Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy

Sabina Lovibond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780415429986
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136819353
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Iris Murdoch was one of the best-known philosophers and novelists of the post-war period. In this book, Sabina Lovibond explores the tangled issue of Murdoch's stance towards gender and feminism, drawing upon the evidence of her fiction, philosophy, and other public statements.

As well as analysing Murdoch's own attitudes, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy is also a critical enquiry into the way we picture intellectual, and especially philosophical, activity. Appealing to the idea of a 'social imaginary' within which Murdoch's work is located, Lovibond examines the sense of incongruity or dissonance that may still affect our image of a woman philosopher, even where egalitarian views officially hold sway.

The first thorough exploration of Murdoch and gender, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy is a fresh contribution to debates in feminist philosophy and gender studies, and essential reading for anyone interested in Murdoch's literary and philosophical writing.

1

A WOMAN PHILOSOPHER

Why not?

The prophet

With electric blue eyes and a prophet’s beard, [he] stands out as a man drawn to big ideas, at a time when university life is ever more specialised. ¹

These words, from a recent British newspaper feature about a Harvard professor, contain plenty of food for thought. The genre is familiar enough: in an article combining exposition and interview, we expect a few words of stage setting to establish a ‘personality’ for our subject. Still, we might wonder how exactly these details of the professor’s physical presence are supposed to bear on his identity as a ‘man drawn to big ideas’. The beard (as shown in the original article) is short, neat and unspectacular; the eyes are indeed a lively shade of blue, though the electricity, naturally, has to be taken on trust. What we have to infer is simply that our correspondent, face to face with this particular fellow-human, is ready and willing to experience the moment as one in which he is being granted access to a world of creative brilliance.

As it happens, the two men are already well acquainted: they are fellow-members of a research team and co-authors of a forthcoming book, which is the occasion of the article. So the writer is not judging solely by appearances; he has a wealth of pre-existing information to draw upon. He does, however, seem to expect his readers to enter into the excitement of the encounter with a convincing specimen of the species ‘man of ideas’.

Of course, it is not literally by virtue of having electric blue eyes and a beard that the professor ‘stands out’ in this way. It is just that these attributes, at least as exhibited by him, are imaginatively appropriate: they evoke the ‘mythology’ of the brilliant academic, rather as Roland Barthes’s sweating Romans serve as mythical signifiers (in the cinema) of a process of solemn thought. ² The physical description is a rhetorical device which we may be able to accept with equanimity; it steers us towards belief in more than just a physiognomy, but perhaps, after reading a paragraph or two, we were headed in that direction anyway.

On the other hand, if the myth-friendly attributes are worthy of notice – if they can help, even indirectly or subliminally, to secure a claim to intellectual attention – shouldn’t we spare a thought for those less fortunate in this respect than our sample professor? What about those many gifted scholars whose eyes are of no more than average brightness, and who are unable to grow a decent beard – or any beard at all?

This book is written from the standpoint of the mythically disadvantaged – not the whole of that entity, to be sure, but one of its constituent sub-groups. The book’s main purpose is to contribute to a certain line of reflection on ‘women and philosophy’, or more generally, women and intellectual or theoretical activity. My concerns will be symbolic rather than statistical. No doubt the statistics would tell an interesting story: for example, the 2009 printing of the poster ‘Oxford Philosophers and their Research Interests’ listed fifteen female names out of a total of sixty-nine, or just under 22 per cent – and this some thirty years after the Oxford men’s colleges went mixed. However, I will proceed not by counting the number of women currently teaching or studying philosophy in universities, but by asking how far the discipline demands to be pictured, even today, as an essentially male domain; in particular, whether there is still some obstacle in the collective imagination to accepting a woman in the role of philosopher (or ‘master-thinker’ ³). My discussion will draw inspiration from feminist writers in what might roughly be called the tradition of Enlightenment modernism – writers for whom there is an expectation that sooner or later, with the dismantling of inherited male privileges, women’s status as the ‘second sex’ will be superseded and both sexes will come to participate on equal terms in political and cultural life. This is a state of affairs which is far from having been realized up to now, even in the ‘developed’ world.

Introducing Iris Murdoch

But I want also to focus on the case of an individual woman philosopher, Iris Murdoch (1919–99). The reasons for this choice will emerge, I hope, as we go along; but for anyone in Britain reviewing the story of ‘women in philosophy’, the name of Murdoch ⁴ is in any case likely to be among the first to spring to mind. In Bryan Magee’s memorable 1978 TV series ⁵ (for which the catchment area was Anglo-American philosophy at large), Murdoch had the strange – but nonetheless genuine – distinction of being the only one of a total of fifteen ‘men of ideas’ who was, in fact, a woman. Yet her achievements in philosophy are not even the main ground of her fame, since she is best known in the wider world as the author of twenty-six novels, published over a forty-year period (from 1954 to 1995). Not everyone likes them, ⁶ but there are evidently plenty of people who find in them – as I have done – a source of thrilling and addictive entertainment. An interview given by Murdoch in 1980 records that ‘it is as a novelist that she wants to be remembered’, ⁷ and my own guess is that her wish will come true, assuming of course that civilization clings on and people continue to read books at all. In the meantime it is reassuring to know that when asked ‘What effect would you like your books to have?’, she was content to reply, ‘I’d like people to enjoy reading them’, and that she welcomed readers who appreciated a ‘jolly good yarn’. ⁸

Murdoch was a full-on ‘Oxford philosopher’ – in her case, a tutorial fellow at St Anne’s College – for only fifteen years (1948–63). ⁹ However, during those years – and afterwards – she published some highly influential work arguing, among other things, for rejection of the dogmatic neo-Humian dualism of ‘fact’ and ‘value’ which held sway at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s. (Hilary Putnam notices Murdoch as an early protester against this orthodoxy and praises The Sovereignty of Good ¹⁰ as ‘a wonderful book’. ¹¹) This aspect of Murdoch’s work connects her with other well-known exponents of ethical objectivism such as Philippa Foot, David Wiggins and John McDowell, but her philosophical idiom is very different from theirs – partly because of her close engagement with continental European thinkers such as Sartre (the subject of her first book) and Simone Weil, and partly because of the intensely personal reading of Plato that informs her writings on ethics and aesthetics. Murdoch understands philosophy as a quest for truth, but not as an exercise in strictly dispassionate reflection: she is not afraid to try and rouse us from our moral slumbers, to instil idealism (at any rate in the sphere of individual morality; politics is another matter, as we shall see in Chapter 2), and to make free use of the language and imagery of religion – mainly Christianity, though she also has a soft spot for Buddhism. (I refer in this non-committal way to ‘language and imagery’ because, while Murdoch describes herself in her late work Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals as a ‘Christian fellow-traveller’, ¹² she maintains in her more careful moments that the ‘demythologization’ of religion is ‘absolutely necessary in this age’, ¹³ and that what are needed today are ‘conceptions of religion without God’. ¹⁴)

Murdoch and feminism: first thoughts

Along with her contemporaries Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, Murdoch is clearly an inspiring figure for women teachers (and students) of philosophy, but her interest for feminist philosophers in particular is due to more than just an abstract recognition of her gifts. Some central themes from SG, especially that of loving attention to a reality other than the ‘fat relentless ego’, ¹⁵ have struck a chord with advocates of the ‘ethics of care’ such as Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking, ¹⁶ or with religious feminists like Janet Martin Soskice who dispute the received idea of the ‘spiritual life’ as demanding ‘solitude and collectedness’. ¹⁷ More recently, Megan Laverty has credited Murdoch with a ‘feminist intervention in the masculine bias that has historically dominated romantic thinking’. ¹⁸ And certainly Murdoch’s well-known sketch of the ‘man’, or moral agent, presented in the existentialist-behaviourist model she criticizes – ‘free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy’ ¹⁹ – seems to show a certain gender-related acerbity: this ‘man’ must indeed be the hero, not the heroine, of the books Murdoch has in mind. Her examples of genuine virtue, too, often seem calculated to reproach philosophy for its habitual neglect of women’s experience: ‘the mother loving the retarded child or loving the tiresome elderly relation’, ²⁰ or the hostile mother-in-law struggling inwardly to overcome her own prejudices (in the ‘M and D’ story discussed below, p. 23). ²¹

So Murdoch’s work in ethics has offered some appealing points of departure for explicitly feminist thinking. But if we ask whether Murdoch herself can be regarded as a friend or ally of feminism, the picture becomes more complicated. Her public statements on the subject – of which there are quite a number – are enthusiastic in general terms about ‘women’s liberation’, and insist repeatedly on the importance of educational equality for women; but they are very cool towards the idea of a female ‘predicament’ or ‘viewpoint’, and leave us in no doubt of her contempt for ‘rubbish like “black studies” or “women’s studies” ’. ²² Murdoch, then, is hardly an obvious contributor to any discussion of the politics of knowledge; and within the growing body of commentary on her fiction, a consensus seems to be emerging that, despite her keen interest in issues of sexual identity and in the dynamics of sexual desire, she cannot be regarded as a feminist writer. ²³ Yet because of these interests, and the fearless way she expresses them in her novels (and to some extent in her philosophical work), Murdoch sets before us a body of material of great importance for our understanding of the ‘gendered’ character of philosophy, and hence of the way sexual difference affects our experience of participating in it – whether as women or men, and whether as teachers or learners. I am not claiming that Murdoch makes it her aim to promote this understanding, since her declared allegiance is to the familiar ‘liberal feminist’ ideal of access to the intellectual mainstream. I will, however, argue that she does so almost in spite of herself by virtue of her rich inventiveness and by a tendency (in the novels) to emotional display and melodrama, shedding light on a variety of psychological patterns to which any critical study of epistemology – or indeed of morals – would do well to pay attention.

Murdoch’s interest in female education was of long standing: for example, we hear from her biographer Peter Conradi that ‘In 1960 she entered a Times debate about offering women a “softer” education, which struck her forcibly as the wrong way to protect them from their current position as “second-class citizens”.’ ²⁴ Despite the claim by literary critic Hilda Spear that ‘Education does not … play a major part in [Murdoch’s] novels’, ²⁵ it seems to me that the novels do in fact dwell in some detail on what people are studying or have studied, and with what success; they also show us many examples of female education prematurely curtailed, and of overweening male arrogance which the reader can attribute to the fact that the men in question have received, over a lifetime, more than their fair share of social (and academic) encouragement relative to their female peers. In the end, however, I believe Murdoch’s attitude here is compromised by the strength of her own investment in the male subject-position with which, for narrative purposes, she so vividly identifies.

At a colloquium held at Caen, France in 1978, Murdoch was asked to comment on the fact that when she uses a first-person narrator in her novels, the narrative voice is always male. She replied as follows:

About writing as a man, this is instinctive. I mean I think I identify more with my male characters than my female characters. I write through the consciousness of women in those stories which have different narrators, so I write as women also in those stories as well as men; but I suppose it’s a kind of comment on the unliberated position of women … I think I want to write about things on the whole where it doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, in which case you’d better be male, because a male represents ordinary human beings, unfortunately, as things stand at the moment, whereas a woman is always a woman! In fact of course I’m very interested in problems about the liberation of women, particularly, for instance, in so far as these concern education. I’m interested in them both as a citizen and as a writer, so they do come in to some extent … It’s a freer world that you are in as a man than as a woman … ²⁶

This passage, obviously, represents an off-the-cuff response and may therefore not merit the kind of solemn dissection invited by the text of a book. Yet we may feel that while Murdoch’s choice of the words ‘unliberated’ and ‘liberation’ signals a wish to reach out to any feminist sympathizers in her audience, the uneasy tone of the passage as a whole shows an awareness that, on the subject of gender identification, she has some explaining to do.

Certainly Murdoch’s tireless exploration of the masculine viewpoint, and the artistic gusto with which she plunges into a world of narcissistic, resentful, half-baked or abject femininity, present a challenge to the sympathetic feminist critic. Deborah Johnson rises to this challenge and, while conceding that Murdoch ‘cannot ultimately be claimed as a feminist writer’, ²⁷ plausibly suggests that the male-voice narratives may be seen as exercises in subversive mimesis as described by Luce Irigaray, and that an anarchic female presence like that of Dora in The Bell ‘subverts patriarchal logical expectations’ and is ‘characterized by the presence of jouissance’, ²⁸ in contrast to the dour industriousness of Dora’s academic husband, Paul. The former point, at any rate, connects the somewhat elusive concept of mimesis with the familiar literary device whereby an alternative ‘voice’ is adopted with ironic or mischievous intent: thus the first-pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Woman Philosopher
• 2. The Simone Weil Factor
• 3. Men, Women and Learning
• 4. ‘What is She Afraid of?’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index