References
- W.H. Auden, ‘Shorts II’ Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (NY: Random House, 1972), 47.
- Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (NY: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1992), 215. Hereafter MGM.
- Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); hereafter RIE. Lovibond's account of Murdoch is concentrated in §§43–45 with helpful context appearing in §§41–42, §§20–27 and §§1–3. Lovibond discusses Murdoch only in passing in her more recent work, but her remarks suggest that she stands by the essentials of her earlier assessment. See Ethical Formation (2002): 9; ‘Virtue, Nature, and Providence’ in Gill (2005): 111.
- ‘When She Was Good,’ New Republic, December 31, 2001: 32.
- London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970; reprinted (with new pagination) London: Routledge Classics, 2001.
- ‘Metaphysics and Ethics,’ reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (Allen Lane, Penguin, 1007), 75. Hereafter I refer to this collection as EM; where I have already introduced the relevant essay, I refer to the collection (with relevant page number) alone.
- ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason,’ EM, 198. Murdoch elsewhere deepens this notion, relating it to Kant's concept of imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as to Plato and Hume (MGM, ch. 11). We need not register these complexities in the present discussion, but it is good to be aware that she sees imagination in this general sense as reaching own into the most fundamental levels of cognition; aspects of this part of her view will surface in the next section.
- Cora Diamond elucidates (what she calls) ‘the ubiquity of the moral’ in Murdoch in ‘“We are Perpetually Moralists”: Iris Murdoch, Fact and Value,’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Antonaccio and Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 79–109. Compare Machiavelli: ‘I maintain that all men, when people talk about them … are described in terms of qualities that are inextricably linked to censure or to praise. So one man is described as generous, another as a miser … one is called open handed, another tight-fisted; one man is cruel, another gentle; one untrustworthy, another reliable; one effeminate and cowardly, another bold an violent; one sympathetic, another self-important; one promiscuous, another monogamous … one tough, another easy-going; one serious, another cheerful … and so on’ (The Prince, ch. 15; Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. David Wootton Hackett, 1994), 48. Murdoch believes that evaluative distinctions structure our innermost perceptions as well as our conversations about others. 9 This point is nicely discussed in Denham (2000).
- Murdoch nowhere (to my knowledge) neatly defines egoism, but makes pertinent remarks throughout her writings. This formulation is my attempt to represent Murdoch's view in a way that explicitly allows for those who suffer from inadequate self-regard to be egoists as well as those whose self-regard is excessive. (The assumption is that an inferiority complex can be just as much a cause of self-absorption and illusion, including an illusion of power, as a superiority complex.) I believe this was indeed Murdoch's intent, but that her language sometimes obscures it. Cf. Gamwell (1996): 175; Denham (2000): 622. In any event, my principal disagreement with Lovibond's interpretation of ‘egoism’ does not turn on this point but on the epistemological nature of the condition, and in this connection Murdoch's language is clear and consistent.
- Picturing the Human (Oxford, 2000), 98–99.
- With the understanding that right action follows from proper conceptualization; much of Murdoch's work is dedicated to establishing this point and I take it for granted in this paper.
- ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee,’ EM, 11.
- ‘Friend of My Youth,’ Friend of My Youth (NY: Vintage, 1991), 4–26. See also Daniel Mendelsohn's ‘The Novel of the Year’ New York Review of Books (January 2003). Although Mendelsohn gives no sign of having read Murdoch, he effectively deploys just her distinction between fantasy and moral imagination in his review of Alice Sebond's critically acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones (2002).
- This formulation is indebted to Cora Diamond's discussion of evil in ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus,’ esp. §§2 and 9. Bilder der Philosophie, R. Heinrich and H. Vetter (eds.), Wiener Reihe: Themen der Philosophie (Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), 55–90. Reprinted in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Crary and Read (Routledge, 2000), 149–173.
- What remains troubling—to me—is the suggestion that there is no critical link between the kinds of literacy a good education imparts and the imaginative activity Murdoch celebrates. This is just to suggest that Murdoch did not resolve how to keep virtue from being the prerogative of an elite, on the one hand, while acknowledging the importance of education to the qualities of min upon which it depends, on the other. But this is not Lovibond's complaint.
- Of course any one of these terms might be rightly or wrongly applied, though terms such as ‘hysterical’ (like ‘savage’ or ‘uppity’) are so indelibly associated in our minds with backward policies that they have lost their currency in political discourse. It is also the case that some of these terms, such as ‘rational,’ may function or be deployed as non-evaluative terms in certain contexts; the question of when a term is evaluative (versus ‘scientific’ for instance) is often an essential part of what must be judged.
- The hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm Thomas' nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991.
- ‘Introduction,’ Race-ing, Justice, En-gendering Power, ed. Morrison (NY: Pantheon Books, 1992), xiv-xvii.
- This need not (and should not) mean seeing them absent any social context, and I do not think this is what Murdoch has in mind. I discuss this matter in ‘Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception,’ Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- Antonaccio (2000), ch. 6 explores farther political dimensions of Murdoch's theory; Clarke (forthcoming) also has political concerns in its sights. Murdoch herself devotes a chapter of MGM to ‘Morals and Politics’ which contains material that I have not been able to examine here, including an account of ‘axioms’ that bears on her conception of rights.
- Antonaccio (2004), §3 offers an astute rejoinder to Nussbaum's criticism; my argument in the next section develops one of the directions Antonaccio traces, though I do not want to assume that she would agree with my analysis.
- ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,’ EM, 284–285.
- Murdoch's concern with the political implications of our conception of ‘the individual’ is present from her earliest writings on existentialism in the 1950s (many of which appear in EM) right up to her final work of philosophy (MGM). Antonaccio (2000) provides an overview and analysis of Murdoch's conception of the individual from which I have benefited greatly.
- ‘The Moral Decision about Homosexuality,’ Man & Society (1964), Vol. 7: 3–6.
- There would appear to be a deeply historical dimension to this way of thinking about the imagination. What is ‘obvious’ to one generation may be the result of the imaginative efforts of a previous generation; it is now incredible to us that previous Americans found blacks or women to be less than full persons (perhaps obviously so) and so on. But I think Murdoch would be quick to recognize that ‘obvious’ evaluative facts can come into question through changes of circumstance, so even here the work of moral imagination may be necessary to renew our understanding.
- I am indebted to Paul Muench, Amélie Rorty and Paul Voice for valuable comments on earlier rafts of this paper. I have also benefited from generous audiences at both the Symposium of the International Association of Women Philosophers at the University of Göteborg and the meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Helsinki.