. Review: Conviction. In The New Reasoner 7: 113–118. Berlin, Isaiah. 1954/2002. Historical Inevitability. In Liberty ed. Henry Hardy, 94–165. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Browning, Gary. 2018. Murdoch and the End of Ideology. In Murdoch on Truth and Love ed. Gary Browning, 133–158. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1988. Losing Your Concepts. Ethics 98: 255–277. Forsberg, Niklas. 2011. Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is. SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 12: 1–17. Forsberg, Niklas. 2013. Language Lost and Found. New York: Bloomsbury. Hare, R. M. 1971. A School for Philosophers. In Essays on Philosophical Method. New York: MacMillan. Hare, R. M. 2002. Philosophical Autobiography. Utilitas 14: 269–305. MacKenzie, Norman. 1958. The Stalemate State. In Conviction ed. Norman MacKenzie, 7–22. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Murdoch, Iris. 1950/1998. The Existentialist Hero. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 108–115. New York, Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1956/1998. Vision and Choice in Morality. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 76–98. New York: Penguin Murdoch, Iris. 1957/1998. Metaphysics and Ethics. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 59–75. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1958b. A House of Theory. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 171–186. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1958a. Review: Dr. Zhivago. In The New Reasoner 7: 140–2. Murdoch, Iris. 1961/1998. Against Dryness. In: Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 287–295. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 eds. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Price, H. H. 1945. ‘Clarity is not Enough’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes 19: 1–31. Saville, John. 1957. A Note on Dogmatism. The New Reasoner 1: 78–82. Saville, John and Thompson, E. P. 1957. Editorial. The New Reasoner 1: 2–3. Thompson, E. P. 1957. Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines. The New Reasoner 1: 105–123. Weldon, T.  D. 1946. States and Morals, a Study in Political Conflicts. London: Murray.

CHAPTER 7

A Prelude to The Sovereignty of Good?

Introduction In the previous chapters, I’ve recommended an approach to reading Murdoch’s early writings that represents her as responding to questions that haunted British philosophy in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Ryle’s increased leadership role in the British philosophical scene and the growing ubiquity of clarificatory or linguistic philosophy at Oxford and beyond raised questions about what was being left behind with the older generation of public-minded, metaphysically audacious, and poetic British Idealists. This changing of the guard raised major questions about the practice of philosophy and the role of the philosopher in public life. How should the distinction be drawn between moral philosophy and preaching? What does it mean to achieve clarity in philosophy, and is it helped or hindered by literary language and paradox? For Murdoch, it seemed possible to bring together the political, literary, and philosophical sides of herself—but discovering how to do this would require that she approach philosophy in an idiosyncratic manner relative to her clarificatory contemporaries. The approach that she developed throughout the St. Anne’s years was characterized by a few distinctive features. It was clarificatory in a poetic sense best understood in light of Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical

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Method. Her contemporaries saw clarification as the task of attending to the logical behaviour of concepts and their criteria; we restore clarity by identifying the ways that philosophers are misled by the superficial syntax of ordinary language use. By contrast, Collingwood focused on the clarity we achieve when we find relatively new words for relatively new phenomena, learning to say what we previously only dimly apprehended. Throughout Murdoch’s early career writings, we saw her identifying experiences that lay beyond the borders of what her contemporaries counted as relevant to the philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, or aesthetics. These experiences also lay beyond the scope of what they could do justice to, given the conceptual frameworks they operated with. She addressed these lacunae and the metaphysical assumptions that supported them by developing analogies and metaphors and by challenging conventional uses of concepts. Thinking in the terms she provides, we can acknowledge various ways that we are answerable to realities beyond our present understanding, notice what within us can prevent us from taking those realities seriously in practice, and recall the kinds of descriptions we apply to those who successfully do so. Rather than attempting to defend alternative philosophical positions, I’ve highlighted the ways that we can understand Murdoch’s clarificatory work as a self-conscious form of moralizing and as an attempt to awaken her contemporaries to the significance of major changes—degenerations—in the literary and political culture of post-war Britain. She did metaphysics as practical guidance, working to protect the health of forms of goodness that are mutable in human life. What this reading brings out is the fact that, for Murdoch, our perfectionist practices—of self-reflection, other-regard, moral development, art-­ creation, and socialist critique—are capable of disorientation and degeneration. It is also to flag that human beings have needs for external sources of inspiration and guidance in moral, artistic, and political life. We have traditionally found these in cultural products like novels and visionary political texts. Their availability is unfortunately not something we can take for granted. Acknowledging our needs can help us to see that we are vulnerable to changes in cultural environment in ways that proponents of the Current View did not, and could not, do justice to in their work. With this in view, I return to the question that has animated this volume: how should we read Iris Murdoch’s early philosophical writings? I have suggested that we should read her work with a close attention to her use of

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literary language, her chosen audience, and her commentary on the relationship between philosophy and culture. This answer has been meant as an alternative to two other approaches that prioritize the defending of positions in a way that I have not: the insight-extractive and synoptic approaches. The first, I argued, does not take this question seriously, using her work as a repository of valuable insights to be extracted and redeployed in arguments capable of satisfying a narrow conception of analytic rigour and clarity. The synoptic approach to Murdoch’s philosophical writings is more promising in that it is interested in the methods that Murdoch employs in her writings. Rather than saving Murdoch’s kernels of wisdom from her unsystematic thinking, Antonaccio worked to find the system operative below the surface of writings that can appear at first blush “highly original, disparate, and unsystematic”.1 Antonaccio offered the first systematic reading of Murdoch as a philosopher whose overall corpus hangs together as a “transcendental” defence of a position that Antonaccio calls “reflexive realism”. This is the view that our thinking presupposes the idea of a transcendent and absolute good. The reality of Goodness is “presumed in the very activity of consciousness in the act of knowing”.2 Our criteria for determining whether or not we’re approaching this ideal are internal to our subjective perspective and our power to discern differences in the quality of our consciousness. More recently, Jordan has proceeded in this same vein. The inflection that he gives to Murdoch’s realism differs from Antonaccio’s. He claims that she should be read as a “response-dependent realist”. In his view, Murdoch maintains that there are moral facts to be discerned in the world, but we can only specify them in relation to a perfected consciousness. Jordan distinguishes his position from Antonaccio’s by claiming that his is a “more perceptual model” and that hers is a more “Kantian constructivist model”.3 Antonaccio locates the criterion of truth inside the first-person standpoint—Jordan appeals to a logically constructed ideal observer’s standpoint.

 Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17.  Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, 114. 3  Jessy Jordan, “Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Realism”, in Journal of Value Inquiry 48(3) (2014), 382. 1 2

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What these two scholars share is the view that Murdoch’s career builds inexorably towards her appeals to Anselm’s ontological argument in her 1969 paper, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” and her 1992 book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. According to Jordan, the fact that Murdoch doesn’t articulate or defend this form of realism during the St. Anne’s years shouldn’t deter us from reading these works as laying the groundwork for that defense. He writes, “[A]lthough not fully formulated in her earlier essays, I believe that Murdoch can be seen there as groping toward the more fullthroated modest transcendental argument of MGM, and that those earlier phenomenological investigations only take their proper place in Murdoch’s mature thought by being seen as a part of a larger transcendental project.”4 That Murdoch’s early writings can be read independently of where her thought landed in the late 1960s and onward should give us pause here. Why should we think that the communication of a vision of the frailty of the human being, the reality of one’s inner life events and of other human beings, and the moral character of our world and actions—in short, the communication of regulative ideas of familiar, if philosophically neglected, human practices—be thought of as immature in relation to a more conventional defense of a philosophical position like moral realism? To return to the scene with which this book began, we could imagine this being the response offered to appease the traditionally minded analytic member of my Iris Murdoch reading group who, upon reading these works, complimented Murdoch’s persuasive descriptions of the moral life and its challenges but repeatedly asked “but where are the arguments?” This question presupposes that something more can and should be done. Murdoch invites us to see that the communication of metaphysical and moral vision is itself a worthy philosophical activity given philosophy’s role as a mirror and guide of its age. Furthermore, her early writings suggest that she believes this to be as much as philosophers can realistically aspire to. When it comes to metaphysical beliefs, one certainly cannot establish their truth once and for all by familiar sorts of philosophical argument (even as these beliefs are perfectly meaningful).5 When questions about the ontological status of what 4   Jessy Jordan, “On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method”, in European Journal of Philosophy 30(1) (2022), 404. 5  Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 64–65.

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she depicts in her writings arise, we see her withdrawing. About the status of inner life events, she writes, “an ontological approach which seeks for an identifiable inner stuff and either asserts or denies its existence, must be avoided”.6 We may not be able to verify the existence of such events in a way that would satisfy Ayer, but there is a sense in which this is beside the point. As Murdoch puts it, “we need and use the idea” that inner life phenomena like thoughts are describable individuals in much the same way as we need and use the idea of our own freedom and others’ in familiar moral practices and the idea of the systematicity of nature in familiar scientific practices. The justification of these beliefs is not philosophical—it is experiential. We can learn from experience that there is a meaningful difference between a lack of clarity about a mental event and an accurate description (and have a vocabulary for describing this difference and what a successful description is like).7 In a similar vein, there are experiences that would confirm for us that there is a meaningful difference between how I typically regard men who lead women on and how Tolstoy regards Vronsky (although I might not be in a position to notice and describe this difference without Murdoch’s help). Murdoch cannot establish that human beings are real, separate individuals or that inner life events really exist. All she aspires to do is to help us to achieve a clearer understanding of these ideas, the kinds of activities they are presupposed in, what in us hinders their practice, and where we can look for exemplars. The accrual of these experience can insulate us from the kinds of doubts that get a real grip on us when we stand outside these activities as spectators. While this might be true, it is possible that this is a case where youthful modesty gave way to mature ambition. That direction of development would be surprising—is it not more common for the young to overestimate their own abilities and to have their ambitions tempered by experience? In what follows, I want to show that there are striking continuities between the Murdoch of the St. Anne’s years and the Murdoch of The Sovereignty of Good. The latter work is one of two that the transcendental interpreters of Murdoch turn to when defending their reading of her. I will show that it in fact contains clues that support approaching these works in the same way that I’ve recommended we approach her earlier works. 6  Iris Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 38. 7  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 38–39.

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Methodological Continuities from “Thinking and Language” to The Sovereignty of Good In Justin Broackes’ “How to Read The Sovereignty of Good”, he notes that this three-essay collection was not written for an audience of philosophers, clarificatory or otherwise. He writes: Murdoch knew how to write standard philosophical journal articles and conference contributions … But the papers that make up The Sovereignty of Good were for a broader and less particularly philosophical audience— the first and the third were ‘big name’ lectures at the University College of North Wales in 1962, and at Cambridge in 1967; and the middle paper was for the 1966 meeting of the ‘Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity’—with physicists, biologists and literary critics among the distinguished participants—at Bowdoin College, Maine.8

In this we see a noteworthy continuity and our first clue that Murdoch retained her belief that philosophical clarification was not just for “the plain man”. Broackes also points out that Murdoch’s targets in these essays were not particular philosophical positions as such, but rather “cultural movements”. She regarded academic philosophy as part of those movements rather than independent from them. In The Sovereignty of Good, we find Murdoch in a familiar posture: reflecting on the state of mid-century philosophy with an eye on both sides of the Channel. Her complaints echo many from the St. Anne’s years and the cast of philosophers who appear in this later volume remain largely the same.9 Moreover, she is still concerned with how philosophical theories prevent the acknowledgement of how things seem to a philosophically naïve perspective. In “The Idea of Perfection”, she describes philosophy as a “two-way movement”. There is the movement towards the “building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of

8  Justin Broackes, “How to Read The Sovereignty of Good”, in The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood (New York: Routledge, 2022), 40. 9  With some minor changes and additions. For example, Stuart Hampshire, who featured in Murdoch’s early writings for his writings on aesthetics, reappears in this collection as the author of Thought and Action (1959) and Freedom of the Individual (1965).

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simple and obvious facts”.10 We need to make that second move in large part because a theory can make itself immune to challenge from rivals by systematically neglecting the very sort of considerations that would show its limitations. For example, behaviouristic moral philosophies deny that the inner life matters except insofar as it can be analysed in terms of behaviour or behavioural dispositions. Whatever doesn’t fit this mould falls outside the scope of our analysis of mental concepts and the scope of what matters morally. Murdoch invites us to set these theories to the side and to consider what we’d otherwise want to say about a particular scenario. A mother-in-law begins to worry that her negative assessment of her daughter-in-law is prejudiced or overdetermined by personal jealousy and exerts the effort to pay her a more careful and just attention. We want to say that she’s done something commendable. And yet, nothing in her outward behaviour or behavioural dispositions has changed—her negative opinion of her son’s bride never showed. Theoretically, nothing has changed in her mental state and there is nothing to commend. Murdoch writes, “This is one of those exasperating moments in philosophy when one seems to be being relentlessly prevented from saying something which one is irresistibly impelled to say”.11 This complaint could well have been written in connection to the philosophical prejudices Murdoch butted up against throughout the decade prior. It recalls to mind her articulation of “The Shakespeare Principle” in her discussion of literature and philosophy from the late 1950s. Rather than accepting the theoretical starting points suggested by Kantian aesthetic theories, this principle states that we should begin an investigation of aesthetic value by considering artworks we are already certain are great.12 It isn’t terribly surprising to learn that there is a strong methodological continuity between, say, a paper like “The Sublime and the Good” that was penned in 1959 and “The Idea of Perfection” which was given as a talk just three years later in 1962. But versions of this principle appear throughout the St. Anne’s years. In “Vision and Choice in Morality”, she began her Aristotelian Society talk by stating the importance of returning to a 10  Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 299. 11  Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”, 316. 12  Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 205.

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“primary apprehension of what morality is” rather than allowing our theoretical commitments to dictate what counts as a morality or a properly moral phenomenon.13 The opening lines of “Thinking and Language”, the earliest paper we’ve discussed in this volume, recommend that we “set aside all philosophical theories, old and new, about the nature of thinking” so that we might consider what we’d more naively want to call thinking and how we’d characterize those activities.14 This general technique enables us to see that proponents of the theories in question have been narrow in their selection of data. It also gives us occasion to notice how much we struggle when we try to describe and explain what our naïve attention reveals. A second continuity can be seen in how the Murdoch of The Sovereignty of Good describes the task of the moral philosopher. It is, she writes, to develop “a systematic explanatory background to our ordinary moral life” through the “provision of rich and fertile conceptual schemes which help us to reflect upon and understand the nature of moral progress and moral failure”.15 As we’ll see, this focus on our fallibility and improvement is connected with Murdoch’s abiding belief that philosophers should offer moral guidance. For now, we should notice how she carried out this task throughout The Sovereignty of Good: “conceptual stretching” and the development of metaphors. The first of these is a term that Broackes uses to explain why reading this text can be so jarring. We encounter words assembled together in unexpected configurations, with Murdoch asserting that there are deep connections between them. For example, she writes, “Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of attention that is a form of love”.16 It is not immediately obvious how to hear this assertion as true. This is especially difficult if: we are used to thinking of love as a kind of fond feeling or judgement about someone’s merits; we think that attention is something we pay to things we don’t love (e.g., work); and we think that prayer is how people ask God for favours (e.g., to give us this day our daily bread). It is by coming to see how these words are inflected in  Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 76. 14  Murdoch, “Thinking and Language”, 33. 15  Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”, 335–336. 16  Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 344. 13

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Murdoch’s writing that we can appreciate how they connect in this statement. If ‘love’ is a humble respect for a reality separate from ourselves and attention is marked by humility and distinguished from mere looking, then how might prayer be thought of as loving attention to God?17 By following Murdoch’s “stretched” uses of concepts, we begin to see that prayer is something more than a religious curio—it has generalizable features that can illuminate otherwise obscure phenomena of the moral life. A second technique that Murdoch both describes and employs throughout The Sovereignty of Good is the use of metaphors and analogies. She writes, The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision. Philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, has in the past often concerned itself with what it took to be our most important images, clarifying existing ones and developing new ones.18

To clarify the nature of moral progress and its impediments, Murdoch develops a rich imaginary of metaphors of pilgrimage and orientation drawn from Plato—especially the myth of the cave and the image of the Good as the sun—and from Freud and Weil—especially a quasi-­Newtonian vocabulary of mechanical systems of energies. The latter explain our tremendous vulnerability to our own lesser nature and our need for and how we are helped by external sources of inspiration and guidance. In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’, Murdoch asserts that a philosophy that is going to stand a chance of helping human beings to better themselves morally must have a realistic conception of our ordinary human condition or “original sin”.19 Twentieth-century psychology had made important discoveries about the human mind that conflicted with the view that human beings are free in the sense described by philosophers like Hare. For Hare, we are always free to step out of the complex of our own drives and motivations to survey the empirical facts, make decisions about what should be done and what principles ought to be affirmed, and to act as principled

 Broackes, “How to Read The Sovereignty of Good”, 49.  Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”, in Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1998), 363. 19  Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, 338. 17 18

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moral agents. On Murdoch’s view, Freud reveals that our psyches determine what we think, imagine, and do far more inexorably. Our psyche is an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings.20

In this picture, how we see the world, its events, and its inhabitants is the outcome of processes that operate independently of our conscious will and according to law-like patterns established in childhood. These “energies” lead us to build up ideas that protect our ego and steer us away from painful truths. As a result, we tend to live in a world of self-protective fantasy, or, “The tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one”.21 The metaphor of “quasi-mechanical energy” is not meant to suggest that human beings are completely unfree and at the mercy of their worst natures. The ‘quasi’ in her formulation is important. Determinism, like any metaphysical thesis, cannot in her view be proven by any philosophical argument or empirical observation. This means that one can defensibly retain the notion that there is some small part of us capable of acting in ways that are not determined by the selfish energies of the psyche; we can counter their influence on our imagination. This free part of us is not the choosing will envisioned by Kant and his twentieth-century successors; we are not capable of choosing to step out of the fantasy world of our psyche directly in the moment. It is rather the part of ourselves that is attracted to, loves, and can seek out what is beautiful and good; this attraction operates on our consciousness, changing the direction of our psychic energies and thereby enabling us to see things in a less selfish light and to improve.22 Understanding ourselves in quasi-Newtonian ways, we see that we are like an object in motion that will proceed forward at a constant speed in the same direction unless it is met with an opposing force. Our will cannot

 Ibid., 341.  Ibid., 348. 22  Ibid., 361. 20 21

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simply conjure this from within itself, but it can seek and receive outside help.23 A second element in the conceptual framework that Murdoch is developing is the concept of ‘prayer’. Prayer gives us a basic model for the exercise of the freedom we have by dint of our capacity to lovingly attend to God; this model helps us to recognize a common pattern among other, more secular techniques of self-improvement. Each case involves the turning of one’s attention to a Good that one respects and loves. As we’ve already seen, Murdoch does not think that prayer is essentially a petition for God to intercede and bring about some determinate state of affairs. What is most fundamental is the way that the person praying turns their attention to a God they regard as perfectly good, transcendent, real, and non-representable.24 To recognize such a being is to recognize one’s own imperfection and need, and to believe that one’s needs might be met (although one has no right to expect this—what we receive from God is a matter of grace). Murdoch writes: The believer feels that he needs, and can receive, extra help. ‘Not I, but Christ’ … whatever one thinks of its theological context, it does seem that prayer can actually induce a better quality of consciousness and provide an energy for good action which would not otherwise be available.25

In prayer, countervailing energy comes to those who look to what is perfect. It would be a moral catastrophe if non-believers had no alternative techniques for exercising this form of freedom. Thankfully, Murdoch thinks that prayer is a model that generalizes to secular practices. Without God, we can still “pray” in the sense of directing our attention towards objects 23  While this is primarily meant to illuminate the process of moral betterment, it also sheds light on powerful and obsessive emotional experiences like sexual love, hatred, resentment, and jealousy. We cannot stop ourselves from loving someone by “pure will” or by commanding oneself to stop. Murdoch writes, “What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. … Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing” (ibid. 345). 24  Ibid., 344. 25  Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”, 368.

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that momentarily displace our ordinary selfish attachments. Murdoch describes it as a “psychological fact” about us “that we can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which are valuable: virtuous people, great art, perhaps … the idea of goodness itself”.26 Murdoch deepens the idea that our engagement with great art is a kind of secular prayer by speaking of it as both a “sacrament” and a “source of good energy”.27 She speaks of it as working with that small, free part of ourselves that loves the beautiful and enables us to be drawn out of our habitual routes of consciousness to contemplate it. We find art interesting and captivating, but a great novel does not reward our usual egoistic drives in the way that fantasies do. If in ordinary life we sum others up as simple types, great art shows us the “minute and absolutely random detail of the world”; if ordinarily we see events in terms of familiar schemas, the events of a great novel are unified in ways we can’t sum up so easily and find “mysterious”. Great art enables us to participate in experiencing reality in the compassionate and just way that the great artist does, energized by the artists’ power to inspire our interest. Murdoch writes, “Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer.”28 What’s important to notice here is that Murdoch is developing a conceptual framework that both clarifies what we are like and what we need. It is a metaphysical description of the human condition that is directly linked to the recommendation of techniques for self-betterment that honour that condition. This is continuous with the practical bent of Murdoch’s earlier writings. The details of Murdoch’s views certainly changed over the course of the 1960s. While she had previously cited both convention and neurosis as the enemies of love, in The Sovereignty of Good the focus is more squarely on the distortive effect of our natural selfishness. There are some cases where conventionality is in the vicinity—for example, in “The Idea of Perfection”, Murdoch depicts conventional ways of judging others (e.g., judging the young in terms of the standards of dress and manners of an older generation). We are, however, given the impression that these are ultimately bolstered by selfish motivations (e.g., a mother-in-law’s jealousy of her son’s new wife).29 But methodologically, we see that Murdoch

 Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, 345.  Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”, 370. 28  Ibid., 371. 29  Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”, 312–313. 26 27

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continued to marry two tasks: the development of explanatory conceptual frameworks and the recommendation of moral resources. In describing the assessment of moral philosophies in The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch mentions two sets of criteria: the first are broadly hermeneutical, the second practical. A conceptual framework should be judged by how it illuminates facets of human life that are otherwise obscure, how it enables us to see new connections between phenomena, and whether it opens up or forecloses further reflection.30 As Broackes has noticed, this is a rather peculiar set of standards to hold moral philosophers to. On the one hand, it is strikingly similar to the criteria we use to assess scientific theories. On the other, her contemporaries would surely balk at the idea that they were attempting to create “fruitful places for reflection”. Murdoch was brave to hold herself and others to a standard that was liable to the judged as rather “woolly” by her peers.31 The second set of criteria are arguably even bolder. In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch claims that we should assess a moral philosophy on the basis of the ideals that it recommends and the quality of the guidance that it offers. Returning to a major theme from “Metaphysics and Ethics”, Murdoch notes that clarificatory moral philosophers wrongly suppose that what they do is morally neutral. She writes: Linguistic analysis claims simply to give a philosophical description of the human phenomenon of morality, without making any moral judgments. In fact, the resulting picture of human conduct has a clear moral bias. The merits of linguistic analytical man are freedom (in the sense of detachment, rationality), responsibility, self-awareness, sincerity, and a lot of utilitarian common sense.32

This is very similar to her earlier claim that the Current View was surreptitiously propagandizing for a liberal moral outlook. But whereas her contemporaries would hear this charge as impugning their success as philosophers, Murdoch denies that neutrality is either realistic or desirable. A moral philosophy should aspire to be a “philosophy one could live by”.33 She aligns herself with philosophers of the past like Plato who attempted to  Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”, 335–336.  Broackes, “How to read The Sovereignty of Good”, 52. 32  Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, 339–340. 33  Ibid., 337. 30 31

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picture the human being in the fullness of their imperfections and predilection for fantasy to justify techniques for moral betterment. This approach to philosophy should not be abandoned—she writes that contemporary philosophers should also ask: “What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better? Can we make ourselves morally better?”.34 During the St. Anne’s years, Murdoch developed conceptual frameworks that disclosed our need for sublime tragic novels and visionary socialist writings. She did not shy away from making substantive recommendations for moral resources on the basis of a substantive vision of what matters, and was then under threat, in human life. In her later writings, we see Murdoch continuing to complicate the distinction between moral philosophy and moralizing. It might be argued that these works are more systematic than her earlier writings in that the framework she develops displays a structure common to all our perfectionist practices rather than describing them in the more piecemeal fashion she had in her earlier work. Similarly, she both names specific moral resources while identifying a structure common to them using the metaphor of prayer. There is a continuity of methodology but greater systematicity in its application. What we have yet to consider is whether The Sovereignty of Good marks a methodological advancement in her body of work. Should we read her transcendental defence of moral realism as the culmination of what came prior? By way of conclusion, let’s consider whether this is plausible and whether we should think of the St. Anne’s writings as a prelude to what came after.

The Limits of Transcendental Arguments In her discussions of prayer in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, Murdoch asks whether some version of this practice for the purification and reorientation of energy can survive in a world without God. The idea of God brings together several notions that are necessary to the effectiveness of this technique and that any alternative candidate must also possess: perfection, transcendence, non-representability, and necessary reality.35 One place where Murdoch’s early thought is believed to have reached its culmination is in the arguments she offers for the necessity of the idea of perfection’s reality.  Ibid., 342.  Ibid., 344.

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In this, Jordan takes her to have finally begun construction on the ground prepared in her earlier writings. In those works, she used genealogical criticism to disclose the historical contingency of positions like ­prescriptivism and offered phenomenological descriptions of ordinary moral experiences to reveal the ubiquity of the evaluative in human thought and experience. In The Sovereignty of Good (and “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” in particular), she employs a transcendental argument to show that the good is in some sense necessary to human consciousness and experience—how things seem to us in the first-person perspective is a necessary appearance rather than something contingent or optional for beings like us. There are a few different registers that “necessary” might be heard in. Throughout this book, I have described elements of the conceptual frameworks that Murdoch developed during her early career as “regulative ideas” that describe how things seem from within the perspective of particular practices and that are needed to orient us within them. The practices themselves are not, however, universal, and their health cannot be taken for granted. This places a limit on the scope of those ideas’ necessity. Murdoch presents the infinitely receding ideal of fully understanding another person or of fully plumbing the depths of an inner life event as ideal endpoints of love and self-understanding respectively. These ideas illuminate effective techniques of self-betterment such as turning to sublime tragic literature. We can become convinced that these practically useful and appearance-preserving ideas represent how things really are. But Murdoch does not think that we can move from metaphysical belief to empirically or logically established certainty. It would, then, mark a significant change to Murdoch’s approach to philosophy if in The Sovereignty of Good she established that a particular metaphysical idea were necessary in a more robust sense, that is, in the sense of being a necessary condition for human consciousness and experience as such. This would be a move from claiming that for those who struggle to love well or to find nuanced descriptions of inner life experiences—those who occupy the perspective of practitioners—it is as if things really were thus-and-so to claiming that this is how things necessarily appear to any conscious human being. Jordan believes that Murdoch defended the second of these two claims using a “modest” kind of transcendental argument. Drawing from Robert Stern’s work, Jordan distinguishes between ambitious transcendental

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arguments designed to satisfy a sceptic about the existence of something like the external world and modest transcendental arguments that take a different tack in addressing sceptics. They operate by correcting a false description of human experience that seems to force a particular sceptical question upon us. For example, sceptical doubts about knowledge of other minds can be motivated by misdescribing our experience of other people’s behaviour and making it seem as if we make inferences from data about someone’s movements to inner, mental causes; a correct description would reflect how we experience movements as actions and expressions. According to Stern, modest responses to the sceptic begin from a “self-­evident starting point concerning our nature as subjects” and then show that this corrected description has “certain metaphysically necessary conditions, where in establishing that these conditions obtain, the sceptic is thereby refuted”.36 Insofar as the starting point is inescapable, what is presupposed by that starting point is thereby established as “how things need to appear to us or how we need to believe them to be”.37 According to Jordan, Murdoch’s transcendental arguments don’t attempt to establish the mind-independent reality of the Good; rather, they reveal that the idea of the Good is necessary to our ways of thinking or experiencing the world; this idea cannot be dislodged any more than we can stop thinking about or experiencing the world in the evaluatively laden ways that we do.38 The reality of the Good is a necessary idea for us given how the world necessarily appears to us. In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, do we see Murdoch describe an idea with this status? She speaks of ideas that have been empirically discovered. Under this heading, she cites Freud’s general picture of the egocentric psyche (as much as she might quibble with some of the details of his psychoanalytic theory).39 She also describes ideas that we discover to be effective regardless of whether or not what they represent really exists. It is for Murdoch a “psychological fact” that by turning our attention towards the idea of God, an individual can receive moral help.40 This is one example of a class of ideas that Murdoch thinks demonstrably reward the believer regardless of their truth. 36  Robert Stern, “Transcendental Arguments: A Plea for Modesty”, in Grazer Philosophische Studien 74 (2007), 144. 37  Stern, “Transcendental Arguments”, 143. 38  Jordan, “On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method”, 400–401. 39  Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, 341. 40  Ibid., 345.

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There are also “as if” ideas that represent how things appear to participants in truth-seeking activities. The notion that evaluative standards and ideals are real represents how things seem to us when we progress in a given practice, improve in our understanding, or learn to appreciate differences in the quality of consciousness (e.g., between myself and Tolstoy). These differences seem meaningful to someone who has learned to see themself as imperfect in relation to standards that seem to be independent of them (in that they don’t think of themself as their author or the source of their authority).41 Murdoch writes: A deep understanding of any field of human activity (painting, for instance) involves an increasing revelation of degrees of excellence and often a revelation of there being in fact little that is very good and nothing that is perfect. Increasing understanding of human conduct operates in a similar way. We come to perceive scales, distances, standards, and may incline to see as less than excellent what previously we were prepared to ‘let by’.42

We are inclined to think in epistemically loaded terms such as “revelation” and “perception”; implicit in this is the idea that there really are differences in quality that matter. Furthermore, our conviction that even the greatest artists or people we morally admire and take inspiration from are yet imperfect presupposes the existence of an ideal of perfection that even they fall short of.43 We do not experience perfection itself, but we experience ourselves and others in terms of our relative distances from the ideal. Experiences of “as if” and “it works” play an important role in building up personal conviction. When Murdoch introduces the ontological argument in a short passage from this essay, we see that rather than a proof that establishes the reality of its object, the ontological argument is, “a clear assertion of faith (it is often admitted to be appropriate only for those already convinced), which could only confidently be made on the basis of a certain amount of experience”.44 The sorts of experience she has in mind are those of being “rewarded”, as in the case of prayer. Faith is the conviction that we will receive strength from God when we attend lovingly to him. Similarly, she characterizes confidence in the reality of the good as the  Ibid., 349.  Ibid., 350. 43  Ibid., 351. 44  Ibid., 351. 41 42

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certainty that we must receive a return when good is sincerely desired. When one proceeds as if the regulative idea of perfection proper to a field of study or skill were real, one’s faith is met with reward: the energy to improve and an increase in what one can discern. Murdoch uses the concept of “reward” in describing what it is like to develop a new skill. When trying to improve her Russian, Murdoch feels that she is confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.45

Here, the structure of prayer recurs. By proceeding as if the Russian language were something real and external to herself—loving it, in the “stretched” sense—Murdoch’s sincere efforts to learn are rewarded. She learns both to speak and understand Russian better, but also to appreciate the distance between herself and an ideal of perfection. We could imagine Murdoch progressing in her studies to the point that she can read the poetry of Pushkin from the Cyrillic script and suddenly appreciating that her ability to understand Pushkin’s words is not accompanied by a Pushkin-­ level of facility with the language (which is impossibly far beyond her). This humbling realization is part of her increased certainty that the evaluative standards and ideals of Russian are real and independent from herself. This is one instance of a “proof” that occurs in numerous forms in connection with numerous practices where “as if” attitudes of love and realism reward one with deeper insight into those standards. In asking whether or not to adopt Jordan’s interpretation of Murdoch, the question we need to consider is whether the “as if” experiences just described are themselves ubiquitous in human consciousness as such. This has been disputed by Murdoch scholars. In David Robjant’s “How Miserable We Are, How Wicked”, he suggests that the transcendental reading of Murdoch exaggerates the universality of attunement to values  Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”, 373.

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external to the conscious will. It is not true that every person’s consciousness is like this and he denies that Murdoch believes otherwise. On Robjant’s reading, Murdoch recognizes that human consciousness can lack this perfectionist structure, especially when a person has suffered afflictions such as the death of loved ones, the horrors of war, or lengthy imprisonment. He writes: If human beings can be placed in situations which strip or shatter the personality, which denude them of all energy and motivation, and render the world utterly charmless and without attraction, then it seems that it simply cannot be true that Good is always and everywhere magnetic, that loving attention to the world will attract us to a clearer image of reality, that our transformative energies are never entirely in abeyance. 46

We might think most of us participate in truth-seeking activities that give us the “as if” experiences described above. This does not show that all of us do. Robjant invites us to acknowledge that some human beings are “dysfunctional” and inhabit worlds in which gradations of value are “levelled”. As he puts it, “the concept of the good is no less frail than the human beings in whom it is sometimes lodged”. 47 Murdoch’s response to post-war philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and moral philosophy were animated by similar worries about the contingency of moral consciousness. In the reading I have defended, she was animated by the belief that particular practices of attending to other human beings and refining our understanding of the world in morally rich terms are mutable. The appearance that other human beings are real in the sense of having impenetrable depths that a cursory understanding of their decisions and behaviour cannot reveal was not operative in Sartre’s novels; where we lose interest in others and allow ourselves to see them in light of our own neurotic fantasies, the kind of “levelling” that Robjant describes has taken place. This flattens the difference in quality between the representation of character in La Nausée and Anna Karenina. A similar levelling took place in the field of socialist political writings.

46  David Robjant, “How Miserable We Are, How Wicked; into the ‘Void’ with Murdoch, Mulhall, and Antonaccio”, in Heythrop Journal 54 (2013), 1000–1002. 47  Robjant, “How Miserable We Are, How Wicked”, 1001.

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If our topic is the Murdoch of the 1960s, we see that here too the transcendental reading downplays her pessimism about human psychology. For every perfectionist practice that she describes, Murdoch is alive to the ways that these activities can be carried out in degenerate forms, without humble attunement to one’s distance from ideals of truthfulness, realism, and love. Echoing the contrast she previously drew between tragic sublime and merely neurotic novels, Murdoch notes that perhaps most artists produce degenerate art that depicts self-consoling fantasies. Great art is rare and precious. It transcends this selfish day-dream consciousness and represents its subject matter with a “realism” that is essentially “both pity and justice”.48 For every artist who succeeds in painting with a sense of his answerability to how things are independently of himself, there are a dozen who paint in a sentimental spirit and represent the world as they wish it to be. For every François Millet painting of the hardness of country life and the work of gleaners in the fields, there is a François Boucher painting of shepherdesses and shepherds luxuriating in a state of sensuous repose. Murdoch’s pessimistic realism about human psychology is especially pronounced in her discussions of interpersonal relationships. In our daily lives, many of us fail to see ourselves as answerable to the transcendent reality of others; we do not recognize the distance between our ordinary, selfish view of them and what they are really like. It is especially hard to notice differences of quality in this domain since it is in interpersonal relationships that our selfishness is most powerful, operating in a “devious and frenzied manner”. Murdoch notes that, “Our attachments tend to be selfish and strong, and the transformation of our loves from selfishness to unselfishness is sometimes hard even to conceive of”.49 Far from struggling moral pilgrims, many of us can’t even imagine that there are standards of unselfish vision that we fall short of. As she puts it, “human love is normally too profoundly possessive and also too ‘mechanical’ to be a place of vision”.50 This is especially true when we are confronted with others’ suffering. It is, Murdoch writes, an “almost insuperable difficulty” for us to acknowledge it without “falsifying the picture in some way while making it bearable”, often through “sado-masochistic devices”.51 We turn away from the reality of suffering by finding a thrill in the idea of our power in inflicting  Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts”, 370–371.  Ibid., 374–375 50  Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” 361. 51  Ibid., 359. 48 49

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it, or taking personal responsibility for it in a self-centering way that is deeply unrealistic (e.g., masochistically blaming ourselves for injuries we played no role in inflicting). We are tempted to think that suffering is how human beings repent for evil and embrace the good—we can thereby think of it as coming to those who deserve it and justified by its ennobling or educational function.52 Our psyche has many strategies for minimizing, intellectualizing, rationalizing, or otherwise erecting consoling or ego-­ serving fantasies between ourselves and another’s pain. Many of us are inexperienced at holding these defence mechanisms in abeyance, not aware that we are susceptible to these ego-protecting distortions and proceeding without a sense of the direction where improvement lies. It is difficult to say in what sense experiences of this kind presuppose the reality of the Good. Murdoch acknowledges the mutability of our faith in goodness as something that limits the effectiveness of the Ontological Argument. She states that she wants to do something more than to present empirical generalizations about how human beings improve (“it works”) and how things appear (“it is as if this were so”). She wants to defend the view that Good exists necessarily. Unfortunately, she is alive to the fact that the proof she offers is limited in its power; like the Ontological Proof, the proof can reveal something implicit in the consciousness of the person who is already convinced. Given the connection between faith in God and Good and experience—a connection that Jordan acknowledges in describing Murdoch’s phenomenological descriptions as a necessary component of her “transcendental argument”—we might say that a philosophical argument alone cannot furnish experience where it has been lacking. While Murdoch laments this, she also acknowledges that, “Philosophical argument is almost always inconclusive, and this one is not of the most rigorous kind”.53 She is herself not entirely convinced of the reality of the Good. After an essay of describing experiences that give one the appearance that differences in consciousness matter morally, she gives voice to the fear that the metaphysical framework she’s presented is nothing but a philosophical consolation against despair. It is possible that there is no moral ordering of better and worse things, that the attempt to be good (rather than, say, just living up to one’s own personal ideals) is meaningless, and that what she thinks of as self-evidently great art is just art that she happens to like.  Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts”, 367.  Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” 360.

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Nothing she has written rules out the possibility that, “Perhaps indeed all is vanity, all is vanity, and there is not a respectable intellectual way of protecting people from despair. The world just is hopelessly evil.”54 While she initially frames this as a response that an imagined interlocutor might have, Murdoch confesses that she is “often more than half persuaded to think in these terms”.55 It is possible to live with a vision of the world as a senseless muddle in which we each must choose among undifferentiated options. It is perhaps because we are vulnerable to despair and selfishness that we need something more than inconclusive proofs to reorient us within the moral life. Just as our perfectionist practices are vulnerable to degeneration without external sources of inspiration and guidance, we need experience to restore our faith in the reality of perfectionist ideals. The very works of art that energize us in our struggle against selfish egoism are the same works that can help us to overcome sceptical and solipsistic despair. What Murdoch offers us throughout her St. Anne’s writings and The Sovereignty of Good is a conceptual framework that enables us to make sense of our vulnerability, to see the direction in which help lies, and to put ourselves in position wherein the humbling reality of perfectionist ideals are in evidence. When we exaggerate the security of our orientation towards the Good, we lose sight of one of Murdoch’s most valuable insights: “Art indeed, so far from being a playful diversion of the human race, is the place of its most fundamental insight, and the centre to which the more uncertain steps of metaphysics must constantly return.”56 This return to novels, to visionary socialist literature, and to poetry is important for both the philosopher and the plain man, both of whom were addressed by Iris Murdoch’s practical metaphysics.

Bibliography Antonaccio, Maria. 2000. Picturing the Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broackes, Justin. 2022. How to Read The Sovereignty of Good. In The Murdochian Mind eds. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood, 40–54. New York: Routledge. Jordan, Jessy. 2014. Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Realism. Journal of Value Inquiry 48(3): 371–385

 Ibid. 358.  Ibid. 359. 56  Ibid. 360. 54 55

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Jordan, Jessy. 2022. On the Transcendental Structure of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Method. European Journal of Philosophy 30(1): 394–410. Murdoch, Iris. 1951/1998. Thinking and Language. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 33–42. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1956/1998. Vision and Choice in Morality. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 76–98. New York: Penguin Murdoch, Iris. 1957/1998. Metaphysics and Ethics. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 59–75. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1959/1998. The Sublime and the Good. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 205–220. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1962/1998. The Idea of Perfection. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 299–336. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1967/1998. The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 363–385. New York: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1969/1998. On ‘God’ and ‘Good’. In Existentialists and Mystics ed. Peter Conradi, 337–362. New York: Penguin. Robjant, David. 2013. How Miserable We Are, How Wicked; into the ‘Void’ with Murdoch, Mulhall, and Antonaccio. Heythrop Journal 54: 999–1006.

Index1

A Against Dryness, 9, 75, 77n4, 77n5, 86n46, 87n52, 97n93, 101n104, 102n106, 104n111, 113n141, 115n146, 126n11, 166n33 Altorf, Hannah Marije, 2, 2n2 Antonaccio, Maria, 2, 7, 7n16, 70, 142n57, 189, 189n1, 189n2, 205n46 Ayer, A. J., 15, 15n8, 16, 17n16, 18, 20–24, 21n29, 21n30, 21n32, 22n36, 27, 27n51, 29, 31n65, 41, 44–47, 45n9, 45n10, 45n11, 46n13, 47n14, 53–55, 57, 60, 71, 73, 76, 123–126, 124n4, 129, 131, 132, 144, 157, 191 B Broackes, Justin, 2, 2n3, 86n47, 113n140, 147, 147n69, 192, 192n8, 194, 195n17, 199, 199n31

C Cavell, Stanley, 145, 145n64, 146n65, 161–163, 162n18, 162n19 Clarificatory philosophy, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 28–30, 34, 35, 38, 44, 153 Collingwood, R. G., 16, 17, 19, 20, 25–28, 26n46, 30, 32–36, 32n69, 32n70, 34n75, 48n18, 58, 58n48, 59, 70, 104, 105n115, 105n116, 153, 187 Communist Party, 14, 30, 37, 169, 172, 180 Consistency, 106, 128, 131, 136, 144–149, 160 Conventionality, 102, 104, 111–113, 115, 116, 126, 185, 198 Crary, Alice, 144, 144n61, 144n62 The Current View, 122, 123, 132–134, 136, 138, 141–143, 146, 149, 154–156, 159–161, 166–169, 173–175, 177–179, 182, 184, 185, 188, 199

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

D Diamond, Cora, 141, 142n57, 161, 163–165, 163n23, 163n24, 184 Dilman, Ilham, 72, 72n87, 101n102 E Emotivist, 45, 76, 160, 162 Existentialism, 3, 75, 86n47 The Existentialist Hero, 92n76, 179n79 The Existentialist Political Myth, 86n48, 87n50 F Foot, Philippa, 14n5, 17n18, 37, 55n38, 131, 131n33, 138, 138n47, 138n48, 145, 145n63 Forsberg, Niklas, 105, 105n117, 106, 106n119, 148, 149n73, 161, 165–168, 166n30, 166n31, 167n34, 167n35, 177, 178n77, 184 Freedom, 7, 16, 38, 48, 71, 76, 77, 79, 84, 86–90, 92, 93, 99–104, 107, 110, 111, 113, 113n140, 114n143, 115, 117, 129, 130, 133, 134, 143, 153, 154, 156, 160, 166, 176–181, 184, 185, 191, 192n9, 197, 199 Fromm, Erich, 103, 103n109, 105, 107, 107n121, 112, 112n137, 116, 116n149, 117n152 H Hämäläinen, Nora, 7, 8n21, 8n22, 42n3 Hampshire, Stuart, 2, 17n16, 82, 82n31, 82n32, 83, 192n9

Hare, R. M., 2, 17, 18n19, 29, 29n60, 30, 30n61, 30n63, 36, 36n82, 102, 122, 123, 125–134, 125n9, 125n10, 126n12, 128n22, 129n23, 129n24, 130n27, 130n30, 130n31, 130n32, 133n36, 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149, 154, 157–160, 157n8, 158n10, 159n11, 162, 166, 174, 195 Hegel in Modern Dress, 90n62 A House of Theory, 9, 122, 139, 139n52, 139n53, 156, 156n5, 168n39, 169, 171n49, 173n57, 173n59, 174n65, 175n68, 180n83, 183n91 I The Idea of Perfection, 192, 193, 193n10, 193n11, 194n15, 198, 198n29, 199n30 Individuality, 75, 77, 91, 98, 100, 101, 117, 179 Inner life, 43, 53, 55, 56, 60, 61, 65, 67, 70, 73, 76, 86, 99, 103, 143, 147, 155, 165, 190, 191, 193, 201 J Jordan, Jessy, 4, 4n8, 4n10, 5, 5n11, 8, 8n23, 9, 70, 189, 189n3, 190, 190n4, 201, 202n38, 204, 207 K Kant, Immanuel, 16, 33, 33n73, 71, 76–81, 78n11, 79n12, 79n15, 79n16, 80n19, 80n21, 82n30, 83–87, 84n39, 97, 98, 102, 110, 128, 156, 196 Knowing the Void, 111n135

 INDEX 

L Labour, 139, 140n55, 150, 170, 175, 176 Liberal, 18, 123, 126, 131, 140, 157, 158, 161, 165, 168, 174, 179, 181, 184, 185, 199 Liberalism, 30, 160 Lindsay, A. D., 19, 25–27, 27n49, 35, 36 Literature and philosophy, 91n72 Love, 14, 27, 103–108, 110, 111, 113–117, 133, 143, 154, 160, 169, 180, 185, 194, 197n23, 198, 201, 204, 206 M MacDonald, Margaret, 20, 23, 24, 24n41, 24n42, 67, 67n75, 67n76, 67n77, 82n30 MacKinnon, Donald, 17, 17n18, 30, 37, 55n38 Metaphysics and Ethics, 5n12, 6n14, 7n17, 7n20, 14n4, 30n62, 122, 123n2, 155n3, 156n6, 157, 157n9, 159n13, 168n38, 178n78, 179n80, 181n86, 182, 184, 184n97, 190n5, 199 Moore, G. E., 123, 124, 155, 156 The Moral Decision about Homosexuality, 104n114, 113, 113n138 Moralizing, 5, 7, 155, 160, 178, 188, 200 Moral realism, 4, 5, 11, 155, 190, 200 N Neurosis, 100, 102, 104, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 181, 185, 198 Non-naturalism, 123, 124, 126, 127

213

Nostalgia for the Particular, 9, 41, 55n39, 55n40, 63, 64n63, 66n72, 67n74, 68n78, 68n81, 76, 97n91, 104, 112n136 The Novelist as Metaphysician, 76, 76n2, 91n71, 91n73, 92n75 Novels, 14, 76, 77, 84, 91–93, 97, 101, 113–115, 121, 167, 185, 188, 200, 205, 206, 208 O On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ 123, 123n1, 190, 194n16, 195, 198n26, 199n32, 200, 202, 202n39, 206n50, 207n53 Ontological argument, 5, 190, 203, 207 P Persuasion, 5, 7, 154, 163 Poetry, 31n65, 33, 60, 69, 75, 85, 92, 204, 208 Prayer, 194, 197, 200, 203, 204 Prescriptivism, 3, 125, 158, 160, 201 Price, H. H., 18, 19, 19n23, 20n24, 25, 25n44, 26, 26n47, 29, 29n57, 31, 31n66, 32, 34–36, 35n76, 41, 55, 56n43, 153, 154, 154n1 R Regulative ideas, 70–72, 111, 117, 190, 201, 204 Responsibility, 19, 27, 29, 90, 125, 131, 149, 160, 168, 199, 207 Robjant, David, 204, 205, 205n46, 205n47

214 

INDEX

Romantic Rationalist, 6n15, 14n2, 56n44, 59n53, 63n61, 73, 73n88, 81, 82n28, 86n49, 88n54, 89n59, 90n63, 92n74, 93n77 Rule-following, 145 Ryle, Gilbert, 9, 13, 16, 18, 20, 20n26, 23, 23n38, 24, 24n39, 24n41, 35, 36n80, 36n81, 41, 43, 43n7, 44, 44n8, 47–53, 48n18, 48n19, 48n20, 49n24, 53n33, 55, 56, 59, 63, 63n62, 67n76, 67n77, 72, 73, 132, 187 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 6n15, 13, 14n2, 15, 15n8, 25n43, 56n44, 59n53, 63n61, 73, 73n88, 76, 81, 82n28, 86–94, 86n47, 86n49, 88n54, 89n59, 90n63, 92n74, 93n77, 113, 123, 205 Separateness, 72, 72n87, 101n102 Shakespeare, 83, 84, 96, 98, 99, 115, 117, 193 Socialist, 9, 38, 140, 168–170, 172, 173, 175–178, 180, 183, 185, 188, 200, 205, 208 The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts, 1, 83n36, 206n48, 207n52 Stebbing, Susan, 20, 27–30, 28n52, 28n54, 28n55, 30n61 Sublime, 7n18, 9, 75, 76n1, 76n3, 77n6, 79n15, 80n18, 80n20, 81, 81n23, 81n27, 82n29, 83n37, 84n38, 85n43, 87n51, 89n58, 91n69, 91n70, 93n80, 94, 95n83, 96, 96n88, 97n92, 98n94, 98n96, 98n97, 100n99, 101n103, 102n105, 102n107,

103n110, 104n112, 107n124, 110, 110n130, 111n132, 111n134, 113n142, 114n145, 117n153, 193, 193n12 The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, 7n18, 9, 75, 76n1, 76n3, 77n6, 80n18, 81n27, 84n38, 85n43, 87n51, 89n58, 91n70, 93n80, 98n96, 100n99, 101n103, 102n105, 102n107, 104n112, 107n124, 110n130, 111n134, 114n145, 117n153 The Sublime and the Good, 75, 79n15, 80n20, 81, 81n23, 82n29, 83n37, 91n69, 94, 95n83, 96, 96n88, 97n92, 98n94, 98n97, 103n110, 111n132, 113n142, 193, 193n12 T Thinking and Language, 9, 42n5, 52, 53, 53n33, 54n34, 55, 55n41, 56n43, 57, 57n45, 58n49, 60, 60n54, 70n85, 95, 95n87, 139n49, 146, 146n66, 191n6, 191n7, 194, 194n14 Thompson, E. P., 180, 180n84, 181, 181n87, 183, 183n93 Tolerance, 9, 104, 105, 109, 110, 115, 134, 159, 182, 184, 185 Tolstoy, Leo, 77, 84, 94, 95, 97–99, 108–110, 108n126, 109n127, 114, 117, 135, 176, 191, 203 Total vision of life, 134, 139, 147–149, 154, 158, 164, 166, 185 Transcendental, 5, 8, 9, 189–191, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207 T. S. Eliot as a Moralist, 88n53

 INDEX 

V Verificationism, 45, 47n17 Verificationist, 44, 46, 47, 51, 62, 157 Vision, 5, 18–21, 24n41, 26, 27, 30, 35, 60, 62, 94, 98, 134–139, 141–144, 146–151, 148n71, 153–156, 158–161, 164, 166, 168, 173, 176–180, 182–185, 190, 195, 200, 206, 208 Vision and Choice in Morality, 122, 132, 132n34, 132n35, 133n37,

215

139n50, 142n58, 146, 146n67, 147n70, 149n74, 154, 154n2, 155n4, 179n81, 193, 194n13 W Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 20n26, 41, 42n3, 42n4, 62, 62n60, 64, 65, 65n69, 145, 145n64, 146n65