Here are some of my thoughts re: the first of three essays in The Sovereignty of Good, entitled “The Idea of Perfection,” written by British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–1989). The work was originally the 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture, given at the University College of North Wales; in 1964, it was published in The Yale Review.
“I can only choose within the world I can see” (p. 36–7).
Murdoch’s main thesis is that our moral life is primarily a function of how we see. True seeing is akin to giving proper attention to things in our world, where attention is equivalent to “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality,” à la Simone Weil (p. 33). Giving the right kind of loving attention is characteristic of an active moral agent, according to Murdoch.
Cultivating this loving attention is a first-personal task — and arguably the most important task of our individual lives. When properly undertaken, it consists in a persistent effort to dissolve the captivating illusions and carefully-woven yet false narratives we tell ourselves — the cherrypicked, reductive, and superficially perfect picture (i.e. “the Instagram profile”) of our fragmented, discursive, and vulnerable lives. Only by continually improving this first-personal act of seeing can we transform and therefore unify our selves with the world.
What we pay attention to, by virtue of our paying attention to it, is what “imperceptibility” gets built into our own value structures. Murdoch wants to remind us of the moments between choices which end up shaping the motivation and choice structures from which we make morally-salient decisions. On her view, the moral life is thus made in every moment of our lives, not just assessed in the moments of morally-salient decisions (e.g. Trolley Problem), as often considered by utilitarian philosophers.
She argues against what was making the contemporary moral philosophy (a “behaviorist, existentialist, utilitarian” concoction) superficial: the reduction of the good to extrinsically observable acts. At the time, contemporary philosophers claimed that thoughts were just “shadows” of acts, and acts could be abstracted away from one’s whole being and morally assessed (namely, according to logic by objective observers):
“I can decide what to say but not what the words mean which I have said. I can decide what to do but I am not the master of the significance of my act” (p. 20).
Murdoch wants modern ethics to not lose sight of individual history — the inner acts of progressive seeing as part of and belonging to our complex, whole beings — which gives rise to our actions in the world. In order to do so, she suggests the usage of “secondary specialized” normative-descriptive terms (i.e. “thick ethical concepts”) like “kind” and “courageous” as opposed to the “primary general” (i.e. “thin ethical concepts”) terms like “right” and “good” — which are descriptively vacuous.
In addition, Murdoch sees art and morals as inextricable (p. 39–40) and thus the Good as something aesthetic and reflective of our true nature. Goodness and beauty are closely linked, as in Aristotlean ethics.
“If apprehension of good is apprehension of the individual and the real, then good partakes of the infinite elusive character of reality” (p. 41).
In conclusion, Murdoch’s essay is an expression of her metaphysical background for the moral life and precisely not a formula of how to act in any and all moral situations, a formula which she claims does not exist.
I am interested in seeing where she takes this collection of essays. As a teaser for Murdoch’s ideas in the other two essays (“On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” and “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”), here is a quote later in which she seems to be exploring the idea of no-self, something I’ve been dabbling with experientially via meditation for the last few years:
“Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”
