HeyJ LII (2011), pp.

993–1008

AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE

MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH
DAVID ROBJANT
Nether Stowey, Somerset, UK

Rather strikingly, Iris Murdoch suggests that in her discussion of St Anselm she might be
understood as a ‘Buddhist Christian’.1 One could take that remark as a reason to read
Murdoch as neither a Christian nor a Buddhist, but a third kind of thinker resembling a
Christian on some points, and a Buddhist on others. Yet the tendency in Murdoch exegesis
has been to claim Murdoch as either a reformist Christian theist, or a sort of Buddhist.
Both of these approaches do violence to Murdoch’s position. The theist readings of
Murdoch are, I will show, quite scandalously insensitive. Study of this insensitivity may be
instructive.

I. THE ONTOLOGICAL PROOF

Murdoch devotes the larger part of the Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals chapter The
Ontological Proof to the exegesis and defence of Saint Anselm. Why? There is a widespread
misconception in the literature that if Murdoch is defending Anselm, then she must be
trying, like Anselm, to understand ‘God’ as the name of a necessary spiritual reality.
Reading Murdoch in that fashion, Maria Antonaccio and Peter Byrne pass over in silence
these remarks from the concluding paragraph of Gifford Lecture No.6,2 reproduced at
Metaphysics 419:
I think that useless confusion arises from attempts to extend the meaning of our word ‘God’ to
cover any conception of a spiritual reality. This move, which ‘saves’ the concept through a sort of
liberal vagueness, clouds over the problem without solving it. ‘God’ is the name of a supernatural
person.3

Murdoch could not be clearer in summing up her view on the Ontological Proof. She does
not believe in God and does not want to extend the meaning of ‘God’ to entities other than
a supernatural person. In fact this is a restatement of an earlier point against theological
sophistication in The Sovereignty of Good:
there is, in my view, no God in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is
perhaps the only sense. When Bonhoeffer says that God wants us to live as if there were no God I
suspect he is misusing words.4

Despite these rather forthright remarks, the ‘useless confusion’ Murdoch speaks of
appears to have its boots on in theology, as when Antonaccio supposes that Murdoch is
aiming to liberate God from the verificationists,5 or when Peter Byrne treats Murdoch as
welcoming Cupitt’s attempt to ‘rethink’ what ‘God’ means and as disagreeing with Cupitt

r 2011 The Author. The Heythrop Journal r 2011 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
994 DAVID ROBJANT

only on how to do this.6 Byrne’s line is that this rethinking comes to the same thing as her
trying to save some ‘form of transcendence’,7 or her offering Good as a ‘substitute’ for the
traditional notion of God the father.8 Byrne treats ‘God’ and ‘the transcendent’ as
interchangeable terms, and assumes that Murdoch is proposing exactly that exchange as a
move in theology. None of this is at all consistent with Murdoch’s explicit remarks.
On the other hand, the fact that Murdoch gives over an entire chapter to the defence of
Anselm may seem to speak powerfully against her remarks on Bonhoeffer and the ‘useless
confusion’. For what reason other than to ‘save’ the concept of God is there for such a
defence of Anselm? What else could she be about? And then Murdoch makes what are for
the theist rather inviting remarks, such as this:

The argument from experience emerges as it were under the pressure of the logical argument. If we
are able to distinguish necessary and contingent we see that God cannot be contingent. Experience
shows us the uniquely unavoidable nature of God (Good, or Categorical Imperative), its
omnipresence, its purity, its separateness from our fallen world, in which its magnetic force is
nevertheless everywhere perceptible. God either exists necessarily or is impossible. All our
experience shows he exists.9

This passage may seem to associate Murdoch’s own conception of Good with God –
perhaps even with the Categorical Imperative (implausible as that may sound). Then there
is this:

These are aspects of the Proof wherein the definition of God as non-contingent is given body by our
most general perceptions and experience of the fundamental and omnipresent (uniquely necessary)
nature of moral value, thought of in a Christian context as God.10

But to take such passages as Antonaccio and Byrne seem to take them is to make a large
context mistake. There is nothing in either passage to suggest that Murdoch is attaching
herself to that ‘Christian context’ in which the name of moral value is ‘God’. Murdoch is
explicating Anselm in all these passages, and when Murdoch is explicating someone else,
she does not introduce every point with the qualification ‘for Anselm’, but rests content to
make that context clear at the start, and get on with it. This explication of Anselm proceeds
in part by extended comparison and contrast with Plato and Kant, and it is to earlier parts
of this that Murdoch refers in her parenthesis ‘. . . God (Good, or Categorical
Imperative)’. The ‘uniquely unavoidable’ is for Plato the Good, and for Kant the
Categorical Imperative, as it is, for Anselm, God. Murdoch is not mixing up God and the
Good and the Categorical Imperative into one gigantic scotch broth of transcendence, but
referring rather to an extended contrast she has been drawing.
‘But,’ Peter Byrne might want to respond, ‘if we are to believe Murdoch’s explicitly
stated non-belief in God, and her attempt to forbid in advance any theological redefinition
of ‘‘God’’ as misuse of words, why then would she try so hard to be fair to Anselm’s proof
of the existence of God? What motive could she have here other than to ‘save’ or ‘‘extend
the meaning of ‘God’’’?’ I will remove the mystery. For the reason why Murdoch cares
about Anselm is that, given his response to Gaunilo, Murdoch holds that what Anselm is
naming ‘God’ is nothing other than the Good:

Gaunilo’s reasonable doubt about whether he can conceive of God is answered by Anselm as
follows. We recognise and identify goodness and degrees of good, and are thus able to have the idea
of a greatest conceivable good. God is taken to be ab initio and by definition good, it is moral
perfection that we are concerned with, which must be in at the start and cannot be added later . . . It
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 995

must also be assumed that other attributes of God, such as omnipotence and omniscience, should
be seen as aspects of, or deducible from, his goodness.11

Murdoch does not say how any such deduction might be possible, and never suggests that
it is possible. In fact the whole drift of her argument is to pull these various notions once
integrated into the person of God (Goodness and Omnipotence and Omniscience), entirely
apart from each other. The point Murdoch is pressing on the response to Gaunilo is that,
while using the word ‘God’, the only ingredient of that complex idea that Anselm is in fact
managing to talk with any sure success about is the Good: Good approached and proven
through ‘degrees of Good’. Whatever Anselm’s terminology, for Murdoch the Good is in
effect the subject of Anselm’s proof, and God’s other qualities (omnipotence and
omniscience and personhood etc) are never successfully integrated with that subject of the
proof. That would of course be a serious objection to make to Anselm if one were a
believer, but for Murdoch the failure to integrate God’s many supposed qualities is no
defect of Anselm’s argument, since what he says about Goodness is for Murdoch
something worth expounding and defending at length - which is what Murdoch then
proceeds to do. Murdoch takes from Anselm’s discussion two important points which she
uses to explain her own position.
First, Anselm’s idea that the perfect Good itself is present in our recognition of ‘degrees
of good’, is deployed as a crucial support for Murdoch’s conviction that the Good is an
‘ordinary everyday’ reality.12 She writes:

The good (better) man is liberated from selfish fantasy, can see himself as others see him, imagine
the needs of other people, love unselfishly, lucidly envisage and desire what is truly valuable.13

The thought is that experiencing the better man who is slightly liberated, we have thereby
an experience of a very distant object; perfect liberation. Commonplace examples such as
that of M and D give sense to ‘liberation from fantasy’ and thereby elucidate moral
perfection. Moral perfection (the Good), as a general liberation from all fantasy, is
something very distant. But it is not insensible: we do know what it is like to make progress
in the right direction. Through Anselm’s ‘degrees of Good’ and Murdoch’s ‘good (better)
man’, the Good is recognized as a experienced reality present in the human world. All
right, we feel how distant the Good is. But that feeling of distance is typically directional,
and connected with some sense of the energy required to make progress. In short, the
Good lies in some particular direction in this world: ‘there is no Platonic ‘‘elsewhere’’,
similar to the Christian ‘‘elsewhere’’’.14
The second point of interest to Murdoch is a connection that Anselm suggests between
virtuous attention and understanding:

Credo ut intellegam (I believe in order to understand) is not just an apologist’s paradox, but an idea
with which we are familiar in personal relationships [. . .]. I have faith (important place for this
concept) in a person or idea in order to understand him or it . . . 15
St Anselm of Canterbury . . . in his preface to the Proof speaks, or prays, to God as follows. ‘I do
not endeavour, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding
therewith; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves.
For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.’16

Likewise, in Murdoch’s famous thought experiment, the Mother in Law (M) with a new
effortfully selfless attention (resembling ‘faith’) believes in and loves her Daughter in Law
(D), and thereby attains a more truthful vision of her:
996 DAVID ROBJANT

What M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or
lovingly.17

The obstacles to any true picture of D enumerated by Murdoch are exactly the obstacles to
any virtuous picture of D, namely: that M is ‘jealous’ of D’s role in the life of her son,
‘snobbish’ about her social status, and ‘narrow minded’.18 M’s overcoming the obstacles to
truthful vision of D is therefore entirely one with her overcoming obstacles to a loving
vision of D. Murdoch’s parable is an echo of Anselm’s Credo ut intellegam. What M must
pray is to believe in D, in order that she might understand her aright. Loving attention is
the precondition for truthful vision.
Connecting these two points, what interests Murdoch in Anselm is that she takes him to
be talking, in misleading theological language, about the central problem of Philosophy. It
is critical to Murdoch’s reading of Anselm that the talk of ‘God’ should be, for her, a red
herring to his true insights. That Anselm clothes his arguments in the language of God
causes only ‘useless confusion’. What he meant to say, she will now say anew, but without
attempting ‘to extend the meaning of our word ‘‘God’’ to cover any conception of a
spiritual reality’. It is not only modern theology, but at bottom Anselm himself who was
guilty of the first ‘liberal vagueness’, in trying to ‘prove God’ by proving (reminding us of)
the presence of the Good. Good is not God, and Anselm has not proved God. He has
however proved Good. This is not a small result.

II. REFLEXIVE REALISM?

It may be complained that my short treatment of Murdoch’s chapter The Ontological Proof
underestimates the resources of the attempt to borrow Murdoch for theist theology.
Antonaccio and Byrne develop their views at length, after all. It will be worth considering
their case in more detail, for at present their works are the leading lights of Murdoch
navigation, and I have suggested that they lead to a wrecking. With the prestige of its
publisher and the timeliness of its appearance, Maria Antonaccio’s Picturing the Human;
the Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch has occupied a uniquely influential position in Murdoch
Studies.19 As will become clear, when Heather Widdows writes that ‘the good is
metaphorical . . . [but,] in some non-specified way, more than a metaphor, something real,
at least in the lives of individuals’ this claim is so much a translation of Antonaccio’s central
exegetical thesis that it is better to discuss it in treatment of Antonaccio than of Widdows.20
Antonaccio’s general project is to reconcile Iris Murdoch with the ‘reflexive realism’ of her
colleague, the Christian Theologian, William Schweiker. Antonaccio explains frankly:
The term [reflexive realism] is William Schweiker’s. See his Responsibility and Christian Ethics, 106–
114 for an articulation and defence of this position . . . Schweiker’s work on this subject has deeply
informed my own thinking as the argument of this book will make clear.21

And what is ‘reflexive realism’? Since Antonaccio uses the technical language of
Schweiker’s thought to explain Murdoch from the very start, her book is in large part
the exposition of Schweiker. Reading on into that exposition one finds, and this is my
theme, that ‘Reflexive realism’ is not at all like Murdoch’s realism. Murdoch recommends:
the awareness that we are continually confronting something other than ourselves [,] [. . .] a
transcendent reality, the resistant otherness of other persons, other things, history, the natural
world, the cosmos [. . .].22
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 997

For Murdoch, following Plato rather closely in this, her philosophical artwork is about
human individuals and the Good. She attempts, by her art, to recognise and give
expression to ‘a reality which is beyond us’,23 and beyond the metaphor of the Cave and
the Sun. On her own view of it, Murdoch’s project is simple, even ‘naı̈vely empirical’.24
Metaphors, in short, are for pointing at reality. On investigation, it will turn out that
Antonaccio has it rather differently that the metaphors are the reality. This, I will show, is
the sense in which Antonaccio conceives of reality as ‘reflexive’.
The hinge upon which Antonaccio’s reading turns is her use of the idea of ‘stretch’ in
this following passage from Murdoch:
We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the
distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real. The value
concepts are here patently tied on to the world, they are stretched as it were between the truth-
seeking mind and the world, they are not moving about on their own as adjuncts of the personal
will. The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality. We can see the length, the
extension, of these concepts as patient attention transforms accuracy without interval into just
discernment. Here too we can see it as natural to the particular kind of creatures that we are that
love should be inseparable from justice, and clear vision from respect for the real.25

On the face of it, the passage appears to speak strongly for a realist conception of the
Good. Murdoch appears to intend that the Good is a reality that our concept of the Good
is stretching towards. Yet what Antonaccio takes from it is that if value concepts are
‘stretched as it were between the truth seeking mind and the world’, then value itself must
be ‘stretched as it were between the truth seeking mind and the world’. Antonaccio asserts
that this:

. . . is pre-eminently the case with the concept of the good, which Murdoch locates in the reflexive
‘space’ that exists between the truth-seeking mind and the world.26

One sense in which a concept may exist between the mind and the world is fairly
commonplace: concepts and metaphors are part of the apparatus by which the mind
reaches out to the world. Yet, that the concept of the Good is located in ‘reflexive ‘‘space’’’
is something Antonaccio repeats, as if it were no mere commonplace but rather a
significant move, on every kind of issue in Murdoch studies. The key to what Antonaccio
understands herself as celebrating is that in Antonaccio’s exegesis of this strongly realist
passage from Murdoch, Antonaccio identifies nothing more to the Good than a concept.
In what is indeed a significant move in Murdoch studies, Antonaccio treats Murdoch as
locating the Good only where the concept is. To put it another way, Antonaccio’s interest
is entirely in the concept of the Good to the exclusion of the Good, and she ascribes this
character of interest to Iris Murdoch. This is seriously mistaken.
Murdoch’s realist point about ‘stretch’ is that moral language (‘value concepts’) refers
to the way the world is. But given Antonaccio’s assumed identification of the Good with
the ‘the concept of the good’, it seems to Antonaccio that when Murdoch speaks of ‘value
concepts’ being ‘stretched as it were between the truth-seeking mind and the world’, she
must mean that the good is stretched ‘between the truth-seeking mind and the world’. For
Murdoch in the above, it is moral language and the concepts deployed in it that stretch
‘between the truth seeking mind and the world’, and not, as is suggested by Antonaccio’s
account, the thing referred to in that language. For Murdoch, moral language deploys a
concept, and that concept instances a conception of the world. For Antonaccio in contrast,
‘good’ refers to a concept, but the concept doesn’t refer onwards to some reality that it is a
998 DAVID ROBJANT

concept of. Instead, for Antonaccio, the concept is its own referent, a ‘reflexive reality’.
Murdoch writes that ‘The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality’.
Reality is what moral concepts are about, and Murdoch does not qualify ‘reality’.
Murdoch plainly intends that the Good is the reality that the concept of the Good is
stretching to. Yet Antonaccio has it that reality is ‘reflexive’ and identifies ‘reality’ with the
stretched concept, displacing anything stretched to. The metaphors constituting the
concept on Antonaccio’s account no longer point to the reality of the Good beyond the
metaphor. The metaphor is the reality. Widdows offers a short restatement of this core
thesis inherited from Antonaccio when she offers that ‘the good is metaphorical’ and thus
real only ‘in the lives of individuals’.27 Antonaccio’s reversal of Murdoch’s unqualified
realism, in favour of a qualified ‘reflexive’ reality which is identified with stretched concepts
rather anything stretched to, is the key move in her book, and has pervasively influenced
Murdoch exegesis ever since. It is a very serious error.
Antonaccio’s view is that the Good is located ‘in the reflexive ‘‘space’’ that exists between
the truth seeking mind and the world’.28 This is patently not realism about the Good, since it
denies that the Good is a part of an objective world which the ‘truth seeking mind’ is
attempting to descry. That is why Antonaccio has to have some technical term for her
position about the good, other than ‘realism’. The choice of ‘reflexive realism’ misleadingly
suggests some kinship with realism proper, but there is no such kinship. On Antonaccio’s
account, objects from all kinds of Art fill the ‘the reflexive ‘‘space’’ that exists between the
truth seeking mind and the world’: our concept (or picture) of the Good equally with God.
That is, from Antonaccio’s point of view, rather the point, since it offers theism a new kind of
warrant. God may exist as an object ‘in the reflexive ‘‘space’’ that exists between the truth
seeking mind and the world’, and by itself that is not saying much. But if we further argue that
exactly the same holds of electrons, crisp packets, bananas, T-shirts and so on, no ‘merely’
will attach to this existing in reflexive space. Antonaccio believes that it is for this ‘reflexive
realism’ that Murdoch does battle with ‘analytic philosophy’s relegation of religion to the
realm of unproven metaphysics’.29 The sense of this is that God and Religion can’t be
relegated to something less than objective fact, if everything in the world is allotted the same
condition. Antonaccio’s dubious assumption is that this general allotment occurs
immediately on liberation from ‘the verificationism of linguistic empiricism’.30 The defeat
of verificationism apparently licences Antonaccio’s scepticism about any ‘objective world of
facts apart from the activity of an individual thinking consciousness’.31 For Antonaccio and
Schweiker, reality in ‘the reflexive ‘‘space’’ that exists between the truth seeking mind and the
world’ is (after the death of verificationism) as real as reality needs to be. This is an interesting
and philosophically sophisticated way of ‘proving’ God’s reality (by, as it were, discounting
anything more real), but the view is a reversal of Murdoch’s faith in the ‘ordinary everyday’
reality of persons and the Good. In Murdoch’s picture, the concept of the Good has the truth
and explanatory power it has because it refers to the Good, just as moral language about
persons can be truth-bearing because of the reality of persons. In contrast Murdoch insists
that ‘there is, in my view, no God’.32 Antonaccio’s reading of Murdoch on the Ontological
Proof forbids Murdoch precisely this explicit contrast between reality (persons, the Good)
and what is for her only an idea (God).
Antonaccio takes Murdoch’s several comparative discussions of the Good and God as a
licence to read the characteristics Antonaccio ascribes to God onto Murdoch’s Good. The
way this is meant to go is that God (Good) is ‘real’ in the sense that He (it) exists as part of
the ‘reflexive ‘‘space’’’ stretched out between the believer and the world. As I have pointed
out, that is not the notion of reality intended by Murdoch’s use of ‘stretch’. Moreover,
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 999

Murdoch’s actual point of interest in the Ontological Argument, as I outlined in the

previous section, is entirely overlooked by Antonaccio, and indeed by all active
protagonists of the Theist School of Murdoch exegesis.
‘Reflexive realism’ functions as a radical adaptation of Plato’s simile of the divided line,
where on Antonaccio’s truncated version there are no objects higher than the objects in the
realm of opinion, and therefore no object more real than God. Antonaccio continues to
speak of ‘the world’, which may at first glance strike one as a place-holder for Plato’s ‘what
is’, but unlike Plato’s realm of knowledge, Antonaccio’s ‘world’ is not a world of objects.
Antonaccio’s objects belong, all of them, in ‘reflexive ‘‘space’’’, and are always the
products of creative intelligence. Antonaccio’s fundamental position resembles an
existentialist tradition to which, as I point out elsewhere,33 Murdoch offers the deepest
sort of objection. For Antonaccio, there is no objective world of facts ‘apart from the
activity of an individual thinking consciousness’.34 This is very far from realism about
persons and the Good, and does not sound much like ‘the authority of truth’.
I have thus far been unfair to Antonaccio and those she has influenced, in that I have
not explained why, despite all that contradicts it, Antonaccio is attracted to her reading of
Murdoch as an ‘reflexive realist’. Part of the explanation is that Antonaccio draws, in a
rather strained way, on the following four Murdoch passages:
The world is not given to us ‘on a plate’, it is given to us as a creative task. It is impossible to banish
morality from this picture. We work, using or failing to use our honesty, our courage, our truthful
imagination, at the interpretation of what is present to us, as we of necessity shape it and ‘make
something of it’ [. . .] an important part of human learning is an ability both to generate and to
judge and understand the imagery which helps us to interpret the world.35

We are all workers and, of necessity, in order to live at all, truth-seekers on that familiar
everyday (transcendental) edge where language continually struggles with an encountered
world. In this activity we are like, or are, artists.36
The world which we confront is not just a world of ‘facts’ but a world upon which our imagination
has, at any given moment, already worked [. . .]. Each of us lives and chooses within a partly
private, partly fabricated world.37

We have already partly willed our world when we come to look at it; and we must admit moral
responsibility for this ‘fabricated’ world, however difficult it may be to control the process of
fabrication [. . .].38

Reading these passages, Antonaccio takes it that:

Murdoch’s aesthetic view of morality does not assume an objective world of facts apart from the
activity of an individual thinking consciousness.39

Infuriatingly, that interpretation suppresses all of Murdoch’s various explicit ‘partly’

qualifications, as in ‘partly fabricated’, ‘not just . . . facts’, and so on. The world is only
‘partly’ fabricated, and the world is ‘not just’ facts: Murdoch nowhere says that there are
no unfabricated realities, or that we can do without the ordinary ‘world of facts apart from
the activity of an individual thinking consciousness’. Other human beings would be, for
Murdoch, the foremost unfabricated realities, and the fact of their existence is indeed a
feature of the objective world. Murdoch’s realm of opinion is, like Plato’s, only partly
fabricated. For making their presence felt both in and before any possibility of fabrication
are the shadows by which we sense:
1000 DAVID ROBJANT

that we are continually confronting something other than ourselves [. . .] a transcendent reality, the
resistant otherness of other persons, other things, history, the natural world, the cosmos [. . .].40

Plato has it, Murdoch too, that the shadows we may see and work on to construct our
fabricated world are constrained by the shapes of ‘a reality which is beyond us’.41 Plato’s
Cave, unlike Antonaccio’s reflexive reality, shows continually, and to anyone who would
turn round and see, the presence of things more real. Whereas ‘reflexive realism’ is
precisely meant to exclude any fact or reality beyond ‘reflexive ‘‘space’’’, Murdoch’s partly
fabricated world invites, always, the hope of progress beyond the fabrication to direct
encounters with the unfabricated real. It is the essence of Murdoch’s Platonism that we
may step out of what Antonaccio calls ‘reflexive ‘‘space’’’, and into the plain light of day.

III. INERT AND UNREAL?

A central complaint against Murdoch from Peter Byrne is that Murdoch seems to him to
abandon, as Byrne would rather not, a teleological conception of the transcendent human
good safely beyond our individual lives and experiences. In this area, Murdoch
approvingly quotes Schopenhauer against Kant:
the task of metaphysics is not to pass beyond the experience in which the world exists, but to
understand it [. . .].42

This reminds us of Anselm’s response to Gaunilo on the immanence of the Good in the
evident degrees of Good. Understood aright, our experience of the better is our experience
of the Good. This is not passing ‘beyond the experience in which the world exists’, but
understanding what is in front of us. In the Schopenhauerian style of Metaphysics
favoured by Murdoch and ‘acceptable to Plato’,43 the job at hand is to describe experience
and attempt to picture it adequately. We are to understand our experiences aright, and
start from the human. Byrne however is with Kant in demanding as his criterion of
transcendence that we pass beyond all human experience. Byrne may thus for reasons of
Kantian inheritance have mistaken Murdoch’s denial of a metaphysical point to human
life external to human experience for a denial of a metaphysical point to human life,
simpliciter. And it will be worth developing this point, since if it were left to its own devices,
Byrne’s complaint would run on into a defence of Antonaccio’s exegesis. The remark of
Murdoch’s on teleology with which Byrne takes issue is as follows:
That human life has no external point or telos is a view as difficult to argue as its opposite, and I
shall simply assert it. I can see no evidence to suggest that human life is not something self-
contained. There are properly many patterns and purposes within life, but there is no general and as
it were externally guaranteed pattern or purpose of the kind for which philosophers and
theologians used to search. We are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to
necessity and chance. This is to say that there is, in my view, no God in the traditional sense of that
term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense . . . if there is any kind of sense or unity in
human life, and the dream of this does not cease to haunt us, it is of some other kind and must be
sought within a human experience which has nothing outside it.44

What Murdoch has said here is that there is no point to life outside of life itself: life is to
that extent ‘self-contained’. I see no reason other than Byrne’s preference for Kant’s over
Schopenhauer’s style of ‘metaphysics’ why this move should be taken, as Byrne takes it, as
placing ‘sharp limitations on the metaphysical import of Murdoch’s moral Platonism’.45
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 1001

For Murdoch and Schopenhauer ‘the task of metaphysics is not to pass beyond’ but to
picture accurately what (Anselm reminds us) is within ‘human experience’. Moreover, the
Kantian sort of ‘metaphysical import’ that Byrne is specifically after here is connected with
his hope to solve a problem peculiar to any Kantian metaphysic of morals. If we agree that
autonomy (choice) is the foundation of morality, we are left with the problem: how can
genuine autonomy be compatible with the deliverances and basic assumptions of the
natural sciences? But as is particularly evident in her critique of Sartre, Murdoch doesn’t
hold Kant’s belief that autonomy (choice) is the precondition of morality. Byrne the
Kantian is thus, and rather absurdly, making it his chief criticism of the radically anti-
Kantian Murdoch that she declines to solve a problem for Kant.
In the following, Byrne has it that Murdoch’s Good collapses into our various
individual ‘conceptions of it’ (various distinct individual ends), and thereby ceases to do
the work of a metaphysical fact. This subjectivisation rather suggests Antonaccio’s
‘reflexive realism’. Byrne complains:

The central problem which emerges from Murdoch’s rejection of teleology is that the concept of the
Good seems to refer, in her system, to something which is inert. It is a commonplace to say: that
which is real is that which has causal power. To test whether ‘the Good’ makes a reference to
something which is real, and which exists independently of our conceptions of it, is accordingly to
ask if there are any phenomena which this postulation might causally account for. There should be
something the Good does.46

But as we shall see there is something that the Good does. Murdoch has not rejected
teleology, but only the Kantian variety of teleology preferred by Byrne. Nor has Murdoch
confined the telos within an individual such as to leave us only with ‘conceptions of it’.
Byrne’s argument might be put like this. If ‘the point’ of life is the Good, and if
Murdoch holds that ‘the point’ is not external to an individual, then the Good is not
external to an individual either, and is, on that account, morally vacuous. This argument is
valid, but unsound. Note that the exegetical premise which Byrne here inserts into a
criticism of Murdoch is just what Antonaccio deploys in her reconciliation with Schweiker.
And of the two, it is Byrne that correctly identifies the consequence of such an exegesis. If
Murdoch holds that there is no ‘objective world of facts apart from the activity of an
individual thinking consciousness’ (nothing ‘which exists independently of our concep-
tions of it’), then Murdoch’s account of the Good will empty it of compelling moral
significance. Byrne’s critical argument is thus a valid one, but unsound: Byrne’s exegetical
premise (shared with Antonaccio) is false. In Murdoch’s remark as quoted by Byrne, the
active contrast is not between an individual human life and that which is external to it, but
rather between such avowedly shared places as ‘human life’ or ‘human experience’ on the
one hand, and what is ‘outside’ all ‘human experience’ on the other. In short, while
Murdoch’s intent is plainly to contain any telos within the ordinary human world and to
eschew any ‘elsewhere’, there is no warrant in her text for Byrne’s accusation that she
wishes, in the style of ‘reflexive realism’, to allocate each individual his own distinct telos.
When Murdoch endorses Plato’s metaphysical teleology of the Good, she does so in
emphatically Schopenhauerian terms which locate the Good firmly within the shared
‘experience in which the world exists’:

Plato makes the assumption that value is everywhere, that the whole of life is movement on a moral
scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind seeks reality and desires the good, which is a
transcendent source of spiritual power, to which we are related through the idea of truth. ‘Good is
1002 DAVID ROBJANT

what every soul pursues and for which it ventures everything, intuiting what it is, yet baffled and
unable fully to apprehend its nature.’ (Republic 505E.)47

Nothing could be more powerful or shared than that which has the attractive power to
move every human soul. Yet Byrne takes it that:
the reality of Murdoch’s putative religious reality [the Good] is in doubt, since it is causally inert.48

It would be causally inert if as Byrne alleges there were nothing to it but our conceptions
thereof, but it is not causally inert, and Murdoch has not reduced the telos to our
conceptions thereof. The Good is that which moves every soul. Murdoch describes the
Good as ‘magnetic’.49 It is worth unpacking her intentions here, as a corrective to Byrne. If
an iron filing moves in the presence of a magnet, we do not usually attribute all the causal
power to the iron filing and describe the magnet as ‘inert’.

IV. CRITICAL APPROPRIATION?

A rival to the Byrne-Antonaccio view is the recent Iris Murdoch’s Contemporary Retrieval
of Plato by Sonja Zuba.50 Zuba’s merit is in her recognition that Murdoch’s Good is not
compatible with any attempt to redefine ‘God’: ‘Murdoch’s account of moral life cannot
be appropriated uncritically by Christian theologians’.51 Murdoch’s moral philosophy
nevertheless contains enough of value that it might seem worth trying to appropriate it
critically, but Zuba frankly acknowledges that this will mean doing without most of
Murdoch’s central tenets:
. . . God must be seen as the source of all value, hence it does not make sense to discuss or speak of
the Good, or any form of morality, without reference to God.52

My concern here is not with the dubious force of Zuba’s ‘must’ but with the way in which,
and admirably, Zuba contrasts the idea of the source of all value (God), on the one hand,
with the idea of value itself (the Good), on the other. That seems right, and rather in the
tradition of the Euthyphro. I am less sympathetic when Zuba has it that for Murdoch:
all divisions between fact and value ultimately reduce the sphere of human knowing and diminish
our ability to perceive accurately [. . .].53

There is simply no text in which Murdoch herself argues, as Zuba here presents her as
arguing, that all divisions between fact and value are unhelpful to accurate perception.
What is at issue in Murdoch’s discussions of fact and value is what picture we should hold
of the background to talk of fact and value. Murdoch’s complaint is that picturing value as
outside and purified from the facts, such as the Tractatus and much later moral theorising
involves, does not allow for observable connections here. For instance:
The instructed and morally purified mind sees reality clearly and indeed (in an important sense)
provides us with the concept.54

Access to reality goes through the virtues, for the ‘good (better) man’ and for M who tries
to see D ‘justly, lovingly’. A further and rather different point is that, in the one case of the
form of the Good, what is and what is valuable are united. But that fact is united with
value at some distant point of perfection issues no licence for the thought that they are
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 1003

generally inseparable. Here, I hold the much cited Antonaccio responsible for Zuba’s
error. For it is not far from Antonaccio’s thesis that reality is ‘reflexive’ and thus made of
concepts, to Zuba’s thesis that our more valued concepts will, in virtue of being valued,
constitute the facts.

V. A BUDDHIST LIKE BRADLEY?

Peter J. Conradi recounts in Going Buddhist how his study of Iris Murdoch and attendance
of her 1982 Gifford Lectures was, for him, part of a seeking that concluded in Buddhist
practice.55 His Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist goes, already, some way in that
direction.56 Such elements of Murdoch’s Platonism as her atheism, emphasis on training
towards virtue, and realism about the Good do suggest some affinity with Buddhism. Her
equally Platonic emphasis on Love and the purified passion of the incomplete soul for a
reality beyond and separate from it - these may recall an affinity with Christianity.
Conradi’s emphasis is somewhat on the Buddhist side of ‘Buddhist Christian’, and so for
Conradi, Murdoch’s is ‘something like a Buddhist world picture’ (Conradi, Artist p. 108).
In fact that is, because of the qualification, and because of the realism about the good that
is involved in Conradi’s notion of ‘a Buddhist world picture’, quite fair. Moreover, in
Conradi’s handling of it in his discussion and assessment of the thought-world behind the
novels, the comparison with Buddhism is, I think, mostly rather helpful. Wanting to move
on to an instructive point of departure, I will not explore all Conradi’s merits here. Let it
suffice to say: it is helpful to reflect that Murdoch’s moral psychology is, like Buddhist
moral thought, integrated into a general epistemology and metaphysic, and that Plato’s
moral psychology may indeed resemble some thoughts from India.57
My worry is about how far Conradi’s own understanding of Buddhism, and sense of
Murdoch as tipping his personal quest in that direction, obscures a point where Murdoch
is at odds with at least some Buddhists, and with her own fictional characters. The Black
Prince is written in the voice of an unsuccessful apprentice mystic named Bradley
Pearson.58 Perhaps the name is not specifically meant to recall F.H. Bradley’s earnest
pursuit of Unity and the Absolute, but the fictional Bradley shares with his namesake some
curious notions of moral progress. Conradi makes use of Bradley Pearson’s mystical
speculations in an attempt to connect Murdoch’s account of ‘true moral vision’ with sexual
love,59 which for Bradley Pearson is ‘the great connective principle whereby we overcome
duality, [. . .] [and] separateness’.60 Conradi is here with the fictional Bradley, and also with
Katsuki Sekida of Zen Training,61 tempted to connect true vision with overcoming
‘duality, [. . .] [and] separateness’. Any such connection would be rather in tension with
Murdoch’s central thought that ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something
other than oneself is real’,62 since to recognise something as other than oneself is precisely
to cherish some sort of duality and separateness:
A love relationship can occasion extreme selfishness and possessive violence, the attempt to
dominate that other place so that it be no longer separate; or it can prompt a process of unselfing
wherein the lover learns to see, and cherish and respect, what is not himself.63

I think Murdoch is here rather sharply critical of both the Bradleys, in their hope to
diminish ‘separateness’. Where the fictional Bradley’s views are echoed by real persons, she
might be critical in a gentle and more conciliatory way, as she is of Zen Training. She says
generously that Sekida’s talk of overcoming the dualism between subject and object is ‘To
1004 DAVID ROBJANT

be thought of as a disposable ladder, since Zen denies it is philosophy’.64 Murdoch’s

implication, I think, is that such talk is not much good as philosophy.
Conradi’s association of Murdoch’s idea of moral progress with that held by Bradley
Pearson (and Katsuki Sekida and F.H. Bradley) is, in the limited use Conradi makes of it,
innocent. Conradi deploys the point only to emphasise that selflessness is a cardinal virtue in
Murdoch’s moral epistemology, which indeed it is. It is however not selfishness to own one’s
own experiences. There is a distinction to be made between the self as an object of love (with
egoistic persons), and the subject as a feature of grammar (even, I suggest, with selfless
persons). A fine passage in Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn illustrates precisely this distinction:

Effingham shifted slightly. There was no doubt that he was very slowly sinking. The thick toffee-
like mud was creeping up the length of his thigh and he could feel the cold gluey stuff gripping the
lower part of his back. He had known for some time that it was now quite impossible for him to get
up; and he feared to move in case he should simply slither down into the liquid hole which now
seemed positively to be sucking at his left leg.
Effingham had never confronted death. The confrontation brought with it a new quietness and a
new terror . . . He could not envisage what was to come. He did not want to perish whimpering. As
if obeying some imperative, a larger imperative than he had ever acknowledged before, he collected
himself and concentrated his attention . . . Something had been withdrawn, had slipped away from
him in the moment of his attention, and that something was simply himself. Perhaps he was dead
already, the darkening image of the self forever removed. Yet what was left, for something was
surely left, something existed still? It came to him with the simplicity of a simple sum. What was left
was everything else, all that was not himself, that object which he had never before seen and upon
which he now gazed with the passion of a lover . . . This then was love, to look until one exists no
more, this was the love which was the same as death. He looked, and knew with a clarity which was
one with the increasing light, that with the death of the self the world becomes quite automatically
the object of a perfect love. He clung on to the words ‘quite automatically’ and murmured them to
himself as a charm.65

Effingham experiences a loss of the self and, ‘quite automatically’, a perfect love of a newly
revealed world. But this transference of Love is not the death of the subject. Effingham’s
experiences are his own, are events in his history.
Where Conradi’s inadvertent association of Iris Murdoch’s moral epistemology with
that of Katsuki Sekida and F.H. Bradley is part of an otherwise helpful discussion of
Murdoch on selflessness, Gordon Graham offers that association as a knock-down
argument against Murdoch. In the following passage, Graham starts by assuming that
Murdoch’s Plato and Aristotle’s Plato are one and the same, and finishes with a
misquotation that confuses Murdoch’s Plato with F.H. Bradley:

In the doctrine of the forms we are presented with transcendents that are both existents and ideals,
in some sense there and yet forever waiting to be realised in the world of which human beings are, in
the main, a part. True, there is something inherently contradictory in this idea, but then, according
to Murdoch, morality is contradictory since it both seeks to eliminate evil and yet needs it for its
own existence through contradistinction. As she says ‘Morality, which makes evil, desires in evil to
remove a condition of its own being; it labours to pass into a super-moral and therefore non-moral
sphere’ (489).66

At Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 489, Iris Murdoch is explicitly reporting the views of
F.H. Bradley in Appearance and Reality, and not with approval. In the next passage, she
goes on to prefer F.H. Bradley’s earlier work in Ethical Studies as being ‘more liberally and
tolerantly empirical (descriptive) about morality’,67 and to follow this up by stating that
the ‘system’ of Appearance and Reality is ‘very improbable’,68 and moreover Hegelian:
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 1005

The most obvious objections to Hegel may indeed be to the outrageous implausibility of the whole
machine; but more sinister is a lingering shadow of determinism, and the loss of ordinary everyday
truth, that is of truth. The loss of the particular, the loss of the contingent, the loss of the individual
. . . Hegel’s system, and Bradley’s smaller more confused copy, ignore (destroy, magic away) the
essential contingency of human life, its rejection of any idea of rational totality.69

In short, Graham’s misquotation presents Murdoch as advocating a position which she is

explicitly attacking. For Murdoch, the idea that ‘Morality . . . makes evil’ belongs to a system
in which the aesthetic unity of a ‘rational totality’ is preferred to the ordinary world of truth
and contingency, not to mention individual human beings. She could not be more damning.
For to Murdoch Reality and Truth are just the ordinary everyday reality and truth: there is
no other. There is no ‘elsewhere’. Truths correspond to reality. ‘Correspondence’ of the
everyday sort must to be cherished in philosophy because it ‘contains the awareness that we
are continually confronting something other than ourselves’.70 The sort of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’
that attends coherence in a system, as in Hegel or Bradley, is mere system, and not truth at all.
Bradley’s systematic concepts of good and evil are indeed related as Bradley would relate
them, but Good is not a concept (Antonaccio’s mistake). That morality ‘labours to pass into
a super-moral and therefore non-moral sphere’ is the sort of ‘truth’ found only in a
philosophical system. It is not a ‘labour’ evident in the real world. F.H. Bradley’s is a system
which loves completeness and totality above correspondence and individuals and all the
messy contingent world, in short, for Murdoch, above reality.
Do not misunderstand me as suggesting that Murdoch’s thought, in being at odds with
that of F.H. Bradley, Bradley Pearson and Katsuki Sekida, is thereby at odds with all that
‘Buddhism’ may mean. If some are now tempted to ‘overcome duality’ through Buddhism,
other seekers find other thoughts there. Murdoch, Conradi tells me, would at one time
discuss Buddhist thought and practice with Andrew Harvey, whose A Journey in Ladakh is
dedicated to Murdoch. As Harvey presents matters, the Tibetans aim at nothing like
Sekida’s overcoming of the dualism between subject and object. Indeed, in stressing
compassion, Harvey’s version of Tibetan Buddhism suggests something like Effingham’s
passion for the world.71 Acknowledging just this sort of distinction among the Buddhists,
Conradi himself has lately offered that ‘Unlike Zen Buddhists, but like the Tibetans,
[Murdoch] wrote not of destroying the ego but of side-stepping it’.72 As remarked above, I
think Conradi is slow to distinguish the subject from the ego in all this. Sekida wants to
destroy the ego, and to make that destruction most emphatic by banishing the subject. On
the other side Effingham has his ego displaced, in his affections, leaving the subject in love
for the world. It would seem from Effingham’s case that to side-step the ego or displace it
in our affections just is to destroy it. This could only be true of a phantasm, but that is
rather the Buddhist point. What Conradi perhaps meant to say was that Murdoch, unlike
Sekida, does not intend to destroy the subject, but (by ‘side-stepping’) to direct loving
attention at the other. That is, by invoking the Tibetans, Conradi is pointing out that
Murdoch does not aim at the subjectless Zen we find in Sekida. Quite. For exactly the same
reason, she does not aim at the subjectless Absolute hypothesised by the Bradleys, either.

VI. INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY?

For her commentators in the journal literature, Murdoch is either to be condemned as

maintaining the same Platonism that Aristotle and more recent commentators have held to
be ‘inherently contradictory’ (Gordon Graham),73 or as dissenting from the dominant
1006 DAVID ROBJANT

conception of Plato’s intentions and thereby ‘doing violence to the original Platonic
schema’ (M. E. L. Whibley).74 This two pronged attack is hardly fair. Nor should we agree
that in ‘doing violence’ to Plato’s epistemology and theory of art as we have hitherto
understood it, Murdoch is automatically ‘doing violence to the original’. This is yet to be
shown or even properly framed – there is nothing published, for instance, on the way in
which Murdoch sustains an original reading of Republic, not as a work of political
prescription informed by a metaphysical elsewhere, but rather as descriptive psychology in
which the banishment of the poets is an allegory for the dependence of factioned souls
upon ‘life illusions’.75 Murdoch’s merits as a Plato interpreter are lamentably neglected.
Graham assumes that:
In the doctrine of the forms we are presented with transcendents that are both existents and ideals,
in some sense there and yet forever waiting to be realised in the world of which human beings are, in
the main, a part.76

But this is by no means the theory of forms as it appears to Iris Murdoch. Murdoch’s
Good is not ‘waiting’ elsewhere as for Graham, nor is it a ‘concept’ as for Antonaccio. It is
there as a person is there; in the ordinary way. It is a reality in front of us which, in framing
images and metaphors, Plato is trying to describe as accurately as he can.

VII. CONCLUSION

I have been considering Murdoch’s remark that she speaks ‘as a neo-Christian or Buddhist
Christian or Christian fellow traveller’.77 In her emphasis upon the importance of love,
Murdoch’s thought travels with many Christians. But she is an avowed atheist. Is she then a
Buddhist? Murdoch’s love for a world distinct from us might be compatible with some
neglected kind of Buddhism, but it contradicts both the Zen of Sekida and the westernised
romantic mysticism of Bradley Pearson. For these reasons, neither ‘Christian’ nor ‘Buddhist’
will quite suggest what Murdoch has in mind. This is precisely what Murdoch meant to
emphasise by inventing the new denomination ‘Buddhist Christian’. As a strategy for warding
off misappropriation into either theism or the romantic orient, Murdoch’s neologism would
appear to have failed. But since commentators have ignored not only the implicit purpose of
the neologism, but also the explicit remarks surrounding it, this is hardly Murdoch’s fault.
I don’t know whether Murdoch’s reputation as a Philosopher will quite recover from
the influential falsehoods of Antonaccio and Byrne, or from the two prongs personified by
Graham and Whibley. Embarrassingly, if Murdoch does survive the professional
philosopher, this will be due not least to the many and continuing labours of one who
is, in the proper sense, an amateur.78 All right, Conradi in The Saint and the Artist makes a
(temporary) mistake about ‘separateness’. The style of that mistake is in professional
company both admirable and salutary. Believing in order to understand, Conradi hazards
all for love of Murdoch. Graham, on the other hand, makes his errors in the service of a
sophisticated dismissal. Conradi’s imperfection is the one I wish for.

Notes

1 Iris Murdoch Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus 1992) p. 419. The Murdoch works
here quoted are reprinted by permission of Aitken Alexander Associates and The Random House Group Ltd.
 AS A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN; THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF IRIS MURDOCH 1007

2 See: 1 (for the text of the lecture) The Iris Murdoch Newsletter, Issue 11, Winter 1998 http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/
downloads/iris-murdoch-newsletter-11.pdf & 2 Maria Antonaccio Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris
Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000) (Material from this work appears here by permission of Oxford
University Press www.oup.com) & 3 Peter Byrne The Moral Interpretation of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press 1998)
3 Murdoch 1992, p. 419
4 Iris Murdoch Existentialists and Mystics (London: Chatto & Windus 1997) p. 365
5 Antonaccio 2000, pp. 51–94
6 Byrne 1998, p. 97
7 Ibid., p. 98
8 Ibid., p. 103
9 Murdoch 1992, p. 405
10 Ibid., p. 396
11 Ibid., p. 395
12 Ibid., p. 267
13 Ibid., p. 331
14 Ibid., p. 399
15 Ibid., p. 393
16 Ibid., p. 392
17 Murdoch 1997, p. 317
18 Ibid., p. 313
19 All the twenty first century monographs so far published cite Antonaccio, in detail, generally without quibble,
and often several times on the one page.
20 Heather Widdows The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005) p. 82
21 Antonaccio 2000, p. 197. This is an endnote 35 to chapter 1, referring to page 15. The text mentioned is William
Schweiker Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995)
22 Murdoch 1992, p. 268
23 Ibid., p. 214
24 Murdoch 1997, p. 42
25 Ibid., p. 374. From The Sovereignty of the Good
26 Antonaccio 2000, p. 51
27 Widdows 2005, p. 82
28 Antonaccio 2000, p. 51
29 Ibid., p. 51
30 Ibid., p. 51
31 Ibid., p. 94
32 Murdoch 1997, p. 365
33 See my ‘Is Iris Murdoch a Closet Existentialist?’, forthcoming in The European Journal of Philosophy
34 Antonaccio 2000, p. 94
35 Murdoch 1992, p. 215
36 Ibid., p. 211
37 Murdoch 1997, p. 199
38 Ibid., p. 201
39 Antonaccio 2000, p. 94
40 Murdoch 1992, p. 268 Murdoch’s italics.
41 Ibid., p. 214
42 Ibid., p. 79. The quote is from World as Will and Representation, supplement to Book 1, ‘Criticism of the Kantian
Philosophy’. The translation is uncredited.
43 Ibid., p. 79
44 Murdoch 1997, 364–365. From The Sovereignty of the Good
45 Byrne 1998, p. 111
46 Byrne 1998, pp. 112–113
47 Murdoch 1992, p. 56
48 Byrne 1998, p. 117
49 Murdoch 1997, p. 384. From The Sovereignty of the Good
50 Sonja Zuba Iris Murdoch’s Contemporary Retrieval of Plato; The Influence of an Ancient Philosopher on a Modern
Novelist (Lewiston: Mellen Press 2009)
51 Zuba 2009, p. 219
52 Ibid., p. 9
53 Ibid., pp. 135–136
54 Murdoch 1997, p. 426
55 Peter J. Conradi Going Buddhist (London: Short Books 2004)
1008 DAVID ROBJANT

56 Peter J. Conradi Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (London: Macmillan 1986), republished as Peter J.
Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (London: HarperCollins 2001) Pagination is to
the latter.
57 A current work on connections here is Thomas McEvilley The Shape of Ancient Thought (New York: Allworth
Press 2002)
58 Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (London: Chatto & Windus 1973)
59 Conradi 2001, p. 258
60 Murdoch 1973, p. 211
61 Katsuki Sekida Zen Training; Methods and Philosophy (New York: Wheatherhill 1975) criticised (sympathe-
tically) in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals pp. 239–250
62 Murdoch 1997, p. 215
63 Murdoch 1992, p. 17
64 Ibid., p. 242
65 Iris Murdoch The Unicorn (London: Chatto & Windus 1963) pp. 166–167
66 Gordon Graham ‘Spiritualized Morality and Traditional Religion’, Ratio IX April 1996, pp. 78–84, p. 80
67 Murdoch 1992, p. 489
68 Ibid., p. 489
69 Ibid., p. 490 Murdoch’s italics
70 Ibid., pp. 267–268
71 Note for instance: Andrew Harvey A Journey in Ladakh (London: Jonathan Cape 1983) pp. 164–165
72 Iris Murdoch Newsletter 2006, p. 30 http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/downloads/iris-murdoch-newsletter-19.pdf
73 Graham 1996, p. 80
74 M.E.L. Whibley, ‘The Redemption of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, October 1998, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp. 375–
383, p. 383
75 Murdoch 1992, p. 22
76 Graham 1996, p. 80
77 Murdoch 1992, p. 419
78 Gratitude will yet be due to many professionals, and I am grateful for helpful comments on drafts of this paper
from Derek Matravers (Cambridge, The Open University), and Stephen Mulhall (Oxford).