The Murdochian Mind

Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, Mark Hopwood, Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, Mark Hopwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000592627
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist of extraordinary breadth and originality whose work defies simple categorisation. Her philosophical writing engages with an astonishingly wide range of figures, from Plato and Kant to Sartre and Heidegger, and her work increasingly inspires debate in ethics, aesthetics, religion, and literature.

The Murdochian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's philosophical work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. Divided into five clear parts, the volume covers the following areas:

• A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
• Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, such as love, moral vision, and attention.
• Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein.
• Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
• Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics.
• The application of Murdoch's thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment.

Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch's philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies.

Part 1 Reading Murdoch

1 The Importance of Murdoch’s Early Encounters with Marcel and Anscombe

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003031222-3

After graduating with a first in Mods and Greats in 1942, Iris Murdoch left Oxford to spend the remainder of the war in London working in the Treasury. In 1945, she joined UNRRA (the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency), and in September that year, she was sent to Austria where she worked in a camp for displaced persons. During that time, she decided to return to philosophy, and applied for research fellowships at Vassar College, New York, and Newnham College, Cambridge, as well as a lectureship at Sheffield. She resigned from UNRRA in July 1946, planning to take up the fellowship at Vassar College, but her application for a US visa was. Having already turned down the award of a Sarah Smithson Fellowship at Newnham College, she was forced to move back to her parents’ home in Chiswick, London.

For at least some of the academic year 1946–1947, Murdoch was in contact, by letter and occasionally in person, with her erstwhile Oxford undergraduate tutor, Donald MacKinnon. In Spring 1947, she submitted a second, successful application for a Sarah Smithson fellowship. In his reference letter in support of her second application, MacKinnon remarks that Murdoch is ‘on the threshold of creative work of a high order’.¹

This chapter outlines the nature of that ‘creative work’. We show how Murdoch’s close study of the Christian existentialist philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel (1883–1973) in the academic year 1946–1947 came to inflect both her early critique of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism and her early attempts to show the limits of logical positivism. We explain how once at Cambridge, Murdoch’s exposure to Wittgenstein’s method, through her philosophical friendship with Elizabeth Anscombe, gave her the conceptual means to recast those aspects of Marcel’s thought (as well as those of Martin Buber) that she believed were important but, as she wrote in her second application, ‘vague’. We show, finally, how both strands of Murdoch’s thinking are later brought into synchrony in the much-discussed example of M&D. This, in turn, allows us to isolate Murdoch’s understanding of the individual’s relation to their own ‘ghostly past’.²

On the threshold

Iris Murdoch arrived in Cambridge in October 1947 with a suitcase full of avant-garde French writing, including perhaps not one but two copies of Jean Paul Sartre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness.³ It may have contained the copy of Marcel’s 1938 play La Soif: piece en trois actes (1938) now held at her archives at Kingston University; it is inscribed on the fly-leaf, ‘from Donald’ and, in Murdoch’s hand, ‘Iris Murdoch, London April 1947’.

Marcel is known to have had a profound influence on MacKinnon, in particular his use of the language of ‘inwardness’. In his preface to the 1949 English translation of Marcel’s Être et Avoir, MacKinnon writes that ‘[w]here some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their “inside” when we so often in our discussion think simply of their “outside”’ (Marcel 1949: 2). Just how much tuition Murdoch received from MacKinnon during the 1946–1947 academic year is hard to say; it is possible that MacKinnon and Murdoch were discovering Marcel’s thought simultaneously. Either way, it is arguably through the lens of Marcel that Murdoch first started to assemble her own distinctive critique of ‘that strange genius’ Jean Paul Sartre, as she refers to him in her 1946 Smithson proposal.⁴ Twelve months later, in her second proposal, Sartre’s writings are only ‘colourful and interesting’.⁵

We begin with some jottings from her journal that bring the content of that early critique into view. An entry from late February 1947 reads: ‘Connect Marcel Etre/avoir analyses with Sartre’s ES/PS analyses. Similar at points but very different. What I have is exposable to me or other’.⁶ And a day later: ‘For M. being is only immanent to the loving thought—not to the judgment on it. Judgment bears on an “it” and has not ontological value’.⁷ Here ‘ES/PS’ refers to Sartre’s distinction between en-soi (in-itself) and pour-soi (for itself). Pour-soi is the being of consciousness; en-soi is non-conscious being or being that has no consciousness of itself. Accordingly, en-soi ‘does not enter into any connection with what is not itself’ (Sartre 1943/2003: 22). It cannot then posit itself as being what it is not, which, according to Sartre, excludes it from temporality.⁸

Marcel’s categories of ‘being’ and ‘having’ are, as Murdoch indicates, ‘very different’. For Marcel, we must distinguish between the realm of problems and the realm of mysteries. A ‘problem’ is something that can be publicly formulated using concepts that are ‘objective’, where a community of enquiry is presupposed and where it is assumed that the solution is available to be discovered by anyone—for instance, the explanation as to why a car has broken down (Sweetman 2011: 5). In contrast, there is a realm of human experience that is ‘mysterious’ insofar as it cannot be fully captured conceptually or formulated publicly using objective categories. Among the mysteries of being are our experience of our own bodies, the nature of sensation, and experience of love, hope, and faith. Since the concrete existing individual is irreducibly involved in all of these experiences, they cannot be adequately captured or explained by means of abstract concepts and nor can they be empirically verified. They belong to the world of ‘being’ as opposed to the realm of ‘having’ (Marcel 1949: 154–175). Crucially, the world of having often implicates body and mind. I can ‘have’ measles. I can ‘have’ an opinion. Both these things can be considered or expressed objectively. Both can be transmitted. It is this technical use of ‘have’ that Murdoch seems to have in mind when she notes above: ‘What I have is exposable to me or other’.

When it comes to human relationships, Marcel holds that to relate to another as spectator is to treat the other, now in Martin Buber’s terms (terms of which Marcel approves), as an It, an object. The I-It relation stands in contrast to the I-Thou relation, which is manifest in interpersonal experience (Buber 1958). ‘This is not an obscure mystical conception, but a normal experience which most people will recognize if they consider their own lives’, writes Murdoch in her second proposal.⁹ In such experiences, there is a connection between being and value which eludes capture by, and in, the objective realm of ‘problems’, the realm wherein, as Murdoch notes above, what is encountered and judged is an ‘it’. In 1947, she locates the key difference between Sartre, on the one hand, and Marcel and Buber, on the other, here: for Sartre, pour-soi is conscious of a non-conscious realm of being-in-itself (or of himself as an object for others). In this sense, the world of which the subject is conscious is ‘empty’ and the subject is a ‘lonely’ and autonomous creator of value. But for Marcel and Buber, the transcendent world of interpersonal relations and incarnate experience already teems with value. It is alive with other individuals—for instance, one’s family—with whom one communes as I and Thou (Marcel 2011: 79–86). Perhaps with this distinction in mind, Murdoch’s 1947 proposal records a certainty: ‘Sartre is wrong to make the free act alone the crucial feature of his ontology’.¹⁰

Murdoch is not, however, without criticism for Marcel and Buber. She contrasts both kinds of existentialist approach with a second trend that she finds current: logical positivism. Logical positivism is a philosophical approach that had been gaining ground in Britain since A. J. Ayer’s popularising Language, Truth and Logic (1972 [1936]). Broadly speaking, for the logical positivist, only tautologies and statements that are verifiable are meaningful. Plainly, this would pose a problem for an existentialist like Marcel, for whom being, value and meaning reside precisely in the interstices of what is not, in Murdoch’s terms, ‘exposable’: that is, verifiable and observable. And this presents Murdoch with a challenge. While she is sympathetic to the existentialism of Marcel and Buber, she finds that they ‘err’ in a certain ‘vagueness’, a ‘failure to define their terms’; they take for granted a particular ‘transcendent background’.¹¹ (She repeats this criticism of Marcel in 1951 when she reviews the first volume of his Gifford Lectures The Mystery of Being: Reflection & Mystery.) At the same time, logical positivism (for which she expresses ‘admiration’ though doubting that it is ‘the whole of philosophy’) is impotent to help, because the method by which it renders language precise (as opposed to vague) would obliterate the very phenomenon that the existentialists have identified. She concludes: ‘A bringing of their concepts [i.e. Marcel and Buber’s] into a more logical framework of thought, and the attempt to relate them to the traditional problems of the theory of knowledge should prove illuminating’.¹²

This is the promise of the creative work that Murdoch was on the threshold of in 1947. Her plan, roughly, is to make space for non-exposable, non-verifiable thought and experience within some logical framework and ontology. She has some ideas about the direction this might take. For instance, though the concept of dialogue is central to Buber’s treatment of the I-Thou relation, he does not analyse the respect in which dialogue is mediated by language (symbol and gesture). Murdoch proposes to consider dialogic communities of diverse sizes, including intimate communities of just two individuals. She mentions love letters.

In the remainder of this chapter, we show how Murdoch’s project began to take shape once in Cambridge where she was herself was exposed, in a very direct way, to the later work of Wittgenstein, chiefly through her friendship with Elizabeth Anscombe. In particular, we chart Murdoch’s reflection on what would later appear as Anscombe’s first published paper ‘The Reality of the Past’. This paper and its subject are—we believe—significant both in the context of the project that Murdoch articulated in her 1947 proposal and in her subsequent philosophy. In the next section, we prepare the reader by saying a little more about Marcel’s reflections on time, before turning to Anscombe’s paper and Murdoch’s reception of it. In the final section, we show that this early intellectual background promises to cast the much-discussed example of M&D in a new light.

Gabriel Marcel on time

Marcel’s Être et Avoir, first published in 1935, is avowedly unsystematic and takes the form of a series of diary entries (some undated) and notes, assembled together with essays on various interlocking themes. For our purposes, what is noteworthy are Marcel’s meditations on time and temporality. Ideally, detailed exposition would be offered,¹³ but we aim just to give the reader a flavour of Marcel’s scattered reflections—and here, as elsewhere, the distinction between the realm of problems and of mysteries offers a hermeneutic guide.

Marcel observes an essential connection between ‘(a) being thought of or treated as an object and (b) possessing a past that can be reconstructed’ (Marcel 1949: 19). The conception of time whereby an object’s past is reconstructed is described by Marcel as ‘cinematographic’; it can be reconstructed, event by event, as by a pure spectator. However, ‘[t]he more we treat the world as spectacle, the more unintelligible it necessarily seems from a metaphysical point of view because the relation then established between us and the world is an intrinsically absurd one’ (Marcel 1949: 18–19). I cannot place ‘myself outside myself’, or view myself as a spectator would view an object.

This ‘cinematographic’ conception of time can be contrasted with one that is concrete and engaged. Promises are made by individuals to others, treated not as an object but as Thou. Marcel wonders what the nature of this commitment is. Suffice to say that ‘we cannot reduce ourselves [or others] to things of the moment’ (Marcel 1949: 46–47). To promise, ‘to swear fidelity’ to another person is to presuppose or have faith or hope in some mysterious constant in being (an ontological permanence) to which one beholds oneself. Faith or hope is needed, for I cannot know what kind of person I (or another) will be tomorrow (Sweetman: 1–8).

Murdoch’s journals reveal repeated meditation on these and nearby thoughts (interleaved with reflections on an extraordinary range of thinkers, as will become a hallmark of her mature work). She notes that fidelity, a technical term for Marcel, is linked to ‘a fundamental ignorance of the future’; hope is ‘a protest dictated by love’.¹⁴ Concerning ‘existence’, Murdoch jots that it is an ‘attempt to reconcile my past, present & future’.¹⁵ Whether she is thinking specifically of Marcel here is not clear. She would have been aware, however, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Reading Murdoch
• Part 2: Core themes and concepts
• Part 3: Critical encounters
• Part 4: Art, religion, and politics
• Part 5: Contemporary moral issues
• Index