Reduce Ourselves to Zero?: Sabina
Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, and Feminism
€ AL
€ AINEN
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NORA HAM
In her book Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy, Sabina Lovibond argues that Iris
Murdoch’s philosophical and literary work is covertly dedicated to an ideology of female
subordination. The most central and interesting aspect of her multifaceted argument concerns Murdoch’s focus on the individual person’s moral self-scrutiny and transformation
of consciousness. Lovibond suggests that this focus is antithetical to the kind of communal
and structural criticism of society that has been essential for the advance of feminism.
She further reads Murdoch’s dismissal of “structuralism” as proof of Murdoch’s alleged
conservatism and neglect of feminist concerns. In this article I will argue that this line of
argument—though not completely off-base concerning the awkwardness of Murdoch’s relation to feminism—(1) gives a misleading picture of Murdoch’s philosophical and ideological
position, and (2) establishes a problematic (though not unusual) antagonism between
moral self-scrutiny and social criticism, which a closer look at Murdoch’s work can help
us overcome.
INTRODUCTION
A man with “electric blue eyes and a prophet’s beard”—this is the cultural stereotype
of “the philosopher” that opens Sabina Lovibond’s book Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (Lovibond 2011). From a newspaper article about a Harvard professor, the
image crystallizes a whole world of expectations and assumptions that, persistently,
make women scarce and often uncomfortable in philosophy. Lovibond’s aim is to
address the issue of women in philosophy on a symbolic level, making use of “the relatively low-key idea of an ‘imaginative background’ established in our early years
through a culture of story-telling.” Her object materials are Iris Murdoch’s philosophy
and novels, which she proceeds to analyze in terms of their “imaginative background.” As she puts it: “I want to see if we can identify any recurring imaginative
patterns which are not just those of one artistically gifted individual, but form part of
Hypatia vol. 30, no. 4 (Fall 2015) © by Hypatia, Inc.
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the equipment available to us collectively, in the European tradition, for grasping
what a ‘philosopher’ is and who can become one” (Lovibond 2011, 7).
Formulated thus, Lovibond’s project is very close to and yet strikingly different
from the one undertaken by Marije Altorf (Altorf 2011). Lightly leaning on Michele
Le Doeuff’s work (Le Doeuff 2002; 2007), Altorf analyzes the philosophical “imaginaries” of three biographies of Murdoch, discussing how they fail to conceptualize her
as a “philosopher,” constructing her primarily as a “woman” and secondarily as a “literary author.” She then moves on to reconstruct Murdoch as a “woman philosopher,”
focusing on both her intellectual integrity as a philosopher and the intellectual benefits of being an outsider in terms of gender and, eventually, also in terms of professional orientation. This latter reconstruction is brief and suggestive, and certainly
provides food for further thought.1
Lovibond picks up both of these threads: the analysis of our shared cultural
imagery and the analysis of Murdoch’s work in these terms. But instead of Altorf’s
“woman philosopher,” she finds a body of work fundamentally (de)formed by a
covertly patriarchal imaginary. Lovibond, thus, is not saving a woman philosopher
from neglect or maltreatment (which was Altorf’s story and which would indeed
be the ordinary story), but is rather charging a woman philosopher with deep
complicity in a patriarchal agenda. This manner of approaching the issue proves
to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Murdoch’s oeuvre does provide
Lovibond with ample material to reflect over, and drives home the point that
woman philosophers may be no less part of the patriarchal order than male ones.
On the other hand, one of the foremost woman philosophers of the twentieth
century is burdened with suggestive (though eventually inconclusive) accusations
of complicity. What is most problematic is how Lovibond’s argument clouds the
sense in which Murdoch is a potential companion rather than an adversary to
the kind of roughly poststructuralist ethics that Lovibond is using in her criticism.2 In what follows I will argue that understanding this companionship is vital
for a fair appreciation of Murdoch’s work and its potential in the context of feminist philosophy. In order to do so, we will first need to take a closer look at
Lovibond’s argument.
WORK
ON
ONE’S SOUL
From the mid-twentieth century on, Murdoch argued that modern philosophy, both
in its analytic and French existentialist guises, is overly concerned with action and
choice, operating with a na€ıve conception of the will and a “liberal” freely choosing
agent, producing a picture of morality that is narrow and biased and ultimately
unhelpful in relation to the complexities of our moral lives. She wanted to supplant
this thin understanding of the moral agent with a richer idea of the moral person as
a complex human being with an inner life and morally significant movements of
consciousness.3
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745
I want to talk about consciousness or self-being as the fundamental mode
or form of moral being. As contrasted with what, or distinguished from
what? Well, as distinguished from conceptions depending solely upon
choice, will and action, from voluntarism and ethical behaviorism, and
indeed from Kant, for whom phenomenal awareness (the mess of actual
consciousness) is without value. (Murdoch 1992, 171–72)
Quite independently of any specific feminist intentions of her own, she has been
appropriated by woman philosophers who have found her emphases concerning moral
philosophy and personhood more illuminating than those of her action-centered contemporaries.4 Lovibond cites Megan Laverty, who has put forward Murdoch’s work as
a “feminist intervention in the masculine bias that has historically dominated romantic thinking” (Lovibond 2011, 3). Indeed, as Lovibond points out, the hero of modern moral philosophy and literature—“free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational,
responsible, brave”—criticized by Murdoch, is certainly male, and “her examples of
genuine virtue, too, often seem calculated to reproach philosophy for its habitual
neglect of women’s experience” (3). The inward, soulful, multifaceted perspective on
moral consciousness, and her persistent emphasis on the good person as “loving” and
moral perception as a “loving gaze,” could perhaps be seen as providing an ethics that
is culturally coded as feminine.
But the interest in the inner life seems, for Murdoch herself, to have little to do
with gendered sensitivities. As Murdoch puts it: “I think I want to write about things
on the whole where it does not matter whether you’re male or female, in which case
you better be male, because a male represents ordinary human beings, unfortunately,
as things stand at the moment, whereas a woman is always a woman!”5 (Murdoch in
Dooley 2003, 82; Lovibond 2011, 5). This remark is served as an answer to the
question why Murdoch mainly writes through male protagonists. Quite strikingly
(from a contemporary feminist perspective), she suggests that this is the way to talk
about universal issues of human life, whereas writing through the voice of a woman
(as things stand) would get her caught up in partial “women’s issues.” As if a male
position in patriarchy weren’t partial and biased!
Yet there are plenty of passages in writings and interviews where she takes an outspoken feminist position: “I’m not very much interested in the female predicament.
I’m passionately in favor of women’s lib, in the general, ordinary, proper sense of
women’s having equal rights. And, most of all, equal education” (Murdoch in Dooley
2003, 61).6 And if this sounds like a slightly dated “rights feminism,” then surely her
alternative perspective on perceptiveness and the inner life has opened the gates for
a new kind of feminist ethics.
But Lovibond is not convinced. First, Murdoch’s feminist pronouncements (as
above) seem to her oblivious to the complexities of female subordination beyond the
sphere of formal rights. “Her public statements, 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
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contempt for ‘rubbish like “women’s studies” or “black studies”’” (Lovibond 2011, 4).
Second, it is in Lovibond’s view precisely by articulating an ethical perspective that
elevates some of the virtues of traditional femininity that Murdoch becomes most
problematic from a feminist point of view. How can this be?
A main source of the problem here, as Lovibond perceives it, is the influence of
Simone Weil and her concept of “attention”:
Murdoch is heedful of Weil’s teaching in ethics, religion and politics
alike . . . but her most self-conscious borrowings are centered on the themes
of attention and obedience. For Weil the concept of attention has a general
epistemological significance not limited to ethics: active enquiry, strenuous
attempts at problem solving, are in her view over-rated, serving only to
“clear the ground”; they are low grade phenomena tainted by the “heat of
the chase,” the egoistic wish not to have wasted our labor. By contrast there
is a kind of attention which is bound up not with the will but with our
consent to receive illumination or insight. (Lovibond 2011, 29)
The good person, according to this picture, must be humble; she must learn to stand
back and wait. She must let things happen, and attend to them, receive, rather than
rush in and do things. “Unselfing” is a key word. This emphasis is fresh and unusual
in a context of mid- and late twentieth-century Anglo-American secular moral philosophy, but as Lovibond suggests, the selfless attention, attendance, and suppression
of the impulse to act are precisely what has traditionally been expected of women. It
is a good description of the internalized feminine ideal that has made women easily
manageable in patriarchal societies. Thus, Lovibond reasons that the rehabilitation of
this idea suggests an attachment, on Murdoch’s part, to an imaginary of female
submissiveness.
It can be argued, against Lovibond, that the submissive gesture of Weil’s ethical
perspective is of a radical Christian rather than conservative bent. The demandingness of her ethics of attention to the other has nothing to do with conventional roles
of socially conditioned self-denigration. The figure she evokes is far from that of the
submissive mother, wife, or muse—it is the religious subject struggling with suffering
and opening up for grace. It thus occupies a space that is genderless and always
adversarial to habitual relations of power. As Murdoch notes: “Considering her, our
political categories break down; and this is perhaps instructive” (Murdoch 1997,
159). Even when secularized in Murdoch’s hands, the notions of attention and obedience preserve this radical aspect.
But, to complicate things, it is precisely Weil’s radicalism that Lovibond finds disquieting. Murdoch’s initial interest in “unselfing” has to do with her wish to complement the action-oriented moral perspective with an account of “the subject as
receptive, and hence with the ethical life as it continues in privacy or in solitude.”
But she is led further: “something of Weil’s ascetic extremism comes through in the
closing pages of SG7: what virtue ultimately requires of us is a willingness to reduce
ourselves to zero” (Lovibond 2011, 31).
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747
THE SOCIOPOLITICAL REALM
What troubles Lovibond here is above all what she sees as the lack of interest in the
outer, judicial, social, structural consequences of this kind of ethic. In Murdoch’s
view, as Lovibond reads her, the only real and serious issues are individual and
internal ones: we must attend to ourselves, change, and eventually efface ourselves.
Lovibond picks up Murdoch’s examples of humble, lowly, selfless people—those “selfforgetting aunts” and virtuous peasants—and notes how their idealized mode of being
is antithetical to the kind of self-assertive conviction that is often the prerequisite of
political action. Murdoch’s unselfing, as Lovibond understands it, renders political
action difficult. In the social realm the ideal person is prepared to give up everything
to help others (and to hunt down every selfish impulse of her own), but is by this
same extremity of spirit rendered incapable of structural thinking, and of understanding herself as part of an objectionable social structure. Similarly, the theme of “obedience” is constructed by Lovibond as an idealization of submissiveness in the political
arena (Lovibond 2011, 33–46).
Now, this reading of Murdoch demands correction at two major points. The first
one has to do with the interpretation of Murdoch’s ideas of unselfing and obedience.
The “self” that is exorcised in Murdoch’s act of attention is a very specific entity: it
is “the fat, relentless ego,” which interferes with our capacity to see things and people
as they really are. Anxieties, desires, wishful thoughts, hopes, fears, pride, and vanity
are among the aspects of our ego that blind us from reality, and in order to see more
accurately, we need to let these go. Unselfing is thus not to be understood as a
wholesale self-denigration but rather a kind of deliberate purification of the self that
we undergo in order to see more clearly. (I will return to this below.) The theme of
obedience is to be seen in relation to this notion of unselfing, as a very conscious
act, brimming with moral integrity. It purposively (though perhaps misleadingly) echoes the Christian pastoral theme, a religious elevation of surrender to authority, but
is nonetheless fully secularized into a description of our relationship to truth, reality.
You do not find in Murdoch’s philosophical writings an idealization of surrender to
another person’s authority or command. What you do find is “the fat, relentless ego”
sacrificed at the altar of reality.
The second problem with Lovibond’s interpretation has to do with the place of
unselfing (and obedience) in Murdoch’s overall moral philosophy. Lovibond elevates
the philosophy of attention and unselfing to the role of a kind of master-theory in
Murdoch’s moral philosophy, and accuses Murdoch, on this account, of halfheartedness on issues of justice and equality. But Murdoch’s overall view is a patchwork of partly disconnected, complementary vocabularies and perspectives, each with
its own role and dignity. As she puts it: “Philosophers have sought for a single principle upon which morality may be seen to depend. I do not think that moral life can
be in this sense reduced to a unity” (Murdoch 1992, 429). Lovibond notes this, but
does not take seriously enough the irreducible coexistence of very different realms of
moral and social life in Murdoch’s work.
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In her summary of aspects or regions of the moral life at the end of Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals (chapters 17 and 18), Murdoch lists four capacious categories: “axioms,” “duties,” “Eros,” and “void” (Murdoch 1992). Axioms have to do with the
“rough-and-tumble of the field of political morality”—with abstract principles to
guide political life (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). Duties comprise the
Kantian realm of what we owe to one another. These are concerned primarily with
the judicial and extrovert aspects of morality that Lovibond suggests are neglected in
Murdoch’s ethics. Eros and void have mostly to do with the introvert aspects, with
the state of our souls. The former, Eros, is our love of the good, a constant striving to
become better, to see the world more clearly, that is, to be seen as a kind of engine
of moral life. This is the heart of Murdoch’s “Platonism.” The latter, void, is the
absence of goodness in certain situations of human life, the experience of absolute
desolation, evil, pain, which may make us doubt the existence of goodness. The
theme of void (as freely borrowed from Weil) is introduced as a check on what Murdoch believes could be misinterpreted as an undue cheerfulness and optimism in her
ethics.8 “Someone may say, if you are always noticing images of God or Good or seeing spiritual ladders, or being some sort of artist, you are very lucky. Your view of
spiritual refreshment as everywhere available is ridiculously optimistic, even sentimental. It seems to neglect how miserable we are, and also how wicked we are”
(Murdoch 1992, 498). We must remember that there are places in human lives
where the Platonic sun just doesn’t shine. Through a creative secularization of some
of Weil’s core ideas, Murdoch achieves a perspective on the dynamics of moral personhood that is unique in her own context of Anglophone twentieth-century moral
philosophy. But she is not uncritical of Weil, noting in her review of Weil’s Notebooks that “the person emerging from these writings is not always attractive, but it
compels respect. She is sometimes unbalanced and scarcely accurate” (Murdoch
1997, 159–60).
The dynamics of Eros and void, describing half-metaphorically the dynamics of
moral experience, are emphasized at the end of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
because it constitutes the special contribution of Murdoch’s late work to moral philosophy. They are not emphasized in order to denigrate other (social, political)
aspects of morality, but because they above all need to be more thoroughly explained.
The quadripartite summary should rather be read as Murdoch’s reminder that we
should not reduce our understanding of morality to any of its components.
On this reading, contrary to Lovibond’s, Murdoch does not so much slide from an
inclusive posture to an extreme “spiritual” one, as move between them. Indeed,
extreme demands on oneself (even demands of self-effacement) can coexist, in a life,
with a thorough understanding of the mutuality and complexity of moral and political life with others. The quadripartite summary is precisely designed to emphasize the
irreducible coexistence of different concerns, “regions,” and complementary vocabularies in moral life.
Nonetheless, Lovibond is quite right in finding it necessary to inquire how the
“image of obedience” (Lovibond 2011, 32), so central to Murdoch’s conception of
morality, fits into her ideas in the social and political realm. She interrogates
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749
Murdoch’s take on the political aspects of ethics from what could be described as a
leftist, loosely post-structuralist, feminist point of view, asking and answering (though
not necessarily in these words) questions like: Can Murdoch take the perspective of
the culturally disadvantaged (the subaltern)? Is she against social change? Is she open
to a structural understanding of power relations? Is she in her way part of the problematic liberal individualization of moral responsibility (pushing the moral responsibility of structural problems onto the individual)? Lovibond’s findings in this respect
are suggestive but inconclusive. I will list some of her observations here:
1. Murdoch, unlike Weil, makes room for rights that “can exert leverage on existing
social arrangements and provide a language for radical movements such as those
promoting ‘women’s rights, black’s rights, animal rights.’” Further, such rights exist
among other irreducibly separate moral “axioms” that need to be negotiated in
“the rough-and-tumble of political life” (Murdoch 1992, 34). Thus she does not
collapse morality into criticism of the self.
2. Yet Murdoch’s repudiation of utopianism can be read as a conservative gesture: a
rationalization of her relative lack of interest in (radically) reforming society
(Lovibond 2011, 35–36, 113, note 76).
3. Concerning the improvement of the lot of subordinated people, Murdoch, like
Weil, appears to emphasize the charity and justice of others, and of society at
large, rather than the radicalization of the subordinated group. “In family life it
may be better to concentrate on one’s duties and leave the question of one’s rights
to be taken up by others! It is certainly often more prudent” (Murdoch 1992, 37).
Thus, there is, arguably, a conservative or patronizing tone in her perspective on
social criticism that is obviously problematic from the point of view of contemporary feminism as well as, for example, postcolonial thought.
4. Murdoch’s criticisms of structuralism and Marxism suggest a politically problematic
individualism or atomism in the moral realm. As Lovibond puts it, her discussions
of these traditions “seem to block our view of the kind of political activity that
relies on a collective interrogation of consciousness” (Lovibond 2011, 39). Individual
interrogations of consciousness are Murdoch’s specialty, but she has little understanding for the philosophical traditions that have developed the most widespread
and efficient tools in our time for doing the same together, aiming at a criticism
of shared practices and beliefs. She is, rather, inclined to see in these traditions a
form of determinism that leaves little room for moral autonomy. “[S]tructuralism,
in her view, posits language as a vast superhuman area of control and thus panders
to the deeply human wish ‘to give up, to get rid of freedom . . . and surrender to
the fate and the relief of ‘it could not be otherwise’” (Lovibond 2011, 41).
Thus the potential threat of this ethics of unselfing, against feminism, is realized
in Murdoch’s thought insofar as she is a politically conservative thinker, blind to
political and ideological biases, and hostile to radical criticisms of the social order.
But is she conservative in a way that makes her insensitive to structural and collective criticisms of society? Lovibond seems to think she is, but her argumentation does
not quite add up to the charge. Well aware of the merely suggestive nature of the
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evidence derived from Murdoch’s philosophical writings, Lovibond thus turns to Murdoch’s novels in order to substantiate her claims.
THE CASE
OF
MURDOCH’S NOVELS
Philosophically inclined men, who take themselves very seriously, and flimsy or submissive women, who fail to take themselves seriously enough, and who certainly are
not taken seriously by others, are stock characters in Murdoch’s novels. There are
other kinds of men and women too, but these specific kinds seem to make more frequent appearances than they do in the average novel of Murdoch’s or our time. They
are the stuff from which Lovibond carves out what she puts forward as Murdoch’s
patriarchal literary imaginary: “the figure of the charismatic ‘master thinker’; the scarcity of intellectually strong women characters; and in the later novels, an increasingly
edgy portrayal of the social impact of feminism, combined with a retreat from any
strictly realistic account of women’s educational experience and opportunities” (Lovibond 2011, 47).
It must be noted that the line of argument here is quite different from the one
presented in relation to Murdoch’s philosophy. In the case of philosophy, Murdoch’s
problematic imaginary is shown (1) in her ethics of obedience, and (2) in her rejection of structuralism and poststructuralist interrogations of collective consciousness.
The literary texts have a supposedly more immediate relation to a patriarchal imaginary, depicting with certain pleasure the existential quests of men and the humiliations of women. Lovibond leans on a candid style of reading the novels, letting us
suppose more or less that what you see is what you get. By a candid style I do not
merely mean her adopting the perspective of an ordinary, nonscholarly reader: “the
voice of a reader who enjoys a ‘jolly good yarn’ and has no problem with the suspension of disbelief, but at the same time is not indifferent to the coherence of a fictional narrative or to the implications of factual detail contained in it” (Lovibond
2011, 48). What I am thinking of rather is the additional basic assumption that the
realities and values depicted in the text are offered by the text as valid (as in the
voice of the implied author, so to say).
Heeding Murdoch’s commitment to literary realism and her insistence that she
does not do moral philosophy (that is, for example, portray an ideal order) in her
novels, we would be well advised to steer clear of the “fable-reading style” of scanning Murdoch’s texts for normative messages. And indeed, it seems that Lovibond
aims to make a more cautious and probing type of argument, when discussing the
issue in terms of Murdoch’s literary “imaginary.” In each of her brief readings, she
finds not only realistic portrayals of the inferior position of women, but also an exaggeration of inferiority, a distinctly patriarchal way of looking, where women don’t
quite count like men do. Most strikingly, she suggests that Murdoch’s portrayals of
uneducated and ignorant middle-class women (and many women figures’ images of
themselves as thoroughly ignorant), though plausible in the 1960s, are less so in the
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751
1980s. Rather than altering her social imaginary to match the times, Murdoch seems
to deflect from her commitment to realism.
Paying attention to these kinds of features is, of course, far from saying that whatever is represented and not explicitly denounced in the novels is part of Murdoch’s
normative order. Lovibond wants us, rather, to reflect over what these features could
mean—referring to “Murdoch’s own declared view that ‘[a]n author’s relation to his
characters reveals a great deal about his moral attitude’” (Lovibond 2011, 47). I have
no quarrel with this, or with the implication it may have for readings of Murdoch’s
novels. The problem is that when representing Murdoch’s literary imaginary as
revealing a positive valuation of the patriarchal order, Lovibond is piggybacking on
the moral implications of the candid reading. How can this be? When Lovibond
reviews patriarchal constellations in Murdoch’s novels and argues that they reveal
Murdoch’s implicit affirmation of patriarchy, she elicits approval based on a candid
reading (these “patriarchal” things are there) rather than based on a more thorough
analysis of the texts that could give a clue as to why the patriarchal features are
there, what their roles are in the texts as literary works, and how they relate to
Murdoch’s artistic endeavor, on the one hand, and her views about life, on the other.
This piggybacking is a result, above all, of the concise nature of Lovibond’s argumentation concerning how Murdoch’s novels should be interpreted. Although Lovibond explicitly notes that she does not intend to close the critical discussion of the
novels she reviews, it looks like the very brevity of her discussion, by not opening a
range of difficult questions, invites the premature approval of candid readers and condemns the novels to a joint status as covertly male-chauvinist and uninteresting.
Separated from the implications of the candid reading, Lovibond’s analysis is
much more vulnerable and potentially tendentious, but also much more interesting.
She is sniffing the air in order to get a grip on Murdoch’s moral habitus and the
moral habitus of her work. Indeed, there is something uneasy here, from an early
twenty-first-century critical feminist perspective: something surprisingly unprogressive,
incurious, murky. This is not without implications for how we should assess her philosophical and literary contributions, but neither does it define them. The suspicions
raised may give cause for further interrogation of these tendencies in her work. Why,
for example, does the male remain, in her literary work, the universally human? Why
does she seem unable or unwilling to move outside that imaginary, herself a woman
and part of that remarkable Second World War generation of moral philosophers,
including Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Warnock, and Mary Midgley?
Lovibond’s method of suspicion is not very far from the method that Murdoch
herself uses on a number of major philosophers, including Wittgenstein, Husserl, and
Derrida. Indeed, the feeling one gets, the sense of direction and covert evaluation
present in a philosopher’s or author’s works, is not irrelevant for how the works
should be interpreted and assessed. But casually linked to parallel suggestions concerning Murdoch’s philosophical work, Lovibond’s notes on Murdoch’s novels create
the semblance of a cohesive argument. We should ask what the supposed implications of Murdoch’s literary habitus are for her work. That her work as a whole is
adversarial to the concerns of feminism? That her ethics of attention is antithetical
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to the equal standing of women and men? These things hardly follow from the supposed literary evidence that Lovibond offers.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
AND THE
TRANSFORMATION
OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
It would not be a great loss for feminist thought (specifically) if Murdoch’s novels
were left to gather dust in the libraries. What we should find more problematic are
the implications of Lovibond’s dichotomy between individual soul-searching and
structural criticism. This is where Lovibond, arguably, is putting out a misleading trail
concerning Murdoch’s contribution, to the detriment of feminist thought. Quite contrary to Lovibond’s picture, there is a close affinity between Murdoch’s focus on the
transformation of consciousness and a contemporary “post-structuralist” collective critique of biased and oppressive visions of society. Consciousness for Murdoch is not
merely a private affair. For example, when tracing the contours of a notion of “the
absolute” in morality, she notes, “I have suggested that we look at these matters by
making use of a concept of consciousness. Of course, as I said above, we may properly
reflect upon our conditioning, our deep prejudices, our received ideas, etc. I mean
‘consciousness’ in a common sense understanding of ‘where we live’” (Murdoch 1992,
304). Like contemporary feminist and postcolonial thinkers (of broadly poststructuralist influence), Murdoch wrote with a heightened awareness of the fact that different
people see different worlds, and that these different visions (both individual and collective) are something that we can and must work on in order to gain moral insight.
Her recurrent discussions on this matter are very closely related to the roughly poststructuralist ethos of Lovibond’s feminism: both destabilize the philosophical “Enlightenment” picture of a plain, empirically available world of facts that can be grasped
by human reason and scientific enquiry. Both state that, as living, understanding
beings, we are caught in complex webs of culturally contingent, historically formed,
and emotionally colored beliefs and values. Our very conceptual frameworks, our patterns of attention, our capacities for understanding are formed by both cultural and
individual biases and limitations.9 Change is slow and can be achieved only through
becoming aware of our perceptual and conceptual limitations. The central difference
is that Murdoch focuses on the idea of an individual person, an individual center of
consciousness, someone who strives to overcome her own limitations in search of the
good. Lawrence Blum notes that “what we subjectively perceive, what is present to
us, is formed by a myriad of factors in our lives—personal, social, cultural, and so
on.” This being “an entirely Murdochian insight,” he asks why Murdoch seems to
neglect it when “discussing subjective perceivings and the structures of value within
which we exercise choice” (Blum 2012, 313). His answer is, interestingly, to suggest
that Murdoch is too concerned with the individual activity of the moral agent (looking at the world) to pay sufficient heed to the social structures that shape his/her
vision. He also stresses the need, overall, for a more fine-grained analysis of what goes
into the ideas of moral perception and attention (Blum 2012, 314–19; see also Blum
1994, 30–61).
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753
Nonetheless, Blum clearly agrees that Murdoch’s focus on unselfing is not a movement away from social and structural concerns, but rather a movement toward a more
substantial idea of “self” (Blum 2012, 313–14). She thinks of her endeavor as one of
rehabilitating a fleshed-out, humanist notion of the “self” in a context where it is
threatened in various ways: on the one hand, by her Anglophone peers (and existentialism), who operate with a thin enlightenment self, without social ties or a real
inner life (Murdoch 1997, 288–89), and on the other hand, by (Derrida’s) structuralism, which in its critique of the Enlightenment self has effaced the individual person,
or rendered it theoretically suspicious (Murdoch 1992, 187–88).
Lovibond places a lot of weight on Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing,” but she
seems to turn this idea in the direction of self-denigration that is typical for
women in patriarchy. But (as noted before) “unselfing” is for Murdoch a kind of
work that the individual person does in order to see what is in front of him (people, art, nature) in a more truthful light. It is intimately connected to Murdoch’s
special brand of realism, the moral/epistemic task of trying to see the world aright.
We are not just caught up in a given historical/ideological moment, but also constantly preoccupied with ourselves, recreating ourselves as the centers of the universe, fooling ourselves with vanity, self-importance, and comforting half-truths.
This is the weave that Murdoch calls fantasy. Unselfing, in this sense, essentially
involves the recognition of structural bias, of privilege, of inequality as well as the
recognition of personal fault. Developing the structural criticism latent in the
notion of unselfing requires only a tiny step forward: that of paying attention to
the social/structural roots of some of our biases. For us who are marinated in poststructuralist feminism, this is an easy, obvious, and indeed necessary step to take,
but we must keep in mind that Murdoch’s concerns were elsewhere, and her scene
was different.
To perceive the world around us more accurately, we strive to transform our consciousness so that it revolves less around ourselves. “It is an attachment to what lies
outside the fantasy mechanism, and not the scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power” (Murdoch 1997, 355). Thus, we need unselfing rather than, for example, self-knowledge.
Turning attention away from the self is not submissiveness in a sociopolitical sense.
It is not a matter of choosing an inferior position in search of some obscure spiritual
goal, but rather of overcoming both the “fat, relentless ego” and the shackles of convention that bind us to given, biased, and potentially oppressive manners of looking.
A substantial conception of the human being but not an inflated notion of “self”;
self-scrutiny without self-preoccupation; self-forgetfulness without self-denigration—
these are elements of a complex economy of the self in relation to goodness and to
our surrounding reality.
In fact, much more than most philosophers of her Anglophone context, Murdoch
exhibits an awareness of how our understanding is shaped by our times: she addresses
her contemporaries as the heirs of the Enlightenment, survivors of two wars, children
of a secularized culture (Murdoch 1997, 287). Discussing Beauvoir’s novel L’Invit!ee,
she notes, “These are people from after the deluge. The values of the nineteenth
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Hypatia
century are gone. The destruction for which Nietzsche called has taken place” (109,
“The Existentialist Hero”). Investigations into the moral predicament of a time and
place are investigations into how our understanding of the world is formed and what
kinds of structural biases it may contain. Our philosophical and moral problems are
immersed in, or rather organic parts of, a social and historical setting. What Murdoch
objects to is any attempt at reducing the individual human being to historical givens.
Yes, we are limited by our conditions, but we are also unique subjects with lives of
our own, moral struggles of our own, and our own individual ways of being good and
bad. For Murdoch this is not a matter of either/or. Both the inner world of the individual and the collective world of society and politics are spaces for moral/epistemic
transformations.
But if a critique of collective structures is implicated in Murdoch’s philosophy,
why does she not recognize this tradition of thought as akin to her own? Part of the
answer (as suggested above) is that Murdoch, as a philosopher of her time and context, did not see the critical potential of the structuralist/poststructuralist tradition
that is obvious for many feminists (and postcolonial critics) of the succeeding generations. When criticizing “structuralism” (in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) she was
specifically concerned with Derrida, who, on her reading, appeared to be presenting a
new form of determinism (Murdoch 1992, 190), an image of language as a cage out
of which we cannot break. Truth, morality, and the individual are rendered impossible against the image of language as “an area of similarities and differences which
transcends our awareness” (188). The overall exegetical merits of Murdoch’s interpretation of Derrida may be questioned, but her criticism does not reveal an antipathy
for “structural” thinking as such, but rather of what she understands as the totalizing
aspect of Derrida’s thought, which seems to efface the possibility of moral personhood.
Another part of the answer has to do with real differences between the poststructuralist, feminist agenda and Murdoch’s own. Murdoch puts a lot of effort into explicating the movements of human consciousness in relation to “the good” in a secular
age, but she does not present any systematic account of the historicity and collective
aspects of consciousness. This lack of theorization of the commonality of consciousness may lead to the interpretation that she does not take this aspect seriously
enough, that it is sidestepped to the benefit of an individualizing ethics. But in fact it
is relatively invisible because it is to such a great extent taken for granted. Murdoch
shares, for example, G. E. M. Anscombe’s sense that modern morality has suffered a
loss of substance due to the displacement of the Christian framework (Anscombe
1958).10 This is certainly a structural and historical critique of shared consciousness
quite on a par with the feminist interrogation of patriarchy, although its focus is on
discernment and complexity lost rather than on substance and complexity gained.
The direction of the inquiring gaze here should not be understood as conservatism in
contrast to the progressiveness of poststructuralist feminism, because both are in different ways using our understanding of the past and present in search of a way forward. (What brought us here—where can we go?)11
Nora H€am€al€ainen
STRUCTURES, SELF,
AND
755
FEMINISM
The second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 70s successfully convinced us that the
personal is political. This is the background against which we stir uneasily at Murdoch’s contention that it is more prudent, in family life, to “leave the question of one’s
rights to be taken up by others.” Completely devoid, here, of political awareness, she
seems to be contemplating the moral dynamics her own happy childhood or her childless marriage with co-academic John Bayley, rather than the realities of “family life”
for the majority of women in the late twentieth century, or indeed today. This is
alarming because individualization of collective or structural problems has been such a
central part of the rhetoric that keeps women down: So you earn less than the fellow
on the other side of the hall? Well, we do pay according to merit. So you didn’t make
it to an executive position (in spite of all)? Surely you were not quite good enough in
the respects that really matter? Your husband let you raise the family alone? Well,
nobody forced you to marry him. You were raped? What did you wear?
Academic, Western feminists are conditioned to see through this kind of rhetoric
today, but it is used quite efficiently to subdue people, for example, in current times
of economic uncertainty. The persistent structural unemployment after the financial
crisis of 2008 is reformulated in terms of some individual fault in the unemployed:
laziness, deficient work or life skills. The difficulty in making ends meet in spite of
employment is explained in terms of irresponsible spending habits. And in many sites
in contemporary societies, the feminist revolution of “private is public” never took
place. Thus a certain vigilance concerning the uses of self-blame and self-scrutiny is a
given part of any feminism worth the name. But Lovibond’s line of argumentation
cannot be seen only in terms of such vigilance. By tracing the fault in Murdoch’s
work to her focus on self-scrutiny, Lovibond (perhaps unwittingly) suggests an ideal
of feminist ethical inquiry where critical self-scrutiny, self-forgetfulness, and selflessness are systematically placed under the suspicion of being regressive, conservative,
and thus potentially dangerous. Can this be her intent? If so, we may contemplate
the consequences: a feminism of political activists who are well-versed in poststructuralist theory and agile in their quest for oppressive structures, but quite suspicious
of selflessness, and so on. If, again, this is not Lovibond’s intent, then something
more needs to be said about the proper place of self-scrutiny, self-blame, selflessness,
and self-forgetfulness. Indeed, it could be argued that a credible poststructuralist critique cannot be performed without profound self-criticism: that the very idea of a
pure structural criticism without self-criticism is incoherent, because we are indeed
inquiring into structures of which we ourselves are (constituent) parts.
It should be noted in Lovibond’s defense that she does not suggest that selfcriticism be ousted from moral philosophy: that she is concerned merely with such
profound forms of self-criticism that threaten the social and political integrity of the
person and hamper her capacity to see her problems as other than individual. But in
Murdoch’s perspective there is no borderline, in the realm of self-scrutiny, that we
must beware of crossing in order not to contaminate our political integrity. Profound
self-criticism, consciousness of one’s “fallen state,” unselfing—this whole stern
756
Hypatia
economy of self—can coexist with an untroubled sense of justice, equality, one’s own
rights, and what is due to others. We do not strengthen the development of the latter
by discouraging the former. And by developing a sense of “original sin,” our own fundamental complicity in the evils of the world, we do not weaken our sense of equality and justice. Rather the contrary. The coexistence of different regions of morality
is often troubled by attempts to juxtapose them. We are manipulated into forgetting
politics and structures through strategic attention to our personal faults; we forget
self-scrutiny when we get carried away by the righteousness of our political quest. But
these conflicts are practical rather than foundational. The different regions or modes
of moral thought are not like countries on a map, divided by drawn borders that will
be redrawn when attention is given to one of them rather than the other. They are
rather like the voices of a quartet, sounding at the same time.
UNIQUELY CLOSE
TO THE
POSTSTRUCTURALIST AGENDA
Murdoch was most interested in the inner moral world and moral work of the individual, and paid only limited attention to the possibility of collective transformations
of consciousness. Her paradigmatic transformative quest is the spiritual rather than
the political one. This certainly is a limitation from the point of view of feminism,
and social and political struggles more generally, because she does not feed such discussions directly. But her focus on the individual is not the right-wing/conservative
thinker’s individualization of collective challenges (as Lovibond suggests). It is not a
move away from, but rather a move toward the kinds of insights that help us become
aware of and combat structural inequality and oppression. She is, in fact, in her context of mid- and late twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy, uniquely close to
the poststructuralist perspective through her insistence that we do not live in a simple world of facts, but rather must struggle to see past the limitations of our individual and cultural repertoires. The proximity to this broad, critical agenda, combined
with a lively interest in inwardness and moral self-being (which are easily philosophized away in the poststructuralist framework) makes Murdoch a helpful companion
in the quest for a well-rounded feminist ethics for anyone roughly sympathetic to the
kind of poststructuralist feminism that Lovibond leans on.
NOTES
1. It may be noted that Murdoch’s interest in ordinary life and ordinary language,
which Altorf tentatively attributes to gendered experience, can be given a completely different reading if it is connected to the “ordinary language philosophies” of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. For discussion of this, see Forsberg 2013; H€am€al€ainen 2013; 2014.
2. For a thorough, critical review of Lovibond’s book, see Robjant 2011. It may be
noted that Robjant suggests a greater distance between Murdoch’s work and structuralism/
poststructuralism than I think would be helpful. Others have recently addressed Murdoch’s
Nora H€am€al€ainen
757
relationship to Derrida’s work (a hitherto relatively neglected topic) (Nicol 2001; Fiddes
2012; Milligan 2012; and Osborn 2012), but these discussions do not have immediate
bearing on the current issue.
3. For major overviews of Murdoch’s moral philosophy, where these issues are developed, see Antonaccio 2000; Widdows 2005; and Broackes 2012.
4. For feminist readings of Murdoch, see, for example, Johnson 1987; Weese 2001;
and Laverty 2007. She has also been a central point of reference and intellectual inspiration for feminist thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Toril Moi (Nussbaum 1990; Moi
2013).
5. Murdoch said this in a symposium with Jean-Louis Chevalier, among others.
6. This passage is from an interview with Jack I. Biles (in Dooley 2003), first published in Contemporary Literature 11 (1977).
7. SG = The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts, first published as a book in
1970. The three essays in this book are also included into Murdoch 1997.
8. Murdoch’s own late use of the notion of void differs clearly from her early
understanding of Weil’s discussion of void. Concerning Weil’s notion, she contends that
“Her concept of ‘the void,’ which must be experienced in the achieving of detachment,
differs from the Angst of popular existentialism, in that Angst is usually thought of as
something which circumstances may force upon a man, whereas experience of void is a
spiritual achievement, involving the control of the imagination, that ‘restorer of balances’” (Murdoch 1997, 159, “Knowing the Void”). Murdoch’s use in Metaphysics as a
Guide to Morals indicates something looser, broader: “a tract of experience” (Murdoch
1992, 498).
9. I agree here with Bridget Clarke, who—when discussing the need to attend to
“socially-rooted obstacles to perception”—notes that “Murdoch’s virtuous agent does in
fact have resources for dealing with this kind of obstacle; these resources simply need to
be made more explicit” (Clarke 2012, 254). Clarke helpfully goes on to complement Murdoch’s discussion of the obstacles to perception/attention with a discussion of feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye’s idea of pattern-perception, that is, the recognition of potentially
oppressive cultural patterns. Maria Antonaccio points out that the overcoming of classbias is implicated in Murdoch’s famous M and D-example: “Though rarely noticed, the
issue of social class surfaces in the mother-in-law’s choice of attributes to describe her
son’s wife. M describes D as ‘not exactly common’ (a clear reference to class) but certainly
‘unpolished,’ ‘lacking in dignity and refinement,’ ‘pert,’ ‘familiar,’ and so on. . .” (Antonaccio 2012, 256). See also Margaret Holland’s discussion of the role of social conventions as
obstacles to perception in Murdoch’s work (Holland 2012).
10. This is an overarching concern and perhaps the most central issue in Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals: the place of spirituality in a secularized world, and the question of
what, if anything, can be saved of Christianity (see, for example, Murdoch 1992, 419).
For discussion of this in terms of a “loss of concepts,” see Forsberg 2013.
11. The co-presence of the structural/historical perspective and the individual “soul”
in Murdoch’s work does not mean that they can be fitted into a neat system. But then
again, neat systems are no part of her philosophical oeuvre, which, in spite of the centrality of the “one-making” tendency in philosophy (Murdoch 1992, 1), always emphasizes a
pluralism of perspectives, vocabularies, and concerns.
758
Hypatia
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