Philosopher
Iris Murdoch
1919–1999
British philosopher and novelist whose Sovereignty of Good defended a Platonic moral realism, in which moral life is chiefly a matter of attentive, loving vision of others.
I can only choose within the world I can see.
Murdoch was born into an Irish Protestant family, which moved to London when she was very young. At Oxford during the war she overlapped with Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley, the “wartime quartet” who all pushed back against the Oxford orthodoxy of their day. After the war she worked in Belgium and Austria for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, where she encountered Sartre’s existentialism, and her first book, in 1953, was on Sartre.
She taught at Oxford from 1948 to 1963, helped introduce Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus to English-speaking readers, and drew on Continental philosophy, Christian mystics and Buddhist thought as well as Wittgenstein. From 1954 she was also a novelist, publishing twenty-six novels. The essays collected in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) later inspired philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Cora Diamond and Martha Nussbaum. She died in 1999, after a decline into Alzheimer’s disease that her husband, John Bayley, described in a memoir.
Key ideas
- Against the choosing will
- Both Oxford moral philosophy and Sartre’s existentialism made the free, choosing will the centre of morality, with no objective values outside the individual to guide it. Murdoch found this picture false to moral experience.
- Seeing before doing
- The fundamental moral task is to see reality, above all other people, justly and lovingly. “I can only choose within the world I can see”, so what we notice already shapes what we can do.
- Attention
- Borrowing the word from Simone Weil, Murdoch called attention “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality”. A mother-in-law, M, who at first finds her son’s wife D vulgar, can come to see her as refreshingly simple and spontaneous by patient, honest attention, without anything outward changing.
- The sovereignty of Good
- Declaring herself “a kind of Platonist”, Murdoch held that Good is like a light that lets us see goodness in particular things, known and loved by ascending from good persons, art and nature. “A genuine mysteriousness attaches to the idea of goodness and the Good.”
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- England
- Period
- Contemporary
Influences
Influenced by
- Platoc. 429 – 347 BCE
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804criticised
- Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951
- Jean-Paul Sartre1905–1980
- Simone Weil1909–1943
Iris Murdoch1919–1999
Influenced by
- Platoc. 429 – 347 BCE
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804criticised
- Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951
- Jean-Paul Sartre1905–1980
- Simone Weil1909–1943
Iris Murdoch1919–1999
Where these links come from
- Iris Murdoch drew on Plato. Source: Lawrence Blum, Iris Murdoch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Iris Murdoch drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant. Source: Lawrence Blum, Iris Murdoch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Iris Murdoch drew on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Source: Lawrence Blum, Iris Murdoch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Iris Murdoch drew on Jean-Paul Sartre. Source: Lawrence Blum, Iris Murdoch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Iris Murdoch drew on Simone Weil. Source: Lawrence Blum, Iris Murdoch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 1953
- The Sovereignty of Good, 1970
- Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Sources
- Lawrence Blum, Iris Murdoch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy