Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”
Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy · Modern · 1959
What does it mean?
Love, she writes, is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. It is not a haze around the self. It is the hard achievement of seeing that the other person does not match your fantasy. Art and morals, she says, share that discovery. A rival reading hears a cold epistemic duty where love was supposed to be a feeling, or a novelist flattering attention. She is arguing against a moral philosophy of isolated acts of will, and against a romanticism that never leaves the self.
Did Iris Murdoch really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Murdoch's sentence in 'The Sublime and the Good'. She adds that love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. The wording is hers.
Where it comes from
'The Sublime and the Good', 1959; reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics
Approximate date: 1959.
How to use it
Pick a person you have been narrating, a parent, a patient, a flatmate in Bristol, and look for one fact about them that does not serve the story. Staying with that fact is the start of what she means. The fact may be inconvenient. That inconvenience is not yet love, but the fantasy cannot survive it unchanged.
A mindset reading
The sentence is hers, in 'The Sublime and the Good' (1959). She adds that love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. Using it as a caption under a wedding photograph keeps the difficulty and drops the argument.
Understand the philosophy
The companion piece is the kestrel in The Sovereignty of Good: attention jerked outward by a hovering bird. Both passages refuse a picture of the moral life as a series of choices by a solitary will that never really sees.
- love
- ethics
- knowledge
FAQ
What does it mean?
Love, she writes, is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. It is not a haze around the self. It is the hard achievement of seeing that the other person does not match your fantasy. Art and morals, she says, share that discovery. A rival reading hears a cold epistemic duty where love was supposed to be a feeling, or a novelist flattering attention. She is arguing against a moral philosophy of isolated acts of will, and against a romanticism that never leaves the self.
Did Iris Murdoch really say this?
Well attested. Murdoch's sentence in 'The Sublime and the Good'. She adds that love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. The wording is hers.
Which work is it in?
'The Sublime and the Good', 1959; reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics Approximate date: 1959.