Quotation
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“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 · Modern · 1970
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading treats the kestrel as a picture of attention. She is anxious and resentful, brooding on damage to her prestige, and the sight of a hovering kestrel abolishes that brooding self for a moment. A competing reading hears a claim that beauty automatically makes people good, which she does not say. The moment ends, and the prestige can return. What the example shows is that the self is not always the centre, and that something real outside it can displace the fantasy. The passage is her set piece in The Sovereignty of Good. Prestige and hurt vanity are the content of the ego she has called the enemy. The kestrel is not a symbol invented for a theory after the fact. It is a report of attention. The 1959 sentence on love is the abstract form of the same discovery. This is the scene.
Did Iris Murdoch really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Murdoch's own example of unselfing in The Sovereignty of Good. The wording is the passage as it is standardly quoted from the book. She is describing a change of attention, not recommending birdwatching as a method.
Where it comes from
The Sovereignty of Good (1970), the example of the hovering kestrel
Approximate date: 1970.
How to use it
The use is not to go and find a bird. It is to notice a moment when something outside the grievance occupies the mind, a student's question or a street one had stopped seeing, and to tell that moment from a performance of self-improvement. She thinks the displacement is a moral clue because the vanity goes quiet without being argued down. A person who then performs the quietness for an audience has rebuilt the prestige the kestrel interrupted.
A mindset reading
Keep a distinction between being pulled out of a brooding self and deciding to be a better person. She thinks the first is evidence about what the self is like. The second can be another project of the same self. The habit is to notice which one just happened.
Understand the philosophy
The kestrel is Murdoch's illustration of unselfing in The Sovereignty of Good. The key contrast is the brooding self and the reality that displaces it. The passage is quoted at length because it is a scene, not a definition. 'I can only choose within the world I can see' is the theoretical sentence. The fat relentless ego is the diagnosis. The sentence about the individual knowable by love is the moral case of the same attention.
- self
- ethics
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading treats the kestrel as a picture of attention. She is anxious and resentful, brooding on damage to her prestige, and the sight of a hovering kestrel abolishes that brooding self for a moment. A competing reading hears a claim that beauty automatically makes people good, which she does not say. The moment ends, and the prestige can return. What the example shows is that the self is not always the centre, and that something real outside it can displace the fantasy. The passage is her set piece in The Sovereignty of Good. Prestige and hurt vanity are the content of the ego she has called the enemy. The kestrel is not a symbol invented for a theory after the fact. It is a report of attention. The 1959 sentence on love is the abstract form of the same discovery. This is the scene.
Did Iris Murdoch really say this?
Well attested. Murdoch's own example of unselfing in The Sovereignty of Good. The wording is the passage as it is standardly quoted from the book. She is describing a change of attention, not recommending birdwatching as a method.
Which work is it in?
The Sovereignty of Good (1970), the example of the hovering kestrel Approximate date: 1970.