Paying Attention to the Good
Iris Murdoch's critical response to existentialism offers a unique view of moral achievement
“But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.” - Iris Murdoch
The acclaimed novelist Iris Murdoch was one of the four Oxford Moral Philosophers (Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch), who were the first to read Wittgenstein’s later work and - perhaps uniquely - understood not only what he was exploring, but why. Although Murdoch is associated mainly with her work in fiction, for which she won the Booker prize and a Damehood from Queen Elizabeth II, her early work in philosophy remains a fascinating revolt against the strange alliance between existentialism and behaviourism that captured thought in the late twentieth century.
The opening quote is from “The Idea of Perfection”, adapted from her 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture and later published in The Yale Review. Here and elsewhere in her philosophical writings, Murdoch’s arguments are impossible to comprehend once someone has set up a home in an existentialist world - and these have thrived and multiplied in the last century. I myself lived in one for many years, and moving out has given me something of an acute sensitivity to the problems of foregrounding individual freedom to the cost of all other values. Many of our more disturbing problems today are rooted in this, sometimes in quite surprising ways.
The lionising of gender and sexual identity, for instance, has become a bizarre means of justifying censorship: the individual freedom to ‘be who you must be’ (which, despite the backlash, remains an authentic human value) becomes perverted when it undertakes to police the permitted forms of diversity. Respect for the good of individual freedom becomes corrupted into encouraging a denial of the freedom of those who recognise any other home for the good, including the family, religion, and local community, all of which grounded human existence for millennia.
Yet Murdoch inverted this understanding of freedom as the unfettered creativity of the individual. She held that freedom was not merely a prerequisite for morality but itself a moral concept, and as such tied up with our knowledge. This always means more than merely the dry “impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world”, and included as well our “refined and honest perception of what is really the case”. This requires our patience, since understanding what confronts us is an exploratory process, one that involves more than just our eyes, needing also a kind of “moral discipline”. Thus Murdoch spoke of the importance of attention, as in the quote above, whereby our commitment to paying attention is itself a moral pursuit of the good.
She gave a simple (and indeed domestic) example of a mother who initially feels hostile to her daughter-in-law, but who through a commitment to being attentive transforms her understanding from negative ideas like “tiresomely juvenile” to positive ideals such as “delightfully youthful”. This attentiveness involves the pursuit of the good without ever leaving our armchair. It requires us to avoid the lazy ease with which we label something as evil, and thus necessary to destroy (an impulse that is itself a source of so much of the evil that surrounds us today). Our attentiveness patiently dismantles all those false pictures that persist solely because of their internal coherence. Indeed, for Murdoch attention was precisely “the effort to counteract such states of illusion”.
Yet this leads us to worlds where freedom to choose is a lesser good than the successors of existentialism would have us believe. For if we are committed to the good, and to the attentiveness required to perceive the good in those around us, we are committed to a very slow process of moral achievement, within which we cannot simply leap off and go in another direction. Indeed, Murdoch argued that if we were perfectly attentive, we would have no choices, and this necessity is that of the saints and the artists alike. This is an alien world to the ones that surround us, yet it holds a worth that lies far beyond mere freedom of choice: a chance to discover the good in everyone.
Hi Chris, I think some of the thoughts in this piece are important to me, but I have a few questions. What is meant by:
(a) “her early work in philosophy remains a fascinating revolt against the strange alliance between existentialism and behaviorism that captured thought in the late twentieth century.”
(b) “Many of our more disturbing problems today are rooted in [the foregrounding of individual freedom to the cost of all other values], sometimes in quite surprising ways.”
(c) “Murdoch argued that if we were perfectly attentive, we would have no choices, and this necessity is that of the saints and the artists alike.”
Enjoyed this piece, Chris. I'm in agreement about the lack of choice (as it were) for the "perfectly attentive." However, the perfectly attentive still must face the fact that plenty of folk out there are so caught up with selfism, it would be self destructive to relate toward them as though they were good people. I have a good friend who seems to generally see and relate to the goodness in folks, but there's an element of character involved there, one that includes a kind of social blindness. Interestingly, he doesn't seem to suffer any adverse consequences, but sometimes those around him do because he's so uncritical (for the most part). We need folks like him, but I believe that there are some attentive characters who hold folks to account, and we need those types as well. And I might add that these attentive characters who hold their peers to account have little choice in the matter.