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Philosopher

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Iris Murdoch

1919–1999 · Moral philosophy · Modern

Iris Murdoch, a novelist and a philosopher, argued against a picture of the moral life as a series of isolated choices by a solitary will. In 'The Sublime and the Good' she writes that love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real, and that art and morals share that discovery.

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The Sovereignty of Good, especially the kestrel passage, makes attention the jerk outward from what she calls the fat relentless ego. She had read Simone Weil, and the reading shows. She had also argued with Sartre, and she thought existentialist freedom, pictured as a leap, left out the slow work of seeing. The novels are not illustrations of the philosophy, and the philosophy is not a code for the novels.

Both are concerned with fantasy, the way a person edits the world until only the self remains. She writes plain English. The plainness is exact. 'Realisation' is doing philosophical work, not decorating a sentiment. A card in this library already holds the 1959 sentence. It is hers. It is not improved by being shortened into a claim that love is just being nice.

Start here

'The Sublime and the Good', then 'The Idea of Perfection' in The Sovereignty of Good.

The sentence you already know is in the first. The second shows the attention she means, at the length the sentence cannot have.

Quotations

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

loveethicsknowledge
Well attested
Meaning & application
“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

selfethicsmind
Well attested
Meaning & application
“The central concept of morality is the individual thought of as knowable by love.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

loveethicsknowledge
Well attested
Meaning & application

Key ideas

  • Attention

    Moral life is a discipline of seeing, not only a moment of choice.

  • The ego

    Fantasy edits the world. Love is the difficult discovery that the other is real.

  • The good

    Not a choice-shaped void. Something we look toward, in The Sovereignty of Good.

Major works

  • The Sublime and the Good (1959)

    The love sentence. Reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics.

  • The Sovereignty of Good (1970)

    Three essays. The kestrel is the set piece of attention.

  • Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

    A collection that includes the 1959 essay.

Influences

Influenced

Common misreadings

  • Love, in the 1959 sentence, is an epistemic achievement, not a haze around the self.
  • She is not anti-fiction. She thinks bad art and bad morals share a failure to see.
  • The novels are not examples engineered to prove the essays.

Famous lines Iris Murdoch never said

None of the lines this library files for Iris Murdoch is marked Questionable or Misattributed. That is only a fact about these cards. It is not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.

FAQ

What is the best book to start with?

'The Sublime and the Good', then 'The Idea of Perfection' in The Sovereignty of Good. The sentence you already know is in the first. The second shows the attention she means, at the length the sentence cannot have.

What is the most famous quote?

This library does not measure fame, and it does not rank lines by how often they are shared. The first line it files for Iris Murdoch that is not marked Questionable or Misattributed is “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” ('The Sublime and the Good', 1959; reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics, Well attested).

What is the most misquoted line?

None of the lines this library files for Iris Murdoch is marked Misattributed or Questionable. That is a fact about these cards, not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.

What is one key idea, in a sentence?

Attention: Moral life is a discipline of seeing, not only a moment of choice.