Iris Murdoch

Sitting at my kitchen table looking across our field at the blazing fall colors, I take a needed break and tune out the news of war and killing here in the States and in the Middle East. I long to reconnect with Beauty now more than ever, not out of avoidance, but for what it can teach me.

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist who spent her life thinking about questions of goodness and beauty. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1919 she studied philosophy at the all women’s Somerville College, Oxford where her education was dominated by the ideas of men: Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard to name a few. At the time science was the major paradigm, rationality the goal; philosophical ideas had to be proven to be considered true. 

Iris Murdoch would end up arguing against most of this. She thought in terms of Metaphysics and Metaphors. Metaphors she believed provided us with new images and perspectives that allow us to look at philosophical questions in new ways.

Her most assessable philosophy book, The Sovereignty of Good, was a compilation of three essays she wrote in the 1960s where she argued to replace the reigning moral question of the time - how to be free in the world, with - how can we be good.

Murdoch thought that we do not see the world clearly, that our minds are constantly active, self-preoccupied, and often under a “falsifying veil which partially conceals the world”.  Anything that could change our consciousness to become more unselfish, a process Murdoch called “unselfing”, could help us see more clearly.  Looking at Art, she thought, was one way by which we could be shown what had goodness, and through this, we could be a better person.

The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just an analogy of) the good life… 

How does Murdoch define Beauty?

Beauty is that which attracts…. unselfish attention. 

Murdoch thought of “unselfish attention” as a type of “loving gaze” during which “nothing exists except the things which are seen.”   In The Sovereignty of Good Murdock tells the story of sitting at her writing desk, in an anxious and unsettled mood, when she saw a Kestrel swoop down into the bushes. She watched this majestic hawk in amazement and after a time realized that, through no conscious effort on her part, she no longer was anxious or grumpy. What changed her consciousness?  Was it the distraction or something in the natural scene itself? 

This particular story is about the natural world but Murdock also believes that looking at Art can have the same effect on us. The experience of  “unselfish attention” can happen by chance, as in the experience of seeing the Kestrel, or it can be an intention where we come to a work of art “in order to clear our minds of selfish care”. 

Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize..

Art is…not a diversion or a side issue, it is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen. 

Beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love by instinct. 

Murdock’s definition of Beauty and ultimately what is good in a good work of art is the most encompassing I’ve come across. It is a liberating definition in its scope of what could be considered good art; a holistic idea of beauty. It isn’t saying that everything in nature is automatically beautiful. It’s not. Neither is every work of art that anyone makes.  Beauty can reside in any form of Art. Painting, poetry, music, novels, it doesn’t matter. Neither does it matter whether a painting is abstract or realistic; painted by a formally trained painter or someone self-taught. What type, style, or form that beauty can be found in doesn’t matter… IF …and it’s a big IF … it has the ability to cause or enact a sense of “unselfish attention” in us. 

You might be able to think of this special attention akin to feelings of awe or wonderment but, if I’m reading Murdoch right, it’s more than that. It’s an attention that connects us to goodness that she believed had a “transcendent magnetic centre”, a type of pure love. 

In subsequent posts, I want to write more about Murdoch’s unique and important thoughts on goodness and what it means for a work of art, or a person, to be good. 

---

What I’m reading…

The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge & Paul Kegan 1970 ISBN 978-0415253994

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Penguin Press 1992 ISBN 0713991003