I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Today I want to explore the core idea of Iris Murdoch’s 1964 essay The Idea of Perfection, which counts for Tuesday Book Club because after it was first published in The Yale Review it was compiled with two other essays into the 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good.
In it, Murdoch argues that moral life is not just about action but is primarily about the act of seeing people and things as they are through cultivation of a just and loving gaze. She challenges the behaviorist views of morality that look only to action to judge whether someone is acting morally or not.
She illustrates her idea with a domestic example. M is a mother-in-law who finds her daughter-in-law D “unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement.” M finds D too familiar, lacking in ceremoniousness, brusque verging on rude, and immature. “M feels that her son has married beneath him,” writes Murdoch, echoing a familiar reckful relationship trope, the idea of settling which depends upon comparing two people’s worth along a unidimensional scale.
What if, writes Murdoch, M reconsiders her perspective:
the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: “I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.”
Over time, without any change in D’s behavior (perhaps D has emigrated or even died), M begins to see D’s behavior differently: “not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile, but delightfully youthful, and so on.”
M’s actions towards D do not change — she always met D with friendliness and politeness — but her inner view has radically transformed.
To Murdoch, freedom and morality depends upon seeing clearly, not action:
What M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly. Notice the rather different image of freedom which this at once suggests. Freedom … is a function of the progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly. M’s activity is essentially something progressive, something infinitely perfectible. So far from claiming for it a sort of infallibility, this new picture has built in the notion of a necessary fallibility. M is engaged in an endless task. As soon as we begin to use words such as “love” and “justice” in characterizing M, we introduce into our whole conceptual picture of her situation the idea of progress, that is the idea of perfection: and it is just the presence of this idea which demands an analysis of mental concepts which is different from the genetic one. [emphasis mine]
This, says Murdoch, is our endless task: to work to free ourselves of the selfish constraints that keep us from seeing the world as it really is.
Murdoch’s intellectual inheritance
For Murdoch, attention is a moral discipline. Murdoch’s ideas trace back to French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil’s promotion of attention as a spiritual discipline: a self-emptying gaze that waits on reality, and ultimately on God. Both Murdoch and Weil agree that the main barrier to living well (Murdoch – morally, Weil – with grace) is the noisy, fat, hungry ego.
Murdoch was famously a neo-Platonist in a time when Plato was out of favor. In neo-Platonism, the Good exists independently of human will and draws the soul upward by attraction, not command. Murdoch’s Good works the same way. It is real but indefinable. It exists outside the self. And it is a magnetic ideal, not a rulebook.
Murdoch’s essay is dense and hard to understand, because she’s writing for philosophers for the most part, and she’s writing in response to and to engage with the British analytic philosophy community. In mid-20th-century Britain especially at Oxford, the focus was on logic, rule-following, and linguistic clarity. There was little room for metaphysics, transcendence, and ideas of the Good.
Murdoch was a prolific novelist as well as a philosopher
Murdoch is one of my favorite philosophers to study, perhaps my very favorite, because of her eclectic approach that draws from British logical positivism, Simone Weil, and ancient Greek philosophy. As well, she was an accomplished novelist, and I think next I’d like to read some of her fiction.
I’m going to start with An Unofficial Rose (1962), her sixth novel, which was available for checkout as an ebook from my local library. Here’s the synopsis:
Hugh Peronett’s life is tinged with regret: the regret of never following his passions and losing the one woman he loved. Twenty-five years ago, he ended an affair with Emma Sands, a detective novelist who had stolen his heart, to be with his wife, Fanny. Now, Fanny is gone, and both Hugh and his grown son, Randall, find themselves at a crossroads of passion and righteousness.
As Hugh, Emma, Randall, Randall’s wife, Randall’s mistress, and several others are caught in a dance of romance and rejection in bucolic rural England, they will discover the true meanings of love, companionship, and desire.
Perhaps next Tuesday’s book club post will feature something from that book.