Does Iris Murdoch’s biography

compromise her moral vision?

Maria Antonaccio
Posted Tue 30 Jul 2019, 2:27pm
Updated Tue 30 Jul 2019, 2:27pm
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/does-iris-murdoch%E2%80%99s-
biography-compromise-her-moral-vision/11366776

In the years following her death, the influx of biographical material on Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999) had an
unsettling effect on the perception of her work. (Sophie Bassouls / Sygma / Sygma via Getty Images)

 Mail

In his poignant memoir, Elegy for lris, John Bayley reports that the myth of Proteus had a special
significance in his life with Murdoch. Proteus, the herdsman of Poseidon’s seals, had the power of
assuming any shape he wished (water, lion, serpent, leopard, tree) in order to evade the grasp of all
who tried to hold him ― all but one: the hero, Menelaus. Murdoch mentioned the myth to Bayley
once or twice as a way of reassuring him that her numerous friendships and intimacies with other
people, as well as her uncanny ability to accommodate herself to each relationship as if it were
unique, did not in the least threaten or compete with her affection for him. “‘Remember Proteus’, she
used to say. ‘Just keep tight hold of me and it will be all right’.”

Readers of Elegy for lris and the other memoirs and biographies that have appeared since Murdoch’s
death in 1999 now know the extent of her protean nature.

The biographies reveal that Murdoch had, as Bayley put it, an “inexhaustible capacity for friendship
but was at the same time intensely private, if not downright secretive. Many who met her immediately
considered her one of their closest friends, yet few were allowed to penetrate her placid exterior.”
This emotional shape-shifting was especially evident in Murdoch’s relations with the so-called
“demon lovers” that preceded her marriage, in which she created “different persona to suit each idol
and mentor.”

Although Murdoch had always been reticent about her personal life and was often evasive when
questioned about the relation of her life and work, any pretence of privacy was shattered by the
intense scrutiny to which her life was subjected in the years following her death. The exposure of
previously unknown facts, including “her extraordinary promiscuity, the contents of her private
journals, even her personal hygiene,” immediately changed the critical landscape. As Bran Nicol has
commented, “Where before her death one could complain of knowing too little, afterwards many
argued that we knew too much.”

The biographical material had an unsettling effect on Murdoch’s readers and interpreters in at least
two ways. Most immediately, it changed the way we viewed Murdoch herself, revealing “a figure who
contradicts much of the characteristics and values we associate with her previous public persona.”
Reviewers of the biographies were moved to comment on Murdoch’s “surprising promiscuity” and the
“melodramatic excess” of her early adulthood, as she pursued several erotic attachments at once,
apparently enjoying the power that came from the mystification and betrayal of others. Murdoch also
confessed (in the journals she bequeathed to her biographer, Peter Conradi) to a self-dramatising
streak in her own personality (“Urge towards drama is fundamental. I am ‘full of representations of
myself’”), which seems the opposite of her philosophy’s constant urging toward “unselfing.”

For those accustomed to seeing Murdoch as a figure of “luminous goodness” ― as her friend and
fellow philosopher David Pears once remarked about her ― these startling revelations came as a
shock. Suddenly, alongside the familiar figure of the saintly Iris that had prevailed earlier, a rival
image appeared: “a complex, sexualized being, capable of cruelty and deception as much as
kindness and wit.”

The resulting vertigo seemed to confirm the truth of Murdoch’s Proteus allusion with a vengeance.
The influx of biographical material also had an unsettling effect on the perception of Murdoch’s work,
raising questions that had long been neglected. “For years,” Nicol notes, “Murdoch’s work had a
curious, almost magical ability to ward off biographical readings.” Not only did Murdoch guard her
own privacy, but she insisted that good art required the expulsion of the artist’s personality from her
work. Her fictional characters, moreover, often mocked or subverted ideas that she had claimed as
her own in her philosophical writings.

As a result of these factors, it became almost routine for critics to warn that it was naïve to look for
Murdoch in her fiction or to identify any of her characters as mouthpieces of her views. However,
amid revelations that Murdoch’s personal life was apparently teeming with the kind of emotional
drama and endless couplings characteristic of some of her novels, these assumptions underwent
renewed scrutiny, with the result that, as Nicol puts it, “viewing Murdoch’s fiction in terms of her life is
[now] almost unavoidable.”

The change affected the perception of Murdoch’s philosophy as well. Her famous dictum that “in the
moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego” looked less like the words of a moral saint and more
like an instance of the physician attempting to heal herself.

The limits of biography

The revelations occasioned by the biographies present the interpreter of Murdoch’s work with a
dilemma: What use, if any, should the critic make of the available accounts of her life in the
assessment of her work? (This problem, of course, is not unique to Murdoch.)

One approach is simply to ignore an author’s biography as irrelevant. Many readers will undoubtedly
continue to enjoy and appreciate Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy on their own merits, whatever
opinion they may have formed of her personal life. But can or should a critic pretend not to notice
when a biography reveals facts that seem to cast doubt on an author’s values or character? Ignoring
such revelations can look like an act of special pleading that may render the critic’s judgment or
objectivity suspect.

To avoid this danger, a critic might take the opposite approach. Instead of ignoring an author’s
biography, he or she may decide to use the author’s life as an interpretive tool that provides fresh ―
if potentially disturbing ― insights into her work. Taken to an extreme, this strategy threatens to
collapse any distinction between the author’s life and her work and makes the enterprise of criticism
subservient to biography. Critics of the so-called ‘intentional fallacy’ have long noted that a literary
work should not be judged solely on the basis of its author’s intentions. Once the work is produced, it
no longer belongs to its author but to the public, and readers will make of it what they will. Similarly,
one could argue that a literary work is a complex artefact that transcends its origins in the life of the
person who produced it and should be evaluated independently of that life.

Between these two approaches ― either ignoring the author’s life or using it as the key that unlocks
her work ― more subtle strategies of relating an author’s life and work are possible. Bran Nicol’s
work on Murdoch is instructive in this regard. In the Preface and Postscript to the second edition of
his book Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (published four years after her death), Nicol
cautions against an overly reductive biographical reading of her fiction as “a temptation that should
be resisted.” However, rather than simply ignore the biography, Nicol makes subtle use of the
revelations about Murdoch’s life to shed new light on a heretofore neglected element of her work: her
interest in masochism. Nicol chooses this theme “not simply because of its presence in the biography
but because, intriguingly, it is something that also happened to be central to Murdoch’s theory of
literary production.”

Without treating Murdoch’s fiction or philosophy as thinly disguised autobiography, Nicol relates the
presence of masochism in both her life and her work in a way that illuminates the often contradictory
practice of her authorship. His work thereby demonstrates how knowledge of an author’s life may
enrich and complicate our interpretation of her work, without collapsing one into the other.

Other recent interpreters of Murdoch have not always been so subtle. What I’d like to do here is
explore one instance where a renowned and often sensitive interpreter of Murdoch, Martha
Nussbaum, yields to the temptation of an overly reductive biographical reading of her work. In a
review of Peter Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life, titled “When She Was Good,” Nussbaum draws on
some of the more revealing details of Murdoch’s personal and erotic life as a critical lens through
which to assess her complex achievements. The mixed portrait of Murdoch that emerges is one of a
gifted but also conflicted and self-absorbed philosopher, who partially succeeded in taming her own
controlling and sadistic erotic tendencies, but who never fully overcame them in either her work or
her life.

Although Nussbaum engages in a wide-ranging and often illuminating discussion of Murdoch’s

legacy and vision, her assumption that an immediate link can be drawn between Murdoch’s personal
struggles and the substantive content of her philosophy, as if the second flowed seamlessly from the
first, is a consistently troubling feature of the review. The resulting distortions ― as I see them ― of
Murdoch’s thought exemplify some of the dangers of reading an author’s work biographically, and
they are significant enough to deserve a response.

In undertaking an “apology” for Murdoch ― in the classical sense of a defence or justification against
detractors, rather than as an excuse or admission of guilt ― my intention here is not to restore the
halo of saintliness that many projected upon Murdoch during her lifetime. Nor do I attempt to develop
my own thesis about the relationship between Murdoch’s work and her life. Rather, my aim is to
balance, and in some cases to correct, what I regard as overstatements on Nussbaum’s part by
challenging the basis of some of her interpretations and advancing a less reductive reading of
Murdoch’s thought.

What use, if any, should the critic make of the available accounts of Murdoch’s life in the assessment of her
work? (Ian Nicholson - PA Images / PA Images via Getty Images)

Murdoch’s influence on Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum and Iris Murdoch have often been regarded as allies in a broadly shared agenda
in ethics. Both thinkers have retrieved elements of ancient Greek thought as a resource for ethics;
both have criticised the dominant theoretical options in modern moral philosophy for their inadequate
conceptions of moral reasoning; both have defended the role of art in the formation of moral
perception and imagination; and both, especially, have a keen appreciation for
human particularity and the complexities of erotic love.

However, the apparent kinship between the two thinkers also masks important differences in style,
substance and temperament. Nowhere, perhaps, is the complexity of the relationship between the
two figures more apparent than in Nussbaum’s essay, “When She Was Good.”

One of the most valuable and illuminating features of the review is Nussbaum’s effort to place
Murdoch’s achievement in the context of post-war Anglo-American moral philosophy. At the time, she
notes, philosophers such as R.M. Hare and others promoted a “muscular conception of philosophy”
focusing on the moment of ethical choice and the role of the will in choosing rightly, rather than on
probing the inner life, or seeking to cultivate the thoughts and feelings of a person of good character.

Murdoch was a distinctive presence in this scene, Nussbaum acknowledges, partly because she was
“the only eminent novelist to publish serious works of moral philosophy.” In this dual role, Murdoch
helped Anglo-American moral philosophy to achieve “a broader conception of its subject matter” by
attending to certain topics which had been rejected as a legitimate part of moral philosophy such as
“the virtues and the vices, the nature of imagination and attention, the vicissitudes of passion.”
Nussbaum contends that the primary source of Murdoch’s “large philosophical importance” and the
thing that set Murdoch apart from her philosophical contemporaries, such as John McDowell and
Phillipa Foot, was her recognition that the “strivings of the inner world” required “a different and
riskier type of writing, which only she, with her complex erotic gifts, attempted to deliver.” For this
reason, Nussbaum claims that Murdoch’s novels are “a major part of [her] philosophical contribution.”

Nussbaum calls special attention to the three essays collected in The Sovereignty of Good as “the
most forceful articulation” of Murdoch’s challenge to moral philosophy. She rightly notes the
explanatory brilliance of the famous example of M and D from the essay “The Idea of Perfection,”
and its influence in making available a very different conception of virtue than the “muscular choice-
is-all school of moral philosophy” propounded by thinkers as different as R.M. Hare and Jean-Paul
Sartre. For this and other reasons, Nussbaum writes, The Sovereignty of Good “had a transformative
impact” on the discipline of philosophy, inspiring younger philosophers who had been troubled by
philosophy’s neglect of the inner life to follow in Murdoch’s footsteps. As a result, today “few would
deny that the then-unknown subject of ‘moral psychology’ is one of the most important and
fascinating branches of ethics.”

Most readers would find Nussbaum’s account of Murdoch’s significance both accurate and
illuminating of her intellectual context. However, when Nussbaum references the details of Conradi’s
biography to draw conclusions about the relation of Murdoch’s personal and erotic life to her
philosophical vision, she adopts an almost clinical approach, interpreting many of the substantive
philosophical interests for which Murdoch is best known almost exclusively as the products of her
inner struggle with her own sexual demons.

In fairness, Conradi’s biography may itself implicitly invite such an approach. He presents materials
which suggest that Murdoch’s commitment to a philosophical vision that sought to defeat egoism
through the practice of a loving attention to other people seems to have been motivated, at least in
part, by Murdoch’s own experience ― an effort to correct the psychic and emotional damage she felt
she had wrought on herself and on others. As she once wrote in her journal, “For me philosophical
problems are the problems of my own life.” Moreover, Nussbaum is not the only reviewer who
concludes from the biography that there are obvious connections between Murdoch’s personal
dramas and the recurring themes of her work. Hilary Spurling goes so far as to assert that “Murdoch
used her novels to conduct a long and thrilling course of public therapy.”

Nevertheless, some of Nussbaum’s conclusions about the relation between Murdoch’s life and
thought seem to exceed the circumspection of many reviewers, as well as of Conradi himself. In
contrast to the restraint with which Conradi presents intimate and previously unknown information
about Murdoch (“obtruding his own personality as little as possible,” as Nussbaum approvingly notes),
Nussbaum’s response to the biography’s revelations can sometimes appear almost deprecatory and
condescending.

The title Nussbaum chose for her review, “When She Was Good,” is illustrative of this tendency. It is
a reference, presumably to the familiar nursery rhyme: “There was a little girl, who had a little curl,
right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very very good; and when she was
bad, she was horrid.” This scolding tone calls to mind Bran Nicol’s observation that some critics have
taken the recent spate of Murdoch biographies as an opportunity to subject Murdoch posthumously
“to the kind of ‘flaying’, the forcible stripping away of the illusions about self, which her characters
undergo in countless examples of her fiction.”

There is some suggestion of this impulse in Nussbaum, who does not shrink from using Murdoch’s
sexual past to debunk her reputation as a moral saint. Nussbaum deploys the biography’s revelations
of Murdoch’s erotic history in a way that seems intended to unmask or cast doubt on the deeper
sources and motivations behind Murdoch’s work. This interpretive strategy leads to some rather one-
dimensional interpretations of a highly complex thinker.

Philosophy and fiction

One instance where I believe Nussbaum’s approach yields an overly simplistic view of Murdoch’s
work occurs early in the review, where she probes Murdoch’s reluctance (in an interview with Bryan
Magee in 1978 on “Philosophy and the Novel”) to admit that her careers as philosopher and novelist
were closely related. That Murdoch could sometimes be evasive when questioned about herself or
her work is not in question.

Interviewers have often noted that she seemed mole curious to know about them than to answer
questions about herself (something Bayley, in Elegy for lris, attributes to the fact that Murdoch was
simply not very interested in herself). However, Nussbaum portrays Murdoch’s resistance to the
imputed connection her interviewer draws between her work as a novelist and as a philosopher as
evidence of Murdoch’s “constant desire to mystify and to prevent people from finding her where she
was.” Nussbaum insinuates that Murdoch was being coy in order to keep the interviewer at arm’s
length ― as if, having shown a certain secretiveness about her erotic life, Murdoch cannot be trusted
to give an honest account of her own career either.

Perhaps because Nussbaum has written extensively about the relation between fiction and
philosophy ― and asserts that there are “profound connections” between them in Murdoch’s case as
well ― she is inclined to dismiss the idea that Murdoch may have had legitimate philosophical and
artistic reasons for distinguishing the two genres. However, Murdoch’s writings on this subject
suggest that her desire to keep her work as a novelist separate from her work as a philosopher
cannot be attributed to coyness alone.
For one thing, Murdoch was always wary of those who sought to label her a “philosophical novelist”
(a term often applied to her contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) precisely
because she did not want her own novels to be read as if they reflected her philosophy or worldview
in any simple or transparent way. Murdoch might have especially wanted to prevent her work from
quick or facile comparisons with Sartre, whose work was the subject of her first book:

I think that Sartre’s theoretical preoccupation when he’s writing the novels do slightly
damage the novels … I’m slightly bothered in his and Simone de Beauvoir’s work by the
insistent presence of a theory.

In addition, Murdoch consistently defended the autonomy of art and the artist from the obligation to
serve any explicit moral, political or philosophical cause. As she noted in a 1968 interview:

[I] don’t think that an artist should worry about looking after society in his art … I wouldn’t
regard this quite as being my job as an artist, but as an alternative to another method of
making people pay attention. I think as an artist one’s first duty is to the art you practice,
and to produce the best kind of work you know how … A novelist working well and honestly
and only saying what he knows and what he understands, will in fact tell a lot of important
truths about his society. This is why tyrannical societies are often frightened of novelists.

Although Murdoch’s denial of a connection between her fiction and her philosophy may have been a
defensive gesture intended to deflect an inquiring interviewer, it may also have reflected Murdoch’s
sincere conviction (stated at several other points in her interview with Magee) that philosophical
ideas “suffer a sea change” when they are expressed in art. In fact, Murdoch regarded with a certain
horror the idea that one might read a novel as if it were a philosophical treatise (much less an ethics
textbook). This elided what she regarded as genuine differences between fiction and philosophy
when it comes to both their linguistic form and their respective roles in human life.

Murdoch did, nonetheless, acknowledge certain connections between literature and philosophy in her
interview with Magee. For example, despite her insistence that philosophy and literature operate by
different rules and appeal to different aspects of the intellect, Murdoch describes both of them as
“truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities” that are “saturated” in the moral. Moreover, Murdoch was
an early advocate of the role that literature could play in the education of the moral imagination (a
position that Nussbaum took up and developed in her own distinctive way decades later).

But these acknowledgments of the affinities between fiction and philosophy did not, in Murdoch’s
judgment, obviate the need for certain distinctions to be drawn between them. For those interested in
exploring the complex relations between Murdoch’s philosophical and fictional works, as well as her
views on the moral status of literature more generally, the full complexity of her statements on this
subject, both positive and negative, deserves sustained attention.

Egoism, as Iris Murdoch presents it, is not only a moral problem, still less only a personal one; it is
an epistemological condition that is rooted in the structure of human consciousness and perception. (Horst
Tappe / Pix Inc. / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The tenacity of egoism

A second and more significant instance in which Nussbaum’s reading of Murdoch’s philosophy
seems reductive or one-dimensional is her discussion of the theme for which Murdoch is best known:
her analysis of human egoism. Nussbaum portrays this central interest of Murdoch’s thought as an
expression of her personal struggle with narcissism and sadomasochism, her constant desire to
control and exploit others: “Murdoch’s life, like her work, was shaped by a moral struggle against the
forces of destructiveness and sadism.”

Nussbaum singles out for special attention the preoccupation of Murdoch’s fiction with seductive
enchanter figures ― such as Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat ― and she reacts with horror to
Murdoch’s attraction to such figures in real life (including the philosopher Elias Canetti, whom
Nussbaum rightly calls a “loathsome and sinister egotist”). Nussbaum concludes that for Murdoch, “it
became a lifelong project to achieve a non-destructive relation to people.” She “came to see her own
life, and life generally, as a moral struggle against what we might without melodrama call
Mephistopheles: the nihilistic wiles of the self-insulating ego, which seeks power and comfort,
exploiting and using other people.” Murdoch’s philosophy, on this reading, is her personal
psychodrama writ large.

The idea that Murdoch’s own personal and erotic struggles may have helped to shape her perception
of the human condition hardly makes her unique; the same could be said for many writers and
thinkers. However, by representing Murdoch’s analysis of egoism primarily as a personal drama of
sexual power and its eventual renunciation, in which goodness signifies “a gentleness that is free of
sadism,” Nussbaum adopts what John Updike calls “a diagnostic mood, as if dealing with a ward of
sick men and women.’’ That is, by dwelling on the psychobiographical origins of Murdoch’s thought,
Nussbaum ignores its larger metaphysical and philosophical framework (except to denigrate it later in
the review), or the detailed philosophical arguments Murdoch offered to support it (especially
in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals).

Also missing from Nussbaum’s account is Murdoch’s sense of the utter tenacity and ubiquity of
egoism in human life ― the seemingly inescapable narrowing of the self’s perceptual and evaluative
field to its own interests; the channelling of attention and desire through the wishes and fantasies of
the ego. Egoism, as Murdoch presents it, is not only a moral problem, still less only a personal one; it
is an epistemological condition that is rooted in the structure of human consciousness and perception.
In short, by interpreting Murdoch’s analysis of egoism through the lens of her youthful desire for
sexual domination and control of others, Nussbaum neglects its larger dimensions and significance.

As Murdoch’s philosophy argues and her novels show, she recognised that egoism was a universal
problem that can and does take endlessly various forms in the lives of human beings. (She
acknowledged, moreover, that religious philosophies such as Christianity and Buddhism had
discovered the problem long before she did.) Her proposed corrective for the problem reflects the
breadth and depth of her diagnosis. In both her novels and her philosophy, Murdoch represented the
achievement of goodness, not only as the overcoming of sadomasochistic urges or as the attempt to
ward off the seductive power of charismatic enchanters (though these are two possible forms that
goodness can take). Goodness is also less dramatically but just as profoundly about the ordinary,
piecemeal efforts that human beings make to become morally better, to overcome their own
prejudices and faults and to redirect their moral attention to the reality of the world and of others (as
in the example of M and D).

Nussbaum’s tendency to limit the scope and significance of Murdoch’s philosophy to the narrow
confines of her personal psychic struggle provides one example of the deficiencies of an overly
biographical reading. It also, in my view, provides Nussbaum with an opportunity to defend the
superiority of the neo-Aristotelian position on which she has staked her career.

Plato or Aristotle?
Ever since the publication of The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum has used the contrast between
Plato and Aristotle (as she understands it) to mark out a wider distinction between two human
impulses or aspirations ― both of them authentic, but one decidedly more compelling, in her view,
than the other.

On the one side, there is the impulse toward a so-called otherworldly form of aspiration, in which
human beings seek to transcend the limitations, vulnerabilities and conflicts of mortal life, drawn by
the vision of a perfect Good and an ideal of perfected love. On the other side, there is the aspiration
toward a purely innerworldly or internal form of transcendence, which, she writes, “asks us to bound
our aspirations to the constitutive conditions of human existence,” to delve more deeply into the finite
realities of human life and human excellence, and to recognise that whatever transcendence is
available to us can be found only there.

Although Nussbaum acknowledges the pull of the Platonic view of human aspiration as a powerful
part of ethical experience and as “a beautiful and valuable ethical norm” in its own right, she sides
decisively with Aristotle and the view of internal transcendence that she associates with his thought.

Given what Nussbaum calls her “recalcitrant Aristotelianism,” it should not be surprising that she
often casts her criticisms of Murdoch in terms of the contrast between these two philosophical visions.
What is surprising is the way in which Nussbaum uses the contrast to disparage aspects of
Murdoch’s personal life, as if they were directly attributable to her Platonism. Nussbaum cites
evidence from Conradi’s biography to support the claim that Murdoch attempted to approximate the
Platonic ideal of a purified eros by renouncing the seductive enchanters of her earlier life, distancing
herself from her youthful erotic self and settling down to a gentle (which is to say, nonsadistic) and
happy marriage with the “childlike” John Bayley.

Instead of portraying the Platonic ideal of a purified eros as an “authentic human aspiration” and “a
valuable and beautiful ethical norm,” as she has elsewhere, Nussbaum associates it here with the
loss (or the repression) of sexual attractiveness, as well as with the neglect of cleanliness and order.
“One can see how difficult the struggle against [Murdoch’s] tendencies to control must have been,”
Nussbaum writes, “from the extreme forms that it took, as she increasingly cultivated a shapeless
and asexual physical persona and domestic surroundings whose squalor greatly exceeded even the
British norm.”

The extent of Nussbaum’s aversion to Murdoch’s domestic arrangements is highlighted when

Nussbaum places it alongside a similar theme in Murdoch’s novels, which “often associate neatness
with egoism, vile filth with virtue.” Commenting on A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Nussbaum notes that
the saint-like character Tallis, “who lives amid mold and vermin of all sorts,” is portrayed by Murdoch
as a moral hero “in part because of this neglect of surroundings,” while the efforts of the enchanter
Julius to impose order on the chaos and grime of Tallis’s kitchen reveals Julius’s “controlling sadism.”
Nussbaum speculates that Murdoch’s indifference to cleanliness in her own surroundings may, like
Tallis’s, have had something to do with her “neglect of the worldly” and her “exacting idea of virtue.”
Rejecting both Julius and Tallis as equally unfit exemplars of virtue, Nussbaum instead favours
Simon, the “young, gentle, pleasure-loving gay man,” with his “whimsical humor, his ability to wear
his heart on his sleeve” as the novel’s “moral core” and true hero.

Nussbaum’s deepest disagreements with Murdoch come into the open precisely at this point. The
bodily and pleasure-affirming eros of Simon is a quality that Nussbaum elsewhere associates with
her heroes ― Aristotle and also James Joyce. In contrast, the “otherworldly” figure of Tallis
represents what Nussbaum regards as the failure of Platonism (and, by extension, Murdoch herself)
fully to engage the concrete realities of embodied human life. Nussbaum in effect reads Murdoch’s
philosophy as a failed though sincere attempt to domesticate her own narcissistic and destructive
sexual impulses through a flight into Platonic abstraction.

Not only does Nussbaum consider Plato’s ideal of virtue misguided; she also thinks that Murdoch
fails in her own personal attempt to live up to it. The contrast between the Platonic and Aristotelian
visions sets the stage for a consideration of Nussbaum’s substantive philosophical disagreements
with Murdoch.

Achieving a clear perception of the other is a necessary precondition for the virtue of tolerance, which Iris
Murdoch associated with the liberal political tradition at its best. (Ian Nicholson - PA Images / PA Images via
Getty Images)

The deficiencies of Murdoch’s philosophy

Nussbaum identifies three “gaps” or deficiencies in Murdoch’s philosophical vision. Although each of
them has some merit in identifying certain issues that those who engage with Murdoch might
profitably pursue, their credibility is diminished somewhat by Nussbaum’s tendency to overstate them
in ways that at times seem intentionally provocative. Oddly, some of Nussbaum’s criticisms directly
contradict what she had earlier identified as Murdoch’s most positive contributions to moral
philosophy.

Social justice and politics

The first “gap” that Nussbaum identifies in Murdoch’s philosophy is her perceived neglect of issues of
social justice. Although Nussbaum had praised Murdoch’s focus on the inner life earlier in her essay,
she now criticises this focus on social and political grounds. Murdoch “seems almost entirely to lack
interest in the political and social determinants of a moral vision, and in the larger social criticism that
ought, one feels, to be a major element in the struggle against one’s own defective tendencies.” This
deficiency, Nussbaum argues, applies equally to the novels:

her characters are almost always undone by something universal about the ego and its
devious workings, almost never by prejudice or misogyny or other failings endemic to a
particular society at a particular time.

As evidence, Nussbaum notes that Murdoch apparently had little to say about “how sexism thwarts
perception,” rarely mentioned race and never critically came to terms with her feelings about Jews.
“Only with regard to the lives of gay men does Murdoch retain a sense of the purely social and
political obstacles to correct vision and action.”

In Nussbaum’s judgment, attention to issues of social justice and the social context of virtue “should
have played a more prominent role in the philosophical essays and the novels.” Many critics have
noticed what is sometimes referred to as the limited social range of Murdoch’s novels, “the way in
which the same world ― the person who read Greats at Oxford and got a first ― always reappears.”
Yet even within the familiar social contexts in which Murdoch wrote, there is a good deal of sensitive
and astute social observation. As Murdoch noted in a 1976 interview, “Every artist has to decide what
he really understands. In fact, in a quiet way, there is a lot of social criticism in my novels.”

Moreover, the careful reader of Murdoch’s philosophy will find important resources for a
consideration of what Nussbaum calls “the social and political determinants of a moral vision,” even if
they are not always explicitly identified in these terms. For example, sensitivity to cultural and
historical context is evident in Murdoch’s account of the workings of the moral imagination in The
Sovereignty of Good ― the way in which moral vision is shaped “in particular contexts of attention”
and with the use of a particular moral vocabulary.

Moreover still, although Murdoch treated the problem of egoism as universal, she recognised that it
can (and does) take a variety of particular forms ― including sexist, racist and homophobic ones.
This acknowledgment is evident even in the example of M and D. 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 ― all leading M to her initial judgment that “my
poor son has married a silly vulgar girl.” The mother’s chief worry, in short, is that her son has
married “beneath” him. Overcoming such overtly classist judgments is precisely what is required by
Murdoch’s account of realistic moral vision.

Action and the inner life

In a second, closely related criticism, Nussbaum sharpens her social and political objection to
Murdoch’s thought by claiming that Murdoch has “an acute problem with action.” Earlier in the review,
Nussbaum had praised Murdoch for providing a compelling alternative to the “muscular” philosophy
of action espoused by Hare and others by drawing attention to an issue that had been utterly
neglected in post-war ethics: that quality of consciousness matters to morality. However, it is clear
that Murdoch never meant to suggest that it was the only thing that mattered. So it seems
disingenuous for Nussbaum to protest that, “It does matter what one does,” as if Murdoch would
have seriously claimed otherwise.

It is even more surprising to find Nussbaum suddenly siding with R.M. Hare against Murdoch, given
that Nussbaum’s own revival of virtue ethics directly challenged the prescriptivism that Hare made
famous. Nussbaum describes Hare in the review as having:

no interest at all in the inner life, or in the effort to cultivate the thoughts and feelings of a
person of good character. He wanted a philosophy that would produce good in the world
and help us understand the nature of good action. His analysis of moral language famously
held that all moral statements were in essence commands to act, and this soldierly
conception of morality became popular in a world intent on seeing the good defeat the bad.

Noting that Hare was impatient with forms of philosophy that seem overly preoccupied with “our
naked insides and the interminable questions they pose,” Nussbaum confesses that she has “some
sympathy with this way of seeing the movement that Murdoch inspired.” One would never guess,
from such a remark, that Nussbaum herself could be seen as “part of the movement that Murdoch
inspired” and had spent a significant part of her career defending an ethics in which “cultivation of
character” plays a central role, while the language of command or prescription is virtually absent.

It is perplexing to find Nussbaum distancing herself from Murdoch on the importance of the inner life
and from other philosophical developments that paved the way for Nussbaum’s own work.
Nussbaum, like Murdoch, fought against what Bernard Williams called the “constriction of the ethical”
to the domain of obligatory action and rule-bound prescription. Here, however, she adopts a
significantly narrower conception of what counts as moral concern and moral action (namely, “hard
thinking about poverty and prejudice”). Although Nussbaum concedes that it might not be “the duty of
every philosopher to talk only about justice,” she dismisses both Murdoch’s art and her philosophy for
failing to talk about it enough, or in the right way. “The mistake in Murdoch,” she claims, “is her subtle
suggestion that the search for justice is superficial.”
 What is particularly exasperating about Nussbaum’s criticism of Murdoch on this issue is that it
allows her to portray Murdoch’s emphasis on the inner life as morally autistic. In an example of the
kind of overstatement that diminishes the value of her point, Nussbaum writes that “Murdoch is so
preoccupied with the goings-on of the inner world, that she seems almost to have forgotten about the
difference that action can make; and the resulting obsession with one’s own states looks strangely
like egoism.” Although Nussbaum concedes that “the big questions of social justice and human
wellbeing need to be approached with an adequate moral psychology,” she contends that “Murdoch
herself tended to veer sharply away from those questions, and even to suggest that in the end they
did not matter, that the only important thing was each person’s struggle for self-perfection.”

Pressing the charge even further, Nussbaum goes so far as to conclude that Murdoch’s “is a
hopelessly egoistic vision of life, in a world in which hard thinking about poverty and prejudice may
actually make a difference to human lives.” Charging Murdoch’s philosophy with egoism seems
almost intentionally provocative ― an attempt to turn the tables by portraying Murdoch’s philosophy
as falling victim to the very thing it was meant to combat. Suddenly Murdoch’s quest for moral
perfection and unselfing is made to look self-indulgent, narcissistic and impractical, while the so-
called hard thinking about “things that actually make a difference” is left to more so-called muscular
philosophers (like Hare, perhaps, or Nussbaum herself).

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Perhaps Nussbaum is simply stating what to her seems an obvious point. If one assumes, as she
does, that Murdoch’s philosophy represents the outworking of her personal obsessions, then that
philosophy is bound to be as self-absorbed as its author apparently was in her personal life. However,
if one rejects that assumption, one may find that Murdoch’s philosophy is infused with a concern for
justice ― though perhaps in a more subtle or indirect form than Nussbaum appreciates. One could
argue, for example, that the values of justice and tolerance are present in the very texture of
Murdoch’s moral psychology and theory of moral perception. Her philosophy sheds important light on
the way in which “the devious workings of the ego” can poison human relations and make moral ―
as well as political ― virtues such as tolerance and appreciation of difference impossible.

For Murdoch, in other words, the achievement of realistic vision was itself a matter of justice, not
simply a self-absorbed pursuit of personal moral perfection. Achieving a clear perception of the other
is a necessary precondition for the virtue of tolerance, which Murdoch associated with the liberal
political tradition at its best.

Nussbaum also ignores the fact that many of Murdoch’s writings demonstrate her profound interest in
politics and its importance in human life. Essays such as “The Existentialist Political Myth,” “A House
of Theory,” “Against Dryness,” “Existentialists and Mystics” and many others repeatedly circle back to
political questions. Her last and most mature philosophical work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
devotes two chapters explicitly to political morality, while also making reference to political themes
and developments throughout.
Nussbaum acknowledges the existence of these writings, but she fails to take them into account
before accusing Murdoch of being disengaged from social and political issues. Nussbaum also does
not explain why a supposedly self-absorbed philosopher like Murdoch spent two years after the
Second World War working for UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in
camps for displaced persons. In a review that makes frequent reference to the sexual details of
Murdoch’s life, these other biographical facts barely register.

Ironically Nussbaum’s critical appraisal of Murdoch on issues of social and political justice lacks the
very quality that Nussbaum praises in Aristotle but finds missing in Murdoch: the quality of “many-
sidedness.” This irony emerges most tellingly in the last of Nussbaum’s criticisms.

Moral perception and the reality of individuals

The final “gap” that Nussbaum identifies in Murdoch’s thought brings me back to the contrast
between Aristotle and Plato noted earlier, but it is one that permeates Nussbaum’s entire critique.
The conundrum at the heart of Murdoch’s career as novelist and philosopher, Nussbaum contends,
is that Murdoch’s Platonism leads her in the direction of a futile quest for the Good, while “her moral
instincts ― I am tempted to call them Aristotelian ― lead in the direction of the variegated world of
surprising humanity.” That is, Murdoch “keeps on suggesting that ‘The Good’ is a unitary abstraction
of some kind, even while all her writerly instincts work in the direction of showing its irreducible many-
sidedness and its kaleidoscopic variety.”

Nussbaum concludes that this tension remains unresolved in Murdoch’s thought and that “anyone
who wishes to make philosophical use of her work must choose between the Aristotelian many-
sidedness or the Platonic mysticism”; Nussbaum adds, “I know which I regard as the more fruitful, in
philosophy and in life.”

Nussbaum’s tendency to identify any philosophical quality that she admires with Aristotle leads her to
classify Murdoch’s respect for particulars as ‘Aristotelian’. However, Murdoch always acknowledged
the tension in her work between a unifying and a particularising impulse as two elements of good
philosophical thinking, both of which she thought were present in Plato.

Murdoch embraced what she called “the two-way movement in philosophy” which alternates between
the building of elaborate theories ― the unifying impulse of “metaphysics” ― on the one hand, and
the attention to concrete empirical details on the other. In one of her numerous references to the
allegory of the cave in The Republic, Murdoch traced this two-way movement in Plato, noting that his
vision includes not only an “ascending” dialectic, “away from the world of particularity and detail,” but
a “descending” one as well. Murdoch suggested that both movements are necessary insofar as
philosophy is not only a theoretical but a practical discipline. As she put it:

In so far as goodness is for use in politics and in the market place it must combine its
increasing intuitions of unity with an increasing grasp of complexity and detail.

Such passages ― and there are many in Murdoch, especially in Metaphysics as a Guide to
Morals ― cast doubt on Nussbaum’s charge that Murdoch simply held “a monistic metaphysical
vision that she never made fully compelling in any genre.” They also challenge the implication that
the tension in Murdoch’s thought was a mark of incoherence, rather than a conscious methodological
decision.

The deeper root of Nussbaum’s complaint, however, is that she believes that the dominance of
Murdoch’s “Platonic mysticism” over her “Aristotelian many-sidedness” leaves Murdoch unable fully
to acknowledge the reality and value of individuals. This is an issue on which Nussbaum has often
commented in other writings, so it is worth looking at in some detail.

The problem with the Platonic view, Nussbaum suggests, is that loving the ideal good blinds us to the
reality of others. The ideal becomes the prism or medium through which one loves other persons, so
that what one loves is the good in other persons. In doing so, one leaves out everything about the
person that is not good, and thus fails to grasp persons in their concrete particularity. This
problem, according to Nussbaum, is evident in Plato’s account of human love in such dialogues as
the Phaedrus:

In loving the image of the divine good in a person, there is a sense in which we love the
human particular in spite of itself … Individuals are lumpy, comical, surprising. As agents
they do not fly off straight to the good but do and say many things both mundane and
absurd.

The Phaedrus tells us nothing of this, nor of anything about “the love of bodily particularity, since the
body from the first, is seen as a sign of something deeper. We hear [instead] about the gleaming
countenance of the beloved, which gestures beyond itself to the good.” Nussbaum contends that “the
reason for this, quite clearly, is that Plato is not at all fond of these features of human love and thinks
of love as uplifting only to the extent that it sets its sights elsewhere.” Compared to loving the ideal
Good, loving a mere human being can never measure up, for “there is bound to be much that is
unsatisfying in a mere human being.”

The same criticism surfaces elsewhere in Nussbaum’s work. In Upheavals of Thought, for example,
she engages in a sustained analysis of the Platonic “ascent” tradition, arguing that Plato’s account of
love embraces neither the separateness nor the qualitative differences that constitute the reality of
individuals. She writes:

to love people as seats of the good and the fine is precisely not a way to embrace the
individuals that they are … Plato’s ascent leaves out of account, and therefore out of love,
everything about the person that is not good and fine ― the flaws and the faults, the neutral
idiosyncrasies, the bodily history. In a very fundamental way it refuses to embrace the very
fact of difference. It loves only what is of a piece with the ideal good.

According to Nussbaum, this is Murdoch’s problem as well. Her embrace of Platonism “sets her in
ambivalent relationship to the sight of the human,” and “her intense love of the good militates against
a loving embrace of the living particular in its everyday nonsymbolic realness.” The kind of love that
Murdoch and Plato describe, in Nussbaum’s judgment, looks beyond real people “to the obscure
image of a metaphysical source of that reverence and awe.”

Nussbaum does acknowledge that there is a positive element in the Platonic and Murdochian
account of moral progress: it forces us to give up much “that would create impediments to individual
love,” such as jealousy, anger and possessiveness. The truth of this insight can be seen in the case
of M (in the previously noted example of M and D). By setting aside her jealousy regarding her son’s
affections, M is able to overcome her initial dislike of D. However, Nussbaum believes that love of the
impersonal good may not leave room for the real-life individual, and that the process of purifying love
may in fact change love into something else. In Nussbaum’s view, M may overcome her jealousy of
D, but she still doesn’t really grasp D in her full and concrete particularity. Since M’s vision of D is
filtered through love of an impersonal Good (purified of her own selfishness), M doesn’t really see D
at all.
However, I think a case can be made that Murdoch’s entire philosophical corpus can be read as
attempting to demonstrate that an allegiance to a Platonic notion of the Good is compatible with
an affirmation of persons in their particularity. In fact, the M and D example shows that the
apprehension of individuals may depend on the mediation of ideals rather than being inhibited or
thwarted by them, as Nussbaum’s account suggests.

As Murdoch puts it, “what M is … attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly
or lovingly.” To attend properly to D as an individual, M’s vision must be purified, and this happens
only when it is mediated through the love of an ideal. Without this mediation, M has only her own
immediate perceptions and prejudices to rely on. M really begins to attend to D when she reflects on
her love for her son and her desire to preserve her relationship with him. This is an important impetus
to her effort to “look again” after her initially negative impressions of D. M is also motivated by an
ideal image of herself. She regards herself as a person “capable of self-criticism,” which makes her
resistant to the thought that she is being close-minded, jealous, or set in her ways, and this image
compels her to try to live up to her own ideal self-conception.

The revised perception of D that emerges from M’s exercise of attention is not less particular or
concrete by virtue of being mediated in these ways; it is more so. When the filters of class prejudice
and jealousy are removed from M’s perception, she ceases to use the stereotypical labels that had
initially reduced D to a nameless member of an inferior social class: “a silly vulgar girl.” As M
struggles to see D afresh, with the assistance of an ideal of goodness, D’s particularity and
uniqueness are revealed (as is evident in the shift in moral language that accompanies M’s change
of vision).

In short, without the mediation of an ideal in M’s attentive reconsideration of D, M might never have
overcome her initial jealousy and prejudice. Rather than seeing the attractive and vivacious young
woman that her son sees and loves, M might have remained stuck in the conventional attitudes that
allowed her to efface D’s unique qualities behind a self-serving veil of preconceptions.

Iris Murdoch at home with husband John Bayley. (Photo by Terry Smith / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty
Images)

The predatoriness of love

The deeper philosophical question embedded in Nussbaum’s concern that love of an ideal good
effaces the reality of individuals is whether human beings can ever really grasp particulars without
the mediation of more universal concepts. Nussbaum has claimed that only art can adequately grasp
particulars. “In the life and vision of art,” she writes, “we attain to a specificity of perception that life
itself generally denies us. In art we see the whole human being, whereas in the rest of life we cannot
both embrace the real and pursue the good.”

Nussbaum thinks Murdoch, in her capacity as novelist, would agree that “the flawed and the comic
particular can be lovingly embraced only by the vision of art.” This allegedly more “Aristotelian”
element of Murdoch’s art, Nussbaum argues, helps to redeem Murdoch from the unfortunate grip of
Platonism on her philosophy. In this area at least, Murdoch’s art succeeds where her philosophy fails.
Again and again, Nussbaum writes, the novels dramatise “the struggle to see clearly in a world of
self-delusion, the revelations and the blindings of erotic love,” and they do so (unlike the philosophy)
“in a rich, devious, and open-ended way.”
Despite Nussbaum’s praise for Murdoch’s art, however, she contends that Murdoch’s personal
struggle with her own desire for manipulation and control was never fully resolved, even in the novels.
The same controlling impulse that led Murdoch to rewrite past journal entries (as Conradi reports),
“removing the names of sentiments, such as anger and contempt, that she felt she should not have
had,” can also be found in her novels, “which draw attention more than most to the presence of
centralized control, as the characters execute a complicated erotic dance whose choreographer is
always just offstage.”

The paradox that attends Murdoch’s art ― and perhaps all art, Nussbaum suggests ― is that it is
unclear whether “the artistic enterprise record[s] and extend[s] the struggle against the ego” or
whether it is “the ego’s most subtle victory.” If the driving motive of the artistic project is the artist’s
own struggle for self-perfection and purification, as Nussbaum believes it was in Murdoch’s case,
then Nussbaum wonders whether the gaze of art “can ever be, in the the fullest sense, a humanly
loving gaze,” or whether it remains controlling and manipulative even when it is at its most perceptive.

Nussbaum credits Murdoch’s best novels with transcending her “horror of control and cleanliness”
and allowing her “to express human love in a shapely and beautiful form.” However, Nussbaum
concludes her essay with the provocative suggestion that Murdoch, long after the sexual excesses of
her youth, remained a kind of predator and further, that Murdoch’s predatory gaze even lighted upon
Nussbaum herself. As evidence, Nussbaum recounts a lunch she shared with Murdoch and Bayley
at their home in Oxford.

I went round to the house, very nervous and awkward and sat for two hours in the chaotic
kitchen being scrutinized, as I felt it, by her sharp probing eyes … All the while I felt that her
very intense gaze was going straight through me, to something that was not me at all, but
to which I was somehow related. More than once I had the thought that Julian Baffin, in
‘The Black Prince’, has about Bradley Pearson: “‘You don’t really see me.” I cannot forget
those predatory eyes, and the way they attended to something of immense importance that
was perhaps more real than me, but that was not precisely me either. Nor can I ever forget
the essential mysteriousness of her face, so much more alive than most people, so blazing
with uncompromising passion … (I remember thinking a sad thought: that this was going to
be the hoped-for friendship with a brilliant woman, but it is after all an encounter with just
another predatory man. Erotic control and artistic control: where did one leave off and the
other begin?)

Nussbaum clearly intends the anecdote to illustrate one of the recurring claims of “When She Was
Good”: that Murdoch’s Platonism prevented her from doing justice to the concrete and embodied
reality of particulars, and that, despite a life-long struggle, she never really overcame her predilection
for sexual control. For Nussbaum, these are really two aspects of the same thing. She depicts
Murdoch at the lunch in Oxford as so intent on looking through Nussbaum ― say, to some
metaphysical Good beyond ― that she fails to see the reality of Nussbaum as an individual. The
(Platonic) gaze is predatory because it turns the individual into fodder for some higher truth, with the
insinuation that a kind of violation thereby takes place. That is why Nussbaum can see the
disappointing lunch with Murdoch as no different from “an encounter with just another predatory man”
intent on “erotic control.”

Though the anecdote is intended to show us that Platonism (and Murdoch) fail to grasp the individual
― or worse, to efface and subsume the individual into some higher vision ― the story has the
unintended effect of suggesting the extent to which Nussbaum’s perception of Murdoch is mediated,
not only through the lens of Conradi’s biography, but perhaps also through Nussbaum’s frustrated
expectations as well.

In fact, the anecdote unwittingly confirms the wisdom of precisely the feature of Murdoch’s position to
which Nussbaum strenuously objects: Murdoch’s insistence that our grasp of particulars is always
mediated (for better or worse) through the evaluative structures of consciousness. Murdoch thought
that such mediation is endemic to the activity of conscious perception, and hence inescapable. But
she also insisted that we can, with moral effort, become aware of how consciousness sets up the
value laden schema that shape our grasp of a situation, and that we can alter those evaluative
schema through an exercise of attention, an act of unselfing (as M does in relation to D, as countless
characters in her novels try, and often fail, to do). Our apprehension of individuals and of reality
depends, in large part, on the quality of those mediations.

Love’s tragic freedom

In May 1994, a conference was held at the University of Chicago to explore the influence and
contemporary significance of Murdoch’s contributions to moral philosophy and religious thought. In
addition to Martha Nussbaum and other prominent thinkers, Murdoch herself was also in attendance.
Nussbaum gave an eloquent keynote address, “Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the
Individual,” a reading of Murdoch’s philosophical and artistic vision that was generous, nuanced and
moving in its insights. As Nussbaum strode to the podium to begin her lecture, Murdoch, who was
seated next to me, watched her admiringly and whispered, “She reminds one of flashing-eyed
Athena, doesn’t she?” It was, at that moment, precisely the right image: Athena, goddess of wisdom
and warfare.

A fragment of remembered conversation hardly constitutes an argument, still less a refutation of an

argument. Yet one cannot help but be struck by how Murdoch’s attentive gaze in this instance struck
upon a metaphor that (one imagines) might have pleased Nussbaum. After the disappointing lunch in
Oxford, Nussbaum notes (correctly, it would seem) that she “had no doubt that Murdoch could have
described me, after an hour, far more precisely than any lover of mine might have described me after
some years.” But she adds: “And yet I believe that there is something more to loving vision than just
seeing. There is also a willingness to permit oneself to be seen.” This is something that Nussbaum
believes Murdoch, in her relentless need for erotic and artistic control, was not finally willing or able
to do.

If, in being seen, we are at the mercy of the predatory gaze of others, in seeing, we are (like any
artist) free to shape the perceived object to our own designs. That extraordinary freedom, for both
good and ill, is what Murdoch called “the tragic freedom of love,” and it is why she placed so much
importance on “what goes on in our heads”:

The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity
to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony and
others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there
any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and
reconciled. We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the confrontation
by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding,
of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is
respect for, this otherness.
Despite the eloquence of the insight, Murdoch was under no illusions about the difficulty it entailed.
Freedom, “the exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention … is
indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly, which we hardly ever do, painful.” That fact
alone can go a long way toward explaining why human beings fail so often to really see ― that is, to
love ― each other, and why the task is endless. We always only have a segment of the circle.

John Updike quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that “there never was a good biography of a good
novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.” Murdoch was indeed “many
people” ― a Proteus, according to her own self-description.

The several biographies that appeared after her death, and the diverse reactions to them on the part
of readers and critics, only underline the point. To my mind, the insights into Murdoch’s personal life
complicate and deepen, but do not necessarily invalidate, our previous perceptions of her or of the
value of her work. Such deepening, she rightly argued, is an inevitable feature of any serious task of
understanding ― especially the understanding of human individuals. If, after reading her biography,
we can no longer perceive her lovingly, the fault may lie at least partly in our own gaze.

Maria Antonaccio is Professor of Religious Studies at Bucknell University. She is the co-
editor (with William Schweiker) of Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness and the
author of A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch, from which this article is an edited
extract.

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