Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) 9780198765868, 019876586X

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee M. N. A. BOCKMUEHL M. J. EDWARDS P. S. FIDDES G. D. FLOOD S. R. I. FOOT G. WARD D. N. J. MACCULLOCH

J. BARTON

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Heidegger’s Eschatology Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work Judith Wolfe (2013)

Ethics and Biblical Narrative A Literary and Discourse-Analytical Approach to the Story of Josiah S. Min Chun (2014) Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia The Rise of Devotionalism and the Politics of Genealogy Kiyokazu Okita (2014) Ricoeur on Moral Religion A Hermeneutics of Ethical Life James Carter (2014) Canon Law and Episcopal Authority The Canons of Antioch and Serdica Christopher W. B Stephens (2015) Time in the Book of Ecclesiastes Mette Bundvad (2015) Bede’s Temple An Image and its Interpretation Conor O’Brien (2015) C. S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation Gary Slater (2015) Defending the Trinity in the Reformed Palatinate The Elohistae Benjamin R. Merkle (2015) The Vision of Didymus the Blind A Fourth-Century Virtue Origenism Grant D. Bayliss (2015) George Errington and Roman Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century England Serenhedd James (2016)

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Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch J U L I A T. M E S Z A R O S

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Julia T. Meszaros 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015949858 ISBN 978–0–19–876586–8 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements My warm thanks go out to my teachers at the University of Oxford, where this project originated. Without Professor Paul S. Fiddes’s long-standing enthusiasm and perceptive feedback this study would never have been realized. His integration of scholarly rigour, faith, and humanity is a model and an inspiration. I am grateful to Professor Johannes Zachhuber, who has been an appreciated guide and collaborator over many years of academic work, and whose encouragement and critique have been invaluable. Professor George Pattison helpfully supported this project in its earliest and last stages. Thanks are also owed to my current university, KU Leuven (Belgium). The generous funding and patient support of Professor Yves De Maeseneer and the Anthropos Research Group have been instrumental in bringing this book to completion. It is rare to find a fellowship at once spiritual and academic. I am all the more grateful, therefore, to my friends and colleagues Geertjan Zuijdwegt, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Hannah Große Wiesmann, and Ignacio Silva. My parents’ faithful love and support is written over everything I do. Without them, I would neither know of love nor be capable of scholarly pursuits. Thank you. And thanks above all to Andrew, my husband and friend, colleague and mentor. Your daily witness teaches me the meaning and beauty of selfless love.

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Contents 1. Selfless Love Contested: Framing the Debate

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2. Grappling with a Tension: Love and the Self in Søren Kierkegaard

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3. From Tension to Dichotomy: Selfless Love after Kierkegaard

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4. A Participatory Individual: The Self in Paul Tillich

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5. Eros and Agape: Love in Paul Tillich

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6. ‘A Mechanism of Attachments’: The Self in Iris Murdoch

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7. Eros and Attention: Love in Iris Murdoch

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8. Recovering Selfless Love: Final Evaluations

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Bibliography Index

207 223

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1 Selfless Love Contested: Framing the Debate In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn, the previously self-absorbed Effingham Cooper comes to learn ‘that with the death of the self the world becomes quite automatically the object of a perfect love’.1 A similar connection between love and a loss of self is forged in the New Testament, whose ethos strongly influenced both Murdoch and Paul Tillich—the other major figure in this study. In the gospel texts, Jesus calls each human person to ‘deny himself and take up his cross and follow [him]’.2 Announcing that ‘whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it’, Jesus calls for a loving turn away from self and towards one’s neighbour and even enemy.3 For, ‘everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted’.4 This logic is developed further in the Pauline letters, which are replete with the language of dying to self.5 The above passages advocate a willingness to deny, rather than to indulge, our self-assertive and self-interested human impulses, and to lovingly turn towards the other. While they do not, of course, provide us with an exhaustive picture of the New Testament’s moral exhortations, they have made a particularly indelible impression on the Christian imagination throughout the ages, and characterize the spirituality of countless saints and mystics ever since.6 Yet these passages also point to that aspect of the Christian ethos which tends to meet with the greatest incomprehension and resistance today. The call to deny oneself in many ways appears to contradict 1

Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (London: Vintage Classics, 2000), 167. Mt 16:24. Biblical references come from the English Standard Version. Mt 10:38–9 (parr. Mk 8:35–6, Lk 9:24, 17:33); Mt 5:44. Note also the call to ‘hate’ one’s life in Lk 14:26. 4 5 Lk 14:10–11. e.g. Gal 2:20, Eph 4:22 f., Rom 6:8, Lk 14:26. 6 See e.g. Charles Borromeo’s reported pastoral advice that, ‘To give light to others the candle must consume itself . . . This is what we must do’; or St John of the Cross’s instruction that, ‘To arrive at being at all, desire to be nothing’; or Kierkegaard’s conviction that the Christian’s ‘life is completely squandered on existence, on the existence of others’ (Congregation for the Clergy [website]; John of the Cross, Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 78; Sren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 279). 2 3

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and undermine some of modernity’s most cherished insights into the constitution, needs, and capacities of the human individual and her well-being.7 Thus, the above passages, though previously perhaps considered the distinct treasure of Christianity, have, more recently, acquired the status of a liability. It is against this background that the present study seeks to reconsider the meaning and viability of a love unselfish in its motivation and centred not on the subject but on ‘the other’. This is done with a view to discerning the grounds on which selfless love can be considered conducive to—even necessary for—individual human well-being in the face of modern insights into the instability of the human self and into the psychologically problematic implications of simply suppressing human impulses and desires. The present study, then, is guided by the question of how such a—perhaps quintessentially Christian—kind of love might serve to support a person’s ability to live out her potential as a free, responsible, loving individual, and why it does not necessarily violate her spiritual and bodily integrity, stand in the way of just and loving relationships, undermine individual creativity, or prevent her from making use of her talents.8 On what philosophical, theological, and anthropological grounds, I here ask, can human goods such as love and friendship, creativity and meaningful self-engagement be considered to rest on selfless love more than on direct self-assertion, purely erotic love, or other paradigms offered in its stead? My assumption in posing this question is that it is only if selfless love can be shown to build up, rather than to undermine, the human self that it holds a legitimate place in the Christian life. The kind of love that is suggested by the New Testament passages cited above and that forms the core subject of this book has been referred to by a variety of names, including ‘self-giving’, ‘self-sacrificial’, and ‘self-denying’. All of these contain different nuances but centre on a common core. Although Murdoch uses the term ‘selfless love’ only occasionally and Tillich—to my 7 Throughout this work I use the pronoun ‘it’ to refer to the ‘human self ’ and, alternately, the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ to refer to the ‘human being’, the ‘human person’, and the ‘human individual’. (This, of course, excludes quotations, in which I follow the practice of the respective author.) 8 My concern with human flourishing echoes the contemporary ‘level of popular interest in . . . happiness, well-being and the good life’, as pointed out, for instance, by Harriet Harris (Harriet Harris, ‘Ambivalence over Virtue’, in Jane Garnett et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (London: SCM, 2006), 217). Harris cites the works of Alain de Botton, Richard Schoch’s The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life (London: Profile, 2006), and Nicholas White’s A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) as reflective of the contemporary concern with the fullness of human life. One could add Sissela Bok, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), and Simon Burnett, The Happiness Agenda: A Modern Obsession (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), among others. As Stephen Pope points out, the worldly well-being of the human individual must include ‘ “external goods” and “goods of the body” ’, and also ‘goods of the soul’ such as a development of one’s potential for creativity, love, and friendship (Stephen Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 149).

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knowledge—not at all, I have chosen this phrase not only for its prevalence in common parlance but, especially, for its unique resonance both with the latemodern tendency to posit human selflessness in the literal sense (that is, to view the notion of a stable and independent self as a fictive construction), and with the more traditional, figurative idea of an other-centred, self-giving love. This twofold resonance is relevant insofar as the rise and fall of selfless love—in the latter sense of a love turned away from self and towards the other—is directly linked to changing conceptualizations of the self. Indeed, selfless love can no longer be adequately explicated and defended apart from an engagement with the late modern deconstructions of the self. As I will argue, different features of such late modern perspectives both undermine and support the coherence of selfless love. We will find that, while their insight into the dynamically evolving nature of the self and its lack of selfsufficiency may help us account for the need for an other-centred love, their rejection of any kind of self-stability and self-unity has potentially contributed to selfless love’s gradual demise. Focusing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of the self, with which both Tillich and Murdoch engage, I will, for instance, explore the manner in which, in Sartrean existentialism, the deconstruction of the substantial self went hand in hand with the allegation of absolute individual freedom to be what one wants to be—a freedom which appeared to be compromised by concessions to the other. At the same time as thus attributing greater powers to the human being, Sartre’s claims regarding the absence of a stable and unified self also implied that the human being was now seen to be more vulnerable to external influences, to the point that she must guard and protect herself from the other. Both these views let selfless love appear as little less than a threat to human selfhood and well-being, and invite an increased focus on self-affirmation and self-care. On the other hand, Sartre’s diagnosis of human ‘self-lessness’ can also be a helpful aid towards showing how the Christian call to selfless love is not only rooted in a concern for the other but also in our anthropological makeup, namely our lack of an isolated or self-contained self. As I will argue, twentiethcentury deconstructions of the self such as Sartre’s are, in this respect, distinctly suited to demonstrating how and why it might be precisely ‘selfless’ love—in the sense of the outward-turned love of an incomplete, otherdependent person—which builds up the self in a way that does justice to the modern concern for the needs and well-being of the concrete human individual. I embark on this discussion not so much via a phenomenological analysis of selfless love, or of concrete moral scenarios, as by way of philosophical and theological analyses of the nature of love and the self. This reflects the view—a view I share with my main interlocutors, Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch—that, insofar as selfless love can be considered fruitful for human life, it must, above all be understood as an interior attitude or posture, whose outward

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manifestations are highly dependent on context. Apart from some more personal insight into the concrete and particular situation and needs of the beloved and the capacities of the lover (insight which an academic treatise would struggle to obtain and convey), it is impossible to define specific external acts as selfless. My concern here thus lies merely with clarifying the anthropological foundations and wider meaning of a loving orientation away from self. This dovetails also with the fact that our contemporary struggle to accept the validity of selfless love is not primarily a matter of lived experience. Most of us have experienced concrete acts that we would willingly, and intuitively, describe as acts of selfless love. Instead, it is first and foremost one of conceptual clarity, or of understanding the foundations, nature, and significance of selfless love. As already indicated, I believe that selfless love is only viable and persuasive if it builds up not only the other, but also the lover himself. This emphasis on what may—to use a botanical metaphor—be referred to as the lover’s ‘flourishing’ constitutes another reason for exploring selfless love in relation to the nature of the human being and her self. For, just as a tree flourishes and achieves its full potential—in the form, say, of blooming and carrying fruit— only where the conditions required by its nature are fulfilled (that is, when it has adequate space, water, sun, soil), we can legitimately speak of human flourishing only on the basis of an understanding of the human being’s makeup or nature. My approach here clearly diverges from understandings of human flourishing or ‘self-fulfilment’ which suggest that the content of such flourishing is not fixed but that ‘each must, in the last instance, determine [this] for him- or herself ’.9 While it is certainly the case that the specific shape of individual fulfilment varies from one individual to another, I assume that certain goods, such as loving relations with others, a sense of personal ‘groundedness’, identity, and belonging, as well as moral goodness or virtue, are integral to the fulfilment of all human persons.

SELF LESS LOVE AND H UMAN FLOURISHING IN CONFLICT: A BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH The Christian call to selfless love has always stood in tension with an equally Christian regard for the needs and limitations of the concrete individual. From William of St Thierry and Thomas Aquinas to Sren Kierkegaard and Benedict XVI, Christians throughout the ages have offered proposals on how Christianity might integrate its eschatological tendency, calling the 9

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 14.

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believer to abandon his or her worldly hopes and desires, with its more incarnationalist impulse of affirming the goods and capacities of the natural world. With the modern emancipation of the concrete human individual and of her freedom, instincts, powers, and desires, these fragile syntheses were increasingly strained, to the point that the possibility and/or value of selfless love came to be seen as dubious, even nonsensical. Today, those suspicious of the Christian tradition, as well as many Christians, intuitively often feel that a good and fulfilled life rides less on selfless love than on self-affirmation and even self-assertion. This late modern perspective cannot, of course, be traced back to a distinct historical turning point or intellectual event. Like many modern beliefs and perceptions, it was facilitated gradually, and by a range of historic developments altering the human being’s self-understanding. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum is surely one of these, entailing, as it does, a sense of the self and its (self-)knowledge as self-contained, as able to ‘find’ itself independently of the other. This ‘sealing of a self against the world’, which eventually leads also to a ‘sealing of oneself against infiltration by another’, is reinforced by ‘the Kantian insistence that we know only representations of objects and not these objects in themselves’, that is, that the human subject does not receive the world as it is but must generate his own image of it.10 In a different way, Hegel’s idealism, too, fosters a sense of self-containedness or self-separateness by positing that spirit returns completely to itself. In the nineteenth century the emphasis on the single and independent individual is expanded further. The Romantics’ sense that true and authentic selfhood is obtained where the individual fully inhabits, and acts in accordance with, his inner states of consciousness, feelings, and desires enhances a sense of self-concern and self-enactment. Selfhood is here tied to a form of self-assertion. Newly emerging psychological and sociological perspectives, on the other hand, promote an increased awareness of the individual’s susceptibility to exploitation, and her consequent vulnerability and need for liberation from the oppressive other. Thus, Karl Marx famously denounces religion as blinding people with false ideals that numb their desire to fight for their rights—a critique that lets selfless love appear as a key ingredient in Christianity’s obstruction of real and effective self-empowerment, or of the human being’s ability to stand up for her rights, and to create living conditions that safeguard human dignity, material well-being, and other needs and desires. In his critique of Christianity as fostering a ‘slave morality’ that perpetuates weakness and failure, Friedrich Nietzsche attacks the Christian notion of love yet more explicitly. A similar attack is involved in Sigmund Freud’s unearthing of the subconscious. Here, the origin of various neuroses 10

Peter Josef Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 54, 69, 76.

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is attributed to (oftentimes Christian) moral ideals whose lofty and unattainable nature supposedly necessitates the debilitating suppression of key needs and desires. Prevalent among these thinkers is the perception that the human being’s ‘primary motive’ in any action is inevitably and properly ‘self-seeking’, such that ‘the agape ideal’ can only ‘encourage masochism and frustration’.11 If love remains a useful category at all, then it must be understood not in terms of selflessness but in terms of self-interest, self-affirmation, and self-assertion. Implied in this view is a perceived opposition between Christian and natural love—an opposition typically framed in terms of agape and eros. As we shall see in Chapter 3, this opposition is by no means propagated only by Christianity’s critics but also by some of its defenders, as the polemics of Anders Nygren show.12 According to Nygren, the Christian ideal of selfless love excludes all forms of natural human love and has no regard for the human being’s this-worldly needs and concerns. Thus confirming secular suspicions about Christian love, Nygren’s thought represents the other side of the modern coin juxtaposing selfless love and human flourishing. The nineteenth century’s spirit of self-confidence and self-liberation may have lost some of its impetus, and Nygren’s Agape and Eros now largely functions as a negative contrast against which theologians develop their own ideas on love. The connection between selfless love and human flourishing has, nonetheless, not been adequately re-established. This lacuna comes largely at the cost of selfless love. To this day, theological defences of the importance of self-love and ecstatic desire are far more easy to come by than vocal pleas for anything resembling selfless love. Feminist thinkers, in particular, justify this with the observation that the ‘sin’ of women, unlike that of men, is not so much that of ‘pride’ and ‘will-to-power’ as that of an ‘underdevelopment or negation of the self ’.13 There is a worry, therefore, that, in encouraging selflessness Christianity has encouraged the sinfulness of women, and hence neglected, or even prevented, their conversion and salvation. Daphne Hampson, for instance, has argued that the ‘autonomy’ and realization of

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Mike Martin, Love’s Virtues (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 39. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, Parts I and II (London: SPCK, 1982), 30. Though no major subsequent writer has adopted Nygren’s scathing dismissal of eros to the full, Karl Barth, Denis de Rougement, and Gene Outka arguably share and continue Nygren’s critical spirit at least in part (see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, esp. IV/2, ed. and trans. G. Bromiley and Th. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960) and David Clough’s, ‘Eros and Agape in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2: 2 (2000)); Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). 13 Valerie Saiving Goldstein, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’, Journal of Religion, 40: 2 (1960), 109. See also Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, ‘Agape in Feminist Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 9: 1 (1981), 74. 12

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the female self are goods endangered by Christianity.14 Secular psychoanalytic thought, whose ideals of self-affirmation, self-realization, and self-forgiveness have pervaded our social imaginary, leans towards classifying selflessness as a disorder.15 In a similar vein, theories linking illnesses such as anorexia to the conceptuality of Western culture and, indeed, of Christianity, insinuate that ideals of love as selfless or self-sacrificial are psychologically, morally and physically harmful.16 It should not surprise, then, that Erich Fromm’s verdict that ‘Christianity has missed the real key to human fulfilment’ because ‘its ideal of life is incompatible with the free development of man’ still resonates today.17

TH E OB S O L ES C E N C E OF S E L F L E S S LO V E : P I T F A L L S It may not be immediately obvious why the impasse between selfless love and the good of the individual human person poses a problem—rather than merely confirming, say, the other-worldly nature of the Christian faith. Yet such an impasse is, first of all, problematic from the perspective of Christianity itself. For the Christian gospel is characterized not only by the call to selfless love but also by a marked concern for the liberation, affirmation, and empowerment— in short, for the well-being—of the individual human subject. Christianity, it is true, does not consider worldly flourishing an end in itself but subordinates it to faith in God. It asks of the believer a willingness to sacrifice her material well-being in this life in the service of the truth—a willingness displayed by the 14

Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 3; Andolsen, ‘Agape’, 74; Cf. Daphne Hampson, ‘Autonomy and Heteronomy’, in Daphne Hampson, ed., Swallowing a Fishbone?: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: SPCK, 1996). 15 See e.g. the PSSI test (Persönlichkeits- Stil- und Störungs-Inventar), which lists ‘selflessness’ as a negative indicator (contrasted with ‘helpfulness’). The test is a widely employed tool for evaluating personality styles, and used as an indicator of personality disorders and the need for psychotherapy. 16 See e.g. Caroline Giles Banks, ‘ “There is No Fat in Heaven”: Religious Asceticism and the Meaning of Anorexia Nervosa’, Ethos, 24: 1 (1996), 107–35. Banks also points to research by Bemporad and Ratey and their account of ‘the anorectic’s sense of moral superiority derived from the endurance of painful abnegation and relinquishment of gratification of desires; selfcontrol is praised, while any form of indulgence is disapproved’ (Banks, ‘There is No Fat in Heaven’, 121). Cf. Jules Bemporad and John Ratey, ‘Intensive Psychotherapy of Former Anorexic Individuals’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 39: 4 (1985). By contrast, David Jasper warns against the tendency to set particularly the ascetic and mystical Christian tradition in opposition to the body, arguing, instead, that this tradition is pervaded by a deep eroticism of the body which typically eludes our contemporary understanding: David Jasper, The Sacred Body: Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009). 17 As quoted by Daniel Day Williams in The Spirit and the Forms of Love (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968), 194.

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many Christian martyrs. Nonetheless, Jesus’s mission and exhortation to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick and wounded indicates that Christianity is neither indifferent towards nor straightforwardly affirmative of the human being’s worldly woes and troubles. His miraculous healings of physical, mental, and spiritual illness, and his endeavour to build up and liberate all crippled forms of human life consistently underline that it is in this life that God’s Kingdom properly begins to take effect.18 The Jesus of the Gospels indeed calls us to use our talents, to stand strong in the face of oppressive forces and to foster joy and freedom, love and peace. As David Ford argues in the context of an analysis of St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, the New Testament promises faith in Christ—dead and risen—to effect ‘a transformation of notions of communication, of event, of human community, of ordinary living and of God’—a kind of transformation that is integral, precisely, to human flourishing.19 Although it may be undermined by the presence of sin in the world, human flourishing can thus never be undermined by Christianity’s own ethos, including its understanding of selfless love. Christianity’s endorsement of a selfless kind of love and its simultaneous concern for the individual’s well-being thus encourage, indeed demand, a continual re-examination of how it is possible that the fullness of human life is tied to our taking up our cross and denying our selves—that is, of how it is that we find our life through losing it in love. The urgency of such an endeavour is reinforced by the extent to which the (intuitively persuasive) modern insistence on the importance of attending to oneself and one’s needs makes it ever harder even for committed Christians to comprehend and appropriate the call to selfless love. Christians’ perplexity at this call may help explain why, although there is an obvious hunger for love in contemporary societies and although the Christian message centres on love, Christianity struggles to make itself heard—and is, instead, regularly perceived as the enemy of love. The credibility of the Christian faith both inside and outside the Church thus seems, among other things, to hinge on a (more) thoroughgoing understanding of the meaning of selfless love. Such an endeavour must take seriously the abovementioned gospel passages that gave rise to the notion of selfless love, while also demonstrating that selfless love as promoted by Christianity does not, as ‘many secular [and, increasingly, Christian] critics’ think, simply ‘repress . . . the self ’s vital impulses’ and ‘creative power’.20 Only then is selfless love no escapist love ‘negating life’ and ‘devaluing . . . man’.21

18 19 20 21

e.g. Lk 17:21, Col 1:13, and kingdom parables such as Mk 4:26–32, Mt 6:10. David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 117 f. Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love, 193. Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love, 192.

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Moreover, if selfless love is in fact key to human flourishing, then its bad reputation is in need of being corrected. However, the relationship between selfless love and human flourishing is of interest not merely to the Christian theologian and believer. It is widely recognized that Christian ideals continue to have a normative hold on the post-Christian imagination. The less these ideals—which include the notion of selfless love—are understood, the more easily they assume an oftentimes problematic life of their own.22 Abuses may thus take place in the name of Christian love. These can be countered only in relation to the Christian tradition’s advocacy of a selfless kind of love. Outright dismissals of selfless love have, moreover, been found to come at a high price even in a nonChristian context. Iris Murdoch, for instance, suggests that where love is reduced to simple and direct self-affirmation, morality itself is put at risk, a claim that will become more clear as this book proceeds. Our understanding of love must take account of the extent to which we are prone to pride and error in ways destructive of both ourselves and others. Only thus can it avoid complicity with a curtailed and amoral understanding of the human good that loses sight of the need for reorientation to the universal Good in which we are united with the other. Thus, it is in order to undercut both destructive interpretations and naive dismissals of selfless love that the meaning of selfless love must be continually re-examined and related to new insights into the self. The need for a renewed exploration of selfless love is further suggested by the limitations and inner contradictions characteristic of attempts to conceptualize love in terms of radical self-assertion. As we will see, Jean-Paul Sartre’s frustrated oscillation between absolute freedom and total determinism, for instance, is tied up with his unwillingness to allow for anything approximating selfless love. As in the case of Nietzsche and Freud, Sartre’s dismissal of selfless love leaves him struggling to take seriously the human being’s more spiritual needs, such as the human desire for remorse, forgiveness, renewal, and selftranscendence. Indeed, Sartre’s—like Nietzsche’s and Freud’s—dismissal of selfless love corresponds with the inclination to deconstruct the human impulse and desire to care for or be changed by another, as well as a person’s experience of communion with others.23 The denunciation of such desires and

22 See e.g. E. L. James’s bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which arguably plays with and celebrates the theme of selfless love but reduces this to self-destructive sexual submission: E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (London: Vintage, 2011). 23 For more contemporary deconstructions of these impulses see e.g. neo-Darwinians such as Michael Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (London: Granada, 1978); Richard Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987). By contrast, even Adam Smith recognized a genuinely caring aspect of human ‘nature’ when he opens his Theory of Moral Sentiments with the observation that, ‘how selfish soever man may be supposed, there

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experiences as mere instances of unhealthy self-victimization or as cover-ups for self-interest appears as little more than a reversal of what these authors criticize: where they accuse their opponents of arbitrarily degrading certain desires of the flesh by calling for their suppression, these authors instead degrade certain desires of the spirit by denying them their experienced meanings and by relegating them to the realm of selfishness. Indeed, Sartre’s unabashedly selective respect for human experience and perception—which contributes to Murdoch’s eventual disillusionment with Sartre—stands in tension with his own, existentialist principles. We can conclude, then, that the dismissal of selfless love as nonsensical or dangerous has problematic implications that prompt such an enquiry as the present one. Recognizing these implications does not justify a superficial endorsement of selfless love. Instead, it calls for an in-depth exploration of the extent to which selfless love might impose significant limits on the human drive for self-creation, power, and self-assertion, but might also affirm and strengthen the human individual while doing so. A viable understanding of selfless love—if it can be found—engages the individual subject as agent,24 and does not simply dismiss human needs and desires tout court.25 In other words, it is only if we can dissociate selfless love from psychological, emotional, and physical powerlessness and oppression that we can legitimately avoid a replacement of selfless love with self-assertion or, as feminist theologians have tended to propose, with mutual relationality or friendship— important goods undoubtedly, but themselves arguably dependent on a posture of selfless love.26 A viable notion of selfless love must not evoke

are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it’ (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759), 1). 24 Andolsen, ‘Agape’, 77. 25 This is, for instance, recognized by Martin D’Arcy, who argues for a self-giving movement outward toward the other but who also insists that ‘the fine point of personality must always remain untouched’ (Martin D’Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love: Lion and Unicorn. A Study in Eros and Agape (London: Collins, 1962), 314). Robert Merrihew Adams argues that self-concern is necessary also from the sheer perspective of following Christian virtues such as gratitude and penitence, while an ‘already satisfied rather than a striving self-interest’ is proper to agapeic love insofar as the Christian is asked to rejoice in the goods given to him (Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘Pure Love’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 8: 1 (1980), 94). 26 This is the approach that has often been taken by feminist theologians such as Barbara Andolsen, Margaret Farley, Elizabeth Johnson, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, who frequently conceptualize these notions in Trinitarian terms (See Andolsen, ‘Agape’; Margaret Farley, ‘New Patterns of Relationship: Beginnings of a Moral Revolution’, Theological Studies, 36: 4 (1975), 627–46; Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroads, 1992); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993)). The value of holding on to a notion of selfless love is recognized also by a slightly more recent feminist argument that warns against quick dismissals of Christian notions of kenosis, renunciation, and vulnerability, which are here perceived as potential prerequisites for the self-empowerment of the oppressed (see Sarah

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what Barbara Hilkert Andolsen has called the ‘spectre’ of a woman without needs, desires, or personality, or propose a passively receptive other-regard that undermines the lover’s potential as a free agent.27 Instead, it must order the relation between self and other in a way that does justice to the individuality of both. It must clarify the place of self-interest, self-concern, and self-love in selfless love, and give a meaningful place to human desire.

THE PRESENT STUDY: CONTEXT AND AUTHORS This book is not, of course, the first to consider ‘selfless love’ in relation to the modern concern for the good of the individual. However, existing studies have not paid any detailed attention to the impact which changing understandings of the self have had on modern assessments of selfless love. More recent studies, especially, have also focused less on the nature and foundations of selfless (or, more commonly, agapeic, Christian) love than on the place of self-love in selfless love.28 While I share the desire, implied in such efforts, to show the positive life-affirming character of Christian love, I do not seek merely to ‘make room’ in selfless (or Christian) love for self-love or the natural desire for personal well-being. Instead, I hope to make sense of the seeming paradox that it is precisely through turning away from ourselves and towards the other that we are said to find—and perhaps even love—ourselves. I do so in reference to the thought of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the moral philosopher Iris Murdoch. It may seem odd to consult two authors on selfless love whose personal lives were marked by adultery and other sexual transgressions.29 To some extent, I am here relying on a distinction between their life and thought that some may find unacceptable—yet

Coakley, ‘Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of “Vulnerability” in Christian Feminist Writing’, in Daphne Hampson, ed., Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: SPCK, 1996), 82–111). 27 Again, see Andolsen’s warnings in Andolsen, ‘Agape’, 77. 28 Eberhard Jüngel, for instance, follows such a track when he seeks to show ‘love [as] the event of a yet greater selflessness within great self-relatedness’ (Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983), 318). More recent studies include Werner Jeanrond, A Theology of Love (London: T. & T. Clark, 2010); Darlene Fozard Weaver, SelfLove and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: OUP, 2001); Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). I return to the latter two works in Chapter 2. 29 Certainly Murdoch, and probably also Tillich, had several extramarital affairs. Tillich was also openly interested in pornography.

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without which it would seem impossible for (at least most) human beings to say anything on the topic of selfless love at all. This distinction aside, however, several points deserve mention. Both Tillich and Murdoch did, in different ways, and to different degrees, recognize and agonize over their proclivity to extramarital affairs and the hurt this caused their respective spouses. This is more obviously the case with Tillich, who inherited a condemnation of adultery from his Christian faith,30 and whose wife was intensely jealous and angry about his affairs.31 Tillich’s son, for instance, remarks that ‘he was plagued by guilt. And he talked about guilt’; ‘Paul was serious in trying to overcome his own tendency to objectify’.32 According to the Paucks, Tillich implicitly recognizes his guilt when he states that grace ‘strikes us’ when ‘we feel we have violated another life, a life which we have loved’, ‘when our disgust for our own being . . . or weakness . . . have become intolerable to us’, and ‘when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades’.33 Though she arguably never viewed fidelity as objectively good, Murdoch, too, was remorseful about any hurt she caused others. After an affair with Thomas Balogh, the lover of her good friend Philippa Foot, Murdoch for instance admitted that ‘I am no better than the swinish heroine of my current novel [Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat], who is so concerned with analysing her own feelings she does not notice the sufferings of others’.34 Tillich’s and Murdoch’s relative misgivings about their behaviour suggest that their erotic life is based less on conviction than on biographical and temperamental weaknesses—which themselves cannot be divorced from the reality of human sinfulness, as Murdoch in particular readily acknowledges. Rollo May, for instance, traces Tillich’s wanderings among women back to dependence on his mother and to her sudden, early death.35 Other attempts at making sense of Tillich’s personal life have included references to his authoritarian father, his trauma from the First World War, his anti-bourgeois or Weimar spirit, and the challenges of emigration. Murdoch’s proclivity to affairs has, in part, been excused as a temperamental quirk. As her late husband put it, she simply ‘fell in love all the time, but she also fell into friendship all the time—the two were so much the same with her.

30 Admittedly, Tillich nonetheless dismisses his son’s question as to how he reconciles his adultery and his being a minister by remarking that ‘he had never spoken against adultery’ (René Tillich, ‘My Father, Paul Tillich’, in Ilona Nord and Yorick Spiegel, eds., Spurensuche. Lebensund Denkwege Paul Tillichs (Munster: LIT, 2001), 9–22, at 14). 31 See Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein & Day, 1974), 145. 32 Tillich, ‘My Father’, 14; see also Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich. His Life and Thought, Vol. I: Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 90, 92 f. 33 Pauck, Paul Tillich, 93. 34 In Anne Chisholm, ‘Iris Murdoch and an Enduring Love Affair’, Guardian Online, 6 Sept. 2012. 35 Rollo May, Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship (London: Collins, 1974), 56–8.

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She lived literally for love and for friendship. That’s very rare in novelists, who are extremely egocentric.’36 Their awareness of their respective faults and shortcomings arguably only lent further impetus to their respective interest in defending the need for a more selfless kind of love. This may have been the case especially with Murdoch, whose concern with ‘how to love without ego, and how to be unsmugly good’ has been traced back directly to the hurt her affair with Thomas Balogh caused Philippa and Michael Foot.37 At the same time, it must be admitted that Tillich especially at times also attempts to justify his erotic behaviour in ways that do not undermine but nonetheless compromise his thought on love. I shall be addressing—and critiquing—these links between his life and thought towards the end of Chapter 5, in which I treat his account of selfless love. By comparison, Murdoch grants more unambiguously that, at least insofar as her affairs hurt others, they are betrayals of love and goodness, and thus at odds with the moral values she advocates. Indeed, although Murdoch’s thought on love does not entail a condemnation of adulterous behaviour, it in no way seems to invite or justify such behaviour. Tillich and Murdoch may appear an eccentric pair of authors also on account of what separates them. While Murdoch was familiar with Tillich’s writings, Tillich does not seem to have known of Murdoch’s work, most of which took shape after his death. His Christian faith fundamentally contrasts with her self-professed ‘atheism’. Tillich is, moreover, schooled in the continental tradition and presents a Systematic Theology as his magnum opus. Murdoch, by contrast, has a background primarily in analytic philosophy and, as every line of her writing indicates, abhors the idea of a ‘system’. Not only does she develop her ideas through novelistic as well as philosophical means, but she frequently paints bold and generalizing pictures involving idiosyncratic and heuristic depictions of the history of thought in a freely associative fashion. Despite these differences, I submit that these two Gifford lecturers invite a joint study of their thought on love. From their respective Christian and atheist vantage points, both seek to restore a balance between selfless love and human flourishing. As I will show, both are aware of the impasse between selfless love and the human good as perceived in modernity, and of the problematic manifestations of this impasse in a moralistic type of Christianity on the one hand and in a morally impoverished philosophy on the other. Both find that polemical views on love, such as present in Nygren and Sartre, derive from distinct views of human selfhood and transcendence. They consequently both give particular attention to these issues when seeking to forge a new link 36 37

John Bayley, in Chris Jones, ‘Iris Murdoch: Between the Lines’, BBC News, 2 May 2003. See Anne Chisholm, ‘Iris Murdoch and an Enduring Love Affair’.

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between an other-centred notion of love and a genuine valuation of the human being’s individuality, freedom for self-creation, and desire for fulfilment. Both go about forging such a link by combining an existentialist and an ontological perspective on love, and by showing a particular regard for the resources provided by the fine arts (especially by literature and visual art) as well as by Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Most importantly, perhaps, they are both equally influenced by and reacting against the psychoanalytical, Marxist, and existentialist thought of the day, and aware that ‘our relation to traditional sources, including the idea of the Good, is no longer simply a function of a publicly established order of meaning but is subject to personal resonance’.38 Beyond these similarities, it must be noted that Tillich’s correlative method was geared precisely towards bringing religious and ‘secular’ ideas into dialogue, and bridging the gap between them. In accordance with his own interest in non-Christian thought, Tillich’s theology lends itself to, and calls for, dialogue with a secular writer. Murdoch is particularly suited to such a conversation, insofar as she, unlike some atheist thinkers, is herself keenly interested in religious thinking, to the point of acknowledging that her own thought continually veers in a theological direction.39 It is important in this regard to note that Murdoch’s atheism signifies primarily a rejection of theism and its (supposed) affirmation of a highest being.40 It does not exclude the notion of a transcendent Good or a belief in the unconditional, and Murdoch indeed recognizes theology’s contribution towards exploring precisely such concepts. Her respect for, and familiarity with, theological thinking—which arguably originates in her early encounters with the Christian moral philosopher Donald MacKinnon—is underlined by the contents of her library,41 and by her repeated references to Augustine, Sren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Don Cupitt, and Karl Barth, among others.42 Crucially, 38 Maria Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good: Iris Murdoch’s Godless Theology’, Annual Society of Christian Ethics, 16 (1996), 223–42, at 241 f. 39 See e.g. Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 456. See e.g. Donald MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: CUP, 1975). While Robjant is correct in claiming that Murdoch is no Christian writer, her claim that she speaks as a ‘Christian fellow traveller’ nonetheless serves as one of many indicators of her significant affinities with Christian thought (David Robjant, ‘As a Buddhist Christian; The Misappropriation of Iris Murdoch’, Heythrop Journal, 52: 6 (2011); Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 419; henceforth: MGM). 40 See e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 425. 41 Murdoch’s library, which includes a breadth of theological works, can in large part be accessed at the Iris Murdoch archive at Kingston University. 42 Murdoch’s theological sensitivity is evinced also by the high regard contemporary Christian philosophers and theologians have for her work. These include Charles Taylor (whom Murdoch taught), Stanley Hauerwas, and Alasdair MacIntyre. See e.g. Charles Taylor, ‘Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy’, in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989); Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Murdochian Muddles: Can We Get Through Them if God Does Not Exist?’, in

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Murdoch saw in Tillich one of those theologians who had something important to offer to the atheist philosopher, who should therefore heed him. Her archived and notated copy of Tillich’s Systematic Theology indicates that Murdoch not only engaged with Tillich’s thought in some depth but that this engagement lies at the root of some of the parallels between their respective outlooks.43 It further underlines, therefore, the significance of the fact that her biggest work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, not only gives several lengthy quotations from Tillich that appear to shape her thought in significant ways,44 but also ends with a reference to his notion of ‘ultimate concern’, and his awareness that moral philosophy, and life itself, becomes impossible apart from reference to the transcendent—a point we will find to be of prime importance for her defence of selfless love.45 Murdoch’s at times extremely dense underlining of Tillich’s text, for instance, indicates her interest in Tillich’s attempt to avoid the extremes of heteronomy and autonomy, as well as in his claim that ‘an awareness of the infinite is included in man’s awareness of finitude’, and in his observation that both Augustine and Kant use their point about ‘the unconditional element’ present ‘in every encounter with reality’ to establish an unconditional being.46 In a similar spirit, Murdoch sympathizes with Tillich’s interpretation of Anselm’s ontological argument, and with his insistence that the unconditional cannot be understood as ‘a highest being called God’.47 Tillich’s discussion of these matters is heavily underlined in Murdoch’s copy of the Systematic Theology, and reflected in her writings. The underlining and markings in sections on love indicate that these, too, were closely read by Murdoch. She, for instance, summarizes in the margin Tillich’s claim that love includes libido, philia, eros, and agape, and underlines that agape must be the ‘criterion’ for the other loves, that it ‘affirms the other unconditionally’, and that it does so ‘because of the ultimate unity of being with being within the divine ground’.48 She equally underlines Tillich’s claims that ‘love does not destroy

Antonaccio and Schweiker, Search for Human Goodness, 190–208; Stanley Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (London: SCM, 2001); Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, Revisions, Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Southbend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1983); Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis (London: Routledge, 2004); Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Review of E. Dipple’s Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit’, London Review of Books, 3–16 June 1982. 43 Murdoch owned the separate three volumes published in 1973, 1975, and 1976 respectively. An inscription at the front of Volume I suggests she read this in 1979. 44 See especially her chapter ‘The Ontological Proof ’, which begins with a quote from Tillich’s Systematic Theology (Volume II) on the lasting value of the ontological argument: Murdoch, MGM, 391 f. 45 Murdoch, MGM, 512. 46 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Volume I. Combined Volume (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968), 228, 230 (henceforth ST I). 47 48 See again Tillich, ST I, 230. Tillich, ST I, 282, 280.

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the freedom of the beloved’ and that ‘basically, however, one’s love to God is of the nature of eros’.49 In the slightly less annotated Volume II she notes, among other things, that Tillich brings existentialism and depth psychology together.50 In some endnotes to Volume I of Tillich’s work, Murdoch relates these ideas to Simone Weil and her emphasis on the ‘need for education: art, stillness, looking’.51 As will become apparent, all of these points of Tillich’s are mirrored in Murdoch’s own thought and will form central aspects of my subsequent argument regarding selfless love and human flourishing. The present conversation between two thinkers of different religious persuasions, moreover, serves to underline the above-mentioned fact that the perception of a clash between selfless love and human flourishing is neither unique, nor uniquely relevant, to Christianity, but promoted, recognized, and problematized by theologians and (at least some) secular philosophers alike. The interdisciplinary angle of the present study further intends to reflect the recognition that the Christian theologian must engage and respond to external challenges, as well as incorporate meritorious insights of non-Christian thinkers. The latters’ proposals, in turn, are bound to be influenced by Christian approaches to moral and anthropological problems, and might, as Murdoch recognizes, draw on these as much as respond to them.

PAUL TILLICH AND I RIS MURDOCH ON SELFLESS LOVE As an army chaplain in the First World War, Paul Tillich began his career in an environment in which self-denial and self-sacrifice were politically demanded. In sermons on the battlefield, the young Tillich intially gave these demands theological backing. Steeped in rigid, Nygrenian interpretations of Christian love through his turn-of-the-century Protestant upbringing, he exhorted soldiers to welcome the opportunity to imitate Christ’s love to the last.52 It was those same years on the battlefield, however, which confronted Tillich with levels of human doubt and despair to which the existing, literally deathly, interpretations of Christian love had nothing to offer in reply. The post-war Tillich thus became convinced that, while Christian love is ultimately to be understood as selfless, its life-giving and life-affirming nature needed to be developed—indeed, that the selfless dimension of 49

Tillich, ST I, 282, 281. The more ecclesial Volume III of Tillich’s ST appears to be almost unread by Murdoch. 51 Murdoch’s notes in her copy of Tillich’s Systematic Theology. 52 See e.g. Paul Tillich, Frühe Predigten (1909–1918). Ergänzungs- und Nachlassbände zu den gesammelten Werken VII, ed. Erdmann Sturm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993) (e.g. ‘Von der Kraft Gottes’, ‘Meine Gnade soll nicht von dir weichen’, ‘Vom Opfer für die Brüder und der Freundschaft Gottes’). 50

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Christian love can pertain only on the basis of its dialectic relationship with self-affirmation. Tillich’s thought on the nature of love constitutes an attempt, therefore, to avoid the world-denying stance which Nietzsche, Fromm, and others accused Christianity of promoting. It seeks, instead, to develop an understanding of love that includes and enlivens that human ‘life-power’ which Tillich identifies as spirit and which he freely associates with Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s ‘will to power’, with Freud’s ‘libido’, and with Bergson’s ‘élan vital’. It is correct, then, to state that ‘Paul Tillich . . . already emphasised fifty years ago the need for theology to rediscover the erotic nature of the human being in all its depth and ambiguity, so as to regain also a piece of biblical realism “after this was for so long obscured by several layers of idealistic and moralistic selfdeception about the nature of man”’.53 In spite of this important and valuable emphasis, and notwithstanding the breadth of scholarship on Tillich, Tillich’s understanding of love and its role in the establishment of the self has not been analysed in depth.54 Recent perceptions that modernist (and postmodernist) deconstructions of the identity, unity, and stability of the human self do not exhaustively illuminate and govern human experience55 further provoke and arguably warrant a return to a thinker such as Tillich, who engages with and adopts much of modern thought while also challenging it to the effect of both transcending and outliving the modernist movement. If Tillich was raised with one-sided interpretations and uncritical espousals of selfless love, Murdoch comes from an empiricist and behaviourist philosophy that eschews references to any form of love. Viewing this as a morally dangerous situation which renders moral philosophy irrelevant to concrete persons, Murdoch is concerned with recovering love—and particularly selfless love—as a moral and philosophical category. She rejects the notion of God and accepts ‘much of the criticism of traditional metaphysics’, but finds that the decline of metaphysics has led contemporary philosophers to fail to make sense of the ordinary human being’s experience of a unified self and to overlook the moral import of the individual’s inner life, and of love in My translation; Werner Jeanrond, ‘Der Gott der Liebe: Entwicklungen des theologischen Liebesbegriffs bei Plutarch und in der frühen Kirche’. In Plutarch, Dialog über die Liebe: Amatorius, ed. Herwig Görgemanns (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 293. (The Tillich quote can be found in Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice (Oxford: OUP, 1954), 117 (henceforth LPJ)). Yet while Jeanrond argues that Tillich proposes to do this through renewed attention to, and integration of, eros, agape, and philia, I will come to find that Tillich in fact pays insufficient attention to the mutuality expressed particularly by philia love. He does, nonetheless, contribute much to an integration of eros and agape and, with this, to a viable account of selfless love. 54 Irwin treats Tillich’s notion of the erotic but not his account of love as a whole. See Alexander Irwin, Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). 55 See e.g. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2 (article publ. online, Oct. 2010). 53

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particular.56 Murdoch accuses her colleagues, such as Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, and Richard Hare, of overlooking the role played by a person’s consciousness and by the orientation of her desires in regard to her ability to even perceive reality. While this provokes Murdoch’s attraction to continental philosophy, and in particular to Sartrean existentialism, with its attention to the significance of human consciousness, she ultimately judges these continental approaches to be wanting also. In her departure from such— in principle welcome—alternatives to Descartes’s understanding of the self, Murdoch seeks to develop a contemporary moral philosophy which accounts for the extent to which the very reality of the human self is dependent on its relationship to a transcendent reality encountered in the worldly other. As we shall see, this endeavour leads her, too, to argue for a selfless love, which integrates the erotic dimension of the human being, and which is constitutive of the self. There have been various commentaries on Murdoch’s attempt to develop a moral ontology centred on the notions of love and the self.57 Yet the question of how she considers love, true selfhood, and, with this, human flourishing to hang together has received relatively little attention.58 At least in part, this is perhaps due to the fact that Murdoch was concerned primarily with the sinful, unloving self, that she shuns an explicit discussion of human flourishing, and that she portrays love as geared precisely towards an ‘un-selfing’. However, Murdoch nonetheless draws much attention to the moral importance of love and the self and, as I will show, envisages a redeemed self that is precisely the outcome of selfless love. This already points to the extent to which her thought, too, transcends and even subverts modernist (and postmodernist) assumptions in a way highly relevant to the present discussion.

Murdoch in Michael Levenson, ‘Iris Murdoch: The Philosophic Fifties and The Bell’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47: 3 (2001), 558–79, at 559. 57 See e.g. Christopher Mole, ‘Attention, Self and The Sovereignty of Good’, in Anne Rowe, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 72–84; Frank Baldanza, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Personality’, Criticism, 7 (1965), 107–35; Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’; Heather Widdows, The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Hampshire: Aldershot, 2005); Samantha Vice, ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’, in Rowe, Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, 60–71. 58 One of the more recent studies on Murdoch’s morality, for instance, does not list the term ‘eros’ in the index and gives little attention to Murdoch’s understanding of love (Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds., Iris Murdoch and Morality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)). The timeliness of an examination of the connection between love and selfhood in Murdoch’s work is further underlined by the plethora of recent literature on Murdoch’s morality, which pays relatively little attention to her account of love, but which indicates a second wave of Murdoch studies. See Simone Roberts and Alison Scott-Baumann, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010); Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2011); Justin Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford: OUP, 2012); Maria Antonaccio, A Philosophy to Live By—Engaging Iris Murdoch (Oxford: OUP, 2012), among others. 56

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In the course of this book, I hope to demonstrate that Tillich’s and Murdoch’s accounts of love and the self provide theological and philosophical insights that are uniquely valuable for developing a sustainable and contemporary account of selfless love. Meanwhile, my analyses will also bring to the fore the weaknesses of their respective accounts. This, too, will aid us in charting the anthropological and metaphysical presuppositions upon which a defence of selfless love as conducive to human flourishing must rest, and which go beyond Tillich and Murdoch themselves. From Tillich’s immense oeuvre, I focus on what I judge to be the most relevant of his more strictly academic writings, and on his Systematic Theology in particular, while making only occasional references to his sermons. Similarly, I focus on Murdoch’s philosophical writings, and quote from her novels only occasionally, to illustrate a certain point. This is primarily due to the fact that, given Murdoch’s unsystematic style and polemical engagement with a broad range of other authors, her philosophical thought alone provides ample material for discussion. Comparing Tillich’s theology with her novels would, moreover, pose methodological challenges too great for the scope of this book. Such challenges are further enhanced by Murdoch’s rejection of being viewed as a ‘philosophical novelist’ (a label she associates with the didactic (mis-)use of literature of which she accuses Sartre).59 Although her novels inevitably play a constitutive role in the development and exposition of her thought, Murdoch almost painstakingly avoids using her characters to lend support to her philosophical programme. This applies particularly to her characters’ dialogues. Even where these do, as Altorf points out, contain exact or almost exact quotations from Murdoch’s philosophical essays, they do not tend to evolve in a way that would prove Murdoch’s philosophy right.60 Nora Hämäläinen has therefore rightly criticized Sabina Lovibond’s attempt to back up her theory about Murdoch’s alleged anti-feminism by enumerating the various submissive women in Murdoch’s novels.61

59 See e.g. interviews with Frank Kermode, ‘The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists’, Partisan Review, 30 (1963), 61–82; and Rubin Rabinvotz, Iris Murdoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 3. 60 Marije Altorf, ‘The Body in the Text: Iris Murdoch’s Embodied Writing Style in The Sovereignty of Good’, in Darlene Bird and Yvonne Sherwood, eds., Bodies in Question: Gender, Religion, Text (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 147–61 (For similar observations see also Guy Backus, Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher, the Philosopher as Novelist: ‘The Unicorn’ as a Philosophical Novel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1986); Miles Leeson, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (London: Continuum, 2010); Peter Hawkins, The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1983), 89). 61 As Hämäläinen points out, ‘one should approach the idea of continuity between philosophy and literature in Murdoch’s work with great caution’ (Nora Hämäläinen, ‘Review of Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 10 Oct. 2011, unpaginated electronic journal).

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THE OUTLINE OF THIS STUDY I begin the present enquiry with a sketch of moments in the recent history of love and the self that I consider to be illustrative of the modern difficulty of sustaining the link between selfless love and human flourishing, and that possess (more or less) direct relevance to Tillich’s and Murdoch’s own approaches to this problem. Both the modern tendency to dismiss the world and our desire to find happiness within it, and the modern celebration of selfassertion, are found in, and arguably receive particular impetus from, Sren Kierkegaard. Chapter 2 thus renders Kierkegaard’s account of the self and of love, and concludes with Tillich’s and Murdoch’s reception of this. Chapter 3 moves on to Anders Nygren’s, Simone Weil’s, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s perspectives on love and the self, as figures in whom Kierkegaard’s already tenuous attempt at holding selfless love and human flourishing together breaks down. The discussion of their thought is, again, followed by Tillich’s and Murdoch’s critical responses. While Nygren and Weil constitute representatives of the divorce of selfless love from human flourishing that are of particular relevance for Tillich (Nygren) and Murdoch (Weil) respectively, Sartre here functions as a representative of the divorce of human flourishing from selfless love who influenced Tillich and Murdoch equally. It may, of course, be objected that Hegel, Schelling, and the wider PlatonicAugustinian tradition, as well as Aristotle, Fichte, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, exerted a greater direct influence on the formation of Tillich’s thought than did Kierkegaard, Nygren, and Sartre. However, Tillich’s correlative theology entails a profoundly dialogical structure, for which both the existentialist (and especially Sartrean) tradition, as well as Nygren, are of critical importance. We can hardly overestimate the extent to which the existentialist mind-set pervaded the common consciousness of Tillich’s time, even and especially outside of the academy. Similarly, Nygren was, at the time, a major and representative voice in Protestant theology. Against this background, the above figures appear as key springboards for the formulation of Tillich’s theological response to the human being’s existential plight. Whereas Murdoch openly follows Weil in many of her ideas, her reception of Kierkegaard and Sartre is more ambiguous. Nonetheless, Murdoch encountered the thought of all three authors at a formative period in her life, and continued to wrestle with what she perceived as the simultaneously attractive and disturbing nature of Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s ideas, as well as with their widespread popularity. Her early book on Sartre62 and the lasting presence of both Kierkegaard and Sartre in her later magnum opus, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, are indicative of the fact that, for Murdoch, too, Kierkegaard

62

Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987).

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and Sartre were important conversation partners in the development of her own ideas. Having thus provided the context for my engagement with Tillich and Murdoch, I proceed to offer detailed exegeses of Tillich’s understanding of the self (Chapter 4) and of love (Chapter 5), and then of Murdoch’s understanding of the self (Chapter 6) and of love (Chapter 7). In these, I seek to show that, in different ways, both Tillich and Murdoch defend a notion of selfless love by creatively using Sartrean existentialism and other ideas towards developing a relational understanding of the self. Whereas Tillich understands this primarily in terms of participation, Murdoch avails herself of the category of desire. And where Tillich’s ontology of interdependence leads him to give an account of the erotic drive for self-fulfilment as dependent on a constraining counterpart, Murdoch will be found to argue that we have a proclivity towards living in immoral and destructive illusions that can be undone only through a practice of unselfing love. For both, the notion of selfless love thus constitutes something of a corrective which breaks through false, or naive, depictions of who we are and how we flourish. The concluding chapter of this study (Chapter 8) summarily recaptures not only the strengths and weaknesses of Tillich’s and Murdoch’s thought on love, but makes concrete suggestions as to how a viable defence of selfless love must go beyond their proposals.

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2 Grappling with a Tension: Love and the Self in S
ren Kierkegaard Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch developed their ideas on love and the self at a point when existing philosophical and theological debates of these themes were marked by unprecedented polarizations. Tillich was raised within a Protestant Christianity that was deeply familiar with the kind of idealized self-abnegation so confidently extolled by Anders Nygren (1890–1978). Although Tillich does not engage Nygren explicitly, the latter’s theology forms an important opponent in Tillich’s project of developing a more existentially relevant theology. The austerity of religious perspectives on the self, such as is found in Nygren but also, for instance, in Simone Weil (1909–43), stood in stark contrast to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), which captured the imagination of the post-war intelligentsia. If Nygren belittled the dignity and the capacities of the human being, Sartre aggrandized them: here, the individual was his own free maker. It is this polarized atmosphere which shapes, and forms the context of, Tillich’s theological enterprise. The same can be said of Murdoch, who shares Tillich’s fascination for Sartre, and allows Sartre to influence her thought more than is typically recognized (and, perhaps, more than she knew herself).1 Like Tillich, she is intrigued by his pleas for the importance of the concrete individual and his or her states of consciousness. While Murdoch’s upbringing and intellectual background prevents her from having to battle with Christian tendencies to diminish the self, she also engages with, and to some extent adopts, the Christian tradition of selflessness. It is in the same spirit that she draws heavily on the thought of Simone Weil. Both Tillich and Murdoch thus not only find themselves caught in a nexus of conflicting ideas about love and the self, but consciously and willingly 1 It is the early Sartre of The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness whom Murdoch and Tillich read and engaged with, and on whose thought I therefore focus in the following discussions.

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engage the respective extremes of this nexus. In order to penetrate Tillich’s and Murdoch’s perspectives, we are well advised to first take a step back, and to consider the ideas underlying the different modern accounts of the self. For this, we turn now to S
ren Kierkegaard (1813–55), who has often been dubbed the ‘father of existentialism’. His thought arguably contains the seeds both for Nygren’s and Weil’s austere perspectives on love and the self, and for Sartre’s emancipatory existentialism.2

THE S ELF I N KIERKEGAARD S
ren Kierkegaard’s thought is, in many ways, a rebellion against German idealism on the one hand and the Danish, Lutheran Christianity of his day on the other. He is harshly critical of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) conceptual reconciliation of reality through a process of absolute thought, arguing that this encloses and sublates the concrete human individual.3 He rejects Hegel’s approach not only from a Christian point of view but also on Hegel’s own grounds. For, as Kierkegaard stresses, it is only on account of, and over against, the concrete human subject that Hegel can develop his system. Nonetheless—and especially with respect to his understanding of the human self—Kierkegaard seems also to have been influenced by German idealism. His account demonstrates significant overlaps, as well as differences, especially with the anthropology of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Since these are paralleled in Sartre’s understanding of the self, I briefly address them in what follows. Kierkegaard’s other important sparring partner is the figure of the bourgeois, nineteenth-century Copenhagen Christian. In analogy to the idealist philosophers, whom Kierkegaard accuses of losing the concrete individual through excessive abstraction, the bourgeois Christian has, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, lost his authentic individual self through an undue elevation of the material over the spiritual. Both parties, German idealism and bourgeois Christianity, thus prompt Kierkegaard to concern himself with the foundations and significance of the human individual and his or her immediate subjective experience.

2 I do not wish to suggest that one can establish a direct lineage between Kierkegaard and Nygren, Weil, or Sartre. Yet, as I shall show, the latter authors’ proposals bear at least an implicit relation to Kierkegaard insofar as they contain radicalized versions of one or another idea present in Kierkegaard. As such, they can be seen as historical evolutions of Kierkegaard’s thought. 3 S
ren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, trans. Douglas Steere (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 184 (henceforth PH). Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: OUP, 1970), 3.

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This experience, Kierkegaard is convinced, is fundamentally characterized by anxiety and despair. In The Sickness unto Death, which Kierkegaard wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Anti-Climacus’ and which constitutes the key text for his understanding of the human self, Kierkegaard defines the human being as a ‘synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity’, that is constituted by God and the unity of which is spirit.4 The human self is that on account of which this ‘relation relates itself to its own self ’.5 That is, it is not merely the relation between the above opposites but the self-reflexivity of this relation or what has been described as ‘the act of self-reference’.6 As different commentators have pointed out, this constitutes a major parallel with Fichte’s thought. Like Fichte, Kierkegaard finds that selfhood only emerges where the synthesis of subject and object that constitutes the human being becomes a ‘positive unity’; that is, where ‘[it] is characterized by a second relation, namely a relation to itself ’; the self, for him, is no mere given but emerges through ‘the reflexive, self-constituting act through which it establishes the relation of itself as subject to itself as object’.7 True selfhood, both Kierkegaard and Fichte conclude, emerges where the self exists ‘for itself ’. However, as Samuel Loncar’s excellent discussion has made clear, it is after having arrived at this point that Kierkegaard (consciously or not) parts company with Fichte. Fichte’s concern to avoid a reduction of the self to the status of an object leads him to reject the notion that the self possesses any degree of givenness. In the Wissenschaftslehre, he instead pronounces the ‘absolute ego’ to be the foundation of the self, whose self-positing nature is thus absolutized. Fichte thereby faces the impossible task of explaining what it is that enables the self to relate to itself, or what founds the absolute ego. Kierkegaard takes a different line. Apparently satisfied that the self ’s origin in a self-reflexive act prevents it from being reduced to the status of a thing, he does not shy away from attributing an element of givenness to the self by introducing a third relation—the self ’s relation to God, who establishes the relation that is the self.8 On this view, the self is first posited by God, to whom 4

S
ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. In Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 146 (henceforth SD). 5 Kierkegaard, SD, 146. 6 Samuel Loncar, ‘From Jena to Copenhagen: Kierkegaard’s Relations to German Idealism and the Critique of Autonomy in The Sickness unto Death’, Religious Studies, 47: 2 (2011), 201–16, at 209. 7 Loncar, ‘From Jena’, 209; David James, ‘The Self-Positing Self in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death’, European Legacy, 16 (2011), 587–98, at 592. 8 It has been pointed out that Kierkegaard’s implicit critique of Fichte here (which is also that of Schelling and of later existentialists) was already voiced by early romantics such as Hölderlin and Novalis, for whom the self is ‘encountered originally in a basic and continuous experience of Selbstgefühl marked by the key passive feature of feeling, that is, of giveness’ (Ameriks, in Loncar, ‘From Jena’, 208). Loncar thus concludes that Kierkegaard was in fact ‘far closer to the romantics

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it must relate itself in order to be able to make full use of its self-reflexive and hence self-constituting powers. Kierkegaard’s self, therefore, is in relation even before it relates to itself and can only relate to itself on account of that prior relation. As we shall see, the individual’s awareness and acknowledgement of this relation—and, underlying this,9 the difference between self and God— becomes the very touchstone of human selfhood.

The Inauthentic Self The human being’s conscious recognition of its intrinsic God-relatedness as foundational to human selfhood requires an awareness of the element of infinity residing within the human being. This pole of the human synthesis forms the foundation of human freedom, yet it is also a cause of anxiety and potential despair. For while the human share in the eternal is the precondition for the human being’s self-relatedness and ability to freely transcend himself, it also continually destabilizes the self-relation on account of which the human being has a self. Constituting an element of invincibly present ‘otherness’, it means that the self can neither ‘lay a hold of itself ’ nor ‘do away with itself ’.10 Forced to hold the tension between the finite and the infinite by affirming himself without being able to fully define or appropriate himself, the human being experiences anxiety and is at risk of falling into ‘despair’—the spiritual death caused by sin and leading to a suffocating loss of self.11 As Kierkegaard sees it, such despair inevitably results from the human being’s failure to relate himself to the eternal element within himself—and hence to his self as such. It can arise in one of three ways. First, it can result from the individual’s unawareness of the eternal dwelling within him, and from a consequent failure to relate to himself as himself. The ‘spiritlessness’, or lack of a self, corresponds with an unconscious despair, a despair, that is, of which the human being is unaware and which he cannot therefore overcome.12 Second, a perhaps more common form of despair is that of the than he realized’—as well as being ‘more of a child of the idealists than he knew’ (Loncar, ‘From Jena’, 208, 213). 9 For an exploration of the nature of the ‘abyss’ between God and the human being and her role in the attainment of authentic human self-knowledge role, see Simon Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2011). 10 S
ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 44 (henceforth CA). 11 Kierkegaard, CA, 155. Hegel’s claim that the separation of the finite and the infinite can be resolved through abstract thought is one such presumption. For thought, according to Kierkegaard, is not identical with Being but is itself a part of finite existence. As such, it cannot even reach Being. 12 Kierkegaard, SD, 178.

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human being who has some consciousness of his true self but who has not the courage to face this by relating himself to it. Such an individual has ‘an obscure conception’ of the eternal within himself but, afraid of the claims this might make on him, distracts and buries himself in his finite self. His despair is a despair of weakness, resulting from ‘not willing to be oneself ’, and yet a more actively generated form of despair.13 In this case, the human being possesses some awareness of himself, and is not entirely incapable of becoming a self therefore. Yet his reflexivity is insufficient: ‘he has no consciousness of a self which is gained by the infinite abstraction from everything outward, this naked, abstract self (in contrast to the clothed self of immediacy) which is the first form of the infinite self and the forward impulse in the whole process whereby a self infinitely accepts its actual self with all its difficulties and advantages.’14 Thus, when he encounters the slightest difficulty he lacks the insight and motivation to make the necessary break ‘with immediacy as a whole’ and falls into the despair of ‘not willing to be himself ’.15 This despair of not willing to be oneself (the despair of weakness) yet again differs from a third kind, the despair of willing to be oneself (the despair of self-assertion). Whereas the first two forms of despair denote a despair of weakness (or, eventually, despair about one’s weakness), this third form of despair ‘becomes conscious of the reason why it does not want to be itself ’ and, in response to this, entails an element of defiance: here, the human being is led to be ‘despairingly determined to be himself ’.16 That is, instead of being willing, in faith, to lose himself in order to be himself, this individual seeks to be himself by willing to be himself; that is, he chooses self-assertion over self-surrender. Such an attempt at self-assertion rests on a consciousness of the ‘infinite self ’, yet it unduly isolates this ‘infinite self ’ and seeks to appropriate it for its own ends. As Kierkegaard writes: [the] infinite self is really only the abstractest form, the abstractest possibility of the self, and it is this self the man despairingly wills to be, detaching the self from every relation to the Power which posited it, or detaching it from the conception that there is such a Power in existence. By the aid of this infinite form the self despairingly wills to dispose of itself or to create itself, to make itself the self it wills to be, distinguishing in the concrete self what it will and what it will not accept. The man’s concrete self, or his concretion, has in fact necessity and limitations, it is this perfectly definite thing, with these faculties, dispositions, etc. But by the aid of the infinite form, the negative self, he wills first to undertake to refashion the whole thing, in order to get out of it in this way a self such as he wants to have, produced by the aid of the infinite form of the negative self—and it is thus he wills to be himself.17

13 16

Kierkegaard, SD, 182. Kierkegaard, SD, 201.

14 17

Kierkegaard, SD, 188. Kierkegaard, SD, 201.

15

Kierkegaard, SD, 188 f.

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At this point, Kierkegaard is clearly positioning himself in relation to Hegel’s conception of the ‘absolute unity of the self-consciousness with itself ’—of the ‘self-identical subject’, which Hegel summarizes in the formula that ‘I’ = ‘I’.18 As James points out, Kierkegaard does not reject the notion of an abstract ‘I’ entirely but, as we saw in the case of the second form of despair, rather invokes it (and awareness of it) as ‘the first form of the infinite self ’ and hence as a necessary precondition for affirming oneself.19 In the fashion of Hegel’s ‘I’ = ‘I’, Kierkegaard’s human being needs to be capable of ‘conceiving of itself in abstraction from, and as independent of, anything other than its own relation to itself ’.20 Only thus can the human being be self-reflexive. But it is important that Kierkegaard considers this abstraction only ‘the first form of the infinite self ’ and not its entirety. For as indicated in the long quotation above, the attempt to absolutize the abstract self and to use this as the basis for the free construction of one’s own self reflects a stubborn unwillingness precisely to accept the concretely existing, finite, individual self and, thus, again obstructs the unification of the self. In contrast to Hegel’s ‘equal man’, therefore, Kierkegaard’s ‘religious individual can be assumed to be someone who conceives of himself as a theological self standing in a singularizing relation to God, rather than as a merely abstract self ’.21 In all forms of despair, the human being suffers from being ‘compelled to be self as he does not will to be’, from being unable to ‘get rid of himself ’.22 As will have become apparent, despair can only be avoided by being or, rather, by ‘becom[ing] oneself ’.23 This, according to Kierkegaard, is ‘the task of the self ’—a task which is directly related to faith insofar as it is ‘by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, [that] the self is grounded transparently in the Power which constituted it’.24 Where the human being relates herself to herself in her entirety (that is, to the finite and the eternal within herself), she is grounded in God, and vice versa: we cannot affirm our existence without affirming also the foundation of this existence. As Kierkegaard here implicitly understands it, faith amounts less to fully overcoming anxiety than to being ‘anxious in the right way’.25 A feeling of insecurity may remain, but ‘the terrible things of life . . . [then] become weak by comparison with those of possibility’; the threats of meaninglessness and self-destruction are averted.26 Such faith stands in a dialectical relationship with despair: the 18 See James, ‘The Self-Positing Self ’, 595; the reference to the ‘absolute unity of the selfconsciousness with itself ’ comes from G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke. Vol. 7, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), 25 (ET: Elements of the Philosophy of Rights, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: CUP, 1991)). 19 20 James, ‘The Self-Positing Self ’, 595. James, ‘The Self-Positing Self ’, 595. 21 22 James, ‘The Self-Positing Self ’, 597. Kierkegaard, SD, 153. 23 24 Kierkegaard, SD, 166. Kierkegaard, SD, 168, 182. 25 26 Kierkegaard, CA, 155, 157. Kierkegaard, CA, 155, 157.

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self, Kierkegaard argues, ‘is in sound health and free from despair only when, precisely by having been in despair, it is grounded transparently in God’.27 For it is only insofar as we are aware of our eternal Self, and of the despair caused by losing this, that we can will to affirm this by submitting to God’s will. Union with God, and thus the individual’s attainment of his true, essential selfhood, passes through prior existential estrangement from God—a thought we will find to be taken up by Paul Tillich.

Becoming a Self: Consciousness, Will, Surrender For the purposes of our further discussion we must consider more closely Kierkegaard’s emphasis on becoming oneself through willing to be oneself. For Kierkegaard, true selfhood, which rests on our affirmation of the eternal within us, is never a mere state of being. Rather, ‘a self, every instant it exists, is in process of becoming, for the self [potentially] does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become. In so far as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self; but not to be one’s own self is despair’.28 This means that the human being must, at every instant, make a new choice to be herself in full awareness that the possibility of despair always lurks around the corner. Kierkegaard thus proposes a dynamic understanding of the self as a developing reality, which we will encounter in a radicalized version in Sartre’s understanding of the self as ‘project’. The more fully the human being has become a self the more of an individual he is. Indeed, true selfhood—and true freedom with it—consists in existing as an individual, a ‘concrete’ subject.29 Kierkegaard considers this to be divinely instituted. As he argues, ‘in eternity each shall render account as an individual’, indeed, ‘eternity will demand of him that he shall have lived as an individual’.30 According to Kierkegaard, we can truly exist only as individuals. Thus, if we do not confront ourselves and take up our responsibility as an individual, then we betray the very core, and foundation, of who we are; we fail to exist, in any genuine sense of the word. Few face up to this challenge. Most of us, Kierkegaard finds, live as mere ‘numerals in the crowd’, allowing ourselves to be determined and objectified by the beliefs, opinions, and behaviours of others.31 Not anchored in relationship with God, our ‘self ’ is then a stunted, even disfigured, version of what it is meant to be. If we become a self by willing to be a self—an individual, subjective self—we must first become conscious of the despair that awaits us as soon as we turn away from God; and, by implication, conscious of our ‘eternal vocation’ to individually root ourselves in a particular and individual relationship with 27 30

Kierkegaard, SD, 163. Kierkegaard, PH, 163.

28 31

Kierkegaard, SD, 163. Kierkegaard, PH, 162.

29

Kierkegaard, SD, 162.

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God.32 Not only is self-awareness or ‘consciousness . . . the fundamental condition for truthfully willing only one thing’, but it is indeed ‘the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude which relates itself to itself ’ which forms the very essence of the human self: ‘generally speaking, consciousness, i.e. consciousness of self, is the decisive criterion of the self ’.33 We will meet engagements with this unique Kierkegaardian stress on human consciousness again in Sartre, Tillich, and Murdoch.34 Equally striking is Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the act of willing as a mark of true selfhood. Kierkegaard boldly connects these terms as follows: ‘The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will, and the more will the more self. A man who has no will at all is no self; the more will he has, the more consciousness of self he has also.’35 In light of the previous discussion we can conclude that Kierkegaard distinguishes between real and merely apparent forms of willing. The human being who ‘in despair . . . will[s] to be oneself ’—that is, who wilfully tries to define himself in purely finite terms—lacks the ‘unity’ necessary for willing in the real sense. As we already saw, Kierkegaard thus considers such a person’s willing tantamount to a failure to be herself, and symptomatic of being governed and numbed by the crowd, which ‘in its very concept is the untruth’.36 The distinctive mark of the true individual is that, conscious of the self in its fullness, she wills to be herself, a unity. Thus becoming more and more of ‘a unity’—and more conscious of herself as a unity—she can increasingly exercise her will as a unity such that her will to be herself is continually strengthened. Kierkegaard’s subject, then, is a ‘voluntary agent’, a ‘living, active, self-making, self-choosing, self-renewing energy, genuinely set in time, process and becoming’, whose choices in becoming a self shape reality itself.37 Kierkegaard individualizes Kant’s concept of the moral law by insisting that the human being truly exists only insofar as he makes use of his freedom by affirming himself qua subject. Paradoxically, however, this subject properly exercises his will and ‘creates himself ’ by abandoning himself to the will of God. This is because true selfhood or subjectivity consists in the concretization of the synthesis of the finite and the infinite. In order to enable this, there must be a ‘development [of] . . . moving away from oneself infinitely by the process of infinitizing oneself, and in returning to oneself infinitely by the process of finitizing’.38 The individual can do this only on the basis of faith, or in and through the 32

33 Kierkegaard, PH, 162. Emphasis added. Kierkegaard, PH, 162; SD, 162. 35 Kierkegaard, PH, 162. Kierkegaard, SD, 162. 36 Kierkegaard, ‘Concerning the Dedication to “That Individual” ’, in The Point of View (Etc.), trans. Walter Lowrie (London: OUP, 1939), 111–22, at 114. 37 James Brown, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Buber and Barth (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 42. 38 Kierkegaard, SD, 162–3. 34

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‘absurd’ belief that he will receive back in an enhanced form that which he has surrendered. (Unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard finds that true subjectivity can become manifest only in relation to an object and that the human will requires a limit. He detects both of these, object and limit, in Christianity’s confrontation of the human being with the paradox of the Incarnate God.) Kierkegaard’s account of the self thus wants to be an urgent warning against the objectifying tendencies prevalent in Hegel and promoted more generally by the idealist, naturalist, and scientific world-views of the day. As Kierkegaard and others sense, these increasingly lead towards an objectification (or what Marx termed a ‘Verdinglichung’) of the human being, such that Hegelian essentialism effectively fosters precisely the existential predicament of selfalienation that it sought to overcome. As we will see, this Kierkegaardian sensitivity to the existential predicament and importance of the human individual and her quest for subjectivity continues to drive the existentialist (as well as Marxian and Nietzschean) projects in the middle of the twentieth century, and resonates also in Tillich and Murdoch. In extolling human individuality and subjectivity, as well as the importance of human consciousness and the will, Kierkegaard’s equally modern and theological account of the self both follows and critiques the idealist (and especially Fichtean) perspective on the self.39 The modernism of Kierkegaard’s self consists in its self-positing nature, in the sense that its existence depends on its relating itself to the relation that constitutes it. Its theological anti-modernism, on the other hand, is contained in the fact that its selfdetermination is neither absolute nor the content of its freedom. Loncar puts it thus: while for Fichte, ideally, ‘to be a self is to be what one posits oneself to be’, for Kierkegaard, ‘to be a self is to become what one already is, “which can only be done through the relationship to God”’.40 This already points to the extent to which human selfhood is tied to love, and it is to Kierkegaard’s account of the same that I now turn. As I will show, Kierkegaard’s thought on love not only corresponds with his above affirmations about the self but, in part, also complicates these.

LOVE IN KIERKEGAARD Kierkegaard’s understanding of love is oftentimes associated with the kind of anti-erotic defence of Christian agape made famous by Anders Nygren. In what follows I seek to show that such an association is not without grounds, James, ‘The Self-Positing Self ’, 590. Loncar, ‘From Jena’, 210; Loncar is quoting from The Sickness unto Death (Hong translation); cf. Kierkegaard, SD, 162. 39 40

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yet that it is also in need of being nuanced—not least because there is, in fact, no textual evidence that Kierkegaard was read by Nygren.41 In Works of Love, his seminal text on love, Kierkegaard follows his Lutheran heritage by approaching the question of love via the Christian command to neighbourlove, and by suggesting that such love must model itself on God’s own love. From these two features—the commanded nature of Christian love, and the alleged need for love to model itself on God’s love—Kierkegaard infers, somewhat contentiously as we will see, that true, Christian love ‘does not seek its own’ and consists, above all, in ‘the duty . . . to love the person one sees’.42 As Kierkegaard argues, it is only thus that love can attain the unchangeable and indiscriminatory qualities of divine Love. For the dutiful nature of Christian love means that, just as God loves even the sinner, we must love our neighbour independently of his or her particular qualities and limitations. True love meets the changeableness and limitations of the beloved with its own permanence and limitlessness and is, in this sense, indifferent to the state of the beloved, including her valuation of or response to the love she receives. In the same spirit, love as duty ‘does not seek its own’ but entails a self-sacrificial willingness to disregard one’s preferences.43 Kierkegaard indeed declares that ‘passionate preferential’ love, which he also refers to as ‘natural’ love, is ‘essentially another form of self-love’, which he in turn associates with ‘egocentricity’.44 In it, the other is loved as an ‘other I’, which ‘in the strictest sense’ amounts to ‘self-deification’ and ‘idol-worship’.45 At the very least, preferential love must therefore be purged of its inherently selfish fickleness and ‘undergo . . . the change of eternity by becoming duty’.46 That is, it must be placed under the criterion of the divine command to love (which is matched by the divine gift of love). Only on this account does a relationship originating in preferential love become ‘dependable’ insofar as it is then no longer tied to worldly contingencies but ‘eternally secured’ by God.47 Placing oneself and one’s love under the divine command to love means rooting one’s love in a divine ‘third’.48 This divine love transforms the other but goes hand in hand also with a transformation of self. The true lover, whose love has ‘undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty’, knows neither self-seeking, nor ‘anxiety about the possibility of change’,

41 See Carl S. Hughes, ‘Anders Nygren: Influence in Reverse?’, in Jon Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology. Tome II: Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 205–18. 42 Emphasis added. S
ren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 172 (henceforth WL). 43 44 45 Kierkegaard, WL, 264. Kierkegaard, WL, 53. Kierkegaard, WL, 57. 46 47 48 Kierkegaard, WL, 35. Kierkegaard, WL, 32. Kierkegaard, WL, 303 f.

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jealousy, or despair.49 His life is ‘squandered . . . on the existence of others’ and characterized by ‘self-denial’ (inwardly) and ‘self-sacrificing unselfishness’ (outwardly), accordingly.50 Through practising such self-denial, the human being indeed ‘makes himself nothing’—not least in order not to compromise the new-found sense of independence of the other, whom he has helped to ‘stand by himself, to become himself, to become his own master’.51 We have thus reached the other end, as it were, of Kierkegaard’s circular plea for understanding love as duty: given the uncomfortable nature of true love, mere inclination or reason cannot entice us into love. Love must be commanded, if we are to enter into it at all. The above emphasis on self-denial is clearly evocative of Nygren’s disparagement of the worldly self and its needs, which I briefly consider later on. From this perspective, Kierkegaard’s ideas appear to be complicit with a strand of Christian thought that has come under considerable attack in modernity— that is, with the idealization of an unattainable, inhuman kind of love that shares nothing in common with, and sees no value in, love as it tends to be most forcibly experienced: romantic love, friendship, and parental love. Kierkegaard reinforces this impression by defining Christian agape-love in ‘polar opposition’ to eros-love.52 It has thus been argued that Kierkegaard considers eros the egocentric, acquisitive ‘path of ascent to God’ that ‘springs from privation’ and ‘is attracted by the value it recognizes in its object’, whereas he defines agape as God’s self-sacrificing descent, a gift that ‘springs from abundance’ and that ‘creates value in whatever object it touches’.53 On this account, eros aims for worldly happiness, whereas agape spurns such a desire as a deceptive and enslaving hindrance to the transformation of the self that alone brings genuine happiness, salvation. Similarly, agape does not entirely lack passion, yet its passion is ‘more akin to suffering (Lidelse) than to desire (Lyst)’, and is ‘a disposition to self-sacrifice for the sake of the other’.54

49 Kierkegaard, WL, 35, 33, 41. Kierkegaard writes that, had the first parents accepted the commandment (despite being unable to understand it), they would not have been subject to that anxiety which caused them to fall (Kierkegaard, WL, 66). 50 51 Kierkegaard, WL, 279, 56, 366. Kierkegaard, WL, 277 f. 52 This opposition corresponds with a set of other Kierkegaardian binaries, including ‘psycho-sensual/spiritual, . . . self/other, . . . beloved/neighbor, desire/duty, luck (Lykke)/gift (Gave), happiness (Lykke)/task (Opgave), lex talionis/redoubling, possession/debt . . . ’ (see William McDonald, ‘Love in Kierkegaard’s Symposia’, Minerva—An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 7 (2003), 60–93, at 61). 53 McDonald, ‘Love’, 63–4. Notably, McDonald—although purportedly giving an account of Kierkegaard’s understanding of love—references Nygren here. This appears to give credence to the charge made by other Kierkegaard scholars that Kierkegaard is commonly, and unjustly, read through Nygren’s lens (see e.g. Pia Soltoft, ‘Erotic Love: Reading Kierkegaard with and without Marion’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 50: 1 (2011), 37–46, at 37). 54 McDonald, ‘Love’, 78.

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The Austerity of Kierkegaard’s Love: Critiques From the contemporary Kierkegaard scholar William McDonald to other seminal thinkers such as Karl Barth and Theodor Adorno, readers of Kierkegaard have largely agreed that he offers what one might describe as a one-sided praise of love as selfless and a corresponding indictment of the worldly needs and desires of the self. Since these (male!) authors’ receptions and critiques of Kierkegaard’s thought on love doubtlessly helped shape Kierkegaard’s reputation and, with this, subsequent discussions of Christian love, I briefly examine them in what follows. Despite positing an ‘antithesis’ between eros and (Christian) agape himself, Karl Barth, for instance, charges Kierkegaard with an undue ‘insist[ence] on this antithesis’.55 Particularly in light of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the depravity of eros, Kierkegaard’s account of this antithesis clouds an adequate perception of the beauty of Christian love, and in a sense unduly elevates eros’s profile. As Barth sees it, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love consequently has an ‘unlovely, inquisitorial and terribly judicial character’.56 Adorno similarly critiques Kierkegaard as making much of the depravity of natural love and as being ‘insatiable in condemning the world, worldliness, and its limited worldly aims’.57 As Adorno complains, Kierkegaard speaks little of divine grace, and even back-pedals on his own ‘ascetic rigorousness’ as soon as it comes to, as it were, getting one’s hands dirty in the world.58 Barth finds a similar problem to be evidenced in Kierkegaard’s definition of love as a duty. In addition to doing injustice to the biblical texts, this definition, he argues, leaves Kierkegaard silent ‘about the creative, generous, liberating love of God’ and thus mars and detracts from the beauty of Christian love.59 In light of Kierkegaard’s intense preoccupation with (disavowing) eros, it is, as Barth and Adorno both conclude, perhaps no surprise that Kierkegaard’s Christian love comes surprisingly close to the love he so adamantly criticizes. For one thing, his agape-love appears strangely prideful. For while eros may carry with it the presumptuousness of being able to lead the human being to God and self-fulfilment, Kierkegaard’s discussion of agape makes little mention of salvific grace: ‘By means of its radical inwardness, it is prone to conceive itself as the sole ground of the world’.60 This is, secondly, underlined by the lack of interest Kierkegaard’s agape appears to show in the concretely existing neighbour, the beloved, as expressed in love’s supposed inability to ‘be

55

56 Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 747. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 782. Theodor Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Munich: Kösel, 1939–1940), 413–29, at 422. 58 Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, 422. 59 Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 782. 60 Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, 417. 57

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disappointed’, which Adorno suggests indicates a ‘rigorousness [which] partially devaluates the beloved person’.61 The neighbour’s ‘particular reality’ is, Adorno argues, ‘rendered totally accidental’, such that, ‘in spite of all the talk of the neighbour, the latter is nothing but the stumbling-block to prove one’s own creative omnipotence as one of love’.62 The fact that Kierkegaard does not, ultimately, consider it possible to live out one’s duty to love is of little help here. For if anything—so Adorno’s critique seems to imply—it further promotes the self-preoccupied attitude suggested by the lack of interest in the beloved. The ‘“Christian” content’ of Kierkegaard’s love ‘is determined only by the subjective qualities of the loving one’, including, precisely, his or her ‘disinterestedness, unlimited confidence . . . self-denial and fidelity’.63 Critical of eros himself, Barth further adds that Kierkegaard’s agape mirrors eros also in its involuntariness: ‘love which is imposed and enforced as a duty . . . can [n]ever be more than an eros with its back to the wall as it were. It is certainly not the love in which man really gives himself.’64 In this light, then, Kierkegaard’s account of love illustrates and promotes a Christian tendency towards self-abnegation and disdain for the earthly. While this would seem to jar with his previously mentioned insistence on the self ’s self-positing qualities and on the will to be itself, Adorno and Barth connect Kierkegaard’s accounts of the self and of love. In their eyes, the very rigour of Kierkegaard’s asceticism manifests a form of pride: extreme self-denial and self-assertion are close neighbours.

Nuancing Traditional Readings of Kierkegaard Arguably, however, these critical readings of Kierkegaard are themselves symptomatic of the contemporary struggle to connect selfless love and human flourishing. More recent (and particularly female) writers on Kierkegaard have challenged the view that ‘Works of Love presents an ethic that is asocial, otherworldly, nonmutual, and unlivable’, and point to those aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought on love that complicate such a picture.65 It is in reference to their more nuanced readings that I now turn to those elements in Kierkegaard’s account of love that suggest that he, to some extent, in fact sought to maintain—and perhaps even to re-establish—the connection between selfless love and human flourishing.

61 62 63 64 65

Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, 416. Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, 419, 417. Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, 415. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 782. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 6.

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According to Jamie Ferreira, the suggestion that Kierkegaard seeks only to undo and undermine the self is unjust. Kierkegaard, she points out, explicitly rejects the idea that a person might ‘do God a service by torturing himself ’, and charges such a person with the ‘sin . . . [of] not willing to love himself in the right way’.66 He distinguishes between false and ‘proper’ self-love, and insists that ‘if anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either’.67 On Ferreira’s reading, Kierkegaard’s proper self-love is a self-love which ‘encompasses the good of the other and is the measure of the good of the other’.68 Self-love here seems in need of being rejected only where it either exceeds or falls short of our love for our neighbour—surely a much less controversial claim than a blanket condemnation of self-love. On this account, then, Kierkegaard blurs the distinction between self- and neighbour-love, and underlines this by claiming—more problematically perhaps—that true love entails a form of self-love, in which the ‘antithetical’ distinction ‘mine and yours’ is overcome.69 Deidre Nicole Green picks up and develops Ferreira’s perspective that Kierkegaard, though insisting that true love entails self-denial and selfsacrifice, is highly intent on the ‘preservation of the self ’ in love.70 Green’s discussion proceeds from Kierkegaard’s suggestion that one should respond to a person seeking one’s forgiveness with the question: ‘Do you now truly love me?’ This indicates, so Green argues, that Kierkegaard advocates a kind of ‘self-love’ while ‘problematis[ing] traditional ideals of the self-sacrificing, submissive and overly permissive woman’ and warning against the attempt ‘to imitate Christ’s suffering’.71 Contrary to those scholars who read ‘Works of Love as advocating indifference to material conditions and concrete realities’, and hence, one might add, as promoting a destructive kind of selflessness, Green argues that Kierkegaard imposes ‘important limitations on suffering and self-sacrifice’, as, for instance, in his insistence that suffering does not carry intrinsic value and should not, therefore, be actively sought out or deemed beneficial.72 Green sees in Kierkegaard’s discussion of eros a warning against excessive forms of ‘self-abandonment’ as constituting a false kind of self-love.73 On these readings, true Kierkegaardian love resists exploitation precisely insofar as it entails, as Ferreira put it, a self-love which encompasses

66

Kierkegaard, WL, 23; see Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 33. Kierkegaard, WL, 22; see Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 32. 68 Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 35. 69 Kierkegaard, WL, 267 f. I will return to this point in the course of my further discussion, especially with regard to Murdoch. 70 Deidre Nicole Green, ‘Works of Love in a World of Violence: Kierkegaard, Feminism, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice’, Hypatia, 28: 3 (2013), 568–84, at 574. 71 72 Green, ‘Works of Love’, 569. Green, ‘Works of Love’, 570. 73 Green, ‘Works of Love’, 571, in reference to WL, 53–5. 67

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the good of the other: the other’s good itself commands that the lover does not allow himself to be abused. Green is right to suggest that Kierkegaard’s question ‘Do you love me?’ even leaves room for mutuality in love insofar as, through it, ‘love maieutically opens a space for further self-investigation, self-disclosure, and exchange’.74 And while Kierkegaard’s claim that, in true love, ‘the distinction “mine and yours” become[s] entirely cancelled’ would seem to cast doubt on whether this is in fact a mutuality in which the lover’s needs are valued, Ferreira highlights passages in Kierkegaard’s thought that suggest otherwise.75 Kierkegaard ‘condemns’, as she writes, ‘the kind of “proud independence that thinks it has no need to feel loved”’ and rejects merely that kind of ‘dependence on the other’s response’, which ‘renders the other instrumental to the agent’s satisfaction’.76 In analogy to our discussion of Kierkegaard’s view on self-love, and, again, in contrast to common interpretations, Kierkegaard does not reject preferential love tout court either. Instead, he explicitly rejects love of one’s spouse or a friend only where this does not rest on love of God as the primary love.77 That is, we may—and, given our embodied nature, cannot but—love our spouse erotically.78 But we must nonetheless love him or her as our neighbour first. This means that we can, and should, love others according to their distinctiveness or individuality so long as we love them equally: we must love ‘each one individually but no one exceptionally’.79 The view that Kierkegaard’s stance on the more natural forms of love is less austere than commonly suggested is further buttressed by Pia Soltoft’s argument that Kierkegaard pictures love as a dialectic movement connecting the temporal and the eternal. According to Soltoft, Kierkegaard considers love to originate in God, but to be universally experienced on the human level, where it manifests itself erotically, namely as ‘a fundamental and bodily situated form of love’, even as an ‘erotic striving’.80 According to Soltoft, this ‘sensual-erotic’ urge spoken of in Either/ Or corresponds to the ‘need to love and be loved’ described in Works of Love, and ‘imposes itself as something that overflows and causes the person to turn his attention away from himself and out toward the world’.81 Whether or not the erotic striving described by Either/Or’s pseudonymous writer A. can be identified as Kierkegaard’s own, Kierkegaard, on this reading, at least acknowledges that a natural, erotic form of love stems from a genuine need (rather than mere selfishness).82 Insofar as Kierkegaard allows a genuine place to this need, this suggests that his criticisms of eros and self-love concern primarily a

75 Green, ‘Works of Love’, 577. Kierkegaard, WL, 268. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 223, 226; cf. Kierkegaard, WL, 39. 77 78 79 Kierkegaard, WL, 57. Kierkegaard, WL, 141. Kierkegaard, WL, 67. 80 Soltoft, ‘Erotic Love’, 38, 40. The latter point is made in reference to ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical Erotic’ in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. 81 82 Soltoft, ‘Erotic Love’, 40–1; cf. Kierkegaard, WL, 155. Kierkegaard, WL, 154. 74 76

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scenario in which love of neighbour is motivated by human selfishness or self-interest—a danger which is excluded in the kind of love of the dead83 that Kierkegaard idealizes.

Concluding Evaluation We can state, then, that Kierkegaard’s account of love and the self is more complex than his earlier interpreters suggest. He affirms a qualified form of self-love and conditionally accepts preferential love and desire. There are signs that he allows even a certain degree of mutuality or reciprocity in love.84 In Kierkegaard’s favour, we must also note that, notwithstanding all the criticisms levelled against them, his apprehensions about ‘natural love’ rest on a legitimate and important sense of how easily love can be reduced to an ‘egoism à deux’, wherein I love the other simply as ‘the one in whom I see myself as I would most like to be’—a perception Murdoch in particular will be found to share.85 His hesitations about preferential love, in turn, reflect the genuine tensions and difficulties resulting from Christianity’s identification of love with the God whose love is unchanging and includes all. Despite these qualifications, Kierkegaard’s account of love remains ambiguous. Soltoft’s suggestion that Kierkegaard affirms the human being’s need to be loved ultimately appears stretched or, in any case, one-sided. As Sharon Krishek has argued, Kierkegaard offers not a joyous, but a reluctant and ambivalent affirmation of the human self and its desires—a somewhat grudging concession to our finite bodily nature.86 This renders Kierkegaard’s endorsement of self-love and preferential love unsatisfactory. Kierkegaard’s understanding of self-love is indeed more narrow than Ferreira’s definition suggests. As Krishek shows, Kierkegaard does not consider it sufficient for selflove ‘not [to be] at odds with the good of the other’; rather, self-love, in order to be acceptable, must be ‘stripped of most of its “embodied” aspects, such as 83

See Kierkegaard, WL, 350 f. I loosely equivocate these terms, arguing in Chapter 8 that, in the context of love, reciprocity is best understood not in terms of a measurably equal exchange of goods and rights (a ‘tit for tat’ reciprocity) but as referring simply to the beloved’s equally loving response to the lover’s love. Such a broader understanding of reciprocity takes into account that love is, by definition, unique even where it is most fully mutual. When discussing Murdoch’s thought, I largely follow her preference for the term ‘reciprocity’, but otherwise make use primarily of the more unambiguous term ‘mutuality’. 85 George Pattison, God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 225. 86 Sharon Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love: The Problem of Preferential Love in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 36: 4 (2008), 595–617, at 614. As Lee C. Barrett has pointed out, Kierkegaard does endorse the human being’s desire for God (Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying. The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013), 90, 391). However, Kierkegaard seems, at the very least, reluctant to allow for this desire to legitimately manifest itself in worldly human desires. 84

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responsiveness and sensitivity to inclinations, desires, and preferences’.87 Even if one does not share Krishek’s sense of the need for ‘an unqualified affirmation of self-concerned sensitivities and desires’, her analysis reveals a problematic and ‘deep ambivalence’ in Kierkegaard about ‘the concreteness of ourselves as one entity, essentially containing both our spiritual elements and our finite, bodily elements’—a surprising failure, given his own turn to the existing self and his call, noted above, to affirm the eternal and the finite self.88 Struggling to distinguish ‘self-concerned sensitivities and desires’ from selfishness, Kierkegaard ‘rejoice[s] . . . in our spiritual connection with God (and with the neighbor)’ but not in ‘our finite embodiment (intended by God) in the world’.89 As Krishek points out, this is confirmed by the fact that, while Kierkegaard’s account of faith in Fear and Trembling entails a double movement of ‘resignation’ and affirmation, his account of love in Works of Love lacks this latter aspect. Kierkegaard portrays faith as consisting, on the one hand, in a denial of one’s will and desires before God’s own will. The ‘knight of faith’ lets go of his finite desires and attachments in the knowledge that ‘nothing belongs to him (but rather to God),’ that he is unable to secure the happiness he desires.90 This mirrors Kierkegaard’s account of self-denying love in Works of Love. Yet, in Fear and Trembling this stance of self-denial goes hand in hand with what Krishek has described as ‘the ability (while still renouncing finitude) to receive back, or rather affirm, finitude’—to ‘find joy and hope and meaning in finitude’ precisely on account of its nature as a free gift.91 Failing to complement the movement of self-denial or self-sacrifice with a ‘joyful return to finitude’, the spirit of Works of Love thus lies in tension with Kierkegaard’s account of the self.92 At the same time, Kierkegaard’s understanding of love manifests—and arguably suffers from—the individualism which characterizes his understanding of the self. Particularly his already mentioned idealization of love of the dead indicates that Kierkegaard’s lover ultimately remains alone and selfreliant. Lover and beloved do not enter into the kind of communion that Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love’, 598. Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love’, 610. Kierkegaard’s ambivalence about the concrete existing self is evidenced also in the fact that ‘the concrete Regine Olsen cannot’, as Richter has remarked, ‘measure up to the isolated spiritual ideal’ (Geistideal) (Richter, in S
ren Kierkegaard, Die Krankheit zum Tode, trans. and comm. Liselotte Richter (Munich: Rowohlt, 1962)). 89 Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love’, 610. 90 Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love’, 614. Cf. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 60–1 (henceforth FT). 91 Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love’, 614. Cf. Kierkegaard, FT, 51, 60–1, and also Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘Abraham believed precisely for this life’ and eventually, because of his great selfrenunciation and faith, came to ‘sit at table joyfully with [Isaac]’ (Kierkegaard, FT, 35). 92 Krishek, ‘Two Forms of Love’, 614. 87 88

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would seem essential for the human being’s flourishing qua person. This is suggested also by his claim that the knight of faith who has ‘made the act of resignation infinitely is sufficient unto himself ’.93 Ultimately, then, Kierkegaard does make insufficient positive sense of the worldly subject’s need of the other or, more particularly, of the need to love and be loved—a need Tillich in particular takes more seriously. My discussion of Kierkegaard’s views on the self and on love has conveyed a tension between different poles—a tension which Kierkegaard himself already struggled to maintain and which, we will see, fully breaks up in the radicalized thought forms of the twentieth century. On the one hand, Kierkegaard calls the concrete existing self to affirm, and thus constitute, itself before God. On the other hand, Kierkegaard fervently endorses the Christian call to love one’s neighbour regardless of one’s particular desires and preferences. This, Kierkegaard suggests, requires the individual to, as it were, undo himself. Notwithstanding its ultimate failure, Kierkegaard’s attempt to conjoin these two impulses—to simultaneously embrace the concrete individual and shape him in the image of the selflessly loving Christian God—explains his status as an important interlocutor for both Tillich and Murdoch.

TILLICH’ S AND MURDOCH’S R E C E P T I O N OF KIERKEGAARD Tillich, who has been viewed both as an ‘heir’ and as a ‘saboteur’ of Kierkegaard’s project, came into contact with Kierkegaard’s thought early in his career (1905 and 1907).94 According to Tillich, Kierkegaard’s ‘importance for the German post-war theology and philosophy can hardly be overestimated’.95 Tillich welcomed Kierkegaard’s attempt to draw attention to the predicament of the concrete and finite individual as a necessary ‘corrective’ to Hegel’s essentialism, and in his licentiate dissertation of 1912 attempts to ‘connect Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic with the later Schelling’.96 Schelling 93

Emphasis added. Kierkegaard, FT, 55. Lee C. Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, in Jon Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology. Tome I: German Protestant Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 335–76, at 335. 95 Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, trans. N. A. Rasetzki and E. L. Talmey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 62. 96 Matthias Wilke, Die Kierkegaard-Rezeption Emanuel Hirschs. Eine Studie über die Voraussetzungen der Kommunikation christlicher Wahrheit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 36. See also Georg Neugebauer, who points out that, in an essay in honour of the translation of Kierkegaard into English, Tillich ‘explicitly mentions the proximity between Kierkegaard and Schelling’ (Georg Neugebauer, Tillichs frühe Christologie: Eine Untersuchung zu Offenbarung und Geschichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 263). 94

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is, to be sure, the more important influence on Tillich. Yet Kierkegaard’s association with Tillich’s great master explains the esteem in which Tillich held also Kierkegaard himself—an esteem evidenced, for instance, in the fact that, in one discussion of the ‘mystical presence of the divine’ and of the ‘depth of guilt consciousness’, of ‘concepts, that is, which Tillich otherwise discusses in his dissertation on Schelling’, Tillich refers to Kierkegaard and not to Schelling.97 According to Lee C. Barrett, Tillich at some point even ‘implied that Kierkegaard understood the psychological dynamics of humanity’s alienation from essential being even better than Schelling had, for even in his later period Schelling had a tendency to downplay the severity of estrangement in the light of its eschatological resolution’.98 It is Kierkegaard’s awareness of the depth of human estrangement and its relation to human consciousness, freedom, anxiety, choice, guilt, despair, and faith which is deeply reflected in Tillich’s own thinking, therefore. As we will see in Chapters 4 and 5, Tillich finds in these concepts key resources for his own description of the human being’s ‘transition from essence to existence’, and for conceptualizing a way out of the existential predicament.99 Tillich echoes particularly Kierkegaard’s observation that ‘the various forms of despair . . . grasp one of the poles in the dichotomy of finitude and infinity, necessity or possibility’, and that faith and love overcomes this by ‘determin[ing] and concretiz[ing] the synthesis between finitude and infinity’.100 We will find that Tillich agrees wholeheartedly with Kierkegaard’s combination of a strong emphasis on self-affirmation with a privileging of neighbour-love, as well as with Kierkegaard’s general conviction that the answers to humanity’s existential plight lie outside of existence. These important influences and overlaps notwithstanding, Tillich ultimately gives preference to ‘Schelling’s vision of the reconciliation of opposites’ (as opposed to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on paradox and dichotomy).101 As Tillich argues, Kierkegaard fails to fully recognize that his ‘existentialism is only possible as an element in a larger whole, as an element in a vision of the structure of being in its created goodness, and then as a description of man’s existence within that framework’.102 Kierkegaard is consequently found guilty 97 This is highlighted by Heiko Schulz, Studien zur Rezeption S
ren Kierkegaards (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 214 f. 98 Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, 368 f. 99 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Volume II. Combined Volume (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968), 40 (henceforth ST II). Although I will focus more on Tillich’s account of love’s role in overcoming existential estrangement, Tillich most likely also draws on Kierkegaard for his definition of faith as ‘ultimate concern’ and his understanding of religion as such (see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 86–9). 100 Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, 86 f. 101 Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, 370. 102 Tillich in Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, 368 (cf. Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology (London: SCM, 1967), 245). This

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of a one-sidedness similar to Hegel. Having exaggerated the discontinuity between essence and existence, Kierkegaard failed, in Tillich’s eyes, to recognize ‘the powers of being within the individual’ (essence).103 Kierkegaard’s pietistic dualism, his sense of the radicality of ‘the difference between God and sinful humanity’, indeed run counter to Tillich’s own emphasis on God’s immanence and for ‘the religious depths of secular culture’.104 Tillich thus ultimately distances himself from Kierkegaard’s (like Heidegger’s) existentialism as failing to show a viable way out of despair. This correlates also with their different understandings of the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Whereas Tillich proposed a fundamental ‘dismantling of any sharp sacred/secular distinction’ and had ‘a passion to identify contact points between Christianity and culture’, Kierkegaard sought to ‘differentiate Christianity from Christendom’, or to purify and narrow the definition of true Christianity.105 Tillich’s criticisms correspond with the above observation, therefore, that Kierkegaard fails to recognize the Christian potential of human desire, and that he is too dismissive of the individual’s flourishing in the world. Thus, while Tillich, who does not explicitly engage Kierkegaard’s understanding of love, might agree with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on self-affirmation in and through selfless love in principle, he would ultimately find his approach too otherworldly and anti-erotic. Despite their disparate religious beliefs (or the lack thereof), Murdoch finds in Kierkegaard a particularly formative and existentially relevant conversation partner. Murdoch first encountered existentialist philosophy, which was then quickly gaining in popularity on the European continent and, eventually, in the United States, during her time with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the mid-1940s (1944–6).106 Alongside Sartre, Kierkegaard sparked her particular enthusiasm and has been described as ‘a constant love of Murdoch’s’.107 Although this was, over the years, replaced by a sense of Kierkegaard as ‘tiresome and

explains why Tillich has also been found to have betrayed Kierkegaard’s project: his essentialist and systematic approach arguably runs counter to the very core of Kierkegaard’s own approach (see e.g. Kenneth Hamilton, The System and the Gospel (London: SCM, 1963)). 103 Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, 368. 104 Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, 369 f. 105 Barrett, ‘Paul Tillich: An Ambivalent Appropriation’, 338. 106 Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 13. 107 Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 17. Broackes notes that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) ‘was one of her favourite books: one of only three philosophical works that she mentions (along with Plato’s Symposium and Weil’s Attente de Dieu) when drawing up a list of influences on her (Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 17; cf. Iris Murdoch’s journal entry in Conradi, Iris Murdoch. A Life, 524 n.).

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queer’,108 he remained an inspirational and fruitful reference point precisely in his perceived ambiguity, ‘and an influence perhaps especially on her concerns with the particular and private and her suspicions of the systematic and universal’.109 Murdoch’s interest in Kierkegaard is doubtlessly founded in his antiHegelian deconstruction of the ‘deterministic machine obliterating the concept of the solitary responsible moral person’.110 She is, in principle at least, highly receptive to his attempt at developing a ‘phenomenology of individual moral struggle’ that takes due account of the individual’s thoughts and perception and entails a ‘conception of a private individual destiny’.111 His insistence that thought must serve life, and that we cannot speak of faith (or, in her case, goodness) in impersonal terms, is close to her own concerns. By his life and art, Murdoch finds, Kierkegaard is an example—outdone only, perhaps, by Simone Weil. Murdoch is especially intrigued by, and grapples with, Kierkegaard’s portrayal of the true Christian, the ‘knight of faith’, as a tax collector—that is, as an ordinary person whose relation with the infinite expresses itself in a perfect embrace as well as an interior relativization of finitude. Kierkegaard’s point is that holiness is, at bottom, inward and hence invisible. It defies our worldly notion of the heroic and is, instead, unobtrusive and easily overlooked. As will become apparent in our analyses of Murdoch’s own thought, Murdoch, to a large extent, shares such an anti-behaviourist emphasis on the inward nature of the moral-spiritual life in a way that suggests a Kierkegaardian influence. Nonetheless, Murdoch’s admiration for Kierkegaard’s tax collector is coloured by a certain ambivalence, insofar as she cannot but wonder whether ‘the man whom Kierkegaard rated highest’ is not in fact ‘related, perhaps even causally related, to the demonic or Luciferian individual of Nietzsche, or the authentic heroic man of Heidegger and Sartre’.112

108 See Paul Martens, ‘Iris Murdoch: Kierkegaard as Existentialist, Romantic, Hegelian, and Problematically Religious’, in Jon Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy. Tome III: Anglophone Philosophy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 135–56, at 137, 151. 109 Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 17n.; see also Antonaccio, who notes that, ‘in the face of such powerful cultural expressions of the idea that “only the whole is real” (e.g. Bradley, who seemed to diminish the reality of the individual person), Murdoch insisted, in language which resonates intentionally with Kierkegaard’s protest against Hegel, that the particular and individual were paradigmatic of the real’ (Maria Antonaccio, ‘The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings’, in Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 155–80, at 171). 110 Murdoch, MGM, 148. 111 Iris Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, in P. Conradi, ed., Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997) (henceforth EM), 798, at 87 (first published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Dreams and SelfKnowledge, 1956; henceforth VCM); Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’. In EM, 261–86, at 265 (first published in Yale Review, 1959; henceforth SBR). 112 Murdoch, MGM, 352.

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Murdoch’s worry here is that, ‘for all his apparent “ordinariness”’, Kierkegaard’s ideal man remains ‘self-assertive’.113 This indicates, on the one hand, Murdoch’s considerable distance from Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the will and the notion of ‘choosing’ oneself. Murdoch is suspicious that the tax collector is all-too individualistic—that his willing to be oneself is hard to distinguish from, or may lapse into, the sinful self-assertion that Kierkegaard argues results in the despair of strength, or the despair of self-assertion. Such an impression is, in Murdoch’s eyes, reinforced by Kierkegaard’s outright celebration of the collector of taxes, which seems to her to result in the Romantic projection of a new kind of self-centred hero. In light of human sinfulness, which Murdoch understands primarily in terms of an aggrandized ego, Murdoch favours the ideal of the ‘de-individualised individual of Buddhism or mystical Christianity’.114 In the same vein, Murdoch, unlike Kierkegaard, is unprepared to resort to the language of being called to ‘become oneself ’ (even though, as I seek to show, her moral philosophy can be read in this way). Although it remains to be seen whether she herself successfully avoids this pitfall, Murdoch also views Kierkegaard’s knight of faith as decidedly too solitary. With Adorno, she criticizes as ‘self-centred and “heroic”’ the ‘“authenticity” and “genuineness” of [Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s] existential subject who in seeking personal liberation loses the world of detail and other’.115 This is, as Murdoch sees it, connected with Kierkegaard’s residual (but considerable) Hegelianism. As she writes: ‘He retained and used with wonderful versatility the clear, dramatic, solipsistic picture of the self at war with itself and passing in this way through phases in the direction of selfknowledge.’116 Murdoch hints at a correspondence between the ‘aloneness’ of Kierkegaard’s man (‘the deity and the solitary self between them enclose the whole of reality’) and Kierkegaard’s separation of the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious into three consecutive stages, through which the individual passes.117 Kierkegaard, to be sure, views these stages as ‘subjective, reversible, and certainly not inevitable’.118 Yet their discontinuity means that Kierkegaard unduly ‘exhorts the anti-Hegelian individual to separate oneself from the social in the direction of religious’ and thereby ultimately turns goodness into a private matter.119 Murdoch, by contrast, regards these aspects as coincident: not only is the realm of the aesthetic on a direct continuum with the highest good but ‘the “ordinary” good man, aware of the magnetism of good as well as the role of duty, is . . . connected to a mystical ideal whether or not he is, in the traditional sense, religious’.120

113 115 118 119 120

114 Murdoch, MGM, 352. Murdoch, MGM, 352. 116 117 Murdoch, MGM, 377 f. Murdoch, SBR, 265. Murdoch, SBR, 265. Paul Martens, ‘Iris Murdoch: Kierkegaard as Existentialist’, 145. Paul Martens, ‘Iris Murdoch: Kierkegaard as Existentialist’, 150. Murdoch, MGM, 355.

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It is on account of this continuum, too, that Murdoch’s individual is in less of a ‘predicament’ than Kierkegaard’s or Sartre’s self.121 The human being is certainly in conflict with others and at a remove from Good. Yet for her this entails no self-alienation in the sense of a total self-separation which can only be overcome by a leap of faith (and by divine grace). Rather, the human being is, in some way or other, already in the relationship which constitutes the path to true and full selfhood—the relation with transcendent Good. Murdoch’s human being is not so much in despair, then, as he is selfish and deluded. This state can, in principle at least, be overcome. Murdoch does not engage with Kierkegaard’s account of love, and there is no evidence that she even read his Works of Love. However, her understanding of love, like Kierkegaard’s, is marked by a sense that freedom must be related to obedience to the transcendent—an idea that comes to the fore even more rigorously in Simone Weil, another key influence on Murdoch. At the same time, Murdoch does not of course share the theism which grounds Kierkegaard’s account of love. Notwithstanding her charge that Kierkegaard’s man is too self-assertive, Murdoch, like Tillich, would furthermore take issue with his failure to appreciate the potential of eros and, had she been familiar with the text, would have criticized his lack of a return to finitude in Works of Love. On the other hand, Murdoch, too, has little sympathy for self-love. We can conclude that, although Murdoch finds in Kierkegaard a stimulating thinker with many right intuitions, she ultimately considers his emphasis on the solitude of the good man, as well as his anti-erotic and anti-aesthetic stance to compromise the good and fulfilled life. His emphasis on will and choice, on the other hand, is found to be too self-assertive to be compatible with selfless love towards the other. Finally, Kierkegaard’s failure to address a person’s moment-to-moment changes in consciousness constitutes at least one important reason for Murdoch’s interest in Jean-Paul Sartre.

121 Iris Murdoch, ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’, in EM, 101–7, at 103 (Radio talk on BBC’s Third Programme, 1950; henceforth NM).

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3 From Tension to Dichotomy: Selfless Love after Kierkegaard In the previous chapter we saw that Kierkegaard seeks to affirm both the concrete existing individual and a selfless love of neighbour that qualifies the needs and desires of that very individual. In different ways, Kierkegaard’s personal renunciation of romantic love and his dissociation of Christian love and eros both suggest that his endorsement of a selfless kind of love ultimately gained the upper hand. Yet if Kierkegaard still attempts to relate such love to the capacities and needs of the existential self, Anders Nygren decidedly undoes such an integrative endeavour. In the following section I briefly suggest how Nygren’s account of love and the self epitomizes the Christian tendency to create a polar opposition between love’s selflessness and the modern concern for individual well-being.

ANDERS NYGREN As is well known, Nygren bluntly identifies Christian and Greek love as agape and eros respectively, and views the two as diametrically opposed.1 He considers the long-standing Christian attempt to integrate and unite these ‘two’ loves as having corrupted and distorted the very particularity of Christianity.2 According to Nygren, the integration of eros and agape, which has culminated in the medieval notion of caritas, is necessarily motivated by an egocentric and individualistic ethic of human happiness and fulfilment. This kind of Greek eudaimonism is precisely what Christianity came to transcend by means of its

1

Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros. Parts I and II, trans. Philip Watson (London: SPCK, 1982), 30. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 158. According to Nygren, such attempts begin as early as in John’s Gospel. 2

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theocentric—and selfless—interest in ‘the-Good-in-itself ’.3 In order to be restored, Christian agape-love must be purged of all traces of Greek eros. Platonic eros, of which Nygren treats only the so-called heavenly kind (dismissing vulgar or common eros entirely), promises purification of the natural passions through spiritualization. Nygren finds this to be indicative of an attempted flight from the world and its materiality—a flight that is entirely at odds with the Christian God’s affirmation of the ‘sense-world’ through his actions in Christ.4 Most importantly, eros’s promise of purification suggests that natural human love, which Nygren identifies with self-love,5 can be redeemed rather than having to be left behind. As Nygren sees it, this means that eros is tied to an un-Christian belief in the power of human self-direction and ascension towards God. Understanding love as eros implies the suggestion that the human person has ‘a life of his own apart from God’.6 It reduces God to an object to be acquired for the human being’s self-satisfaction and cannot accommodate the divine descent that is at the heart of Christianity. As such, it must be considered dependent on the value of its object and is unrelated, therefore, to the love of sinners made manifest by God in Jesus Christ. By contrast, agape, which Nygren considers to be most purely conveyed by Paul, is no human capacity or inclination but the love which God, in Jesus Christ, has demonstrated to be his, and only his, own. This love, which is wholly grounded in God, does not seek to achieve any particular end: God loves not for any distinct reason but simply because this accords with God’s nature. As God’s love both of the righteous and of the sinner indicates, agape is ‘spontaneous’, ‘unmotivated’, and ‘indifferent to value’.7 Instead of making distinctions with respect to its object, agape creates worth in its object, thus sharing in God’s general creativity. Finally, agape initiates that ‘fellowship with God’ which is otherwise impossible.8 All the above features describe, according to Nygren, God’s love for the human being. Christians are, to be sure, called to ‘pass on’ this divine love, yet there is no straightforward way for them to do so.9 For the divine agape lies 3 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 44 f. As O’Donovan rightly points out, Agape and Eros is, first and foremost, a critique of eudaimonistic approaches to morality (Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 1980), 152 ff). As such, Nygren’s book arguably jars with a key assumption underlying the present study—namely, that selfless love can—and, in principle at least, should—build up the self. Nygren’s thought nonetheless deserves some discussion, not least because his rigorous account of Christian love has contributed to the perception of a dichotomy between selfless love and human flourishing. 4 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 179. 5 Love of self is dismissed as entirely ‘alien to the New Testament commandments of love’, and must therefore not merely be ‘refined but totally annihilated’, Nygren argues (Agape and Eros, 100, 709). Whereas Kierkegaard was still aware that Christian love, as he understood it, runs the risk of being abused in exploitative ways (and sought to counter this subjecting Christian love to distinct criteria), Nygren shows no such awareness. 6 7 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 92. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 74, 75, 77. 8 9 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 91. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 80, 75.

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outside of the capacities of the human being, who is unable to create out of nothing and who cannot spontaneously initiate love.10 The human person herself is, indeed, capable merely of eros-love, which is so unlike true love that it cannot even be integrated with or sublimated into Christian agape. Instead of loving, the human being must thus respond to God’s love with an act of faith (faith, unlike love, being a responsive act). This consists in his allowing himself to be ‘possessed by God . . . belong[ing] absolutely to Him’, to the point that he is pervaded by God’s agape.11 Thus, even in the context of neighbour-love, agape remains solely God’s own love, which flows through the faithful human subject as through a ‘tube’.12 The human being cannot, on this account, be an agent of love in the proper sense since he or she has ‘nothing of his own to give’.13 Nygren here radicalizes the notion of selfless love and, in doing so, divorces it not only from any concern with the human subject’s well-being but also from the human subject herself. Uninterested in the self and its desires, love has become both utterly selfless and impossible for the human being qua agent. It is in this way that Nygren, unwittingly perhaps, instantiates the modern tendency of pitting selflessness and self-affirmation against one another as mutually exclusive opposites. This becomes apparent also in his rejection of the notion of self-sacrifice (which Kierkegaard still defended). Though to different effect, Nygren, much like Adorno and Barth, sees in this concept an element of wilfulness or self-assertiveness that undermines the very command to selflessness that it is meant to promote. If the perceived dichotomy between selfless love and human flourishing has caused much of Western thought to give an increasingly free rein to human self-affirmation and self-assertion, then it leads Nygren to fall victim to the opposite temptation. As evidenced in his suggestion that a person holding the higher ideal of celibacy might nonetheless engage in sexual acts for the sake of his or her partner, Nygren promotes a total self-surrender, even against one’s core beliefs.14 As in Sartre (discussed later in this chapter), whose thought Nygren would doubtlessly reject, self and other are here pushed into the roles of slave and master in a manner which puts at risk not only their respective flourishing but goodness itself. Both sides of this modern trend understand love in terms of a disintegration of the self, which Sartre dreads and which Nygren commends. Notwithstanding these inadequacies, Nygren’s thought helps to reveal the complexity of the problem by underlining both the ambiguity of human desire and the limitations and dependency of the human agent.

10 12 14

Nygren, Agape and Eros, 125. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 735, 129. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 735, 131.

11

Nygren, Agape and Eros, 94. 13 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 129.

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Tillich’s Reception of Nygren In regard to theological understandings of Christian love, Nygren can legitimately be considered Tillich’s main opponent (whereas Iris Murdoch makes no reference to Nygren).15 As Alexander Irwin writes, ‘Tillich does not mention Nygren by name in his more important discussions of the qualities of love, but his language makes perfectly clear to whom his criticisms are addressed’.16 This is not to say that Nygren and Tillich have nothing in common. Tillich, for instance, shares the view that divine love can be identified (at least, primarily) with agape and, like Nygren, attributes to this a certain priority and distinctiveness. Tillich, too, thus makes a basic distinction between eros and agape. However, he considers it a grave error that Nygren regarded ‘the different qualities of love as . . . differences of genre’, and traces this error back to Nygren’s failure to embrace ‘the single and ontological nature of [love]’.17 Only by recognizing that love is one and rooted in being itself does one see that Christian and Greek love cannot contradict each other. As my discussion of Tillich’s own thought in Chapters 4 and 5 will make clear, Tillich’s criticism here is reflective also of a genuine concern, on his part, for the well-being of the human individual in the world. This concern goes hand in hand with Tillich’s more general disagreement with a Calvinistic pessimism about nature—a disagreement he addresses in particular in relation to Karl Barth. According to Tillich, such pessimism, of which Nygren is an extreme example, is inadequate because the work of the theologian hinges not only on the relative intactness of nature (and thus, reason) but also on the effectiveness of God’s grace: without a natural attraction to, and knowledge of, God, human persons lack the foundation for receiving and responding to divine grace.18 Nygren’s attempt to solve this problem by doing away with human action altogether fails to convince, since it turns grace into an imposition that undermines human freedom and, indeed, love itself. We will, moreover, find Tillich to be aware also of the pastoral and psychological inadequacy of Nygren’s dismissal of the human individual’s

15

Nygren, who has little or no sympathy with existentialism, likewise takes an implicit stand against Tillich when he mentions him in one breath with the ‘existentialist’ Kierkegaard (see Carl S. Hughes, ‘Anders Nygren: Influence in Reverse?’, in Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology. Tome II: Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 205–18, at 211). 16 Irwin, Eros toward the World, 23. Acapovi points out that, in his ‘Essay on the History of Christian Thought’, Tillich not only mentions Nygren by name but explicitly criticizes Nygren’s theory of love (C. M. C. Acapovi, L’Être et l’amour. Une étude de l’ontologie de l’amour chez Paul Tillich (Berlin: LIT, 2010), 284). 17 18 Emphasis added. Acapovi, L’Être et l’amour, 287. See Tillich, ST I, 68.

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worldly needs, desires, and potential for self-affirmation. From the 1930s on,19 he thus works towards firmly establishing the dimension of eros in Christian love.

SIMONE WEIL In the twentieth century, the theme of ‘becoming nothing’ before God is given yet another twist by the French writer and activist Simone Weil. Weil, whose sources of inspiration included not only Plato, Judaism, Catholic Christianity, and Eastern religious philosophy but also Kierkegaard, makes what she calls the ‘decreation’ of the ego one of her central themes.20 Strangely similar to and dissimilar from Nygren, Weil writes that human love must be understood precisely not as selfish but as instinctually selfless: in her eyes, we are capable of truly loving only what is other than self. Our problem, from Weil’s perspective, is not an inherent self-love but the illusion that self-love is possible.21 This misconception causes human beings to direct their intrinsically selfless love— indeed, their humility—to the wrong, seemingly self-enhancing objects, thus idolatrously humiliating themselves before false gods.22 The root cause of this misapplication lies, as Weil suggests, in the fact that the ego—our common but misguided sense of self—obstructs the ‘power of supernatural attention’ that is required for recognizing the good.23 Like the force of gravity, the ego continually drags us down, and closes us in on ourselves. It undermines our reaching out to the other, whom we instinctively wish to love, and closes us off from grace. It is for this reason that the ego must be ‘decreated’, in the sense not of being destroyed but of passing into the divine realm of the ‘uncreated’.24 Weil’s affirmation of an intrinsic human capacity for selflessness would seem to point to an understanding of the human being more positive than that 19 Cf. Acapovi, who points out that Tillich’s emphasis on eros first becomes evident in the 1930s, with ‘The Socialist Decision’ (Paul Tillich, ‘Die sozialistische Entscheidung’, in Main Works. Writings in Social Philosophy and Ethics, ed. Erdmann Sturm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 273–420, at 306 f.). Nygren’s Eros and Agape appeared at once in Swedish and in German in 1930 (Part I) and 1937 (Part II). 20 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987), 28 f. Martin Andic has shown that, although she tends to mistake Kierkegaard’s pseudonym for the man himself, Weil was familiar with both Kierkegaard’s direct and his indirect writings and refers to him twice in her notebooks. Andic argues that, notwithstanding Weil’s intention of criticizing Kierkegaard, there is in fact ‘substantial agreement between [her and Kierkegaard]’ (Martin Andic, ‘Simone Weil and Kierkegaard’, Modern Theology, 2: 1 (1985), 20–41, at 20, 23, 26; see Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 1956), 201, 203 f.). 21 The human being, she says, would ‘like to be an egoist and cannot’ (Weil, Gravity and Grace, 53). 22 23 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 53. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 53. 24 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 53.

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of Nygren. The same impression emerges from her suggestion that we must love God via his creation, which she argues we must value in its particularity. True love, Weil suggests, consists in loving one another not ‘for the love of God’ but ‘for the love of the one for the other’ while nonetheless hoping to re-create that other—an ‘impossibility’ which she admits only ‘comes about through the agency of God’.25 When suggesting that the call to neighbourlove, or ‘to love a stranger as oneself ’, also ‘implies the reverse’—that is, to love oneself as a stranger—Weil moreover endorses (a form of) love of self.26 We can and must love ourselves—insofar as we love ourselves as strangers. Despite this, Weil’s thought in many ways shares Nygren’s stark austerity. Weil has little more than disdain for the ‘particular individual’ that we are in this world—a view often seen as tied up with the circumstances of Weil’s premature death.27 ‘It is tactless’, she writes, ‘for me to be there . . . If only I knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear . . .’28 The worldly individual is primarily an obstacle and an inappropriate imposition. This expresses itself in Weil’s call to make oneself nothing by taking ‘the form of a slave’.29 Given that, with his sacrifice, God has ‘renounce[d] being everything’, human beings ‘should renounce being something’.30 This posture of ‘renunciation and sacrifice’ concerns also our desires.31 Associated with a false attachment to the world, human desire must be sacrificed even where its object is something good— until it exists merely in a void, lacking any actual object. Weil’s love demands the human being’s detachment from all value and preference: ‘love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude’; and, similarly, ‘[m]an should not desire to receive’.32 Only then, Weil implies, can we encounter grace. Similarly to the French spiritual movement of the pur amour 300 years earlier, Weil thus defines true love not according to its object but according to its quality (or its objectlessness). Its radical and genuine selflessness consists in its sheer equanimity. With this, Weil’s call for the ‘decreation of the ego’

25

Simone Weil, Waiting on God: Letters and Essays (London: HarperCollins, 1977), 107. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 55. 27 During the Second World War, Weil’s understanding of solidarity with the working classes famously led her to undertake a heavy work regime and then to limit her food rations to what (she thought) was granted to workers in occupied France. In combination with the tuberculosis she had contracted, this eventually weakened her such that she died at age 34. The idea that Weil was in fact anorexic has also been raised: Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Redding: Addison-Wesley, 1987); David McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (London: Macmillan, 1989). 28 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 36 f. 29 Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (London: OUP, 1968), 157. 30 31 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 29, 35. Weil, On Science, 153. 32 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 55; Weil cited by Andic, ‘Simone Weil and Kierkegaard’, 36. 26

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undercuts the notion that the worldly self, with its particular needs, predilections, and desires, is of any lasting significance. This is underlined also by her insistence that the posture of attention and of patient waiting, which facilitates the decreation of the ego, is one that lays bare not only our own ‘impersonality’ but also that of the other, to whom we attend.33 Weil’s interpretation of St Paul’s ‘not I but Christ in me’ (Gal 2:20) thus implies that in ‘true love it is not we who love the afflicted in God, it is God in us who loves them’.34 Weil thereby approximates Nygren’s understanding of the human being as a ‘tube’ through which God’s love can pass. And indeed, like Nygren, she cannot imagine true love in terms of a perfect union of human and divine love but only in terms of God’s own, ‘divine, uncreated’ love for himself, which is ‘passing through . . . [the soul]’.35 Weil’s thought, then, echoes the more austere elements of Kierkegaard’s thinking, while lacking the latter’s encouragement to actively will to be oneself. Given this one-sidedness, Weil’s claims, equally reminiscent of Kierkegaard, ‘that truth is learned by obedience’ and that it is genuine only where it is ‘reflected in one’s life’, or her insistence that suffering is a sign of God’s loving grace and that through renouncing everything but God one has already gained God, drive selfless love and a regard for the individual’s needs in this world further apart.36 This is further underlined by the fact that Weil considers the decreation of the ego through attention to be possible only ‘in solitude; and not only physical and mental solitude’; there is no place, in her account, for any kind of ‘We’ and, thus, for the human need and desire to be part of a community.37

Murdoch’s Reception of Weil Whereas Paul Tillich does not appear to have been familiar with Weil’s thought,38 Murdoch was deeply influenced by it, claiming that it had evoked in her ‘total love at first sight’.39 Murdoch, interestingly, places Weil in Cf. Weil’s Essay ‘On Human Personality’, in David McLellan, Simone Weil, 273–88. 35 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 41. Weil, Waiting on God, 92, also 107. 36 Andic, ‘Simone Weil and Kierkegaard’, 30. 37 See Siân Miles, Simone Weil: An Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 56. 38 As Nina Heinsohn has recently argued, there nonetheless exist certain similarities between Tillich and Weil, for instance with regard to Tillich’s emphasis on expectation and waiting for the ‘New Being’ and Weil’s key concept of attention, as well as their shared interest in desire, mysticism, and prayer. However, as my argument throughout this book will make clear, the differences in their approaches far outweigh these similarities (Nina Heinsohn, ‘Vom Warten auf das Unverfügbare–Bemerkungen zu Korrespondenzen im Denken Simone Weils und Paul Tillichs’, in Peter Haigis and Ilona Nord, eds., Tillich Preview 2013 ‘Theologie der Liebe’ im Anschluss an Paul Tillich (Berlin: LIT, 2013), 75–92, at 82–4, 92). 39 In letter to Gabriele Griffin (see Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 28). 33 34

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‘the existentialist line’ of thought, alongside Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Sartre.40 Yet she is also aware of the eclectic variety of influences underlying Weil’s thought, which her own thinking will in many ways come to mirror. Murdoch credits Weil in particular with providing her with a completely new perspective on Plato as highly relevant to the present age. As Murdoch writes, Weil conveys Plato as a philosopher ‘who involves the whole man’ and whose moral philosophy ‘concerns the continuous detail of human activity, wherein we discriminate between appearance and reality, good and bad, true and false, and check or strengthen our desires’.41 It is through Weil’s reading of Plato, then, that Murdoch comes to find in him answers to the problems she detects in the moral philosophy of her own British contemporaries. Although Murdoch acknowledges that ‘the personality which emerges from . . . [Weil’s] writings is not always attractive’, she insists that Weil ‘compels respect’—for instance, for her discipline in life and thought (an exemplary quality Murdoch likens to that of Kierkegaard’s ‘subjective thinker’), and for her courage in confronting the reality of human selfishness or sin and the consequent difficulty and slowness of moral progress.42 Murdoch welcomes in particular Weil’s viewing the moral life not in terms of choice and action but of waiting and contemplation, as summarized in Weil’s claim that ‘we should pay attention to such a point that we no longer have the choice’.43 Murdoch is highly sympathetic to Weil’s sense that, as Murdoch puts it, ‘until we become good we are at the mercy of mechanical forces’ and that ‘we make advances by resisting the mechanism’, for which ‘there is no reward’.44 As we will see, she follows Weil in her call to ‘decreate’ the ego, and directly adopts Weil’s notion of ‘attention’ and, hence, of love as ‘an orientation, a direction of energy, not just a state of mind’.45 Justin Broackes is therefore right to point out that Murdoch’s definition of love as ‘the perception of individuals’, and as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’, is indeed ‘almost exactly that of Simone Weil’.46 Murdoch clearly sees in Weil a valuable resource towards overcoming a moral philosophical outlook that is impervious to sin, ‘unambitious’, and unreasonably ‘optimistic’.47

40 Murdoch, MGM, 133; ‘Knowing the Void’, in EM, 157–60, at 158 (first published in The Spectator, 1956; henceforth ‘KV’). 41 Murdoch, MGM, 14. For Murdoch’s criticisms of British philosophy, see Chapter 6. 42 43 44 Iris Murdoch, ‘KV’, 159 f. Murdoch, ‘KV’, 159. Murdoch, ‘KV’, 158. 45 See e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 212, 218, 245, 247, 503. See also Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’, in EM, 287–95, at 293 (first published in Encounter, 1961; henceforth ‘AD’) and The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), (henceforth SoG), 33 f. 46 47 Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 33. Murdoch, SoG, 49.

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Murdoch thus inherited from Weil an enthusiasm for ideas difficult to ‘domesticat[e] within the existing philosophical world’—in Broackes’s eyes, an important factor in Murdoch’s eventual departure from the Oxford academic philosophical scene.48 The link between Murdoch and Weil also explains some of the flaws of Murdoch’s own thinking. As we will see towards the end of Chapter 7, Murdoch seems to have adopted from Weil a failure to adequately value the dimension of human personhood and, related to this, a certain individualism (and lack of mutuality in love).49 Nonetheless, Murdoch, in important respects, also distances herself from what she recognizes to be Weil’s ‘extremism’.50 Murdoch recognizes a potentially ‘repellent and self-destructive quality in her austerity’, and finds Weil ‘almost too ready to embrace evil and to love God as its author’.51 She finds it ‘hard not to believe that she in some way willed her own death’, and is, as Broackes writes, ‘in a way, more suspicious of suffering and of other-worldliness than Weil is, and slightly more optimistic about the possibility and actual existence of everyday modest virtue’.52 Although Murdoch does not shy away from affirming the need to confront the Void, her own perspective, both in her philosophy and her novels, is considerably more jovial and life-affirming than Weil’s, therefore. Lovibond can thus contrast ‘the general tendency of Weil’s essay on “Human Personality”’ with ‘the affectionate celebration of human peculiarity that animates . . . [Murdoch’s] novels’ and with ‘the atmosphere of Murdoch’s discussion of “Morals and Politics”’.53 Murdoch is much more positively disposed towards the notion that the individual has rights.54 And in contrast to Weil’s selfdestructive form of solidarity with the poor, Murdoch, though affirming that ‘an uncriticised idea of happiness cannot be the sole basis of an ethical theory’, also acknowledges, in a more practical manner, the relevance of ‘a Benthamite utilitarian conception of happiness . . . as a frequently relevant feature’—not least, perhaps, for the sake of ‘continuing to be capable of helping others’.55 Despite her great respect for Weil, Murdoch thus ultimately senses the need to balance Weil’s understanding of love as selfless attention with a greater and more worldly concern for the individual, and his needs, desires, and happiness.

48

Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 20. See e.g. Peta Bowden’s discussion of Weil’s emphasis on the impersonal and of her individualistic streak (Peta Bowden, ‘Ethical Attention: Accumulating Understandings’, European Journal of Philosophy, 6: 1 (1998), 59–77, at 62 f.). 50 51 Murdoch, MGM, 247. Murdoch, ‘KV’, 160. 52 Murdoch, ‘KV’, 160; Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 21. 53 Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 34. 54 Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 34. 55 Murdoch, MGM, 47, 483; Sissela Bok, ‘Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch: The Possibility of Dialogue’, Gender Issues, 22: 4 (2005), 71–8, at 74. 49

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THE S ELF I N J EAN-PAUL SARTRE I have sought to show that—without engaging Kierkegaard’s ideas directly— Nygren and Weil effectively undo the tension Kierkegaard seeks to maintain in favour of the latter’s call for selfless love. Sartre, I now argue, opts for the other extreme.56 Transposing Kierkegaard’s existentialist perspective into a modern atheistic framework, he offers us a radicalized version of Kierkegaard’s turn to the concrete individual human self understood as a dynamic, self-choosing, and self-making reality. We will see that, in doing so, he cannot conceive of love in any common sense of the word. Yet Sartre’s thought confronts us not only with the breakdown of the synthesis Kierkegaard struggled to maintain but, as I wish to argue, provides also a unique resource for giving new meaning to the notion of selfless love. It is for this reason—and because Sartre’s is perhaps the most influential modern appropriation and development of Kierkegaard’s existentialist perspective, and a significant influence on both Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch—that I now consider Sartre’s thought on the self in some detail.

Being and Selfhood Sartre proposes a distinct fusion of an ontological and an experiential perspective, a version of which both Tillich and Murdoch adopt. Although drawing significantly on Hegel, Sartre follows Heidegger in approaching the problem of the relation between self and other posed by Cartesian dualism ontologically rather than epistemologically or cognitively. At the same time, his primary starting point is the experienced reality of the human subject.57 This leads him to posit not merely the human being’s detachment from a transcendent world of essence but the non-existence of any such world, and thus the inadequacy of ascribing universal validity to any given proposition or value. In doing so, Sartre integrates and radicalizes the thought of his various predecessors. Sartre’s ontological perspective means that he thinks the ‘self ’ in relation to being as a whole, which, in line with his experiential starting point, he identifies not as a concept or a transcendent essence but as the ‘objective’,

56 It is interesting to note Sartre’s and Weil’s shared French background. One might argue that, reaching back as far as Peter Abelard (1079–1142) on the one hand and the tradition of ‘pur amour’ in Jeanne Guyon (1648–1717) and François Fénelon (1651–1715) on the other, French thought has often construed matters of love and human selfhood in terms of extremes, a tendency Sartre and Weil can be seen to continue. 57 As we will see further on in this book, Sartre has been charged with falling short of his selfset goal of basing his analyses on the experience of the concrete human individual.

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existential dimension of all phenomena, including the human individual.58 His analysis of experienced reality leads him to split ‘being’ into three different modes. The solid, stable, and non-conscious being of non-human realities is referred to as ‘being-in-itself ’ (être-en-soi).59 This contrasts with the transparent, free, and absolute consciousness that distinguishes the human being, which Sartre identifies as ‘being-for-itself ’ (être-pour-soi). As we will see, these two forms of being exist in tension: ‘being-for-itself ’ experiences ‘being-initself ’ as alien, even threatening, insofar as the latter is that part of the ‘phenomenon’, which always ‘overflows the knowledge which we have of it’ and which can never be fully grasped.60 Finally, ‘being-for-others’ (être-pourautrui) refers to the ‘dimension of being in which my Self exists outside as an object [and thus as a being-in-itself] for others’.61 In analogy to Heidegger, these three modes of Being correlate with three ‘ekstases’, or ways in which consciousness is successively separated from, and thus ‘stands out’ from, its self (although for Heidegger, the self stands out towards Being as such, to which Sartre does not attribute the same ontological weight).62 Sartre defines these as: (1) ‘temporality’, which demands that consciousness continually ‘nihilates the in-itself ’ in its existence in past, present, and future; (2) ‘reflection’, whereby the ‘for-itself tries to adopt an external point of view on itself ’; and (3) ‘being-for-others’, wherein the self discovers its lack of knowledge of, and control over, its own self in the world.63 We can already take note of the fact that all three of these categories entail an element of self-distancing or self-othering: the human being is not selfidentical. In order to unpack this scheme and its relevance to the thought of Tillich and Murdoch, let us delve into the relation between the different modes of being more deeply. Sartre’s sharp distinction between ‘being-in-itself ’ and ‘being-for-itself ’ implies ‘the radical separation of consciousness from the world’ and the identification of consciousness with what Sartre considers to be absolute freedom over against the world.64 As such, this Sartrean version of Descartes’s cogito raises the question of how it is that human consciousness can perceive the world from a unified point of view—in short, how we can obtain an ‘ego’. Reflecting on ‘consciousness-in-the-world’, Sartre comes to reject both Descartes’s adherence to God as the guarantor of the cogito and the Kantian claim that the unity of consciousness necessarily involves the possession of a transcendental ego.65 Such a concept, so Sartre argues, undermines precisely 58 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 1969), 630 (henceforth BN). 59 60 61 Sartre, BN, 631. Sartre, BN, 630. Sartre, BN, 630. 62 63 Sartre, BN, 631. Sartre, BN, 631. 64 John F. Whitmire, ‘The Double Writing of Les Mots: Sartre’s Words as Performative Philosophy’, Sartre Studies International, 12: 2 (2006), 61–82, at 71. 65 Sartre, BN, 631.

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the utterly undetermined nature of consciousness that emerges from the perceived (or posited) separation of consciousness and the world. Like Fichte’s ‘absolute ego’ or Kierkegaard’s God, these concepts still imply the idea of a substance inhabiting and governing consciousness, and thereby ‘violently separat[ing] consciousness from itself ’ and robbing it of its freedom.66 ‘The transcendental I’, Sartre argues, ‘is the death of consciousness.’67 Leaning on Heidegger, Sartre instead pictures the ego as an object of consciousness, a being-in-itself, which is ‘in the world’ and which arises to consciousness with the world’s other objects.68 With this, he renders the human individual’s sense of self a purely empirical matter, and denies the existence of an ‘inner life,’ such as is implied in Freud’s notion of the unconscious.69 In the same vein, Sartre rejects also inward reflection (that is, the idea of contemplating oneself or one’s inner life) as being based on the misunderstanding that the unity and the personality referred to as ‘self ’ exist before the act of reflection, when in fact the ‘self ’ is its product. ‘Being-for-itself ’, then, lacks any prereflective unity, and is absolute, transparent, spontaneous, and free.70 Contrary to being-in-itself, it ‘determines itself to exist at every instant’ and is ‘always a creation ex nihilo’.71 It is a dynamic being in time, not a static entity.72

The Fragility and Relationality of the Self In direct analogy to Kierkegaard, who we saw envisaged the subject as emerging in and through an ‘act of self-reference’, Sartre has been found to frame human subjectivity as the ‘spontaneous’, ‘immediate, untheorized’ ‘reflexivity of consciousness’, or, as Sartre himself puts it, as the ‘consciousness (of) consciousness’.73 It is in this sense that the human being is, in both 66

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, 2004), 7. 67 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 7. 68 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 1. The only ground Sartre does allow is, one might add, an impersonal, universal indeterminate consciousness. 69 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 43. 70 In positing this, Sartre has been perceived to belie the phenomenological principle that phenomenology must guide metaphysics (rather than vice versa). Sarah Richmond, ‘Introduction’ to Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, xvi. 71 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 46. 72 Consciousness itself is not a subject which has the world as its object, but an object of an ‘absolute, impersonal consciousness’, which links consciousness and world together (Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 51). Once ‘purified of the I’, it understands that, far from creating its world, it merely—and anxiously—witnesses the ‘tireless creation of existence’ on which it is itself dependent (Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 51, 46). 73 Christina Howells, ‘Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 318–52, at 331. For Sartre’s expression, ‘consciousness (of) consciousness’, see Sartre, BN, xxxvii.

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Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s eyes, properly speaking ‘for itself ’. Sartre’s decision, however, to identify this ‘for itself ’ with pure and empty consciousness means that the human being can become aware of itself (such that it can exist ‘for itself ’) only in and through its relationship to the world. Being empty, an isolated consciousness has no being in the real sense: one can meaningfully speak of consciousness (and thus of becoming conscious of consciousness and hence a subject) only in the sense of consciousness of something. The being of consciousness is dependent on an object. Our subjectivity is tied to perceiving the world as object—and thus, to objectifying possible subjects in the world. Indeed, ‘being-for-itself ’ can only ‘recover its own Being by directly or indirectly making an object out of the other’, that is, by ‘enslav[ing] the Other’ who possesses me by making me be.74 As such, human subjectivity is both dissatisfactory and difficult to maintain. Although the self-reflexivity of consciousness ‘personalizes it’ by providing it with a unified viewpoint from which to perceive the world, it also means that consciousness is at a remove from itself; ‘present to itself ’, it is not selfidentical and—not unlike Kierkegaard’s self—can be described as a ‘relationship’.75 Instead of possessing stable and self-identical being, it is a momentary manifestation tied to the successful objectification of the other. Just as the human subject cannot hold on to herself, she is also unable to know herself: as soon as the subject sets out to grasp its ‘self ’ by turning towards itself, it interrupts the objectifying gaze at the other on which its ‘being’ depends. The ‘for-itself ’ is, moreover, constantly at risk of losing its subjectivity insofar as ‘the Other’ himself inevitably strives to realise his subjectivity, such that it is difficult for the ‘for-itself ’ to maintain its objectifying hold on ‘the Other’. Thus, although it is only as a subject that the ‘for-itself ’ retains the freedom that constitutes it, ‘being-for-itself ’ nonetheless lusts after the stable, permanent being of the ‘in-itself ’.76 It is not a surprise, then, that it is to the object-like mode of ‘being-in-itself ’ that the ‘for-itself ’ constantly succumbs. Instead of accepting its lack of a fixed identity, the ‘for-itself ’ will falsely identify itself with one of the roles that arise from its relation with the world. That is, it will think of itself as having—or, being—a self, in the sense of a permanent stable reality identical with who we are. In doing so, it betrays its true status as ‘being-for-itself ’ and becomes Hazel Barnes, ‘Key to Special Terminology’, in Sartre, BN, 629–35, at 630; Sartre, BN, 364. Howells, ‘Conclusion’, 332. The term ‘relationship’ is Howells’s own; for the others see Sartre, BN, 103. 76 Sartre arguably rescinds on his identification of ‘Being-for-itself ’ with absolute freedom later in his life. As John Whitmire points out, some even see in Sartre’s later works, such as Les Mots, ‘a wholesale renunciation of his position in Being and Nothingness’, insofar as he is here perceived to give so much weight to our social conditioning that our freedom as such is called into question (Whitmire, ‘The Double Writing of Les Mots’, 71). In the same article Whitmire goes on to challenge the radicality of this view. 74 75

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inauthentic. That is, it falls into ‘bad faith’: for, the act of self-identification, which for Sartre entails a turn away from the other, allows the other to take on the role of the subject, whose perceptions of one’s self determine the objective being one assumes.77 Here, the proper order of things, in which consciousness constitutes the ego, is ‘reversed by a consciousness which imprisons itself in the world in order to flee from itself, [such that] consciousnesses are given as emanating from states, and states as produced by the ego’.78 The ego has then obtained a bastard version of the ‘creative power which is absolutely necessary to . . . [consciousness]’.79 Our sense of a stable self is thus the product or function of existing as an object for the subjective Other, of ‘being-for-others’—a state of conflict with others, in which case we are no longer free and, hence, ourselves.80 We find Sartre taking a Hegelian turn, here, both in adopting what he calls Hegel’s ‘brilliant intuition’ that I ‘depend on the Other in my being’, and in his negative understanding of this dependency.81 It leads Sartre to view the relation between self and other in terms analogous to, and yet more pessimistic than, Hegel’s master–slave dichotomy. There is ‘No Exit’ from the dilemma that I can only obtain stable being where the other affirms me in my being (in which case I need the other qua subject), but that I can only exist as a free subject where the other affirms me as I want him to (in which I need the other qua object). The result is a conflict of consciousnesses wanting to control and possess each other as free objects.82 Gaining control over the other’s perceptions appears as the only means towards securing the other’s recognition that is critical for one’s own being, while maintaining the selfdetermination that corresponds with realizing one’s absolute freedom and concomitant subjectivity. For, since it is the Other’s free recognition which founds and shapes the existence of ‘being-for-itself ’, it does not benefit ‘beingfor-itself ’ to possess another as an inert object (as the master possesses the slave). Instead, ‘being-for-itself ’ must strive to control the Other’s free perception of myself—that is, to control their freedom as freedom, an endeavour Sartre identifies with the dynamics of love.83 This, of course, is a contradiction in terms and, hence, an impossibility.

77 For, ‘the Other’s subjectivity is experienced only across one’s own objectivity . . . [and vice versa]’ (William Ralph Schroeder, Sartre and his Predecessors (London: Routledge, 1984), 9). 78 Sartre in Sebastian Gardner, ‘Sartre, Intersubjectivity, and German Idealism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 43: 3 (2005), 325–51, at 328. Cf. Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 34 f. 79 Sartre, in Gardner, ‘Sartre, Intersubjectivity, and German Idealism’, 328. Cf. Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 35. 80 81 Sartre, BN, 364. Sartre, BN, 237. 82 Sartre, BN, 237; Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Huis Clos’, in Théâtre I. Les Mouches, Huis Clos, Morts sans Sépulture, La Putain Respectueuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) (‘huis clos’ meaning ‘closed door’). 83 Sartre, BN, 367.

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Authentic Selfhood: The Self as Project The ‘for-itself ’s’ awareness that, despite its freedom, it cannot be what it wants to be—that is, free and stable—leaves it in anguish. Sartre agrees with Kierkegaard that ‘anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself ’.84 As Sartre goes on to define it, anguish emerges from ‘a certain mode of standing opposite [one’s] . . . past and . . . future, as being both this past and this future and as not being them’.85 Anguish, that is, corresponds with the human being’s becoming conscious of his being as freedom and realizing that, precisely because his being is freedom, there is nothing in him to determine his particular exercise of that freedom. There is, then, a disjuncture between who I am now and who I determine myself to be: ‘I am not the self which I will be.’86 Indeed, I am not what ‘I am’ but what ‘I will’, and am thus faced with the almost paradoxical, and hence impossible, task of willing to be ‘me’. Like Kierkegaard, Sartre proposes to view the anguish that results from this as an opportunity. That is, he admits that this anguish can lead the human being further into bad faith (insofar as it, say, causes him to hold on to inauthentic illusions of stable being).87 But he also finds that it urges upon us, and in that sense facilitates, an embrace of the fact that we are beings who are both free and situated, or who strive for, but fail to obtain, both free and stable (that is, godlike) being.88 Where anguish leads the human being to accept this, she is freed from the need to withdraw into inauthentic being and can embark on the attempt to actualize her freedom—a freedom that can be defined as the ‘undetermined self-realisation of the existential subject’—in full awareness of, and despite, the ultimate impossibility of such an endeavour.89 The key to this actualization of human freedom is the pursuit of an ‘individual project’, or the free adoption and attempted realization of so-called ‘values’.90 In choosing a set of values, the ‘for-itself ’ chooses a ‘way of being’ through ‘positing [its] ultimate ends’, and through wilfully projecting itself onto these.91 As has been critically noted, such a project is ‘criterionless and hence arbitrary’, yet it is also ‘criterion-constituting in the sense that it grounds the set of criteria on the basis of which our subsequent choices are made’.92 Their legitimacy rests on the sincerity with which they are held—that 84

85 86 Sartre, BN, 29. Sartre, BN, 29. Sartre, BN, 39. See Jonathan Webber, ‘Bad Faith and the Other’, in Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism (London: Routledge, 2011), 180–94, at 186. 88 See Christine Daigle, ‘The Ethics of Authenticity’, in Jonathan Webber, ed., Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism (London: Routledge, 2011), 1–14, at 5. 89 Paul Tillich, ‘The Nature and Significance of Existentialist Thought’, Journal of Philosophy, 53: 23 (1956), 739–48, at 746. 90 91 Sartre, BN, 407, 464. Sartre, BN, 630, 443. 92 ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011) (publ. online). 87

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is, on whether they are recognized to be individual and freely projected ways of being in the world that lack any prior, objective existence. This Sartrean call for a project, in which the individual freely wills what he or she is, amounts to the call to become a self. Although rejecting their foundations for the self (the absolute ego and God respectively), Sartre’s project manifests a Fichtean and Kierkegaardian spirit (more than that of Heidegger, for whom ‘Dasein’ is thrown into and constituted by the world). In particular Sartre’s understanding of the self as a dynamic ‘project’ mirrors Kierkegaard’s view that the self is always ‘in the process of becoming’.93 Underlying these definitions is a shared awareness of the corrupting effect of being enslaved to the material world, and the shared conviction that, in order to exist truly, one must have lived as an individual (with the difference, of course, that Sartre does not accept Christ as the standard for authentic individuality). Failing to ‘be oneself ’, so both agree, leads to despair. Both moreover see the true self as a product of the consciously choosing will, and as resting not on individuals’ orientation towards death (as Heidegger envisages it) but on their choice of life.94 They attach equal importance to human consciousness and, especially, its reflexivity. Nonetheless, and as David Roberts has pointed out, Sartre’s notion that this ‘choosing of my selfhood’ is arbitrary and, precisely as such, identifiable with freedom amounts to what Kierkegaard defined as ‘bondage to despair’; in turn, Kierkegaard’s freedom of ‘reconciliation with God’ would be seen, by Sartre, ‘as enslavement to an illusion’.95 Furthermore, Sartre’s ‘project-self ’ is not only a self that is always in the process of becoming—a perpetual struggle for selfbeing found also in Kierkegaard—but, more than in Kierkegaard’s case, also a self that continually fails properly to emerge. The project self is marked by an inner contradictoriness that inevitably leads to ‘a perpetual failure of this project’: even though the project may be freely devised, our commitment to it (which is necessary in order for it to be our own) undermines freedom, which is lost through any attachment to permanence.96

The Self and Love We have established that Sartre’s human individual neither is nor has a self in the sense of a stable and autonomous substance with which it is self-identical. Indeed, we are intrinsically selfless insofar as empty consciousness, that which 93

For Sartre on the self as project see e.g. Sartre, BN, 364, 366; cf. Kierkegaard, SD, 163. Daigle, ‘The Ethics of Authenticity’, 5. 95 David E. Roberts, ‘Faith and Freedom in Existentialism: A Study of Kierkegaard and Sartre’, Theology Today, 8: 4 (1952), 469–82, at 472. 96 Sartre, BN, 620. 94

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constitutes us, is a lack. Insofar as we can obtain anything like a self, this is an instable reality that can be acquired only gradually, and in relation to ‘the Other’, whose perceptions determine us in our very being. The authentic human self is a fragile project that emerges from a constant and conflictual process of asserting ourselves over against ‘the Other’, and of fighting for the Other’s recognition which is bound to imply his perception of us as object. The human being’s dependency on the other’s recognition is such that autonomous self-creation is ultimately impossible, even though it must, according to Sartre, be attempted, if freedom—and hence all hope of becoming a subject—is not to be lost from the outset. While Sartre thus closely ties human selfhood to our orientation towards ‘the Other’, he cannot but be pessimistic about love and desire. As already indicated, Sartre’s picture of human relationality leaves him unable to situate love anywhere but within the battle of consciousnesses seeking to control and objectify one another. Paralleling his claim that ‘conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others’, he defines love as ‘the project of making oneself be loved’—that is, of seeking to enforce recognition of one’s project, or individuality.97 Love’s fulfilment is impossible for, as we saw, the ‘struggle of two freedoms’ to master one another without destroying one another qua freedom is futile; thus, ‘love’s very objective . . . is self-defeating and is bound to bring the lover and the beloved into conflict with one another’.98 Unable to undo the experience that, as Garcin, one of Sartre’s literary characters, puts it, ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’, it does not facilitate Hegel’s ‘community of mutual recognition’.99 Although Sartre’s ‘love’ is crucial to attaining full human selfhood and, therewith, some kind of flourishing, it does not, ultimately, overcome solipsism and is a far cry from anything resembling selfless love, with its associations of surrender, self-giving, and service to the other. Human desire, too, is little more than a symptom of the conflict between self and other. According to Sartre, desire is the result of my (inevitably) failed attempt ‘to grasp the other as object but also as free’ in order ‘to appropriate . . .

97

Sartre, BN, 364, 375. Ilham Dilman, Love and Human Separateness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 71; Sartre, BN, 379. 99 As Daigle argues, it is possibly through the influence of Simone de Beauvoir that the later Sartre is able to envisage the conflict’s resolution into ‘mutual recognition’ (Daigle, ‘The Ethics of Authenticity’, 8). Daigle detects this shift in What Is Literature? (1947) and Notebooks for an Ethics (1947–8), where, as Thomas Flynn has pointed out, Sartre claims that ‘we can conceive an absolute conversion to intersubjectivity’ (Sartre, in Thomas Flynn, ‘Introduction’ to Adrian Van den Hoven and Andrew N. Leak, eds., Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 1–16, at 5; see also Daigle, ‘The Ethics of Authenticity’, 12). Sartre, Huis Clos, 182; Sartre, BN, 609 f. The same fear of the uncontrollable nature of ‘Being-in-itself ’ manifests itself also in Sartre’s self-professed horror of the sexual body’s ‘slime’ and stickiness, which he describes as ‘the revenge of the in-itself ’: ‘Being-in-itself ’ continually eludes and escapes us in its contingent particularity. 98

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[his freedom], or at least, to make the Other’s freedom recognize my freedom’.100 This attempt must fail insofar as the Other’s freedom transcends the world in which I encounter him: ‘I can grasp the Other only in his objective facticity.’101 Desire, then, is a function of the desperate attempt to ‘ensnare his freedom within this facticity’, to cause the other ‘to be incarnated as flesh in his own eyes’—an endeavour which, in turn, requires my own ‘incarnation’.102 Desire thus aims for a ‘reciprocity of incarnation’, but fails as soon as we attempt ‘to act out desire by incarnating ourselves in the other’: we then ‘once more cease being incarnate and become abstract while the other is once more reduced to an object’.103 Ironically perhaps, it is precisely Sartre’s assertion of the human being’s ontological ‘self-lessness’ (that is, the lack of a stable self) that leads him to reject figuratively ‘selfless love’. As we saw, (the early) Sartre’s assertion of human freedom as absolute dictates that we must seek to preserve our autonomy even in the midst of the intersubjectivity to which we are, in his mind, condemned. Our selflessness is, for Sartre, a shortcoming, and ‘the Other’ a threat as much as a blessing. There is ‘No Exit’—no obvious way out—of this dilemma. Even in the unlikely situation that two lovers renounce their urge to control one another and passively respect each other’s freedom instead, ‘the lovers’, writes Sartre, ‘remain each one for himself in a total subjectivity’.104 As Sartre concludes towards the end of his major discussion of love, ‘nothing comes to relieve them of their duty to make themselves exist each one for himself ’.105 Sartre’s self remains a solitary reality that is, at best, respected and, more likely, threatened by the other. The cancelling of the distinction of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ posited already by Kierkegaard takes on a different note here then. It is less the case that we are reconciled to the other, and to sharing everything with the other, than that all is absorbed—or absorbable—into the self. While Sartre’s thought remains unsatisfactory, therefore—not least insofar as it fails to make sense of the joy experienced through gratuitous human acts of self-giving love, and through the very desire not only to be loved but to love—it provides insights into the dynamic and developing nature of the self that Tillich and Murdoch take up in helpful and creative ways, and that will be key to the further argument of the present study.106 Sartre’s thought, moreover, draws valuable attention to the human being’s responsibility to be truthful to her nature, to exist both in relation and as an individual, and to realize her freedom to this end.

100

101 102 Sartre, BN, 393. Sartre, BN, 394. Sartre, BN, 394 f. 104 105 Sartre, BN, 398. Sartre, BN, 376. Sartre, BN, 376. 106 It is noteworthy in this respect that, for his book on Sartre, W. R. Schroeder picked the following inscription: ‘To lose oneself is to find oneself; not to lose oneself is to remain forever lost’ (Schroeder, Sartre and his Predecessors, book cover). 103

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TILLICH’ S AND MURDOCH’S RECEPTION OF S ARTRE Not only Murdoch but Tillich, too, ‘encountered Sartre’s Existentialism at the height of its cultural fashion and influence, and as one of its first and most important expositors in English’.107 Where Murdoch (at least initially) saw in this movement a potential corrective to the ills besetting analytic philosophy, Tillich was intrigued by its ability to capture the contemporary consciousness. Both came to level strong criticisms against Sartre’s thought but, in different ways, contributed much to the spread of existentialist ideas in theology and British philosophy respectively.108 As we will see throughout this book, they share109—and are encouraged and influenced by—Sartre’s attempt to think in direct relation to lived experience, while having recourse to an ontological terminology enriched with religious and psychoanalytic concepts such as responsibility, guilt (even sin), and anxiety. They are influenced, here, by Sartre’s understanding of the self, and appreciate his (and other existentialists’) regard for questions of value and morality—for questions, that is, which are traditionally addressed within the religious realm, and which have been sidelined by (what especially Murdoch perceives to be) the behaviourist dismissal of the moral value of consciousness typical of the Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy of the time.110 Tillich, in particular, sees in Sartre’s anthropology an urgent, honest, and theologically valuable ‘interpretation of man’s own existence’, including an account of the ‘psychological dynamics of modern man’.111 He views Sartre’s thought as, primarily, a testimony to the contemporary situation that invites a theological response: Tillich’s own ‘decided engagement with ontologicalphilosophical questions, which culminates in the claim that God is the answer to the question contained in being, cannot be thought without existentialism’.112 However, Tillich not only responds to but also draws on Sartre’s thought. According to Ebinger, for instance, Tillich’s central ‘anthropological distinction between essential and existential being, which already reaches back to Tillich’s engagement with Schelling, seems oriented more on Sartre’s than on Heidegger’s Richard Moran, ‘Iris Murdoch and Existentialism’, in Justin Broackes, ed., Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 181–96, at 182. 108 According to Peter Conradi, Murdoch was ‘almost certainly the first English philosopher to take [Sartre] seriously’ (Conradi, ‘Preface’ to Murdoch, EM, xxi). 109 This is due, not least, to the fact that both Tillich and Murdoch can be seen as inheritors of the same intellectual heritage, which, via Kierkegaard, extends to a wide spectrum of the Platonic-Augustinian tradition. 110 Tillich, ST II, 26; See e.g. Murdoch’s excitement, upon first encountering the French existentialists, that ‘the Church is very much with them still’ and that ‘it is still the eternal Good & Evil which is in question’ (Murdoch in Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 215). 111 Tillich, ‘Existentialist Philosophy’, 66. 112 Thomas Ebinger, Verkehrte Freiheit? Jean-Paul Sartres Freiheitslehre aus christlicher Sicht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 126. 107

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understanding of existence’.113 This means that Tillich’s understanding of the self also shares important similarities with Sartre—a parallel that is further enhanced by the fact that, in his effort to counter Nygren, Tillich is highly attracted to, and draws on, Sartre’s self-affirmative drive and ‘courage to be’.114 Murdoch soon ‘came to distrust Sartrean existentialism and British philosophy equally, and to see them as sharing a common ground in offering no barrier to romantic self-assertion’.115 Yet it would be wrong to conclude from this that she sees nothing of value in Sartre or has not been influenced by his thought. Although she ultimately finds that ‘existentialism is not, and cannot by tinkering be made, the philosophy we need’, Murdoch, who encountered and read Sartre at a very formative period of her life, was much encouraged in her own work by Sartre’s interest in the inner life and the imagination, and by his attempt to develop ‘a theory of the self and the self ’s attitude to death’ in relation to these psychological realities.116 As Richard Moran implicitly suggests Murdoch is furthermore indebted to Sartre (among others) for her sensitivity to ‘the sheer pervasiveness of morality in life, the rejection of the atomistic picture of actions as particulars, the metaphor of vision itself and the idea of struggle in connection with seeing clearly’, as well as for his account of the instability of human selfhood and its relation to human consciousness.117

Sartre’s Unstable Self: A Developing Project Although Tillich and Murdoch reject Sartre’s understanding of authentic human existence as a function of the autonomous will, they share his concern to move away from objectifications of the human being. Both are intrigued by his view that true selfhood is not simply a given but a fragile state of being continually at risk of being undermined by impersonal, mechanistic forces that play to the human being’s fear of being herself. As the following chapters will illustrate, Sartre’s rejection of a static, object-like self as a self-indulgent, though widespread, illusion, and his suggestion, instead, that the human self is a continually developing, dynamic reality emerging from and through human consciousness, are indeed echoed in much of Tillich’s and Murdoch’s own thought. Murdoch, in particular, will be found to share Sartre’s perception that 113

Ebinger, Verkehrte Freiheit, 126. Importantly, Tillich also considers existentialism ‘the good luck’ and ‘natural ally of Christianity’ because of its analysis of ‘the predicament of man and his world in the state of estrangement’ (Tillich, ST II, 30). With this, existentialism has, in Tillich’s eyes, provided theology precisely with the questions to which it must, according to the principles of his correlative method, provide an answer. 115 Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 14. 116 Murdoch, SoG, 46; Murdoch in Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 215. 117 Moran, ‘Iris Murdoch and Existentialism’, 184. 114

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our states of consciousness are highly significant for who we are, and constitute the heart of our spiritual and moral life. Even though Murdoch judges that Sartre ultimately fails to live up to his own insights here, she considers him far superior, in this respect, to the behaviourist and empiricist perspectives dominating the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of her time.

Selfhood and Freedom Sharing Sartre’s concern to liberate the human being from distorting determinations through what is other than self, both Tillich and Murdoch, moreover, welcome Sartre’s emphasis on the extent to which human selfhood hinges on the individual’s exercise of her freedom. A similar emphasis indeed guides Tillich’s quest for the ‘New Being’ and Murdoch’s resistance against the ordinary human being’s flight into ‘convention’.118 Freedom, they agree, is not simply a mechanism enabling arbitrary decision-making without deeper consequences. Rather, the exercise of freedom affects the human individual in his very being, and is thus critical to genuine selfhood. Having said this, Tillich and Murdoch reject (the early) Sartre’s decision to respond to portrayals of the world as a ‘logical or naturalistic mechanism’ by absolutizing human freedom such that it can allow neither an objective reference point nor the influence of others.119 Where Sartre’s freedom might be described as the ability to orientate oneself, or take a particular attitude towards a given situation, Murdoch defines freedom as the ability to act in accordance with transcendent Good.120 The assumption that human freedom is maintained only if the human being is seen as ‘standing outside the structural necessities of essence’, in that she is ‘neither logically nor physically nor morally determined by them’, results from what both Tillich and Murdoch consider to be a mistaken opposition of freedom and destiny (or givenness or ‘necessity’) as two theoretical options between which we must choose.121 According to Tillich and Murdoch, such a dichotomy implies what one might summarize as a reduction of freedom to autonomy and of destiny to heteronomy (or, in Murdoch’s words 118 See e.g. Paul Tillich, The New Being (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) (henceforth NB) and Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in EM, 205–20, at 217 (first published in Chicago Review, 1959; henceforth ‘TSTG’). 119 Tillich, ‘Existentialist Philosophy’, 66. Sartre in fact increasingly veered towards more deterministic accounts of reality, yet Tillich and Murdoch do not engage these later developments of his thought. 120 As Robjant has shown, Richard Moran misses this fundamental difference between Sartre’s and Murdoch’s understanding of freedom (David Robjant, ‘Is Iris Murdoch a Closet Existentialist? Some Trouble with Vision, Choice and Exegesis’, European Journal of Philosophy, 21: 3 (2013), 475–94; cf. Moran, ‘Iris Murdoch and Existentialism’, 193 ff.). 121 Tillich, ‘The Nature and Significance’, 746, and e.g. Iris Murdoch, SoG, 35, 39.

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determinism). Contrary to Sartre’s portrayal, autonomy and heteronomy are, by Tillich and Murdoch, seen not as alternatives but as interconnected errors founded on a failure to see the interdependency of freedom and destiny. That Sartre misconceives human freedom is underlined also by the inner contradictions Tillich and Murdoch detect in his thought. Sartre’s absolute freedom precludes the subject from assigning a fully normative status even to her self-determined project. For, on Sartre’s terms, the subject’s acceptance of her values as genuinely authoritative and binding inevitably leads her to lapse back into the state of bad faith against which she must rebel. In Tillich’s and Murdoch’s eyes, then, Sartre’s insistence on the importance of sincerity to one’s own nothingness demands one’s sacrifice or resistance against all other possible values, including those generated by one’s own consciousness. Sincerity can ultimately be ensured only through a lack of values. Yet this, in turn, inevitably reinforces the risk of impersonal determination by the other, or of ‘bad faith’. Far from being free, Sartre’s human being is thus imprisoned in a state of eternal adolescence or immaturity. His only ‘freedom’ lies in his necessarily unending rebellion against his supposed oppression. In exposing this, Tillich and Murdoch in no way challenge Sartre’s unmasking of the self-deluding tendencies of the human individual. Nonetheless, they conclude that Sartre’s own system ultimately obstructs a coherent and convincing account of how these can be overcome. Lacking any notion of an objective standard external to herself (and thus, her own self-delusions), it is unclear how Sartre’s individual would be able to recognize either her bad faith or the supposed truth of absolute freedom for what it is. The upshot of this is, as Murdoch observes, that ‘all positive beliefs stand in danger of mauvaise foi’, such that Sartre’s thought ‘inspire[s] action more by a sort of romantic provocation than by its truth’.122 As we will see, both Tillich and Murdoch thus extend the Sartrean connection between freedom and being by seeing freedom as rooted in, and framed by, the structures of being as a whole. This precludes attempts to identify freedom with human autonomy, or ‘with a casting off of bonds, with emotional unrestraint’.123

Sartre’s ‘Courage to Be’ Although we will see that Tillich considers the tension between being and nothingness (or non-being) to be overcome in God (or being-itself), he is 122 Iris Murdoch, ‘A House of Theory’, in EM, 171–86, at 177 (first published in Conviction, ed. J. S. Mackenzie, 1958; henceforth ‘HT’); SoG, 46. 123 Murdoch in Interview with William Slaymaker, in Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in a House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 139–54, at 140.

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appreciative of Sartre’s insight that the human being must affirm himself in the face of experiencing such a tension. Tillich particularly respects Sartre for admitting that he experiences non-being as a threat and a harbinger of meaninglessness and despair, and for his attempt at affirming being in spite of this threat.124 In Tillich’s eyes, Sartre summons ‘the courage to be as oneself ’ that is demanded also by Christianity, and thereby reveals as cowardly those who reject ‘as meaningless the meaningful attempt to reveal the meaninglessness of our situation’.125 Sartre, in this respect, indeed constitutes a model for the theologian whom Tillich considers to be inevitably ‘in faith and in doubt, committed and alienated’.126 Nonetheless, Tillich will again take issue with what he sees as Sartre’s tendency to absolutize the experiences of doubt and alienation, such that they ultimately ‘drive toward a despair about the possibility of being at all’ and ‘toward a despairing refusal to accept any finite truth’.127 Tillich considers this indicative of an inability to see beyond estranged existence: Sartre’s experience of the threat of non-being appears as absolute only because ‘the dimension of the ultimate is shut off ’.128 In such a situation the human being builds up ‘defences’, such as Sartre’s claim that the individual’s essence consists in his ability to ‘make of himself what he wants’.129 Once these fail, ‘the destructive force is directed against the subject himself ’, thus enshrining feelings of ‘emptiness, cynicism, and the experience of meaninglessness’, as manifest in Sartre’s ‘destructive pessimism’.130 This would seem to be what has occurred when the Sartrean existentialist hero rejects the ultimate meaning even of love and friendship.131 Murdoch, similarly, argues that in his reaction against ‘the intellectualist, substantialist picture of the self ’, Sartre adopts aspects of Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s accounts of the human being while discarding their respective footholds.132 Thus, he accepts Kant’s notion of the human being as an ‘isolated non-historical consciousness’ identical in all persons—but rejects his assertion of a (not entirely knowable) transcendent objective truth; equally, he adopts Kierkegaard’s view of man as ‘in doubt and confusion’—but rejects his belief in God.133 The same pattern can be observed in Sartre’s adoption of Kant’s view of the will as a free source of value separated ‘from the causally

Tillich, ‘The Nature and Significance’, 740; Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 103 (henceforth TCB). 125 Tillich, TCB, 139 f. 126 James Livingston and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Modern Christian Thought. Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 143. 127 128 129 Tillich, ST II, 73. Tillich, ST II, 73. Tillich, ST II, 73, TCB, 150. 130 131 Tillich, ST II, 73, 13. Tillich, TCB, 144. 132 Iris Murdoch, ‘The Existentialist Political Myth’, in EM, 130–45, at 135 (first published in Socratic Digest, 1952; henceforth ‘EPM’). 133 Murdoch, ‘EPM’, 134. 124

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determined phenomenal world’ wherein the will is emptied ‘of the universal rational certainty and spiritual authority with which Kant endowed it’.134 While for Kant there is still a ‘moral reality, a real though infinitely distant standard’, and thus the challenge of ‘understanding and imitating’, Sartre asserts merely ‘individual power, self-assertion, commitment or choice’.135 ‘[T]he task of living is . . . turned into a perpetual psychoanalysis’, yet there is no actual criterion or ‘technique for exploring and controlling our own spiritual energy’.136 Personality is reduced to the free exertion of an unchecked will. Murdoch judges that this not only amounts to a highly pessimistic picture of the human world as it mostly is (‘the Sartrean world of fact was a wilderness of mauvaise foi occasionally lightened by sincere individual free acts’) but that it also creates an inadequate image of thought as ‘mov[ing] bodiless[ly] and unimpeded above [the world’s] morass’, while choosing and ‘carr[ying] values’.137

Existentialist Solipsism Underlying both of the above criticisms is an objection to Sartre’s putting the subjective human will in the place of an objective and transcendent reality, which Tillich defines as being as such (or God) and Murdoch as sovereign Good. In short, they take issue with his submergence of essence in existence. As my analyses of their accounts will indicate, Tillich and Murdoch consider Sartre’s effective denial of essential being—and of the existential human being’s relationship with this—ultimately to undermine human courage and freedom. They similarly see this as lying at the root of his reduction of the human being to ‘an empty shell’ that lacks a moral compass and vision, and that is perpetually at odds with what is not itself.138 Murdoch, in particular, finds that Sartre’s lack of an objective reference points results in a ‘dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual’ that expresses itself, for instance, in his claim that ‘the misgivings of a consciousness in bad faith’ can be ‘uncovered’ and explained only by consciousness itself.139 As she argues, Sartre thereby does exactly ‘what he has accused traditional philosophy of doing, that is, hypostatizing the mind in the form of an imaginary and indemonstrable substance’.140 Murdoch consequently bemoans that ‘as psychoanalyst [Sartre] remains impenitently Cartesian’.141 Despite his emphasis on consciousness, she observes, he treats 134

135 Murdoch, MGM, 444. Murdoch, SoG, 30; Murdoch, MGM, 444. 137 Murdoch, Sartre, 124; Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 269. Murdoch, MGM, 445, 156. 138 Murdoch, Sartre, 122. 139 Iris Murdoch, ‘Existentialist Bite’, in EM, 151–3, at 153 (first published in The Spectator, 1957; henceforth ‘EB’); Murdoch, Sartre, 54. 140 141 Murdoch, Sartre, 126. Murdoch, Sartre, 54. 136

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consciousness in an ‘abstract, perfunctory, a priori and non-empirical’ manner.142 Sartre masterfully ‘describ[es] certain carefully selected states’ of consciousness, but ignores or dismisses as illusory those which contradict his notions of absolutely free consciousness on the one hand and consciousness in bad faith on the other.143 These include the human being’s belief in ordinary virtue and the difficulties implied in trying to achieve this, as well as the human sense of hope, and the existential desire for love. Sartre’s account of ‘life as an egocentric drama’ of warring states of consciousness makes love in any more traditional, other-concerned sense superfluous—and potentially dangerous—for the constitution of the true self, and leads him to ignore the ordinary human being’s experience that the fullness of being entails, and is attained in and through, love.144 Murdoch thus ultimately deems Sartre’s attempt to ‘take his stand “in the middle of experience”’ unsuccessful.145 In sum, Tillich and Murdoch view Sartre as providing valuable insights into the instability of human selfhood and its interdependency on human consciousness, imagination, and freedom but consider these to be undercut by his radically immanentist, or one-sidedly existentialist, outlook. As will become apparent throughout the following chapters, they view this as the main reason for Sartre’s inability—and decided unwillingness—to put forth a notion of selfless love, and for his decision, instead, to cast love as a fight for power and self-assertion over against the other.

CO NCLUSION Our survey of Kierkegaard, Nygren, Weil, and Sartre—figures both representative of the increasing polarization of selfless love and human flourishing and influential on Tillich and Murdoch—has served to illustrate that, while the natural human impulse for self-assertion and the Christian ideal of love have always been in an ambivalent relationship, the modern emancipation of the human individual stretched the tension between the two to breakingpoint. As I have sought to show, Kierkegaard’s thought constitutes a modern Christian attempt to sustain a productive tension between the modern call for self-creation on the one hand and the Christian notion of selfless love on the other. For him, we truly exist only insofar as we make use of our freedom towards affirming and appropriating our subjectivity; at the same time, precisely this is possible only in and through a loving and obedient surrender to God. In Nygren, Weil, and Sartre this fragile balance breaks down. 142 144

Murdoch, MGM, 260. Murdoch, Sartre, 124.

143 145

Emphasis added. Murdoch, MGM, 260. Murdoch, MGM, 160.

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In Nygren and Weil, the call to selfless love, or self-abandonment to God, grossly overshadows the concern for the needs of the finite self that is still present in Kierkegaard. The finite self is ‘nothing’ but an illusion and an obstacle. Love has consequently become detached from the finite self and its desire; it passes by the self and its fulfilment in the here and now. Sartre, by contrast, is stuck in finitude insofar as he allows no transcendent reality to which the human being can relate, commit, and transcend herself. Where Kierkegaard had proclaimed that we must individually choose to place ourselves under an external commandment precisely in order to exist as free individuals, Sartre conflates the commandment to which we must surrender ourselves with our self-created values. Love, or the turn outwards, is thus a liability to the self. By an excessive problematization of the finite self (Nygren and Weil) and of the turn away from the self (Sartre), Nygren, Weil, and Sartre thus disconnect selfless love and human flourishing. I now go on to substantiate my claim that Tillich and Murdoch are receptive to the above thinkers as well as sensitive to the problems caused by their creation of a chasm between love and the finite self—a chasm which Tillich associates with the Fall. By considering their own ideas in more detail, I will explore their suggestions regarding how we can defend a selfless kind of love while honouring the needs and freedom of the individual lover—and how we can, conversely, protect human freedom and individuality without falling into solipsism. As we will see, Tillich and Murdoch follow Sartre in responding to such questions by understanding love and the self existentially as well as rooting them ontologically. Doing so, however, leads them to cast love and the self in terms which, I will argue, offer a fresh perspective on selfless love as compatible with the human desire to flourish in this world as well as in the next.

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4 A Participatory Individual: The Self in Paul Tillich In what follows, I analyse Tillich’s account of the self, wherein he lays the foundations for understanding selfless love as crucial to human selfhood and flourishing. As we will see, Tillich’s anthropology gives considerable room to the human drive for self-fulfilment, but ties such self-fulfilment to a selfsurrendering movement towards the o/Other. We must begin our analysis of Tillich’s understanding of the self with a brief overview of the methodological and ontological framework underpinning this, and thus delineate, first of all, his ontology of essence and existence.1

TILLICH’ S ONTOLOGY OF ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE Though rejecting the label of the ‘existentialist theologian’, Tillich is committed to overcoming Hegelian essentialism, and affirms concrete human existence as the focal point of all forms of human inquiry.2 He is highly critical of the philosophical impulse to flee finite existence by construing otherworldly utopias and, instead, sees existence as being in need of confrontation and transformation. As is widely known, it is with a view to facilitating such

1 Not least due to his eclectic use of sources, Tillich’s thought arguably contains a range of conceptual unclarities, to the point that it has been remarked that ‘there cannot be a single correct account of his ontological position’ (Alistair MacLeod, Paul Tillich: An Essay on the Role of Ontology in His Philosophical Theology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), 18; see also Adrian Thatcher, The Ontology of Paul Tillich (Oxford: OUP, 1978), 158–61). This difficulty with Tillich’s thought is reinforced by his reinterpretations of classical philosophical concepts and biblical images, which have been perceived as wilful (see e.g. George Tavard and Avery Dulles, in George Tavard, Paul Tillich and the Christian Message (London: Burns & Oates, 1962), 188 f., 192). 2 e.g. Paul Tillich, ‘The Philosophical Background of My Theology’, in Main Works, Vol.1, ed. Günther Wenz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 411–22, at 416.

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transformation that Tillich developed his ‘method of correlation’—an approach often portrayed as theologically outdated but retaining remarkable pastoral clout.3 Biblical revelation, which Tillich regards as authoritative, prohibits all forms of escapism and asks to be ‘correlated’ to existence in order to transform it by showing a way out of its seemingly hopeless struggles. The work of the theologian, then, requires an investment in and engagement with the contemporary human being’s existential questions, as manifest in philosophy, art, and culture. Theology must set out from analyses of existence, which sets the paradigm for theological truth claims insofar as ‘no statement about God can be made which is not rooted in the correlation between man’s self-awareness and the experience of the divine presence’.4 Theology itself cannot, to be sure, effect, but only point to, a transformation of existence, and this it can do only by drawing on revelation. Nonetheless, ‘if a theologian is to understand the God–man relationship and make it understandable to his fellowmen, he must’, as one commentator has summarized Tillich’s position, ‘be speaking about the “man” which everyone experiences’.5 Tillich consequently professes that it is particularly in his ‘doctrine concerning man in which the influence of existentialism is important’.6 He also insists, however, that, in asking about himself, the human being in existence points, precisely, beyond himself. The human being is ‘the door to the deeper levels of reality’, and yet becomes intelligible only in light of what lies beyond himself.7 Tillich bases this latter, more un-existentialist claim on a certain reading of Anselm’s ontological argument—a reading which Murdoch, in turn, later draws upon.8 Anselm famously sought ‘a single argument that needed nothing but itself for proof . . . that God really exists; that he is the supreme good, who depends

3 Critics have included, in particular, scholars writing in the tradition of Karl Barth, in response to whose dialectical approach Tillich developed his correlation method (e.g. Alexander McKelway, The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich: A Review and Analysis (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1964), 268). From very different angles, Tillich’s method of correlation is also criticized by David Tracy and by Mary Daly, among others (David Tracy, ‘Tillich and Contemporary Theology’, in James Luther Adams, Wilhelm Pauck, and Roger Lincoln Shinn, eds., The Thought of Paul Tillich (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 260–77, at 266; Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 72 f.). For a critique from a postmodern perspective, see Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), ch. 1. 4 Paul Tillich, ‘The Impact of Psychotherapy on Theological Thought’, in Ausgewählte Texte, ed. Christian Danz, Werner Schüßler, and Erdmann Sturm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 393–400, at 395. 5 Kenan Osborne, New Being: A Study on the Relationship between Conditioned and Unconditioned Being according to Paul Tillich (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 201. 6 In Gustave Weigel, ‘The Theological Significance of Paul Tillich’, in Thomas O’Meara, OP and Celestin Weisser, OP, eds., Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965), 3–24, at 23. 7 8 Tillich, ST I, 70. See Murdoch, MGM, 391 f., 431.

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on nothing else’.9 According to Anselm, it is logically impossible to think that God does not exist once we recognize God as being not a mere thing but ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’.10 As ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’, God must, moreover, necessarily exist not only in thought but in reality, which is ‘greater’ than thought: if he existed ‘only in the understanding’, something greater than God could be imagined such that one would not in fact be thinking about God in the first place.11 On the basis of this logic, Anselm goes on to extend his ‘proof ’ to God’s various perfections such as his mercy and justice. Tillich concludes that, taken as a rational demonstration of God, this argument is useless. ‘Ultimate reality’ or the ‘ground of the soul’ lies beyond language and cannot therefore be described literally and in itself.12 The ontological argument does, however, indicate ‘the relation of our mind to Being as such’.13 It supports the notion that finite being and being-itself participate in one another such that ‘our mind implies principia per se nota which have immediate evidence whenever they are noticed’, such as the transcendentals.14 Tillich thus considers the ontological argument to bring to expression that ‘an awareness of the infinite is included in man’s awareness of finitude. Man knows he is finite, that he is excluded from an infinity which nevertheless belongs to him’—and he knows this precisely because of his intrinsic relation with the infinite.15 Finitude or ‘being, limited by non-being’ is, Tillich continues, marked by a split between essence and existence, the former of which stands for objective and eternal truth.16 The split between essence and existence implies also a split between the essential and the existential self. One consequence of this split is that the language and discursive concepts of the existential self, or the human being in existence, cannot obtain objective truth. They are therefore malleable, and ultimately inadequate. The human being in existence can only receive truth in the form of living symbols: talk of God is ‘unavoidably’ symbolic.17 The real separation of essence and existence already indicates that, in a clear departure from Sartre, Tillich does not merely derive essence from existence, or 9

Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 2. 10 11 Anselm, Proslogion, 2. Anselm, Proslogion, 2, 7. 12 Paul Tillich, ‘The Word of God’, in Writings in the Philosophy of Religion: Main Works, Vol. 4, ed. John Clayton (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 405–15, at 413. 13 Emphasis added. Paul Tillich, ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’, in Main Works, Vol. 4, ed. Clayton, 289–300, at 292. 14 15 Tillich, ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’, 292. Tillich, ST I, 228. 16 Tillich, ST I, 210. 17 Tillich, ‘The Word of God’, 411. In the context of analysing the implications of his account of love, I will come to lament the fact that, despite claiming that the unconditioned can only be spoken of symbolically, Tillich, somewhat arbitrarily, elevates the language of being to a ‘nonsymbolic’ way of talking about God (the ‘ground of being’) (see Tillich, ST I, 264).

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‘unchanging, infinite, and eternal’ being from ‘changeable, finite and mortal’ being.18 Nor, however, does he follow Hegel in deriving existence from essence. Instead of placing these two dimensions in a logical or temporal sequence, he ascribes to them a primordial unity which the existential human being seeks to regain.19 This quest for what Tillich at times calls ‘essentialization’, or the essentialized self, is ultimately a quest for God, who is ‘beyond the contrast between essence and existence’ (and thus also beyond language).20 Tillich considers ‘God’ a ‘symbol’ for ‘the ground of the ontological structure of being’, for ‘being-itself ’.21 God, he argues, must not be understood in terms of Anselm’s ens realissimum, which, for Tillich, amounts to a highest or universal Being distinct from the human person. Instead, he should be viewed as ‘the power in everything that has power’.22 The more deeply the human person participates in being-itself, his transcendent ground, the more em-powered (and the less despairing) he is. This is because, as the ground of the ontological structure of being, being-itself is not ‘subject to’ this structure, which entails non-being.23 Being-itself contains a ‘negative principle’, yet in being-itself, being continually overcomes non-being—a dynamism Tillich considers indicative of the fact that God, symbolically speaking, has a ‘life’ in which separation never lapses into estrangement.24 The more the human being participates in this divine life, the more he himself is enabled to withstand nonbeing and, hence, to be. Its ability to overcome non-being allows being-itself to separate from itself without losing itself, and thus to participate in finitude. It is in this context that being-itself manifests itself as the ‘power of being’ and the ‘ground of being’.25 Tillich considers this participation of being-itself in finite being to be reflected, 18

Tillich, ST I, 262; Pattison, God and Being, 29. Though influenced by classical thought, Tillich’s use of ontological terms diverges from that of the Thomistic tradition. 19 Tillich, ST I, 183. As Tillich sees it, such a symbiosis of existentialist and essentialist elements follows from, or continues, the Platonic-Augustinian approach to philosophy, an approach which he refers to as ‘ontological’ and which he contrasts with Anselm’s and Aquinas’s ‘cosmological’ approach (the latter being traced, somewhat controversially, through Duns Scotus and Ockham to Kant and Barth) (Tillich, ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’, 289). Although not making this precise contrast, Murdoch can—roughly—be placed in the same ‘Platonic-Augustinian’ tradition. 20 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Vol. III. Combined Volume (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968), 427 (henceforth ST III); ST I, 262. 21 22 Tillich, ST I, 210, 265. Tillich, ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’, 298. 23 Emphasis added. Tillich, ST I, 265, TCB, 180. As several critics, including John McQuarrie and Adrian Thatcher, have pointed out, Tillich uses the concept of ‘being’ in a confusing number of unspecified ways (see John McQuarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought (London: SCM, 1963), 367, n. 2; Thatcher, The Ontology of Paul Tillich, 159). While this creates problematic ambiguities in Tillich’s thinking, we must leave these aside for the moment. Tillich, ST I, 263. 24 Tillich, ST I, 210, 265; TCB, 180; ST I, 268. 25 Tillich, ST I, 212, 261 f., 272. Leonard Wheat has argued that Tillich pushes this so far as to deny all non-identity of God and the human being: Leonard Wheat, Paul Tillich’s Dialectical Humanism: Unmasking the God above God (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970).

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for instance, in the human being’s access to universals, in her ability to ask the ontological question (that is, ‘what is being-itself?’), and in ‘the infinite drive of the finite beyond itself ’.26 As indicated by these examples, all of which appeal to the human capacity for knowledge, the key link between the human being and being-itself is the human being’s share in Reason. According to Tillich, it is only because the human being has a reasonable structure which mirrors that of the divine logos that ‘the divine logos can appear as man without destroying the humanity of man’, or that there can be revelation without heteronomy.27 We already see here that Tillich replaces Sartre’s ontology of conflict with an ontology of participation. Yet the perfect unity of being-itself, which precedes the distinction between finitude and infinity and between essence and existence, contrasts with the human being’s entanglement in a tension between these poles. The human being participates in her infinite ground (on account of which she possesses freedom) but is nonetheless finite (on account of which she feels legitimately threatened by non-being). Her awareness of her finitude causes her anxiety about losing herself, which in turn tempts her to actualize her (finite) freedom and, thus, her being. The human being thus leaves behind her original state of ‘dreaming innocence’ in which ‘freedom and destiny are in harmony, but . . . [not] actualised’.28 As we shall see in Tillich’s interpretation of the Fall, to which I return further below, this brings the human being into existence but also leads her to become estranged from her essence, which entails both being and non-being and by which she participates in the ground and power of being.29 Tillich thus understands the actual, living, existential self to result from the human being’s actualization of the freedom to stand ‘outside the divine life’— that is, outside the life which sustains this freedom.30 Existence has tragic underpinnings, therefore. The actualization of the existential self is, in Tillich’s eyes, a necessary step towards the fullness of being human. It is the precondition for becoming fully conscious. And yet it is an unsustainable way of being insofar as it divorces the human being from the ground of the freedom on which his existence is grounded. Hence, having attained consciousness, the human being must now be reunited with his essential ground. Only thus can he preserve his freedom. Such reunification can be attained because, as we will see Tillich argue, in Christ being-itself participates even in the ‘estrangement’ of the existential self.31 Where the existential self responds to this outreach by accepting it and participating in it, estrangement is conquered and the essential and existential self are reunited. We have thus gained a basic sense of Tillich’s understanding of the existential self ’s ground, plight, and telos. I now turn to how Tillich conceptualizes 26 29 31

27 Tillich, ST I, 195, 212, 182, ST II, 36. Tillich, ST I, 288. 30 Tillich, ST II, 33–50. Tillich, ST I, 284, 290. Tillich, ST I, 300; ST II, 144 f.

28

Tillich, ST II, 40.

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the nature or make-up of the human self, and how the self becomes manifest both in the context of existential estrangement and in the context of reunion with the ‘ground of [its] being’.

THE NATURE OF THE S ELF Tillich understands the human self in terms of four levels of being, which characterize ‘all living beings’, but which are most perfectly present in the human being, indeed, which ‘are he himself ’.32 The first of these is the ‘basic ontological structure which is the implicit condition of the ontological question’, that is, the subject–object structure of being presupposing the self– world relation.33 The second level consists in the three ontological polarities of individuality and universality, dynamics and form, and freedom and destiny, whose polar elements express ‘the self-relatedness of being’ and ‘the belongingness of being’ respectively.34 To these are added, at the third level, the ‘characteristics of being which are the conditions of existence’; they ‘express . . . the power of being to exist’ and the ontologically inescapable ‘difference between essential and existential being’ and their relation to one another and to being-itself.35 Fourthly come ‘the categories of being and knowing’, which, for reasons of space and immediate relevance to my argument, I discuss only implicitly.36 I will now review Tillich’s account of the four levels of being with a view to establishing Tillich’s understanding of the human self, and with particular reference to Sartre.

The Self-World Relation as the Basic Ontological Structure Tillich begins his enquiry into the human self with the observation that ‘man experiences himself as having a world to which he belongs’.37 Selfconsciousness and world-consciousness, he infers from this, are interdependent. Not unlike Kierkegaard, he argues that ‘world-consciousness is possible only on the basis of a fully developed self-consciousness’ which implies self-relatedness.38 Yet with Sartre, who suggested that we can only be conscious 32 Tillich, ST I, 188. According to Tillich, it is precisely this ‘structure of a being which has history [and] underlies all historical changes’—the human being ‘as he is given in present experience and in historical memory’—which is the subject of ‘an ontological and theological doctrine of man’ (Tillich, ST I, 185 f.). 33 34 35 Tillich, ST I, 182. Tillich, ST I, 183. Tillich, ST I, 183. 36 37 Tillich, ST I, 182 f. Emphasis added. Tillich, ST I, 188. 38 Tillich, in David Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 68.

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(and hence conscious of ourselves) in relation to an object, Tillich adds that the inverse is also true. Without awareness of the world, ‘self-consciousness would have no content, for every content, psychic as well as bodily, lies within the universe’.39 According to Tillich, however, this interdependency does not pose a dilemma, in which the human being faces an impossible choice between selfconsciousness and world-consciousness (both of which are critical for existing as a subject). Rather, the two forms of consciousness naturally coexist and reinforce one another. The same, then, is true also for self and world as such. Implicitly attributing to self and world some basic degree of objective reality (in need of being, in Tillich’s language, ‘actualized’), Tillich portrays them not as engaged in a competitive battle for dominance and survival, but as two poles mutually supporting and enriching one another through a fruitful interplay. This interdependent polarity of world-consciousness and self-consciousness is portrayed as the first and ‘basic ontological structure [which] implies all the others’, including the ‘subject–object structure of reason’.40 It testifies to the centrality of human experience, and to the extent to which this is intertwined with human reason. On the one hand, experience founds the human being’s acts of reason. Without experiencing himself in distinction from, but in relation to, the world, the human being would be neither inclined nor able to ask about the self in the first place. Indeed, he would lack the ability to ask anything at all. Given that the human being experiences himself as a self, he cannot but enquire into the self. In Tillich’s existentialism, the legitimacy of and need for such enquiry thus hinges not on abstract and speculative conclusions about ‘whether selves exist’, but on the human being’s ‘aware[ness] of self-relatedness’.41 On the other hand, the awareness and relationality, which the human being experiences, presuppose reason.42 Without reason, which is ‘the logos of being’, being ‘would be chaos’ or, in other words, not being ‘but only the possibility of it’.43 Reason creates structure. Though the self may, as Sartre suggested, lack content, reason provides it with a form: it allows the self to be a ‘centered structure’, that is, a separate individual distinct from its surroundings and able to gather ‘all contents of awareness’.44 This ‘self-centeredness’ signifies the human being’s distinctness from the world as a separate individual, and is thus a ‘quality’ of what will shortly be described as ‘individualization’.45 It provides the human being with that ‘ego-self ’ on account of which it ‘possesses’ itself ‘in the form of self-consciousness’.46 That the human 39

40 41 Tillich, ST I, 189. Tillich, ST I, 189 f. Tillich, ST I, 188. This is highlighted, for instance, by Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology, 68. 43 Tillich, ST I, 190. 44 Tillich, ST I, 190; Tillich, ST III, 39. Tillich’s existential self has, accordingly, been described as an ‘empty form’. (George McLean, ‘Paul Tillich’s Existential Philosophy of Protestantism’, in Thomas O’Meara, OP and Celestin Weisser, OP, eds., Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965), 42–84, at 48). 45 46 Tillich, ST III, 34. Tillich, ST I, 188. 42

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individual can organize his environment such that the latter becomes a world which is a ‘structured whole’ is a function both of his ‘centeredness’ (which can vary in degree), and of reason’s inherence in the world.47 Subjective in the self ’s case and objective in the world’s, reason both particularizes and connects, Tillich argues. It is on account of its subjective share in objective reason that the centered self is also ‘aware that it belongs to that at which it looks’: the ‘ego-self ’ ‘has’ a world and is also ‘in’ this world.48 The fact that the self is also in the world and a part of it means that while it transcends the world it is also conditioned by the world. It has become obvious that, like Sartre, Tillich rejects the idea of the self as ‘a thing which may or may not exist’.49 Such an idea would entail the kind of supernaturalist understanding of the self as a static object existing in a transcendental realm—a view Tillich, like Sartre, wants to overcome.50 Instead, Tillich, too, sees the human self as a particular manifestation of human consciousness: the self dynamically emerges where consciousness relates both to itself and to the outer world. Although he will respond to this differently than Sartre, Tillich also acknowledges that the self ’s consequent instability and dependency on others is expressive of its lack of self-sufficiency—its finite limitedness—and that the self may therefore experience its relationality as threatening. Like Sartre, Tillich moreover considers the self to be intrinsically empty: it ‘does not itself have any content but bundles and coordinates’.51 Finally, Tillich agrees that, in existence, wherein the interrelatedness of self and world is ruptured, the self is not fully centred and unified. Yet, by defending the self ’s essential centredness and unity, Tillich also distances himself from Sartre. More than Kierkegaard, who had also retained a stronger sense of the self ’s unity, Tillich ties the realization and experience of this unity to the self ’s openness and relation to the world. As Robert Scharlemann observes, Tillich asserts that the unity of the self is ‘over against’, but also dependent on, ‘the unity outside itself ’, the unity of the world.52 Thus, where Sartre sanctions and promotes the existential human being’s attempt to emancipate himself from the world, Tillich considers such an attempt responsible for the disunity of the human being. According to Tillich, the self must respond to the seeming threat of the other not by seeking to control the other (and thus to minimize his dependency on the other), but by participating in the other. Tillich can argue this, and thus avoid Sartre’s bitter battle of consciousnesses (from which there is ‘No Exit’), by seeing consciousness and the self as a part of the world and thus a part of 47

48 Tillich, ST I, 190. Emphasis added. Tillich, ST I, 188. 50 Emphasis added. Tillich, ST I, 287. Tillich, ST I, 188. 51 Karin Grau, ‘Healing Power’: Ansätze zu einer Theologie der Heilung im Werk Paul Tillichs (Munster: LIT, 1999), 194. 52 Robert Scharlemann, ‘Christianity and the End of Modernity: Tillich and Troeltsch’, in Religion and Reflection: Essays on Paul Tillich’s Theology (Munster: LIT, 2004), 231–52, at 248. 49

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the other. Despite being structured around dual polarities, Tillich’s ontology is ultimately profoundly participatory. Tillich thus sees the existential self as suffering less from false aspirations towards substantial being than from pretensions to autonomy. Contra Sartre, this implies that the existential self is neither responsible for, nor capable of, filling its initial emptiness through the development and assertion of an ‘individual project’. Instead, the self receives content through and from the other, in whom it participates, and whose Good it seeks. Tillich thus calls the self to transcend its existential inclinations—a move he can make only on the basis of the assumption that, while we know the self through existence, the self is ultimately ‘an original phenomenon which logically precedes all questions of existence’.53 Such self-transcendence requires the human being to re-establish the balance between the polar ontological elements, which constitute the self–world relation and which Tillich views as the second level of being.

The Ontological Polarities Constituting the Self-World Relation Individualization and Participation We already saw that while Tillich views the self as centred, he also considers it to be a part of the world: human selfhood is captured in the ‘experience of being a part of something from which one is at the same time separated’.54 From this experience of the existential self, Tillich infers an ontological tension between ‘the self-relatedness of being’ and ‘the belongingness of being’, which contains several polarities of interdependent ontological elements.55 The first of these is the polarity of individualization and participation. This signifies that human individuality cannot be attained through mere self-relation or through relations with a reality which is wholly other; human individuality is attained only through the self ’s going out of itself and participating in what is other than itself but to which it nonetheless belongs.56 The human being’s capacity for participation in what is other than self is, in turn, tied to his individualization. This applies in two ways: the higher the individualization of 53

Tillich, ST I, 188. Guy Hammond, ‘Individualisation and the Quest for Meaning’, in Gert Hummel, ed., Truth and History: A Dialogue with Paul Tillich (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 187–97, at 192. 55 Tillich, ST I, 183. 56 According to Roberts, this allows Tillich to bridge the gap between nominalism and realism: ‘against the former it affirms that the knower participates in what is knowable instead of being merely related to it. Against the latter it refuses to regard individualisation as somehow unreal as compared with universals’ (David Roberts, ‘Paul Tillich’s Doctrine of Man’, in Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, eds., The Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 108–31, at 116). See also McLean, ‘Paul Tillich’s Existential Philosophy’, 45. 54

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self and other, the higher the potential for their mutual participation. For the human being’s capacity for participation not only rises with his level of individualization, but he can also participate most fully in ‘that level of life which he is himself ’.57 Individualization and participation, respectively, culminate in ‘personality’ and ‘communion’ (a form of participation possible only among persons).58 Similar to Buber’s notion that the personalization of the human being depends on ‘I–Thou’ relations, to which I shall return in the final chapter of this book, Tillich argues that the ‘encounter of person with person’ is the precondition for the development of the human being’s ‘personal life’, which he considers to be connected also with her moral and spiritual life.59 Since communion arguably depends on the consent, and the active participation, of all parties involved, Tillich’s thought should imply that individuality at its fullest is dependent on mutual participation. Tillich’s insistence that the highest form of participation is one of communion between persons casts a dubious light on his reluctance to think of the ground of being in thoroughly personal terms and to speak of the human being’s relation with being-itself as one of communion. For, if the participatory relationship with other persons is the context in which emerges the full self, then it would seem to be the context also where the existential human being is united with her essence, and thus with the ground of her being. The active participation of being-itself in human existence further seems to invite the notion that the human being and being-itself stand in a relationship of participatory communion and mutuality. In the next chapter, we will find that this inconsistency has problematic consequences for Tillich’s account of love. For the present purposes, it must be noted that Tillich’s association of individualization with personhood, and of participation with communion, though perhaps compromised or downplayed by other aspects of his thought, nonetheless implies an important foundation for my enquiry into the validity of selfless love. The polarity of individualization and participation clearly underlines that Tillich, unlike Sartre or also Nietzsche, does not consider the individual self to be born out of a relation of power over, or control of, another. He does not deny Sartre’s (and Heidegger’s) claim that, ‘if he did not meet the resistance of other selves, every self would try to make himself absolute’.60 He will also admit that the other’s resistance against the self ’s attempts at making itself absolute is critical for a person’s awareness of his or her individuality. Yet he 57 Tillich, ST I, 195. While Scharlemann may be right that ‘the more centred another self is, the more inaccessible this other becomes to the power of one’s own self ’, Tillich does not consider this to mean that the other becomes intransigent or alien to the self (as is for instance assumed in postmodernism). On the contrary, perfect participation corresponds with the perfect centredness of the relating parties (Scharlemann, ‘Christianity and the End of Modernity’, 251). 58 59 60 Tillich, ST I, 195. Tillich, ST III, 43. Tillich, ST I, 196. Sartre, BN, 245.

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considers such awareness to derive not so much from the frustration that follows the attempt to impose oneself on the other, but more from the realization that the other’s resistance against such attempts is entirely appropriate. Tillich’s human being comes to recognize her own individuality as a good by coming to recognize another’s individuality as an inviolable good. Similarly, it is only on the basis of such an insight that the human being becomes capable of the kind of participatory communion that allows her to obtain full personhood. Proposing, therefore, that individuality and relatedness are not only compatible but that they are essentially interdependent, Tillich, unlike Sartre, does not need to keep the other at bay. On his account, the kind of Sartrean conflict between self and other results from a failure to recognize their interdependence as mutually enriching. This failure, which is characteristic of human beings in existence in general, leads the human being to absolutize either the pole of individualization or that of participation. Where, in the former case, the human being seeks an unattainable autonomy and thus condemns herself to being an empty form—a self without a world—in the latter case the human being immerses herself in the world to the point of losing herself in ‘the collective’.61

Dynamics and Form The polarity of individualization and participation illustrates Tillich’s conviction that the structures of being imply neither a demand to submit to an alien heteronomous power nor total human autonomy. The other ontological polarities serve to further underline this point. More specifically, the polarity of dynamics and form expresses the fact that being is marked by a ‘structure of vitality and intentionality’.62 In the case of the human being, this manifests itself, on the one hand, in a creative and (potentially) life-giving drive for ‘self-integration’, for ‘selfcreation’, and for ‘self-transcendence’ (‘dynamics’).63 These three movements, which Tillich considers to be circular, horizontal, and vertical respectively, are movements of ‘life’ or of ‘the actualisation of potential being’ and entail elements of ‘self-identity’ and of ‘self-alteration’.64 They only achieve their goal, however, if rooted in ‘meaningful structures’ or forms, the other end of this ontological polarity.65 Self-creation can only take place on the basis of the human being’s confrontation with ‘universals’—of ‘living in tension with (and toward) something objectively valid’.66 Without this, Tillich argues, the creative dynamism of the self goes off in all directions and achieves nothing concrete. The human being cannot be creative arbitrarily; his vitality must emerge out of and be ‘directed towards meaningful contents’: it must be 61 64

Tillich, ST II, 83. Tillich, ST III, 32–4.

62

Tillich, ST I, 199. 65 Tillich, ST I, 200.

63

Tillich, ST III, 34. 66 Tillich, ST I, 200.

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‘formed’.67 Forms, in turn, can be preserved only on the basis of being continually revitalized through being inhabited and developed. Tillich understands this interdependence of dynamics and form to signify the interdependence of being and becoming, which manifests itself particularly in the ‘moral and cultural acts’ of the existential human being, which Tillich associates with the ‘growth of the individual’.68 While Tillich here incorporates Sartre’s sense of the self as a project continually in the process of becoming, he also asserts the need for a stable, objective framework, within which this dynamism can take place. In and of itself, Tillich’s self is not simply empty (or nothing) but an empty form that obtains content only where it relates itself to and roots itself in other, objectively valid forms. In a sense, Tillich thus positions himself between Sartre and Kierkegaard, the latter of whom we saw insist that, despite being a self-constituting reality in one sense, the self nonetheless depends on a relation with an objective reality that utterly transcends it; although, unlike Kierkegaard, Tillich often shies away from referring to this reality as ‘God’. Tillich’s endorsement of the vitality and dynamism of the self testifies also to his sympathies for Nietzsche’s sense of a passionate, boundless Schöpfungslust, by which the human being strives to break out of those false and heteronomous bourgeois moralities which seek to negate this force, and thus the self.69 Indeed, Tillich explicitly refers to Nietzsche’s definition of spirit as ‘the life which cuts into life itself ’ when he identifies the dynamic vitality of the human being with his spirit.70 The human being’s dynamic vitality consists, Tillich argues, in the human spirit transcending ‘the organic realm’, of which it nonetheless remains a part, in order to break back into this same realm in a transformative way.71 Signifying the human being’s ‘power to be’—his ‘courage for self-affirmation [even] in the moment of being negated’—Tillich’s notion of vitality, similarly, picks up Sartre’s stress on the individual’s capacity to transcend his situation, to liberate himself from conformity, to empower himself, and to attain a new authenticity.72 Tillich thus shares the modern conviction that a life-force inheres in the human being which neither can nor should be suppressed, and which lies at the origin of human cultural creativity. He considers this relevant to nothing less than the transcendence of existential estrangement, and hence to acquiring the fullness of being. However, if Tillich considers it paramount for theology to absorb key aspects of this modern optimism, he equally holds that modern thought is coherent only where theology is brought to bear on it. Tillich insists that, in 67

68 Tillich, ST I, 200. Tillich, ST I, 200. Tom Kleffmann, Nietzsches Begriff des Lebens und die evangelische Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 474. 70 Tillich, ST III, 29. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 80. 71 72 Tillich, ST III, 12. Kleffmann, Nietzsches Begriff des Lebens, 459. 69

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existence, this life-force is insufficiently integrated with ‘form’, its conditioning counterpart, and hence turns against itself. The existential self strives to go ‘beyond the given form through which it has being’.73 Instead of transcending itself ‘in terms of form’, it breaks form and moves towards chaos.74 Once such an ontological imbalance has arisen, the self can only inhabit form rigidly and without content, thus making form a law unto itself. Similar to its back and forth between loss of world and loss of self, the existential self thus tends to swing between law and chaos. It is only where the human being accepts the transformative power of being-itself, which breaks into existence from without, that this inadequacy can be overcome and that the human being’s life-force can live up to its redemptive potential. The danger of divorcing ‘dynamics’ from ‘form’ is one to which the modern critics of Christianity are typically insensitive. As Kleffmann shows in a study of theological receptions (and their ultimate limitations) of Nietzsche’s Lebensbegriff, Tillich recognizes that, insofar as these critics retain an element of ‘form’, this is often nothing more than a disguised version of what he calls ‘dynamics’.75 While modern notions such as ‘individual morality’ or ‘authentic values’ might, at first glance, seem to suggest a certain degree of ‘form’, closer scrutiny indicates that they in fact elevate the self ’s very vitality (or ‘dynamics’) to the level of form. They thereby ensure that ‘dynamics’ actually rids itself of its restraining counterpart. Since such formless vitality denies the self in its true—that is, finite, relational, and dependent—reality, such approaches effectively fail to affirm the self in the face of non-being: instead of recognizing and confronting the threat of non-being, they seem to aspire to an absolute— and hence hopeless—assertion of being over non-being. Thus, while Tillich rejects a repression of the self ’s vital energy, he also argues that this vitality must be rooted in, and directed towards, its source.

Freedom and Destiny The third and final polarity of ontological elements is that of ‘freedom and destiny’. This is most intricately intertwined with the origins of the human being’s estrangement from essence, and thus with the third level of the self ’s ontological structure (or those ‘characteristics of being which are the conditions of existence’, and which explain the difference and relation between existence, essence, and being-itself).76 ‘Freedom in polarity with destiny is’, in Tillich’s words, ‘the structural element which makes existence possible because it transcends the essential necessity of being without destroying it.’77 Human freedom is ‘identical with the fact that man is spirit’, meaning that he is 73 75 77

74 Tillich, ST I, 74. Tillich, ST I, 74. Kleffmann, Nietzsches Begriff des Lebens. Tillich, ST I, 201.

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‘the dynamic unity of reason and power, of mental universality and vital individuality’.78 Were the human being only mind, he would merely be ‘statically related to the universals’; as spirit, however, he is ‘creating in unity with the eternal forms and norms of being’.79 Freedom allows the human being to move beyond a given situation by ‘imagining and realising something new’; it allows him to transcend and actualize himself towards ever greater degrees of personality and community, to bring forth meaningful cultural products, and even to create things which are merely playful rather than geared towards self-transcendence.80 Thus, the primary characteristic of freedom lies in its creativity, which Tillich associates with the human being’s development of his or her moral and spiritual life. However, while freedom is potentially infinite such that it entails even the freedom to transcend being as such, this potential can be exercised only at the cost of freedom itself. Freedom’s rootedness in being means that where the human being uses her freedom for the sake of leaving behind or denying being, she leaves behind freedom itself and thus becomes subject to the kind of servitude characteristic of the existential self.81 This is because freedom cannot be exercised in a vacuum. It is always tied to a particular agent who exercises it in a particular cultural and historical context. Where freedom is divorced from these constraining factors, it is undermined. Since being is, according to Tillich, structured by reason, freedom cannot ‘decide against reason’ without deciding against being—and, thus, against its own ‘essential content’.82 In the case of the human being, the rootedness of freedom in being must also mean that it is intrinsically constrained by finitude and, indeed, by the culturally and historically shaped circumstances of the particular context and personality of its agent. Freedom is not abstract: it is exercised by a concrete person, who has been shown to emerge in relation to her environment in a particular context, and who must respect these characteristics in exercising her freedom. It is these conditioning factors which Tillich groups under ‘destiny’: destiny is ‘myself as given, formed by nature, history, and myself ’.83 In essence, destiny does not compromise freedom but constitutes its precondition. It provides freedom with an agent, a context, and an object. Destiny is thus distinct from fate. While one’s fate can merely be accepted, one’s destiny demands to be shaped or ‘realize[d]’.84 Freedom thus depends on being geared towards, and affirmative of, destiny. It depends on an affirmation and creative shaping of

78 Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man in Existential Philosophy’, Journal of Religion, 19: 3 (1939), 201–15, at 206. 79 80 Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 206. Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 206 f. 81 As Tillich points out, servitude would not be servitude if the self were not essentially free. 82 Tillich ST I, 288; Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 208. 83 Tillich, in Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology, 71. 84 Roberts, ‘Tillich’s Doctrine of Man’, 118.

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being in its concrete reality.85 In turn, destiny can only unravel and become the destiny of a particular individual where it is not simply accepted and surrendered to, but creatively appropriated and freely shaped.86 Freedom’s interdependence with destiny is indicative of the fact that freedom’s ‘ability to transcend any given situation implies the possibility of losing one’s self in the infinity of transcending one’s self ’.87 The above implies a rejection both of the notion that the human being is essentially free to be what he wants to be, and of the suggestion that he is bound to, and determined by, his environment. Freedom neither amounts to contingency, nor is it illusory. Rather, the interdependency of freedom and destiny exposes determinism and indeterminism as two illusory sides of the same coin. With this, Tillich does not go against modern understandings of freedom entirely. To an extent, Tillich for instance welcomes the fact that ‘Nietzsche and Sartre . . . understood freedom as the undetermined self-realisation of the existential subject’, and distinguishes their account of freedom from ‘the indeterministic concept of freedom as contingency’.88 This is because these thinkers retain something of Schelling’s definition of ‘freedom as the possibility of good and evil’, and thus understand that freedom can undermine itself, as when it lapses into mere undirected wilfulness or when it affirms inauthentic values.89 By positing that freedom must be used for the good of actualizing one’s individual personality, Sartre, for instance, acknowledges that ‘decision does not mean choice without any criterion’ but remains free only where it respects the agent’s individual project.90 Tillich nonetheless holds that Sartre’s absolute freedom, like Nietzsche’s will to power, does not ultimately orientate the individual to the ground of being, which simultaneously conditions and transcends him, and which is both related to and distinct from him. Just as Sartre’s empty consciousness is unconstrained by a given form, so his freedom is not rooted in being which, in the case of the human person, entails finitude and ‘has been formed by nature and history’.91 It is precisely this refusal of Sartre’s to see freedom in a

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This once again resonates with Nietzsche’s call for the affirmation of things as they are. Yet for Tillich this still implies an affirmation of essence as a conditioning factor on existence. 86 The creative element implied in the self ’s relationship to destiny is sometimes underemphasized, e.g. by Scharlemann, who writes about Tillich’s human being that, ‘if it could make itself out of nothing and in any way . . . it would choose to make itself into precisely the unique individual that it actually is here and now’ (Scharlemann, ‘Christianity and the End of Modernity’, 249). Scharlemann, problematically, reserves creativity for the postmodern rather than the modern self. Instead, one might argue that it is precisely the postmodern self which tends towards stating and enshrining incongruities rather than engaging in the creative process of seeking to resolve these. 87 88 Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 208. Tillich, ‘The Nature and Significance’, 746. 89 90 Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 203. Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 203. 91 Roberts, ‘Tillich’s Doctrine of Man’, 118.

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polar relationship with destiny which would seem to lie behind Sartre’s oscillation between the extremes of absolute freedom and determinism. Contra Sartre, Tillich’s account implies that freedom is not merely a feature of an empty consciousness or will, but of the whole person, whose self ‘includes bodily structure, psychic strivings, moral and spiritual character, communal relations, past experiences . . . and the total impact of the environment’, and who must use her freedom to affirm these factors, which constitute her destiny.92 Once again, then, Tillich deems Sartre to have recognized, and to rightly affirm, a central quality of human existence (freedom), yet to separate this from its essential counterpart (destiny).93 With this, Sartre illuminates and witnesses to the condition of the existential human being, who has thus undermined his potential freedom, and consequently experiences the structures of being as destroying rather than sustaining freedom, and thus ‘as antithetical to human flourishing’.94

The Conditions of Existence Tillich considers the human being’s freedom to be not only compromised by, but also responsible for, existential estrangement. Human freedom, or freedom rooted in finite being, is deemed to explain the very fact of human existence. It thus leads us to the third level of ontological concepts, which Tillich defines as an ‘analysis of finitude in its polarity with infinity as well as in its relation to freedom and destiny, to being and non-being, to essence and existence’.95 As indicated at the outset of this chapter, Tillich defines finitude as ‘being, limited by non-being’.96 Unlike being-itself, wherein non-being is continually conquered, finite being has a beginning and an end.97 This is part of its form and destiny. At the same time, for Tillich, the human being’s power for 92 Tillich, ST I, 204; Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 206–10. Tillich’s account of freedom is comparable, therefore, with what has been referred to as a ‘compatibilist’ notion of freedom, which does ‘not attempt to abstract from the conditioning and even “determining” factors that continue to be in effect even as a “free” act is undertaken’ (Sarah Coakley, ‘ “Kenosis”: Theological Meanings and Gender Connotations’, in John Polkinghorne, ed., The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 192–210, at 205). As we will see in the following chapter, Tillich follows what Coakley describes as theological renditions of such an approach. These suggest not only that human freedom must take account of and relate itself to biological, social, and cultural factors but also add to this the concept of ‘God’s providential and determining will’ as well as the notion of ‘God as nurturing and sustaining us into freedom’ (Coakley, ‘Kenosis’, 206). 93 Again, I am here talking of the earlier Sartre of Being and Nothingness, for whom freedom is still absolute. The later, increasingly Marxist Sartre arguably veers towards the other extreme, a kind of determinism. 94 95 96 Pattison, God and Being, 30. Tillich, ST I, 184. Tillich, ST I, 210. 97 Notably, Tillich does not identify being-itself with infinity since he considers this to be merely the negation of finitude and, thus, interdependent with finitude.

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individualization, her vitality and freedom, indicate that the finite human being also ‘belong[s] to that which is beyond non-being, namely, to beingitself ’.98 Only for this reason, is she capable of recognizing her finitude and of envisaging infinite possibilities of transcending a given situation. Although unable to realize this existentially, she can even imagine ‘the negation of the negative element in finitude’.99 Tillich considers this combination of finitude and its transcendence to be captured in the notion of ‘finite freedom’, which he argues is the central characteristic of human essence.100 Following Kierkegaard, Tillich thus argues that this finite freedom evokes anxiety in the human being. Anxiety, which Tillich, too, distinguishes from fear of a distinct object, results from the human being’s awareness of the threat posed by non-being on the one hand, and of his freedom to combat this threat on the other.101 As such, anxiety is the precondition for the individual’s ‘break with the world of the everyday’ and, thus, a motor for his self-liberation through an actualization of his freedom.102 However, anxiety also gives rise to the temptation to freely respond to the threat of non-being by denying one’s relation to non-being. It tempts the human being to deny the extent to which he is conditioned by the world, such that he, instead, ‘makes himself existentially the centre of himself and his world’.103 Finite freedom thus corresponds with an anxiety that gives rise to the temptation to sever oneself from one’s essence. The surrender to this temptation is at the root of the separation of the ontological elements and it is for this reason that the ‘description of the basic ontological structure and its elements reaches both its fulfilment and its turning point’ in the polarity of freedom and destiny.104 According to Tillich, the biblical account of the Fall symbolically expresses precisely the human being’s surrender to this temptation—his free denial of his finite destiny. The story does not record, according to Tillich, a historical event signifying an ontological change, but mythically illustrates that the human being was fallen from the moment he came into existence. Tillich pictures Adam-before-the-Fall as being in innocent but ‘dreaming’ union with being-itself.105 In him, essence and existence are in unconscious unity, yet merely potential and unactualized. His finite freedom evokes anxiety about non-being, as described above. Adam-before-the-Fall thus ‘experiences the anxiety of losing himself by not actualising himself and his potentialities and the anxiety of losing himself by actualising himself and his potentialities’.106 He responds to this by choosing to actualize his freedom and, with 98

99 Tillich, ST I, 212. Tillich, ST I, 212. Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 202. 101 Tillich, ST I, 212. cf. Kierkegaard, CA, 42. 102 103 Livingston and Fiorenza, Modern Christian Thought, 136. Tillich, ST II, 56. 104 105 Tillich, ST I, 201. Tillich, ST II, 38. 106 Paul Tillich, ‘Existential Analyses and Religious Symbols’, in Theological Writings: Main Works, Vol. 6, ed. Gert Hummel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 385–98, at 372. 100

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this, his being. In effect, he comes into existence but becomes estranged from his essence. Adam’s Fall, and the anxiety that prompted it, is an ambiguous matter, therefore. It is the foundation of the existential human being’s estrangement from the ground of his being, in relation to which alone the threat of nonbeing can be overcome. Yet without it, the human being would have remained in a state of innocent but apathetic unconsciousness, in which that true (that is, actual and conscious) ‘unity with the ultimate’, which Tillich defines as perfection, would have been impossible.107 Even in existence, then, anxiety remains critical in pointing to an ‘essential structure’, primarily by confronting the human being with the ‘shock of non-being’, and by thus causing him to ask about his being.108 As such, anxiety can, as Tillich and Kierkegaard agree, engender in the human being an awareness of his dependence on a transcendent saving reality (and thus what has been called ‘the freedom of faith’),109 as well as a state of despair.110 Tillich indeed portrays the Fall as a felix culpa insofar as the human being has to exist before he can accept the threat of nonbeing by turning towards, and consciously participating in, the ground of being, in which non-being is continually overcome.111 Existence nonetheless comes at a high price. Once the self has aggrandized itself by actualizing its freedom independently of its destiny, it is bound to do so again. The ontological balance characteristic of the human self has now been replaced by ‘a demonic structure’, which brings the existential self to ‘confuse natural self-affirmation with destructive self-elevation’.112 This is lethal, for the existential self ’s attempts to be the centre of everything result 107 Tillich, ‘Existential Analyses’, 372. Tillich, like Kierkegaard, considers pre-fallen man to be in a state of innocence but also of ‘dreaming’ ignorance and, thus, not of perfection. Cf. Kierkegaard, CA, 41 f. 108 Tillich, ‘Existential Analyses’, 372. 109 George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 11. 110 As has become evident, Tillich considers this to happen in Sartrean existentialism. In light of Kierkegaard’s views on love discussed in Chapter 2, one might conclude that Sartrean despair stems from the existentialist’s failure to accept commanded love and from his mistrust of the other, which Kierkegaard considers to be the inevitable effect of such a failure. 111 Tillich’s above-described account of the Fall itself arguably implies several problems. It is unclear, for instance, why ‘Adam-before-the-Fall’ would be unconscious of the union of essence and existence, yet conscious of his freedom and the threat of non-being. Most significantly, and as highlighted particularly by Niebuhr, Tillich’s highly Hegelian account appears to turn the Fall into a logical necessity—an allegation Tillich has denied by claiming that the Fall is not a logical or ‘structural necessity’ but an inevitable fact (Tillich, ST II, 50; Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Biblical Thought and Ontological Speculation in Tillich’s Theology’, in Charles Kegley, ed., The Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982), 252–63). However, accepting that the virtue of Tillich’s account of the human being lies not so much in its ability to explain the origins of the human predicament as in its ability to describe the state of this predicament, the nature of selfhood in its fullness and the challenge implied in realizing this, we need not concern ourselves with the legitimacy of his understanding of the Fall in any more detail. 112 Tillich, ST II, 59.

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in ‘its ceasing to be the centre of anything’.113 It is thus that self and world are increasingly disunited, until both cease to be a whole in any meaningful sense and are, instead, encountered as meaningless, empty, and even unreal. The self is then reduced to the status of an object that no longer has a world but that is enslaved to an environment, to which it does not belong. It is at this point, where the self has been uprooted from its essential ground, that anxiety turns into despair, which Tillich defines as ‘freedom aware of its servitude or finiteness which is separated from its infinity’, and which he detects in the contemporary existentialist consciousness.114 As Tillich points out, the German term Verzweiflung illustrates this well. Literally meaning ‘split-into-two-ness’, Verzweiflung is the state in which ‘parts of the self overtake the centre and determine it without being united with the other parts’, such that the self ’s vital and creative drives towards self-transcendence ‘move against one another’ and ‘split the person’.115 Here ‘the possibility of being at all’ is doubted.116 The root causes of this self-removal from the ‘divine centre’ are, as Tillich argues, ‘unbelief ’, or ‘the disruption of man’s cognitive participation in God’, and ‘hubris’, the attempt to make oneself the centre of oneself and of one’s world.117 Given its unlimited nature, the human being’s essential ‘desire to draw the whole of reality into [it]self ’ constitutes ‘concupiscence’, which, after unbelief and hubris, is the third in Tillich’s somewhat contested trilogy of sins.118 All of these sins lead to an unawareness of the possibility of overcoming estrangement—of the fact, that is, that being-itself continues to participate in the human being’s existential estrangement. They moreover prevent overcoming estrangement by mere effort and discourse. Subject to the ambiguities of existence, the existential self would be incapable of the necessary unambiguous response to non-being. Tillich recognizes that this is particularly acute in the case of the person who has already descended into despair. Despair, and the sense of guilt, doubt, and meaninglessness it entails, is what it is because the human being cannot see the consolation of essence even where it is shown to him. As Tillich powerfully argues in The Courage to Be, a lack of vision prevents vision; the sick cannot heal the sick. The most that a person caught in these existential straits can do of his own accord is to affirm himself not as he is essentially but as he is in his given situation. In this context, Tillich credits

114 Tillich, ST II, 70. Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 213. Tillich, ST II, 71, 73. 116 117 Tillich, in Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology, 69. Tillich, ST II, 54, 56. 118 Tillich, ST II, 59. Tillich’s emphasis on sin as hubris has been critiqued especially by feminists, such as Judith Plaskow, as failing to take into account the female tendency towards self-abnegation, and its potential sinfulness. See Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980). 113 115

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Sartre for possessing such ‘creative courage’ to accept and affirm even his own sense of doubt and meaninglessness.119

OVERCOMING SELF-ESTRANGEMEN T In Tillich’s eyes, Sartre’s philosophy captures not only the contemporary prevalence of existentialist despair, but also existence’s lasting connection with the ground of being. If there can be ‘creative courage’ even at the furthest end of estrangement from essential being, then ‘there is no self-affirmation of a finite being, and there is no courage to be, in which the ground of being and its power of conquering nonbeing is not effective’.120 Notwithstanding this important testimony, Sartre’s project provides no viable answer to how existential estrangement can be overcome. His failure to recognize that ‘the power of infinite self-transcendence is an expression of man’s belonging to that which is beyond non-being, namely, to being-itself ’ means that his courage ultimately fails to affirm the human being.121 Sartre’s identification of ‘beingfor-itself ’ with absolute freedom and nothingness means that non-being ultimately always has the final word. Sartre’s courage can therefore only accept and absolutize doubt and despair. It promotes a ‘destructive pessimism’, which, Tillich implies, ultimately ruins the self.122 Sartre’s position makes clear that salvation from the despair of existential estrangement rides on a shift in consciousness. It depends on an emergent awareness of the human being’s participatory relation with being-itself, which facilitates a conscious assumption of non-being into being. Such an awareness would entail also a recognition of human finitude, and an acceptance of human relatedness as well as human individuality. As we will see in the following chapter, Tillich considers this to be made possible through the ‘courage to accept acceptance’—a courage intimately connected with love.123

CONCLUSIO N Tillich’s account of the human self has been found to reflect his sensitivity, and desire to respond, to Sartre’s thought. The respective first poles of his 119

Tillich, TCB, 143. Tillich, TCB, 160. Note that I am here talking about a genuine self-affirmation of the self as it is (doubt and all), rather than the undue self-elevation discussed above. 121 122 Tillich, ST I, 212. Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 215. 123 Tillich, TCB, 154. 120

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ontological polarities (that is, self, individualization, dynamics, and freedom) reflect his endorsement of the human drive towards a free and creative affirmation of one’s individual self and thus of a transcendence of whatever enslaves and objectifies the human being. Tillich regularly underlines the theological legitimacy and significance of Sartre’s call for self-creation in the face of the threat of non-being (like, also, Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ and Freud’s ‘libido’).124 Much like these modern authors, he attributes to this lifeforce self-liberating capacities that are key to the flourishing of the individual human self. At the same time, Tillich remains faithful to a more Kierkegaardian heritage insofar as he judges that, in and of itself, this life-force is incapable of facilitating full human selfhood. Rather, its integrity and effectiveness depends on a balance with its constraining counterparts—the elements of participation, form, and destiny. In existence, such a balance has been upset. The ontological elements are here severed from one another. Existence as such does not, therefore, have the means to affirm itself. Arguing that this is an insight of the ‘Augustinian-Reformation type of theology’ that is being rediscovered and confirmed by modern psychotherapy and ‘pastoral psychology’, Tillich invokes psychology’s support for his proposal that the human being’s conquest of non-being depends on her relation with being-itself.125 The human being’s drive for self-transcendence is an implicit indicator of the human quest for such participation. Its fruitfulness, however, follows from its interdependence with the essentially conditioned nature of existential being. Notwithstanding the high regard Tillich has for modern thinkers such as Sartre (as well as Nietzsche and Freud) and the extent to which he draws on them, he thus considers their unwillingness to recognize the constraining— and yet enabling—counterparts of the human being’s life-force indicative of the extent to which their thinking is compromised by, and hence unable to overcome, existential estrangement. His verdict that Nietzsche and Freud conflate ‘man’s essential self-affirmation and his existential striving for power of being without limit’ can be extended also to Sartre.126 The human being enters into the fullness of his individual being not through the pursuit of an immanently and arbitrarily conceived project but in and through a relationship with his transcendent ground. This kind of a self-affirmation entails a form of relationality in which the other is neither relegated to the status of an object, nor left to his own 124 See the discussion, in Chapter 3, of Sartre’s understanding of anguish and the self as project. Tillich, ST I, 198, ST II, 62 f.; see also Tillich, TCB, 25–30, 119. 125 Tillich, ‘Impact of Psychotherapy’, 393. Regarding psychology a ‘doctrine . . . of man’, and convinced that man is ‘a unity and a totality’ and that therefore ‘all methods contribute to one and the same picture of man’, Tillich was adamant that his ideas must not contradict the conclusions of psychology (Tillich, ‘The Conception of Man’, 201). 126 Tillich, ST II, 63.

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individualistic pursuit of a project (as two varying interpretations of Sartre would have it): instead, this relationality recognizes the other as representative of nothing less than the ground of one’s own being, from which one is distinct, yet to which one belongs. Indeed, Tillich’s insistence that the individualization and participation of the human self are interdependent on one another steers clear both of Nygren’s advocacy of the self ’s total subjection to the o/Other and of Sartre’s dualism, in which the relation between self and other entails either a battle of consciousnesses or, at best, a tolerant respect for the other’s individual pursuit of his or her own project. With this, Tillich’s account of the self arguably helps resolve the tension inherent in Kierkegaard’s understanding of love, which seemed both to place self and other at a remove from each other (for example, Kierkegaard’s tendency to abstract from the other’s particularity) and to advocate their submergence in one another (for example, his suggestion that in real love the distinction ‘mine and yours’ is overcome). Tillich’s lovers, we can already see, are individuals who participate in one another. With a view towards our discussion of Tillich’s understanding of love in the following chapter, it is already worth highlighting that Tillich’s notion of the interdependency of individualization and participation is rooted in his understanding of the human being’s relation to its transcendent ground.127 As will become more apparent, it is only because there is an unconditioned reality from which we are distinct, yet to which we belong, and because this transcendent ground actively participates in existence, that the existential human being can, in turn, participate in the o/Other, and thus obtain a world and a self. Where such a mutual participation of the human being and her transcendent ground is realized, her spirit rises from ‘the conditioning psychological realm’ and, while absorbing this into itself, transcends this such that true freedom is attained.128 This actualization of the spirit through ‘the presence of the unconditioned in man’s reason’ is the foundation for human flourishing, because it enables the integration of the human being’s ‘eros, passion, imagination’ with the ‘logos-structures’—an integration indicative of the human being’s unity with being-itself.129 Unlike Sartre (and Nietzsche), who tend towards basing human self-integration on using the other ‘as a means’, Tillich is insistent that such self-integration can take place only where the other is ‘acknowledge[d] as person’.130 Hence, we can already see that, for Tillich, the foundations of full, free selfhood are tied to love.

127

128 Pattison, God and Being, 30. Tillich, ST III, 28. Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology, 65; Tillich, ST III; 25. 130 Jari Ristiniemi, Experiential Dialectics: An Inquiry into the Epistemological Status and the Methodological Role of the Experiential Core in Paul Tillich’s Systematic Thought, doctoral dissertation (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell Int., 1987), 62. 129

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5 Eros and Agape: Love in Paul Tillich Tillich has been shown to understand the human self as both essentially distinct from, and belonging to, the world and being-itself. It is therefore neither governed by a heteronomous power nor fully autonomous. We further saw that he considered the human urge for individual selfhood, freedom, and creativity to be a key part of the human being, without which she cannot transcend that which enslaves and objectifies her. Without her dynamic drive for self-development, the human being loses her self to the point of becoming incapable of reaching out to others. At the same time, it is precisely this drive which compels the human being to enter into communion with others. In and of itself, the kind of urge for individual self-development that Sartre endorses cannot enable the emergence of a full and flourishing self but depends on its constraining counterparts. In existence, so we saw, the connection between these different movements is severed, such that the various ontological polarities constituting the self are distorted. Their reordering depends on the human being’s participation in the ground of her being—a participation which the existential individual, being subject to the ‘ambiguities of existence’, cannot effect of her own accord. For the human being in existence, full selfhood thus depends on the initiative of beingitself. As I will now argue, it is in the context of these observations that Tillich develops a notion of selfless love which does not undermine but which supports the self and its dynamic drive for individuality and freedom.

REVEALED AND E XISTENTIAL LOVE More than in the case of his anthropology, Tillich develops his account of love through recourse to revelation, as well as through an existential perspective on the human being. Revelation leads him to posit that love is one, and identifiable with being-itself.1 Given that, in being-itself, the ontological polarities 1

Tillich, ST I, 310.

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are united, love, essentially, entails a balance and unity between the various ontological elements. Love therefore both enables and characterizes the essentialized state of the human being in which such ontological balance is actualized in existence. It entails liberation from existential estrangement and a corresponding realization of ‘the true expression of potential being’—or of what Tillich calls the ‘New Being’.2 Meanwhile, Tillich’s existential method leads him to find that the love of the existential human being consists less in the balanced unity of the ontological elements than in the desire for such unity. Love as encountered in existence is characterized precisely by the severance of the ontological polarities. According to Tillich’s existentialism, ‘love in all its forms is a drive towards the reunion of the separated’, and a form of desire.3 Quite in contrast to criticisms that he devalues existence by regarding it as ‘unreal’, Tillich indeed considers existential love to be indicative of an element in the love of being-itself.4 Tillich thus creates a tension between love as the unity of the ontological elements and love as the desire for such unity. Being-itself entails both dimensions. He proposes to resolve this tension by applying his concept of life to both love and being-itself. As he argues, ‘every life-process unites a trend toward separation [from the other] with a trend toward reunion [with the other]’.5 Thus, insofar as being-itself has ‘life’ (which, referring to the biblical notion of the ‘living God’, Tillich considers it does), it accommodates the separation of the ontological elements. The difference between the love of being-itself and love as manifest in existence is not, then, that the former knows no element of separation, but that in being-itself, where non-being is perpetually conquered, the respective trends towards separation and reunion are in ‘unbroken unity’, whereas in existence their ontological unity is broken.6 Essentially, love is a continually fulfilled desire for reunion. Existentially, this desire is yet unfulfilled. According to Tillich, then, both revelation and existence indicate that, even at its height, love is a constant becoming one. Love is not a static reality but a dynamic process, and is consistently characterized by a desire which revelation does not overcome but which it fulfils. At the same time, love’s rootedness in being-itself means that love cannot be reduced to desire in the sense of an emotion, and that love is interdependent on power and justice which, as revelation tells us, equally characterize being-itself.7 Love’s union with power means that it is not a powerless or chaotic surrender to the power of being, but that, in its fight against non-being, it ‘resists and condemns’ that which stands against the reunion of the separated in the divine life.8 Love’s union 2 4 5 8

3 Tillich, ST III, 137; ST II, 136 ff. Emphasis added. Tillich, LPJ, 28. Hamilton, System and the Gospel, 175; see also e.g. Osborne, New Being, 194 f. 6 7 Tillich, ST I, 310. Tillich, ST I, 310. Tillich, ST I, 310; LPJ. Tillich, ST I, 314; Tillich, LPJ, 114.

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with justice means that it ‘affirms the independent right of object and subject within the love relation’, which ensures that the freedom of the beloved is preserved.9

LOVE’S ROO TED NESS I N BEI NG Of the ontological elements discussed in Chapter 4, the polarity of individualization and participation, which perhaps expresses the interdependence of self and o/Other most starkly, plays a particularly central role in love. Love, Tillich argues, is ‘absent where there is no individualisation, and . . . can be fully realised only where there is full individualisation’.10 Given the interdependency of individualization and participation, this, inevitably, also means that love hinges on the human being’s participation in the o/Other. The existential rupture of the ontological polarity between individualization and participation then means that love in existence is distorted. One manifestation of this is that self and other and, with this, self-love and other-love, are perceived as diametrically opposed to one another. This finds expression, for instance, in the common supposition—and existential experience—of a dichotomy between love as eros and love as agape, and was illustrated in Chapter 3’s discussion of Nygren’s, Weil’s, and Sartre’s radical ideas on love. Tillich takes up the distinction between love as eros and love as agape and seeks to respond to their existential rupture. Defining all love as a longing for reunion, which implies fulfilment, he seeks to counter the division of love into a ‘desire for self-fulfilment by the other being’ (eros) and ‘the will to selfsurrender for the sake of the other being’ (agape) as indicative of a false alternative.11 In what follows, I show that, although Tillich does not simply conflate these desires, he considers it the mistake of the existential human being to view and practise them as two independent, and potentially conflicting, forms of love. True love, so my analysis of Tillich suggests, entails a concern with—indeed, the fulfilment of—self and other in conjunction with one another. Far from pursuing opposite ends, eros and agape constitute different ‘qualities of love’, both of which are geared towards reuniting what is separated and both of which are—somewhat surprisingly perhaps—oriented primarily towards the other.12 The primary distinction between these two modes of love, then, will be found to lie in their different sources (the existential human being and

9 11 12

10 Tillich, ST I, 313. Tillich, ST I, 310. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 114 (henceforth DF). Tillich, DF, 114.

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God respectively), and thus in the positions from which reunion of what is separated is sought.

LOVE’ S MANIFESTATION IN EXISTENCE

Love as Eros Tillich considers eros to possess ‘the greatness of a divine-human power’.13 Echoing traditional interpretations of Platonic eros, he defines it as a ‘movement of that which is lower in power and meaning to that which is higher’.14 As such, it is closely related to libido, ‘the movement of the needy toward that which fulfils the need’, and philia, ‘the movement of the equal toward union with the equal’.15 Eros is the human being’s unavoidable and legitimate ‘striving for the summum bonum’, and, hence, most perfectly manifest in one’s love for God.16 Indeed, eros is, in Tillich’s eyes, so closely associated with our love of God that one can legitimately speak of a human agapeic love towards God only if this can be united with eros.17 Eros is not only an inexorable aspect of the human being but without it, the human being’s love of God degenerates into meaningless ‘obedience to a moral law, without warmth, without longing, without reunion’.18 Without eros, human love of God deforms into ‘the opposite of love’, Tillich argues in clear contradistinction to Nygren.19 Tillich understands eros as a ‘mystical’ and ‘cultural’ reality, which includes a cognitive, a moral, and an aesthetic dimension.20 Eros’s reuniting function means it is, firstly, the ground of knowledge.21 It pushes the human being towards ‘the universals’ by way of which ‘man participates in the remotest stars and the remotest past’.22 It thereby helps the human being to acquire insight into the ground of being, God or ‘the Christ’, and thus leads towards a knowledge which ‘transforms and heals’ by conquering ‘want and estrangement’.23 In accordance with the mystical identification of God and the Good, eros, secondly, constitutes the explanation for the moral motivation of the will.24 For Tillich, eros transcends the ‘moral command without denying

13

14 15 Tillich, LPJ, 117. Tillich, ST I, 311. Tillich, ST I, 311. 17 18 Tillich, ST I, 312. Tillich, ST I, 312. Tillich, DF, 115. 19 Tillich, LPJ, 31. It is worth recalling that Nygren denies both the legitimacy of eros and the possibility of genuinely human love of God. 20 McKelway, Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich, 135. 21 22 23 Tillich, ST I, 195. Tillich, ST I, 195. Tillich, ST I, 106 f. 24 Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 59 (henceforth MB). 16

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it’, thus constituting the ‘transmoral motivation for moral action’.25 Eros, thirdly, functions as the ‘aesthetic state of man’s spiritual development’ and as ‘the driving force in all cultural creativity and in all mysticism’.26 He therefore considers theologians who, like Nygren, reject eros because they ‘depreciate culture’ and/or ‘deny a mystical element in man’s relation to God’, as failing to realize that religious and cultural rituals as well as theology itself depend on an eros towards beauty and truth respectively.27 Instead, Tillich, like Erich Fromm, perceives a clear correspondence between the ability to love one’s neighbour and that of loving ‘artistic expression[s] of ultimate reality’.28 Eros, then, transcends passing emotions and epithymia in the sense of ‘desire for pleasure’.29 It is neither a surface phenomenon, nor in search of superficial gratification. Instead, it emerges out of the depths of the self ’s personal centre and seeks to affirm and transform this centre by uniting it with its essential ground. As such, eros certainly seeks an affirmation of the self in its individual identity and signifies ‘the desire for self-fulfilment by the other being’.30 Yet, as will become clearer throughout the following, true eros implies the knowledge that this cannot be achieved by exploiting the other for one’s own ends but only through participating in the other and his or her good. As a love which seeks the fulfilment of the self, eros must, essentially speaking, entail a drive towards an increasing participation in the other, for individualization is dependent on participation.31 True eros thus seeks selffulfilment not in a competitive and selfish struggle with the other but ‘as an “I” to a “thou”’.32 It is marked by a loving concern for the other’s well-being as much as by self-affirmation. This already indicates the extent to which eros is closely tied to agape.

Love as Agape We have seen that eros is, at heart, an existential reality. By contrast, agape refers first and foremost to the revealed love of being-itself. Agape ‘affirms the other unconditionally, that is, apart from higher or lower, pleasant

25

26 27 Tillich, LPJ, 59. Tillich, LPJ, 117 f. Tillich, LPJ, 30. Tillich, LPJ, 31. For parallels between Tillich and Fromm see later discussion. 29 30 31 Tillich, LPJ, 30. Emphasis added. Tillich, DF, 114. Tillich, ST I, 312. 32 Tillich, LPJ, 31. This corresponds with other challenges to the conventional portrayal of Platonic eros as purely self-seeking and acquisitive. See e.g. Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 56 f.; Elizabeth Pender, ‘Spiritual Pregnancy in Plato’s Symposium’, Classical Quarterly, 42 (1992); Rowe, ‘Introduction’ to Plato, Symposium, 7; Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 29 f. 28

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or unpleasant qualities’—indeed, despite their ‘demonized’ state.33 Given its rootedness in an inner unity which entails its own fulfilment, agape can seek the other’s flourishing without any calculations. It is universal, preferring or excluding ‘no-one with whom a concrete relation is possible (the neighbour)’.34 It is independent of ‘contingent characteristics which change and are partial’, and it is able to ‘suffer and forgive’.35 It seeks the other and his good ‘because of the ultimate unity of being within the divine ground’ from which it emerges.36 Yet it ‘neither forces . . . nor leaves [the beloved]’, but ‘attracts him and lures him toward reunion’.37 Tillich clearly bases this interpretation of agape on a prior understanding of God as ‘work[ing] toward the fulfilment of every creature and toward the bringing-together into the unity of his [God’s] life all who are separated and disrupted’.38 Agape characterizes above all the divine love of being-itself. In existence, Tillich claims, this love manifests itself as the ‘Spiritual Presence’. Tillich bases this claim on a correlation of human experience and revelation. On the one hand, he argues that it is because the qualities of agape (such as its unconditionality and unchangability) are experienced as ‘blessedness (makaria or beatitudo in the sense of the beatitudes)’, that ‘agape can be applied symbolically to the divine life and its Trinitarian movement’.39 The experience of blessedness which agape evokes suggests that agape makes ‘the symbol of the divine blessedness concrete’.40 On the other hand, he claims that love as described above can be called by the name of agape because its qualities match those already connected with the divine love as portrayed in the biblical texts. In the context of agape, the conscious tension inherent in Tillich’s method— namely, the mutual determination of existential question and ontological answer—thus comes to light. Tillich, in short, accommodates the most central aspects of traditional interpretations of eros and agape, while rejecting Nygren’s attempt to place them in a dichotomous relation. He follows traditional interpretations of Platonic eros as an ontological pull or attraction back to one’s source and thus as a love of what is beautiful. Agape, by contrast, is love as its own source, unmotivated, gratuitous, and thus directed also at the sinner, at the estranged. It is a love which makes its object beautiful. While acknowledging these differences, Tillich considers an ‘absolute contrast between agape and eros’ to have the effect that agape is ‘reduced to a moral concept’, while eros becomes ‘profanised in a merely sexual direction and deprived of possible participation in unambiguous life’.41 It is because of his or her erotic desire for the fulfilment of self that the human being can joyfully receive and experience agape as a spiritual blessing. Vice versa, it is only under the governance of 33 36 39

Tillich, ST I, 311, 146. Tillich, ST I, 311. Tillich, ST III, 144.

34 Tillich, ST I, 311. Tillich, ST I, 314. 40 Tillich, ST III, 144.

37

38

35 Tillich, ST I, 311. Tillich, ST I, 310. 41 Tillich, ST III, 146.

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agape that eros reaches the true and the beautiful—that is, that it turns towards the ‘other’, in whom the desired fulfilment of self is to be found. Eros and agape thus share a distinct ‘point of identity’: both belong to the same ‘urge toward the reunion of the separated’, emanating, in the case of eros, from the disunity of the ontological elements that characterizes existential estrangement and, in that of agape, from these elements’ unbroken unity in being-itself.42 Although Tillich himself does not spell this out, his notion, discussed earlier, that the structure of being implies the interdependence of self and world (or ‘other’) further substantiates the unity of eros and agape. The agapeic lover can participate in the other only on account of his being a fully individualized self. In seeking full and fulfilled selfhood, which, according to Tillich, consists in perfect individualization and participation, eros thus pursues a goal that is complementary to agapeic love. Meanwhile, and as we shall see later on, eros’s proper functioning in existence rests on a prior reception of agape. In the human being at least, eros and agape evidently reinforce each other. And yet the existential human being tends to view eros and agape as diametrically opposed. This perception stands in the way of human flourishing insofar as it obstructs love’s proper functioning. In the following sections, I examine how precisely Tillich considers the opposition of eros and agape to manifest itself, and how he proposes it may be overcome.

Ambiguous Love While Tillich infers from love’s essential and revealed oneness that ‘no love is true love without the unity of eros and agape’, he is also conscious that this unity remains unrealized in existence, where the ontological polarities are ruptured.43 The ambiguities of existence cause love to become fractured and distorted. Its isolated fragments lose balance, become unlimited, and enter into conflict with each other. In existence, libido has, for instance, often ‘fallen under the tyranny of the pleasure principle’, using ‘the other’s being not as an object of reunion but as a tool for gaining pleasure out of him’.44 Where sexual desire thus ‘bypass[es] the centre of the other person’, it becomes destructive and evil.45 Mystical eros, in turn, can be confused with libido and drawn into the same ambiguity, such that human love towards God becomes impersonal or sexualized. (Tillich attributes the fact that the New Testament does not use the term eros to the prevalence of this distortion.) Especially in its cultural form, eros is bound to 42

Tillich, ST III, 146. Tillich, in Udo Kern, Liebe als Erkenntnis und Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit. ‘Erinnerung’ an ein stets aktuales Erkenntnispotential (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 98. 44 45 Tillich, LPJ, 117. Tillich, LPJ, 117; ST II, 62. 43

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detach ‘from the realities which it expresses’, thereby becoming mere ‘aesthetic enjoyment’ and preventing precisely the ‘existential participation and ultimate responsibility’ it is meant to enable.46 Agape, on the other hand, is at risk of being distorted into a concern for the other, in which individual selfhood is lost rather than built up. In short, Tillich considers existential estrangement to be a state wherein ‘the polarities which make up the dynamism of life [are] driven into conflict with each other in such a way that one may absorb the other’, thereby causing ‘self-loss, disintegration, non-being’.47 It is important to underline that, despite his sense that eros, libido, and philia are particularly prone to such distortions, Tillich does not simply dismiss these loves. In and of themselves they do not, in his eyes, ‘contradict the created goodness of being’, but rather manifest a drive without which ‘life would not move beyond itself ’ and without which human love of God would be meaningless and self-contradictory.48 Here, again, Tillich is clearly indebted to Sartre’s and others’ emphasis on the legitimacy, importance, and meaningfulness of the human being’s drive for self-transcendence and self-affirmation. In effect, Sartrean existentialism as well as depth psychology and the philosophy of life lead him to suggest, for instance, that libido can constitute a proper and natural ‘desire for vital self-fulfilment and not for the pleasure resulting from this union’, or that philia rests on a natural and universal desire of beings to be united with other beings.49 Tillich’s integrative efforts—his attempt, that is, to bring modern thought and classical Christianity to bear on one another—result in the claim that these loves can only achieve their intended goal, the affirmation and flourishing of the individual, if ‘passion’ is coupled with ‘truth’, ‘libido’ with ‘surrender’, and ‘will to power’ with ‘justice’.50 This coupling means that even libido, for instance, has a role in true love, yet that it does so as ‘the desire for vital self-fulfilment’ that cannot be attained without the other, rather than as the above-mentioned, more exploitative ‘desire for the pleasure resulting from . . . union’ with the other.51 Like his anthropology, Tillich’s account of love thus implies a critical appreciation of Sartre’s drive towards selfrealization, or Nietzsche’s will to power and Freud’s libido as both important ‘symbol[s] for man’s natural self-affirmation’ and indicative of man’s ‘power of being’; and yet, he again argues that these need to be nuanced in terms of making a distinction between ‘man’s essential self-affirmation and his existential striving for power of being without limit’, with only the former being commended.52 According to Tillich, true love, like being-itself, demands that

46

Tillich, LPJ, 117 f. John Dourley, Paul Tillich and Bonaventure: An Evaluation of Tillich’s Claim to Stand in the Augustinian-Franciscan Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 164. 48 49 50 Tillich, LPJ, 116; ST I, 311. Tillich, LPJ, 30. Tillich, ST I, 277. 51 52 Tillich, LPJ, 30. Tillich, ST II, 63. 47

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human power is combined with meaning. Only then is it capable of empowering the human being and leading her to genuine fulfilment, for only then does it do justice to the human being as ‘spirit’.

Love under the Spiritual Presence Although the dimension of spirit, which unites the human being with her ground, is an aspect of human essence, it is not fully actualized in existence. This would remain the case, were it not for the divine Spirit, in whom power and meaning are in perfect unity, and who pours out true love.53 As a result of the divine Spirit’s participatory presence in existential estrangement, human existence is marked not only by ‘structures of destruction’ but also by counterbalancing ‘structures of healing and reunion of the estranged’.54 Manifesting itself as the ‘Spiritual Presence’, the divine Spirit strives towards all creatures’ reunification with the ground of their being, and thus towards their fulfilment.55 It accepts the existential human being despite his or her unacceptability, and is capable of generating an ecstatic movement in the human spirit on account of which the human being becomes aware of the transcendent union of essence and existence. This movement, which implies the experience of an ‘ultimate concern’, ‘spreads healing forces over a personality in all dimensions of his being’ by reuniting the ontological elements, such that a ‘centred self ’ can emerge.56 Agape’s healing forces affect the human being in her entirety, that is, ‘the dimensions of the spirit, of psychological self-awareness, of bodily functions, of social relations and of historical self-realisation’.57 Its fruit is the New Being, or what St Paul calls a ‘New Creation’, which Tillich defines as ‘re-conciliation, re-union, re-surrection’.58 Implied in this is an awareness of the unity with God that results in an ‘astonishing experience of feeling reunited with one’s self, not in pride and false self-satisfaction, but in a deep self-acceptance’.59 Where the human being waits for, receives, and accepts the unconditional divine love conveyed by the Spiritual Presence, she accepts herself ‘as something which is eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted’.60 According to Tillich, this

53

54 55 Tillich, ST III, 118. Tillich, ST II, 86. Tillich, ST III, 137. Tillich, ‘The Impact of Psychotherapy’, 399. 57 58 Tillich, ‘The Impact of Psychotherapy’, 399. Tillich, NB, 20. 59 Tillich, NB, 22. 60 Tillich, NB, 22. It has been argued that Tillich’s notion of desiring and waiting for the New Being, which overcomes alienation and brings fulfilment, and which is inaugurated where the Spiritual Presence breaks into existence, closely corresponds to Simone Weil’s notion of attention which, in the French, has connotations both of waiting and of paying attention to (Heinsohn, ‘Vom Warten auf das Unverfügbare’, 84, 92). 56

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is the meaning and ground of all healing: ‘the reunion of one’s self with one’s self ’.61 The result of such acceptance is that the undistorted agape of the Spiritual Presence becomes a reality within the human being. Accepting the saving power of the divine agape is ‘the only unambiguous and all-inclusive sacrifice a human being can make’, and an act which (at least ‘fragmentarily’) saves the human being from the typical existential predicament of being uncertain about which of her potentialities to sacrifice.62 It allows her to participate in ‘the “communion of the Holy Spirit”’, where ‘the essential being of the person is liberated from the contingencies of freedom and destiny under the conditions of existence’.63 Once a person makes this sacrifice, agape takes ‘the personal centre into the universal centre [which corresponds with] the transcendent unity’.64 This counteracts the tendency of the existential self to draw into the unity of its centre also those aspects of the encountered world which contradict its essential being. Under agape, which ‘seeks the other one in his centre’ and sees him as God sees him, the ‘personal centre [of the self] is established in relation to the universal centre’.65 In the process of selfintegration, the human being is thus enabled to judge contents rightly and to appropriate only what befits her essential self.66 She is enabled to transcend the confining structures of existence and to participate in ‘the true expression of potential being’.67 A person’s finite freedom, then, is not undone by her participation in the New Being, but is now viewed and utilized realistically and authentically.

Agape’s Effect on Eros We found that in existence the various aspects of love enter into conflict with one another and consequently fail to lead their subject to fulfilment. By accepting the love of the Spiritual Presence, by contrast, the human person is reunited with the power of being. Since this founds the oneness of love as such, it enables the reordering and unification of the various aspects of a person’s love, until these are recognized as ‘lying within each other’.68 The divine agape’s ability to thus ‘unite with’, ‘judge’, and ‘transform’ existential eros, libido, philia, and agape results from its own unique ‘independen[ce]’.69 Agape has a distinct origin in the Spiritual Community, and shares in the structures of the New Being. It is embodied in Christ’s self-sacrificial love. The spiritual community from which agape issues forth can withstand the diversity

61 64 67

62 63 Tillich, NB, 22. Tillich, ST III, 286; Tillich, TCB, 5. Tillich, ST III, 286. 65 66 Tillich, ST III, 286. Tillich, ST III, 286. Tillich, ST III, 286. 68 69 Tillich, ST III, 137; ST II, 136 ff. Tillich, DF, 114. Tillich, ST III, 146.

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and tensions of love in existence, and is able to transform these in such a way that the ‘unity within the divine life’ becomes manifest.70 As already indicated, agape does not create unity by dismissing but by affirming the various, more erotic aspects of human love. At the same time, the existentially distorted and fruitless erotic desire for the fulfilment of self is educated and transformed by agape so that it can manifest itself truthfully. Eros then continues to seek the fulfilment of the self but is now enabled to do this not through utilizing the other but through entering into a relation with them within which eros seeks the other’s good. Agape thereby prevents erotic desire from ‘becoming an aesthetic enjoyment without ultimate seriousness’.71 It similarly ‘makes sexual love (libido) seek the fulfilment of others . . . and causes communal love (philia) to accept in love that which is unacceptable’.72 Far from imposing simply an asceticism, then, agape embraces the self-affirming aspects of love typically captured by the terms eros, libido, and philia.73 In Tillich’s eyes, agape is thus ‘the norm and standard for every other type of love’ and ‘expresses the ontological basis for all love in being-itself ’.74

LOVE AND THE SELF

Love’s Effect on the Self We have already touched on the implications Tillich’s previously described account of love has for the flourishing of the human self. Tillich, we saw, grounds human flourishing in a balanced unity of ‘centred personality, selftranscending vitality, freedom of self-determination’ (power) on the one hand and ‘universal participation, forms and structures of reality, limiting and directing destiny’ (meaning) on the other.75 He similarly claims that the fullness of being includes ‘passion as much as truth, libido as much as surrender, will to power as much as justice’.76 Only if these poles are in unity is the spirit of the human being actualized. If one pole gains the upper hand, the outcome is either ‘abstract law or chaotic movement’.77 On the one hand, then, the agapeic Spiritual Presence affirms the subject’s erotic drive for creativity and self-expression, yet on the other hand, the human being’s eros requires ‘ascetic discipline’—or ‘the conquest of a subjective self-affirmation 70

71 72 Tillich, LPJ, 116. Tillich, LPJ, 118. Tillich, LPJ, 116 f. Agape does allow for a ‘disciplinary asceticism’. Contrary to ‘ontological asceticism’, this does not reject ‘things because of the material in them’ (Tillich, MB, 42). 74 75 McKelway, Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich, 135. Tillich, ST I, 276. 76 77 Tillich, ST I, 277. Tillich, ST I, 277. 73

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which prevents participation in the object’.78 In order to achieve this balancing act, the subject must allow itself to be ‘determined by that which transcends subject and object, the Spiritual Presence’.79 The unity of seemingly opposite poles corresponds with a unity also of love. In enabling the human being to achieve the unification of love, the divine agape not only tolerates the freedom and individuality of the beloved but re-establishes these. For where fragmented love enslaved the human being to a range of conflicting ends, reintegrated love provides the human being with the freedom to move forward and transcend her self-enclosed state. In the same vein, the agapeic love of the Spiritual Presence does not, according to Tillich, ‘violate the structures of the beloved’s [or the lover’s] individual and social existence’.80 Since the communion it wants to establish depends on the self-integration and centredness of the individual, who is ‘both the subject and the object of love’, agape ‘maintains the identity of the self without impoverishing the self, and . . . drives toward the alteration of the self without disrupting it’.81 The divine agape further liberates the human beloved and enables her attainment of true individuality by allowing her to genuinely confront and accept her finite freedom. By providing the human being with the ‘courage to be’, it ‘conquers the double anxiety which logically . . . precedes the transition from essence to existence, the anxiety of not actualising one’s essential being and the anxiety of losing oneself within one’s self-actualisation’.82 It thereby institutes the New Being on account of which the human being is redeemed from the existential estrangement effected by the Fall. Thus, if the acceptance of the agapeic love of the Spiritual Presence enables the transformation of existential human love, it does so both in full respect for and for the sake of the individual human self. For, as Tillich agrees with Nietzsche, ‘a love relation is creative only if an independent self enters the relation from both sides’.83 True love can issue only from an individualized self and can do its work only if it is received and accepted by a (relatively) individualized self. Similarly, while the acceptance of the divine agape requires the human being to empty herself of ‘a false form of hubristic human power’, it comes not at the cost of, but promotes, life and its possibilities for ‘vital self-expression’.84 Spirit and life increase correlatively. The notion that agape can break into existence and reunite what is separated (the human self and its ground, eros and agape, the ontological elements) 78

79 80 Tillich, ST III, 225. Tillich, ST III, 225. Tillich, ST I, 313. 82 Tillich, LPJ, 27; ST III, 287. Tillich, ST III, 287. 83 Tillich, ST I, 313. Cf. Nietzsche’s statement that ‘A man must first be firmly poised, he must stand securely on his two legs, otherwise he cannot love at all’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 64). 84 Coakley, ‘Kenosis’, 206; Tillich, ST III, 255. 81

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without requiring the sacrifice of individual identity and freedom, contradicts Sartre’s view that a loving reception of what is other than self comes at the cost of individual freedom. Sartre’s account of selfhood and freedom prescribes that the human individual must seek not to be transformed, but merely to be recognized by the other.85 It is on account of his sense of the interdependency of individualization and participation, and of freedom and destiny, that Tillich disagrees with such a portrayal. Yet while Tillich thus rejects understandings of love as a quest for personal power, it should also have become clear that this does call for a total ‘resignation of power’.86 According to him, Christian thinkers who associate love with sheer powerlessness misunderstand power in compulsory terms, and falsely conceive of love as a purely emotional or ethical rather than ontological reality.87 Tillich’s conviction that true love affirms at least a type of ‘will to power’, that it embraces eros, philia, and libido, and that it endorses and fosters human freedom, individuality, and power, raises the question of the nature and validity of self-love. I now consider this question before demonstrating why Tillich’s account of love can be understood as one of selfless love.

Love, Eros, and Self-Love Tillich distances himself from process theologians and argues that, since God is beyond ‘the fulfilment and non-fulfilment of reality’, God does not desire his own fulfilment.88 Tillich indeed finds that the terminology of eros, libido, and philia can only be applied to the divine love in ‘poetic-religious symbolism’ and is subordinate to the symbol of agape.89 By contrast, he appears to associate eros with the human desire for the fulfilment of self. In light of this, it is all the more striking that Tillich willingly speaks of a divine self-love, and on the other hand follows Spinoza in ‘hesitat[ing]’ to use the concept of a human ‘self-love’.90 Tillich indeed considers it possible to think of the divine agape as self-love, but, in the context of human love, prefers to distinguish between the various phenomena to which he argues ‘self-love’ can refer, that is, between active self-affirmation, natural self-acceptance, and the selfishness Nygren (and, to some extent, Kierkegaard) were shown to identify as self-love.91 This is not to say that Tillich makes no reference to a human form of ‘proper’ self-love—yet he clearly thinks of this as a love directly

85

86 87 Sartre, BN, 379. Tillich, LPJ, 11. Tillich, LPJ, 11. 89 Tillich, ST I, 312. Tillich, ST I, 312. 90 Tillich, TCB, 22; see e.g. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), III, prop. 55, schol. and IV, prop. 48. 91 Tillich, LPJ, 34, ST I, 313. 88

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associated with agape: insofar as the divine love invites and demands human self-love, it invites self-love ‘in the sense of agape’.92 In order to understand what Tillich means by such self-love, we must turn to his discussion of the love between the Trinitarian personae. Classical theological descriptions of these persons are, Tillich argues, ‘a statement about God loving himself ’.93 As he sees it, the Trinitarian nature of God symbolizes, on the one hand, an element of ‘separation’ within the divine life.94 It is through this that God loves himself. On the other hand, the Trinitarian nature of God symbolizes God’s separation from himself, which manifests itself in God’s creation of free human beings. By loving these beings, even in their estrangement, God ‘fulfils his love of himself ’—not because he needs reunion with what is estranged from him in order to be fulfilled, but because he thereby fully acts out the love which constitutes him, and of which the free and gratuitous spilling out to the other in creation and redemption is an intrinsic feature.95 The Trinitarian nature of God, Tillich argues, indicates both that God loves himself by loving the other within God-self (another Trinitarian person), and that God fulfils his love of himself by loving the other outside of God-self (the creature). In a sense, the divine agape thus undoes the commonly held binary opposition between self-love and other-love, in that it is always directed to the other and her good, yet simultaneously loves itself in doing so. It teaches that the self can be loved not directly but, to play with a Ricoeurian phrase, only as—and in—another.96 This has important ramifications also for human self-love. In keeping with his insistence that all human love must be placed under the criterion of the divine agape, Tillich argues that it is only insofar as ‘the human being joins himself to God’s Trinitarian love’ and loves himself in the sense of agape that he can be said to genuinely love himself at all.97 More direct forms of human self-love, such as ‘self-affirmation, libido, friendship and eros’ are consequently thought to collapse into a ‘selfishness which is always connected with selfcontempt and self-hate’.98 In order to truly love himself, the human being must instead follow the Trinitarian example of loving himself as another— ‘himself as the eternal image in the divine life’.99 Only then is he united with the ground of his being, and is his love rescued from existential estrangement and its distortions.

92

93 Emphasis added. Tillich, ST I, 313. Tillich, ST I, 313. This must be distinguished from the existential separation of estrangement. 95 Tillich, ST I, 313. Tillich does not, to my mind, make sufficiently clear what exactly is meant by the statement that, in loving the creature, God ‘fulfils his love of himself ’. In any case, it does not seem to indicate that God needs the creature for his own fulfilment (Tillich insists, for instance, that we can speak of a divine eros only metaphorically). See Tillich, ST I, 312. 96 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Tillich, ST I, 313. 97 98 99 Tillich, ST I, 313. Tillich, ST I, 313. Tillich, ST I, 313. 94

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By calling all self-love to be placed ‘under the criterion of self-love in the sense of agape’, Tillich suggests that the self truly loves itself by going out to, and desiring the fulfilment of, the other.100 Though not obliterated, the distinction between eros and agape is thereby blurred in a manner highly relevant to the connection between selfless love and human flourishing. If eros desires the fulfilment of self, it must orientate itself precisely away from the existential self and towards the self ‘as the eternal image in the divine life’—an image that is encountered in and through relationship with the o/Other. Precisely in its self-concern, eros, too, is other-oriented, therefore. At the same time, the agapeic concern for the other leads, precisely, to the fulfilment of self desired by eros. These reflections also entail the important claim, which Tillich does not fully work out, that the human being can truly love himself only upon having received the other-oriented self-love of another—God—as a gift. We must be loved (and allow ourselves to be loved) before we can love ourselves. Tillich illustrates this human need for receiving and accepting love in his sermon, ‘The New Being’. Here Tillich argues that the human person is naturally ‘hostile, consciously or unconsciously, toward those by whom one feels rejected’.101 Where this is the case, she is likely to extend this hostility also to others and even to herself, such that self-love becomes impossible. This mechanism can be broken not by attempting to make oneself liked by the other, but only by allowing oneself to be taken up into the divine self-love, which reaches out even into estranged existence and which fully accepts the estranged human being.102 Implicitly at least, Tillich thus connects the flourishing of the individual self with being loved, and with allowing oneself to be loved—a point to which I return in Chapter 8. Finally, we can conclude that Tillich does consider eros to possess a definite role in self-love. Yet far from promoting a direct, circular kind of self-love, true eros, which seeks the fulfilment of self by moving the human being towards the good and the beautiful, undergirds precisely the movement towards that which lies above and beyond the self. As such, it assists the human being’s dwelling within the divine self-love. With these various considerations, Tillich clearly distances himself from simple condemnations of human self-love. In light of God’s self-love, human self-love must rather be seen as an intrinsic aspect of the imago dei. At the same time, Tillich challenges unchecked endorsements of human self-love, and instead suggests that the human being’s love of herself and her world is true love only if it ‘penetrate[s] through the finite to its infinite ground’.103 Since the ‘divine self-love includes all creatures’, self-love of the human kind equally ‘includes everything with which man is existentially united’.104 Such 100 103

Tillich, ST I, 313. Tillich, ST II, 54.

101 104

Tillich, NB, 20. Tillich, ST I, 313.

102

Tillich, NB, 21 f.

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true self-love ‘is not an isolated act which originates in the individual being but is participation in the universal or divine act of self-affirmation, which is the originating power in every individual act’.105 Thus, what seems like imposing a limitation on self-love—Tillich’s insistence on the need for human self-love to be placed under the criterion of agape—in fact enables self-love, and does so in direct support of the good of the other. Indeed, self-love entails love of the other or is intertwined with it to the point of being entirely interdependent with it. It is far removed, therefore, from the self-centredness we saw Nygren attribute to self-love. We may close by noting that much of the above suggests Erich Fromm’s influence on Tillich’s account of love and the self. Tillich would have met Fromm regularly during their years as members the ‘New York Psychology Group’,106 and approvingly refers to his thought on love in The Courage to Be.107 According to Fromm, much of Christian theology, as well as the views of modern secular thinkers like Max Stirner, Nietzsche, and Freud, suffer from a mechanical juxtaposition of self-love and other-love, as well as an undifferentiated association of self-love with egoism and selfishness. Fromm rejects the notion—in his eyes, Calvinist and Kantian—‘that love for others and love for oneself are alternatives’, and argues instead that ‘the attitude towards others and towards ourselves, far from being contradictory, basically runs parallel’.108 Tillich embraces this Frommian idea that ‘the right self-love and the right love of others are interdependent, and that selfishness and the abuse of others are equally interdependent’—an idea according to which the trouble with the ordinary human being is not that she has too much but that she has too little self-love.109 At the same time, Tillich expands this by introducing the need for the grace of the Spiritual Presence.

Love and the Courage to Be The acceptance of such grace—of God’s own love—requires courage: ‘the courage to accept acceptance’.110 Such courage, in which the human being accepts God’s attempt to take him or her into his own self-love, is the first step towards the ‘courage to be’.111 This, in turn, unites the ‘courage to be as oneself ’, or an affirmation of the self as a ‘separated, self-centred, individualised, incomparable, free, self-determining self ’, with the ‘courage to be as a 105

106 Tillich, TCB, 23. The group met in the years 1941–5. Tillich, TCB, 22. 108 Erich Fromm, ‘Selfishness and Self-Love’, Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes (Washington, DC: William Alanson Psychiatric Foundation), Vol. 2 (1939), 1–21, at 3, 7. 109 110 Tillich, TCB, 22; Fromm, ‘Selfishness and Self-Love’, 18. Tillich, TCB, 155 ff. 111 Tillich, TCB, 86. 107

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part’, or an affirmation of the self as ‘participant’, that is, of oneself as ‘a part of something from which one is, at the same time, separated’, yet without which one would not be oneself.112 Tillich identifies the courage to be as the act of affirming being ‘by taking non-being upon oneself ’.113 As indicated in the previous chapter, he judges that it is only through participation in the divine ‘power of being which prevails against non-being’ that being can be affirmed in spite of nonbeing.114 Though affirming the self, the courage to be is not an individualistic or autonomous assertion of power over another self, but rather consists in the human being’s participation in the divine self-affirmation.115 Tillich’s discussion of courage reflects, and corresponds to, the notion that self-love depends on a prior reception of the divine love—a reception Tillich identifies with faith.116 It also suggests, however, that this perfect love need not necessarily be received consciously: faith can be implicit as well as conscious and explicit. It is imaginable that the person with merely implicit faith, and lacking conscious knowledge of herself ‘as the eternal image in the divine life’, nonetheless succeeds in affirming this true self. However, in Sartre’s attempt at affirming himself in spite of declaring the non-being of the self, this is not the case. For, in the face of doubt and meaninglessness, Sartre attempts to affirm himself solely by way of the courage to be as oneself, or independently of the courage to be as a ‘part’.117 We saw that, since he considers the other to be a potential threat or compromise to a person’s self-development, Sartre proposes that the person seek to control the other. He thereby argues against the surrender that is entailed in daring to make oneself part of a larger whole. Sartre lacks the courage to expose himself to the other despite the anxious perception that she is a threat to the self. This, I take Tillich’s argument to imply, is intertwined with a lack of courage to accept the divine acceptance, and thus to allow oneself to be grasped by, and to participate in, the unconditioned. Without this courage, which rides on a prior ‘experience of love’, the trust that is required for participation in the human other remains unfounded.118

SELFLESS LOVE IN PAUL TILLICH Having engaged in in-depth analyses of Tillich’s thought on the self and on love, it is time to evaluate these with regard to the core question of our study: can we meaningfully speak of love as selfless, and yet as building up the human 112

113 114 Tillich, TCB, 86–9, 113, 86. Tillich, TCB, 86. Tillich, TCB, 181. 116 117 Tillich, TCB, 89, 181. Tillich, ST III, 298. Tillich, TCB, 152. 118 Pattison, God and Being, 32. See ‘The New Being’, and, as Pattison points out, ‘Love is Stronger than Death’ (in Tillich, NB, 15–24, 170–4; Pattison, God and Being, 32 n.). 115

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self? Tillich’s thought, I now wish to argue, provides us with key conceptual resources for answering this question in the affirmative. Let me briefly recapitulate the core points of Tillich’s accounts of love and the self. In the previous chapter we found Tillich placing self and world in a dialectical relationship. We have a self to the extent that we have a world and vice versa. Or, differently put, we are individuals in and through participating in our environment (and, again, vice versa). This framework allowed Tillich to incorporate into his systematic theology Sartre’s emphasis on the human self as a self-constituting and dynamically developing reality striving for ever greater levels of individuality and freedom, while avoiding Sartre’s absolutist and unrealizable individualism and the despair to which this leads. In order to bear fruit, Tillich consistently argued, the Sartrean drive for personal fulfilment must be rooted in an acceptance of the context in which this drive operates (the world), and of this drive’s fertile ground (being-itself). As Tillich conceives it, then, the self can be built up only where the existential human being understands that he neither simply possesses his self nor constitutes it autonomously, but that true selfhood is obtained gradually and graciously, in and through a participatory relationship with that which is other than self. Tillich’s insistence that eros is characteristic primarily of existence means that it is embedded in this state of affairs. The existential human being’s erotic desire for the fulfilment of self is, as Tillich seems to imply, a function of this ontological ‘self-lessness’—self-less in the sense of the incompleteness and contingency of her self. In this sense, then, the human being loves, or must love, because she is selfless. Yet, as we saw above, the ambiguities of existence tempt the individual to divorce eros, the legitimate desire for the fulfilment of self, from agape, which manifests itself as ‘the will to self-surrender for the sake of the other being’.119 This is problematic insofar as the ontological structure of being, which includes the interdependency of self and world, prescribes that eros can reach its goal only in direct relation to the agapeic concern for the fulfilment of the other. Given that the most perfectly individualized reality—God—is also the most participatory, individual human fulfilment depends on loving participation in the world. In their interconnectedness, agape and eros are two sides of the same coin, the desire for the reunion of what is separated, which Tillich defines as the essence of all love.120 Reunion always entails and affects at least two parties and must therefore comprise the desire for the fulfilment of self and the concern for the other. It must comprise the more existential eros, which emerges from the human being’s separation from God and self, and the more

119

Tillich, DF, 114.

120

Tillich, ST III, 146.

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divine agape, which is grounded in God’s self-identity, his perfect unity with himself. We can already note that, notwithstanding their different grounds, both of these modes of love are directly associated with two kinds of selflessness: eros is the mark of selflessness in the literal, ontological sense; it is a function of the existential human being’s lack of, and desire for, a self. Agape by contrast is marked by selflessness in the figurative, spiritual-moral sense. It is a love in which the lover does not hold on to his self but generously shares himself and his love with the other. We saw that Tillich pushes beyond the polarity of eros and agape as much as he advocates it. On the one hand, he see eros and agape in a hierarchical order, wherein agape is the criterion under which eros, and all related forms of human love, must be placed. Given its rootedness in God, who is self-identical, agape is one and untouched by the ambiguities of existence. In combination with its outward-going and generously self-giving quality, it can thus redeem the various modes of human love by uniting them under its wing. On the other hand, Tillich also portrays the agape of the Spiritual Presence as true self-love, thus challenging the kind of conventional definitions of eros and agape he himself also draws upon. The divine agape never turns in on itself but always goes out to the other and their good (whether this is the internal or the external other, another Trinitarian person or the creature). Yet, it loves itself in doing so. The self, so the divine love teaches, can be loved only as and through another. In addition to providing us with an account of erotic love as grounded in literal selflessness, and of agapeic love as a figurative selflessness, Tillich thus also insists that it is in and through agapeic selflessness that the erotic desire for fulfilment of self is satisfied. Tillich’s placing of eros under the criterion of agape implies that erotic self-love is realised in and through a selfless (agapeic) going out to the other and seeking their good. This agapeic ‘going out’ is, first and foremost, that of the Spiritual Presence, which the human being must receive in order to be united with that ground of her being without which her true self, whose fulfilment eros properly desires, will not even come into view. As I noted, the reception of this love rides both on the courage to accept acceptance and on an openness towards participating in the other. At the same time, the agape which forms the criterion for eros refers also to the human being’s selfless concern for the human other, who reflects the image of God and thus brings the human being into closer communion with the ground of her being. The same agape can, finally, also refer to the human being’s love of God. Yet it is here that the distinction between eros and agape is fully blurred: God is the fulfilment of the human self that eros desires, yet he is also other than self and must be loved as such. True love, Tillich thus argues, includes self and other equally, yet does so not in the form of two separate movements but in one single movement of loving the other. For, as ‘the agape quality of love drives to acceptance of the beloved and his transformation into what he

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potentially is’, ‘the eros quality of love drives to union with the beloved in that which is beyond the lover and the beloved’.121 On Tillich’s account, then, self-fulfilment is intricately intertwined with selfless love: it depends (1) on the impetus of eros, a mode of love that derives from the human being’s ontological ‘selflessness’ and that, being unable to facilitate human fulfilment in and of itself, prepares the human being to (2) receive the figuratively selfless love of God, which (3) reunites the human being with the ground of his being and thereby enables him to love himself truly and selflessly, namely by turning away from his existential self and towards God, the world, and ‘himself as the eternal image of the divine life’. The reception of the selfless love of God requires the ‘courage to accept acceptance’, and it is for the sake of such courageous acceptance that Tillich so strongly endorses Sartre’s impulse for self-affirmation in the face of non-being. It is only where the human being is open to affirmation that she will be able to garner the courage to accept the divine love. Sartre’s philosophy supports such openness, even if Sartre falsely assumes that the human being must affirm herself directly. Far from rejecting the human being’s quest for the affirmation, development, and fulfilment of self, Tillich endorses this while at the same time turning it on its head. As we have seen, he suggests that the human yearning and impulse for (self-)affirmation enables the human being to be taken up into God’s selfless love, and thus to seek her fulfilment by placing the desire for it under the criterion of the agapeic will to self-surrender for the sake of the other. Insofar as Tillich’s account of love can be said to issue in a notion of selfless love, this selfless love overcomes the juxtaposition of self- and other-love. Though more indirectly, it is as concerned with the good of the self as with that of the other. Quite obviously, it is then distinct from, and even fundamentally at odds with, mere selflessness in the sense of an absolutist and morally driven self-effacement or self-denial. As love, which Tillich has been shown to define as desire, it consists not in a moral duty heteronomously imposed on the self and devaluing the self or subordinating it to the other, but in a desirous and free movement involving the lover in his or her entirety— namely, emotionally, cognitively, and even bodily. Grounded in the interdependency of self and other, it satisfies the lover’s need and desire for fulfilment as much as that of the beloved. At the same time, Tillich’s ‘selfless love’ never revels in itself but always remains turned towards the other. Similarly to Gabriel Marcel’s suggestion that the joy of generosity vanishes once one enjoys one’s own generosity, Tillich implies that the fruits of true love, the up-building of the self, depend

121

Emphasis added. Tillich, DF, 116.

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on love’s other-centredness.122 Tillich’s selfless love is not calculating, therefore, but entails a readiness for ‘holy self-waste’.123 In his sermons, Tillich suggests that love emerges from an ‘abundant heart’. Commenting on the text from Mark 14:3–9, ‘Why was this ointment wasted?’, Tillich maintains that ‘giving love’ can involve the ‘waste of an uncalculated self-surrender’, a selfwaste ‘beyond the limits of law and rationality’ ‘in service of a new creation’.124 He describes the divine ‘wasteful self-surrender’ as a traditionally Lutheran insight which has largely been lost to a ‘religious and moral utilitarianism which always asks for the reasonable purpose’.125 As he argues, law, conventions, and a rigid self-control have all served to stifle occasions to waste ourselves and to repress the ‘creative abundance of the heart’.126 In claiming that contemporary human beings suffer not only from receiving too little love but also from their lack of possibilities ‘to waste themselves’, Tillich relates even the notion of self-waste back to the concern for human flourishing: self-waste, he implies, is a fundamental human need, engrained in essential being.127 A notion of selfless love as based on Tillich’s thought on love and the self thus mediates between Nygren and Sartre, while qualifying the claims of both. Tillich’s selfless love leads to what he describes as ‘theonomous personal fulfilment’—a fulfilment that is based neither on autonomy nor on heteronomy but that is rooted in the human being’s relationship with a reality that is distinct from the self but also its ground.128 Contrary to the ‘humanistic idea of man which actualizes what man can be directly and without sacrifice,’ this fulfilment depends on recognizing one’s dependency in terms of the sacrifice of ‘all human potentialities’ to the Spiritual Presence, which seeks to take the human being into its love.129 Such a sacrifice is rewarded by a transformation and a return of these potentialities ‘back into the limits of man’s finitude’, which results in a greater freedom than could be attained through autonomous self-assertion.130

122

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being. Vol. II: Faith and Reality, trans. G. S. Fraser (Southbend, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), 119. See also Nocke’s observation that ‘in love the human being realises himself, but not by concentrating on this self-realisation, but precisely through letting go and turning towards the beloved “thou”, as love commands’ (F.-J. Nocke, Liebe, Tod und Auferstehung: über die Mitte des Glaubens (Munich: Kösel 1993), 91 in Joachim Drumm, ‘Liebe. IV. Systematisch-Theologisch’, 912–15, at 914, in Walter Kasper et al., eds., Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. Vol. 6 (Freiburg: Herder, 2009) (my translation)). As Drumm argues, it is on this dialectical principle alone that one can resolve the dispute between ‘Bossuet, who holds that human love of God and the desire for happiness belong together’, and ‘Fénelon, who de facto separates love from hope’ (Drumm, ‘Liebe’, 914 (my translation)). 123 124 125 Tillich, NB, 47. Tillich, NB, 47. Tillich, NB, 47. 126 127 128 Tillich, NB, 48. Tillich, NB, 47. Tillich, ST III, 289. 129 130 Tillich, ST III, 289. Tillich, ST III, 289.

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DIFFI CULTIES W ITH T ILLI CH’S AC C OU NT OF SELFLESS LOVE Notwithstanding its creative potential, Tillich’s thought on love and the self entails various difficulties, which I must address before bringing the present discussion to a close. Primary among these is Tillich’s depersonalizing tendency regarding both God and the human being.

Depersonalizing Tendency In the previous chapter, we saw that Tillich defines the fully individualized self as a person, and considers this to emerge in and through participatory communion with other persons. In this chapter, Tillich was shown to hint at the personal relations within God by referring to the inner-Trinitarian love relations. That Tillich is sensitive to the special dignity articulated in the notion of personhood is further indicated by his appreciation of what he considers to be the Protestant emphasis on the ‘unmediated, person-to-person encounter with God’.131 These statements would seem to suggest that the dimension of personhood is central to Tillich’s account of love. Tillich seems aware of the extent to which this dimension encapsulates both the foundations and the essence of our humanity, or the context in which we rise to full selfhood as well as the nature of that selfhood. Classically considered to be the seat of an intellect and a will, the notion of the ‘person’ is moreover that reality of being which is most capable of knowing another and willing his good; the ‘person’, so considered, seems to support Tillich’s call for placing love under the criterion of agape. Tillich nonetheless fails to grant the personal dimension a key role in his theology. His doctrine of God, in particular, serves to undermine his insights into the dignity of personhood. In line with his general tendency towards abstraction, Tillich considers the personal God a ‘confusing symbol’ for beingitself, and settles on the claim that God/being-itself is neither ‘a person’ nor ‘less than personal’.132 Without further specification of what this means, God—it seems—is to be considered more than personal, or supra-personal. Tillich is arguably driven here by the worthy intention of avoiding conceptualizing God as a being and to avoid ‘tritheism’.133 Yet his caution leads him towards a veritable neglect of the personal self-revelation and presence of the Christian God. Such an impression is reinforced by the fact that, as A. J. McKelway and others have observed, Tillich barely addresses the

131

Tillich, DF, 116.

132

Tillich, ST I, 271.

133

Tilllich, ST I, 271; ST III, 302.

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particular historical person Jesus.134 As the above analysis indicates, his account of love is entirely divorced from references to the life of Jesus Christ. In fact, Tillich’s rather scant attention to the Trinitarian nature of God, and thus to God’s own personal relationality, is equally indicative of the a-personal rather than supra-personal nature of his account of love. As we have seen, he does not ignore the Trinity. Yet in treating this divine mystery, he refers to Father, Son, and Spirit primarily abstractly and a-personally as ‘symbolic names’,135 and—apart from the passage discussed above136—fails to explore how the love between these ‘names’ can, and should, serve as a central interpretative Christian framework for understanding the nature of love. Tillich’s underemphasis on the Christian belief that God acted in a distinct individual in history causes him to underplay the extent to which Christian salvation, and hence human fulfilment, consists in personal knowledge of a personal life.137 Similarly, it prevents Tillich from fully confronting the extent to which ‘the revelation of the inaccessible ground and abyss of being’ is geared towards ‘our centre of personality’, which this abstractly defined reality supposedly seeks to grasp.138 Asking ‘how one still can have a personal encounter with something or someone that is more than a person’, Hans Schwartz has gone so far as to conclude that Tillich considers it ‘impossible to have a relationship with God in the proper sense of the word’.139 R. A. Killen has, similarly, found that ‘a God who is not a person . . . cannot really love or be loved’.140 These may be exaggerations, failing to observe that ‘personality’ need not be reduced to ‘a’ personal being,141 and ignoring the fact that Tillich decidedly embraces the notion that God loves the human being and that human beings can love God. Nonetheless, Tillich’s account of God would seem to suggest that God’s inner-Trinitarian love, as well as love between God and the human being, is of an impersonal nature. There clearly exists a tension, then, between Tillich’s anthropology, wherein he endorses the notion of personhood, and his theology, wherein he disparages it. This discrepancy weakens Tillich’s case that the divine agape—selfless love—satisfies the erotic desire for the fulfilment of self. Arguably compromising the role human communion plays in mediating God’s love, it furthermore fosters an individualist spirituality and ethic, and thus compromises

134

McKelway, Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich; R. Allan Killen, The Ontological Theology of Paul Tillich (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1956), 275; Hamilton, System and the Gospel, 186. 135 136 Tillich, ST III, 301. Tillich, ST I, 313. 137 This is pointed out by Hamilton, System and the Gospel, 189. 138 Hans Schwartz, ‘Open Questions Concerning a Personal God in Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology’, in Gert Hummel, ed., God and Being: The Problem of Ontology in the Philosophical Theology of Paul Tillich (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 189. 139 140 Schwartz, ‘Open Questions’, 188, 186. Killen, The Ontological Theology, 275. 141 Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2000), 32 f.

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also the place of mutuality and reciprocity in love—a point to which I return shortly.142 The questionable nature of Tillich’s relative eschewal of personal language for the sake of the language of being is reinforced by the fact that, throughout his career, Tillich became increasingly convinced that there is no nonsymbolic language for God.143 This would seem to diminish the particular merit of Tillich’s decision to refer to God primarily in terms of ‘being-itself ’. To be sure, the notion of a personal God may risk anthropomorphism and can arguably be misunderstood as referring to an individual being. Yet every concept is capable of distortion and bears certain drawbacks. Tillich’s own insight that the human being can fully participate only in other persons supports the idea that Christian discourse should in fact privilege the concept of personhood.

Lack of Mutuality in Love Interpersonal relationships, which Tillich admits provide the key context for the individualization of the human self, are arguably also the relationships that provide the greatest potential for mutuality in love—that is, for a giving and receiving of love between both (or all) parties in a given relationship. Tillich fails to explicitly address and endorse such a mutual sharing of love between humans or between the human being and God. This is surprising, not least insofar as Tillich’s suggestion that true selfhood rests on sacrificing one’s worldly possibilities in order to receive the gift of divine agape seems to indicate an awareness that love is a two-way movement.144 His recognition that the highest form of participation is communion gives a similar impression. That Tillich nonetheless remains silent on the matter of mutuality would seem to be one of the negative side-effects of his reluctance to speak or think of God as personal. As already indicated, Tillich does not develop a notion of personal relationship or, indeed, friendship between God and the human being—a lacuna underlined by his merely peripheral interest in love as philia. The love relation, as he portrays it, lacks the dynamic back and forth, the 142 Kleffmann implicitly highlights this in the context of discussing Tillich’s application of Nietzsche’s understanding of life, or of the human being’s drive towards overcoming non-being through self-creation. According to Kleffmann, Tillich attempts to incorporate Nietzsche’s concept of life into theology by applying it to God. Insofar as this is the reason for Tillich’s tendency to speak of God in impersonal terms, Kleffmann is right to conclude that his effort is not fully successful. It causes Tillich to do injustice both to Nietzsche’s concept of life, which he thereby turns into a ‘transhistorical, statically thought precondition’, an a priori, which in fact no longer captures the essence of Nietzsche’s dynamic struggle; and to the Christian understanding of true life as dependent on a concrete and personal communication between man and God (see Kleffmann, Nietzsches Begriff des Lebens, esp. 581–3). 143 144 e.g. Thatcher, The Ontology of Paul Tillich, 160. Tillich, ST III, 288 f.

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shared encounter, of genuine mutuality, and instead seems stiff and static. Taking the individual rather than the group as its starting point, Tillich’s abstract terminology of individualization and participation, for instance, captures only a unidirectional movement from self to self and self to other. The human being is, in turn, thought to be ‘grasped’ by the enigmatic ‘Spiritual Presence’ (itself an abstract term detracting from the traditional notion of the Holy Spirit as one of the three persons of the Trinity) and ‘taken into’ the divine community.145 No mention is made of God’s seeking to enter into an intimate and personal mutuality with the human being. Indeed, the very notion that God personally addresses the human being is absent from the text. In tension with his embrace of participation and courage, Tillich also casts the human being’s stance towards being-itself in distinctly passive terms. I have already mentioned his notion of ‘the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life’, a state he defines as faith and which he connects with ‘the state of being taken into that transcendent unity’, the state of love. Both of these states are identified as agape. Tillich, to be sure, also considers agape as faith to be ‘an act of the entire personality’, indeed, ‘the most personal of all personal acts’ and a ‘conscious act’.146 The active element of agape as love remains less clear, however. We furthermore saw Tillich identify eros, which he considers to be the primary human love for God, with the ‘state of being driven’, thus compromising the extent to which his endorsement of eros does justice to Sartre’s understanding of the drive for self-affirmation.147 By failing to properly embrace and spell out the role of mutuality in Christian love, Tillich does not succeed in fully distancing himself from the notion that true love consists in a one-sided exploitation by, or sacrifice of, one individual to another. This puts at risk his important insight that selfless love does not amount to sheer self-denial or a matter of duty but naturally involves also the human being’s erotic desire for the fulfilment of self. Feminist concerns about conceptualizing love solely in terms of a turn towards the other, and not towards the self, are thereby buttressed.148

Eros as a New Law Though in principle subjecting eros to the criterion of agape, Tillich arguably does so somewhat ambivalently, and hence imperfectly. Tillich’s vigorous rebellion against the ‘restraints of a stultifying bourgeois existence’ ignited in 145

146 Tillich, ST III, 137. Tillich, DF, 4 f. Tillich, ST I, 310; LPJ, 27. Kierkegaard, FT, 97, 59. 148 Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, for instance, has shown that feminist theologians often see this as entailing a purely passive receptivity, which they find problematic. 147

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him an enthusiasm for the open vitality and dynamism of eros.149 In some respects, this seems to have overshadowed Tillich’s embrace of the relatively more restrictive and ascetic notion of love as agape—or in any case, to have encouraged Tillich to free love as such from the restrictions of concrete normative elements. It seems to be in such a spirit that Tillich insists that the Decalogue and other documents created by the Spiritual Presence ‘are not ethical law books’ and that ‘love decides at every moment as to their validity and their application to the particular case’.150 In the words of Marion and Wilhelm Pauck, Tillich, similarly, suggested that it did ‘not matter so much what happened between two people so long as agape was not absent from the relationship’—agape here being defined, rather vaguely, as a love which ‘seeks the other one in his centre’ and ‘sees him as God sees him’.151 In thus trying to counter legalistic notions of agapeic love, Tillich has been found to have turned eros into a ‘new law for him[self]’.152 His ‘erotic solution’, as he called it, entailed an advocacy of ‘the ecstasy of living that includes participation in the highest and the lowest of life in one and the same experience’, and wherein love appears dissociated from normative morality.153 The impression of a direct link here, between Tillich’s theological views and how he lived his life, is confirmed by his friend Rollo May, who described Tillich’s life as ‘the clearest demonstration of eros in action I have ever seen’.154 As May puts it, Tillich’s ‘erotic life’, in particular, was precisely what Tillich hoped for—‘a daring way of opening up new human possibilities’.155 Tillich understood marriage as open or without bounds, somewhat willfully redefined fidelity as meaning ‘not to be possessive’, and rejected the notion of a ‘vow’.156 As his son puts it, he wanted ‘to be free in his marriage—free to relate to the infinite possibilities of life that provide vital fulfilment—and refused to regard his wife as the absolute law which would imprison him once more’.157 His emphasis on love as eros meant that ‘loving care’ became, for him, ‘equate[d]’ 150 R. Tillich, ‘My Father, Paul Tillich’, 19. Emphasis added. Tillich, ST III, 170. 152 Pauck, Paul Tillich, 90 f. Pauck, Paul Tillich, 92. 153 In Pauck, Paul Tillich, 93. 154 May, Paulus, 52. Not dissimilarly, but far more critically, Donald MacKinnon has remarked that the exploratory spirit Tillich acquired during the post-war years of the Weimar Republic, and which characterized also his theology, would seem to have fostered a conceit, boldness, and lack of self-criticism that informed his behaviour at large (Donald MacKinnon, ‘Tillich, Frege, Kittel: Some Reflections on a Dark Theme’, in Explorations in Theology, 5 (London: SCM, 1979), 129–37, esp. 135–7). 155 May, Paulus, 52. 156 See Pauck, Paul Tillich, 87 and Tillich, in Pauck, Paul Tillich, 88. (cf. D. Mackenzie Brown, ed., Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 195–6). On his rejection of a vow, see his statement, ‘I deny the possibility of a vow because of the finitude of the finite. A vow, if it is an absolute commitment, would make the moment in which we make it infinite or absolute. Other moments come which reveal the relativity of the moment in which this decision was once made’ (Tillich, in Pauck, Paul Tillich, 88). 157 Emphasis added. R. Tillich, ‘My Father, Paul Tillich’, 19. 149 151

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‘with the threat of the loss of autonomy’, and his sexual wanderings can be seen as an attempt to preserve such autonomy.158 If Tillich ‘preached to his students (and women especially) incessantly to avoid the pitfalls of compulsive self-giving, which he felt was the great danger implicit in the monogamous relationship’, he did so out of a concern that they ‘remain open, even as he was, to the infinite experiences of life’.159 Yet, as Tillich himself admits, the ‘ecstasy of living . . . demands courage and passion but it can also be a flight from God’.160 Thus, while a fundamental openness to life should indeed be a part of love, it would seem that its motivation and purpose require closer delineation than Tillich provides. It is, for instance, questionable whether such an openness should entail the freedom to give in to one’s personal erotic impulses, as Tillich frequently did, even where these hurt everyone involved, above all one’s wife and children. Preventing such abuses would seem to require that one’s openness to life—and the concomitant drive towards self-fulfilment—be tied to an objective good which directs it. In this respect, Tillich’s definition of eros as the desire for self-fulfilment—as opposed to, say, the desire for transcendent Good, in which self and other meet—may be unhelpful, at least insofar as he does not make it sufficiently explicit that such a desire for self-fulfilment cannot be the motivating factor in love.161 Tillich duly recognizes that we cannot flourish apart from the other, but leaves open the possibility that it is for our own sake that we must seek the other’s flourishing. Implied in this is a failure to do full justice to his recognition of the inter-personal nature of the human being, and of the consequent fact that the Good of self and other is, ultimately, one. As a result, Tillich sees lover and beloved in a problematically (and tragically) conflictual relationship, as, for instance, in his perspective on marriage. It is in relation to these difficulties— that is, by way of her sensitivity to the oneness of the Good and the risks of a hidden selfishness in seeking this Good—that we will find Murdoch to be a helpful complement to Tillich’s approach.

CO NCLUSION In the previous chapter I showed that Tillich accepts Sartre’s observation that the human being neither simply ‘has’ a self, nor can ground her own self—that she is, as I have put it, ‘self-less’. We also saw, however, that Tillich inferred 159 R. Tillich, ‘My Father, Paul Tillich’, 19. Pauck, Paul Tillich, 89. In Pauck, Paul Tillich, 93. 161 Tillich’s advice to his students, ‘to fulfil themselves and their personal as well as their professional lives’, suggests that eros, as he understood it, did to his mind take on the status of an end in itself (R. Tillich, ‘My Father, Paul Tillich’, 19). 158 160

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from this not the need to control the other but to participate in him, and to seek his good. If the human being wishes to be a free individual (as Sartre of course does), he or she must become a ‘person in communion’. In the present chapter I argued, somewhat more boldly, that Tillich bases the attainment of such personhood in communion on a kind of ‘selfless love’. This selfless love is first and foremost a divine love, in and with which God reaches out to the existential human being and transforms human love in existence. The existential human being thereby becomes capable of a selfless love that entails the kind of participation in the other found to be so critical to full and flourishing individual selfhood. In this love, the erotic desire for the fulfilment of self that springs from our existential selflessness is united with an agapeic concern for the other. Constituting a love of self as—and via the—other, this selfless love overcomes the perceived tension between self-love and other-love. Its noted flaws notwithstanding, Tillich’s selfless love thus works towards paving a middle way between Nygren’s call for self-effacement and Sartre’s cry for self-assertion. It shows the relevancy of both concerns—of Nygren’s insistence on turning away from self, and of Sartre’s demand that the human being realize his potential for individuality and freedom—while seeking to reconfigure them in a fruitful and viable tension. As such, his endeavour remains close to Kierkegaard’s, though with the benefit of a clearer and yet nuanced endorsement of eros as well as an engagement of some of the most radical ideas present among the philosophers of the increasingly postChristian twentieth century. Despite some of its problems, Tillich’s thought on love and the self thus substantiates the link between selfless love and human flourishing, and constitutes a useful resource for conceptualizing selfless love as a love that accommodates the needs and desires of the self. In order to clarify to what extent such a link can be sustained even in an atheistic context, and with a view to correcting some of Tillich’s above-mentioned shortcomings, I now turn to the thought of Iris Murdoch.

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6 ‘A Mechanism of Attachments’: The Self in Iris Murdoch We have seen that, through both drawing on and amending Sartre’s understanding of the human self, Tillich’s anthropology prepared an account of selfless love as critical to human flourishing. Turning towards Iris Murdoch, I now seek to show that such a link is not specific merely to Tillich’s theological context. Although coming from an atheistic perspective, Murdoch, too, ties full—and hence fulfilled—selfhood to a form of selfless love. While her account of love and the self overlaps with Tillich’s in significant ways, it also complements his. Her greater awareness of the human propensity to self-deception, for instance, has wide-reaching implications for her understanding of love. Like Tillich, Murdoch develops much of her thought on love under the influence of, and in response to, Sartre, of whom she is somewhat more critical than Tillich. She shares Sartre’s atheistic outlook and his emphasis on the need to free oneself from cowardly illusions about the nature of human selfhood. Yet she is intent on avoiding what she perceives to be the absolute, empty, and arbitrary freedom posited by the French philosopher. Considering Sartre’s understanding of freedom vain and fruitless, Murdoch draws on Plato, Freud, and Weil in order to put forward the thesis that the human being stands in a constraining relation with transcendent and objective Good. As we will see, this leads Murdoch to hold on to a basic sense of unified selfhood. The fact that Murdoch writes in a scholarly environment that is largely hostile to the eclectic set of sources that shape her thought arguably helps account for the disputatious, and oftentimes polemical, tone of her writing.1 1 Notably, Murdoch does not, as Stephen Mulhall points out, portray other thinkers ‘as occupying consistent and logically-watertight positions’; nor does she herself offer a ‘single, self-contained and coherent conceptual system’ (Stephen Mulhall, ‘Constructing a Hall of Reflection: Perfectionist Edification in Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, Philosophy, 72: 280 (1997), 219–39, at 237). Doing so would contradict her view of the elusiveness of the whole or the unified, and of the consequent messiness of moral life and reflection. The following analyses have to be read against the background of this caveat.

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Yet Murdoch’s at times harsh criticisms of Sartre, for instance, must not cloud over the impact the French existentialist nonetheless had on her thinking—an impact more profound, perhaps, than Murdoch herself allowed.2 Murdoch adopts, or in any case shares, Sartre’s understanding of the illusory nature of the ego, his portrayal of the self as a reality in constant flux, his connection between freedom and (states of) consciousness, and, more problematically, his dualistic understanding of the relation between self and other—a point I will come to criticize towards the end of Chapter 7. Like Sartre, she is convinced that the emergence of true human selfhood is dependent on a distinct inner discipline and obstructed by illusions of stability and independence. In direct contrast to Sartre, however, Murdoch suggests that the natural conflict between self and other should be met with what I will describe as a selfless kind of love. As I now show, such love rests not on a simple disregard for the self but on an awareness of its great importance—and ambiguity.

WHY THE SELF MATTERS

The Bracketing out of Consciousness and Value Murdoch observes that, motivated by a desire for rational and public certainty and clarity, philosophy since Kant—which she boldly classifies into Sartrean ‘existentialism . . . and linguistic empiricism (the tradition of Moore and Wittgenstein)’—has increasingly bracketed out the inner life of the human individual and, with this, value.3 She roots this modernist and, as she calls it, 2 See e.g. her forceful claim that ‘I have no sympathy with existentialism, what I see as a rather crude unrealistic picture of solitary egoistic will’, in Afaf Khogeer, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch’, in The Integration of the Self: Women in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006), 221–4, at 222. It is true that Murdoch rejects Sartre’s emphasis on the self-contained individual will for a more Weilian emphasis on obedient surrender to transcendent Good. As I hope to show, she nonetheless shares other, related aspects of Sartre’s (and Kierkegaard’s) thought, such as his call for liberating oneself from a ‘false’ and illusory self. For a debate regarding Murdoch’s relative existentialism see e.g. Moran, ‘Iris Murdoch and Existentialism’, in Broackes, ed., Iris Murdoch: Philosopher, 181–96, and Robjant, ‘Is Iris Murdoch a Closet Existentialist?’, European Journal of Philosophy, 21: 3 (2013), 475–94. 3 I agree with Altorf that Nussbaum misunderstands Murdoch when reading her as proposing ‘that there is a philosophical style that is content-neutral’ and ‘of plain hard reason, pure of appeals to emotion and sense’ (Marije Altorf, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (London: Continuum, 2008), 3, referring to Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. edn. (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 16). Neutrality is indeed the precise opposite of what Murdoch proposes. Murdoch, for instance, strongly criticizes Plato’s aspiration to ‘develop . . . a view of ethical understanding that separates intellect as much as possible from the disturbing influences of sense and emotion’ (Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, xv). Nussbaum does later qualify her assessment in ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’, in Antonaccio and Schweiker, Search for Human Goodness, 29–53.

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neo-Kantian, development in Kant’s attempt to ‘vindicate the idea of unity’ by basing knowledge of reality on the objective foundation of human reason.4 Although her greatest loyalties lie with Plato, Murdoch is by no means unsympathetic towards Kant.5 She regularly invokes, for instance, Kant’s notion of duty, his emphasis on the imagination, and, as Maria Antonaccio has argued, his respect for the individual agent.6 Nonetheless, Murdoch’s affinities with Kant have perhaps been overemphasized. With respect to the self, in particular, Murdoch is highly critical of Kant, judging his mentioned attempt at preserving oneness to be an inadequate path towards a noble goal. Kant’s approach requires him to think of the self as ‘radically divided’ into the ‘noumenal rational self ’ and the ‘phenomenal self ’.7 This, Murdoch argues, prepares and facilitates the modern disparagement of consciousness and the individual. According to Kant’s theory, the phenomenal self, which stands for the reality we commonly conceive of as our self, is unnecessary for the human being’s acquisition of knowledge and, instead, constitutes merely a product of our perception, removed from the reality underlying it. It is ‘spiritless and causally determined’.8 Since it is this phenomenal self which comprises the messy and unstable jumble of consciousness, Kant’s theory here implies a dismissal of consciousness, or of the individual’s perceptible inner life, as irrelevant to knowledge, which, in Murdoch’s eyes, is inseparable from morality. Following Kant, it is indeed only on account of the transcendental ideas of reason (which in turn are unknowable, since the categories of understanding cannot be applied to them), that we can be said to have a self at all. As Murdoch sees it, Kant’s account of the human self moreover implies a related, and equally problematic, separation of fact and value.9 Kant separates the human being into ‘man as knower of the phenomenal world (exercising theoretical reason)’ and ‘man as moral agent (exercising practical reason)’.10 Insofar as Kant’s duty and the categorical imperative can be said to involve an affirmation of value at all,11 they are derived solely from practical reason—and thus independently of that knowledge of the phenomenal world which alone can issue in truth claims. Kant’s notion that one could make room for value at a later stage—that it ‘enter[s] the alien world as a kind of laser beam and can be enacted as duty’—disregards the fact that, as Murdoch sees it, ‘all awareness

4 I here examine Murdoch’s reading of Kant for heuristic purposes. I do not assess the accuracy of this contestable reading. Murdoch, MGM, 250. 5 6 See e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 178. Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’. 7 8 Murdoch, MGM, 149. Murdoch, MGM, 149, 155. 9 10 Murdoch, MGM, 34, 438. Murdoch, MGM, 149. 11 According to Murdoch, Kantian morality already challenges the idea of value insofar as the categorical imperative, in a sense, bestows goodness whereas value is intrinsic to a thing (see e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 28).

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includes value as the (versatile) agility to distinguish true from false’.12 Since Kant, we have thus been losing the crucial insight that human consciousness is critical to the acquisition of knowledge, and that this is so precisely in and through the moral quality of consciousness. In the long run, this approach results in pictures of the self as an ‘historical individual, language user, victim of identity crises’, which may be interesting, but which, if dealing with morality at all, treat it merely ‘as a social or historical, etc. phenomenon, rather than worrying about the self as moral being’—or so Murdoch argues.13 Equally, Kant’s isolation of knowledge and value has enabled existentialist reductions of value to ‘the empty substanceless movement of freedom (choice, decision) itself ’, as evidenced in Sartre.14 According to Murdoch, both of these aspects—the relative dismissal of consciousness (which is highly individual both with regard to its bearer and its contents) and the separation of fact and value (which separates morality from knowledge of the individual particulars of the world)—have furthered a modern ‘horror of the contingent’ and of all things individual that ultimately leads to a horror of the human individual himself.15 Kant’s notion that the ‘response to duty demands an enlightened assessment of the relevant world’ provides something of a counter to this, but is, in Murdoch’s eyes, undermined by his demand that we respect each other as abstract, ‘co-equal bearers of universal reason’ rather than as ‘particular phenomenal eccentric individuals’.16 Indeed, that by which the human individual actually defines herself—‘character’—is ‘unreal’ for Kant, for whom ‘resort[ing] to detail is’, on Murdoch’s reading, ‘to obscure the issue and make excuses’.17 With the exception of Achtung, which is an emotion not between persons but a feeling of awe towards the moral law, Kant considers desires and emotions morally irrelevant and even obstructive.18

Neo-Kantian Developments Kant’s attempt to provide a stable, unified basis of knowledge by bracketing out our inner life of emotions and desires, has, Murdoch argues, been definitive for all later accounts of the human person and her relation to reality. Murdoch identifies the tradition of linguistic empiricism as one key strand of perspectives on the self. Linguistic empiricism, a heading under which she summarizes philosophical approaches as various as Anglo-Saxon analytic 12

13 Murdoch, MGM, 34, 221. Murdoch, MGM, 166. 15 Murdoch, MGM, 260; ‘EPM’, 134. Murdoch, MGM, 269. 16 17 Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 262. Murdoch, MGM, 269. 18 Murdoch’s reading of Kant as uninterested in emotions and human relations may be unfair. See Pamela Anderson and Jordan Bell, Kant and Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2010). 14

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philosophy, utilitarianism, behaviourism, and structuralism, derives, Murdoch argues, from Wittgenstein’s concern to preserve philosophical clarity. This led Wittgenstein, too, to dismiss the inner life as too fleeting, obscure, and private to constitute a sufficient foundation for knowledge. As a result of one’s likely inability to ‘logically prise experiences apart’ and of the coexistence, within our inner life, of ‘seeing, thinking and “interpreting”’, the inner life is here, again, deemed unworthy of philosophical consideration.19 In effect, the contents of ‘consciousness’ remain unaddressed: as Murdoch points out, Wittgenstein avoids the term. In discounting Descartes’s solitary knower, Wittgenstein is furthermore trying to avoid not only the individual but also value, thereby upholding the separation of fact and value. Morality is relegated to a separate, ‘peripheral’, and ‘personal’ realm, ‘discussed in terms of emotive language, imperatives, persuasions, and other tentative formulae’.20 According to Murdoch, the emphasis on the obscurity, vagueness, and unknowability of the inner life has increasingly promoted behaviourism and, among structuralists, the notion that the inner life is an illusion, or indeed that any theory of the ‘self ’ must be ‘eliminated’.21 For Murdoch, this raises the question of whether there cannot ‘be too fierce a removal of entities deemed to be unnecessary and unknowable’.22 Wittgenstein, she argues, ‘banished not only . . . a naïve error (or grammatical fiction) but the whole multifarious mixed-up business of our inner reflections, thought-being, experience, consciousness’.23 The result, which Murdoch considers to become especially apparent in literature, is that ‘the clearly delineated human person vanishes, an impressionistic stream of consciousness flows instead, then even the idea of consciousness itself may seem to vanish, objects and scenes dissolve into words’.24 Murdoch initially saw a more promising alternative in the second major strand of mid-twentieth-century philosophy—Sartrean existentialism. Unlike the behaviourists, for instance, Sartre is aware of the human being’s vulnerability to objectifying forces, and recognizes the need to counter these. Implied in this is a sensitivity to the workings of human consciousness, to its penchant for fantasy, and its susceptibility to desire. Murdoch furthermore admires Sartre for his courageous confrontation of the ‘blankness of contingent things’, and of their effect on human consciousness.25 She nonetheless concludes, however, that, despite these right intuitions, Sartre ultimately fails to

19

20 Murdoch, MGM, 279, 278. Murdoch, MGM, 150. 22 23 Murdoch, MGM, 150. Murdoch, MGM, 270. Murdoch, MGM, 279. 24 Iris Murdoch, ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, in EM, 243–57, at 250 (paper presented at a symposium on British writing, 1978; henceforth ‘AIN’). 25 David Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Columbia, Miss.: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 19. 21

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value contingent individuals and, thus, also consciousness itself.26 One reason for this lies in Sartre’s failure to consider the world’s contingent particulars as sources of Goodness and Beauty—a failure we will see Murdoch interpret as a failure of love.27 Sartre’s notions of freedom as absolute and of the will as an entirely autonomous source of value, as well as his identification of goodness and sincerity, further contribute to his de facto depreciation of contingent particulars. All of these imply, Murdoch argues, the moral human person’s detachment from the concrete and particular facts of her worldly surroundings. Accordingly, a person’s perception of, and attitude towards, these facts is rendered irrelevant to her freedom and sincerity, which on the other hand constitute value. Fact and value are, again, rent apart. Thus, while Murdoch welcomes the existentialist interest in consciousness and in the relation between self and other, she rejects Sartre’s willingness to ‘withdraw his man to a point at which he is independent of what seems to him the inhuman determinism of the modern world . . . even if it means depicting him as an empty shell’.28 If the problem with linguistic-behaviourist man is his inevitable ‘surrender to convention’, the problem with existentialist man is his morally inadequate ‘totalitarian’ way of relating to others, and his neurotic self-obsession.29

Murdoch’s Perspective on Contemporary Approaches to the Self The above, ‘neo-Kantian’ challenges to traditional notions of the self are not, in Murdoch’s eyes, without merit. Insofar as they are based on ‘sound antiCartesian critical arguments about sense data, momentary inner certainties, or the role of memory images in remembering’, Murdoch takes them very seriously.30 Indeed, she predicates her exploration of the self on the fact that the substantial, unified self—‘the truth-seeking individual person, as a moral and spiritual centre’—is no longer self-evident and must, at the very least, be justified anew.31 However, she resists the conclusion that the notion of the 26

The contrast between Murdoch’s and Sartre’s treatment of the individual is discussed by Diogenes Allen in ‘Two Experiences of Existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1974), 181–7. Allen quotes the thoughts of Sartre’s character Roquentin in La Nausée, that ‘the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer’, and that true vision implies seeing the actual fluidity of things (Allen, ‘Two Experiences of Existence’, 181). As I here seek to show, Murdoch’s moral philosophy does not imply a wholesale rejection but nonetheless a qualification of Sartre’s sense of underlying fluidity and disorder insofar as it calls for seeing the ‘glorious’ nature of the distinct and separate individuals outside of ourselves (Allen, ‘Two Experiences of Existence’, 181). 27 28 Gordon, Fables of Unselfing, 19 f. Murdoch, Sartre, 55. 29 Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 268; Wolfram Völker, The Rhetoric of Love: Das Menschenbild und die Form des Romans bei Iris Murdoch (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1978), 38. 30 31 Murdoch, MGM, 157. Murdoch, MGM, 161, also 202, 166.

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‘self ’, even in a more or less substantial sense, can simply be dismissed. One reason for this is that modern philosophical arguments for the irrelevance of consciousness and the illusory nature of the unified self have not altered the fact that human beings nonetheless continue to think of themselves as unified and stable beings in everyday life. As Murdoch notes, even someone like David Hume, who consciously professes the disunity and instability of the self, explicitly admits to thinking of himself as unified as soon as he leaves the house.32 Thus, where the ‘unity or identity of the self . . . is increasingly seen as a pseudo-problem’, a key aspect of human life—indeed, the very foundation of human experience—is ignored and our ability to express it lost.33 Such a loss is all the more inadequate if one considers that, as Murdoch observes, ‘the layman lives at peace with “consciousness”, with all its obscure implications of “ownership” and “presence”’.34 By nonchalantly setting aside ‘consciousness, or inwardness, as a bearer of moral substance’, or by attempting to provide a ‘neutral’ analysis of consciousness, philosophy brackets out precisely those features which make consciousness philosophically difficult, interesting, and important—that is, its ‘detailed mobility’, ‘its polymorphous complexity and the inherence in it of constant evaluation’.35 In sweeping aside that part of us which we, on a day-to-day basis, experience as the very centre of our being, philosophy not only arbitrarily limits its sphere of analysis, but also becomes insensitive to the moral significance of the fact that ‘the mind is like a ragbag, full of amazing incoherent oddments’.36 Leading, as it does in Sartre’s case, to the identification of the ‘true person’ with the ‘empty choosing will’, the modern dismissal of the moral significance of consciousness and its contents is out of touch with human experience also insofar as it prevents us from making sense of Sartre’s observation that, when we are confronted with a situation, we usually find ourselves unable to step back and decide between different courses of moral action.37 According to Murdoch, the contemporary elevation of the will implies the misguided notion that human decisions are made in the context of an isolated moment, and entails a failure to recognize that our ‘choice’ or course of action is in fact predetermined by the moral character we have acquired over time. Murdoch associates the fear of consciousness and the self with a desire to develop a neutral, value-free perspective on reality, and with a related ‘terror’, present both in Sartrean existentialism and in linguistic empiricism, ‘of anything which encloses the agent or threatens his supremacy as a centre of

32 34 35 37

33 Murdoch, ‘AIN’, 253. Murdoch, MGM, 166. As quoted by Widdows, The Moral Vision, 35. 36 Murdoch, MGM, 166; Murdoch, MGM, 237. Murdoch, MGM, 166, 237. Murdoch, SoG, 34, 35.

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significance’.38 As Murdoch argues, these sentiments imply a double mistake. Not only is it impossible to simply introduce value into an account of the world when one sees fit, but we cannot even perceive the world without value. The mere distinction between true and false accounts of reality implies a value judgement. The failure to recognize this results not in value-neutral descriptions of the world but in the tendency to turn fact into value (a tendency squarely at odds with the underlying intention of separating fact and value). In short, Murdoch concludes that, insofar as linguistic empiricism and Sartrean existentialism have presented us with a notion of the self at all, this is empirically, philosophically, and morally inadequate.39 Without much explanation, she considers thinkers who lie outside of what she identifies as the neo-Kantian paradigm, including Gabriel Marcel, Simone Weil, and the Christian tradition more generally, to have equally failed at presenting us with any more credible, ‘satisfying or powerful picture of ourselves and each other’.40 The above critiques, then, set the parameters for Murdoch’s own quest for a viable account of the self—an endeavour which has been described as ‘a central interest of Murdoch’s thought for forty years, and . . . perhaps the greatest source of her influence on ethical inquiry’, and as ‘the starting point for Murdoch’s broader philosophical vision, which depends on the capacity of the individual to have meaningful inner experience and to recognise and experience different levels of consciousness’.41 Bemoaning the fact that ‘we have never had . . . a satisfactory Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn’, it is such a theory which she sets out to develop.42 This implies in particular the challenge of how one can, after the collapse of old certainties about the reality of the soul, philosophically recognize the continuing experienced unity of the conscious self—of ‘a moral and spiritual centre’, that is, and of the ‘individual’ as the most basic moral

38 Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 269. Murdoch’s argument implies a tension here. For, while she considers linguistic empiricism guilty of excessively shielding the individual from external influence, she also accuses it of sacrificing the individual to convention. As will become more apparent in the following discussion, the crux here lies in the fact that Murdoch considers the reality of the individual to be founded in submission to the transcendent, which is utterly distinct from, and indeed denied by, convention. Murdoch’s accusations here reflect her tendency to render other philosophical perspectives in very broad, and at times inaccurate, brushstrokes—a tendency legitimately criticized, for instance, by Sabina Lovibond (Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 39). 39 Murdoch, SoG, 46; ‘SBR’, 269. Not unlike Tillich, Murdoch discerns the failure to see and respect the other outside the self already in Hegel’s system. 40 Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 270. 41 Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 86. Widdows, The Moral Vision, 21. 42 As quoted by Baldanza, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Personality’, 179.

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category.43 In doing so, Murdoch seeks not so much to dismiss modern ‘doubt about the empirical self ’, but to discern ‘how we are to discuss in a more realistic way a demythologised and (apparently) disunited self ’.44 No matter how elusive and unstable human consciousness and the self might be, they must be kept in view, if moral philosophy is to survive. And indeed, Murdoch’s own thought on the matter is based on the firm conviction that ‘consciousness is a form of moral activity: what we attend to, how we attend, whether we attend is morally significant’.45 Insisting, contra Kant, ‘that ordinary modes of phenomenal awareness are morally relevant’, Murdoch argues that it is precisely in ‘our dense familiar inner stuff, private and personal’, that morality begins.46 We might, for instance, seek to inhibit malicious thoughts, or try to concentrate on someone’s strengths and virtues.47 Meanwhile, we will find that Murdoch’s concern to establish the moral significance of the inner life does not lead her to propose that the moral subject examine his or her consciousness in much depth or detail. Such fascinated self-examination is, if anything, promoted precisely by the modern dismissal of the moral significance of consciousness. As one commentator rightly points out, the counter-Sartrean challenge Murdoch sets herself is precisely to take consciousness into view without ‘going deeper into [it]’—indeed, to enable the individual ‘to go out from it’.48 Murdoch’s investigation into the human self is influenced also by a sense of the inadequacy of Sartre’s (and other) understandings of human freedom. Murdoch appears to share Tillich’s conviction that Sartre’s definition of freedom rests on a misunderstanding of freedom and determinism as two theoretical options between which we must choose.49 Just as the world is no ‘logical or naturalistic mechanism’, freedom cannot, Murdoch argues, be identified ‘with a casting off of bonds, with emotional unrestraint . . .’.50 Like

43

In Widdows, The Moral Vision, 33. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 107; Murdoch, MGM, 162. 45 Murdoch, MGM, 167. 46 Murdoch, MGM, 149 in Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’, 228; Murdoch, MGM, 153. 47 Murdoch, MGM, 153. 48 Frederick Hoffman, ‘Iris Murdoch: The Reality of Persons’, Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 7: 1 (1964), 48–57, at 49. Gordon is not entirely right to suggest that Murdoch prefers ‘inwardness and sensitivity’ over the insight that ‘reality is “something outside us” ’, and that, in her novel The Bell, she consequently shows greater sympathies for Michael than for James (see Gordon’s criticism of Kaehele and German in Gordon, Fables of Unselfing, 30). In fact, Murdoch considers ‘inwardness’ a highly ambiguous matter, which can imply either a relation to Good (as it arguably does in Michael) or self-obsessiveness (a fault Michael also displays). As will become more evident below, she certainly prefers to identify reality with what lies outside us. 49 Murdoch expressly denies ‘a contest between total freedom and total determinism’ in an interview with William Slaymaker (in Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 140); cf. Tillich, ‘The Nature and Significance’, 746. 50 Murdoch, MGM, 460; Murdoch in an Interview with William Slaymaker, in Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 140. 44

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Tillich, she thus seeks to steer a course between the human being’s subjection to heteronomous rule and ‘a self-important autonomy’.51 And like Tillich, she considers such a middle way to require seeing the human being in relation to what Tillich, on whom she draws heavily in this respect, calls ‘the unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality’.52 Notwithstanding her ‘atheism’, which, for her, consists in the rejection of a highest being, or an ‘answering judging rewarding Intelligence and a comforting flow of love’, Murdoch is strongly critical not only of our increasing unwillingness and inability to address the question of the self, but also of modernity’s increasing loss of a transcendent reference point.53 Murdoch admittedly assumes that the notion of a personal God obstructs morality by serving our need for consolation, which she associates with the selfish ego and its self-aggrandizing fantasies. She can only think of God as an escapist fantasy, standing in the way of our facing the facts of life, including the reality of death, and what she perceives as the ultimate lack of rewards, the absence of final justice, and the world’s subjection to chance and necessity.54 Yet Murdoch is highly cautious with regard to the conclusions one might draw from the collapse of the West’s theistic metaphysical framework. For her, this must not spell the collapse of metaphysics and of its sense of the transcendent in general. Even where we are convinced that no ‘“elsewhere” in the Christian sense’ exists, we still need metaphysics, Murdoch argues, to address the problem of the one and the many, and to forge ‘a basic connection between knowledge and morals’.55 More specifically, Murdoch suggests that it is only where Good is understood to be a transcendent objective reality,56 that is, a ‘good “going beyond” one’s egoistic self ’, and sharing the divine status of ‘a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of 51

52 Murdoch, MGM, 460. Murdoch, MGM, 381, 432, 511 f. Cf. Tillich, ST I, 230 f. Murdoch, MGM, 344; SoG, 77. On the question of God in relation to Murdoch’s metaphysics see also Franklin Gamwell, ‘On the Loss of Theism’, Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Murdochian Muddles’, and William Schweiker, ‘The Sovereignty of God’s Goodness’, all in Antonaccio and Schweiker, Search for Human Goodness; Stephen Mulhall, ‘ “All the World Must Be ‘Religious’ ”: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments’, in Rowe and Horner, Iris Murdoch and Morality, 23–34. 54 There is a certain parallel here to Tillich’s notion that sin, which for Murdoch is selfishness and the concomitant tendency towards illusion, originates in anxiety about death. 55 Murdoch, MGM, 399. 56 There is some debate as to what Murdoch meant by the Good’s ‘reality’, which ‘transcends’ us. According to Broackes, it ‘turns out to be no weirder than that of a world of people and things with refreshing simplicity, spontaneity, and other such qualities—yet it is transcendent, both in that it has an endless complexity that goes beyond whatever we may at any one time capture of it, and in that the very concepts of the moral and personal understanding in which we try to capture that world can be said themselves to have an endless “depth”: there is more to love, for example— and even to simplicity and spontaneity—than what figures in our partial conceptions of those things’ (Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 35). Antonaccio seems to situate Murdoch’s Good in the ‘texture of human consciousness’ (Antonaccio, A Philosophy to Live By, 112). This has been criticized by Nora Hämäläinen in ‘Symposium on Iris Murdoch: A Philosophy to Live By— Engaging Iris Murdoch’, Heythrop Journal, 54: 6 (2013), 1007–11, at 1009. 53

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attention’, that morality is prevented from collapsing into mere behaviourism or subjectivism.57 According to Murdoch, philosophy after Kant has increasingly moved in the direction of denying the reality of transcendent Good. In their attempt to liberate the moral human being from ‘any structure larger than himself ’, contemporary philosophers have reduced the idea of the Good to a function of the human will.58 Good has been turned from a demanding objective reality into an ‘empty space into which human choice may move’.59 Murdoch illustrates the tension between these two opposed ways of seeing the Good in a conversation between the schoolmasters Bledyard and Mor in her novel The Sandcastle. When the virtuous Bledyard challenges Mor on his extramarital affair with a young artist, Mor flatly states that, ‘all I can say is that this is my situation and my life and I shall decide what to do about it’. Bledyard, on the other hand, rejects the notion that Mor’s view is ‘a sort of virtue . . . as if to be a free man was just to get what you want regardless of convention’, suggesting, instead, that ‘real freedom is total absence of concern about yourself ’—a controversial position, which Murdoch shares and to which we return below.60 Murdoch, in short, considers metaphysics the foundation of human selfhood and morality, and thus seeks to rescue metaphysics from the ruins of the illusion of a personal God, without challenging the notion that human life is ‘self-contained’.61 With recourse to Plato and Kant (and their respective notions of the Good as a ‘universal’ or as a ‘categorical imperative’), she argues that ‘the Good, not will, is transcendent’.62 Thus, it is her metaphysic of transcendent Good, which she develops through recourse to Anselm’s ontological argument, that we must now consider. This will allow us to give an account of her understanding of the self.

MURDOCH’ S METAPHYSIC: TRANSCENDENT GOOD

The Ontological Proof As Marije Altorf rightly points out when discussing Murdoch’s rendition of Anselm’s ontological proof or argument, Murdoch holds that this proof is ‘an 58 Murdoch, MGM, 498; SoG, 55. Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 268. Murdoch, SoG, 95. While Murdoch sees the followers of G. E. Moore as claiming, more helpfully, that the Good is real but categorically elusive, she observes that they wrongly infer from this elusiveness that Good is not objective and transcendent but a matter of subjective choice and opinion (Murdoch, SoG, 95). 60 Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle (London: Penguin, 1960), 213 (henceforth TS). 61 Murdoch, SoG, 77. 62 George Steiner, ‘Foreword’ to Iris Murdoch, EM, ix–xviii, at xi. 57 59

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affirmation of faith which a man can only give to himself ’.63 Following the philosopher J. N. Findlay who, Murdoch finds, brings out the ‘deep meaning’ of the ontological argument, Murdoch considers this to point not to God but to the reality of transcendent Good.64 This has rightly led Christopher Insole to attribute to her a ‘reversal’ of the ontological proof.65 Pace Insole, however, I would suggest that the reason for this reversal is not that she reads the argument as pointing to an always elusive, ‘infinitesimal point’, any substantiation of which reduces Good to selfish fantasy.66 The notion of an elusive and infinitesimal point does not necessarily contradict the notion of God, whom Anselm arguably understands as precisely such a reality.67 Rather, it is Murdoch’s fixed and a priori understanding of ‘God’ as an anthropomorphic reality, ‘a thing among others’, which leads her to read the ontological argument as pointing to Good rather than God.68 Be this as it may, Murdoch suggests that the argument indicates the human being’s necessary relation to ‘what is absolute’, to an ‘unconditioned structure’, thereby clarifying that ‘morality is not one empirical phenomenon among others’.69 Murdoch quotes Weil at several points in her discussion of the ontological argument, pointing out, for instance, that ‘Weil . . . speaks of “an orientation of the soul towards something which one does not know, but whose reality one does know”, and an “effort of attention empty of all content”’.70 With Weil, Murdoch indeed considers the ontological argument to express the fact that, wherever the notion of good is invoked, ‘absolute good and our contact with it’ is proven in that absolute Good forms the necessary foundation for such invocations.71 Such invocations in turn are an intrinsic aspect of human life, featuring, for instance, in attempts ‘to do something well or [where we] are conscious of failure’.72 As Murdoch says, ‘we know of perfection as we look upon what is imperfect’.73 Reality is pervaded by the notion of goodness and cannot be perceived in independence from the Good. Without this illuminating reference point present to human consciousness but nonetheless external to the human subject, the world becomes a mere extension of the subject and, thus, as Murdoch infers, a projection of the subject’s selfish desires and fantasies. Where the human being does not place herself under the Good and perceive things in its light, she neither perceives reality nor

63

64 Altorf, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining, 99. Murdoch, MGM, 412. Christopher Insole, ‘ “Beyond Glass Doors . . . The Sun No Longer Shining”: English Platonism and the Problem of SelfLove in the Literary and Philosophical Work of Iris Murdoch’, Modern Theology, 22: 1 (2006), 111–43, at 132. 66 Insole, ‘Beyond Glass Doors’, 132. 67 See e.g. J. Burton Fulmer, ‘Anselm and the Apophatic: “Something Greater than Can Be Thought” ’, New Blackfriars, 89: 1020 (2008), 177–93. 68 69 70 Murdoch, MGM, 405. Murdoch, MGM, 412. Murdoch, MGM, 401. 71 72 Weil in Murdoch, MGM, 401. Murdoch, MGM, 430. 73 Murdoch, MGM, 427. 65

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remains a part of it. Indeed, she herself becomes less real. This means that, in correlation to her changing relation to Good, which manifests itself in how she looks at the world, the human person is ‘always in motion toward or away from what is more real’.74 Like Anselm, Murdoch combines a transcendental claim that human judgements and perception depend on an intrinsic relation between consciousness and Good with the empirical argument that the human being is also oriented towards Good as the standard of perfection, to which ‘the gradual apprehension of lesser degrees of goodness in its surroundings’ leads it to aspire.75 Thus, while Murdoch does consider Kant’s categorical imperative to legitimately represent the ‘absolute’, she endorses also a Platonic sense of the magnetic nature of Good. As she suggests, the Good’s pull becomes evident in the fact that, despite persistently failing to arrive at the Good, the human being inevitably turns continually back towards it. While Murdoch’s understanding of consciousness and Good is heavily influenced by Plato, who, she argues, knew ‘that morality, an orientation between good and evil, was in a unique sense fundamental and ubiquitous in human life’, Murdoch also begins both of her two chapters on the ontological proof with a quote from Tillich.76 Indicating a significant and unexplored overlap between her project and Tillich’s, this states that ‘nothing is more important for philosophy and theology than the truth [the ontological argument] contains, the acknowledgement of the unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality’.77 Murdoch mirrors Tillich’s understanding of God as a ‘depth dimension of man’, when she affirms that ‘what is higher is, as Eckhart observed, inside the soul’.78 She arguably also shares even her this-worldly perspective with Tillich. Meanwhile, Murdoch’s penchant for the proof leads her, more than Tillich, to affirm also the transcendent otherness of the Good. Good, Murdoch argues, is ‘above being, non-personal, non-contingent’, and no ‘existing thing (or person)’; it lacks that ‘fundamental status’ which allows the gods ‘to be contrasted with ordinary existence’.79 It is because Murdoch’s Good precedes thought and language that she tends to drop the article with respect to the Good, referring to it primarily as ‘Good’ or ‘goodness’.80 Good is not an object In Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’, 231. Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’, 231. 76 Murdoch, MGM, 402; for Murdoch’s citation from Tillich’s Systematic Theology see MGM, 391 f. and 431. Cf. Tillich, ST I, 230 f. 77 Murdoch, MGM, 391, 431. 78 Murdoch, MGM, 399. As Antonaccio points out, Murdoch even refers to the Good’s pervasion of reality, including that of consciousness, as the ‘deep structure’ of human life (in Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’, 224). 79 Murdoch, MGM, 37, 479. 80 However, Murdoch does sometimes also refer to ‘the Good’, e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 464, SoG, 96. 74 75

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but an Idea, a ‘reality principle’, that which lies at the origins of reality insofar as it unlocks reality for us by illuminating it.81 Murdoch metaphorically speaks of the Form of the Good not only as ‘a source of life’ but also as a ‘sun . . . in whose light the truth is seen’.82 Good constantly eludes our concepts: it is impossible to look at directly, or to grasp, describe, or depict, since its very nature dictates that it is always ‘still somewhere beyond’.83 At the same time, this morally unambiguous reality (whose ontological status nonetheless remains highly ambiguous) is the absolute end-point of our existence, from which our selfishness continually steers us away. Its utter otherness and externality ensures that it cannot be bent to serve human ends, whether these are the arbitrary purposes of the will or theistic notions of the transcendent that offer the consolations of divine love and of eternal life. ‘The ordinary person does not, unless corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates values by his choices’, writes Murdoch.84 Values issue from the objective transcendence of Good. This Good is the non-negotiable endpoint of our existence, whose demands are absolute, yet it does not promise any rewards: it has ‘no externally guaranteed purpose and must be obeyed “for nothing”’.85

Good and the Individual In order to understand how a transcendent and elusive Idea can be obeyed, it is important to see that Murdoch considers the above defence of the Good to be a defence also of the moral significance of the individual. Murdoch is convinced that it ‘is fairly evident’ ‘that a belief in the unity, and also in the hierarchical order, of the moral world has a psychological importance’: though the consoling notions of unity and order must be prevented from becoming a false consolation, there must be a ‘best decision’, Murdoch argues.86 She considers this to imply a particular connection between goodness and oneness. As Murdoch argues, ‘the unity and fundamental reality of goodness is an image and support of the unity and fundamental reality of the individual’.87 This affects, on the one hand, the question of where Good is encountered and what such encounters result in. In her literary work, Murdoch suggests 81

Murdoch, MGM, 474. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’, in EM, 386–463, at 389 (based on the Romanes Lecture, 1976; henceforth ‘FS’). 83 84 Murdoch, SoG, 91. Murdoch, SoG, 95. 85 e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 312. In light of her pessimism about the attainability of Good, the characters in Murdoch’s novels rarely succeed in being good ‘for nothing’. As I illustrate further below, Bledyard in The Sandcastle, Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Eugene in The Time of the Angels, and Denis in The Unicorn can nonetheless be counted among the more unambiguously good characters. Many other characters have moments in which they approach Good. 86 87 Murdoch, SoG, 55. Murdoch, MGM, 427. 82

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that ‘intimations’ of the ineffable Good are ‘scattered’ in the individual particulars of the world, whether these be objects or persons.88 This is amply illustrated in Murdoch’s novels, practically all of which are replete with examples of the Good’s incarnation in the world. To name a few of these, Tim in Nuns and Soldiers has an experience of transcendence and grace when he discovers a beautiful, untouched rocky pool of water in the French mountains.89 Dora in The Bell comes to see the Good in the pictures at the National Gallery,90 and Eugene in The Time of the Angels perceives the Good in his copy of Rublev’s icon of the Trinity.91 (Murdoch herself surrounded herself with stones and other talismanic objects which she appears to have viewed as ‘Platonic objects, living in some absolute world of Forms’.92) Such mystical encounters with Good in the particulars of the world are then thought to issue in a greater awareness of, and respect for, other individuals.93 Thus, by approaching Good in and through her love of Bruno, Diana in Bruno’s Dream, for instance, comes to lovingly perceive a plethora of individual particulars in her everyday surroundings that she previously never noticed.94 Notwithstanding her dismissal of seeking Good within oneself, Murdoch, on the other hand, considers the notion that ‘the unity and fundamental reality of goodness is an image and support of the unity and fundamental reality of the individual’ indicative of the status of the individual human self. Murdoch’s reading of the ontological argument implies that where the reality of Good is recognized, that of the self is also vindicated. The Good’s rootedness in consciousness means that, for Murdoch, ‘the idea of the Good and the idea of the self as a thinking consciousness are grasped in one and the same act of understanding’.95 This is because Good is implicitly and invisibly present in, and recognized on account of, what one might call a person’s deep-seated moral sense. Although human knowledge of Good is such that we never push 88 Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (London: Vintage, 2002), 171 (henceforth TA); MGM, 167. As Karen Armstrong rightly points out, Murdoch considers art, too, to give intimations of the ‘reality that is wholly separate from [oneself]’ (Karen Armstrong, ‘Introduction’ to Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (London: Vintage, 2001), unpaginated (henceforth NS)). 89 90 Murdoch, NS, 156–8. Iris Murdoch, The Bell (London: Vintage, 1999), 190 f. 91 Murdoch, TA, 54. 92 Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 414; John Bayley, ‘Iris’, ‘Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch’ and ‘Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories’ (London: Duckworth, 2002), 85. 93 In light of the above, Robjant is right to suggest that Murdoch’s Platonism stands in contrast to Nietzsche’s claim, invoked by Lovibond, that ‘Plato is a coward in the face of reality . . . he flees into the ideal’ (David Robjant, ‘Is Iris Murdoch an Unconscious Misogynist? Some Trouble with Sabina Lovibond, The Mother in Law, and Gender’, Heythrop Journal, 52: 6 (2011), 1021–31, at 1027; Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender, and Philosophy, 11 quoting Nietzsche from Twilight of the Idols). Murdoch’s Good is, as Robjant points out citing Murdoch, ‘not something obscure. We experience both the reality of perfection and its distance away’, and it demands precisely that we turn to rather than flee from the world (Murdoch, in Robjant, ‘Is Iris Murdoch an Unconscious Misogynist’, 1027; Murdoch, MGM, 508). 94 Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (London: Vintage, 2001), 288 f. (henceforth BD). 95 Antonaccio, Imagining the Good, 232.

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through to the foundations of reality, we are not usually ‘in doubt about the direction in which Good lies’.96 There is an intrinsic connection between Good and consciousness, which is a manifestation of our selfhood, or of our distinctive and private irreducibility. Murdoch’s claims regarding the Good’s hidden presence in the individual particulars of the world and its vindication of the human individual are a part of her attempt to avoid falling into the extremes of heteronomy or autonomy, and arguably constitute her alternative to Tillich’s notion of theonomy. Although ultimately one, Good contradicts a heteronomous outlook insofar as it is dispersed, and not encountered in one distinct and known place. It does not impose itself on, and is not simply given to, the human being, but must be discerned in the many individual particulars of the world. Likewise, the notion that it is only upon recognizing the Good that the human being can recognize his or her individual selfhood counters any human claims to autonomy or self-sufficiency. Murdoch’s account of Good thus explains her sympathy for Kant’s awareness of ‘the dangers of blind obedience to a person or institution’, and undergirds her simultaneous conviction that we are bound to an impersonal and transcendent standard outside of that which we commonly take to be the self.97 The same account also grounds her response to contemporary philosophy’s lack of interest in the self. It is this response which it is now time to further unpack.

THE NATURE OF THE S ELF Murdoch’s use of the ontological argument has led her to assert the interconnection between consciousness and Good, and thus between consciousness and value. ‘To be conscious’, argues Murdoch, ‘is to be a value-bearer or valuedonor.’98 This is directly connected with the importance of ‘reflective’ human experience to ‘moral decision and action’.99 All of us, Murdoch argues, are perfectly aware of the extent to which our constant experiential stream of thought serves as a background to moral activity; of the influence which the object of our consciousness has on us, of how we can be obsessed by bad thoughts, and of the possibility, albeit infinitely difficult, of influencing our consciousness. Whether we actively use our consciousness in order to lovingly attend to the present moment or whether we allow it to drift and be dominated by anxieties has, as Murdoch insists, moral implications. Murdoch’s close association of the good and the real means not only that those cognitions are ‘purer’ which are more true to reality but also that, as we 96 99

Murdoch, SoG, 95. Murdoch, MGM, 259.

97

Murdoch, SoG, 30.

98

Murdoch, MGM, 256.

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increasingly attach ourselves to Good, we become more rooted in reality— including our own.100 In this sense, the messy workings of human consciousness, our inner motivations, our deepest attachments and desires, the objects of our attention, determine nothing less than who we are. This leaves us with a tension. On the one hand, there seems to be a certain fluidity to who we are: the very reality of our being corresponds with, and is thus a function of, our states of consciousness. On the other hand, and as suggested by our common experience of ourselves as having continuity, self-identity, or self-being, our ever-so-slight control over our states of consciousness would seem to point to an underlying element of stability. Murdoch considers this ambiguity—the simultaneous absence and presence of a unified self—to pose an important moral philosophical problem, insofar as it is decisive for the preconditions of moral progress. She explores this ambiguity in reference to the thought of both Plato and Freud.

Freud and the Ego According to Murdoch, whose career coincides with the gradual popularization of psychoanalysis, Freud’s analyses shed light on the extent to which we can legitimately speak of a unified self.101 A key factor in this achievement is what Murdoch considers to be his (somewhat unintentional) revelation of the fundamentally selfish nature of inner human activity. Freud, so Murdoch argues, portrays the human psyche as a ‘machine’ which is ‘predisposed to certain patterns of activity’, or an ‘egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy’ susceptible to the lure of conflicting desires.102 As Freud recognizes, it is difficult for the human being to understand and control these desires, and he or she is typically reluctant to do so. Instead, the psyche generates illusions which conceal the more unpleasant aspects of reality (such as the fact that we are not all-powerful, and that we will die), which, as Murdoch would add, justify and foster our selfish pursuits. Both God and the ravenous human ego (the latter of which Freud, in Murdoch’s eyes, mistakenly bolsters) are among the kinds of illusions which obstruct the human being’s relation with Good.103 By effectively portraying the human being as a ‘historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself ’, Freud, so Murdoch argues, offers us ‘a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man’, indeed, ‘what might be called a doctrine of original sin’.104 His reconstitution of the notion of sin on the basis of new insights into the human being’s inner life helps bridge modern 100

Murdoch, MGM, 243. Jack Turner provides a highly critical Freudian perspective on Murdoch’s use of and reaction to Freud—though one failing to recognize the complexity of Murdoch’s reception of Freud, which also includes positive elements. See Jack Turner, Murdoch vs. Freud: A Freudian Look at an Anti-Freudian (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 102 103 104 Murdoch, SoG, 76 f., 50. Murdoch, SoG, 50. Murdoch, SoG, 50, 76. 101

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and ancient thought.105 For Murdoch, the fact that it is one of modernity’s own protagonists who (implicitly at least) confirms human sinfulness and puts it back on the table makes it all the more disingenuous that late modern philosophers ‘deny (Sartre), ignore (Oxford and Cambridge) or attempt to render innocuous (Hampshire)’ the pervasive selfishness and self-obsession of human beings.106 Recognizing this selfishness would, in Murdoch’s eyes, force contemporary philosophers into a total revision of their ‘conceptions of will and motive’.107 Indeed, it would help nuance our understanding of the self and undermine the various reductionist accounts of it. Somewhat ironically perhaps, Murdoch seems to consider the helpfulness of Freud’s perspective to be enhanced by the inadequacy of his response to this situation. Freud problematizes the conflict of desire and the state of selfish delusion that issues from it only insofar as this conflict obstructs the individual’s sense of well-being and social functioning. Thus, although Freud agrees that the human being must be purged of certain illusions, his goal in doing so is not the attainment of truth. As Murdoch sees it, Freud is interested in making human beings not ‘good’, but ‘workable’, and considers such workability to depend on ordering desires according to the dictate of reason, which he identifies with the ego.108 Consequently, for instance, he condones the typical human practice of ‘adopt[ing] substitutes for “early pleasures”’ by clothing oneself in consoling illusions.109 Indeed, he seeks merely to perfect this practice with a view towards a more efficient functioning of the ego, which, according to Murdoch, amounts to a perpetuation of human selfishness. As Murdoch sees it, Freud’s emphasis on the ego as the criterion according to which desire is to be harmonized is, in fact, central to what she perceives as the demise of moral philosophy, and the key to understanding the difference between the true and the false self. As Freud himself will readily admit, he sees the ego as a fictive reality geared towards alleviating the personal discomfort caused by the conflict of desire by unifying desire in a self-determined and self-serving cause. This process is facilitated by introspective work undergone in relation to an objective observer, the psychoanalyst. In all these respects, Freud’s and Murdoch’s perspectives conflict. The introspective turn is, for Murdoch, inevitably a turn away from transcendent Good, which is encountered in what is other than self, and the supposedly objective observer constitutes merely a new illusion (replacing the old illusion of God). Most 105 It is arguably Freud, for instance, who enables Murdoch to integrate her early Marxism into her lasting Platonism by centring on the need for an inner revolution. 106 107 Murdoch, SoG, 50. Murdoch, SoG, 50. 108 If Murdoch is, as I will argue in the following chapter, hesitant to explicitly endorse a concern for human flourishing and well-being, then this is arguably also due to her observation that in Freud such a concern comes at the cost of truth and goodness. 109 See e.g. David Gordon, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing’, Twentieth Century Literature, 36: 2 (1990), 115–36.

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importantly, in bolstering the ego, Freud aligns himself with a fictive reality— and human fictions, so his own thought reveals, are inevitably coloured by human selfishness and, hence, opposed to the demands of transcendent Good. By making the ego rather than transcendent Good the standard according to which the human being should orient herself, Freud, in short, positively ‘bars the way to the top’, to a perception of reality from a purer vantage point.110 Murdoch does not consider Freud’s account of the human being a satisfactory endpoint, therefore, but the most powerful contemporary description (and perpetuation) of our state of what Tillich would call ‘estrangement’ from ‘being-itself ’ or—for Murdoch—from Good. Resulting from a misdirection of desire towards a false and fictive good, Freud’s ego constitutes that false self, which entails an ‘(illusory) unity’ and with which we commonly identify, yet which we must ‘silence and expel’.111 It conceals the conflict of desires and, deeming itself all-powerful, bestows on the human being a ‘comforting sense of a unified self, with organised emotions and fearless world-dominating intelligence, a complete experience in a limited whole’.112 It is this fantastical, self-contained, and selfish ‘ego-self ’ which Murdoch would seem to have in mind when she writes that ‘the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion’, and that beholding reality properly requires one ‘to look and look until one exists no more’.113 Drawing on Weil’s notion of ‘decreation’, and in complete contrast to Freud, Murdoch indeed claims that the ego-self must be ‘suppress[ed]’ or even die.114

A Mechanism of Attachments As Samantha Vice has pointed out, ‘in contradiction to what she herself says’, Murdoch’s ‘self ’ cannot be only, or significantly, ‘ego’ or a ‘fantasy mechanism’.115 If we are to be capable of altering and morally improving our states of consciousness, there must be some degree of positive and even substantial selfbeing or selfhood which facilitates, or at least serves as the foil for, such change. Murdoch is much more quiet and elusive about such a reality—not least, it would seem, because it is typically covered up by human selfishness and the ego. Yet her insistence on the interdependency of transcendent Good and the individual conscious self indicates that there must be a reality capable of supporting or carrying human goodness. 111 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 418 f. Murdoch, MGM, 88; SoG, 63. Murdoch, MGM, 88. Correspondingly, Murdoch argues that the ‘idea of the unreality of the self mediates the idea of death’ (Murdoch, MGM, 139). 113 Murdoch, SoG, 91, 63. 114 Murdoch, ‘TSTG’, 218; for the ‘death of the self ’ see Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Penguin, 1977), 167 (henceforth UN). 115 Vice, ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’, 65. 110 112

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Murdoch’s understanding of the true self, which is essential to a life more honest and good than that envisaged by Freud, is prepared by her ‘marriage’ of Freud and Plato. Regardless of the ultimate validity of Freud’s oftenchallenged116 claims to a certain Platonism, this marriage is aided by Freud’s decision to refer his psychoanalytical picture of the psyche as constituted by ego, superego, and id to Plato’s ‘tripartite division of the soul’ (appetite, spirit, and reason).117 As Peter Conradi suggests, Murdoch thus integrates Freud’s ‘mechanical model of the psyche’ as consisting of conflicting desires with Plato’s ‘moral one’.118 The upshot is a picture of the human being as consisting in an ascending hierarchy of different dimensions where ‘the lowest part of the soul is egoistic, irrational, and deluded, the central part is aggressive and ambitious’, while ‘the highest part is rational and good and knows the truth which lies beyond all images and hypotheses’.119 These ‘different parts’ correspond, she argues, with different ‘modes of desire’, which, in turn, imply different ‘levels of awareness’.120 The lower part of the soul lays a ‘veil’ over reality that clothes reality in illusions, including the already mentioned ‘fictions of a theological nature’, or neo-Kantian ‘imagined inflation[s] of self ’, such as the presumption of omnipotent freedom.121 It is the part, therefore, which gives rise to the fantastical ego and which corresponds with selfish desire. As one or another of these levels gains the upper hand, the human being moves ‘through a continuum within which [she is] aware of truth and falsehood, illusion and reality, good and evil’.122 Consisting of such different, and conflicting, parts and desires, the human soul or self123 is marked by a ‘real disunity’.124 Murdoch, however, also 116 See e.g. F. M. Cornford, with whose work Murdoch was familiar (e.g. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 451; F. M. Cornford, ‘The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium’, in W. K. C. Guthrie, ed., The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 1950), 68–80.). 117 Murdoch, MGM, 418. As Gordon points out, A. W. Price, in his essay ‘Plato and Freud’, ‘found more congruence than she does between the two tripartite pictures of the soul, equating Freud’s “ego” with Plato’s charioteer (rather than, as Murdoch does, with his “bad horse” [FS 36]), “superego” with the good horse of “spirit”, and “id” with the bad horse of “passion” ’ (Gordon, Fables of Unselfing, 40); see also A. W. Price, ‘Plato and Freud’, in C. Gill, ed., The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 247–70. However, Gordon judges that ‘this doesn’t offer much to build on for, as Gerasimos Santas points out in Plato and Freud, “Unlike Plato, Freud did not have an ethical theory” ’; moreover, Murdoch rejects precisely the notion that Plato seeks to turn the ego into the charioteer, suggesting instead, and as shown below, that the human being must allow herself to be compelled by reality (Gordon, Fables of Unselfing, 40; see also George Santas, Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991)). 118 119 Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 96. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 389. 120 121 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 389. Murdoch, SoG, 77; ‘FS’, 427. 122 Murdoch, MGM, 250. 123 Murdoch claims that ‘the theological idea of the soul has been a support to the concept of the self in philosophy’, and tends to speak of the soul in positive and of the self in negative terms (Murdoch, MGM,166). However, she does also refer to the ‘self ’ positively (e.g. Murdoch, MGM, 161, 166; SoG, 69) and, ultimately, does not make a strict distinction between the concepts (see Murdoch, MGM,166). 124 Murdoch, MGM, 88.

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pictures the self as that which holds these different parts together. Seen in this light, the self would seem to have a certain basic degree of permanence or stability, which is captured in Murdoch’s definition of the self as a ‘substantial and continually developing mechanism of attachments’.125 As this seems to suggest, it is the very nature of human selfhood which compels the human being to attach herself to what is other than self—to potentially conflicting and illusory objects of perception. It is worth noting that Murdoch clearly sees no contradiction between the substantial and the dynamic nature of the human self. On the contrary, these two features capture precisely the previously noted ambiguity of human selfhood. For, on the one hand, such a ‘more positive conception of the soul’ provides the normative core without which, as Sartre’s total deconstruction of the self has shown, ‘“freedom” is readily corrupted into self-assertion’ in a manner Murdoch considers morally unsustainable.126 On the other hand, the ‘continually developing’ nature of the self indicates its fluidity, its project-like character, to use Sartre’s phrase. The human self is no private and self-contained possession but a living reality deeply affected by how it relates to what lies outside itself.

The Good Self In addition to the ego and the mechanism of attachments underlying it, Murdoch’s equivocal use of the term ‘self ’ arguably has a third connotation. The ‘good’ self—the actual counterpart to the illusory ego—really only emerges where the higher part of the soul or self dominates the lower part. This is the case where the illusory ego has been decreated or has died,127 and where the self in the sense of the mechanism of attachments is fully attached to transcendent Good. What this ‘good’ self looks like can be helpfully illustrated in reference to Murdoch’s understanding of what she calls the art object. Murdoch considers the art object ‘a kind of “thing” [but] also a kind of “soul”’.128 It may, she argues, ‘seem to be a limited whole enclosed in a circle, but because of contingency and the muddled nature of the world and the imperfections of language the circle is always broken’.129 Thus, insofar as an

125

Emphasis added. Murdoch, SoG, 69. Murdoch, SoG, 69. 127 Murdoch, MGM, 88. If my interpretation is correct that Murdoch seeks solely the ‘death’ of an illusion, a fantasy, about oneself, then Lovibond’s suggestion of a tension in Murdoch between the ‘death of selfish desire’ and ‘the conversion of such desire from a “lower” into a “higher” form’ does not apply; not only does Murdoch speak of the death of the self rather than that of, as Lovibond suggests, selfish desire, but Murdoch’s ‘kill[ing]’ is to be metaphorically understood and stands for conversion (in analogy to Christianity’s understanding of conversion as a dying to self and living in Christ) (Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 93). 128 129 Murdoch, MGM, 163. Murdoch, MGM, 88. 126

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art object presents itself as a unit, it images what I have called the ego-self.130 Very good art, by contrast, ‘mirrors not only the (illusory) unity of the self but its real disunity’, by ‘proclaim[ing] its incompleteness and point[ing] away’ from itself.131 Applying Kant’s notion of the sublime to art, Murdoch argues that ‘the world overflows the art object’, ‘it transcends it’.132 True art is therefore ‘porous or cracked, another reality flows through it, it is in tension between a clarified statement and a confused pointing, and is in danger if it goes too far either way’.133 It is precisely this porous openness to the world and, through it, to the Good which characterizes also the good self. The higher part of the soul dominates where another reality—transcendent Good—flows through the self and where the self, in turn, both embodies and ‘points to’ the Good. The good and true self thus emerges where the human being opens himself to, and perceives reality in light of, transcendent Good to the point that this pervades his very being. According to Murdoch, this requires the human being to be oriented precisely not towards his self but towards the world. For not only is this where transcendent Good manifests itself but, as Murdoch puts it drawing on Plato’s metaphor of the fire and the sun, the self is a blinding fire, or ‘such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see nothing else’.134 If Freud’s ego is the outcome of turning towards the self, the good self emerges where the human being allows herself and the world to be illumined by the true sun, transcendent Good. Murdoch thus associates her call for an ‘unselfing’ or for a Weilian kind of ‘decreation’ with an absence of self from the mind, and is highly critical of Freudian introspection.135

Unity and Disunity We have seen that, while Murdoch considers our experienced sense of ‘positive being’, ‘self-being’, and ‘separateness’ philosophically important, she only endorses this very cautiously, almost implicitly.136 What we typically think of as our unified self tends, in fact, to be the illusory ego—as she considers Freud to have (unwittingly) shown. The untruthful and immoral nature of this ego is one reason why moral philosophy must take our experience of self-being seriously. Another reason lies in the kernel of truth which our experience of the ego nonetheless contains: notwithstanding her reluctance to talk of a 130

131 132 Murdoch, MGM, 86, 88. Murdoch, MGM, 88. Murdoch, MGM, 88. Murdoch, MGM, 88. Murdoch already made a similar point in ‘The Fire and the Sun’, where she describes the structure of the art object as ‘pierced, its ‘sense flow[ing] into life’—terms evocative of Diotima’s description of the lover and his eros in the Symposium (see e.g. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 460). 134 135 Murdoch, SoG, 30. Murdoch, MGM, 245. 136 Murdoch, MGM, 97; ‘AIN’, 253; ‘SBR’, 274. 133

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unified self, Murdoch does not dismiss the idea in its entirety. Not only does she describe the self as a ‘substantial mechanism of attachments’ but she also acknowledges an, albeit ‘very small’, ‘good self ’, which corresponds with a unity of desire in transcendent Good.137 This, in a sense, is the inverse of the supposedly self-contained and self-determined unity of the ego-self. It is a relational and other-dependent unity whose reality correlatively increases with the development of the human being’s relation with what is other than self; the ‘good self ’ thus depends on a gradual process of purification. By aligning a person’s ‘good self ’ with the unification of her desire in transcendent Good, Murdoch implies that a person’s full and flourishing human selfhood depends on her openness to what is other than self. Tied to a state of being oriented outwards and anchored in transcendent Good, true selfhood corresponds with perceiving the world not through the lens of selfish prejudice but ‘in the light of truth’.138 In Murdoch’s eyes, this means recognizing and respecting individuals in their respective uniqueness and without any self-interest. This harkens back to Murdoch’s above-mentioned insistence that goodness is truly gratuitous, ‘for nothing’: the Good ‘excludes the idea of purpose’ and, although it can be described as a ‘spiritual goal’, it has nothing to do with an ‘external point or τέλος’ in the sense of a ‘general and . . . externally guaranteed pattern or purpose’ (such as has been ascribed to God, Reason, Science, and History).139 We can conclude, then, that if Murdoch considers the notion of a unified self potentially dangerous, then this is not so much because the true self lacks any kind of unity. Instead, Murdoch’s wariness stems from her observation that our sense of unity (which we typically picture as a given unity and in terms of the independency and self-sufficiency of the ego) tends to obstruct the kind of openness to Good necessary for empowering the higher part of the self. As Charles, in Murdoch’s novel The Sea, the Sea, realizes, ‘life is a matter of immersion in one’s surrounding element, and . . . if you separate yourself off—the manipulative, inviolate “I”—you’re more likely to sink than swim’.140 The good and ‘real’ self is the self immersed in its surroundings. It is the self firmly attached to transcendent Good, towards which its desire is oriented. In order to understand the difficulty of such an attachment to Good, we must already take a first look at Murdoch’s understanding of eros and its constitutive role with regard to the self. We will revisit the theme of eros in the following chapter, where I discuss Murdoch’s account of love in general.

137

138 Murdoch, SoG, 66. Murdoch, MGM, 165. Murdoch, SoG, 69 f.; MGM, 343; SoG, 77. 140 Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 81. 139

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THE S ELF A ND EROS

Energizing the Self We saw that, as a mechanism of attachments, the self is closely related to desire. Desire drives the human being to attach his self to different objects in a manner that affects the extent to which his self stands in reality, including its own. We found, too, that Murdoch considers such desire to be marked by conflict, and receptive to the lure of its own creation, the ego. She nonetheless also insists that all desire is, in fact, for elusive and transcendent Good. Whatever we desire, we desire ‘as, genuinely, good’, even ‘though many desires reach only distorted shadows of goodness’.141 Whether we are aware of it or not, the Good is, in the words of Max Lejour in Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn, ‘the unimaginable object of our desire’.142 It is that which ‘all men love and wish to possess for ever’, and it ‘exerts a magnetism, which runs through the whole contingent world’.143 Desire, then, is a form of love for the Good—and the proper human ‘response’ to the Good’s magnetic pull.144 It connects us with the Good and is therefore critical to our moral and spiritual life. Leaning on Plato, Murdoch captures this desirous love in terms of eros. While she does not explicitly define the nature of this force, her writings (and particularly her novels) depict it as a deep-seated energetic force that erupts periodically and in response to Beauty, the visible correlate of transcendent Good.145 In principle, eros is capable of providing the impetus and energy needed to break through human selfishness and the ego, as well as the emotional glue, so to speak, for our relationship with transcendent Good. It can, for instance, propel the human being onto her path towards Good by—potentially at least—causing her to fall in love with Good, and thus to leave behind all concern with self. Eros thereby enables ‘moral progress’, which results in what Murdoch herself refers to as ‘metanoia’ or a ‘new state of being’—a phrase that calls to mind Tillich’s notion of the ‘New Being’.146 As such, Murdoch’s eros ‘pictures probably a greater part of what we think of as “the moral life”’ and can legitimately be characterized as the energetic principle animating the ‘mechanism of attachments’ that is the self.147 Murdoch’s account of eros undergirds her anti-behaviourist argument that a human being’s outward acts are a function of her inner life. If eros did not cause us to fall in love with Good we would know Good but remain ‘idle spectators of what we know’—unwilling or unable to let our knowledge change 141 142 143 146

Murdoch, MGM, 343. Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (London: Vintage, 2000), 100 (henceforth TU). 144 145 Murdoch, MGM, 343. Murdoch, MGM, 343. Murdoch, MGM, 343. 147 Murdoch, MGM, 165, 54. Murdoch, MGM, 497.

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us and thus to put it into action, Murdoch argues.148 In response to Sartre’s observation that ‘quand je délibère les jeux sont faits’, Murdoch argues that our actions are preceded by, and indeed dependent on, the orientation of this inner force.

The Fallibility of Eros Such orientation is no straightforward matter. For although Murdoch claims that eros is intrinsically for the Good (‘what is desired is desired as, genuinely, good’), she also recognizes that eros lacks perfect judgement. Not only is eros rash and easily swayed, but it is also dependent on human vision. The human being ‘desires in accordance with what he sees’—yet his vision is, typically, blurred by the selfish ego.149 Consequently, eros can cause the human being to attach herself to false, illusory goods.150 This means that, although eros is indispensable for establishing the self ’s relation with Good and, hence, for redeeming the fallen human being, it can also support the individual’s natural selfishness. When causing a person to fall in love, eros can, for instance, cause her to fall in love with an extension of herself, and thus to undermine the other and his individual distinctness. Murdoch’s eros, then, is a ‘trickster’, an ‘alchemist’, or ‘a sort of magician and sophist’, just as much as it is ‘a lover of wisdom’ and a potential ‘figure of grace’.151 Murdoch is sympathetic to Plato’s vision of ‘erotic love as an education’ bringing us continually closer to the Good, but she is perhaps more guarded than her teacher.152 Given the energy eros provides and its ability to ‘wrench . . . our interest out of ourselves’, it may open us up to true reality and teach us ‘that other worlds and other centres really exist and have rights’.153 And yet, she warns, eros can also ‘be a form of insanity whereby we lose the “open scene”’, that is, where we fixate our attention on one individual reality— usually our ego-self in disguise—at the cost of seeing, respecting, and loving reality itself.154 It is, as Murdoch acknowledges, difficult to be unselfishly in love: ‘without Eros man is a ghost. But with Eros he can be—either a demon or—Socrates.’155 Eros can be ‘an ultimate consolation and an ultimate saviour’; it can cause our downfall through effecting a retreat into consoling illusions as much as it can be the foundation of our life in the light of the Good.156 148 Iris Murdoch, ‘Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Religion’, in EM, 496–531, at 516 (first published in Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues, 1986; henceforth ‘AG’). 149 150 Murdoch, SoG, 39. Murdoch, MGM, 343. 151 152 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 420, 415, MGM, 24. Murdoch, MGM, 345. 153 154 Murdoch, MGM, 345. Murdoch, MGM, 345. 155 Iris Murdoch, ‘Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art’, 464–95, at 487 (first published in Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues, 1986; henceforth ‘AE’). 156 Murdoch, MGM, 346, 343.

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As will have become apparent, Murdoch considers eros to be strictly distinct from Good. While the Good is ‘the absolute’ or ‘the spiritual goal’ (though, as we saw, not the telos), and of a ‘transcendent, impersonal and pure’ nature, eros-love is the spiritual path and, as such, something ‘more mixed and personal’ than Good.157 This means that it is by no means true that, as Zuba suggests, ‘Murdoch misses or pretends not to see love as a problem’ rather than just as a ‘solution’ (though, as we shall see in the following chapter, love is a solution too).158 As one commentator observes, ‘for Murdoch love— perhaps more than any passion or experience by humankind—is prone to selfdeception’.159 In analogy with the different parts of the soul or self, eros can be divided into ‘lower’ and ‘higher’, or unpurified and purified, eros. These signify eros directed towards false goods and eros directed towards transcendent Good respectively. Somewhat problematically, Murdoch considers lower eros to be more personal and higher eros more ‘impersonal’—a point I return to in Chapter 7.160 Importantly, Murdoch considers the higher eros, which leads the human being to attach her ‘self ’ to transcendent Good, to entail not so much the suppression but the purification of ‘blind, obsessive, mechanical [and thus unreal] desire’.161 Contrary to what has been alleged, Murdoch thus calls for a transformation rather than a suspension of ‘physical sexuality’.162 According to her theory, we must connect even the ‘commonest human desire to the highest morality and to the pattern of divine creativity in the universe’.163 This arguably happens when sexual desire is directed towards Good, which cannot be possessed or used for gratification. Such desire is purged from all elements of selfishness and respects the other for who they are. Murdoch clearly attempts to modify Plato insofar as she insists that the ‘purified sexual energy’ of ‘good Eros’—an energy which can ‘lead us to Enlightenment’—does not ‘impatiently bypass [the other’s] individuality in search of the Good’.164 Contrary to Martha Nussbaum’s reading, Murdoch envisages purified sexual desire as a desire in which the lover sees and desires the other as the idiosyncratic individual they are, and in which he neither possesses the beloved nor insists on a return of his love. As I will argue in the 157

Murdoch, MGM, 343. Sonja Zuba, Iris Murdoch’s Contemporary Retrieval of Plato: The Influence of an Ancient Philosopher on a Modern Novelist (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2009), 147 (fn.). 159 Scott Moore, ‘Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers: What They Say and What They Show’, in Rowe and Horner, Murdoch and Morality, 104. 160 Murdoch, SoG, 75. 161 Peter Conradi, ‘Platonism in Iris Murdoch’, in Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton, eds., Platonism and the English Imagination (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 330–42, at 333; Murdoch, MGM, 139. 162 See e.g. Dorothy Winsor, ‘Solipsistic Sexuality in Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature, 34: 1 (1981), 52–63, at 52. 163 164 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 415. Murdoch, ‘AIN’, 246 f.; Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision’, 38. 158

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following chapter, Murdoch’s understanding of ‘good Eros’ here is compromised by her already mentioned assertion of an ‘impersonal’ element, which Nussbaum has rightly criticized.165 This is not, however, true of her ‘slight disdainfulness towards characters [in her novels] who do not re-educate their instincts’—a disdainfulness of which Nussbaum complains that it does not make the reader feel ‘altogether like[d]’.166 Murdoch’s impatience with such characters may, on the one hand, betray her artistic limitations. Murdoch admires not only Shakespeare but also George Eliot, precisely for her ‘godlike capacity for so respecting and loving her characters as to make them exist as free and separate beings’, and has implied that, while aspiring to such a standard, she does not reach it.167 On the other hand, her impatience with certain characters also testifies to her conviction that, while a true lover accepts others for who they are, he also challenges them to discipline their desire.168 Good erotic love is not, therefore, tantamount to an indiscriminate approval of others (including one's readers). This comes to the surface in The Sandcastle, where Bledyard, a saint-like figure very respectful of others, criticizes Mor for his affair with a young artist. Uncomfortable with the criticism, Mor objects that, ‘I seem to remember your saying not so long ago . . . that human beings should not judge one another’; Bledyard counters, rather persuasively, that ‘sometimes . . . it is unavoidably our duty to attempt to attempt [sic] some sort of judgment—and then the suspension of judgment is not charity but the fear of being judged in return’.169 If Murdoch left her reader all too comfortable or unchallenged, her artistic project would have failed.

CO NCLUSION We have seen that Iris Murdoch considers the workings of human consciousness central to the moral life. Finding this to be unrecognized by her philosophical contemporaries, she sets out to develop a moral philosophy that takes into account the way in which moral change begins with an alteration of the state, or contents, of a person’s individual consciousness. While the present discussion did not allow or require me to give anything close to a comprehensive account of Murdoch’s moral philosophy, it should have made clear that her interest in the moral dimension of human consciousness leads her to 166 Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision’, 45. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision’, 49. e.g. Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 275. For Murdoch’s awareness of her limitations see e.g. her interviews with W. K. Rose and Stephen Glover, in Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 16–29, at 22, and 33–42, at 35. 168 169 Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 284, 276. Murdoch, TS, 211 f. 165 167

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construe a metaphysics of transcendent Good and a theory of the self. According to Murdoch, we can meaningfully speak of morality only in reference to an absolute standard extrinsic to ourselves, and on the basis of some degree of individual self-being, as captured in the notion of a substantial self. While Murdoch develops her understanding of the human self in explicit reference to Freud and Plato, this clearly resonates also with Sartre, whose thought lay behind some of her earliest reflections on human consciousness. The supposedly self-determined and self-contained ego-self, with which we commonly identify, is an illusion: we are, in that sense, selfless and need to embrace our selflessness through a process of unselfing. Yet this ego-self is nonetheless an important indicator of the selfish, desirous forces which impose themselves on the far more elusive, real self, and which obstruct the emergence of the ‘good self ’. For, instead of being self-enclosed and stable, the real self is a mechanism of attachments in the grip of the whimsical and fallible force of erotic desire, and deeply affected by that to which it is related (or ‘attached’). In order for this self to become ‘good’, the ‘self-in-progress’ must engage in an ongoing struggle to liberate himself from the enslaving illusions of ‘bad Eros’, and to live in the truth. This self-liberation is, above all, a liberation from the ego-self: true human selfhood depends on the human being’s ‘extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’.170 It is particularly the implied stress on the fragile and dynamic nature of true selfhood, and on the need to liberate oneself from illusions about oneself, which manifests the influence of Sartre and his sense that the human self lacks stable and unified being and must liberate himself from ‘bad faith’. Quite unlike either Sartre or Freud, Murdoch is convinced that such self-liberation requires the human being to relate to a universal, external, transcendent Good—an objective reality or Idea, which provides us with a standard of perfection. In order to spell out how one might obtain true selfhood, Murdoch thus moves from Sartre and Freud to Simone Weil. (Plato, as always, remains with her, too.) This leads her to couple her understanding of love as eros with an understanding of love as attention to the world wherein transcendent Good is encountered.171

170

Murdoch, MGM, 244.

171

Murdoch, MGM, 497, 496.

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7 Eros and Attention: Love in Iris Murdoch We have already seen that Murdoch considers true human selfhood to depend on ‘a long deep process of unselfing’ effecting a ‘metanoia’.1 We also saw that love, in the form of eros, is implicated in the forces that necessitate such a process of unselfing. As I now show, Murdoch nonetheless also considers love, in a broader sense, to be key to the success of this process of unselfing and, thus, to the attainment of true and full selfhood. More precisely, it is, as I now argue, a selfless kind of love which facilitates the necessary ‘decreation’ of the ego—a decreation Murdoch likens to what T. S. Eliot considered to be the artistic task of ‘continual self-sacrifice’.2 While Murdoch’s approach here has, perhaps almost inevitably, led to feminist irritations, I will seek to show that, though not without faults, it does not entail an outright depreciation or dismissal of the needs, desires, and capacities of the individual human subject.3 The kind of selfless love that I claim lies at the heart of Murdoch’s moral philosophy does not so much compromise the flourishing of the individual human subject as that it seeks to restore a notion of human flourishing that incorporates the human being’s moral and spiritual disposition and needs, and that squarely opposes anything resembling a materialistic hedonism. In what follows, I give a more complete account of Murdoch’s understanding of love, and of how exactly such love is thought to affect the human self. As I will argue, Murdoch understands love to consist in an integration of eros and attention. To some extent, this parallels Tillich’s account of love as a unity of eros and agape on non-theistic terms. I close with some observations on the weaknesses of Murdoch’s account.

2 Murdoch, MGM, 54. Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 283. Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, e.g. 86. Gabriele Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), 52, 101. 1 3

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LOVE’ S DIFFERENT ASPECTS

The Insufficiency of Eros-Love Although ‘love’ is one of her perhaps most frequently used terms, Murdoch gives no systematic account of it. She attempts to integrate a broad variety of perspectives on love, including particularly Plato’s notion of eros, a Christian sense of other-centred love, and the fact that we think of love for others as ‘one of the most important things in any life’.4 Insofar as ‘love can be used to understand any desire or tendency’, the concept is, as Murdoch points out, highly ambiguous.5 On the one hand, ‘love’ is in close conceptual proximity to the transcendent Good and, accordingly, often given something of the aura of the sacred; on the other hand, love is also prone to corruption and ‘often distorted by egoism’.6 Since love is able to ‘name something bad’, it is, as Murdoch suggests in contrast to Christian perspectives on love, not on a par with ‘Good’.7 According to Plato’s Symposium, whose imagery ‘exalts perfect Good over imperfect love’, love does not, so Murdoch argues, share the sovereignty of Good and ultimately belongs to the immanent human realm rather than to the transcendent.8 As we already saw, it is precisely the consequent ambiguity and malleability of love which Murdoch considers to be captured in the concept of eros. ‘The activity of Eros’, Murdoch writes, ‘is orientation of desire.’9 Good eros is the orientation of desire towards transcendent Good, bad eros the orientation of desire to the selfish ego. Although eros always signifies an orientation to perceived Good, it suffers from the human being’s inability to properly distinguish true from false Good. This becomes particularly evident where the human being falls in love with another person. On the one hand, eros then ruptures a person’s self-absorption and enables the ‘sudden realisation that another human being exists in an absolute sense’.10 The momentous removal of the world’s centre from oneself to another provides an opportunity for the person to be led out of herself, to ‘forget’ herself, and to radically centre herself on another.11 Falling in love can thus effect a spiritual, quasi-religious transformation of consciousness. On the other hand, and as Murdoch illustrates in countless examples in her novels, it is also one of the experiences most prone to selfish distortions.12 Eros can cause the human being to love another merely 4

5 6 Murdoch, MGM, 342. Murdoch, MGM, 342. Murdoch, MGM, 342. 8 9 Murdoch, SoG, 99. Murdoch, MGM, 343. Murdoch, MGM, 497. 10 Armstrong, Introduction to Murdoch, NS, unpaginated. 11 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 415; ‘AG’, 516. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, intr. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), 412–579, at section 252 a, b, pp. 489 ff. 12 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 416 f.; ‘AG’, 517. Examples of a failed ‘falling in love’ include Bradley in Murdoch’s The Black Prince, Mor’s love for Rain Carter in The Sandcastle, Jake’s love for Anna in 7

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as a mirror of himself. It can disguise love of self as love of another. In such a case, eros reinforces the lover’s natural tendency towards egoistic selfimprisonment and his desire ‘to derealise the other, devour and absorb him, subject him to the mechanism of our own fantasy’.13 Eros can thus conceal a selfish love by suggesting a ‘violent mock-ascesis or a false loss of self ’, which, as Conradi describes it, makes the subject oblivious to his ego’s imminent attempt to resurface and swallow the other.14 Eros’s struggle to turn the human being away from self and towards transcendent Good can, in part, be described with reference to its character as a somewhat unconscious, impulsive force which breaks into human consciousness from within. Particularly in the case of falling in love, the eruptive nature of this energy, which seems to lack an intrinsic self-reflexivity, can be so sudden, overpowering, and impassioned that it leaves little room for a critical consideration and assessment of reality as a whole. This is particularly acute where eros causes the human subject to confuse transcendent Good with the ego. Where her selfishness is thus enhanced, the erotic subject fails to perceive reality for what it is. This furthers her moral decline since, as Murdoch argues, ‘I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of “see”’.15 Eros’s proper functioning is thus interdependent on the subject’s perception of reality. This leaves us with the seeming paradox that eros can only perform its task of binding a person to the Good if that person is schooled in perceiving the Good. We might say, then, that eros itself must be purified from ego and its ‘false images’, and guided by something other than itself.16 In the following discussion I want to bring together Murdoch’s notion of eros with her proposed practice of ‘attention’ by arguing that these two forms of love are complementary to one another. Eros inspires attention, which must in turn guide eros. This will show how Murdoch—though aware that (eros-)love can be part of the problem of human self-delusion and sinfulness—nonetheless also considers love in a wider sense to redeem the human being of this morally and spiritually inadequate state.

The Practice of Attention Murdoch explicitly ‘borrow[s]’ the term ‘attention’ from Simone Weil.17 She understands attention as a conscious and active practice or ‘moral discipline’ and, following Weil, likens it to prayer.18 Attention, she writes, constitutes the Under the Net, and Henry’s love for Stephanie in Henry and Cato. For the potential need to ‘fall out of love’ see Murdoch, MGM, 345. 13 14 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 417. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 142. 15 16 17 Murdoch, SoG, 36. Murdoch, MGM, 317, 320. Murdoch, SoG, 33. 18 Murdoch, SoG, 63, 53. Cf. Miles, Simone Weil: An Anthology, 212.

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‘effort to counteract’ our often ‘convincingly coherent’ but false pictures of the world through making use of the ‘continual slight control over the direction and focus of [our] vision’.19 As such, it has a moral quality which is missing in the more neutral concept of looking. ‘Looking’, Murdoch implies, can refer to many kinds of perception, thus leaving room for the beholder to impose on the object of his vision his own, possibly denigrating prejudices.20 Attention, by contrast, is unambiguously good; it ‘imperceptibly . . . builds up structures of value around us’.21 Given our above discussion of the juxtaposition of the dazzling self and transcendent Good, it is clear that Murdoch’s attention must refer to a glance directed outwards, away from self. The practice of attention contrasts with the—in Murdoch’s eyes, problematic—classical psychoanalytic endeavour of examining oneself and one’s inner life. Through use of his mental faculties, and up to the point of forgetting himself, the attentive beholder consciously focuses his gaze on an object outside of himself. In doing so, he attempts to let go of his prejudices and projections onto reality and to allow reality to speak for and reveal itself: the absence of self from the mind is, Murdoch writes, ‘“good for us” because it involves respect, because it is an exercise in cleansing the mind of selfish preoccupation, because it is an experience of what truth is like’.22 Attention thus rests on the humble recognition that reality—that which is—must be sought outside of the (ego-)self, which is a major source of fantasies and illusions. It enables the human subject to begin to discover the particularity and individual distinctness of his surroundings, wherein alone Good is to be encountered. As such, it helps undo the selfish fantasies that separate the human being from what is good and real, and facilitates spiritual and moral change. Murdoch illustrates this process in her much-cited example of a mother-inlaw (M) who, through a slow reformation of her vision, succeeds in altering her negative view of her daughter-in-law (D). M, Murdoch writes, becomes aware that her negative image of D may be based on prejudice, that is, that she looks at D from the perspective of her own preconceptions about what her ideal daughter-in-law should be like. Impelled, it seems, by a faint sense of eros for the Good, M decides to ‘look again’, so as to acquire a less ‘distorted’ and more real ‘vision’ of D.23 M, in short, begins to pay ‘careful and just attention’ to D.24 She attempts to see D ‘as she really is’, that is, as a concretely existing individual whose reality differs from M’s (inevitably selfish) preconceptions of her.25 The more she pays attention to D as she is (rather than, say, as M would 19

Murdoch, SoG, 30, 36. For the difference between looking and attention see Murdoch, SoG, 36. 21 22 23 Murdoch, SoG, 36. Murdoch, MGM, 245. Murdoch, SoG, 17, 36. 24 Murdoch, SoG, 36, 17. 25 Murdoch, SoG, 36. Murdoch illustrates this in her novels, such as when Tim’s increasing unselfishness, which leads him to end his fraught love-relation with Daisy, finally allows him to 20

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like her to be), the more she sees her in light of transcendent Good—and, indeed, as good. According to Murdoch’s metaphysic, this amounts to M seeing the ‘reality’ of D, rather than using D as a mere projection for her ego. As this example indicates, a change in perception implies a discovery of value—indeed, of the fact that reality is saturated with value, or the Good. M for instance comes to ‘discover’ D ‘to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay’, and so on.26 Where M perceives D more justly—that is, where she sees her more as she really is—she will have moved closer to the Good and thus have become a better person herself. Contrary to the behaviourist or empiricist philosophers, nothing would necessarily have changed outwardly, nor would the change have come to M easily. Rather, she would have engaged in an invisible ‘internal struggle’, a gradual reformative process.27 This kind of private effort for right vision is, Murdoch claims, the basis of morality.

Attention, Obedience, and Necessity Murdoch adopts Weil’s association of attention with obedience.28 Attention is an ‘exercise of love’, a ‘patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation’ and, as such, corresponds with ‘obedience to reality’.29 Murdoch identifies such attentive obedience with a truthful exercise of will. In attention, the will’s inclination to grasp reality and move in it uninhibitedly is suspended. Instead, it is reality which is allowed to compel the will, to become ‘compulsively present to it’.30 This clearly runs counter to Sartre’s notion of the will as the creator of reality, who exerts the self ’s ideas and preferences. Will, for Murdoch, ‘is obedience not resolution’.31 The human subject must, to be sure, wilfully resolve to embark on a practice of attention, yet the will here acts not as an isolated entity (of the ‘neo-Kantian’ kind Murdoch rejects) but in combination with eros and reason. In such an act, the will obeys the Good towards which eros seeks to draw the self; it seeks to obediently guide the subject’s passions and desires, her imagination and capacity for reflection in accordance with actual reality. With Weil, Murdoch considers obedience of will to result from an experience of ‘necessity’.32 Reality is encountered where it is perceived and accepted see her in all her beauty and for who she is (Murdoch, NS, 391). By contrast, Mary, rather more a ‘nice’ than a ‘good’ character in The Nice and the Good, realizes that she does ‘not love [Theo, who is more of a “good” character] enough to see him clearly’ (Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (London: Vintage, 2001), 88). 26 27 Murdoch, SoG, 17. Murdoch, SoG, 22, 17. 28 As Völker points out, the concept of ‘obedience’ can be traced back further to Meister Eckhart (Völker, Rhetoric of Love, 51). 29 30 31 Murdoch, SoG, 41. Murdoch, SoG, 38. Weil in Murdoch, SoG, 39. 32 Murdoch, SoG, 39.

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as other and as resistant to one’s will—where it is perceived as necessary.33 Although the world in and of itself is contingent, it is necessary in relation to us and our experience insofar as it is not contingent on our will but exists independently and prior to us. By confronting us with its necessity, the world around us conveys to us ‘the futility of selfish purposes’.34 The world also reveals the necessity of Good, both by mirroring this and by ‘itself obey[ing] an alien law’, the law of necessity.35 Goodness, so Murdoch argues, depends on the willingness to confront and accept the ‘pointless necessity of the world’, even and especially where this is experienced as a void.36 Similarly to Kant and Weil, Murdoch here asserts that goodness must be pursued ‘for nothing’, that goodness demands obedience to reality irrespective of consolations or rewards.37 Goodness is, in Murdoch’s eyes, its own reward. As I seek to show later in this chapter, this does not contradict the notion that the pursuit of the Good builds up the self and enhances the individual’s freedom and happiness. To pick a more intuitive example, true love does not seek its own but loves the other for who they are; and yet, it is precisely such love which bestows the greatest happiness and freedom on the lover. In insisting that goodness be pursued ‘for nothing’, Murdoch is not so much dismissing the legitimacy or even importance of human flourishing in general, as arguing that the desire for such well-being cannot be the driving force of our moral and spiritual life. Note, for instance, her remark, in the context of discussing Schopenhauer’s asceticism, that ‘the completely selfless person . . . seems to us as a stripped-down nothing’.38 Murdoch acknowledges that Schopenhauer’s picture ‘may seem too puritanically absolute’, but also points out that he in fact rejoices in the world, is passionate, and simply ‘feels that only what is extreme will crack the hard ego’.39 The affinity, here, between her and Schopenhauer is obvious. Both implicitly suggest that ‘the true reality of our being’, and hence our well-being, is so hidden by human selfishness that it can only be obtained via the detour of a turn away from self.40 In advocating obedient attention to the other, Murdoch thus calls for a willingness to undergo feelings of emptiness or of Kantian ‘awe and fear’ for the sake of approaching Good: insofar as true goodness rests on truthful vision, it requires us ‘to silence and expel self ’, ‘to look and look until one exists no more’.41 The

33 As Sage points out, ‘ “Otherness” has for Murdoch here none of the sinister significance it had acquired for Beauvoir in The Second Sex; this is not least because it is the otherness “of people”, not of women, that Murdoch stresses’ (Sage, Women in the House, 73). 34 35 36 Murdoch, MGM, 109. Murdoch, MGM, 108. Murdoch, MGM, 108. 37 38 39 Murdoch, MGM, 108. Murdoch, MGM, 62. Murdoch, MGM, 62. 40 Murdoch, MGM, 61. 41 Murdoch, MGM, 108; SoG, 63; In Peter Conradi, ‘Preface’ to Murdoch, EM, xix–xxx, at xxiv.

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Good, and the flourishing selfhood attending it, is at times uncomfortable, even painful, to obtain. Yet—particularly in light of eros—the path towards Good is not only one of hardship. According to Murdoch, the Good never imposes itself on the human being but entices her ‘surrender . . . to its authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish’.42 This is because the Good awakens our eros and thereby magnetically attracts us to itself. Beauty, such as that of nature or of ‘great art’, is a key aid in this, Murdoch argues.43 It is ‘a clue to Good’ insofar as it shares the latter’s ‘removed, transcendent nature’.44 ‘We cannot acquire and assimilate the beautiful’ but find it, like Good, to be ‘indomitable’.45 Both Beauty and Good are ‘to be desired, yet respected, adored, yet not possessed’.46 As an ‘image of Good’, Beauty is also ‘a way to Good; or a substitute for it’ and that which calls forth in us erotic desire.47

A Just and Loving Gaze In addition to obedience, attention is linked with justice and love. According to Murdoch, attention can also be described as the conscious direction of ‘a just and loving gaze . . . upon an individual reality’ outside of the moral subject.48 The just quality of attention signifies its freedom from ‘prejudice’ and ‘temptation’; it constitutes the attempt ‘to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection’ so that no room is left for the tentacles of the ego and its fantasies.49 Although it thus stands for seeing reality as it is, justice does not entail a value-free or neutral kind of accuracy. Considering such neutrality impossible, Murdoch maintains that we can only but perceive reality either in light of Good or in light of our own selfish ego (or a disguise thereof). Since reality is, according to Murdoch, drenched in and structured by transcendent Good, it is only where the individual subjects himself to this transcendent Good and orientates himself towards it, that he or she becomes able to genuinely inhabit reality. Significantly for our present discussion, Murdoch also explicitly identifies ‘attention directed upon individuals’ as ‘an exercise of love’.50 Indeed, 42

Murdoch, SoG, 86. Murdoch, MGM, 418. Thus, Dora in The Bell, Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Paula and Richard in The Nice and the Good, and others pursue truth and Good partly in galleries. Murdoch’s emphasis on Beauty explains why she considers ‘the metaphor of vision so indispensable in discussions of aesthetics and morality’, to the point that she prioritizes the category of vision over that of will (Murdoch, ‘FS’, 453). 44 45 46 Murdoch, MGM, 343. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 417. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 417. 47 Murdoch, MGM, 344. Murdoch’s affirmation of the moral value of Beauty is echoed by Scarry, who argues that beauty makes aesthetic fairness and ethical fairness manifest: Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (London: Duckbacks, 2001). 48 49 50 Murdoch, SoG, 33. Murdoch, SoG, 39. Murdoch, SoG, 2, 41. 43

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attention properly aims precisely for the ‘imaginative recognition of, that is, respect for . . . otherness’ which Murdoch identifies with ‘love’.51 We have seen that Murdoch associates both eros and attention with love (eros being defined as ‘the continuous operation of spiritual energy, desire, intellect, love’).52 This becomes particularly obvious with regard to her definitions of love as ‘the perception of individuals’, as the ‘non-violent apprehension of difference’, and as ‘the discovery of reality’: both (good) eros and attention are geared towards facilitating precisely such vision.53 The reader is here potentially left with the impression that eros and attention are alternative manifestations of the same larger reality—‘love’. While eros might thus appear as a quick, impulsive, and impassioned form of love whose success rate is somewhat unpredictable, attention might then be characterized as a slower, more disciplined and reliable form of love that would appear to lack emotional warmth. As I will now argue, such a reading would be mistaken. In linking both eros and attention with love, Murdoch envisages these movements not as alternative forms of love but as complementary aspects of love. True love, that is, consists in the interplay of eros and attention.

The Complementarity of Eros and Attention Without some underlying erotic attraction to the Good, the previously mentioned mother-in-law’s decision to embark on the difficult and sobering practice of attention would seem incomprehensible. Similarly, our loving ‘respect for otherness’ would, without erotic desire for the Good, lack the kind of emotional warmth we naturally associate with love, as well as the human self itself. For, insofar as the human self is, as Murdoch suggests, a mechanism of attachment that is moved by erotic desire, attention must involve eros if it is to transform our self (rather than becoming a closet form of egoism dwelling with particulars without seeing in them the transcendent Good). Just as attention thus needs eros, so eros needs attention. Murdoch indeed considers eros to ‘move . . . among and respond . . . to particular objects of attention’.54 Desire does not operate in a vacuum but in response to what we look at. In light of human selfishness, it is only insofar as eros operates in the context of a practice such as attention to the other that it lovingly connects the human subject with transcendent Good. ‘Our desires, our life-energy

51 53

Murdoch, ‘TSTG’, 216. Murdoch, ‘TSTG’, 215, 218.

52

Emphasis added. Murdoch, MGM, 496. 54 Murdoch, MGM, 496.

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or Eros, can’, Murdoch writes, ‘be purified through our attention to God, or to some magnetic Good unescapably active in our lives’ and encountered in worldly particulars.55 By schooling a person in seeing that which transcends the self, attention enables love’s ‘maturation’, which implies ‘falling out of intense “love” . . . and in love with the separate world and the separate people it contains’.56 Attention, in short, offers the discipline of perception that is critical to the ‘discipline of desire’—the chastening—that Murdoch identifies as a key aspect of the process of unselfing, which eros properly seeks to promote.57 The complementarity of eros and attention explains how, for Murdoch, it is true both that love placed us in the (Platonic) cave, and that love, albeit of such a higher, chastened sort, gets us out of it.58 It also explains why Murdoch does not have in mind asexual or otherwise oppressive love when she says, with Plato, that it is ‘chaste love’ which ‘teaches’.59 Chaste love is much rather eroslove made capable of fulfilling its goal of leading the subject to the Good by a practice of attention that ensures the subject’s turn towards the individual other. The complementarity of eros and attention further sheds light on Murdoch’s claim that we learn the meaning of love (and related concepts) only gradually, and in concrete contexts.60 This makes little sense if applied to the sudden, eruptive force of eros alone. Instead, ‘love’ is learnt where eros is guided by the attentive gaze at the individual reality presenting itself to the moral subject. In a similar vein, this complementarity indicates also why Murdoch condemns attempts at what Conradi calls a ‘fast unselfing’.61 Left to itself, eros would be prone to promoting such an insufficient, deceptive askesis, such as when it causes a person to conflate falling in love with the ‘death’ of the ego. The slow and difficult nature of overcoming the ego becomes evident at various points in Murdoch’s novels. As Conradi points out, the writer Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, for instance, ‘suffers first the partial askesis involved in falling desperately in love’ with someone, and is ‘then further “unselfed” by losing her, and by being falsely punished for a murder he may have willed but did not commit’.62 Murdoch pushes this even further in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, where the purity of Tallis is illustrated in his

55

56 Murdoch, MGM, 109. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 142. 58 Murdoch, MGM, 39. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 141. 59 60 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 417. Murdoch, SoG, 28. 61 Conradi, ‘Platonism in Iris Murdoch’, 336. 62 Conradi, ‘Platonism in Iris Murdoch’, 342. A similar example is Tim in Nuns and Soldiers, whose dying to self begins when he falls in love with Gertrude, but is deepened only through her leaving him. Typically for Murdoch, Tim’s second, mature stage of dying to self involves a confrontation with death (Murdoch, NS, 173–90, 375). 57

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unreciprocated and yet unfailing love for his estranged wife: Tallis’s love is entirely ego-free. These various pointers to eros’s need for purification and its interdependency on a practice of attention cast doubt on whether the limited notice critics have, according to Conradi, given to Murdoch’s notion of eros really is indicative of these critics’ ‘puritan moralism’.63 While her concept of eros may deserve more consideration than it has thus far received, its place of importance in Murdoch’s thought is shared with, and tempered by, the moral-spiritual practice of attention, which she identifies as ‘the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent’.64 The upshot of this is that Murdoch’s own thinking evinces something of the ascetic, if not puritanical— features she openly attributes to Plato. Murdoch’s (good) eros corresponds with a dying to self that is in clear contradiction to our natural instinct. The conscious other-centredness of attention prefigures and enables eros’s intended centredness on the Good. Purified eros seems almost to be an internalization of the total other-centredness of attention, to the point that such eros entails no direct and active concern for one’s own flourishing or well-being. Conradi’s judgement, then, that ‘[eros] is the very centre of [Murdoch’s] thought’, does not fully capture her claim that love must be ‘a central concept in morals’.65 It bypasses the complexity of Murdoch’s concept of love, the fact that it is only in the context of attention that eros can truly be identified as love. Similarly, Sage’s impression, that ‘attention is too neutral and altruistic a word’ for Murdoch’s morality, is not entirely fitting.66 As I have argued, Murdoch rules out the possibility of neutral perception and considers attention to be soaked in value. Attention, then, does not compromise the kind of erotic desire and passion Sage rightly considers key to Murdoch’s thought.67 Instead, attention and eros are complementary to one another in a manner reminiscent of Tillich’s (and other Christian) notion(s) of the complementarity of eros and agape. Attention, we might say, enables the subject’s erotic ascent towards the Good through promoting the self ’s descent from selfaggrandizing illusions. The complementarity of eros and attention means that true love, for Murdoch, is a ‘rational virtuous passion’—desire entirely free of self-interest and entirely oriented towards the other.68 As I now seek to show, such love is both selfless and conducive to human flourishing.

63 65 66 68

64 Conradi, Saint and Artist, 256. Murdoch, SoG, 67, 33. Emphasis added. Conradi, Saint and Artist, 256; Murdoch, SoG, 2. 67 Sage, Women in the House, 78. Sage, Women in the House, 91. Murdoch, MGM, 298.

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LOVE AND THE SELF

The Human Self in Love In the previous chapter we saw that Murdoch defends the unique importance of human and other individuals as the fundamental constituents of reality, and hence as the central loci of the moral life. We saw also that Murdoch considers the moral and spiritual valuation of human consciousness to be a key prerequisite for thus safeguarding the individual, insofar as the workings and contents of consciousness encapsulate our intransigent particularity. Yet Murdoch is also aware of the ambiguity of understanding the human individual in reference to consciousness. Where the human being is reduced to a stream of consciousness, individuality in fact gets lost and moral agency undermined: the moral life hinges on our ability to act on our consciousness, to evaluate it and alter its contents. It was against this background that Murdoch affirmed an element of substantial self-being. Thus, when Murdoch speaks of the good human being as an unselfed or selfless being, she does not have in mind a mere shadow of a person. Even in his or her unselfed state, the human being retains an indestructible core— indeed, a ‘self ’, which is further built up and strengthened through a person’s loving attachment to the Good. The purification of desire through attention not only enables the lover to recognize and respect the individual particulars within the world but uncovers also the lover’s own individual distinctness. Murdoch’s attentive eros further allows for, and indeed depends on, a degree of self-relatedness. While she resists the psychoanalytical dissection of one’s inner life, her own example of the relation between M and D indicates that she does endorse a basic moral self-reflectiveness and self-evaluation. M’s decision to reconsider her image of D rests on a combination of an erotic attraction to Good and a self-awareness that allows her to recognize the extent to which she falls short of this standard. Contrary to what has been suggested,69 Murdoch’s account of love does, moreover, entail an affirmation of the human being’s status as a resolute moral agent. Murdoch, to be sure, understands humility as ‘selfless respect for reality’ and considers it ‘one of the most difficult and central of all virtues’.70 Yet she explicitly dissociates this from ‘a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice’ and, contrary to some commentators,71 (tentatively) affirms the importance of the human will when she explicitly associates

69

70 Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 86. Murdoch, SoG, 93. Cf. John Wilson, ‘Can One Promise to Love Another?’, Philosophy, 64: 250 (1989), 557–63; Tony Milligan, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Romantic Platonism’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow (2005), 160. 71

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the faculty of ‘active imagination’, which she considers so central to the purification of desire, with ‘an exercise of will’.72 The very process of unselfing through love consists in consciously willed imaginative activity (even though this activity is, as Broackes points out, most adequately described as a form of ‘meditation’73) and, in turn, bestows on the lover greater courage and independence. Murdoch’s novels, again, concretize this. Through their loving conformity to transcendent Good, virtuous characters such as Bledyard in The Sandcastle or Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat are freed from the pressure to conform to convention. This enables them to boldly speak out against wrongdoing or to undertake ‘decisive action’ against injustice or in situations of danger in a way that contrasts starkly with the passivity of morally more ambiguous characters, such as Ann in An Unofficial Rose.74 The accusation that Murdoch demonizes anyone who ‘demonstrate[s] a Kantian commitment—as Murdoch understands it—to the capacities of the rational and autonomous subject’, is therefore unfair.75 Contrary to her (in her words) neo-Kantian colleagues, she rejects merely the view that the individual and his or her powers can be affirmed directly or through arbitrary assertions of will or creations of values. As we saw, Murdoch proposes, instead, that truthful self-affirmation rests on a willed turn away from self and towards recognition of the other and their unconditional value. Finally, and as we saw, Murdoch’s pessimistic anthropology of selfishness does lead her to call for the suppression of ‘bad desire’. However, this concerns precisely those desires which, in Murdoch’s eyes, enslave and hence weaken the self, such as the desire for social acceptability, for personal gain, or for intellectual fame. As noted above, her insistence that we must be good for nothing amounts not to a rejection of rewards tout court but to a warning that where we seek Good for the sake of rewards we are already replacing Good with the ego. Far from undermining them, Murdoch thus keenly safeguards the human being’s individuality, her capacity for self-relatedness and bold action, as well as her desire. What is more, the moral goodness she commends does, in fact, bear fruits that build up the moral subject and enable her to flourish.

73 Murdoch, SoG, 93; ‘TSTG’, 199. Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 20. Gordon, Fables of Unselfing, 37. Bledyard speaks out against Mor’s affair with another woman (Murdoch, TS, 211–13). Tallis defends Simon and Axel when attacked by homophobic youths in a restaurant, and acts to defend Hilda when she is in danger (Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (London: Vintage Classics, 2001) [henceforth FHD], 232). Other examples of characters who become more independent and active as they move closer to Good are Dora in The Bell and Tamar in The Book and the Brotherhood. 75 Insole, ‘Beyond Glass Doors’, 133. 72 74

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The Fruits of Attentive Eros Reality and Truthfulness The lover’s ‘arrival’ in reality constitutes perhaps the most important benefit of the attentive, erotic love Murdoch envisages. ‘Love, and so art and morals,’ writes Murdoch, ‘is the discovery of reality’.76 Through love of Good, as encountered in the individuals of the world, the lover’s ego is decreated to the point that only that ‘bit of [her]’ is left which is ‘real and knows truth’.77 The consequent ‘realisation of a vast and varied reality outside ourselves . . . brings about a sense, initially of terror, and when properly understood of exhilaration and spiritual power’.78 In part, this spiritual power derives from the fact that, once reduced to her truthful core, the lover is not only enabled to better perceive and accept the individual realities outside of herself but also to know and accept herself: for Murdoch, ‘it is only in . . . love that we can discover ourselves’ or ‘the essence of [our] personality’, our individual character.79 Love thereby enables the human being to live and act without pretence, as the individual that she is. Murdoch illustrates the way in which attentive eros ‘join[s] us to the world’, or to reality, by reference to the work of learning a language.80 ‘If I am learning, for instance, Russian,’ Murdoch argues, ‘I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect . . . . My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a 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.’81 The same attitude of ‘obedience to reality’ also facilitates the creative work of the artist.82 The artist can, so Murdoch insists, only reveal reality to the viewer (which is what, in Murdoch’s eyes, good art does), if he allows reality to reveal itself to him. This, again, requires him to love reality with erotic attention. That such love bestows the freedom to live as an individual and facilitates a focus on reality and truth, rather than on self-aggrandizing illusions, is arguably illustrated in various of the more virtuous characters in Murdoch’s novels. As already mentioned, Bledyard (The Sandcastle), Tallis (A Fairly Honourable Defeat), and Willy Kost and Uncle Theo (The Nice and the Good) all lead simple (and idiosyncratic) lives at a remove from the world. Yet they are capable of unusual courage. They may seem eccentric or shy, but their strong commitment to truth and virtue goes hand in hand with an

76 79 80 82

77 78 Murdoch, MGM, 244. Murdoch, ‘AG’, 515. Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 282. Baldanza, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Personality’, 189. 81 Murdoch, MGM, 497, 496. Emphasis added. Murdoch, SoG, 87. Murdoch, SoG, 39.

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independent mind and a willingness to challenge others in their wrongdoing. In The Sandcastle, for instance, it is only Bledyard who has the clarity of vision and courageous freedom to challenge the actions of his adulterous colleague Mor. Able to withstand the mockery of the entire school, Bledyard is more fully himself and arguably has greater self-esteem than Mor, who considers his ability to realize his aspirations to be dependent on his lover’s affection. Bledyard lacks not personality or agency,83 but a self-conscious concern with self-image, and an uncontrolled urge to assert himself.84 Despite his somewhat forlorn, even pitiful, existence and lack of personal presence, the ascetic Tallis Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat is the only character in the novel who fearlessly and effectively intervenes in a scene of racist abuse, and who brings the cynical Julius King to reveal his evil schemes.85 Though not quite as saintly as Bledyard and Tallis, Willy and Theo in The Nice and the Good, too, lead confined existences and urge one another to love the good more truly.86 Particularly Theo, who ‘often seem[s] to have become almost imperceptible’ to others in a way that he himself provokes, also willingly confronts his own selfishness and guilt.87

Moral and Spiritual Freedom Arguing that ‘freedom and love must be related’, Murdoch further envisages love to equip the lover with genuine freedom.88 It is important to note, in this context, that Murdoch demands that ‘intellectual, emotional or spiritual freedom’ (which she is primarily interested in) not be conflated with political freedom.89 The former type of freedom is not a given but a spiritual and moral achievement. It cannot be identified with unlimited choice, or ‘with a casting off of bonds, with emotional unrestraint’; instead, such freedom means, as ‘Plato’ puts it in one of Murdoch’s dialogues, ‘not to be a slave of selfish desires’ and thus to be able to ‘exist sanely without fear and to perceive what is real’.90 Finding that the ‘natural urge to want to be able to do what one wants 83 Murdoch has been accused of undermining these in Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 86. 84 Lovibond is right, therefore, that Murdoch’s good person lacks a ‘strong sense of [her] own identity’, a ‘determination to “get anywhere” ’, and ‘eloquence or . . . general savoir vivre’ as well as evincing a certain bodily ‘stillness’ (Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 86). Lovibond makes no case, however, for why these are faults, particularly from the moral perspective Murdoch assumes. Lovibond, moreover, brushes over the fact that, as illustrated above, Murdoch’s good characters are not, for instance, ‘still’ or uneloquent at all times but shun primarily a pointless and self-absorbed busy-ness. 85 86 Murdoch, FHD, 232, 389–400. Murdoch, NG, 123–6, 344. 87 88 Murdoch, NG, 86, 347 f. Murdoch, SoG, 2. 89 In Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 141. 90 In Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 140; Murdoch, ‘AG’, 515; Iris Murdoch, ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’, in EM, 193–202, at 201 (first published in Encounter, 1966; henceforth ‘DPR’).

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to do’ is far too ‘ambiguous’ a matter to be the defining structure of freedom, Murdoch defines real freedom as ‘a function of the progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly’, of the attempt, that is, to purify eros through the practice of attention.91 Murdoch provocatively suggests that the ‘real’ freedom acquired through the individual’s vision of the Good, and through his concomitant entry into reality, consists in the absence of choice. According to Murdoch, the perception of a multiplicity of options from which one can choose signifies not freedom’s overwhelming scope but its absence. It results from the unordered nature of one’s selfish desires and from the inability to perceive a situation clearly, or from a ‘discrepancy between personality and ideals’.92 The more the human person is by contrast united with transcendent Good, the more she is attracted and compelled by this single, unified reality. Her newly gained ability to live and act in unambiguous accord with the good and the real is what, in Murdoch’s eyes, makes her truly free—free, not least, to be the individual she is and to grant others the freedom to do the same. According to Murdoch, only such a freedom, which issues from direct union with Good, can ground and explain ‘the freedom wherein the good man spontaneously helps and serves others’.93 And yet such a freedom is acquired as slowly as we approach the Good, and through the continuous work of love. Murdoch’s views here are informed by her conviction that prevalent portrayals of freedom as ‘the sudden jumping of the isolated will in and out of an impersonal logical complex’ are not in fact true to reality.94 As indicated by Sartre’s frustrated experience that ‘quand je délibère les jeux sont faits’, freedom cannot be understood as an empty, a priori faculty to be applied at will and to any given reality. The human being is not free in the sense of ‘undetermined’. His decisions and actions result from who he is as an individual, or has allowed himself to become over time—whether he has given in to selfish desire or loved transcendent Good. Contra Sartre, Murdoch argues that freedom is also unable to, as he puts it, ‘fly in the face of the facts’.95 As she sees it, such an idea constitutes an inadequate attempt to prevent the subjection of morality to science, or of values to facts—an attempt, that is, ‘to solve this problem without really facing it’, insofar as it willingly accepts the separation between fact and value assumed by modern science and forces the human person into it (by associating the human individual with value and the outer world with fact).96 As Murdoch writes, the notion that morality can

91

92 Murdoch, SoG, 38. Murdoch, SoG, 38. Murdoch, SoG, 39, 38; MGM, 109. 94 Murdoch, MGM, 326, 460. Murdoch detects such a view of freedom in the English analytic philosophers of her day or in Sartre’s freedom as absolute self-determination. 95 96 Murdoch, SoG, 26. Murdoch, SoG, 26. 93

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‘escap[e] from science only by a wild leap of the will’ reflects neither what we are able to do nor what is required of us.97 Murdoch thus considers freedom to consist in the submission to what is real and good, or in choosing, so to speak, real, objective values.98 Such a willing submission, or obedient choice, is enabled by attentive, erotic love. Similarly to Tillich’s dialectical integration of freedom and destiny, Murdoch here marries freedom with an element of determinism. Freedom, she writes, is concerned also, and perhaps primarily, with ‘self-control, with just understanding, with the liberation of the person from irresponsible motives’.99 At the same time, Murdoch incorporates the Platonic and Kantian view—a variation of which is present also in Sartre—that freedom consists in a liberation from, and transcendence of, that ‘“lower” level of existence’ where the human being is enslaved by ‘“mechanistic” processes’ which ‘block the self ’s access to a moral absolute’.100

Happiness, Joy, and Fulfilment Given her interpretation of Plato and Kant, Murdoch is ambivalent about the link between love and happiness. Though inclined to affirm ‘that the free man is happier . . . than the person who is the slave of mean desires’ which ‘torment’ him, she does so only hesitantly, and in awareness of this being ‘difficult’.101 Murdoch sympathizes with what she sees as Kant’s conviction that ‘a search for happiness . . . is heteronomous, a surrender to egoistic desires’.102 Happiness, though ‘so often spoken of as an intelligible end’, ‘becomes multiform under the pressure of surrounding values’.103 It can thus denote ‘the satisfaction of selfish desires’, which have no place in the good life.104 Seeking strictly to avoid selfish abuses, Murdoch admires Kant’s stoicism, his consistency in making no concessions which would make the moral person feel more encouraged or consoled in her moral efforts, yet might also open a back door to selfishness.105 At the same time, Murdoch not only acknowledges that ‘the quest for happiness and the promotion of happiness’ is a natural feature of human life and love, but also observes that ‘Plato’s Eros, by contrast, is potentially a happy lover, at many levels, and the joy which breathes in the art of the dialogues is itself a sign or symbol of the possibility of spiritual happiness’.106

97

98 Murdoch, SoG, 26. Murdoch, MGM, 326. In Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 140. It is in the context of freedom that the origins of feminist difficulties with Murdoch’s thought become clear: she invests considerably more energy in conceptualising the preconditions for spiritual freedom than those of political freedom. 100 101 Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’, 237. In Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 145. 102 103 104 Murdoch, MGM, 438. Murdoch, MGM, 326. Murdoch, MGM, 124. 105 106 Murdoch, MGM, 440. Murdoch, MGM, 497, 438. 99

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In light of this ambiguity, Murdoch tentatively endorses two kinds of happiness, which I propose can be conceptualized along the lines of her claim that ‘morality divides between moral obligation/duty and spiritual change’.107 Where a human being tends, for instance, towards self-obsessive inwardness and destructive gloom or bitterness, an aspiration to happiness can, firstly, be a ‘moral duty’.108 The desire for happiness ‘keeps people sane and freshens life’.109 As such, it is capable of pushing the human being along on the path of life and of keeping her open to encounters with the world. A human being may not yet sense an erotic attraction to the Good, but her desire for happiness may at least stimulate that basic engagement with the world without which her eros for the Good could not be kindled in the first place. Matters arguably change once the human being begins to relate to the world more openly and erotically. If happiness is then made the criterion for assessing the validity of one’s actions, it is bound merely to promote selfishness, Murdoch suggests. To speak, again, with Bledyard, happiness is then a ‘poor guide’ that should be replaced with ‘respect for reality’, which requires ‘apprehend[ing] the distinct being of others’.110 The view that ‘the question, how will this affect happiness, is always relevant to every moral decision’ is, Murdoch writes, a ‘utilitarian idea’ that undermines morality and must be strongly resisted.111 Nonetheless, Murdoch acknowledges that true love of Good leads to a deep kind of happiness, joy, or bliss: eros is ‘the desire for good and joy’ and its satisfaction thus entails both these qualities.112 Such happiness differs from the immediate gratification granted by the enjoyment of art and nature and is closer to the ‘mysterious and obscure’ bliss Murdoch associates with religion—‘a purified joy, which is the vision of good itself ’ and which allows us to ‘see the world . . . in the light of good’.113 It is ‘a unique form of rapture’ that does not contradict or exclude suffering.114 This rapture cannot be properly pictured by the imperfect soul, in that it relies on first looking beyond our concern for happiness and well-being. It cannot, therefore, be actively aimed at. Since the Good transcends our worldly conceptions of it, the true lover is—where needed—willing to go further, to make greater sacrifices than might seem reasonable. Yet while love can contain ‘an equal portion of pain’, ‘great love is inseparable from joy’.115

107

Murdoch, MGM, 53. Conradi, Saint and Artist, 88. See also Murdoch, NG, 345, and her statement that ‘for some people, happiness is part of organising a good life’, and that ‘one has a right, even a duty, to be happy’ (in Dooley, From a Tiny Corner, 165). 110 109 Murdoch in Conradi, Saint and Artist, 88. Murdoch, TS, 212 f. 111 112 Murdoch, SoG, 65. Emphasis added. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 415. 113 114 Murdoch, MGM, 123; SoG, 65; MGM, 109. Murdoch, MGM, 109. 115 Murdoch, NG, 332 (uttered by Mary). 108

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Love of Good as Murdoch conceives it does bear distinct spiritual and moral fruits then, which ‘enliven [the soul’s] spiritual faculty, which is intelligent and akin to the good’, and among which we can count the discovery of reality, the freedom to act in accordance with reality, and a kind of blissful rapture.116 These fruits are reflected in Murdoch’s (relatively few) good characters, who exude a peaceful calm, a freedom from anxiety, and a quiet happiness visible primarily to those who approximate them in virtue.117 We must now consider whether this love, which builds up the self, can legitimately be described as selfless.

S E L F L ES S L O V E I N I R I S M U R D O C H Our discussion so far suggests that, as Murdoch describes it, love can be described as selfless in more than one sense. We saw that, under the influence of Sartre, Murdoch—like Tillich—considers our common self-understanding delusional. We are literally self-less, insofar as the self-determined and selfcontained ego-self with which we commonly identify is, in fact, a fiction. True love enacts and realizes this intrinsic selflessness. Consisting in a process of ‘unselfing’, love confronts us with, and is an (implicit) admission of, the fictional nature of the ego-self, an illusion at which it chips away.118 Using the term ‘selfless’ in a more conventional and figurative way, true love, as Murdoch conceives of it, is selfless also, and especially, in its orientation. It is oriented away from the illusory ego-self and towards the Good as encountered in the particular individuals of the world (things and persons alike). It sees the other in light of Good and respectfully and affirmatively grants him the space to be the individual he is. Unlike Tillich, Murdoch herself explicitly establishes such a link between love and selflessness. She not only equivocates between the term ‘selfless’ and the already mentioned notion of ‘unselfing’, but speaks of true love as ‘virtuous selfless love’, which she contrasts with ‘bad egoistic love’.119 As Murdoch writes, ‘the good life becomes increasingly selfless through an increased awareness of, or sensibility to, the world beyond the self ’—an awareness

Murdoch, ‘FS’, 404. This is true, again, of Bledyard in The Sandcastle and of Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Murdoch also illustrates ‘the pain and final joy gained from loss of self and loving attention to the world’ in the case of Bradley in The Black Prince (Dipple, in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 238f). Murdoch’s saints have also been said to ‘conceal . . . mysterious radiance beneath their exterior dullness’: Ruth Heyd, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, University of Windsor Review, 1 (1965). 118 119 Murdoch, SoG, 100. Murdoch, MGM, 341, 16. 116 117

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that we saw is obtained in and through love, or the eros-impelled practice of attentively perceiving the world in light of transcendent Good.120 Given the atheistic underpinnings of her thought, Murdoch of course rejects the notion of a divine agape, a selfless love that breaks into, and transforms, human existence from without. Her insistence that eros is in need of being purified by agape nonetheless bears strong similarities with Tillich’s call for the integration of eros and agape, or for placing eros under the criterion of selfless love. Like Tillich, and in relative proximity to Sartre and other modern defenders of the human individual’s intrinsic vitality, needs and impulses, Murdoch endorses eros as constitutive of human love and selfhood. Without eros, the human being is but a shell of himself, unattracted by the Good and hence incapable of the spiritual and moral change that is required for him to overcome his destructive selfishness and fantastical outlook on the world. Like Tillich, Murdoch is equally convinced that, left to its own devices, eros is incapable of uniting the human being with the Good, and thus of facilitating the attainment of a unified, free, and happy self. Eros is too ambiguous and impulsive a force to correctly discern the Good on its own: where Tillich considered eros prone to seeking self-fulfilment independently of the other’s fulfilment, Murdoch, similarly, considers it perpetually tempted to mistake illusory, narcissistic goods for the one real Good. Yet where eros is guided and purified by a more measured and wholly other-oriented practice of loving attention, it is, so Murdoch argues, capable of reconstituting or reshaping the downtrodden and disintegrated self. Murdoch thus ultimately turns against what she considers the ‘irresponsible and undirected’ self-assertion of ‘the younger Sartre, and many British moral philosophers’.121 In the same vein, she leaves little room for direct self-love, which she never even mentions in her extensive discussions of love. Murdoch’s critique of the psychoanalytical gaze at the self would seem to apply also to the question of self-love: we cannot love ourselves through an explicit turn towards ourselves, for in doing so we lose sight of the transcendent Good, in relation to which alone we can inhabit reality, including our own. Murdoch’s insistence that the explicit pursuit of self-gain has no place in the moral and spiritual life—an insistence that contrasts with Tillich’s endorsement of the desire for self-fulfilment—equally suggests an aversion to self-love as a distinct form of love that can be placed alongside selfless love. We similarly found Murdoch to pass over, even mistrust, the notion of self-fulfilment or human flourishing. Convinced that (human love of) Good ‘cannot be entirely or exhaustively explained in terms of its contributing to a fuller, better, richer, more satisfying human life’, she suggests that human

120

Murdoch, MGM, 53.

121

Murdoch, SoG, 47.

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self-concern, in particular, is part of the problem rather than the solution.122 Despite this, I would suggest that her selfless love converges with self-love in a manner similar to what we found in Tillich. Even in its selflessness, Murdoch’s love does not dismantle but affirms and builds up the individual human subject. It liberates the lover from the conflicting, selfish desires that cloud his perception of reality (including the reality of his own self) and that undermine his ability to act with a clear and moral purpose and intention. It thereby bestows on him, too, a new freedom to be and act as the individual he is. It includes and satisfies the instinctual dimensions of desire and emotion that strive for human fulfilment, and connects the human being with reality, while bestowing on her freedom and joy. In order to fully appreciate the life-giving value of selfless love as Murdoch conceives of it, we must read her account of love in reference to two key assumptions undergirding it. The first of these is an ardent defence of spiritual over material goods. This rests on Murdoch’s conviction that the human being is an intrinsically moral being, yet tempted to do away with this dimension and thereby to undermine itself. As Murdoch seems to see it, our attempts to shape the world materially are misguided and futile unless they are based on adequate perception of the world. This, in turn, is inseparable from our moral character—from our relation with Good. We might infer, then, that the abovementioned spiritual or, in any case, non-material goods of emancipation from illusion, of freedom to live in accordance with the Good, and of joyful bliss do not stop short at ‘enliven[ing] [the soul’s] spiritual faculty’ but are directly relevant to the human individual’s ability to act in the world—and, hence, to shape this world materially.123 The relevancy of Murdoch’s selfless love to human flourishing can, secondly, be appreciated only in relation to her conviction that human selfishness and self-concern are—paradoxically enough—the primary obstacle to the attainment of genuine individual happiness and well-being. Selfishness prevents us from recognizing the value of precisely the above-described goods. In order to obtain these spiritual goods, the human being must pursue precisely not her own ‘narcissistic needs’, such as the need for self-assertive power and freedom from pain.124 Rather, she must let go of a concern with herself and her own well-being and begin to look towards what is ‘other’ than self: selfless love of Good is ‘the attempt to see the unself, to see and respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness’.125 As Antonaccio puts it, Murdoch proposes ‘a good that drives the idea of human flourishing to a new level of aspiration, indeed towards an ideal of perfection’, ‘so that we may recognise 122 Murdoch, in Brian Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2004), 5. 123 124 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 404, 389. Griffin, ‘Influence of Simone Weil’, 99. 125 Murdoch, SoG, 91.

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those goods that only come into view through the renunciation or purification of self ’, and which ‘may bring about the fulfilment of a higher good than one had been seeking, a good that enhances the value of human life precisely by going beyond conventional notions of fulfilment’.126 Implicit in this is the view that the human being is incapable of building himself up single-handedly and directly. In order to genuinely grow in freedom and joy, he must first turn outwards and away from all attempts at self-development. Murdoch’s anthropology leaves little room, therefore, for modern notions of autonomy. And yet, she has by no means forsaken the existential stress on self-determination or self-creation. Although relational to the point of needing to turn outward in order to flourish, Murdoch’s moral subject does not depend on the other’s active help or cooperation. Her moral subject must ‘do it all himself ’.127 We are not autonomous in the sense of being unaffected by, and unaccountable to, an absolute standard encountered in the world around us. Yet the work of selfless love—the work which grounds us as flourishing individuals—is nonetheless a matter we can and must undertake single-handedly. Here at least, Murdoch remains close to Sartre. Two aspects of Murdoch’s account of love and the self are particularly helpful complements to Tillich’s thought. Murdoch is more sensitive than Tillich to the human being’s tendency for self-deception, and its moralphilosophical significance. Where Tillich’s honourable desire to free the Christian tradition from an oppressive moralism leaves him vulnerable, perhaps, to an exaggerated optimism about the human being, Murdoch’s more secular philosophical background makes her conscious of the price of de-emphasizing human sinfulness all too much. More than Tillich, Murdoch thus draws our attention to the likelihood that a narcissistic and destructive eros passes itself off as true love. With this, she substantiates the assumption that (a type of) selfless love remains relevant to understanding the foundations of human flourishing even from a non-theological point of view. With her advocacy of a practice of attention, Murdoch furthermore offers a clearer and more concrete picture of the individual lover’s role in the purification of eros or, on Tillich’s terms, of how grace—the agape of the Spiritual Presence—can be received. Whether or not it entails an exhaustive account of what makes love selfless, Murdoch’s plea for the moral-spiritual value of focused and contemplative attention to the o/Other lends a more practical and concrete dimension to the notion of selfless love, and arguably enhances the lover’s role as an individual agent.

126 Maria Antonaccio, ‘Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy and Theology’, in Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 15–22, at 21. 127 Murdoch, NS, 297.

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DIFFICULTIES WITH MURDOCH ’S ACCOUNT OF SELFLESS LOVE Before attempting a synthesizing account of selfless love as building up the self, we must briefly address several problems embedded in Murdoch’s account of selfless love. Not unlike Tillich, she characterizes true love as impersonal, and devalues reciprocity in love.

Compromising the Personal Dimension Murdoch is by no means simply dismissive of the dimension of human personhood and interpersonal relations. She acknowledges that ‘human love, the love of persons for other persons, is sui generis, and among our natural faculties and impulses the one which is potentially nearest to the highest divine attributes’, and even concedes that Christ ‘exhibit[s] personal yet selfless love and prov[es] that it is possible’.128 She claims, too, that ‘the practice of personal relations is the fundamental school of virtue’, and criticizes T. S. Eliot for characterizing morality in terms of a confrontation of ‘the thing’, ‘the institution’, or ‘the dogma’, rather than of ‘“another person” whom we should treat as separate and real’.129 As William Schweiker rightly points out in response to Nussbaum, Murdoch indeed argues that Good is encountered only in ‘loving attention to particular persons’.130 Yet Murdoch’s thought also contains a current which severely compromises this seeming embrace of human personhood. This is summarized in her claim that ‘the highest love is in some sense impersonal’.131 As she continues, this is something ‘we can indeed see in art, but which I think we cannot see clearly, except in a very piecemeal manner, in the relationships of human beings’.132 Conradi thus describes mature love in Murdoch as ‘a darker, colder, more impersonal commodity’ that contrasts with the ‘intense’ love of one who is ‘in’ love.133 Antonaccio, similarly, observes that ‘the idea of impersonality and distance seems to be essential to Murdoch’s concept of the Good’ which we are called to love.134 Murdoch’s novels underline this. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Rupert—whose thoughts both Conradi and Scott Moore associate with Murdoch’s own—speaks of love being able to ‘exert its greatest power’ and ‘to redeem’ a person precisely ‘when it becomes almost impersonal and loses its 129 Emphasis added. Murdoch, MGM, 346. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 453; ‘SBR’, 275. William Schweiker, ‘The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism’, in Rowe and Horner, Iris Murdoch and Morality, 180–93, at 187. 131 Murdoch, SoG, 73. In light of her understanding of art as a conveyer of Good, Murdoch’s description of the ‘greatest art [as] “impersonal” ’ is similarly significant (Murdoch, SoG, 60). 132 133 Murdoch, SoG, 73. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 142. 134 Antonaccio, ‘Imagining the Good’, 231. 128 130

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attractiveness and its ability to console’.135 Similarly, when Danby, in Bruno’s Dream, finally begins to love his dying father-in-law Bruno more selflessly, he loves him ‘with a blank almost impersonal sort of love’.136 Bradley and Julian in The Black Prince are made, by their love, to feel ‘quite impersonal’, and Brendan in Henry and Cato says that ‘it’s the greatest pain and the greatest paradox of all that personal love has to break at some point’.137 In the same vein, Murdoch’s characters often encounter transcendent Good in the context of contemplating impersonal particulars such as art or stones rather than of encounters with human persons. More obviously and explicitly than Tillich, Murdoch also insists on the impersonal nature of the transcendent—a conviction which not only supports but founds her preference for impersonal love. The Good, which is the final object of all true love and which connects the lover with reality, does not reach out to the lover, cannot be dialogued with, and neither receives nor returns the lover’s love. Instead, it may well be encountered as a ‘blank face’ or void.138 It is for this reason that the impersonal nature of the human being’s love, his renunciation of the hope for a response to our love, is the litmus test for whether his love is true, whether it is, indeed, directed towards the one true Good. Only where the human being resists what is in Murdoch’s eyes a selfish temptation to personalize Good, where he confronts the fact that ‘there is no one there’, has he really liberated himself from all idols.139 It is, she thus writes, one of the ‘paradoxes of a complete religion’ ‘that the movement of the saving of Eros is toward an impersonal pictureless void’.140 As Paul Fiddes comments in the context of discussing Murdoch’s account of beauty, ‘despite finding the sublime in the beauty of the world, [Murdoch] can only conceive of beauty as awakening us to the supremely Good rather than giving us a personal relation with the Good’.141 Since Murdoch considers human love of Good paradigmatic for all love, we can conclude that she does not envisage lover and beloved to enter into inter-personal relations with one another. And indeed, her reserved definition of love as a ‘looking at’ and ‘respecting’ the individual other underwrites the preservation of distance and separateness between lover and beloved. When Ann in Nuns and Soldiers, for instance, has a mystical encounter with Christ himself, she is told by him that she ‘must do it all [her]self ’.142

135

Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 220. Murdoch, in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 218. Moore, ‘Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers’, 107. 136 Murdoch, BD, 263. 137 Murdoch, in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 262, Murdoch, Henry and Cato (London: Triad Panther, 1977) [henceforth HC], 348. 138 139 140 Murdoch, NG, 348. Murdoch, HC, 154. Murdoch, ‘FS’, 463. 141 Paul S. Fiddes, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful: Intersections between Theology and Literature’, in Heather Walton, ed., Literature and Theology. New Inter-disciplinary Spaces (Farnham: Ashgate, 2001), 127–52, at 139. 142 Murdoch, NS, 110.

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In this respect, then, Murdoch’s love fails to do justice to the personal needs, desires, and potential of both lover and the beloved. Her lover’s intrinsic desire for mutual relationship is thwarted. And by remaining uninvested in the beloved’s response, he fails, for instance, to encourage them to become lovers of Good themselves, and thus to realize their own potential. In contrast to her insistence on Good as one, Murdoch thereby also fails to realize the unifying potential of the Good as the reality in which lover and beloved truly encounter one another as individual persons in communion. Grounded in her metaphysics, and reinforced by her excessive fear of the human tendency to corrupt love into self-gratification,143 Murdoch’s depreciation of the personal renders it questionable whether she can indeed be described as a proponent of an ‘ethical personalism’ or ‘a personalist ethic of love’.144

Lack of Reciprocity These qualms are connected to the fact that good relationships as imagined by Murdoch lack reciprocity, and therefore help build partnership and community only to a limited extent. Similarly to Tillich, Murdoch’s devaluation of the personal dimension and potential of the human being is intertwined with a depreciation of dialogue and reciprocity. As mentioned, this undermines the legitimacy of the lover’s desire for a real and mutual encounter with his beloved. This is manifest, for instance, in Murdoch’s suggestion that ‘much, in some cases most, of our spiritual energy and understanding comes from non-reciprocal relationships with what is beyond and other’.145 Murdoch’s good man is reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, insofar as he is ‘un-self-centred’ but rarely in communion, or in an interpersonal exchange, with others.146 Indeed, his movement towards greater ‘understanding’ is, for Murdoch, a movement ‘onward into increasing privacy’ (a notion arguably in tension with her rejection of the turn towards the self).147 Murdoch’s idea that unreciprocated love most aptly leads us towards Good is surely informed by her study of Weil, and appears as early as in Under the Net, her first novel, published in 1954.148 Here Anna tells Jake that ‘unsatisfied love is concerned with understanding. Only if it is all, all understanding, can it remain love while 143 See e.g. Murdoch’s opposition of impersonal art to ‘individualistic’ (in the sense of egoistic) art (Murdoch, in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 142). 144 Völker, Rhetoric of Love, 42. Völker may nonetheless be correct to remark on similarities between Murdoch and Scheler, including the notion that morality consists in the ‘I being deflected from itself, directed onto something else and thereby being overcome’ (Völker, Rhetoric of Love, 43). 145 146 147 Murdoch, MGM, 478. Murdoch, ‘SBR’, 283. Murdoch, SoG, 28. 148 Murdoch appears to have first encountered Weil around 1950 (Broackes, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 20 n.).

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being unsatisfied.’149 Time and again, Murdoch’s good characters are figures whose relationships are one-sided, who continue to love in spite of the fact that their love falls on deaf ears. As indicated above, Tallis’s love for Morgan is portrayed as a central aspect of his knowledge of Good precisely because it is unwavering despite being unreturned.150 The good and noble Count in Nuns and Soldiers, too, loves Gertrude silently, in the midst of her relationships with other men, and without asking for a return of his love.151 In Bruno’s Dream, Diana’s true love of Bruno is also largely unidirectional, ‘like loving death itself ’.152 Murdoch, like Kierkegaard and Weil, is surely right that goodness transcends a mechanism of returns, or the need to ‘receive the equivalent of what we give’.153 Yet insofar as this leads her to elevate non-reciprocal relations, it also causes her to degrade the return of one’s love to an occasion for selfishness. Such reciprocation is, Murdoch implies, a consolation, an immediate gratification. And, as one critic summarizes Murdoch’s position, ‘love that is consoling cannot redeem, but unconsoling love (beyond our conscious wiles) may be able to redeem’.154 Thus, in Under the Net, it is only once his old love Anna leaves him and disappears that Jake begins to love her: ‘I had no longer any picture of Anna . . . It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself.’155 Wondering about true love rather than the supposedly selfish love he had for Dorina, Austin in An Accidental Man similarly asks whether ‘he [could] not simply have willed Dorina . . . not greedily desiring a return’.156 It is the same instinct, which explains Murdoch’s predilection for attending to objects, which cannot return one’s love. One consequence of this tendency to elevate non-reciprocal over reciprocal love is that Murdoch’s good life is a lonely life. The more virtuous characters in her novels typically not only lack a partner but generally live withdrawn, somewhat isolated lives on the fringes of society.157 They often lack intimate relations even with those immediately surrounding them and typically shun a more personal and emotional investment in their immediate community. 149

Murdoch, UN, 45. As Fiddes observes, Murdoch’s sense that loving the other entails rejection by them constitutes a parallel between her and Levinas (Fiddes, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, 139). 151 Similarly, Bledyard loves Rain Carter, who has an affair with Mor, secretly and without any self-interest; Bradley in The Black Prince only truly approaches goodness once Julian leaves him; Ann in An Unofficial Rose renounces Felix, whom she loves; and the Christ-like figure Denis in The Unicorn loves Hannah silently and in a servile way. 152 153 Murdoch, BD, 288. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 10. 154 155 Moore, ‘Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers’, 107. Murdoch, UN, 268. 156 Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man (London: Book Club Associates, 1973), 358. 157 This is true, for instance, of William Eastcote in The Philosopher’s Pupil, Hugo Belfounder in Under the Net, Uncle Theo in The Nice and the Good, Bledyard in The Sandcastle, and Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. 150

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When realizing that the transcendent Good calls her to leave her London friends and to go to work with the disadvantaged in America, Ann ‘wept for the loneliness to come’.158 The Count in Nuns and Soldiers, another more virtuous figure, describes his failed love of Gertrude as him having ‘enacted both sides of the relation’, a feat which ‘could be done because she was inaccessible’.159 Upon her conversion, Tamar in The Book and the Brotherhood, like Ann, goes to church, but only ‘secretively, alone with God’.160 And, as Obumselu points out, Jake ends up seeking a relationship not with Anna, who is something of a soulmate and whom he loves, but with Anna’s sister, with whom he has the less intimate rapport, yet whose ‘unendearing otherness is’, in Murdoch’s scheme, ‘evidence of contact’.161 As Jake goes on to observe, right relations with another entail not ‘knowledge’ of them (nor, one might add, communion with them) but ‘simply a kind of co-existence [which] too is one of the guises of love’.162 Such coexistence can be attained only ‘after one has realised the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it’.163 With this, Jake evokes Weil’s notion that ‘when a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy to be preserved both in himself and in the other’.164 Jake, that is, confirms Murdoch’s Weilian notion that the preservation of individual distinctness is at odds with an emotive quest for knowledge of, and intimacy with, the other. The dualistic element that Jennifer Goodyer has rightly detected in Murdoch’s thought—Murdoch’s rejection of ‘consummately reciprocal’ love—can be traced back to her fear of the human desire for consolation, and to her connected demotion of love’s personal dimension.165 Murdoch’s morality is, at best, what George Steiner has described as one of ‘individualised 158

159 Murdoch, NS, 110, 479. Murdoch, NS, 510. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Vintage Classics, 2003), 490. 161 Ben Obumselu, ‘Iris Murdoch and Sartre’, English Literary History, 42 (1975), 296–317, at 299. 162 Murdoch, UN, 268. Once she comes to love him selflessly, Diana, too, experiences not a communion but merely a ‘coexistence’ with Bruno (Murdoch, BD, 287). 163 Murdoch, UN, 268. 164 Weil, An Anthology, 286. The term ‘necessity’, I take it, here refers to the bond of affection, and thus designates not the necessity of the world around us (which Murdoch defends) but the kind of selfish, emotional necessity that would turn a bond into a form of bondage. This resonates with what I take to be Murdoch’s claim that the other’s distinctness is best loved and preserved in relationships that are free from the ‘insanity’ of erotic love (emphasis added. Murdoch, MGM, 345). 165 Jennifer Spencer Goodyer, ‘The Blank Face of Love: The Possibility of Goodness in the Literary and Philosophical Work of Iris Murdoch’, Modern Theology, 25: 2 (2009), 217–37, at 232. Whereas Goodyer judges this dualism to be incompatible particularly with attaining ‘selflessness’ in the sense of overcoming individualistic self-sufficiency, I locate the problem more in the extent to which such dualistic love does justice to the personal needs and potential of lover and beloved (Goodyer, ‘Blank Face of Love’, 232 f.). 160

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reciprocity’, though as I have sought to show, this might already be overstating Murdoch’s embrace of reciprocity.166 Megan Laverty’s suggestion that Murdoch thinks of learning as ‘something that we become ready to receive’ and that is ‘in that sense like grace’ is, indeed, only partially right: it brushes over the fact that Murdoch’s true lover will be reluctant to allow another human being to, in one way or another, return his love.167 Real personal union or intimacy, in particular, is thereby rendered impossible, and the creative potential of eros remains unexhausted. The result is, again, a loss for both lover and beloved. Aloof from, or even wary of, the beloved’s response to his love, the lover fails to actively encourage love in the beloved. Just as he does not, therefore, actively build up the beloved, so he also refuses to be actively built up by her. Thus, while Murdoch’s love does, as I would argue contra Goodyer, entail real selflessness in the sense of a ‘pure cognitive state’, ‘where the object is not disturbed by the subjective ego, but where subject and object simply exist as one’, it lacks a more positive element of gift-exchange and nurturing care.168 Though not herself advocating a ‘feminine ethic of self-effacement’, Murdoch thereby arguably risks fostering the kind of asymmetrical relationships within which such a dangerous ethic will thrive.169

CO NCLUSION We saw Murdoch agree with much of modern philosophy that the idea of the self as a self-contained and stable substance is illusory. With Sartre, she argues that the self with which we commonly identify is the result of cowardly wishful thinking, of a failure to look reality (including our own reality) in the eye. Unlike Sartre, however, Murdoch connects such a failure with human selfishness or sinfulness, and postulates the need to strive for a more truthful kind of selfhood not through autonomous self-creation, but through a reorientation and submission to transcendent Good, without which she deems reality meaningless and unlivable. While holding on to an absolute contrast between 166

Steiner, in Murdoch, EM, xvi. Megan Laverty, Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision (London: Continuum, 2007), 6. 168 Murdoch, MGM, 245. 169 Griffin, ‘Influence of Simone Weil’, 275. Meanwhile, Robjant is right to point out that Lovibond’s objection to Murdoch’s morality of ‘selflessness’, viz. that such a value is held more by women than men and has played a role in the oppression of women, is not only difficult to prove but irrelevant to the question of whether it is indeed a true moral value (Robjant, ‘Is Iris Murdoch an Unconscious Misogynist’, 1026; see also Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, 85). See also my discussion in Chapter 8. 167

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Good and the human self, Murdoch, like Tillich, embraces the human being’s relational and other-dependent nature. She captures these qualities in her characterization of the self as a mechanism of attachments that is governed by erotic desire. Murdoch’s understanding of love builds on this need for the self to orientate itself outwards, to the o/Other. I have argued that Murdoch considers such an orientation to consist in a combination of erotic desire for transcendent Good and a visual practice of attention to the particular other. It is this combination of eros and attention which Murdoch understands as love. Such love, I have sought to show, can be described as selfless love in two respects: it rests on a (conscious or unconscious) admission that the human being is literally selfless in the sense of lacking a contained and fixed self, and it lacks any kind of selfish concern with the ego and is, instead, wholly other-centred.170 Given that this love, as Murdoch portrays it, not only engages the lover erotically, and thus at the core of her being, but also puts her in touch with the real and the good, it can legitimately be seen as building up rather than undermining the individual human self. This process bestows on her a greater freedom to live as an individual (and to let others do the same), as well as begetting the experience of a blissful joy. Paralleling Tillich’s mediation between Sartre and Nygren, Murdoch carves out a path between Sartre and Weil that avoids the one-sided extremes of both. Arguing that we best affirm ourselves by loving the Good, she rejects Sartre’s notion that we can affirm ourselves single-handedly. Yet she does so without uprooting erotic desire from the human person and her love, and without devaluing the human self, its individuality, and potential for personal growth. True love, Murdoch furthermore admits, gives even to the ‘(indestructible) lower levels [of our self and desires] their best possible satisfaction’.171 Vice versa, Murdoch rejects Weil’s claim that my existence as a particular worldly individual is ‘tactless’ and, although she acknowledges human selfishness, does not follow Weil in calling for the sacrifice of all human desire. At the same time, Murdoch embraces Weil’s call for the decreation of the ego and for obedient submission to transcendent Good. Thus navigating a middle way between the polar oppositions sketched in Chapter 3, Murdoch’s thought, like Tillich’s, goes some way towards suggesting that selfless love may, in fact, build up the self. In the concluding chapter I attempt a final evaluation of the extent to which Tillich’s and Murdoch’s insights allow us to argue for the compatibility of selfless love and human flourishing.

170 That Murdoch’s love implies ‘self-forgetfulness’ is also recognized by Völker, although he underplays the role of eros in this (Völker, Rhetoric of Love, 44). 171 Murdoch, ‘FS’, 389.

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8 Recovering Selfless Love: Final Evaluations This book set out to answer the question whether selfless love can be understood as facilitating human flourishing. It was asked on what grounds selfless love can be said to build up, rather than undermine, the lover’s self. I approached this problem not from an ethical or psychological perspective but from that of theological (and philosophical) anthropology. Following my main conversation partners, Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch, I enquired into the make-up of the human self and its implications for human love and wellbeing. Such an anthropological approach was prompted by the observation, articulated in Chapters 1 to 3, that the increasing implausibility of ‘selfless love’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries corresponded, among other things, with considerable shifts and changes in our understanding of the human self. It was furthermore prompted by the suspicion that some of these same shifts, such as Sartre’s assertion of the human being’s ontological self-lessness, might in fact also be utilized towards a more positive understanding of the connection between selfless love and human flourishing. As I have argued, both Tillich and Murdoch in fact engage, and draw upon, Sartre in precisely such a way. In what follows, I give a brief comparative overview of Tillich’s and Murdoch’s analyses of the human self and of the notion of love they build on this. Such a comparison will enable me to retrace how and why they do indeed link the well-being of the human self to a selfless kind of love. It will also facilitate a final evaluation of how their accounts of selfless love constitute an improvement on Kierkegaard’s thought on love and the self, and of how they allow a move beyond post-Kierkegaardian impasses, such as that between self-love and neighbour-love, and individuality and relationality. After highlighting some weaknesses in the proposals of Tillich and Murdoch, I will make some suggestions as to where a robust defence of selfless love may have to deepen, or even depart from, their thought.

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UNDERSTANDING S ELFLESS LOVE: TILLICH’ S AND MURDO CH’S CONTRIBUTIONS

Paul Tillich: A Short Summary Our discussion of Tillich’s thought on love and the self in Chapters 4 and 5 confirmed that Tillich seeks to make room in Christian love for eros, or the human desire for self-fulfilment. As he portrays it, true Christian love indeed not only accommodates such a desire but also facilitates its fulfilment. We saw that in making such a claim, which leads him to stress the Good’s immanence where Murdoch emphasizes its transcendence, Tillich was reacting against the austerity of Nygren’s otherworldly interpretation of Christian love. Among other factors, Tillich’s argument for understanding Christian love as concerned also with the individual’s this-worldly desires and well-being was fuelled by his respect for those critics of Christianity who, like Sartre, argued for the legitimacy, and even necessity, of the individual’s struggle for self-transcendence, power, and fulfilment. It was Sartre, too, who confirmed and deepened Tillich’s Christian sense that the human being lacks the complete and stable self she likes to attribute to herself, and must therefore continually challenge her instinctive self-understanding. Tillich incorporates these insights into a Christian ontology of essence and existence. In doing so, however, he holds on to a basic degree of self-being, and challenges the idea that the o/Other might be an obstacle to the individual’s legitimate attempts to become more fully himself. As Tillich sees it, the relatively unstable and other-dependent character of the human self calls not for a futile effort to control the other but for loving participation in the other, whereby the self is (re-)united with the ground of its being. By understanding the self as both more substantial and more participatory than Sartre, Tillich can argue that the fullness or flourishing of the individual self rides on a person’s loving orientation towards, and participation in, the o/Other. Where this participation takes on the shape of ‘communion’, the individual self achieves its full, ‘personal’ potential. We have seen that this theological anthropology, which centres on the interdependency of individuality and participation, is directly intertwined with Tillich’s understanding of love. For it implies that eros, or the desire for the fulfilment of self, cannot be satisfied apart from or over against the o/Other, such as through direct self-love or self-assertion. Instead, eros’s fulfilment hinges on its integration with another kind of love, which Tillich defines as agape, or the desire for the fulfilment of the other. It is important to stress, in this respect, that Tillich assigns a genuine validity to the erotic desire for self-fulfilment, and indeed considers it impossible for the human being to love agapeically without such a desire. The human being therefore genuinely ought to accept and affirm his or her individuality and its concomitant desire

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for personal fulfilment. The essentially relational nature of the human self means that the erotic quest for individual growth and fulfilment can succeed only where this quest is, as Tillich puts it, placed under the ‘criterion’ of love as the desire for the fulfilment of the other. Thus, even self-love, in the sense of the desire for one’s own fulfilment, must ultimately manifest itself as an other-centred kind of love in order to be effective. As we saw, Tillich understands such an other-centred, selfless love, first and foremost, as a love the human being must receive in the form of God’s own love, which then enables her, too, to selflessly turn to the other in a way that includes her eros for personal fulfilment. While endorsing Sartre’s quest for freedom, individuality, and authenticity under the rubric of love as eros, Tillich thus ties the fulfilment of this quest to a selfless kind of love. Incorporating, and seeking the fulfilment of, the individual’s need and desire for self-fulfilment, Tillich’s thought challenges the adequacy of conceptualizing selfless love as a love that denies or goes against the needs and interests of the self. As he conceives of it, selfless love indeed facilitates the lover’s flourishing precisely by seeking that of the other.

Iris Murdoch: A Short Summary Where Tillich’s focus lay in making room, in Christian love, for human flourishing, Murdoch’s primary concern is to establish the moral importance of selfless love. This leaves her more critical than Tillich of Sartre’s struggle for personal freedom and authenticity, and less interested in happiness than in goodness. Nevertheless, she, too, embraces Sartre’s sense of the absence of a fixed and self-contained self and his simultaneous affirmation of the human being’s intrinsic drive for self-transcendence towards greater freedom and individuality. We saw her capture both these things by conceptualizing the human self as a ‘mechanism of attachments’ governed by erotic desire. This allows Murdoch both to affirm and to turn on its head Sartre’s insights into the continually developing and other-related nature of the human self, and into the human being’s debilitating reluctance to face up to this. The changing objects to which Murdoch’s self attaches itself affect the self ’s very reality. Eros’s intrinsic fallibility ensures that these objects are frequently of an enslaving kind. At the same time, it is in keeping with the very nature of Murdoch’s erotic self for it to, indeed, be attached to the o/Other: relations with the other do not threaten the self in principle but have a genuine power to build up the self. This is the case not least because Murdoch’s eros-driven ‘mechanism of attachments’ retains a permanent core, or a certain degree of self-being, which makes such attachments possible in the first place. Murdoch thus shifts the focus from Sartre’s ultimately impossible challenge of establishing genuinely fruitful relations with the other from a theoretical to

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a practical level. Where Sartre’s purely free and self-assertive self was, by definition, condemned to a war with the other, Murdoch’s erotic self merely needs to relate itself to the right kind of o/Other. For Murdoch, of course, this is transcendent Good, which alone makes manifest what is true and real, including the true and real human self. We saw that, in keeping with Sartre’s observation of the human being’s tendency to self-delusion (and under the influence of Plato, in particular), Murdoch’s emphasis here is on the significance of human vision for love: we erotically desire and attach ourselves to what enslaves us because our blinding ego prevents us from recognizing the Good, which, Murdoch argues, is incarnate in the individual particulars of the world. The liberation of the human self thus hinges on a reformation of our vision: we can begin to desire and love what is Good (which, by definition, includes what is good for ourselves) only once we set our eyes on such Good. As we saw, Murdoch pictures the called for purification of our erotic desire in terms of continually paying attention to the world to the point of dying to self (‘to look and look until one exists no more’). Murdoch describes this effort as an ‘exercise of love’. Paralleling Tillich’s picture above, such an effort, firstly, corresponds with the lover’s (conscious or unconscious) recognition of his ontological selflessness, in the sense of the illusory nature of his ego-self and its pretensions to completeness and autonomy. It, secondly, consists in a figuratively selfless loving orientation towards the other, where alone Murdoch argues Good can be encountered. Again, then, we are left with a picture wherein full human selfhood is, on the one hand, intrinsically bound up with erotic desire, which thus has a definite and legitimate place in life; but where such selfhood can, on the other hand, only be obtained if this desire is guided by a practice of attention which Murdoch describes as a selfless kind of love. Like Tillich, Murdoch arrives at the above view of love and the self by adopting Sartre’s insight into the unstable nature of the human self and by simultaneously supplementing this with ‘some more positive conception’ of the self as ‘substantial’. Yet more insistent on the ambivalent nature of human eros, Murdoch is more sceptical than Tillich about direct human selfaffirmation. She indeed supports her defence of selfless love by reference not only to a relational anthropology but also to the destructive consequences of human selfishness and the consequent need for a process of ‘unselfing’.

The Foundations of Selfless Love It will have become obvious by now that Tillich’s and Murdoch’s approaches to the topic of love converge on several important points. Both follow Sartre in affirming (1) that the human being in existence does not possess an entirely stable and self-contained self and is crippled by assuming otherwise. Leaning

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on Sartre (among others), both (2) endorse the human being’s intrinsic capacity and urge to transcend false and constricting forms of selfhood. They depart from Sartre in (3) understanding self and other as ontologically interrelated realities, in (4) affirming the possibility of attaining full and flourishing selfhood, and in (5) tying such selfhood to a more unambiguously other-centred love, whereby the human being enters into relation with a transcendent reality which constitutes the source of his true being. For both, though especially for Murdoch, the human being’s separation from objective (and, in one sense or another, transcendent) truth and goodness obscures the need for such an other-centred love. It cloaks the human individual precisely in the illusion of already possessing an intrinsically complete self. In contrast to Sartre, both Tillich and Murdoch emphasize that full selfhood cannot be obtained by sheer force of will but that it depends on grace (Tillich), or on a longer-term practice of attention (Murdoch). While advocating a loving orientation away from self and towards the other, both authors take seriously the concern, already articulated by Kierkegaard, that other-love often degenerates into mere self-love. And both, implicitly at least, second Nygren’s and Weil’s insistence that true love is not motivated by self-seeking, and that the human being must allow himself to be pervaded by a transcendent reality that deconstructs his ego. In sum, then, Tillich and Murdoch consider selfless love to be required by the simultaneously relational and fallen nature of the human person. It is required by the fact that the full human self emerges only in the context of relations with the other, and the consequent need to break through the fallen human person’s instinctive self-isolation from, or opposition to, the o/Other.

The Nature of Selfless Love In commending selfless love as critical to the full emergence of the human self, Tillich and Murdoch have in mind not primarily an act or an emotion but, first and foremost, something more akin to an internal disposition towards the world—a spiritual posture or way of perceiving the world that undergirds a person’s acts. Selfless love, as they conceive of it, is a matter of being before it is one of doing. This approach reflects, among other things, Murdoch’s antibehaviourist outlook and her awareness that human selfishness frequently causes us to engage in seemingly selfless acts for selfish reasons that ultimately harm both the supposed beneficiary of the act and ourselves. Such an understanding of selfless love as (primarily at least) an interior disposition must not be taken to imply a dismissal of the importance of concrete acts of love. Rather, it gives expression to the conviction that selfless love can take on many forms, whose unifying characteristics consist in a certain understanding of oneself and in an unreserved orientation and openness to the other. This

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is important with regard to human well-being insofar as it underlines that seeming acts of selfless love will be destructive of the self or, at least, inhibit its full flourishing where they do not emanate from precisely such a disposition— that is, where they are in fact rooted in a paternalistic and proud altruism, for instance, or in the experience of societal pressure and moral norms. Apart from the lover’s interior disposition (as well as his overall character and wider context) then, it is difficult to assess the effect even his morally good acts have on his well-being. This is one of the reasons why I have not attempted to offer concrete examples of selfless love. While it may be possible to tie selfless love to a few basic or general principles—such as a willingness to confront and challenge evil, to defend the Good, and to see and respect the other—such love can be concretely illustrated only in the context of a detailed and intimate understanding of the individual lover. Selfless love is best concretized, therefore, by way of extended fictional and other narratives, which convey a person as a whole, including the purposes and motivations that underlie his or her external acts. It is primarily in the context of immersing oneself in such stories, as found for instance in Scripture, in lives of the saints, or in novels, that the relative authenticity and creative potential of a given act of selfless love becomes apparent. Identifying selfless love first and foremost as an inner disposition also means that selfless love is no tool or technique of which we can simply avail ourselves in an effort to improve our moral character. As I have sought to show, Tillich and Murdoch picture us as having a hand in living out the call to selfless love. We can, for instance, seek to open ourselves to God’s acceptance and thus to muster the courage to be (Tillich), or to embark on a process of unselfing by paying greater attention to the details of the world around us (Murdoch). Nonetheless, human estrangement (Tillich) or selfishness (Murdoch) naturally works against selfless love, to the point that we ultimately rely on divine grace breaking into our existence from without (Tillich)—or that we must live with the sobering realization that some of us will simply remain incapable of love (Murdoch). Tillich’s and Murdoch’s thought on love here indeed implies that persons whose potential for love remains unawakened— say, because they have never received love, as I will go on to suggest—will find themselves tragically unable to flourish.1 In this sense, the human being, as

1 This is echoed in the traditional view that agape ‘comes from a position of plenitude’ (Insole, ‘Beyond Glass Doors’, 136). Note also that Tillich considers our capacity to love contingent on being loved by God first (a factor outside of our control), and that Murdoch acknowledges that ‘there are places in lives . . . where there is nothing but darkness’ (Murdoch, MGM, 499). The latter point is highlighted by Robjant, who rightly stresses that Murdoch does not consider ‘loving attention . . . a universally accessible method of progress [to the Good]’ (David Robjant, ‘Symposium on Iris Murdoch: How Miserable We Are, How Wicked; Into the “Void” with Murdoch, Mulhall, and Antonaccio’, Heythrop Journal, 54: 6 (2013), 999–1006, at 1000).

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understood by Tillich and Murdoch, remains incapable of autonomously fabricating his or her personal fulfilment, just as he or she cannot simply ‘access’ and instrumentalize either God or sovereign Good.

Advancing the Earlier Debate It will have become obvious that Tillich’s and Murdoch’s defences of selfless love share significant similarities with the thought of Sren Kierkegaard. Both continue Kierkegaard’s attempt to bring to the fore the concrete existing individual and (especially in Tillich’s case) his powers of self-affirmation, while nonetheless privileging a notion of selfless love. Both share his conviction that the human individual exists in relation to a transcendent reality which is foundational for the human being’s own reality, and which profoundly affects how he should live his life. But they also hold that the existential individual is alienated from this reality. For them, like Kierkegaard, this properly results in a more or less agonized personal, moral, and spiritual struggle for genuine subjectivity (Tillich and Murdoch), meaning (Tillich), and goodness (Murdoch). As already noted, Murdoch in particular adopts Kierkegaard’s awareness that even seemingly selfless love is often little more than self-love in disguise. On my proposed reading, both Tillich and Murdoch nonetheless offer a more successful integration of selfless love and human flourishing by bringing to the fore the existential individual’s active role in selfless love. For one thing, they both strengthen the importance of human eros for selfless love, and thereby bring us at least a step closer towards recognizing the human being’s natural desire to flourish as a resource for selfless love, and as being satisfied by such love. Although we saw that Tillich’s integration of eros and agape is not without faults, it involves a basic hopeful recognition of the finite individual’s created goodness and of her intrinsic connection with the saving ground of her being that is lacking in Kierkegaard. The individual’s erotic desires are not blindly accepted in all their manifestations, but are nonetheless seen capable of opening and—in principle at least—guiding the individual to the divine ground in which lover and beloved are united. Murdoch, similarly, is cognisant of eros’s ambiguity, yet at the same time recognizes eros as a fundamental and indispensable force towards Good. Without this inner mechanism or attraction, the human being would lack an intrinsic motivation for goodness, and thus for unselfing love. Implied in this greater valuation of eros is a more unambiguous endorsement of the finite individual and his or her well-being in this world. Tillich and Murdoch achieve a greater integration of selfless love and human flourishing also by virtue of developing a more relational anthropology. In contrast to Kierkegaard’s claim that the knight of faith is ‘sufficient

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unto himself ’, Murdoch, and especially Tillich, labour at demonstrating the interdependency of human individuality and relationality. Again, their proposals ultimately remain insufficient in this regard. Murdoch seems to retain something of Kierkegaard’s solipsistic tendency in her scepticism towards the desire for a return of one’s love. Tillich has been found to underemphasize the shared and mutual nature of true love. Nonetheless, both embed the human individual more firmly within the world and the relationships this brings, and recognize precisely the human being’s self-centredness or self-concern (even where this expresses itself as a concern with one’s own virtue) as detrimental to true and flourishing selfhood. By simultaneously strengthening the existential individual’s role in love and emphasizing that individual’s intrinsic relationality, Tillich and Murdoch also help counter the impasse between the defenders and the detractors of selfless love examined in Chapter 3. In different ways, Nygren, Weil, and Sartre all denied either the human being’s individuality or his relationality. Nygren’s talk of the ideal human being as a tube through which God’s love flows leaves little room for personal individuality, and instead reduces the human being to a vehicle for God’s love of himself—that is, to pure relationality. The radical nature of Weil’s call for a process of unselfing entails a similar compromise of human individuality. Again, the human being is to be reduced to a vessel ‘through which God’s love flows’. Sartre’s understanding of human freedom, on the other hand, lets selfless love, and human relations in general, appear as nothing less than a threat to the core of a person’s identity. Tillich, in particular, supports his claims regarding the interdependency of individuality and relationality by reference to the human being’s intrinsic relationship with a transcendent reality that grounds his being.2 On the one hand, the individual’s foundational relationship with the transcendent bestows on him an inviolable dignity, and reinforces his significance as divinely created. On the other hand, the same relationship serves as the foundation for understanding relationality as such to be life-giving. It is in acknowledging these two poles and the tension between them that Tillich, and to some extent Murdoch, ultimately challenge the radicality of Sartre’s claims about the instability of the human self. Although they admit that the self is unstable insofar as its identity is continually moulded by (dynamic) relationships, they nonetheless hold on to a minimal stable core—or, as Murdoch puts

2 As will have become apparent, Tillich and Murdoch of course consider the transcendent Other to ‘found’ reality in different ways. Whereas Tillich envisages this Other as the creative, ontological ground of being, Murdoch does not pose the question of the origins of being and considers the transcendent merely to illuminate reality. While Murdoch thus makes a somewhat weaker claim than Tillich, she nonetheless maintains that, apart from our relation with the transcendent Other, we have no access to reality and do not really live in it.

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it, some basic degree of self-being—on account of which the human being can enter into desirous relationships and attachments in the first place. I would thus suggest that, contrary to Sartre’s or indeed Nygren’s self, Tillich’s and Murdoch’s self can be described as a relational substance. It will have become evident that grounding the interdependency of individuality and relationality in the tension between finitude and infinity not only helps mediate between, say, Nygren and Sartre, but also helps overcome the impasse between freedom and determinism, and that between eros and agape. For as we saw, it leads Tillich and Murdoch to affirm and endorse the human capacity to transcend the status quo, while also recognizing that this capacity is itself embedded in, and constrained by, the finite world. Likewise, it leads them to embrace the human being’s erotic drive as a meaningful symptom of this tension, while also acknowledging the priority and normative import of a more agapeic love that seeks the good of the other. If the individuality of human selfhood is interdependent on its relationality, then love can neither, as Nygren and Weil propose, sacrifice the individual (say, to the relationship with God) nor, as Sartre proposes, sacrifice relations with the other to one’s own fight for individuality. Instead, so Tillich and Murdoch argue, both individual flourishing and love require precisely a loving surrender to the other and a valuation of the individual lover himself.

WEAKNESSES AND UNRESOLVED ISSUES Thus far I have largely highlighted the positive contribution Tillich and Murdoch make to the question of selfless love. Yet in order to clarify where and how a viable account of selfless love may have to move beyond Tillich’s and Murdoch’s proposals, it is important briefly to recapitulate their main weaknesses, as already stated towards the end of Chapters 5 and 7. There I argued that both Tillich and Murdoch fail to adequately acknowledge and foster the personal dimension of the human being. I suggested that this shortcoming is intertwined with a tendency to underrate the role of mutuality or reciprocity in love. These weaknesses, like Tillich’s inclination to turn eros into a law unto itself, once again amount to a portrayal of selfless love as an overly individualistic or solitary endeavour. Notwithstanding their awareness that the call to selfless love is conditional upon a relational anthropology, Tillich and Murdoch do not sufficiently live up to this criterion and fail to fully liberate themselves from a more solipsistic understanding of the human person. Among other things, this prevents them from adequately demarcating true selfless love from the kind of self-destructive and exploitative relationships feminist thinkers typically associate with the term. To be sure, simple

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accusations of a misogynist conservatism3 are misguided in relation to both Murdoch and Tillich. For, as I have shown, both ground selfless love not in a patriarchal order or a narrow and antiquated set of moral norms or duties but in an ungendered understanding of the human being’s anthropological make-up—in what they argue to be every human being’s dependency on, or even intersubjectivity with, God and the world. As Hämäläinen has pointed out, Murdoch’s key inspiration—Weil’s notion of submission—is itself more of ‘a radical Christian . . . bent’, and envisions the figure of ‘the warrior-angel or martyr-saint, rather than the mother, wife or muse’.4 As such, ‘it occupies, arguably, a slot which is genderless and always adversarial to habitual relations of power’.5 Nonetheless, Tillich and Murdoch brush over the lover’s need to receive love before he can—and should attempt to—give love, as well as over the lover’s desire for his love to be returned such that selfless love leads to the kind of communion with the other that the human person naturally desires.6 Thus, while Tillich and Murdoch have certainly underlined the continued relevancy of the notion of selfless love and offered valuable foundations for selfless love, they do not satisfy the full range of criteria for selfless love established in Chapter 1 of this book. In what follows, I wish to make some suggestions as to how some of these weaknesses may be counteracted. Unable to offer a complete account of the preconditions for defending selfless love, I focus on three key features which Tillich and Murdoch either reject or leave undeveloped, yet which would help bolster their case for selfless love. The three elements I have in mind are: (1) a determined endorsement of the human need to receive love before giving love, as well as of the human desire and potential for mutual love; (2) an emphatic embrace of the fact that transcendent, objective Good is necessarily the Good of self and other and, thus, the unifying meeting point of the two; and (3) an account of the transcendent as a personal reality who instigates and makes possible selfless love in the first place. In order to demonstrate the relevance of these points, it will be beneficial to have recourse to the personalism of Martin Buber, with whom Tillich and Murdoch share much in common and on whom both comment. I will also make some suggestions as to how Tillich’s and Murdoch’s accounts of love provide the foundations for, and can accommodate at least some of, these features more easily than is suggested by their prima facie scepticism, or even antipathy, towards one or more of these features.

3 See e.g. the mentioned critical work of Lovibond (in relation to Murdoch) and Plaskow (in relation to Tillich). 4 Hämäläinen, ‘Review of Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy’, unpaginated. 5 Hämäläinen, ‘Review of Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy’, unpaginated. 6 Hämäläinen, ‘Review of Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy’, unpaginated.

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MOVING BEYOND TILLICH AND M URDOCH

Giving and Receiving in Selfless Love Selfless love, I firstly propose, can facilitate the flourishing of lover and beloved only if it rests on a prior reception of love. Although rooted in the lack of a full self, selfless love must properly be understood as rooted also in a plenitude of love. This dependence of selfless love on a gift of love must manifest itself in the selfless lover’s openness to receiving love also from his beloved. On the basis of this insight, I secondly argue that selfless love ultimately tends towards mutuality. This does not mean that selfless love should not be directed towards our enemies or that each and every love relationship must be two-directional. It does, however, mean that the selfless lover is not indifferent to the return of his love, but is indeed oriented towards this. Tillich, to some extent, admittedly acknowledges the dynamic of giving and receiving in love. Before the human individual becomes capable of selfless love, so he argues, such love has to break into and transform existence from without, thus acknowledging that ‘the sick cannot overcome the sick’.7 Implied in this is the suggestion that full human selfhood depends on being participated in by another even before participating in the other. Coupled with Tillich’s insistence that such divine participation becomes fruitful only where it is accepted, human flourishing is therefore ultimately tied to a cooperative effort between lovers. Yet, as we saw, Tillich does not fully spell out these insights, and instead undermines them by de-emphasizing the personal nature of the transcendent, and by failing to fully unravel the mutual or ‘communal’ nature of true love. Murdoch’s understanding of transcendent Good as a passive reality that cannot be communicated with and that does not love the human being cuts the person off from any kind of external help and, in that sense, isolates her even more. Her moral subject ‘must do it all [her]self ’.8

Receiving Love from the o/Other As the lover’s gift to his beloved, selfless love must have been received before it can be given or passed on. This claim, which of course echoes 1 John 4.19 (‘We love because he first loved us’), is most fundamentally true insofar as the lover’s very existence depends—at least in a broad sense—on the reception of love. In addition to the procreative act, the acts of clothing, feeding, and nurturing a newborn baby necessarily involve something of what Tillich and Murdoch define as selfless love: they issue from the care-giver’s loving and attentive turn away from self and towards the needs and well-being of 7

Tillich, ‘The Impact of Psychotherapy’, 399.

8

Murdoch, NS, 297.

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another, the baby. Without being ‘loved into being’ in this most basic manner, the human being dies.9 That a person’s being should depend on such elemental acts of love almost naturally invites the suggestion that the fullness of her existence, her flourishing, also depends on the reception of love in a sense that goes beyond external acts. As we saw, a person’s ability to love selflessly, moreover, rests on selfawareness and a sense of self-worth. In order to love selflessly, a person must (consciously or unconsciously) know herself to be a free moral agent with a calling to God or Good, and must believe her own love to be worth giving to another. All of these capacities grow with being loved by another first: they grow on account of a person’s experience of being respected and affirmed as an individual of intrinsic value and with the powers of agency and judgement; and they grow on account of her having experienced the value of relations with others. Though not a guarantee, the experience of being loved is certainly a benefit, and most likely a prerequisite, for one’s own ability to love—an insight confirmed both by everyday experience and by insights into the psychological development of the human person.10 Recognizing the importance of receiving love for giving love does not necessarily amount to endorsing also self-love. It does, however, underline that selfless love cannot rest on self-disdain. Such an attitude would obstruct a person’s openness to allowing herself to be loved, and would thus undermine that sense of self-worth, without which she would not consider her own love worth giving. A viable defence of selfless love must therefore acknowledge that such love is premised on a benevolent self-acceptance or self-affirmation, wherein the subject affirms herself as the relational and necessarily otheroriented person that she is, and on account of which she can allow herself to be loved by others.

Desiring the o/Other’s Love Selfless love furthermore involves a special openness towards receiving the love of the beloved. For, as Gabriel Marcel has argued, the lover’s sense of selfworth does not derive simply from being loved but from ‘being loved by other 9 See also Ratzinger’s claim that, ‘in order to be able to live . . . biological birth is not enough: man can only accept his personality, his “I”, in the power of the approval of his being that comes from another, from “you” ’. Without this ‘rebirth’ through another’s loving affirmation, a person’s ‘actual birth would remain incomplete and leave him in conflict with himself ’ (Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love (New York: Crossroads, 2005), 90). 10 See e.g. David Kurtz et al., ‘Maltreatment and the School-aged Child: School Performance Consequences’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 17: 5 (1993), 581–9; Kathryn Hildyard and David Wolfe, ‘Child Neglect: Developmental Issues and Outcomes’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 26: 6–7 (2002), 679–95; or the case of the neglected children discovered in Romanian orphanages after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989.

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beings who are loved by me’.11 In the long run at least, selfless love can only be sustained if it is returned by (at least some of) those to whom it is given. The lover must thus openly receive and even invite or desire a return of her selfless love. This follows also from the very purpose of selfless love. If selfless love wants to affirm the other and promote his well-being, then it must make a lover of him too: the axiom, which dovetails with my argument throughout this book, ‘that the more exclusively it is I who exists, the less do I exist’, applies to lover and beloved equally.12 True love of the other and his or her Good cannot, therefore, consist merely in respect for the beloved’s otherness, but must also entail a (selfless) desire for the beloved to love what is outside of him, including the lover herself. As David Bentley Hart has pointed out, where the other’s response to my love is, as in Levinas, neither ‘expect[ed]’ nor ‘want[ed]’, ‘the other is not really other at all . . . but the infinite orientation of my ethical adventure’; ‘by expecting nothing of the other, wanting nothing, I leave the other behind; and stripped of the dignity of the desirable . . . the other becomes merely my “occasion”’.13 We can conclude from this that the human person’s desire to be loved, though oftentimes maligned by modern thought,14 has not only a legitimate but a fundamental place in selfless love. This desire, which includes the desire to be loved by one’s beloved and, thus, the desire for a mutuality or a communion of love, is relevant both to the effort of sustaining one’s selfless love and to seeking the good of the beloved. Selfless love indeed reaches its climax and bears the greatest fruit where this desire is fulfilled: it culminates in a reciprocal relation such as that of friendship, wherein each party gratefully returns the other’s selfless love and thereby gives the other back to himself anew and enriched.15 Indeed, it is precisely in its quest for the other’s Good that selfless love naturally tends towards mutuality and thereby acknowledges that the Good is ultimately attained, not as a result of unilateral action on behalf of another, but through cooperation with another.

11

12 Emphasis added. Marcel, Mystery of Being, ii. 8. Marcel, Mystery of Being, ii. 34. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 81 f. Although I would agree that selfless love must entail an openness to the possibility of self-sacrifice, I would thus reject Niebuhr’s notion that mutuality cannot be pursued directly but can legitimately emerge only where it is based on self-sacrifice, which he believes prevents the individual from natural morality’s expectation of or demand for mutuality (Richard Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. Vol. 2: Human Destiny (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 69). 14 See e.g. Josef Pieper, who points out that ‘Nietzsche called wanting to be loved “the greatest of all presumptions” ’, and that Freud called for ‘emancipation from dependence on the desire to be loved’ (Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 183, 185). As Pieper implies, this is partly a result of the rise of atheism, insofar as this desire is, above all, legitimate in the context of one’s relation with God. On the importance of the love of a personal transcendent for selfless love, see my discussion later in this chapter. 15 See e.g. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 90. 13

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Clarifying Reciprocity It must be stressed that such an affirmation need not undermine love’s gratuitousness or the particular value of non-reciprocal relations—concerns that constitute the tenor of Murdoch’s implicit scepticism of reciprocity, and of her explicit critique of Martin Buber’s notion of dialogical relation as the foundation of human personhood.16 Firstly, the quest for reciprocity as I have commended it is not motivated by self-interest,17 and does not entail ‘the reasonable expectation that one will receive a return in proportion to what one gives to the other’.18 Instead of involving a Sartrean redefinition of love as the ‘demand to be loved’, it involves the desire and the hope of a return for the sake of the other. It also grants a sense of the ‘unreturnable’ insofar as it acknowledges and embraces the fact that, as soon as a gift (such as the gift of love) ‘passes into someone else’s hands, it is marked by their character, by their usage’ and will, if returned, be qualitatively altered.19 An affirmation of reciprocity in selfless love does not undercut the Christian command to love our enemies so typically associated with selfless love. It still implies that selfless love is given ‘without the guarantee of return’ and bears with the lack of a return.20 At the same time, it does mean that selfless love of one’s enemies aims not at sanctioning but, precisely, at undoing hostile relationships by laying the ground for a mutual understanding that is fully actualized only where the love received is returned.21 It is, secondly, misguided to suggest that an affirmation of reciprocity necessarily implies an undue elevation of symmetrical relations that devalues

16 Jean-Luc Marion insists, not dissimilarly, that ‘the lover has the unmatched privilege of losing nothing, even if he happens to find himself unloved, because a love scorned remains a love perfectly accomplished, just as a gift refused remains a perfectly given gift’ (Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 71). As already noted, Murdoch’s scepticism towards reciprocity suggests itself from her insistence that the idea of a personal, loving God is a false consolation and from the fact that unreciprocated love is one of the unifying characteristics of the most saintly characters in her novels. For Murdoch’s critique of Buber see MGM, 461–80. Cf. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London: Collins, 1961), 39; I and Thou (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937), 62. 17 See e.g. Stephen Pope’s (critical) description of a ‘ “tit-for-tat” reciprocity based on enlightened self-interest’, that limits ‘what the agent ought to do on behalf of the other’ (Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 239 f.). 18 Andolsen, ‘Agape’, 69, 71. 19 John Milbank, ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’, First Things (March 1999), publ. online, unpaginated. 20 Milbank, ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’, unpaginated. 21 Milbank, ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’, unpaginated. As James Alison has argued, love of enemies does this by freeing the lover from the circle (or reciprocity!) of violence and the reflexively hostile actions this inevitably engenders in her. In this sense, too, the selflessness necessarily involved in love of enemies actually builds up the lover’s self (see James Alison, ‘Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self ’, Public Lecture delivered at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London, 30 Oct. 2007 (publ. online, unpaginated)).

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relations with the weak and vulnerable, or even non-human.22 In this respect, it is helpful to turn to the personalism of Martin Buber, whom both Tillich and Murdoch engage, yet whom Murdoch, at least in part, misreads.23 Buber fiercely rejects the notion of ‘love without dialogue’ and, much like Tillich after him, suggests true dialogue and individual personhood to be interdependent.24 The fully personal self emerges in the context of ‘mutual’ or dialogical relations. Where the human being says ‘Thou’ to the other, or where he opens and gives himself to her, the other will respond in a similar way, such that a mutual relation emerges, in which self and other reveal their very being to one another.25 As Buber makes clear, this dialogue, which is critical to full personhood, does not necessarily consist in a visible and conscious exchange between two human parties of similar standing.26 Instead, it consists in a ‘mutuality of inner action’, which need not be oral or even conscious, and which can take place also with non-human beings, such as animals or trees.27 Buber grounds this in an appeal to a reality which transcends the finite other and which he identifies as God: where I meet a finite reality as a ‘Thou’, it is not only this finite other who reveals himself to me, but also God, the ‘eternal Thou’.28 Where the other does not visibly or consciously respond to my saying Thou, God’s presence in what Buber calls the ‘between’ of self and other nonetheless allows a revelation also of the finite other’s being. It is in and through this divine presence, then, that dialogue can take place even where one or both parties are not explicitly aware of it, and it is in and through the various ‘moments’ of dialogue with others that ‘there arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One’.29 The reciprocity enabled by the I–Thou relation does not, then, equal ‘speech’ in the sense of conversation.30 A tree lovingly addressed as ‘Thou’ will 22 Barth, who emphasizes the need for verbal speech in I–Thou relations, arguably thinks of these as symmetrical (see Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2. 222–84). As I will argue in what follows, doing so is unnecessary, however. 23 Like Buber, Schleiermacher and other Romantics also offered critiques of the monadic Cartesian subject by proposing a more eccentric understanding of the self. Yet the shortcomings of Tillich and Murdoch seem to call precisely for the personalist notion that the I only comes to itself in the encounter with a personal other, as emphasized in particular by Buber’s personalism. 24 Buber, Between Man and Man, 39. In direct reference to Buber, Tillich states that ‘there is no other way of becoming an “I” than by meeting a “Thou” and by accepting it as such, and there is no other way of meeting and accepting a “Thou” than by meeting and accepting the “eternal Thou” in the finite “Thou” ’ (Paul Tillich, ‘An Evaluation of Martin Buber: Protestant and Jewish Thought’, in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert Kimball (New York: OUP, 1959), 189). He similarly writes that ‘he who cannot relate himself as an “I” to a “Thou” cannot relate himself to the true and the good and to the ground of being in which they are rooted’ (Tillich, LPJ, 31). However, as already noted in Chapter 5, Tillich not only fails to flesh out this insight, but also obstructs it by de-emphasizing the personal. 25 26 Buber, I and Thou, 6–8, 33. Buber, Between Man and Man, 19 f., 25. 27 28 Buber, Between Man and Man, 27. Buber, I and Thou, 6, 75 f. 29 Buber, Between Man and Man, 33; I and Thou, 119, 32 f. 30 Buber, Between Man and Man, 19; cf. Murdoch, MGM, 463.

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not, for instance, respond visibly or consciously, yet it will nonetheless respond—by disclosing itself to the beholder.31 Although perhaps qualitatively different, even less complete, than an openly two-directional dialogue, such a seemingly unidirectional dialogue is all the more possible between human persons.32 It is conditional, however, on a God who reveals Himself in and through the other. An appropriate understanding of the importance of reciprocal relations to selfless love thus hinges on the recognition that reciprocity has many guises, and includes much of what appears to be non-reciprocal. At the same time, it need not, as Murdoch fears, correspond with a rejection or depreciation of non-reciprocal relations. In this respect it is necessary to move beyond Buber: while Buber does not, as Murdoch seems to imply, reject the non-mutual I–It relations, it is true that his elevation of I–Thou relations comes at the cost of making positive sense of genuinely non-mutual relations. Instead of exploring the positive value of the many, and oftentimes inevitable, cases in which reciprocity is absent, Buber attempts to conceive of all authentic or meaningful relations as somehow dialogical (for which he has been criticized by Franz Rosenzweig).33 Implied in this seems to be the problematic suggestion that, where the other does not respond to my love, I have failed in meeting them as a Thou. Yet, while Murdoch, by contrast, appears to find greater value in such non-reciprocal relations, even she does not give a fully convincing explanation of why these might be morally relevant. Her insinuation that they most aptly mirror our supposedly non-mutual relation with transcendent Good is unsatisfactory insofar as it would seem to entail an elevation of non-mutual over mutual relations that does injustice to the human being’s personal needs and potential. The suggestion that they, analogically speaking, confront the lover with the reality of death, on the other hand, fails if—as Christians believe— death is not an end-point. A more satisfactory (and Murdoch-inspired) explanation of the moral significance of non-reciprocal relations might be that such relations can school and deepen a person’s capacity for selfless love by furthering the purgation from selfishness that is necessary in order for selfless love to manifest itself to the full. Unreciprocated love arguably creates a certain distance between lover and beloved that invites the lover to question—and purify—the motives for his love. Murdoch illustrates this in the character of Diana, whose love of the dying Bruno is (seemingly) unidirectional and ‘profitless’ (in the sense of offering no personal satisfaction), but which—for this very reason—frees her 31

e.g. Buber, Between Man and Man, 25, 27. Buber, I and Thou, 6 f. Cf. also I and Thou, 103, where Buber states that ‘the relation with man is the real simile of the relation with God’. 33 Franz Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, September 1922, in Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten. Band II: 1918–1938, ed. Grete Schaeder (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1973), 124–8. 32

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from resentment and quite tangibly ‘joins . . . [her] to the world’ and, with this, to transcendent Good.34 Reciprocity can thus be endorsed without denying the fully valid, though nonetheless penultimate and provisional, value of nonreciprocal relations. The claim that selfless love is grounded in reciprocal relations does not, then, correspond with a dismissal of non-reciprocal relations. Equally, it does not amount to a dissociation of selfless love from the many forms of relation in which reciprocity is impossible. Instead, it entails merely the acknowledgement that even such love relations—such as manifest in love of the dead, love of enemies who are bent on remaining enemies, or love of an abuser, from whom the lover must stay away for the sake of his own well-being—can only be sustained on the basis of a ‘larger’ or overarching mediatory relation of mutual love. The most complete form of such a mediatory relation is doubtlessly that between the lover and God. For, God’s comprehensive love of all human beings joins the lover with his beloved and sustains the lover’s capacity to love even where the beloved does not actively respond to the love he receives. (It is against this background that I go on to suggest, below, that a personal transcendent, with whom the lover can enter into a mutual love relation, is another critical factor in defending the up-building potential of selfless love). Meanwhile, the link between selfless love and reciprocity serves to underline that non-reciprocal relations with other human beings are truly loving only to the extent that they continue to invite a direct or indirect form of reciprocation. Indeed, the sole hope of precisely those human beings who are unable or unwilling to love selflessly lies in their experience of being loved in a way that continues to hold out to them the possibility of becoming lovers themselves— and thus of entering into a mutual love relation.35 In a Christian context, which involves an eschatological vision, the promise that the possibility for such mutuality extends beyond this life further sustains the lover in his love of an unresponsive, or even hostile, beloved.36 The notion that selfless love not only strives for, but rests on, cooperation and mutuality or reciprocity, finally, constitutes an important element in ensuring that selfless love be distinguished from what Marcel calls a ‘pathology of giving’, which ends in a ‘moral suicide where one person abdicates and annuls himself completely for the benefit of another’.37 It is the logical conclusion of premising selfless love on the interdependency of self and See Murdoch, BD, 288 f.; for the expression ‘joins us to the world’ see Murdoch, MGM, 496. For this and the above examples of the impossibility of direct reciprocity see Paul S. Fiddes, ‘Forgiveness and Restorative Justice’, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 5:1 (2016). 36 See Julia Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self ’, in Julia Meszaros and Johannes Zachhuber, eds., Sacrifice and Modern Thought (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 66–82, at 77–8; and Paul S. Fiddes, ‘Forgiveness and Restorative Justice’ (forthcoming). 37 Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1984), 100. 34 35

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other, and thus of distinguishing selfless love from the complete and unidirectional self-sacrifice of one person for another. The recognition that selfless love is intrinsically geared towards overcoming the lack of its return (even while it will, in principle, bear with such a lack), should make the notion of selfless love more palatable to feminists such as Margaret Farley, who has closely associated agape with a mutuality of equal giving and receiving between lovers.38 Farley’s suggestion that ‘receiving and giving are but two sides of one reality which is other-centred love’ indeed aligns with selfless love as I have described it.39 It equally indicates that feminist writers such as Barbara Hilkert Andolsen or Sarah Coakley are right to point out that emphasizing ‘openness and vulnerability’, or a ‘dependence upon love from others’, is no selfish indulgence but an important challenge precisely to the individual’s selfish self-enclosedness.40 In this light, then, Murdoch’s worry that the quest for reciprocity accommodates human selfishness is too onesided. Selfishness can take on many forms, including a lack of openness towards, even of concern for, a reciprocation of one’s love.

The Oneness of Good Affirming the place of reciprocity in selfless love is one more aspect of clarifying that selfless love, in principle and properly understood, benefits self and other equally. Doing so closely corresponds with a recurrent insight from my discussion of love and the self in Tillich and Murdoch: the Good of the self is intertwined with that of the other. I now propose that a viable defence of selfless love demands a greater emphasis not only on reciprocity but, connected with this, also on the oneness of Good. Although this follows particularly from Murdoch’s theory of Good, it is underemphasized by Murdoch herself. As Murdoch implies, contra the successors of G. E. Moore (though not against Moore himself), the objectivity of Good is intertwined with its oneness.41 We saw that Murdoch’s understanding of the human being relies on the notion that all his or her desires are harmonized and fulfilled in the one true and objective Good. Only thus, she argues, can one maintain an authentic moral philosophy—as opposed to an ideology concerned merely with gratifying one’s various personal, conflicting, subjective desires. Murdoch—unlike Tillich—gives expression to this conviction by consistently speaking not of the Farley, ‘New Patterns of Relationship’. Farley, ‘New Patterns of Relationship’, 639. 40 Andolsen, ‘Agape’, 78. See e.g. Coakley, ‘Kenosis’, 206, 208. See also Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Person, Kenosis and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies in Conversation’, Modern Theology, 19: 1 (2003), 41–65. 41 Murdoch, SoG, 41. 38 39

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‘Good of the self ’ and the ‘Good of the other’ but only of ‘Good’ as such. This manifests itself also, and particularly, in her depiction of eros. Whereas we saw Tillich define this as the desire for the fulfilment of self, Murdoch portrays it solely as an (admittedly fallible) desire for ‘Good’.42 In doing so, Murdoch may be motivated above all by her somewhat one-sided sense of human selfishness and by her related insistence that we must love Good ‘for nothing’. This arguably leads her to underemphasize the extent to which this one Good does, after all, concern not only the beloved but also the lover himself. Nonetheless, her reference solely to the one Good is a valuable reminder that the oneness of Good means that Good is a reality shared by all. Tillich’s definition of eros and agape as the desire for the fulfilment of self and the desire for the fulfilment of the other respectively is less helpful in this respect. Notwithstanding the individuality of self and other, the Good of the self is neither parallel to, nor at odds with, that of the other. Instead, it is entwined with this. The individual cannot flourish privately, apart from the other and ‘their’ Good, nor is his or her flourishing, as Sartre would have it, inevitably at odds with that of the other.43 Indeed, where the moral subject perceives a supposed act of love to be bad for himself, this act cannot fully benefit the other (and vice versa). Thus, although selfless love seeks the Good in the other to whom it is oriented, it is, ideally speaking, a shared endeavour in which self and other naturally meet—an insight which corresponds with my suggestion above that selfless love tends towards reciprocity. As a common reality, the Good is indeed most perfectly sought with the other, such as in friendship. This means also that it is appropriate—and nearly inevitable—for the selfless lover to be aware of the fact that his love, though directed towards the other, in whom Good is found, will be also to his own benefit. As has been established, selfless love cannot be motivated by self-interest. Yet it is nonetheless undermined by the idea that the Good of the other rules out any gains for the self.44

42 We saw in Chapter 7 that Murdoch establishes the oneness of Good (but not God) through recourse to the ontological argument. As becomes evident in Altorf ’s discussion of Murdoch’s interpretation of the argument, Murdoch considers this to point to a unified and unconditioned reality, which transcends the diversity of the various religious and philosophical traditions, as well as consciousness itself (Altorf, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining, esp. 98–106). 43 De facto conflicts of interest nonetheless exist, of course, but these would seem to result from one or another party’s pursuit precisely not of the one Good but of their own supposed good—in short, from the effects of human selfishness or fallenness, which a relational anthropology such as here proposed deems ultimately to be detrimental to both self and other. 44 This does not rule out the possibility of self-sacrifice. It does imply, however, that selfsacrifice is legitimate only where it is undertaken with a view to acting in accordance with the one Good. As such, a legitimate self-sacrifice will, in some way or other, be to the Good of the self as well as of the other. Ultimate sacrifice (in particular the giving of one’s life), though possible, seems to make sense only in the context of faith in a kind of flourishing which ‘no eye has seen, nor ear heard’ (1 Cor 2:9).

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A Personal Transcendent I finally propose that selfless love does most justice to the personal potential of lover and beloved, and thus promotes human flourishing most fully, if the ‘ontological third reality’ to which both Murdoch and Tillich appeal is, analogically speaking, personal. By this I do not mean to cast the transcendent as an anthropomorphic being among other beings. Rather, I seek to establish and justify the claim that the transcendent loves the human person in his or her individuality, such that this reality—most commonly and aptly named God—can be understood to facilitate and sustain an intimate and interpersonal love relation with the human being that respects his or her freedom to refuse such a relation. This definition is rooted in more classical definitions of personhood as entailing a will and an intellect, the former being the precondition for the ability to love. It also reflects, however, the Christian belief that God has shown himself in a concrete and loving human person, and thus gestures towards a Trinitarian understanding of God, which I discuss further below. In arguing for the importance of the personal nature of the transcendent, I, likewise, do not presume to demonstrate the actual existence of a personal God but merely to show how the traditional conception of a personal God places selfless love on a more coherent and tenable foundation. With this third proposal I most clearly move beyond Tillich’s and Murdoch’s thought: while they both are open to casting the transcendent in terms of a personal God on a loosely symbolic level, I propose that the language of ‘personhood’ can be attributed to God really and properly, albeit, imperfectly and non-exhaustively. The point here is that personhood or personality can be attributed to God in a way that is qualitatively different from other divine attributes which are commonly termed ‘symbolic’ or ‘metaphorical’. God is truly personal because he truly knows us and loves us in a way similar to how other humans know and love, and which in turn illuminates and informs (and ultimately causes) our own personhood (even as it infinitely surpasses that which we experience as personhood in this world). As I will argue, such a view supports a more firm endorsement of the personal nature and potential of the human self, and of the previously described elements of reciprocity and of the oneness of Good.

The Personal Transcendent and the Finite Other The importance of the personal nature of the transcendent has already suggested itself by the fact that both Tillich’s and Murdoch’s problematic depersonalization of the human being is embedded in a metaphysic centred around a (more or less) impersonal transcendent. The link between one’s understanding of the human being and of the transcendent is reinforced where

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love of human persons is, as in Tillich’s and Murdoch’s case, thought to connect the lover precisely with the transcendent. Murdoch’s thought is particularly indicative of this difficulty. She rightly stresses that ‘a love which . . . treats [the beloved other] as an end not as a means, may be the most enlightening love of all’.45 Aware that she would violate this principle by positing that Good is encountered through the other, she suggests that Good is encountered in the other.46 In doing so, however, she falls into the untoward situation in which the moral subject looks for what is impersonal in what is personal, effectively being tempted to love the personal, human other as one would love Good—that is, with an impersonal love, which loves the other ‘for nothing’ and without envisaging a response. As I have argued, such an impersonal love of what is personal fails to love the other for the person they are and runs past their—and the lover’s—particular needs and potential. The implication of Murdoch’s metaphysic is that an impersonal Good ultimately depersonalizes even the human relationships of the one who loves this Good, thus hampering the possibility of mutuality and communion, or of that form of relationship in which human persons would seem to flourish best. As I have already suggested, human personhood, and the human being’s consequent capacity for love relations, is equally endangered where God is understood as an impersonal ground of being or life-force. The term ‘persona’ originally means mask and can thus be understood to refer to that which is not ‘present-at-hand’ or which exceeds what we can see and control.47 Personhood thus involves the reality of a will and, hence, freedom. It signifies, precisely, the transcendent and free nature of God. This is critical both to God’s capacity to love (for a determined or an imposed love cannot be love) and to the human being’s freedom and capacity to love. Only where the ground of our being is personal and thus free can we be, and experience ourselves as, free agents of love.48 One who is grounded in an impersonal, deterministic ‘force’, cannot truly love. Apart from better explaining the foundations of our capacity to love, understanding God as personal also establishes a more coherent symmetry between loving the human other and loving God (or the transcendent Other). Within such a framework, the lover is free to encounter God in the human other without having to depersonalize his love-relation with that other. By better ensuring that the lover acknowledge and love the other as the person he is, the notion of a personal God also helps free the moral subject’s relations with the beloved from undue pressures, and thus to safeguard the beloved’s Murdoch, ‘FS’, 417. Cf. Murdoch’s interpretation of Plato, which is characteristic of her own thought on the matter: MGM, 107, 182. 47 Jan-Olav Henriksen, ‘It’s Personal—Or Not At All: On God as Love/r’, Dialog. A Journal of Theology, 50: 1 (2011), 63–70, at 64. 48 Henriksen, ‘It’s Personal’, 67 f. 45 46

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freedom and individuality. One of the greatest challenges of rooting selfless love in a relational anthropology (and thus in the interdependency of self and other) lies in explicating that the lover’s flourishing is affected by the other’s response but does not wholly depend on this. As I have argued, selfless love itself prescribes that the lover cares about the other’s response. At the same time, it would seem almost impossible to think of him as wholly dependent on such a response without in some sense making the other into a liability—thus giving rise to a Sartrean antagonism between self and other. Where the selfless lover stands in relation both to a finite other and to a personal transcendent, he or she can allow and desire the former’s loving response while being able to accept also the lack of such a response. The finite other plays a definite, but not an exhaustive or exclusive role in the unfolding of the lover’s personhood. It is helpful, in this respect, to call to mind Buber’s already mentioned notion that the personal self of the lover is bestowed by the divine third, which ‘has its being between [the finite lover and beloved], and transcends both’.49 Buber does ultimately consider the mutual love between self and other the necessary context for the emergence of an I–Thou relationship, and thus for the development of the lover’s full, personal self. Yet his understanding of transcendent reality as personal and loving at least frees him from tying the constitution of the self to the other’s concretely visible response, and indeed broadens the meaning of the term ‘response’. Most importantly, the lover’s self is not built up by the finite other directly but by the God who shows himself in the space between self and other. Understanding the transcendent as personal thus helps free the finite beloved from undue pressures to respond to the love of another in a particular and externally visible way. At the same time, it does not render the externally visible response of the beloved immaterial to the lover’s flourishing. Where the beloved does return the lover’s love, the beloved for instance manifests and makes visible the divine response in a manner appropriate to the human being’s embodied and emotional nature. The lover’s selfhood and well-being is thus promoted more tangibly and completely, its shared and incarnate nature becoming more obviously apparent. Where the finite beloved does not openly return the lover’s love, both lover and beloved will, in turn, be more likely to struggle to perceive and receive that transcendent love, which sustains the lover qua lover and which builds up his self. Nonetheless, where the transcendent itself is conceived of as a personal respondent, the lover is not fully dependent on his beloved’s response. The beloved’s lack of active participation in the love relationship can thus be respected even while it prevents love from becoming fully manifest.

49

Emphasis added. Buber, Between Man and Man, 246.

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A Foundation for Reciprocity and the Oneness of Good The notion that the transcendent is best thought of as personal is in line also with my above argument for the special value of reciprocity. Given human personhood, a fully mutual relationship can be had only with a partner whose personal potential—that is, whose freedom and capacity for love and subjectivity—matches or exceeds that of the human being.50 It follows that if selfless love can be most fully practised in the context of mutual love relations, it is most fully present in relations of mutuality between persons. Although the transcendent may, as Tillich seems to imply, be more than personal51 (such that it can for instance be the source of being and fulfilment also of realities transcending the human person), it is precisely its similarity to human personhood which is of particular significance for a viable account of selfless human love.52 In making such a claim, it is worth noting that it is no less scandalous to apply the analogy of love to relations with the Good than it is to apply the analogy of the personal to the Good.53 Only where personal reciprocity becomes possible within the love relation with transcendent Good itself is justice done to Tillich’s and Murdoch’s claim that true love issues in, or involves, a love relation with the transcendent and that this relation is the ultimate foundation of the fullness of being of self and other. Configuring the transcendent as personal also adds cogency to the claim that the one transcendent Good of which Murdoch speaks is, or includes, the Good of the human being, thus constituting the source of her flourishing. Since the human person’s Good consists in an actualization of her personal potential, the manner in which we speak of Good should reflect this. While the transcendent may, again, be ‘more’ than personal, the fact that the Good of the human being is personal suggests that the transcendent must, analogously speaking, also be thought of as personal, and that it is this quality of transcendent Good which is particularly relevant to the human being. Similarly, and following my above suggestions regarding a connection between love, freedom, and personhood, if the language of love is central to conceptualizing the origins of the human being, and if this applies particularly to the human being’s relation with the transcendent, then personal language is arguably the 50 This corresponds particularly with Tillich’s (and Buber’s) notion that the fullness of individual selfhood consists in personhood and that this is interdependent with communion, or the ‘encounter of person with person’ (Tillich, ST III, 43). 51 Tillich, ST I, 271. 52 Again, it must be stressed that this similarity nonetheless coincides with an even greater dissimilarity. 53 In the same vein, and pressing for consistency, Schwartz has asked why, ‘if God as person is included in the more than a person . . . can Tillich not concede that God is a person but also more than a person instead of saying that God is not a person but not less than one?’ (Schwartz, ‘Open Questions’, 188; as Schwartz points out, this was also asked by Carl Armbruster, The Vision of Paul Tillich (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967), 153).

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most satisfactory and ‘capacious’ language available to us for conceptualizing both the human being and the transcendent.54 Only a transcendent conceived of as personal, that is, an ultimate reality, which, though distinct from the human being, is—analogically—also pictured as relational, adequately reflects the human being’s Good and the utmost or fullest object of her love. In short, if transcendent Good includes personal goods, then it must be especially apt to characterize this Good itself as personal.

The Transcendent as Trinity In Christian theology, the notion of a personal transcendent reaches its acme in the doctrine of the Trinity. Implying that ‘the persons in God are nothing less than relationships’, this expresses the personal nature of the transcendent not only in terms of a relationship between God and world but also in terms of a loving, inner-divine relationality.55 The Trinity thereby highlights the unfathomable nature of the transcendent (stressed by both Tillich and Murdoch).56 When analogously used as a basis for clarifying the nature of the human being, it furthermore underlines that loving relationships are not accidental to the human being but constitutive of who he or she is. At the same time, the fact that each of the Trinitarian persons retains an individual distinctness, confirms the claim that relationality, again, does not come at the cost of individuality but that these two elements condition one another.57 As Enrique Cambón has pointed out, the Trinitarian persons’ equal distinctness and loving relationality also clearly distinguishes selfless love, as I have called it, from self-annihilation: ‘A trinitarian relationship between two or more persons means that each one is himself or herself while bringing the other to be.’58 By characterizing the divine life as marked by a reciprocity of giving and receiving among persons, the doctrine of the Trinity, similarly, lends support to my above claim that, if it is to do justice to the personal nature of the human 54

Fiddes, Participating in God, 31 (see entire discussion, pp. 31–3). See e.g. Fiddes, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, 141. 56 See e.g. Fiddes, Participating in God, esp. 45. 57 Admittedly, the analogy between the persons of the divine Trinity and the human person can only be pushed so far, for each of the divine persons is self-subsistent. 58 Cambón, in Ellen Van Stichel, ‘The Ethical Potential of Communal Movements for Catholic Social Thought: The Trinitarian Anthropology of the Focolare Movement’, in Kevin Ahern, ed., Visions of Hope: Emerging Theologians and the Future of the Church (Maryknoll, N.Y. Orbis Books, 2013), 133–50, at 143. As Van Stichel points out, Cambón suggests that ‘persons act in a Trinitarian way when they live with others, for others, in others, and thanks to others’ (Cambón, in Van Stichel, ‘The Ethical Potential’, 143). Whenever one of these elements is compromised, the relationship is harmed and loses its Trinitarian quality, insofar as it lapses either into indifference towards the Good of the other or a unidirectional self-emptying. Differently put, either selfless love or human flourishing are then compromised. 55

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being, then the gift of selfless love must ultimately correspond also with a reception of love. Traditional understandings of the Trinity associate the movement of giving with the Father and that of receiving with the Son. The doctrine thus underlines the interrelatedness of these movements: just as a father and son logically imply one another, so do the movements of giving and receiving love. Assuming that this Trinitarian scheme, mysterious though it is, sheds light also on human love, we can say that the human being’s gift of love, which seeks the Good of the other, imitates in particular the love of the Father, in whom the lover participates through his act of love.59 As such, the gift of love logically corresponds with the human beloved’s active reception of this love (or indeed the lover’s prior reception of love), which in turn constitutes a participation in God the Son, who is called the ‘beloved’. The fact that, while engaging in this dynamic reciprocity, the Trinitarian persons remain in a perfect, though complex, unity ties together my above two points about love’s proper striving for reciprocity and its rootedness in the unity of Good: the Good of the Father and the Son is one. Pushing the analogy between divine and human reciprocity yet a step further, we can say that—insofar as it imitates that of Father and Son—the relation between lover and beloved makes present God the Spirit, who brings forth the flourishing of both lover and beloved.60 Incidentally, such a perspective lends further backing to Tillich’s notion that the ‘Spiritual Presence’ forms the precondition for human flourishing. It is also in keeping, of course, with Buber’s notion that God speaks from the space between lovers. The doctrine of the Trinity thus also corresponds with my above suggestion that the reciprocity of selfless love properly speaking involves not two but three parties, insofar as the self is built up not solely through the lover or the beloved but also and especially through the love of a transcendent third. It is noteworthy that the link between the doctrine of the Trinity and mutuality or reciprocity has led Christian feminists, too, to see in this doctrine a particularly important image of loving relations. As already indicated, Farley, for instance, asserts that the three persons of the Trinity engage in a reciprocal giving and receiving of love.61 Elizabeth Johnson sees in the doctrine of the Trinity ‘a symbolic picture of totally shared life at the heart of the universe’.62 As she argues, the doctrine emphasizes ‘the connectedness of all that exists in the universe’, and portrays this connectedness as one of mutuality between

59 See e.g. Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Vol. III (New York: Crossroads, 1983). Congar mentions Nygren as having validly shown that agape is ‘love as the source without antecedent’ (Congar, I Believe, 140). 60 For an exposition of the Western theological theme (and its theological sources) of the Holy Spirit as the bond of love between Father and Son, see again Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Vol. I (New York: Crossroads, 1983), 85–92. 61 62 Farley, ‘New Patterns of Relationship’, 66 f. Johnson, She Who Is, 222.

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‘different equals’.63 The Trinity is here considered to convey that relation is the very fabric of reality and, in its right formation, holds the key to ‘the flourishing of all creatures’.64

Compatibility with Tillich’s and Murdoch’s Thought As I argued, Tillich’s claim that the abstract language of being allows for a better grasp of the transcendent than personal language, stands in tension with his own characterization of the human telos as one of personhood. My proposal that the transcendent be conceived of as personal does not contradict Tillich’s thought, therefore; rather, it is more in line with, and undergirds, his insight into human personhood. As Schwartz points out, as Tillich moves from Volume I to Volume II of the Systematic Theology, he himself comes to realize ‘that a two-fold access to God, non-symbolic and symbolic, is impossible’ and concludes that all language of God is symbolic.65 Tillich thereby opens the door to the more thoroughly Trinitarian perspective I here propose. My above proposal constitutes a more definite break with Murdoch. Murdoch recognizes the metaphorical relevance of references to a personal ‘God’, but nonetheless insists on the actual unreality of such a God. Based primarily on a concern about selfish elevations of the ego, her view here lacks a firm philosophical foundation, however. Murdoch for instance passes over the question of the origin of being; she gives no account of what it is that makes the depraved human being capable of undergoing the hard work of attention; and she leaves the tension between our supposedly intrinsic desire for Good and our equally natural selfishness unexamined. It has thus been argued that her philosophically wanting foundation for the Good leaves her unable to substantiate the Good: doing so would, again, mean giving in ‘to the forces of self-gratification, vanity and destructive self-love’, and thus, to seeing the world according to the fantasies of the ‘fat relentless ego’ rather than ‘as it really is’.66 Murdoch thereby arguably makes faith in Good impossible.67 That Murdoch’s assertion of Good is more a precaution against selfishness than a consistently argued philosophical conclusion would help explain why, in her understanding of the Good, Murdoch seems in some ways not to move

63

64 Johnson, She Who Is, 222. Johnson, She Who Is, 223. 66 Schwartz, ‘Open Questions’, 188. Insole, ‘Beyond Glass Doors’, 132. 67 While my discussion will have indicated that I do not share Insole’s verdict that Murdoch thereby heightens the ‘neo-Protestant’ and Nygrenian notion of the utter worthlessness of the human being, I am more inclined to follow him in his claim that Murdoch’s interpretation of the ontological argument amounts to denouncing faith as sin (Insole, ‘Beyond Glass Doors’, 132). Insole rightly establishes that, for Murdoch, to ‘believe in the possibility of the perfection and transcendence towards which we must strive . . . is precisely to violate (by introducing “metaphysical form”) the very perfection that we are striving for’ (Insole, ‘Beyond Glass Doors’, 132). 65

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beyond ‘the characteristics of the old God’.68 As we have seen, she holds on to the incarnate nature of Good and continues to associate our path towards Good with a selfless kind of love. Her attempt to do this independently of the personal nature of the transcendent arguably involves her in various difficulties, however. As Stephen Mulhall, for instance, notes, Weil’s sense that ‘the void can give spiritual succour’ becomes distorted in Murdoch’s metaphysics.69 It lacks the coherence such an insight receives from Christianity’s ability (as Mulhall puts it) to ‘incorporate . . . the ultimate human experience of reality’s resistance to meaning and value within the life of God’, who died in the person of Christ on the cross and rose to life.70 A more personally conceived transcendent would not only better confront some of these problems, but would also help solve many of the philosophical problems elicited by Murdoch’s rejection of the idea.

SELFLESS LOVE AND HUMAN FLOURISHING I began this study with the observation that the modern turn to the individual human self has, in many places, created a stalemate between selfless love and human flourishing. In Sartre’s case, for instance, it has resulted in an opposition of self and other and in a definition of love as ‘the project of making oneself be loved’. The biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it is thus rendered unintelligible. For, contrary to the New Testament, Sartre implies that personal fulfilment is achieved not through lovingly turning away from self and towards the other, but through asserting oneself over against the other. Our study of Tillich’s and Murdoch’s thought on love and the self has suggested that modern thinkers such as Sartre nonetheless offer valuable insights into the nature and powers of the self, and are right in seeking to foster human individuality, freedom, and self-transcendence. However, it has also suggested that, insofar as these insights have led it to dismiss selfless love, modern thought has been misguided. As we saw, Tillich and Murdoch endorse in particular the modern awareness of the fragile and dynamic nature of the human self, and the conviction that the individual’s natural capacities, needs, and desires are instrumental for his or her flourishing. Yet they also insist that this does not yet settle the matter of selfless love, and they invite us, instead, to nuance modernity’s perspective on the human self—and only then to draw conclusions about the nature of love and its relation to human flourishing. 68 69

Altorf, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining, 97 (cf. Murdoch, SoG, 54). 70 Mulhall, ‘All the World’, 34. Mulhall, ‘All the World’, 34.

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For, while philosophers such as Sartre rightly recognize the human being’s tendency to assume a false self-stability, they fail to see that their response to this state of affairs—namely, the endorsement of individual self-affirmation and self-assertion—in fact remains trapped within the parameters of the problem it seeks to address. The human being’s refusal to recognize the fragility of the self and the attempt to handle this by asserting the self over against the other are, on Tillich’s and Murdoch’s account, two sides of the same coin. Both stem from a failure to acknowledge and accept the intrinsically relational nature of the human self. This relationality implies that the human self cannot, as Norris Clarke puts it, ‘be looked on as primarily an isolated, self-sufficient individual, with freely chosen relations added on’, but is ‘intrinsically ordered toward togetherness with other human persons . . . i.e., toward friendship, community, and society’.71 The human self is properly co-determined or co-constituted by the o/Other, to the point that its flourishing—indeed, its very being—rests on actively welcoming the o/Other into itself. It is this make-up of the human self which ties human flourishing to an inner opening to and receiving of the o/Other or to what I, drawing on Tillich and Murdoch, have described as selfless love. Despite its mentioned shortcomings concerning love and the self, modern thought provides distinct resources for making sense of this connection between selfless love and human flourishing. As Tillich and Murdoch recognize, the modern awareness of the self ’s instability, lack of self-containedness, and erotic drive all point to the self ’s intrinsic relationality and consequent need for the o/Other that founds this link. That the connection between selfless love and human flourishing is obscured in spite of these pointers is the result of a second modern failure—an unwillingness to accept human fallenness or the ambiguity of human desire, which is capable not only of revealing but also of concealing reality. Where the relational nature of the human self and the fallenness of the self ’s desires are acknowledged, however, the link between selfless love and human flourishing begins to become evident. Signifying a turn away from self and an opening towards the o/Other, selfless love is that disposition towards the world by which the individual properly acts out his or her intrinsic relationality and enables his or her desires to reach their true goal. As we saw, this does not entail a renunciation of the individual’s natural drives and desires so much as their reorientation. Rightly understood, selfless love, for instance, capitalizes on the self ’s dynamic drive towards self-transcendence and towards greater freedom, but also orients this drive towards the o/Other. Underlying this is the recognition that it is only in the context of overcoming its misguided

71

Norris Clarke, ‘Person, Being and St Thomas’, Communio, 19: 4 (1992), 601–18, at 611.

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self-seclusion from the o/Other that the human self is fully unfolded. As I have argued throughout this book, the flourishing facilitated by such a loving selfopening to the other is of a shared nature, yet nonetheless that of individual subjects. Mark McIntosh illuminates this point when he writes that, ‘my freedom is always a freedom-for-the-other, but it is nonetheless the identifier of my self ’; for, not only am I ‘never more myself than when I give myself away for my neighbour in love’, but it is also ‘the personal traits and vehemence’ by which I do so which ‘mark’ me ‘as a subject’.72 The human being’s hope of flourishing as a free individual thus rests on his relinquishing the self-concerned pursuit of personal well-being, and turning to the o/Other in selfless love instead. By definition, such a reorientation precludes the idea of using the o/Other as a means towards obtaining personal fulfilment. Indeed, it sees the o/Other as an end in itself. This implies not that selfless love is unmotivated, but that it is motivated by a desire for the one true Good, which, by definition, includes self and o/Other equally and wherein each finds his or her personal fulfilment. As Bernard of Clairvaux puts it: True charity is never left with empty hands, and yet she is no hireling, out for pay, but ‘seeketh not her own’. . . . True love seeks no reward; and yet it merits one. Nobody ever dreams of offering to pay for love; yet recompense is owed to him who loves, and he will get it if he perseveres.73

72 Mark A. McIntosh makes these observations in relation to Emmanuel Levinas’s and Michel de Certeau’s respective accounts of the self (see Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 216, 219). 73 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Love of God (London: Mowbray, 1961), 57 f.

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Bibliography 1. Primary Texts Paul Tillich The Interpretation of History, trans. N. A. Rasetzki (part 1) and E. L. Talmey (parts 2–4) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936). ‘The Conception of Man in Existential Philosophy’, Journal of Religion, 19: 3 (1939), 201–15. ‘Existential Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 5: 1 (1944), 44–70. The Shaking of the Foundations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949). First published 1946. Love, Power and Justice (Oxford: OUP, 1954). [LPJ] ‘The Nature and Significance of Existentialist Thought’, Journal of Philosophy, 53: 23 (1956), 739–48. Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). [DF] ‘An Evaluation of Martin Buber: Protestant and Jewish Thought’, in P. Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. R. Kimball (New York: OUP, 1959), 189–92. Morality and Beyond (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). [MB] Systematic Theology. Combined Volume (Welwyn: James Nisbet, 1968). [ST] ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’. In Writings in the Philosophy of Religion. Paul Tillich Main Works. Vol. 4, ed. J. Clayton (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 289–300. First published 1946. ‘The Word of God’, in Writings in the Philosophy of Religion. Paul Tillich Main Works. Vol. 4, ed. J. Clayton (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 405–15. First published 1957. ‘Participation and Knowledge: Problems of an Ontology of Cognition’, in Philosophical Writings. Paul Tillich Main Works. Vol. 1, ed. G. Wenz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 381–90. First published 1955. ‘The Philosophical Background of My Theology’, in Philosophical Writings. Paul Tillich Main Works. Vol. 1, ed. G. Wenz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 411–22. First published 1960. ‘Existential Analyses and Religious Symbols’, in Theological Writings. Paul Tillich Main Works. Vol. 6, ed. G. Hummel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 385–98. First published 1956. Frühe Predigten (1909–1918). Ergänzungs- und Nachlassbände zu den gesammelten Werken VII, ed. E. Sturm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993). ‘Die sozialistische Entscheidung’, in Writings in Social Philosophy and Ethics. Paul Tillich Main Works. Vol. 3, ed. E. Sturm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 273–420. First published 1933. The Courage to Be, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). First published 1952. [TCB]

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Index Adorno, Theodor 39, 40, 49, 53 agape 6, 11, 17, 182 n. 1, 194, 201 n. 59 and eros 30, 32–4, 45–9, 93–120, esp. 97–9 and 102–3, 149, 158, 167, 169, 178, 183, 185, 195 as criterion for love 15, 106–14, 117, 167 agency 50, 159, 162, 188 altruism 158, 182 and self–love 6 anguish, see anxiety anorexia 7 Anselm of Canterbury 15, 72–4, 131–3 anthropology, theological and philosophical 63, 71, 93, 100, 115, 121, 160, 169, 177–8, 180, 183, 186 relational 185, 195 n. 43, 196, 198 trinitarian 200 anxiety 24–5, 27, 31–2, 40, 59, 63, 75, 87–9, 91, 104, 130, 166 atheism 11 n. 28, 13, 14, 54, 120–1, 130, 167, 189 n. 14 attention, practice of 137, 151–6, 181, 202 and decreation 180, 182 and eros 149, 151, 156–8, 167, 169, 176 fruits of 161, 163, 166 n. 117, 167, 169 and Good 131, 170 and love 53, 148, 153, 155–8, 176 as purifying 159, 167, 169, 180 and vision 145, 157 in Weil 49, 51–2, 101 n. 60, 132 Augustine 14, 15 authenticity 5, 23, 25, 42–3, 58–61, 64, 82–3, 102, 179, 182, 192 autonomy 6, 15, 60–2, 64–6, 79, 81, 93, 109–10, 113, 119, 126, 130, 136, 160, 169, 174–5, 183 bad faith 58–9, 66, 68–9, 148, 195 Barth, Karl 6 n. 12, 14, 33, 34 n. 64, 47–8, 72, 74, 191 beauty 97 and goodness 126, 144, 171 being 1, 12, 15, 63, 67, 73, 77, 79, 82, 85, 88, 109, 113, 115, 125, 127, 128, 130, 133, 137, 142, 143, 154, 165, 176, 181, 198, 199, 202, 204 being-itself 40, 41, 48, 66, 68, 73–6, 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89–94, 97, 98–100, 103, 110, 114, 116–17, 139

ground of being 15, 27, 28, 73–6, 80, 85, 88, 89, 90–3, 96, 106, 178, 184, 197 New Being 51, 65, 94, 101–9, 144 and selfhood 54–60, 76–92 structure of 76, 81, 86 Benedict XVI 4 Bergson, Henri 17 Bernard of Clairvaux 205 body 2, 7, 36, 38, 61, 77, 86, 101, 112, 162 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 14 Buber, Martin 80, 186, 190–2, 198–9, 201 Christianity 2, 4–8, 11, 13, 16–17, 22–3, 30, 35, 37, 41, 43, 45–6, 49, 64, 67, 83, 100, 141, 178, 203 communion 9, 38, 80–1, 93, 102, 104, 111, 114–16, 120, 172, 174, 178, 186, 189, 197, 199 consciousness 40, 75, 85–6, 90, 92, 128, 195 n. 42 and the Good 130 n. 56, 132–7 and the individual 5, 22, 26–30, 122–8, 135–6, 139, 147, 159 inner life 56, 64, 123–5, 129, 137, 144, 152, 159 modern dismissal of 18, 44, 68–9, 122–4, 127 moral relevance of 18, 22, 124–5, 127, 129, 147, 150, 159, 161, 168 and selfhood 5, 26–30, 55–69, 76–8, 136–7, 139, 148, 161, 168 and world 55–8, 76–8 death 1, 12, 16, 25, 50, 53, 56, 60, 64, 130, 139, 141, 157, 173, 192 Descartes, René 5, 18, 55, 125 desire 1, 6, 9, 21, 37–9, 41, 45, 47, 51–2, 69, 89, 124, 125, 127, 149, 153, 174, 203, 204 finite 2, 5, 6, 10, 20, 33, 49, 51, 70 for fulfilment 5, 14, 20, 32, 53, 95–120, 154, 165, 167, 178, 179, 183, 195 and the Good 143–5, 155–6, 180, 194–5, 202, 205 and love 69, 94–120, 148, 150, 156, 172, 176, 184, 186, 189–90, 198 orientation of 18, 137, 138–40, 204 and the other (cf. Sartre) 61–2, 95–120, 151, 179 purification of 146–7, 157–60

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desire (cont.) renunciation of 7, 50 and selfishness 132, 140–1, 146, 162–4, 168 despair 16, 24–9, 32, 40–1, 44, 60, 67, 74, 88–90, 110 determinism 9, 42, 65–6, 85–6, 126, 129, 164, 185, 197 ego 43, 143, 152–3, 158, 160, 175–6 as absolute 24, 56, 60, 151 and consciousness 56, 58, 77 decreation of 49–52, 149, 151, 154, 157, 161, 176, 181 and desire 144–5, 150, 180 egoism/ego–centrism 13, 31–2, 37, 45, 69, 108, 130, 140, 144–5, 148, 151, 155–6, 172 n. 143, 202 and Freud 137–9, 142 as illusory 122, 138–9, 139–40, 141–2, 148, 166, 180 and love 13, 108, 145, 166 and world 78, 202 empiricism 17, 56, 65, 69, 122, 124, 127–8, 129, 132–3, 153 eros 44, 47, 117, 143 and agape 6, 15, 17 n. 53, 30, 32–4, 45–9, 93–120, esp. 97–9 and 102–3, 149, 158, 167, 169, 178, 183, 185, 195 ambiguity of 99, 145–7, 151, 167, 180 and attention 148, 149–76, esp. 156–8, 183 and fulfilment of self 33, 44, 45, 95–120, 157, 164, 167, 178, 179, 183, 195 for God/Good 16, 144–6, 150, 152–5, 165 as law 117–19 in Murdoch 18 n. 58, 144–8, 149–76, 180, 183, 195 in Plato 142 n. 133, 145–6, 164 purification of 100, 102–3, 107, 147–8, 151, 158, 163, 167–9 and self-love 34–6, 46 in Tillich 92, 93–120, 178–9, 183 essence 54, 65, 67, 80, 87–8, 89, 101, 110, 114 and existence 40–1, 68, 71–6, 83, 85 n. 85, 86, 88, 101, 104, 178 estrangement 28, 40, 64 n. 114, 67, 74–6, 82–3, 86, 88, 91, 94, 96, 98–101, 104, 106–7, 139, 182 existence 1 n. 6, 25 n. 11, 30, 32, 40, 55, 58, 63, 64, 67, 79, 80, 81, 83, 117, 133, 134, 164, 167, 180, 188 ambiguities of 67, 75–101, 110, 111 relation to essence 26–7, 41, 68, 71–6, 85 n. 85, 86–95, 101–4, 107, 120, 178, 182, 187 existentialism 3, 16, 18, 21–3, 40, 48, 64, 72, 77, 88 n. 110, 94, 100, 122, 125, 127, 128

experience 4, 9–10, 17, 32, 36, 54–5, 61–3, 69, 72, 76–9, 86–7, 95, 98, 101, 109, 118–19, 125, 135–6, 146, 150, 152, 154, 163, 174 n. 162, 176 of anxiety 23–5 of estrangement 67, 87 of meaninglessness 67 of unified self 77–8, 127–8, 137, 139, 142 faith 7–8, 12–13, 26–7, 29, 38–40, 42–4, 47, 67, 88, 109, 117, 132, 195 n. 44, 202 Fall, the 70, 75, 87–8, 104, 137, 145, 181, 204 feminism 6–7, 10, 19, 89 n. 118, 117, 149, 164, 185, 194, 201 finitude 15, 29, 38, 40, 42, 44, 70, 73–5, 84–7, 90, 113, 118, 185 flourishing, human 2, 4, 8, 39, 61, 86, 91–3, 98, 119 compatible with selfless love 9, 13, 16, 19, 34, 71, 103, 107, 120, 121, 143, 149, 154–5, 168–9, 176, 177–88, 195–6, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203–5 in Murdoch 18, 138 n. 108, 143, 149, 154–5, 158, 168, 179–80 in tension with selfless love 4–7, 20, 34, 41, 46 n. 3, 47, 69, 70 in Tillich 71, 103, 107, 120, 178–9 freedom 3, 5, 8, 14, 48, 196–9, 203–5 in Kierkegaard 24–5, 28–30, 40, 44 in Murdoch 16, 44, 121–2, 124, 126, 129, 131, 140–1, 154–5, 161–4, 166, 168–9, 176 in Sartre 9, 55–70, 110, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129, 179, 184–5 in Tillich 16, 75–6, 83–95, 102–5, 110, 113, 119–20, 179 Freud, Sigmund 5, 9, 17, 56, 91, 100, 108, 121, 189 n. 14 Murdoch on 121, 137–42, 148 and sin 137–9 Tillich on 17, 91, 100, 108 friendship 2, 10, 12–13, 32, 67, 106, 116, 189, 195, 204 Fromm, Erich 7, 17, 97, 108 God 7–8, 24–5, 27–30, 35, 38–9, 41, 49, 55–6, 59–60, 63, 66–70, 86 n. 92, 89, 94, 97–8, 101, 105, 110–11, 119, 133, 157, 174, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189 n. 14, 191, 192, 195 n. 42 as illusory 15, 17, 137–8, 144, 190 n. 16 love of 31–3, 37, 47–8, 51, 96, 102, 106–8, 112, 118, 120, 179, 184, 193 love for 16, 36, 46, 48, 50–1, 53, 96, 99–100, 112, 113 n. 122

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Index as personal 114–16, 130–2, 190 n. 16, 196–203 proof of 72–3 as symbol 74, 82, 202 Good, transcendent 9, 14, 43, 44, 46, 49, 65, 68, 72, 79, 96, 107, 119, 121, 122, 130–76, 178, 180, 182, 183, 186–9, 192–205 Goodness 4, 13, 40, 42–3, 47, 100, 123 n. 11, 126, 132–5, 138 n. 108, 139, 143–4, 154, 160, 173, 179, 183 Gospels, see New Testament grace 33, 44, 48–51, 108, 135, 145, 169, 175, 181–2 happiness 10 aspiration towards 20, 32, 38, 113 n. 122, 164–5, 167 and flourishing 2 n. 8, 45, 167–8 and goodness 154, 165–6, 168, 179 and moral duty 53, 165 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5, 20, 23, 25, 27, 30, 39, 41, 42, 43, 54, 58, 61, 71, 88 n. 111, 128 n. 39 heteronomy 15, 65–6, 75, 81–2, 93, 112–13, 130, 136, 164 inner life, see consciousness Jesus Christ 1, 8, 46, 115 Kant, Immanuel 5, 15, 29, 55, 67, 68, 74, 108, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 140, 142, 154, 160, 164 Kierkegaard, Sren 1 n. 6, 4, 14, 20, 22–44, 177, 181 critiques of 33–44 and knight of faith 38–9, 42–3, 172, 183 love 30–9, 88 n. 110 Murdoch’s relation to 42–4, 122 n. 2, 172–3, 183–4 and Sartre 54, 56–7, 59–60, 62–3, 67, 69–70, 76, 78 the self 23–30 Tillich’s relation to 39–42, 82, 87–8, 91–2, 105, 120, 183–4 and Weil 49–52 libido 15, 17, 91, 96, 99–100, 102–3, 105–6 love in Christianity 2–3, 6, 16, 32–3, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 150, 178–9, 200–5 as desire 45, 61, 69, 94–120, 144–8, 155–160, 178–9 as duty 32–4, 117 in existence 93–4, 99–109 and God 15–16, 31, 46, 50, 51, 53, 97–117, 130, 134, 184, 196–202

225 and human flourishing 2, 11, 69–70, 97, 119, 121, 154, 161–9, 177–188, 195–6, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203–5 and the individual 52, 155–156, 159, 161, 169, 182 in Kierkegaard, see Kierkegaard and loss of self 1, 8, 36, 47, 51, 149, 151 and morality 157–8, 161 in Murdoch, see Murdoch and mutuality 53, 116–17, 172–5, 184–94, 199–200 natural 6, 33, 36, 46, 156 of neighbour 1, 31–40, 45, 47, 50, 97, 177, 205 of other, see O/other Philia 15, 17 n. 53, 96, 100, 102, 103, 105, 116 preferential 31, 36–9, 50, 98 pur amour 50–1, 54 n. 56 in Sartre, see Sartre of self 11, 31, 35–7, 44, 46, 49, 50, 105–8, 120, 145, 150–1, 177–9, 181 as self-giving 3, 10 n. 25, 61–2, 111, 119 sexual 12–13, 98–9, 103, 146, 157 in Tillich, see Tillich and transcendent Good 144–8, 161–75, 180, 194–5

Marcel, Gabriel 112, 113, 128, 188–93 Marx, Karl 5, 14, 30, 86 n. 93, 138 n. 105 mauvaise foi, see bad faith Meister Eckhart 133, 153 n. 28 Murdoch, Iris 48 attention, see attention biography 12, 13, 22 eros, see eros and Freud, see Freud love 9, 17, 18, 149–76, esp. 159–69, 179–80 and neo-Kantianism 122–6, 131, 133, 136, 140, 142, 153, 154, 160, 164 ontological argument 72, 131–4 reception of Kierkegaard 29, 30, 35 n. 69, 37, 39–44, 122 n. 2, 172, 173, 177, 181, 183, 184 and Sartre 10, 20, 54, 55, 62–70, 121–9, 138, 141, 145, 148, 153, 163–9, 175–6, 177, 180–1, 184–5 self 121–49, esp. 136–48, 159–60, 179–180 and Tillich 1, 3, 11, 14–22, 72, 119, 120, 121, 177–204 weaknesses of 170–5 and Weil 20, 51–3, 121, 122, 138, 132, 139, 142, 148, 149–54, 172–4, 176, 181, 186, 203 mutuality 17, 36, 37, 53, 80, 116, 117, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 199, 201

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mysticism 1, 7 n. 16, 14, 40, 43, 51 n. 38, 96, 97, 99, 135, 171 necessity 24, 26, 40, 65, 83, 88 n. 111, 130, 153, 154, 174, 178 New Being, see being New Testament 1, 2, 7, 8, 46 n. 5, 99, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 9, 17, 20, 30, 42, 52, 80, 82 n. 70, 85, 91, 92, 104, 108, 135 n. 93, 189 n. 14 non-being 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 83, 86–91, 94, 100, 109, 112, 116 n. 142 nothingness, see non–being Nygren, Anders 6, 13, 16, 20, 22, 23, 30–2, 45–51, 54, 64, 69, 70, 92, 95–8, 105, 108–13, 120, 176, 178, 181, 184, 185, 201 n. 59, 202 n. 67 obedience 44, 51, 69, 96, 122 n. 2, 136, 153–5, 161, 164, 176 ontological argument 15 in Murdoch 131–6, 195 n. 42, 202 n. 67 in Tillich 71–3 ontology 18 in Sartre 54–62 in Tillich 21, 63, 71–91, 93–105, 110–12, 178 original sin, see sin O/other, the 10 n. 25, 18, 25, 32, 43, 51, 53, 65, 66, 71, 117, 126, 128 n. 39, 133, 134, 138, 141, 143, 157, 158, 165, 169, 172, 174, 176, 190, 192, 193 and being 55, 61 communion with 9, 114, 186–95 conflict with 3, 44, 47, 57, 58, 61, 62, 69, 81, 122, 151, 154, 180 good of 35, 98, 103, 119, 167, 179, 185, 195, 201 love of 1–5, 11–15, 31, 36, 37, 49, 50, 102–13, 118, 120, 150, 173 n. 150, 181, 194, 196, 197, 203 participation in 78–81, 91–2, 95–7, 99, 110, 111, 120, 178, 187 perception of 52, 160, 165, 166, 168, 182 respect for 128, 145–7, 156, 171, 182 and the self, see self as threat 57–62, 78, 109 participation 21, 74, 75, 79–81, 89, 91–105, 108–10, 116–20, 178, 187, 198, 201 passion 31, 32, 41, 46, 82, 92, 100, 103, 119, 140 n. 117, 146, 153, 154, 156, 158 perception 10, 42, 52, 58, 61 moral 123, 126, 133, 139, 141, 151–8, 163, 168 perfection 73, 88, 132, 133, 135 n. 93, 148, 168, 202 n. 67

philia, see love Plato(nic/nism) 20, 41 n. 107, 46, 49, 52, 63 n. 109, 74 n. 19, 96–8, 121–3, 131–5, 137, 138 n. 105, 140, 142, 144–6, 148, 150, 157–9 n. 71, 162, 164, 180, 197 n. 46 power 8, 10, 17, 46, 49, 58, 68, 69, 74, 80, 81, 96, 102–5, 108, 161, 168, 170, 178, 179, 186 of being 26–7, 74–6, 82–4, 86, 90, 91, 94, 100, 102, 109 and justice 94, 100–1, 103 will to power 6, 17, 85, 91, 100, 103, 105 reason 32, 48, 75, 77, 78, 84, 92, 122 n. 3, 123, 124, 130, 133, 138, 140, 143, 153 reciprocity 37, 62, 116–17, 170, 172–5, 185, 190–201 relationality 10, 21, 56–8, 61, 77, 78, 83, 91, 92, 115, 143, 169, 176, 177, 179–85, 188, 195 n. 43, 198, 200, 204 revelation 72, 75, 93, 94, 98, 114, 115 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9, 10, 13, 18–23, 52 freedom 65–6, 85–6, 90, 105, 110, 163–4, 179, 184 love 47, 60–2, 67, 69, 95, 190 the self 3, 28–9, 47, 54–70, 77–8, 91–2, 105, 110, 141, 148, 175, 180–1, 184–5, 195, 198, 203–4 Tillich’s and Murdoch’s reception of 18, 41–2, 44, 63–9, 73, 75–82, 85–6, 88 n. 110, 90–3, 95, 100, 105, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 119–22, 124–9, 138, 141, 145, 148, 153, 163–4, 166–7, 169, 175–81, 184–5, 190, 195, 198, 203–4 self deconstruction of 3, 17, 42, 141 in Descartes 5, 18, 55, 125 as dynamic 3, 28, 54, 56, 60, 62, 64, 76, 78, 81–3, 93–4, 141, 148, 184, 203–4 essence of 54–5, 73–5, 80, 83, 87, 101 in existence 23–30, 45, 54–60, 64–92, 101–4, 107, 110–12, 180 fragility of 56–8, 61, 64, 148, 203–4 in Kierkegaard, see Kierkegaard lack of 3, 25, 56, 60–2, 78, 110, 111, 133, 143, 148, 166, 178, 187 loss of 1, 8, 25, 26, 28, 36, 47, 51, 74, 75, 81, 83, 85, 93, 100, 104, 149, 151, 166 n. 117, 203 in Murdoch, see Murdoch and the O/other 141, 143, 148, 181, 198–200, 203–5 as relational 21, 56–8, 61, 78, 83, 91, 92, 143, 169, 176–85, 188, 195 n. 43, 198, 200 in Sartre, see Sartre

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Index as stable/unified 3, 17, 55–64, 78, 85, 87, 121, 124–7, 129, 137, 139, 142, 143, 148, 167, 175, 178, 180, 184 as substantial 3, 67, 79, 126–7, 139, 141, 143, 148, 159, 178, 180 in Tillich, see Tillich and world 1, 5, 33, 35, 46, 54–60, 76–83, 87, 89, 92, 93, 99, 102, 107, 110, 112, 128–36, 139, 142–5, 150–7, 159, 166–74, 180–6 self-assertion 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 26, 34, 43, 44, 47, 64, 68, 69, 113, 120, 141, 167, 168, 178, 180, 204 self-fulfilment 4, 5, 7, 14, 21, 33, 44, 45, 70, 71, 95, 97–107, 110–13, 115, 117, 119–21, 164, 167–9, 178–9, 195, 203–5 self-interest 1, 6, 10, 11, 37, 143, 158, 173 n. 151, 190, 195 self-love, see love self-realization 7, 59, 85, 101, 113 n. 122 self-sacrifice 2, 7, 16, 31, 32, 35, 38, 47, 102, 149, 189 n. 13, 194, 195 n. 44 selfishness 10, 36–8, 52, 105–6, 108, 119, 130 n. 54, 134, 138–9, 144–6, 151, 154, 156, 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 173, 175, 176, 180, 181, 182, 192, 194, 195, 202 selfless love and Christianity 1–11, 39, 69 and feminism 6, 10 foundations of 2–4, 11, 71, 80, 177, 180–1, 187–202 human flourishing 5–9, 13, 16, 20–1, 34, 45, 46 n. 3, 47, 51, 54, 69–70, 107, 115–17, 120, 121–2, 158, 166–9, 178–80, 203–5 and the individual 33, 49, 53, 70 meaning of 4, 8, 11, 177, 181–3 in Murdoch 12, 13, 15–19, 44, 122, 148–9, 158, 166–76, 179–80, 182–6, 202–3 the self in 49, 61–2, 93, 111–12, 122, 148–9, 167–8, 176 and self-affirmation 3–7, 41 in Tillich 12, 13, 16–19, 71, 80, 93, 105, 109–20, 178–9, 182–6, 202–3 selflessness 3, 6–7, 11, 22, 35, 45, 47, 49–50, 62, 111–12, 120, 148, 166, 168, 174, 175, 180, 190 sin 6, 8, 25, 35, 52, 63, 89 n. 118, 130 n. 54 Original 137 soul 2 n. 8, 51, 73, 128, 132, 133, 165–6, 168 in Plato 140–2, 146 spirit 5, 10, 17, 24, 82–4, 92, 101, 103, 104, 140 Holy 102, 115, 117, 201 subject 2, 5, 7, 10, 23–4, 27–30, 39, 43, 47, 54–62, 67–9, 76–8, 85, 95, 102–4, 129–32,

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149, 151–3, 155–60, 168–9, 175, 187, 188, 191 n. 23, 195, 197, 205 subjective 23, 28, 34, 43, 52, 58, 68, 78, 103, 131 n. 59, 175, 194 subjectivity 29–30, 56–8, 61 n. 99, 62, 69, 183, 186, 199 suffering 12, 32, 35, 50–1, 53, 79, 165 Symposium, The 41 n. 107, 142 n. 133, 150 Tillich, Paul biography 16 correlation method 14, 20, 64, 72, 98 eros 92, 93–120, 178–9, 183 love 10–17, 71, 73 n. 17, 80, 90, 92–120, 178, 203–4 and Murdoch 1, 3, 11, 14–22, 72, 119, 120, 121, 177–204 reception of Kierkegaard 82, 87–8, 91 reception of Nygren 92, 96–8, 105, 108, 113, 120, 178 reception of Sartre 64–70, 75–9, 81–2, 85–6, 88 n. 110, 89–91, 100, 113, 119–20, 129, 178 the self 71–92, 99, 178, 194–6, 203–4 weaknesses of 114–19 Trinity 115, 117, 135 and reciprocity 200–2 ultimate concern 15, 40 n. 99, 101 value 13, 35, 46, 50, 54, 59, 63, 66, 67–70, 83, 85, 122, 127, 134, 136, 164, 168–9, 175 n. 169, 188, 203 and fact 123–6, 163 perception of 32, 128, 152–3, 155, 158, 160 vision 64, 89, 126 n. 26, 162, 193 as moral 68, 145, 152–6, 163, 165, 180 Weil, Simone 16, 20, 22, 23 n. 2, 42, 44, 51–4, 69, 128, 132, 151, 153, 172, 173, 174, 176, 184, 185 Plato 49, 52, 121, 148 self-love 49–51, 70, 154 well-being 2, 3, 4–8, 11, 45, 47, 48, 97, 138, 154, 158, 165, 168, 177, 178, 182, 183, 187, 189, 193, 198, 205 will 34, 38, 64, 95, 96, 110, 112, 114, 122 n. 2, 134, 138, 153–4, 157, 159–60, 163–4, 181, 196–7 as choosing 29, 43, 44, 54, 59, 60, 87, 127 as empty 86, 127 and selfhood 26–30, 35, 43, 51, 59–60 as source of value 67–8, 126, 131, 155 n. 43 will to power, see power Wittgenstein, Ludwig 122, 125 World War I 12, 16, 118