Great art is a moral accomplishment. It mirrors the struggle to see clearly in everyday life.

Iris Murdoch on Art, Attention and the Metaphysics of the Good

Iris Murdoch is best known as a writer of novels. She wrote twenty-six of them, recurring often to the question of human freedom versus the many varieties of determinism. One of the novels, The Sea, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 1978. She was also a formidable student of philosophy, and taught the subject at Oxford for many years.

Philosophy at Oxford had departed from the long tradition of reflection about ultimate things. In the 2022 book Metaphysical Animals, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman write that before World War I, the Oxford philosophers took themselves to be engaged in a bold undertaking:

to kill off the subject formerly known as ‘philosophy’ and to replace it with a new set of logical, analytic and scientific methods known as logical positivism. Speculative metaphysical enquiry—the pursuit of knowledge of human nature, morality, God, reality, truth and beauty—was to give way to clarification and linguistic analysis in the service of science. The only questions permitted were those that could be answered by empirical methods.

From the vantage of the present, it is fair to say that they were successful in this, insofar as philosophy was replaced with... whatever we should call that enterprise that takes place in philosophy departments today, in cognitive science, and in all those allied disciplines that name themselves with a “neuro-” prefix. Viewed from the outside, the aspirations of the analytical school look like nothing so much as an elaborate system for evading big questions.

We are aided in identifying them as such by a counter-movement of thought that began after World War II, led by Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot. They inaugurated what would become a dissident strand within academic philosophy. Unlike the existentialists, who likewise rejected the positivist edifice, the Oxford dissidents were more frontally engaged with the analytical turn and sought to identify what had gone wrong in it. That they were women is probably significant. That they were writing after the most shattering events of the twentieth century is also surely significant, as Cumhaill and Wiseman note. When the first of the two great wars ended, the logicians and linguistic analysts picked up right where they had left off, as though nothing significant had occurred that might bear on their undertaking. Iris Murdoch and her circle, by contrast, saw the necessity of returning to the biggest questions. Their moment resembles ours, in that respect, and Murdoch’s essays are a treasure to be recovered.

Murdoch’s Moral Phenomenology

In one of those essays, “The Idea of Perfection,” what is at stake is the question of how we ought to picture the human being. This is consequential because, as she says in another essay, man is the creature who makes a picture of himself and then comes to resemble that picture. Bad philosophy may fail as a realistic description of the how things are, but such descriptions can be fertile. They are disseminated and taken up, receding as objects of scrutiny but inflecting our patterns of thinking and feeling.

Analytical philosophy of mind has a hard time dealing with the fact that we are moral beings. That is, we have an “evaluative outlook” (I use the phrase of philosopher Talbot Brewer). The things we perceive “show up” for us in a neutral palette sometimes, but often they do so in vivid colors such as lame, charming, inane, subtle, funny, pathetic,winsome, desperate, inspiring, vulgar, overwrought, sly, generous, elegant and so on. These are not neutral descriptive words; they carry a judgment. Also, they are not obtusely binary, such as “good” and “bad,” but more directly tied-on to human situations, more affectively pungent, the kind of words you would need if (like a novelist) you were to undertake something like “moral phenomenology.” Which, come to think of it, is perhaps a good description of Murdoch’s philosophical oeuvre.

Our evaluative outlook—our sense of where value lies, what it looks like, our ability to detect new flavors of it—can change, and typically this change has a direction to it, such that we can call it progress. When a life goes well, our judgments become deeper and more discerning. It would sting to learn that that someone you respect regards you as complacent and self-satisfied, incapable of being arrested by the new in a way that induces an evaluative shift.

The idea of progress in moral perception, indeed the very concept of moral perception, is unintelligible if we dogmatically insist that “value judgments” are merely subjective. That is, if we suppose that when we call something good, this means nothing more than “I prefer this.” Yet such an ethically denuded ontology—there really isn’t anything value-laden out there to perceive—must be insisted upon if philosophy of mind is to claim jurisdiction over the question of how the mind perceives, and insist that it can do so with the logical and conceptual rigor it prides itself on. Such rigor, it is thought, requires abstaining from the fuzzy domain of value judgments. Features of the moral life that are clearly entangled with our “cognitive” capacities (such as perception) must be quarantined, in order to maintain a notion of cognition that is narrow enough to be amenable to analytical methods.

What philosophy of mind needs, then, is an ally in the sphere of ethics that will agree to a clear demarcation between their respective turfs. This demarcation is accomplished if “the good,” understood as the generic of evaluative terms, has no ontological status of its own. Such a tacit agreement established the intellectual cartel that has set the terms of modern life. Mind the gap and you will be in good standing, metaphysically.

Of course, this gap between Is and Ought long predates the rise of today’s narrow academic disciplines. David Hume pointed the way in the eighteenth century. A couple of centuries down that road, the result is a crippling lack of self-awareness in those human sciences that aspire to analytical rigor, driven by a kind of physics-envy. Murdoch writes that philosophy of mind has “been imposing upon us particular value judgments in the guise of a theory of human nature” without knowing that it does so. For its part, “modern ethics tends to constitute a sort of Newspeak which makes certain values non-expressible.”

The Central Place of Love

Among the facts that have been forgotten or theorized away is the fact that “love is a central concept of morals.” Contemporary philosophers “constantly talk of freedom” but “they rarely talk of love” (299-300). This inarticulacy about love matters. If we don’t have an adequate vocabulary and conceptual repertoire for some phenomenon, we are unable to use language to elaborate our experience. The experience itself becomes harder to fix in the mind, less available to us.

Murdoch’s positive project is arrestingly unconventional. She argues for the central place of love, not just in interpersonal ethics where one might expect to find a discussion of love, but as an epistemic principle. Loving is at the root of our capacity to apprehend the world in its true colors. And this, in turn, is due to an ontological fact concerning the status of “the good.”

Murdoch declares herself a Platonist. The good is real, not a projection of our subjective consciousness onto things we happen to value. The good makes a demand on us, and to respond to this demand adequately is to see things clearly. True perception is thus a moral accomplishment. As we shall see, some of her most compelling arguments demonstrate this in the context of distinguishing great art from ordinary, bad art.

Before spelling these things out, Murdoch needs to clear away a lot of underbrush. (Numbers in parentheses are page numbers in the collection Existentialists and Mystics. I will be referring to three of the essays: “The Idea of Perfection,” “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” and “On the Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.”)

At issue in the Oxford scene was, again, the question of whether “goodness” is a real constituent of the world, something out there. To suppose that it is, was declared to be an instance of “the naturalist fallacy.” The sophisticated position was that “Good is indefinable because judgments of value depend on the will and choice of the individual.” “Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the will.” “Good must be thought of, not as part of the world, but as a movable label affixed to the world; for only so can the agent be pictured as responsible and free” (301).

Tacitly, according to this position, if there were a substantial Good independent of our will, it would threaten the “freedom” that, as Murdoch noted, is the constant preoccupation of modern thought. That is because such a Good would compel us in certain directions rather than others. It would be perverse to choose something bad, after all. It would be irrational. So both our freedom and the sovereignty of our reason were taken to depend on there not being a Good that transcends us and is independent of us. Evidently, thereis a sense of threat to the self that underlies the appeal of moral subjectivism.

This anxiety rests on the modern understanding of what reason is—and of what freedom is. Both notions are narrow, when viewed against the larger sweep of the human tradition. Here, reason always means something public, in the sense that, if something is available to reason, it should be available to all. If it isn’t, it is probably some private, irrational delusion. Meanwhile, freedom is understood as a characteristic of the individual will, revealed in a moment of choice. For this choice to be truly free, it must be entirely my own, a pure eruption of the will that is unconditioned by anything outside the will. True choices are necessarily ungrounded. If you are compelled toward some choice by your reasoning about the situation, it isn’t really an act of your own will. Any person similarly situated, thinking clearly, would choose the same. So the human being is a combined thing: an impersonal rational thinker, whose reasoning cannot escape a publicly observable machinery of logical necessity and shared facts, plus a personal will that leaps around according to no logic at all, until in the moment of choice and action a man inserts himself into the machinery of public reason. It is a picture that combines total freedom and determinism. Murdoch thinks it is mistaken on both sides.

Reason, in this system, must be neutral and objective, carefully abstaining from value judgments. This is what allows us to think of reason and will as separable faculties of the person, corresponding to the distinction between facts and values. “If the will is to be totally free, the world it moves in must be devoid of normative characteristics, so that morality can reside entirely in the pointer of pure choice” (333).

Murdoch names this set of mutually supporting doctrines “behaviorist-existentialist.” Behaviorist because the operation of reason can be detected only by publicly observable actions, and this standard of detection gets imported back into the thing itself: Reason is the sort of thing that issues in actions, as opposed to private revery. To existentialists, on the other side of this intellectual arrangement, freedom means freedom to choose in a pure act of will. There is a hint of mischief in Murdoch’s pointing out that these positions are allied, if we consider them personified. Behaviorists and existentialists wear different costumes (on one side, sensible shoes; on the other, berets) and are sure to detest one another. Yet the determinists and the freedomists need one another, locked as they are in common mistake.

In a subsequent essay titled “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” Murdoch makes a related point. In current moral philosophy, the moral agent is “pictured as an isolated principle of will” beside “a lump of being which has been handed over to other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology. On the one hand a Luciferian philosophy of adventures of the will, and on the other natural science. Moral philosophy, and indeed morals, are thus undefended against an irresponsible and undirected self-assertion which goes easily hand in hand with some brand of pseudo-scientific determinism” (338). Given this easy rapport between pseudo-scientific determinism and Luciferian freedomism, it becomes easier to understand why, for example, the 2023 book Determined, by the Stanford neuro-sage Robert Sapolsky, would reach the bestseller list in a society where “liberation” provides the standard of progress.

The Formative Role of Attention

As a corrective to the prevailing view, Murdoch emphasizes the role of attention in shaping the world that is actually present to our consciousness. This is happening all the time. By the time a moment of choice arrives, we are already inhabiting a world shaped (for us) by our habits of attention, in the course of which specific currents of its value-laden nature stand forth. Our established habits of seeing will largely set our response. This is a retrospective view of how we became the kind of person who is likely to respond in such-and-such a way.

Looking forward, we are for the most part free to allocate our attention. The question of what to attend to is the question of what to value. The morally relevant “choosing” in some episode happens, then, not in a clap of the will at a dramatic moment of decision but in a piecemeal and cumulative way that is continuous, and has already happened by the time the choice must be made. This does not mean we are not free. But Murdoch’s account does highlight a fact that is weirdly absent from the prevailing view: the existence of moral effort. In large part, such effort consists of the struggle to control one’s attention.

And this is indeed effortful. “Of course psychic energy flows, and more easily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world... Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion” (329). Basically, you have to get out of your own head to see things clearly. She calls such effort “unselfing”.

In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” Murdoch says she is not a Freudian, but she shares Freud’s view that our psychic energies are not simply available to us to direct in a deliberate way; there is a roiling layer of the unconscious and the semi-conscious urging us along at every turn. And the consistent tendency of these psychic energies is selfish. It is a tendency shaped and hardened into particular channels by our own biography. Murdoch writes, “Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by...” (331). Unselfing may be accomplished through self-criticism, but such a negative effort of ego-asceticism has its limits.

But to love is to be drawn out of our self-centered patterns toward some positive object that is other than oneself. Love thus has the same outward-pulling tendency as attention. And reciprocally, to attend to something fully is, in a sense, to love it.

Murdoch’s suggestion here is a bit obscure. May not my accomplishment of clear vision, through a patient and just attention, reveal something that is rightly to be hated? How then are we to suppose there is a natural kinship between love and attention? I believe her position becomes tenable if we provide a premise that is a bit elusive, appearing only fleetingly, in her own account: The good, which is lovable, is somehow fundamental, ontologically. If that is the case, attention that penetrates to this fundamental layer will reveal something lovable, even in the hateful. I will return to this question at the end.

Relieving the Burden of Choice Through Obedience to Reality

Murdoch provides philosophical ground for making sense of “the paradox of choice” (a term coined by Barry Schwartz and taken up in recent psychology). Psychologists find that a proliferation of choices makes people less satisfied with whatever choice they end up making. This is not surprising, if the crazy proliferation of choices under consumer capitalism is the public correlate of the bad philosophy Murdoch has identified: our identification of freedom with the ungrounded leaping about of the will. A false picture of the human situation can make people unhappy, in ways detectable by empirical psychology.

Murdoch writes, “If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.” This is the reverse of the behaviorist-existentialist prescription, which is that we should seek to increase our freedom by “conceptualizing as many different possibilities of action as possible.”

The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’. (331)

Will and reason then are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent....As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection. (332)

Great Art Is a Moral-Cognitive Accomplishment

“One of the great merits of the moral psychology which I am proposing is that it does not contrast art and morals, but shows them to be two aspects of a single struggle.” The existentialist-behaviorist view is tacit in what she calls “the familiar Kantian-Bloomsbury slogan” of “art for arts sake.” Murdoch finds such a view of art “intolerable.”

Goodness and beauty are not to be contrasted, but are largely part of the same structure. Plato, who tells us that beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love immediately by nature, treats the beautiful as the introductory section of the good. So that aesthetic situations are not so much analogies of morals as cases of morals. (332)

For the most part, contemporary theorists of art have banished the term “beauty” even from the domain of art. Perhaps that is because beauty points toward goodness in just the way Plato suggested, and intimations of such a connection must be suppressed if one is to remain metaphysically respectable. But what if respectability is here purchased at the cost of metaphysical cowardice?

The existentialist picture of choice is connected to a crypto-democratic view of art that can’t distinguish great art from the ordinary productions of ordinary artists, which exhibit the same distortions as our everyday consciousness.

Art presents the most comprehensible examples of the almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy and also of the effort to resist this and the vision of reality which comes with success. Success in fact is rare. Almost all art is a form of fantasy-consolation and few artists achieve the vision of the real. The talent of the artist can be readily, and is naturally, employed to produce a picture whose purpose is the consolation and aggrandisement of its author and the projection of his personal obsessions and wishes. To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic.’ The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only (for all its difficulties) the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real. Of course great artists are ‘personalities’ and have special styles; even Shakespeare occasionally, though very occasionally, reveals a personal obsession. But the greatest art is ‘impersonal’ because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all. (352)

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It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. (353)

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If, still led by the clue of art, we ask further questions about the faculty which is supposed to relate us to what is real and thus bring us to what is good, the idea of compassion or love will be naturally suggested. It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love. (354)

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Good art “affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent.” (370)

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“An understanding of any art involves a recognition of hierarchy and authority.... We surrender ourselves to [good art’s] authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish. (372)

I have reproduced these passages at length to show just how fertile is Murdoch’s use of art as a window onto the everyday challenges and aspirations that come with being the sort of creature who is attracted to what is excellent. This attraction is at the heart of our capacity for clarity (such as it is). In Platonic terms, the Good is that in light of which reality reveals itself, like the sun that illuminates the Earth.

Murdoch endorses this Platonic point while rejecting the existence of the Idea of the Good, if we mean that as “people used to think that God existed” (361). This statement occurs near the outset of the essay “On the Sovereignty of ‘Good’ Over Other Concepts.” Without fanfare, she takes it as a beginning point for her inquiry that human life has “no external point or telos” (364) and “there is no God” (365).

The Good/God Question

Here Murdoch becomes elusive and frustrating. I say that not as a believer who wishes to have a formidable secular thinker on side, but on grounds internal to her own thinking. Her entire argument through these three essays is teleological and makes frequent recourse to the idea of the transcendent as the necessary anchor for our aspiration to clarity. That aspiration is inseparable from our aspiration to excellence. The good, she says, is the “magnetic center of attraction” that provides direction and authority to our efforts. As a simple statement of psychological fact, this is recognizable and straightforward. Going deeper into any field of human endeavor reveals standards and degrees of excellence that were previously invisible to one as a novice. One’s standards get higher: there is little that is very good, and perhaps nothing that is perfect. Yet “the idea of perfection” produces “an increasing sense of direction” to any endeavor. “The idea of perfection moves, and possibly changes, us (as artist, worker, agent) because it inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy” (emphasis added). “The idea of perfection is also a natural producer of order. In its light we see that A, which superficially resembles B, is really better than B” (emphasis in original). And this occurs without us needing to have “the perfect” or “the good” pinned down. Indeed it can’t be pinned down. But this is not because the good is a mere projection of our preferences. It can’t be pinned down because the good “always lies beyond, and it is from this beyond that it exercises its authority” (emphasis in original). All of this from page 350.

Yet human life “has no external point or telos,” she says, bafflingly (364). It sometimes seems as though Murdoch is trying to re-invent the wheel while scrupulously abstaining from the use of a circle, and the result is flat contradiction. It will be said that her position has no contradiction it we take the good, and the idea of perfection, only as heuristics that carry some psychological utility. It is on such grounds that she entertains the efficaciousness of prayer and even sacraments. She is compelled to think about these practices by the rest of her argument. Let me briefly rehearse the steps by which she gets to a consideration of prayer.

Murdoch’s picture of the self is that of “an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the state of the system in between moments of choice” (344). Hence the importance of training our attention, by way of forming “the system” and giving it a set, if you will. Given the naturally selfish tendencies of the system, and the limited efficacy of self-criticism and negative efforts of the will, it needs objects of love to pull it out of itself, the better to glimpse reality. The believer, she says, has an advantage in this. “The religious believer, especially if his God is conceived as a person, is in the fortunate position of being able to focus his thought upon something which is a source of energy” (345).

Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. With it goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavor which overcomes empirical limitations of personality. What is this attention like, and can those who are not religious believers conceive of profiting by such an activity? (344)

Likewise, Murdoch sees the value of sacraments. “A sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit” (356).

She quotes Wittgenstein with approval: “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.” This would seem to state an intuition that is perilously close to the idea that existence itself is a miracle.

Yet Murdoch labors valiantly to keep the God hypothesis at bay. The effort is worthwhile. Taking no shortcuts and availing herself not at all of the theological tradition, by her model she challenges the complacency of believers for whom received dogma may short-circuit the work of reflection by which religious experience (like experience altogether) is deepened. But at some point, her persistence in rejecting God, while invoking religious practices and relying on religious concepts, itself begins to look dogmatic. Or like a case of someone taking the principle of parsimony to the point of vacating her own logic. As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. And no simpler.”

Or perhaps hers is a case of intellectual scruples overdeveloped to the point of spiritual blockage, a prudish fear of flying. One wants to say to her, “My dear Iris. Live a little. Take a gamble.” One of the stock opinions of atheists is that belief in God is a consolation for the weak, who lack the courage to face a universe that does not care for human beings. But an inflection can occur in one’s perception (and it certainly feels like a case of seeing further, more clearly, in my own case) after which this looks not courageous but anxious and self-protective, in the way of a man whose dignity rests on making sure he is not duped. Or who wishes not to be in anyone’s debt and therefore refuses a gift for fear it will compromise him. This is ill-mannered.

As it happens, the occasion for my re-reading of these essays (I previously encountered them twenty years ago, as an atheist) was that my wife Marilyn and I hosted a Lent reading group devoted to them, for members of our parish. Toward the end of our sessions, Marilyn wondered if Murdoch’s theological inhibition may stem from a fear of being loved, because it entails being fully known.

Murdoch recognizes the psychological utility of an imagined “God” as an object of love. But what if this God really is other to the self, and loves us back? On Murdoch’s own account, it is in and through love that one perceives most fully. To be on the receiving end of this, to be fully known—even the number of hairs on one’s head—by a God that is the real source of Good is to take an existential risk that few modern thinkers can abide.

Yet such a hypothesis would make compelling a key intuition of Murdoch’s which, in her own treatment of it, remains mysterious. Namely, that a full and just attention – to anything at all – will reveal something to be loved. Even (as for St. Francis) the pus-filled wounds of the leper. This begins to make sense if the world and everything in it was made by an intelligence who acted out of love.

Suppose all is atoms, as the materialist says. That there should be such a thing as an atom is surely miracle enough: a nucleus, around which dance electrons that are particles and yet also waves, an ensemble of actuality that remains open to possibility. If substance itself is properly an object of wonder, gratitude and love, Murdoch‘s argument is completed.