Breathing Life Into Moral Philosophy

Influential women philosophers are as rare as hen’s teeth. Or used to be. Things are
changing now, in part because of Iris Murdoch’s writings on moral philosophy and
because of her fascination with the inner struggles with good and evil of reflective
people, a recurring theme of her twenty six novels. Murdoch, living and writing in
Oxford during most of her life, managed to resist the powerful influence of Oxford
philosophers for whom there was simply no place in philosophy for talk of the emotions
and imagination except as sources of interference with rational thought.

Anyone who has read her philosophy, or her novels, or who has read John Bayley’s
exquisite memoirs of their life together and his detailed descriptions of the savage effects
on her mind of Alzheimer’s disease, will appreciate the careful reconstruction of her life
presented in IRIS MURDOCH: A LIFE by friend, editor of a book of her philosophical
essays and author of a book on her novels, Peter Conradi. Conradi has amassed an
astounding amount of detailed information about Iris from her journals and
correspondence as well as from extensive corresponce with dozens of people: friends,
colleagues, teachers, acquaintances, fellow students. I counted over 1600 footnotes to the
twentytwo chapters that make up this remarkable study. The book includes a
genealogical tree of her Irish family as well as an excellent bibliography. The book is
nothing if not thorough.

So what do we learn about Iris from this impressive mass of pointillist detail? While her
husband John Bayley wrote an elegy, this book is a eulogy for her high intelligence, her
remarkable energy, her competence in everything she did, her moral seriousness, her
charisma. People fell in love with her simply watching her walk to class, or seeing her
ride by on her bicycle [as did John Bayley, who thought this is the person I will marry as
she cycled past his window]. Countless young men asked her to marry them. The
philosopher David Pears remarked on her “luminous goodness …. when she came into a
room, you felt better.” As a women philosopher myself, long daunted by the ‘dryness’
and ‘coldness’ of Anglo-American philosophy, grateful for her writing on moral
philosophy, for her reintroduction of the inner life of the soul into this arid discipline,
her insight into the messiness of our attempts to discern the good under the pressures of
the ‘fat relentless ego’, I read the book with fascination and envy. What would it be like
to be able to resist the powerful norms of Oxford philosophy and say what you thought
and make a dent on subsequent thinking about moral life? What would it be like to live
such a charmed life, to inspire passion without having to even bother combing one’s hair?
To have been cherished in elementary school, head girl in high school, an impressive
student at Oxford, Dame of the Empire and have one’s portrait in the National Gallery?

Oddly, even though I should know better by now, things are never so simple. Iris
stuggled for years in various kinds of complicated love relationships: one carried on by
correspondence for almost four years with fellow student, the heroic poet-soldier Frank
Thompson, others with powerful, sadistic intellectual men like Elias Canetti, sometimes
having affairs with two or more people simultaneously, and generally suffering acutely
from what she once referred to as ‘this love business’, ‘demented with grief’ over the

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death of Franz Steiner, the cause of terrible sadness in those hopelessly in love with her,
finally having to resign from St Ann’s College, where she taught philosophy, as a result
of a passionate lesbian affair. Things settled down considerably, but not completely,
when she married the supremely gentle John Bayley at the age of thirtyseven.

I used to look forward each year to her latest novel. I read each one avidly. Eventually,
however, I tired of the emotional chaos associated with the complicated, sometimes
destructive erotic attachments and obsesssions of her characters. I grew tired of
obsessions in my own life as well. It helped to have read these texts, to see the
pointlessness of such turmoil. It helps me now to re-read the descriptions in these books
of the few characters who, free of emotional self-obsession, live very much in the present
moment, free of the anxieties of attachment, capable of generous giving. Characters such
as Jackson, [in Jackson’s Dilemma, her last novel, written just in the nick of time, as
Alzheimer’s disease began its cruel encroachment on her memory], are luminous humble
people, almost nondescript, who have an uncanny way of loosening the knots that
paralyze the other characters and of bringing a sense of lightness to situations. Good
fiction and good moral philosophy remind us of these possiblities. We need reminders.

It is through such fictional characters that we are able to think more clearly about moral
possibilities. Detailed models of people getting it right, or getting it wrong are necessary
to give substance to moral philosophy. Murdoch’s good characters act as models of the
kind of sensibility and responsiveness we can cultivate when we turn our attention away
from the preoccupations of the fragile ego, outward toward the goodness manifest in the
world around us. Beauty and goodness are sources of moral improvement. She put the
concept of love back at the center of moral philosophy, breaking the strong taboo against
such ‘irrationalism’ in the dominant philosophy of the time. “Love is the perception of
individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself
is real”.

One of my colleagues remarked, when he heard I was writing this review, that, like books
on Marx which are only appreciated by Marxists, a book on Iris Murdoch would probably
only interest those already taken with her novels or her philosophy. Not so. This is the
story of the life of an intellectual woman intensely engaged with the best writers, thinkers
and artists of the time. Engaged in an attempt to see clearly and to act responsibly during
a time of great and terrible political turmoil. Born in 1919 she lived through the events
leading up to and following World War II as a young student. She was, like many idealist
intellectuals of the time, a deeply committed member of the Communist Party until the
hopes that she and her friends had in Russia gave way to horror at the revelation of what
really went on during Stalin’s reign of terror. We live in a time of equal intensity and
turmoil. Many today feel a similar sense of dismay as we watch erosions of democracy in
the countries of our hopes and witness atrocities that many fear cannot be contained or
resolved.

Murdoch did not address political questions in her writing, confining her focus to the
struggles of individuals with the sources of evil and chaos within the self and within
immediate personal relationships. Nevertheless her writings offer us something really

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valuable: glimpses of the sources of evil within our lives, and, better yet, glimpses of the
way out of chaos and destruction. I think this is a philosophy out of which ‘political
views can be generated’. The key to this philosophy is the idea of the moral imagination.
This is not something esoteric. It is simple. “Anyone can try to imagine someone else’s
plight”. To do so we need a constant supply of resources: visions of beauty and
goodness. We need to direct our attention away from self-obsession, to these sources.
Watch a kestrel in flight. Enjoy good art. Focus on whatever is true, honest, just,
beautiful. “We can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which
are valuable: virtuous people, great art, perhaps the idea of goodness itself.” Moral life is
less a matter of making specific choices, A vs B, more a matter of cultivating the quality
of our attention. Less a matter of will, more a matter of vision. “Our ability to act well
‘when the time comes’ depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual
acts of attention.”

Is this naïve aestheticism? Denial? Or clichéed ‘positive thinking’? No. The main theme
in her novels and her philosophical writing is the importance of recognizing and resisting
escape, fantasy, avoidance.
In her short essay entitled ‘Void’, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, we read of the
enormous fragility of human beings. Anyone can be destroyed. There is nothing that
cannot be broken or taken aways from us. Our thoughts return again and again to the
imprisoned, the starving, to experiences of loss, ignominy, affliction. The only thing we
can do vis à vis the void, the emptiness, the losses, the evil, is to avoid denial, mechanical
thinking, “to live close to the painful reality and try to relate it to what is good.” “We
have a natural impulse to derealise our world and surround ourselves with fantasy.
Simply stopping this … is progress.”

Conradi’s book provides the rich detailed description of a person striving to live this
philosophy: the daily attempt to perceive less selfishly. It is more richly textured than any
novel, based, as it is, on such enormous documentation and on a cherished friendship
with Iris and John. As Sabina Lovibond puts it in her recent book Ethical Formation,
moral life is not captured by codes of conduct. “The uncodifiability of what is apparent to
the morally exemplary person is offset ….by real-life material from which the spirit of
their thinking can be reconstructed”.