Quotation
Last reviewed:
“I can only choose within the world I can see.”
Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy · Modern · 1970
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is a limit on the will. Choice happens inside the world a person can see, so a moral change is often a change in vision rather than a leap at the moment of action. A competing reading hears a denial of responsibility: if I can only choose what I see, failures of sight excuse me. She thinks the quality of seeing is itself the moral work, and that it is difficult because the ego distorts it. The sentence is in the first essay of The Sovereignty of Good. See is not eyesight. The 1959 sentence, already in this library, says love is the realisation that something other than oneself is real. This sentence says what that realisation does to choice. A will that chooses inside a fantasy is, on her account, not the free will her contemporaries were praising.
Did Iris Murdoch really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Murdoch's sentence in 'The Idea of Perfection', collected in The Sovereignty of Good. She uses 'see' in a moral sense: the world one can see is the world attention has made available. A longer gloss of that sense is her argument, not a second quotation.
Where it comes from
The Sovereignty of Good (1970), 'The Idea of Perfection'
Approximate date: 1970.
How to use it
Two colleagues look at the same meeting and do not have the same options, because one of them has not seen that a junior person was humiliated. Her sentence says the second person does not first choose wrongly and then happen to be inattentive. The inattention is the narrow world. It does not excuse the omission. It relocates the work to the seeing, which she thinks can be trained and can also be refused.
A mindset reading
When a decision feels thin, ask what you have not looked at, rather than only whether you were brave at the last moment. The habit follows her against a picture of morals as isolated acts of will. It can become an excuse if the seeing is never expected to change.
Understand the philosophy
The Sovereignty of Good collects three essays. This sentence is from 'The Idea of Perfection'. The key word is see. The 1959 line on love is from 'The Sublime and the Good' and is not this sentence. The kestrel passage and the sentence about the ego, also added here, are the picture and the diagnosis that this limit on choice requires.
- ethics
- knowledge
- self
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is a limit on the will. Choice happens inside the world a person can see, so a moral change is often a change in vision rather than a leap at the moment of action. A competing reading hears a denial of responsibility: if I can only choose what I see, failures of sight excuse me. She thinks the quality of seeing is itself the moral work, and that it is difficult because the ego distorts it. The sentence is in the first essay of The Sovereignty of Good. See is not eyesight. The 1959 sentence, already in this library, says love is the realisation that something other than oneself is real. This sentence says what that realisation does to choice. A will that chooses inside a fantasy is, on her account, not the free will her contemporaries were praising.
Did Iris Murdoch really say this?
Well attested. Murdoch's sentence in 'The Idea of Perfection', collected in The Sovereignty of Good. She uses 'see' in a moral sense: the world one can see is the world attention has made available. A longer gloss of that sense is her argument, not a second quotation.
Which work is it in?
The Sovereignty of Good (1970), 'The Idea of Perfection' Approximate date: 1970.